Generic interconnectivity in fifteenth-century music - Bokulich, Clare; Rodin, Jesse; Berger, Karol, 1947-; Kronengold, Charles (Charles Stewart); Stanford University, Department of Music (2016)
In his Dictionary of Musical Terms (ca. 1475) and Art of Counterpoint (1477), theorist and composer Johannes Tinctoris famously articulated a threefold hierarchy of music genres consisting of song, motet, and mass. Musicologists have traditionally attached significant weight to Tinctoris's tripartite scheme, analyzing each genre independently, considering the origins of each separately, and organizing modern editions in terms of genre. My dissertation focuses on the myriad ways in which musicians connected genres to one another in the fifteenth century, quoting secular songs in masses and motets; composing motets in the style of songs, re-texting songs so that they could be sung as motets, and subsuming liturgical chant into the texture and context of courtly songs; combining motets into substitute mass cycles, and even extracting mass sections and re-texting them as songs. Whereas some of these interconnections, masses based on songs in particular, have received a good deal of scholarly attention, others such as motets based on songs, have largely gone unrecognized. By considering genres not in isolation but in communication with one another, my dissertation makes the case for genre as a determinant of borrowing practices. Moreover, I argue that dissimilarity between genres was a driving force behind their commingling. Recognizing the significance and pervasiveness of generic interconnectivity sheds new light on some of the thorniest issues of the fifteenth century, including the style of Josquin's famous Ave Maria...virgo serena; the origins of and relationship between Ockeghem's D'ung aultre amer, the motet Tu solus, qui facis mirabilia, and the Missa D'ung aultre amer, both attributed to Josquin; and the motet cycle Vultum tuum.
Submitted to the Department of Music.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016.
Rights: (c) Copyright 2016 by Clare Frances Elisabeth Bokulich
Rights: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Keywords: theses