Les Motets, Guillaume de Machaut - ensemble Musica Nova

Ensemble: Musica Nova Album: Les Motets, Guillaume de Machaut Video: Guillaume de Machaut, ms 1586, XIVth cent. • In Western classical music, a motet is mainly a vocal musical composition, of highly diverse form and style, from high medieval music to the present. The motet was one of the pre-eminent polyphonic forms of Renaissance music. The late 13th-century theorist Johannes de Grocheo believed that the motet was "not to be celebrated in the presence of common people, because they do not notice its subtlety, nor are they delighted in hearing it, but in the presence of the educated and of those who are seeking out subtleties in the arts". In the early 20th century, it was generally believed the name came from the Latin movere (to move), though a derivation from the French mot ("word", or "phrase") had also been suggested. The Medieval Latin for "motet" is motectum, and the Italian mottetto was also used. If the word is from Latin, the name describes the movement of the different voices against one another. Today, however, the French etymology is favoured by reference books, as the word "motet" in 13th-century French had the sense of "little word". In fact, the troped clausulas that were the forerunner of the motet were originally called motelli (from the French mot, "word"), soon replaced by the term moteti. The earliest motets arose in the 13th century from the organum tradition exemplified in the Notre-Dame school of Léonin and Pérotin. The motet probably arose from...