Conference Agenda

The thirteenth-century three-voice motet Hare, hare, hie! / Balaan! / Balaam foregrounds several types of racialized, musical boundaries. Invoking “Engliskeman,” Scotsman, and Normans, the lyrics feature a Picard dialect that seems to poke fun at Anglophone speakers. The musical structure also mocks insular characteristics by employing voice exchange between the upper voices, a technique often associated with the English rota. Through the tenor’s relationship with the Use of Sarum, the Feast of the Ass and the Feast of Fools, and the motetus depiction of an encounter with Englishmen in an Arras pub, the piece is colored by brushes against national, linguistic, and generic borders between France and England. Taken along with the English musical characteristics, the motet seems a ready parody of Englishmen in Picardy, a conclusion advanced by Saint-Cricq and Everist. However, the motet’s two manuscript witnesses—Noailles and W2—complicate this conclusion.

Historiographically, these two manuscripts play into established arguments about centers and peripheries. The music contained in Noailles is cast as peripheral and flawed, and Saint-Cricq has called the polyphony in the compendium “borderland motets” (Saint-Cricq 2018). However, I find that Hare, hare, hie, at first glance an obvious example of non-center material in textual, linguistic, and musical content, demonstrates a thoroughly Parisian grounding. The lyrical references in Hare, hare, hie! / Balaan! / Balaam point us not only to the ethnically-based administrative ‘nations’ of the University of Paris, but also to a network of parodical literature and exegesis accessible to student-clerics of the university, heightened by the motet’s musical content. Finally, a Latin conducus motet found in the Montpellier Codex, Balam inquit vaticans / Balaam, provides a fascinating foil to Hare hare hie. By simultaneously functioning as a paraliturgical accompaniment to the Feast of the Ass and a similarly parodic musical send-up of English styles, the Latin motet blurs boundaries between sacred and secular, French and English, and the purposes music can serve in the thirteenth century. The clerical rebuke issued in Hare, hare hie echoes through Balam inquit vaticans, offering an ethnicity-crafting commentary on an unusual feast.

The fourteenth-century ars nova (new art) fully systematized divisions of the breve and semibreve, and in so doing it offered composers and scribes a degree of rhythmic control that was previously inaccessible. But mensural notation was still contextual, and as such, it required interpretation. Some of Guillaume de Machaut’s works (such as Rose, liz, printemps) have inspired scholarly inquiry into their equivocal notation, but these are usually seen as outliers. And yet, ars nova notation is often significantly more ambiguous than might be expected. Current dating debates initiated by Karen Desmond and Anna Zayaruznaya, in addition to ongoing efforts to foreground scribal agency (Kolb, 2022), invite us to revisit Machaut’s six complete-works manuscripts with fresh eyes. How do implicit scribal practices augment the explicit theoretical record?

In this paper, I revisit moments of ambiguity in Machaut’s virelais, using the notation of rests as an entrypoint. Rests are considered to be more theoretically stable than notes because, unlike notes, they are not subject to the operations of imperfection and alteration. But while rests can recede into the background (for example, at the end of lines), they can also introduce complications that are not easily resolved. A handful of problematic rests in Machaut’s virelais are removed from modern editions and attributed to scribal error, despite their consistency across the sources. I argue that scribes used both these rests and their placement on the staff to affirm or reject the closure of mensural units. In some cases, rests may signal a change in mensuration, as in Helas et comment aroie (Maw, 2002), or reinterpretation of repeated material, as in Aymi, dame de valour. The earliest editions, driven by a preference for regularity and parallelism, normalized and simplified Machaut’s virelais. The enshrinement of these interpretations has certainly influenced, and potentially limited, later reconstructions. By returning to the original notation, embracing its complexities, and taking its recorded silences seriously, we make room for ars nova notation to prioritize and convey musical ideas that exceed modern expectations.

Repetition is fundamental to music-making: indeed, pleasure derived from the experience of musical repetition may be unique to this domain (Margulis 2014). Repetition is often articulated as the defining feature of thirteenth-century Parisian polyphony: specifically the characteristic repetition of pitches and rhythmic patterns in discant and motet tenors. The integration of these repeated patterns within complex structures led to the twentieth-century canonization of these compositions as “works of art” where “purely artistic considerations begin to take precedence over liturgical requirements” (Smith 1966). By contrast, the repertoire of insular thirteenth-century liturgical polyphony in general has not been described using this language of exceptionalism. In fact, scholars tend to downplay the role of repetition in these works: Ernest Sanders (1963) writes that structural repetition is infrequently found, and instead the “essential integrity of the [base plainchant]” is respected.

Yet repetition is itself an essential feature of plainchant. Composers of late medieval plainchant Alleluyas, for example, increasingly employ repeat structures. Thus, “respecting” the essential integrity of the plainchant in polyphonic composition necessarily entails the incorporation of repetition, and whether to foreground or conceal these repetitions is a compositional choice. Forty-seven insular Alleluya polyphonic settings copied from c. 1230 - c. 1330 are based on identifiable plainchant melodies. Since several are multiple settings of the same melody, just twenty-two individual melodies provide the basis for these works. The majority have internal verse melismas with a repetitive pitch structure, mostly in bar form (aab). I focus on this subset, with examples drawn from settings of the Judicabunt Sancti, and Post partum virgo (Assumpta est Maria) melodies. These repetitive internal melismas are the site of extensive textings (prosulations) in the upper voices, and frequently have multiple tenor statements. Drawing on Margulis’s work, I consider the ritual “behavior” of repetition in the acts of composition and performance, and how repetitive gestures in these case studies focus and manipulate the attentive state. These findings are contextualized within recent hypotheses that assert the “flexible world of ad-hoc performance” in thirteenth-century polyphony (Roesner 2018) and the role of memory in its performance and composition (Berger 2005).