In fact, the tenor/contratenor pair is written out only once, with a “canon” or special direction that
specifies how it is to be altered on repetition. Although the tenor carries a Latin label (Vir mitis, “gentle
man”), this seems to be nothing more than another encomium to Zabarella, not a text incipit. There is no
known chant—and no conceivable chant—that bounces up and down by fifths, stutters through so many
repeated whole-step oscillations, or descends by step through an entire octave the way this “melody”
does. Clearly, the tenor and contratenor in this particular motet are not melodies at all, but harmonic
supports.
The canon instructs the performers of the tenor and contratenor to read their parts each time under a
different mensuration sign— and, C respectively. Thus despite their notational congruence, the actual
rhythms of each presentation not only differ but undergo a progressive compression from perfect to
imperfect time that resembles a traditional tenor diminution, but in three stages instead of two. The texted
parts, meanwhile, are written chiefly in semibreves and minims, note values that are radically affected by
the changing mensurations.
And yet the three stanzas are deliberately set so that they resemble each other melodically as much as
possible in terms of contour, prosody (text distribution), and overall form, progressing each time from
textless introitus through syllabically texted stanza to melismatic, hocket-ridden cauda. The result is a
virtual set of strophic variations that in their fascinating interplay of sameness and difference symbolize
the ideal of a harmoniously integrated society of free individuals—the ideal to which every northern
Italian city state (or res publica, whence “republic”) nominally aspired. Ex. 8-7 shows the fanfare-like
introitus to each of the three strophes in turn.
DU FAY: THE MOTET AS MYSTICAL SUMMA
Guillaume Du Fay (ca. 1397–1474) lived almost exactly a century later than his namesake Guillaume de
Machaut, and like Machaut he will be reintroduced in a later chapter. It is very important to consider at
least one of his works right here, however, in order to appreciate the direct generic and stylistic continuity
that linked Du Fay’s creative output with that of his fourteenth-century precursors.
The reason for speaking in such urgent terms is that the beginning of “The Renaissance,” for music, is
often—though, as we will see, arbitrarily—placed around the beginning of the fifteenth century, and major
historiographical divisions like that can act as barriers, sealing off from one another figures and works
that happen to fall on opposite sides of that fancied line, no matter how significant their similarities. Not
only that, but (as already observed in a somewhat different context) an appearance of stylistic
backwardness or anachronism—inevitable when sweeping categories like “Medieval” and
“Renaissance” are too literally believed in—can easily blind us to the value of supreme artistic
achievements such as Du Fay’s isorhythmic motets. They are not vestigial survivals or evidence of
regressive tendencies, but a zenith.
The fact is, Du Fay’s career was very much like Philippe de Vitry’s a century earlier. He was a
university-educated ordained cleric—in short, a literatus—whose musical horizons had been shaped by
Boethius, by Guido... and by Philippe de Vitry. Like his predecessors, he thought in scholastic terms
about his craft but in Platonic terms about the world. For him, no less than for the founders of the Ars
Nova, the world was materialized number, and the highest purpose of music was to dematerialize it back
to its essence.
Born in French-speaking Cambrai, near the border with the low countries, Du Fay followed in
Ciconia’s footsteps to early employment in Italy. He may have first gone down there as a choirboy in the
entourage of the local bishop, who attended the Council of Constance, where Francesco Zabarella,