Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

This macaronic motet comes from the so-called Montpellier Codex (Mo), the most comprehensive
and lavishly appointed motet book to survive from the thirteenth century. It contains more than three
hundred motets of every description, ranging in date over the whole century, all gathered in eight
fascicles, or separately sewn sections, of which the first six (including the one containing the macaronic
motets) seem to have been compiled around 1280. It is best known for its “classic” Franconian motets, in
which the voices are rhythmically even more strictly “stratified” according to pitch range (the higher the
range the quicker the pace). This, too, is a refinement on the discordia concors idea, and the prosodic
contrast is often mirrored at the semantic level. In one famous example from Mo (Pucelete/Je
langui/DOMINO), the merry triplum describes the poet’s enjoyment of his loving lassie in breves and
semibreves; the droopy motetus complains of lovesickness in longs and breves; and the tenor keeps up an
even tread of perfect longs.