The Motet in the Age of Du Fay (review)

The Motet in the Age of Du Fay. By Julie E. Cumming. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. [xv, 418 p. ISBN 0-521-47377-2. $69.95.]

Prior to the appearance of the monograph under review, the study that would probably have best filled its purpose was Wolfgang Stephan's Die Burgundisch-Niederländische Motette zur Zeit Ockeghems (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1937), the date of which indicates how great the need had become for a reevaluation of the issues. Although Reinhard Strohm, Margaret Bent, David Fallows, and other scholars have been intensively occupied with the late-medieval motet and related topics for quite a few years now, many diverse threads have remained to be pulled together. It is therefore propitious that Julie E. Cumming chose to expand her doctoral dissertation (Concord out of Discord: Occasional Motets of the Early Quattrocentro [University of California at Berkeley, 1987]) into a thorough investigation of the motet in Western Europe during the first seventy-five years of the fifteenth century. Apropos of the new book's title, it should be noted that the lifetime of composer Guillaume Du Fay (d. 1474) dictates the limitation of scope "to works found in sources copied before 1475" (p. 307, n. 7).

Cumming's casting of this book as a genre study is carefully deliberated. The most immediate concern of her first chapter, "Approaches and Analogies," is to develop an underlying conceptual framework modeled along Darwinian lines. To this end, the author applies an analogy derived from the field of biology, maintaining that the evolutionary model "clarifies the motet's historical development" (p. 22). Further, she contends that "to tell the story of the motet in the fifteenth century is to tell the story of the creation, evolution, and extinction" of a series of "subgenres" (p. 20). This method, upheld throughout the book, entails identifying collateral categories under the overall umbrella of "motet." Accordingly, the task of chapter 2 is to postulate a series of musical and textual "features," of which various "clusters" tend to coexist in individual works, thus facilitating classification of the repertory into codifiable archetypes. The combination of features present in any given piece creates a "horizon of expectation," which then "will enable us to recognize the ways in which a work negotiates the conflicting claims of tradition and innovation" (p. 40).

Before proceeding to specific examples, Cumming considers period uses of the designation "motet," surveying three different types of evidence: music treatises, archival references, and music manuscripts. The author concludes that these disparate sources of information evince "little or no contradiction" in their conception of the term (p. 60). Ultimately the element most "essential to the identity of the genre" is the notion of "functional flexibility" (p. 61). This concept plays a pivotal role throughout the author's subsequent narrative, as she defines both what motets are and what the contexts were in which they were performed.

The remainder of the book (parts 2 and 3) is devoted to examining the motet repertory as represented in individual sources, focusing on--but by no means limited to--the codex Bologna Q15 (part 2) and the seven compilations that make up the Trent codices (part 3). Cumming identifies Q15 as central for two reasons. First, it contains more motets than any other source assembled between about 1420 and 1440; second, these pieces are placed together in the manuscript, thus constituting direct evidence as to what the compiler(s), at least, understood under the classification of "motet." On the basis of its rich and varied contents, Cumming asserts that "knowledge of the motets of Bologna Q15 will enable us to understand almost the whole range of motet types from the early fifteenth century" (pp. 65-66). Having sorted out the subgenres in this earlier layer of works, the author then proceeds to a consideration of the predominantly later corpus represented in the Trent codices (copied, as Cumming notes, during the period roughly between 1430 and 1475; see p. 167).

In advancing her...