of the cathedral nobility.”^6 If that seems a bit too schematic, since it casts the music, rather than the people
who use it, in an active role, we can re-imagine the situation in more human terms. Let us imagine, then,
that city-dwelling clerics (such as Johannes de Grocheio), who would have known and valued both the
urbanized chanson and the prosulated discant, would have been the ones most apt to crossbreed the two
and arrive at a new music that pleased them particularly. The great value of Crocker’s formulation is that
it emphasizes the co-responsibility of the courtly and the cathedral genres and their respective milieux for
the birth and, especially, the rapid growth of the motet.
Again we need to be cautious when it comes to questions of priority and concordances. (A
concordance is the reappearance of music or text in a new place.) Just as we cannot assume that a given
clausula is older than a musically concordant motet just because historically the clausula came first, so
we cannot assume that when a motet exists with texts both in Latin (sacred) and in French (secular), that
the French must be the contrafact just because sacred music has the longer recorded history, or because
measured rhythm was first notated in church. In the case of motets based on the Ex semine clausula, it is
easy to make the false assumption, since all of them go back to a known Latin sacred prototype in modal
rhythm. But as we have already seen, the French motet in Fig. 7-4 comes from an earlier source than the
Latin one in Fig. 7-3 and uses an earlier method of notation.
Also of possible significance is the fact that the French motet is not a double motet. Its one text is
evidently meant to be sung by the two upper voices in rhythmic unison. Take away the tenor and such a
homorhythmic, syllabically texted piece would be called a conductus. So motets in which two voices sing
a single text against a tenor have for that reason been christened “conductus motets,” and are presumed to
be early. It is modern scholars, however, who have done both the christening and the presuming. And a
presumption, by definition, lacks supporting evidence.
The evidence does not allow us to state that the Latin motet was invented before the French. Only
“common sense,” our knowledge of early prosula technique, and our conjectures about the new genre’s
possible liturgical use support the Latin-first idea. On the other side of the scale there is the source
evidence. The earliest sources for motets in French are actual trouvère manuscripts, such as the huge
Manuscrit du Roi that was mentioned in chapter 4. It was put together between 1246 and 1254, which may
actually be a bit earlier than the date of W 2 , and no later than Flo, which seems to contain the earliest
surviving Latin-texted motets.
There are even a few French pieces called “motet” in the Manuscrit du Roi that, being monophonic,
are not related to the Notre Dame clausula at all. Like polyphonic motets they are written in mensural
notation and are without sectional repeats. Like late trouvère chansons, on the other hand, some of them
make use of “refrains”—the short, endlessly recycled verbal/musical tags or “hooks” we encountered in
chapter 4. One of these monophonic motets quotes as a tag of this kind the refrain of Adam de la Halle’s
little rondeau Bone amourete, already familiar to us as Ex. 4-6. In the motet (Ex. 7-3), the refrain is split
up, and the whole rest of the poem is inserted between its two halves: