Listening to Machaut's Motets

Clark, Alice V.

doi:10.1525/jm.2004.21.4.487

Cited by 6 publications

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“…Social and cultural practices may also shape a listener's experience of music (Gay, 1996;Johnson, 1995). Such ecological models of listening are challenging long-held conceptions of how medieval music was engaged with and perceived by historical listeners (e.g., Bent, 2010;Clark, 2004;Zayaruznaya, 2017).…”

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The Metaphor of Sweetness in Medieval and Modern Music Listening

2021

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Historical listening has long been a topic of interest for musicologists. Yet, little attention has been given to the systematic study of historical listening practices before the common practice era (c. 1700–present). In the first study of its kind, this research compared a model of medieval perceptions of “sweetness” based on writings of medieval music theorists with modern day listeners’ aesthetic responses. Responses were collected through two experiments. In an implicit associations experiment, participants were primed with a more or less consonant musical excerpt, then presented with a sweet or bitter target word, or a non-word, on which to make lexical decisions. In the explicit associations experiment, participants were asked to rate on a three-point Likert scale perceived sweetness of short musical excerpts that varied in consonance and sound quality (male, female, organ). The results from these experiments were compared to predictions from a medieval perception model to investigate whether early and modern listeners have similar aesthetic responses. Results from the implicit association test were not consistent with the predictions of the model, however, results from the explicit associations experiment were. These findings indicate the metaphor of sweetness may be useful for comparing the aesthetic responses of medieval and modern listeners.

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The Metaphor of Sweetness in Medieval and Modern Music Listening

2021

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“…But below I mostly use the term "audience" in its most literal sense, as involving audition. See also the theorization and defense of listening as an activity in Clark 2004, where the chief concern is with the intelligibility of structure rather than of text.…”

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Intelligibility Redux

Zayaruznaya

2017

MTO

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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 theSpeculum musicaeseems 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.

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The Fourteenth-Century Motet

Clark¹

2018

The Cambridge History of Medieval Music

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Listening to Machaut's Motets

Cited by 6 publications

References 1 publication

The Metaphor of Sweetness in Medieval and Modern Music Listening

The Metaphor of Sweetness in Medieval and Modern Music Listening

Intelligibility Redux

The Fourteenth-Century Motet

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