The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet by Anna Zayaruznaya (review)

Anna Zayaruznaya’s book is a substantial contribution towards a new analytical approach to the late-medieval motet. The traditional textbook view, which describes ‘isorhythmic’ motets as coldly medieval expressions of absolute and mathematical music, has been content to identify repeating rhythms and to count breves. More recent scholars, among them Margaret Bent and Jacques Boogaart, have directed attention to the poetry, discovering layer upon layer of significant musical ramifications, while literary scholars such as Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot have brought a larger literary context to analysis of the texts. Zayaruznaya now pushes the analysis further, showing that large and small details of the musical structure of some Ars nova motets are fashioned to reflect a central poetic idea or image.

How can music signify an idea? The question has been especially fraught since the nineteenth century, when Eduard Hanslick, for the sake of philosophical rigour—the need to consider music as an independent art—famously denied the relevance of all external factors (text, programme, composer biography) when judging the aesthetic value of music. Richard Wagner saw things differently, arguing that any striking moment in a piece of music, such as an unexpected modulation or colourful chord, left the listener asking ‘why?’ unless some external poetic justification could vouchsafe the departure.

The battle over absolute music, as well as the strict separation of disciplines in the academy, has strongly influenced the course of early music analysis. We have moved from an approach that focuses almost exclusively on musical issues to one that is more and more eager to embrace text and context. For Zayaruznaya, ‘motets seem to reflect broad ideas by means of formal and textural gestures occurring simultaneously on multiple levels’ (p. 232).

The underpinnings of such an aesthetic of the Ars nova motet lie in an artistic project assembled c.1318 by officials of the French royal chancery, discontented over a government in crisis. Scholarship over the last twenty-five years has shown that the result, the version of the Roman de Fauvel surviving in the manuscript Bibliothe’que nationale de France, f. fr. 146, brought about a fundamental artistic revolution that would influence literature and music for generations. All details of this multimedia extravaganza, which juxtaposes different genres, interpolated texts, music, and images, cumulate to convey the moral lesson. A reader moves backwards and forwards, a process that Nancy Freeman Regalado has labelled ‘reciprocal reading’, epitomized in the Roman by the image of the jeu de la civière, the game of the stretcher or dung-barrow, in which one person moves forwards while the other moves backwards.

Enter the monsters. Exhibit A is the motet Je voi/Fauvel, with a tenor sung by the beastly Fauvel himself: ‘autant m’est si poise arriere comme avant’ (it’s all the same to me if it weighs the same from the back as from the front). Formally constructed of overlaid palindromes, it is ‘the earliest clear superimposition of a body onto a specific piece of music’ (p. 46).

Zayaruznaya subsequently moves to more complex cases, offering two virtuosic analyses of works dating a decade or so later than the Roman de Fauvel. The first is In virtute/Decens, probably attributable to Philippe de Vitry. An admonition to would-be poets of motets, this extraordinary work takes as its point of departure the opening of Horace’s Ars poetica, which famously evokes an example of poetic incongruence, a chimera with a woman’s head, feathers, a horse’s neck, and a fish’s tail. Over the controlled rhetoric of an interlocked tenor and contratenor, Zayaruznaya maps out upper-voice rhythmic correspondences that define a four-part musical superstructure of unequal lengths. The shape of the chimera, potentially a visual image for the composer, broadly determined the form of the work: ‘motets can be creatures, and creatures have shapes’ (p. 103). (Unfortunately...