This is the first full-length study of the vernacular motet in thirteenth-century France. The motet was the most prestigious type of music of that period, filling a gap between the music of the so-called Notre-Dame School and the Ars Nova of the early fourteenth century. This book takes the music and the poetry of the motet as its starting-point and attempts to come to grips with the ways in which musicians and poets treated pre-existing material, creating new artefacts. The book reviews the processes of texting and retexting, and the procedures for imparting structure to the works; it considers the way we conceive genre in the thirteenth-century motet, and supplements these with principles derived from twentieth-century genre theory. The motet is viewed as the interaction of literary and musical modes whose relationships give meaning to individual musical compositions.
Biografie (Thomas Forrest Kelly)
Thomas Forrest Kelly is the Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music at Harvard University. He is the author, among other books, of First Nights (Yale, 2004, named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), and First Nights at the Opera (Yale, 2004). He has been president of Early Music America.
