Inserted into a performance of the sequence, the motet text would be the kind of thing we might (very
loosely) call a trope. And the likelihood that the piece was meant to be inserted in this way seems good,
since the text in question is the scantiest we have ever seen in a motet. It consists of a mere four lines of
Latin verse, enunciated twice: first in the triplum and then in the motetus. While the triplum has the text,
the motetus has an untexted melody. When the motetus gets the text, it takes over the melody to which the
triplum had already sung it, and the triplum takes over the untexted countermelody: voice-exchange! And
that is why a sequence melody served so well: with its double versicles it has a built-in pes to support the
voice exchange. The particular manner of voice-exchange shown here, in which only one voice is texted
at a time, is described by only one theorist, Walter Odington, a monk at the Benedictine abbey of
Evesham, near the cathedral town of Worcester in the “West-country,” who wrote around 1300. “If what
one declaims, all others declaim in turn, this is called rondellus,”^2 he informs us, divulging a sure sign of
English authorship, even when, as here, the music in question is found in a continental source (the famous
Montpellier codex, alias Mo, familiar to us since chapter 7).
The texted exchange only comes at the repetition of the sequence’s double versicle. But the first tenor
statement also supports a textless exchange that counts, in Odington’s definition, as a rondellus (for
rondellus, he tells us, can be cum littera or sine littera). And then the whole double versicle is repeated
in the tenor to support an extended cauda in hocket style, in which the voices exchange not only their tunes
but their relative positions the second time around. The text and its liturgical tie-in have served as little
more than a pretext, clearly, for the kind of elaborate musical game we have been reading about since the
beginning of this chapter. Giraldus would have understood.
THE WORCESTER FRAGMENTS
There is an English source for the Balaam motet as well as the French one, but like almost all the English
sources of the period, it is fragmentary—just a scrap containing the motetus voice. The wholesale
destruction of “popish ditties”—manuscripts containing Latin church music—in the course of the Anglican
reformation was a great disaster for music history. Between the eleventh century, the time of the staffless
Winchester Tropers, and the beginning of the fifteenth, not a single source of English polyphonic music
survives intact. All we have, for the most part, are individual leaves, or bits of leaves, that chanced to
survive the holocaust for a seemingly paradoxical reason: having become liturgically or stylistically
obsolete, the books that contained them had already been destroyed. The surviving leaves had been
recycled, as we would now put it, for lowly utilitarian purposes. Some had been bound into newer
manuscript books as flyleaves (the heavier protective leaves in the front and back of bound volumes), or
as stiffeners for the covers or spine. Some had even been rolled up and inserted into organ pipes to stop
little leaks that were causing the pipes to sound continuously (what organists call “ciphers”).
As we can tell from the folio numbers on the surviving leaves and from tables of contents that have
outlived their hosts, many of the manuscripts from which these shards remain were originally massive
tomes, comparable to the Florence or Montpellier or Ivrea codices that so abundantly preserve the French
repertory of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And the surviving shards come from so many different