FIG. 7-8 El mois de mai./De se debent bigami/KYRIE (Ba, fol. 14 v).
The seventh and eighth fascicles of Mo date from the turn of the fourteenth century, Grocheio’s time
exactly. By now the fun and games aspect of discordia concors has so burgeoned as to invite free choice
of found objects in all parts including the tenor, and the more extravagant the better. The motet in Fig. 7-
9 /Ex. 7-9 is one of those racy things Grocheio particularly recommends for his “feasts of the learned.”
Semibreves permeate all parts. The triplum and motetus texts are descriptions of just such medieval
fraternity parties as Grocheio describes, at which young literati gathered to gorge on capons and guzzle
wine and nuzzle girls and despise manual labor, and particularly to praise Paris, the fount of the good life
for budding intellectuals. And the tenor? It consists of a fourfold repetition, prescribed by an early use of
ditto or repeat marks in the notation, of a fruitseller’s cry—“Fresh strawberries, ripe blackberries!”—
possibly drawn directly “from life” as lived on the Parisian streets.
A motet like this one, in which both musical and subject matter are entirely urban and entirely secular,
no longer has any direct relationship to the courtly and ecclesiastical traditions that historically nourished
the genre. Its connection to the clausula or the trouvère chanson can be better demonstrated historically
than stylistically. It has become independent of its traditions and ready to nurture the growth of new ones.
As the American composer Aaron Copland once observed, when the audience changes, music changes.
THE “PETRONIAN” MOTET
To close our discussion of the thirteenth-century motet we can turn to the pair that opens the seventh
fascicle of Mo. On the basis of citations by fourteenth-century writers they are attributed to a shadowy but
evidently important composer and theorist named Petrus de Cruce (Pierre de la Croix?) in the treatises.
These two motets, and another half dozen with similar characteristics (therefore also conjecturally
ascribed to Petrus), are in a very special style that takes the device of rhythmic stratification to the very
limit that contemporary notation allowed. Further, in fact, because Petrus modified Franconian notation
and its attendant textures so as to exaggerate the layering effect.