minims!—that renders the texts with a dispatch bordering on flippancy.
In the motet’s prima pars (first half), a cantus firmus is sneaked into the altus, the least “essential”
(and therefore, so to speak, least conspicuous) voice, and paraphrased in such a way as virtually to
disappear into the contrapuntal warp and weft. It was a familiar melody, however, and no doubt meant to
be noticed (at second hearing, perhaps, with a furtive smile of recognition). The plainsong original, a
sequence for the Feast of the Assumption (but often sung at other Marian services and appropriated, as it
is here, for votive purposes), begins with the familiar words of the daily “Hail, Mary!” prayer, entered
above the polyphony in Ex. 13-9.
Meanwhile, the tenor, the voice most likely to carry significant preexisting material, is confined to a
monotone recitation of the prayer that the sequence quotes, as if mimicking the mumbling of a distracted
communicant going through the rosary, the string of beads on which one counted off the “fifteen decades”
(15 × 10 = 150 !) of Aves that a pious Christian was expected to recite each and every day. When the
rosary recitation in Compère’s tenor reaches the name of Jesus, the prayer shifts over to a patchwork of
all-purpose litanies: “Kyrie eleison,” “Hear us, O Christ,” “Holy Mary, pray for us,” and so on. The
texture, meanwhile, gathers itself up from the opening fairly fragmented state through paired voices
(beginning, of course, with the “structural vs. nonessential” opposition), proceeding through an opposition
of high and low voices, and ending with an emphatic homorhythm.
The secunda pars expands the litany to include a wide variety of patron saints, mirroring the crowd of
new names with a pervasively imitative texture in which the order and interval of entries, and the
rhythmic values, are unpredictably varied. The motet explodes at the end into a long and exceptionally
virtuosic triple “proportion.” This is truly something new: funny church music—funny, but still pious.
Piety of this kind, though, is “humane”—pitched to the level of its hearers, rather than (like the English
High-Church polyphony sampled earlier) way, way over their heads.
EX. 13-9 Loyset Compère, Ave Maria, mm. 1–18