medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Apologies for a wrong link:here is the review that people may be
interested in:
Gordon Plumb
Nosow, Robert. <i>Ritual Meanings in the Fifteenth-Century Motet</i>.
Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 292. £64.99. ISBN: 9780521193474.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Randell Upton
University of California, Los Angeles
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This book is a wonderful contribution to musicological scholarship that
has the
potential to move the discourse on late medieval music forward in
interesting
and productive ways. Nosow frames his study to facilitate understanding
seemingly dissimilar motets written for different performance contexts
as a
coherent genre in functional (that is, how they were used) rather than
structural (that is, how they were put together) terms. Drawing on
several
decades' worth of scholarship on individual composers and particular
works,
Nosow demonstrates how fifteenth-century motets were written to be
performed in
ritual contexts, whether sponsored by religious or civic organizations.
This
book provides a welcome challenge to musicology's tendency to sort late
medieval
musical works into separate categories based on an anachronistic divide
between
"sacred" and "secular," as understood in our own post-Reformation
period.
By focusing primarily on the compositional activities of their creators
(composers), musicological study of motets followed general practice in
twentieth-century musicological scholarship. In such an investigation
historical
details are chiefly valuable for establishing chronologies of musical
works,
both within one composer's output and among the compositions of
composers who
worked in different times and places. But even as scholars searched
archives for
historical information on composers and patrons, the explicit focus of
their
analysis remained the comprehension of structural and contrapuntal
details of
the works themselves, as well as the creation of taxonomies by which
surviving
works could be sorted. For the late medieval motet the culmination of
this
approach was Julie Cumming's book <i>The Motet in the Age of Du Fay</i>
(Cambridge, 1999), based on her dissertation "Concord Out of Discord:
Occasional
Motets of the Early Quattrocento" (Berkeley, 1987). Nosow's own
dissertation,
"The Florid and Equal Discantus Motet Styles of Fifteenth-Century
Italy"
(UNC-Chapel Hill, 1992) was itself this sort of study. As Nosow points
out,
since the 1990s musicologists such as Julie Cumming, Craig Wright, Rob
Wegman,
Philip Weller, Catherine Saucier, and Nosow himself have broadened
their inquiry
to consider the cultural context of individual motets or repertoires.
But the
lack of direct historical evidence documenting the performance of many
motets
has thwarted modern knowledge of the contexts in which these works were
written
and performed. It is difficult to discuss musical works in their
historical
context if it is not possible to determine what those contexts were.
To address this problem, Nosow focused his work by asking the question:
Why did
people write motets? His answer, the thesis of his book, is that "all
motets of
the fifteenth century originated as ceremonial vehicles, and cannot
easily be
separated from the rituals of which they formed part" (2). (My answer
to Nosow's
question would be, "because they got paid to do so"; I would rephrase
his
central question to ask "What were motets used for?") By focusing on
ceremony
and ritual Nosow has found a way to comprehend fifteenth-century motets
as a
coherent group, even though "[t]he specificity of use for the
fifteenth-century
motet meant that each was fashioned and voiced with particular ends in
mind, to
meet the exigencies of the moment" (234).
Reflecting its subject matter--musical works famous for their tight
structural
designs--Nosow's book has a clear and coherent formal plan. There are
eight
chapters, conceived as two pairs. The first chapter of each pair
discusses motet
composition and performance in a particular place for particular
patrons: the
Chapel Royal of Henry V of England, the Veneto cathedrals of Padua,
Vicenza, and
Treviso, churches and confraternities in Bruges, and the cathedral at
Cambrai.
The second chapter of each pair discusses theoretical concerns: the
motet as
religious ritual, the motet as ritual embassy (that is, one particular
rhetoric
used in many motet texts), motets as the vehicle of contemplation, and
motets'
role in creating community for the choir and for the observers and
other
participants in ritual. Overall Nosow discusses a large number of
polyphonic
musical works (I counted eighty motets, eleven settings of the Mass
Ordinary,
and four songs) by composers such as John Dunstaple, Johannes Ciconia,
and
Guillaume Du Fay, among others. He also provides useful overviews of
the
different kinds of ceremonies for which motets were written, describing
civic
and ecclesiastic processions, memorials, motets used to end the service
of Mass
or the offices of Matins and Vespers, and the Flemish <i>lof</i>
service. These
descriptions provide the reader with a fuller understanding of the
range of
opportunities and venues in which polyphonic music could be performed,
an
element often difficult for non-specialists to perceive.
