On the one hand, these passages serve to identify the liturgical function of the motets and the cycles surrounding them on the other hand, they are hardly ever analyzed in detail, not only because their homophonic austerity seems to be of little interest, but also because they defy normal analytical procedures.
The homophonic passages usually found in fifteenth-century motets to be sung at the culmination of the mass, the elevation, play a paradoxical role in modern scholarship. Finally, I demonstrate how my analytical methodology may be used in conjunction with other methodologies of sonority and cadence to analyze large-scale tonal structures, illustrated with an analysis of Machaut’s Motet 17 as well as a comparison of Vitry’s Flos/Celsa and Gloria Ivrea 64. Then, I discuss the prevalence of particular elaborative figures and their implications for structural analysis. First, I build upon the analytical methodology presented in Chapter 1 by presenting a number of analytical criteria for determining the contrapunctus structure. Finally, Chapter 4 presents structural analyses of fourteenth-century motets and motet-style liturgical polyphony. I then consider the relationship between theory and practice in Chapter 3 through a detailed analysis of dissonance treatment in the treatise examples and contemporaneous repertoires in order to determine which repertoires most relate to the teachings of contrapunctus treatises. Chapter 2 further contextualizes this argument by illustrating the significant conceptual shift regarding the relationship between tonal structure and elaboration from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century. In Chapter 1, I examine the various uses of the phrase “fundamentum discanti” (“foundation of discant”) in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century treatises and discuss its connection to contrapunctus as the structural foundation to support its embellishment, demonstrated through analysis of the musical examples in De diminutione contrapuncti and the Compendium de discantu mensurabili by Petrus dictus Palma Ociosa. This methodology is based on historical thought by carefully analyzing contemporaneous treatises and their musical examples in order to better understand the compositional process conveyed both explicitly and implicitly in the treatises. The primary goal of this dissertation is to produce a rigorous methodology for distinguishing between the contrapunctus structure and its elaboration in performing structural analysis of fourteenth-century diminished counterpoint.
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