That, too, is possible. There is no need to decide. This much can be agreed upon: what is only a
sporadic and short-lived device, or set of devices, in French music became definitive in English music
over the course of the thirteenth century. Again, there are at least two ways of interpreting this (or any)
fact. One can assert, as some historians have done, that the musical predilections of the English contingent
exerted an influence on French university musicians in proportion to their numbers; when their numbers
declined, so did their musical influence. Or one can assert, as other historians have done, that certain
French pieces especially appealed to the English imagination because their distinctive features recalled to
the English their local oral practice—a practice previously inflected by the habits of their Viking
overlords, but now reencountered within a literate context sanctioned by “mainstream” (read: French)
cultural authority. And that is how the English were led to a national “school” of artistic, literate music
making all their own. Guess which view is favored by English historians and which by French (as well as
some influential Americans).
PES MOTETS AND RONDELLUS
Whatever their way to it, the English did develop their own “insular” ways of inflecting French genres of
literate music. One of those genres was the motet. The English loved to use sequence melodies as tenors,
as in the famous “Balaam” motet (Ex. 11-7a), which adopts for this purpose a versicle from the Epiphany
sequence, Epiphanium Domino, that happily incorporates an internal repeat into each of its repeated
strophes (Ex. 11-7b).
The text of the sequence verse is a paraphrase of Balaam’s fourth prophecy from the Bible (Numbers
24:17) “A star shall advance from Jacob and a staff shall arise from Israel that shall smite the brows of
Moab”—placed in a context that turns it into a forecast of the Star of Bethlehem that proclaimed the
coming of Christ. And the motet text is a paraphrase of the sequence verse.
EX. 11-7A Balaam inquit, vaticinans