Toward an Interpretation of the Sixteenth-Century Motet

Singing the King’s Music: Attaingnant’s Motet Series, Royal Hegemony and the Function of the Motet in Sixteenth-Century France

“…50 This view was largely supplanted in the 1980s when several scholars, notably Anthony Cummings and Jeremy Noble, proposed a paraliturgical function for the motet: where it would adorn the liturgy but was not essential to its performance. 51 Within the paraliturgical function, we also find a use for motets in processions and at stational liturgies. Robert Nosow proposed that motets used in processions or stational liturgies served a ceremonial function, one which added drama and interest to the liturgy, and Noel O'Regan found that polyphony, and motets in particular, were standard components of processions in late sixteenth-century Rome.…”

The Masses and Motets of William Byrd

“…Byrd's formative years as a composer of Latin sacred music are perhaps the most difficult to assess, for little music has come down to us from earlier than around 1575. Kerman suggests that 'in view of the extensive anthologizing of his Aspects of the sixteenth-century motet repertory are studied in Dunning 1970 andCummings 1981. music that took place in the 1580s and 90s, it is not likely that many early motets existed which are now completely lost' (p.55); but this assumes that the scribes of those manuscripts we are still lucky enough to possess had access to the entire corpus of Byrd's student works, a view that is surely suspect. Many of Byrd's unpublished motets are preserved today in the slenderest of states -often a single manuscript -and there is no evidence to suggest that they were once widely circulated.…”

Constructing Identities in a Music Manuscript: The Medici Codex as a Gift*

“… 36 A consideration of the evidence for the liturgical, secular, and paraliturgical use of motets in sixteenth-century Rome can be found in Cummings, 1981. …”

“… 81 The list of documented examples is long, and includes Lockwood, 1985, 100; Shearman, 2003, 1:247–50 (document 1516/14); Cummings, 1981, 45–46n6; Lockwood, 1976, 121n57; Blackburn, 1992, 5–6. See also Tomasello, 453–57, 468–69; Cummings, 1981, 45–46, with copious documentation, given largely in his n5. Paolo Cortese discusses music specifically as an after-dinner activity in his De cardinalatu : see the facsimile and translation of the relevant passage given in Pirrotta, 147–55.…”