Motet

A chant tenor carries new words, holding sacred and secular in one piece.

Related

RenaissanceMotetCounterpointVoice

The motet uses a chant melody as a foundation and adds newly composed voices and words above it. It is both liturgical music and a workshop where composers display counterpoint.

Origins

In thirteenth-century Paris, clausulae were fitted with words and became the first motets. The tenor keeps the chant while upper voices sing different Latin texts, sometimes with secular words at the same time. Fourteenth-century isorhythm made the design more intricate. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Josquin and Palestrina brought imitative writing to the motet and restored a single text.

Listening features

The tenor often sustains chant notes as a cantus firmus, while upper voices enter one by one with the same motive. Early motets set different words in different voices, so the ear hears parallel narratives. Renaissance motets are usually unaccompanied, with clear cadences and phrases that breathe with punctuation. Bach's motets add double choir and a grander scale.

Composers and works

Machaut and Dufay left medieval motets. Josquin's Ave Maria and Palestrina's Sicut cervus are Renaissance models. Bach's Singet dem Herrn brings the German motet to a grand scale, and Poulenc's O magnum mysterium carries the genre into the twentieth century.

Lineage

It grows from organum and clausula, leads to the Mass cycle and cantata, and feeds the madrigal and secular polyphony.

Misconceptions

A motet is not a Mass; it usually sets a single text. It is not always Latin or sacred, since medieval motets often mix in secular words. The term changed over time, so a thirteenth-century definition cannot be applied to Bach.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "Motet" — definitions checked, not quoted
• Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 1 — context checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.