Mapping the Motet in the Post-Tridentine Era

Mapping the Motet in the Post-Tridentine Era provides new dimensions to the discussion of the immense corpus of polyphonic motets produced and performed in the decades following the end of the Council of Trent in 1563. Beyond the genre’s rich connections with contemporary spiritual life and religious experience, the motet is understood here as having a multifaceted life in transmission, performance and reception. By analysing the repertoire itself, but also by studying its material life in books and accounts, in physical places and concrete sonic environments, and by investigating the ways in which the motet was listened to and talked about by contemporaries, the eleven chapters in this book redefine the cultural role of the genre. The motet, thanks to its own protean nature, not bound to any given textual, functional or compositional constraint, was able to convey cultural meanings powerfully, give voice to individual and collective identities, cross linguistic and confessional divides, and incarnate a model of learned and highly expressive musical composition. Case studies include considerations of composers (Palestrina, Victoria, Lasso), cities (Seville and Granada, Milan), books (calendrically ordered collections, non-liturgical music books) and special portions of the repertoire (motets pro defunctis, instrumental intabulations).

Esperanza Rodríguez-García is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal), working with the project The Anatomy of Late 15th- and Early 16th-Century Iberian Polyphonic Music. She has held research positions at the IMR-University of London (as an Early Career Research Associate), the British Library-RHUL (as a researcher on the project ‘Early Music Online’) and the University of Nottingham (‘Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow').

Her publications on various aspects of music of the Early Modern period include one music edition, one book and various articles on musical sources, musical institutions and their repertoires, historiography and book history. Her latest contribution (‘Authors, Books, and Readers: Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Missae, magnificat, motecta, psalmi et alia [1600]’) appeared in the volume Makers, Owners and Users of Music Sources before 1600 (ed. Tim Sheppard and Lisa Colton, Brepols, 2017).

Daniele V. Filippi is is a Swiss National Science Foundation post-doctoral research fellow at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Academy of Music, Basel, Switzerland). The motet has been part of his scholarly interests since his graduation at the University of Pavia at Cremona (1999) with a dissertation on Palestrina’s Motecta festorum totius anni of 1563. He has researched and published about several early modern composers, including Palestrina, Victoria, de Monte and G.F. Anerio. Among his recent publications are '"Audire missam non est verba missae intelligere…": The Low Mass and the Motetti missales in Sforza Milan' (Journal of the Alamire Foundation 9, no. 1 [2017]) and the book Listening to Early Modern Catholicism: Perspectives from Musicology, co-edited with Michael Noone (Brill, 2017). For more information, see www.selvarmonica.com/.