This is one of Vitry’s most widely transmitted motets, surviving in at least ten sources and cited as an example in the ars vetus et nova treatise complex. I was invited to contribute an analytical case study and after some deliberation (so many motets, so little time) I decided to write about Philippe de Vitry’s Colla iugo subdere/ Bona condit cetera. This summer saw the publication by Boydell and Brewer of the very attractive Critical Companion to Medieval Motets edited by Jared Hartt. New publication: Anna Zayaruznaya, “ Materia matters: Reconstructing Colla/ Bona” in A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets, ed. Is composition the elixir of life? If not, what’s going on? Continue reading → Posted in History and Historiography | Tagged medieval people, Petrarch, Philippe de Vitry | 3 Replies I am a “materia” girl I’ve always been suspicious of such claims for reasons that are probably obvious from my tone here, and from the more concrete data from my realm of music history: We know that Vitry died at 70 and we think that Machaut lived into his late 70s Ockeghem and Du Fay lived a long time too. If you are like me, you’ve often heard it asserted that medieval people were considered old by age 40, or 50, or some other age that makes us feel healthy and superior compared to our feeble distant ancestors. Now Vitry was born in 1291, and was already 58 years old when Petrarch lashed out. Anyway, in the course of berating Viry for this crazy and self-indulgent thing he’d written, Petrarch complained that Vitry was getting old-not physically, mind, but mentally: “videris… michi, vir egregie, non tam corpore quam animo senuisse” (you seem to me… to have aged not so much in body as in mind). The details don’t matter for present purposes, though I’ll get into them in the book. In 1350 Petrarch wrote a letter to Philippe de Vitry, a composer about whom I’m currently writing a book, complaining about something Vitry had said in a letter to another dude, which letter Petrarch had seen. 1340 in a copy of the Roman de la Rose, Morgan Library MS M.503, fol. 3 (forthcoming), pre-print freely available here. Anna Zayaruznaya, “New Voices for Vitry,” Early Music 46, no.William Watson, “Philippe de Vitry, Levi ben Gershon, and the Consonant Whole Tone.” Music Theory and Analysis 5 (2018): 28–57. ![]() Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 242-62.
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