Intelligibility Redux: Motets and the Modern Medieval Sound

Abstract

The medieval composers of polytextual motets have been charged with rendering multiple texts inaudible by superimposing them. While the limited contemporary evidence provided by Jacobus’s comments in the Speculum musicae seems at first sight to suggest that medieval listeners would have had trouble understanding texts declaimed simultaneously, closer scrutiny reveals the opposite: that intelligibility was desirable, and linked to modes of performance. This article explores the ways in which 20th-century performance aesthetics and recording technologies have shaped current ideas about the polytextual motet. Recent studies in cognitive psychology suggest that human ability to perform auditory scene analysis—to focus on a given sound in a complicated auditory environment—is enhanced by directional listening and relatively dry acoustics. But the modern listener often encounters motets on recordings with heavy mixing and reverb. Furthermore, combinations of contrasting vocal timbres, which can help differentiate simultaneously sung texts, are precluded by a blended, uniform sound born jointly of English choir-school culture and modernist preferences propagated under the banner of authenticity. Scholarly accounts of motets that focus on sound over sense are often influenced, directly or indirectly, by such mediated listening.