In his understanding of the ceremonial function of processions Nosow
makes good
use of the model provided by Gordon Kipling's important book <i>Enter
The King:
Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph</i> (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998). Like Nosow, Kipling set out to find the
historical
context within which to understand surviving artistic texts, and in
doing so
uncovered (and demonstrated the significance of) extensive social
practice, the
processions through which royalty and nobility formally enacted their
relationships with their subjects in cities and towns. In his monograph
Nosow
shows how fifteenth-century motets were not (or, were not only)
liturgical
vehicles, but rather formed part of civic ceremonial practices
involving
important and powerful patrons. Like Kipling's processions, these
ceremonial
practices have been uncovered due to scholarly desire to contextualize
surviving
musical works.
Two discussions stand out as particularly significant: "The Daily
Memorials of
Henry V" in chapter one, and "The Motet as Ritual Embassy" in chapter
four.
These discussions deepen our understanding of three of the most famous
(in
modern times) motets of the period: Dunstaple's beautiful <i>Veni
Sancte
Spiritus/ Veni Sancte Spiritus et infunde/ Veni Creator/Mentes tuorum
and Preco
preheminencie/ Precursor premittitur/ Inter natos</i>; and Guillaume Du
Fay's
motet for Florence cathedral, <i>Nuper Rosarum Flores</i>. Following
Margaret
Bent and drawing on chronicles including the <i>Gesta Henrici
Quinti</i> and
<i>Vita & gesta Henrici Quinti, Anglorum regis</i>, Nosow shows the
genesis of
Dunstaple's motets (and others) as part of daily memorials established
in
response to vows sworn by Henry V. But the highlight of the book for me
is
Nosow's chapter four. Following a suggestion of Michael Long's, Nosow
examines
the medieval <i>ars dictaminis</i>, the art of letter writing, to
discover
conceptual models for the newly composed texts of ceremonial motets.
Motets are
works of formal communication, and Nosow shows how many of them follow
the
theoretical model precisely, exposing the cultural work that the texts,
and by
extension the motets, accomplish. That the words of <i>Nuper Rosarum
Flores</i>
explicitly connect the motet with Santa Maria del Fiore, the cathedral
of
Florence, and with ceremonial acts involving the pope and the people of
Florence
has long been known. But recognizing this motet's character as one of
ritual
embassy allows us to perceive its ceremonial function more clearly: the
motet
speaks to the Virgin on behalf of the people of Florence, while
honoring Pope
Eugenius IV as the intercessor between the two. The pope had promised
indulgences to everyone attending the consecration, and the motet is
the formal
vehicle by which the Virgin is asked to intercede with her Son to
deliver the
promised benefits. The beauty of the music is the vehicle by which the
request
is demonstrated for the people of Florence who witnessed its
performance. In
uncovering the rhetorical basis of so many late motet texts, Nosow
gives us new
means of understanding what the experience of musical performance could
have
meant in the past.
One problem with this book is its surprisingly thin engagement with
scholarship
on ritual. Nosow cites two book-length studies to support his
definition of
ritual: communication scholar Eric Rothenbuhler's <i>Ritual
Communication: From
Everyday Conversation to Mediated Ceremony</i> (Thousand Oaks: Sage,
2000) and
religious-studies scholar Catherine Bell's <i>Ritual: Perspectives and
Dimensions</i> (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
There is
room for a far greater engagement with theories of ritual from
anthropology,
sociology and religious studies in the musicological study of medieval
music.
While some musicologists might object to Nosow's providing little newly
discovered historical material himself, such a complaint would miss an
important
point: thanks to the work of scholars in the past few decades it is now
possible
to compare and analyze the mass of documentation concerning musical
practice,
composers' lives and works, and the social contexts of music making in
ways that
bring new understanding to the study of surviving musical texts.
Nosow's book is
more than a mere summary of existing historical discoveries; rather its
synthesis of information and analysis provides a new, useful, and
coherent
framework within which to understand the late medieval motet.
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