motet summary

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Below is the article summary. For the full article, see motet.

motet, Latin choral composition, generally in one movement. Its origins are in the 13th century, when words (French mots) began to be added to originally wordless polyphonic lines in settings of plainchant. It grew directly out of the clausula, a polyphonic decoration of a portion of organum, but it soon split off to become a separate composition, while retaining a meaningless fragment of chant text and melody in the tenor part. The upper texts often became a confusing mixture of sacred and secular—and even anticlerical—poems, indicating its intended performance in courtly as well as ecclesiastical settings. The motet was the most important musical genre of the 13th century and an essential vehicle for the development of polyphony. In the Renaissance, sacred motets, now employing a single text, were written by composers such as Josquin des Prez, Orlande de Lassus, and William Byrd, though it remains unclear how often they were performed in church settings. In the 17th–18th centuries, motets were written by Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Heinrich Schütz, and Johann Sebastian Bach. After c. 1750 the genre declined, and its distinguishing characteristics became diffuse.

William Byrd Summary

William Byrd was an English organist and composer of the Shakespearean age who is best known for his development of the English madrigal. He also wrote virginal and organ music that elevated the English keyboard style. Of Byrd’s origins and early life in London little is known. He was a pupil and

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina Summary

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was an Italian Renaissance composer of more than 105 masses and 250 motets, a master of contrapuntal composition. Palestrina lived during the period of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation and was a primary representative of the 16th-century conservative approach

Gioachino Rossini Summary

Gioachino Rossini was an Italian composer noted for his operas, particularly his comic operas, of which The Barber of Seville (1816), Cinderella (1817), and Semiramide (1823) are among the best known. Of his later, larger-scale dramatic operas, the most widely heard is William Tell (1829).

Johannes Brahms Summary

Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist of the Romantic period, who wrote symphonies, concerti, chamber music, piano works, choral compositions, and more than 200 songs. Brahms was the great master of symphonic and sonata style in the second half of the 19th century. He can be viewed as