Many if not most motet texts in this great age of motet writing were nonstandard and nonliturgical.
Even Gombert’s In illo tempore is an example: described above as a gospel motet, it is really just a
“gospel-style” motet, in which a narrative formula much used in the gospels (In illo tempore, literally “At
the time when”) is appropriated to introduce a fairly torrid paean to the Virgin Mary disguised as praise
of her son: “Blessed is the womb that bore Thee, and the breasts that gave Thee suck.” We might hazard a
guess, therefore, that Gombert’s motet was intended for use at a typical pre-Reformation “Lady Mass.”
But it is no more than a guess.
By the same token, the Qui consolabatur me patchwork was presumably designed to beautify or
symbolize a mournful occasion; the textual fragments assembled in it speak of tears, bitterness, and loss.
So spectacularly affect-laden are its words that the motet was once a mainstay in an elaborate hypothesis
according to which the midcentury composers of Catholic Holland and Flanders often expressed a covert
leaning toward Lutheranism, with its emphasis on personal religious feeling, by engineering secret
chromatic modulations to color their music through the wholesale infusion of unwritten musica ficta
accidentals.^12 That theory has been, if not disproved, at least shelved for lack of supporting evidence. But
even without secret chromaticism Clemens’s motet is a strikingly affective work, in which expressivity is
heightened and buttressed by what we may—at least in direct contrast with Gombertian rigor—fairly term
poetic license.