The undeniable fact is, however, that by the end of the century—that is, by Grocheio’s time—the motet
was a strictly polyphonic genre, and it reveled more than any other genre in its polyphonicness. To deny
this fact about the motet on account of the genre’s not-strictly-polyphonic origins or ancestry would be to
commit what is called the “genetic fallacy”—the inadvertent or deliberate confusion of something as it is
with what it may originally have been. (For a more obvious example, imagine claiming that our national
anthem is not a patriotic song but just a drinking song.) And while we’re on the subject of fallacies, it is
also a fallacy (the so-called “pathetic fallacy”) to say, as in this paragraph’s first sentence, that the motet
“reveled in its polyphonicness.” Motets cannot revel. Only people revel. And it was people, notably
Grocheio, who reveled in the complexity of the polyphonic, polytextual motet. For an example of the fully
evolved, late thirteenth-century French motet that Grocheio reveled in, see Fig. 7-5, from the Bamberg
Codex, and its transcription (Ex. 7-4).
The form of the piece is clearly discant- or clausula-derived, although there is no actual clausula
counterpart to it. Two parts in trochaic meter (“first mode”) are composed against a spondaic (“fifth-
mode”) cantus firmus borrowed from a Gregorian melisma. In this case the melisma comes from the
Easter Gradual, Haec dies, already encountered in Ex. 1-7b. Compare the tenor in Ex. 7-4 with the notes
sung to the italicized words in the final phrase of the Gradual: “quoniam in seculum misericordia ejus”
(for His mercy endureth forever). The motet tenor consists of a double cursus of the chant melisma, its
notes cut up into alternating groups of two and three longs or maximas.
FIG. 7-5 French double motet, L’autre jour/Au tens pascour/IN SECULUM (Ba, fols. 7–7 v). The layout resembles that of Fig. 7-
3 . The tenor begins under the motetus part on fol. 7 and continues most of the way across the bottom of fol. 7 v.
EX. 7-4 Transcription of Fig. 7-5