The Ivrea Codex now lives in the Chapter library of the cathedral of Ivrea, a small town in the foothills of the Italian Alps, south of the modern ski resort Aosta (home to an important 15th-century music manuscript). This may seem an unexpected area in which to find major sources of medieval music, but in fact the position of these towns on one of the main routes across the Alps between France and Italy readily explains their importance in the Middle Ages. They lay on roads that linked centres of power, and accordingly they grew in importance themselves, sustaining cathedrals with musical traditions that provided a natural home for collections of sophisticated polyphony.
Recent research suggests that the Ivrea manuscript was copied late in the 14th century, in the 1380s and 90s, but that it preserves music written considerably earlier, not later than the 1360s. And yet it is still one of the earliest sources for 14th-century French music, since (apart from one of the Machaut manuscript) nothing else of any size survives intact after Le Roman de Fauvel of c1318. Thus most of our view of the new style of composition, the so-called ars nova, that began in the 1310s and was developed for at least fifty years, comes from the pages of this manuscript: almost all the motets from that period are here, together with most of the earlier songs and much of the mass music. It is far and away the most important source for ars nova music.
The sequence of mass movements […] does not form a mass cycle; they are very unlikely to have been written by a single composer or for a single occasion. The opening Sanctus is ‘troped’, that is, it has a greatly expanded text and as a result a somewhat longer musical setting than is usual, though the composer (whoever he was) managed to save space by assigning the normal Sanctus text to the lower three voices and running through the troped text in the top voice in much shorter note values. Points to savour include the melodic imitation at ‘fecundata’ and ‘in excelsis’, both probably encouraged by their text. The Kyrie (ascribed in another manuscript to ‘Chipre’) uses a much simpler style, but not necessarily an earlier one, since these different stylistic registers could simply indicate different kinds of occasion (in this case less festive) or differently skilled performers. The Gloria lies somewhere between these two extremes, and includes a small trope in celebration of Christ’s humanity near its end. The Credo is notable for its ‘hocketing’ passages (alternating short notes and short rests in the upper voices) and for its two-note imitations, all of which provide an illusion of a regular repeating rhythmic structure such as would occur in a motet. Hocketing is also a feature of the Sanctus setting […], although in other respects it seems a more modern piece than the Credo. The closing motet, Post missarum solempnia, is not strictly speaking a mass movement, but could in practice have been used in place of the concluding Deo gracias from the mass liturgy since its texts refer to that role and conclude with the words ‘deo gracias’.
Clap, clap/sus Robins is a delightful anomaly, an old fashioned ars antique style motet, out of place in its much progressive surrounding though still entertaining enough to be copied into the Ivrea manuscript.
Motets by Guillaume de Machaut
Although Guillaume de Machaut is often rather different from that of his contemporaries, his complets works have survived, so we know far more about him than about any other composer from medieval France. Most of his 23 motets come from the first part of his composing life (roughly 1320-50) and are typically varied and idiosyncratic specimens of the kinds of ars nova motets of which more ‘normal’ examples survive in Ivrea. Dame/Fins cuers doulz, Trop plus est bele/Biaute paree de valour and Lassel/ Se j’aim mon loyal ami are the three motets that Machaut composed over song melodies. In each case a borrowed triple-time song is heard in long notes in the lowest voice, while the texted voices harmonise it above, so that a sense these motets are really polyphonic song, albeit with extra texts for the upper parts.
The group of Latin motets is in almost every way different. Tu qui gregem/Plange, regni respublica, Christe qui lux/Veni creator spiritus and Felix virgo/Inviolata genitrix are Machaut’s only late motets, written around 1360. They set religious and political texts, very different in tone from the love texts of the French-texted works, and they are composed over a melody borrowed from plainchant, not from secular song. They are all written for four voices, not three, the fourth voice forming a pair with the tenor to provide a two-part harmonic foundation for the texted parts. They use regularly repeating rhytmic and harmonic structures (so-called ‘isorhythm’) as a way of organizing relatively long spans of time. And they all begin with an introduction in which the voices enter one at a time. All seem to have been written during a period of political turnoil that included the Siege of Reims (where Machaut lived) by the English in the winter of 1359/60, perhaps alluded to in Christe qui lux/veni creator spiritus.
The third group of Machaut motets consists of those found not only in the Machaut manuscripts but also in Ivrea, which indicates that they had some popularity beyond Machaut’s immediate circle. His two French-texted motets in Ivrea, Qui es promesse/Hal Fortune and Amours/Faus Samblant well represent opposing styles found among his motets, Amours/Faus Samblant belongs squarely within the musical world of the early ars nova and was clearly influenced by the motets of Philippe de Vitry; but Ha! Fortune shows Machaut’s idiosyncratic harmonic and rhythmic taste, with juxtaposed F# and Bb as well as long passages of syncopation. Martyrum/Diligenter inquiramus celebrates St Quentin, and may have been written after Machaut became a canon of St. Quentin, in north-west France, sometime between 1333-5. It shares with the late motets a solo introduction, and like most ars nova motets its periodic rhythmic structure is clearly marked by hocket passages.
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson
