Motet

A motet is a polyphonic vocal setting of a sacred (occasionally secular) text in Latin or another language, for several independent voice parts woven together by counterpoint. In the 13th century early motets famously combined two or three different texts in different languages over a chanted tenor — a layering that ritually astonished listeners. Renaissance composers from Josquin Desprez onward smoothed the form into the imitative texture that became standard: each voice enters in turn with the same theme before the parts diverge. Dynamics are gradient rather than dramatic; expressive shaping is achieved through the gradual entry of voices and through harmonic tension.

The motet emerged at the Notre-Dame school of Paris around 1200 as a development of the discant clausula, with composers such as Perotin adding new texts above existing chant fragments. Guillaume de Machaut's 14th-century motets blended sacred and courtly poetry; Guillaume Dufay and Johannes Ockeghem refined imitation in the 15th century; Josquin Desprez (c. 1450-1521) made it the dominant texture. Palestrina, Lassus and Byrd carried the genre through the 16th century; Heinrich Schutz's 'Geistliche Chormusik' and Bach's six motets (BWV 225-230) extended it into the Baroque, after which it shrank to a specialist niche.

In Josquin's 'Ave Maria...virgo serena' (c. 1485) listen for the way each voice enters singing the same melody a few beats after the last, building a cumulative wash of harmony before the parts diverge. The arrival of all voices on a stable chord and the suspensions that precede it are the genre's main expressive device. Compare a motet's even, flowing surface to the more sharply differentiated sections of a Mass or oratorio.

Josquin's 'Ave Maria...virgo serena' sung by the Tallis Scholars is the cleanest entry. Palestrina's 'Sicut cervus' (published 1581) shows the more polished mid-Renaissance manner. For the form's Baroque endpoint, Bach's 'Singet dem Herrn' (BWV 225, c. 1727) for two four-part choirs is unmatched.

Thomas Tallis's 40-voice motet 'Spem in alium' (c. 1570) is scored for eight five-part choirs arranged in a semicircle, and was reportedly composed to outdo Alessandro Striggio's earlier 40-part 'Ecce beatam lucem'. The piece is so dependent on physical space that recordings only hint at the impact of hearing it inside the resonance of a cathedral.