Music 501: Medieval and Renaissance Music

Class Project

Choose a Renaissance motet or mass based on a pre-existing original (chant, song, or polyphony). Make sure you have a reliable scholarly edition that indicates original pitch, clefs, note values and proportional signs, and make sure you can find a copy of the chant or other melody upon which the work is based. Include:

• Title, subtitle (e.g., a psalm-motet in three partes, for six voices), composer, approximate date, original MS or printed source, modern editions, recordings)
• A brief essay introducing the work in its musical, liturgical, and cultural context.
• Text: source, liturgical use, poetic form, other comments. Print out the text as poetry or divided into prose verses (as psalms or other scripture).
• Melody: source, liturgical use, other comments. If appropriate, print out the melody in chant (square neum) notation, otherwise mensural notation.
• Voice parts: names, clefs, range, abbreviations for chart below.
• Dispersion chart: Make a chart that shows each text-based segment of the motet and provides for each the following information, based on your own analysis (for masses, select a single movement for your dispersion chart):
  • Text segment (or incipit)
  • Measure numbers (or semibreves)
  • Mensural sign (time signature, if it changes)
  • Voices present (i.e. C5TB)
  • Use of pre-existent material (i.e. CF in bassus, paraphrased imitatively in CA, etc.)
  • Imitation, with pitch and temporal interval
  • Structural closes (main cadences, with pitch, voices involved)
  • Secondary junctures (cadences or other closes, as above, also explain mitigating factors)
  • Other remarks.

Include a photocopy of the best edition of the work with your analysis.

The written work is due on December 1; you should be ready for ten-minute oral presentations on December 1 and 3.

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