Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-05T03:49:30.899Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

10 - ‘The spirit moves me to speak of forms changed into new bodies’: Anton Webern, Philippe de Vitry, and the Reception of the Ars Nova Motet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2020

Get access

Summary

If you want to create a work of art that is unified in its mood and consistent in its structure … [then] this is only possible through the inspiration by a poetical idea, whether or not it be introduced as a programme. I consider it a legitimate artistic method to create a correspondingly new form for every new subject. … Of course, purely formalistic, Hanslickian music-making will no longer be possible, and we cannot have any more random patterns, that mean nothing either to the composer or the listener.

It is possible that some motet composers were drawn to a hyperbolized and even transcendentalized conception of the materials of composition; such attitudes have been too common among the composers of the twentieth century for us to deny them to those of the fourteenth.

Many contend that the reception of medieval music in modern times says more about the society remaking the Middle Ages in its own image than it does about the Middle Ages. The revival of interest in medieval music since the eighteenth century, though entertaining as a story, is, one might argue, irrelevant to any current attempt to come to grips with the function, social context, and compositional history of this music in its own time. But that is what I am going to attempt here. I want to take useful historical analogies – of any vintage – and use them to reveal some unexpected things, not about the present, but about the past.

Nineteenth-century editors took Machaut's hybrid narrative Voir dit literally, as a love story, a fact we may either decry or find amusing, but Machaut himself anticipated this reception. As Deborah McGrady has shown, the courtly public he depicted in the poem received his ongoing project literally as well. Regardless of the range of motivations that may have guided the poet's creation, he knew, for better or for worse, that his courtly consumers prized the story's entertainment value above all, and so it should not astonish us that the exact same interpretation resonated when the work re-emerged in the nineteenth century. In spite of the superiority we feel as regards scholarly matters, the nineteenth-century reception actually remains a valid facet of the work.

Type
Chapter
Information
Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages
Essays in Honour of Christopher Page
, pp. 271 - 304
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×