Morton [Mourton, Moriton], Robert

(b c1430; d after 13 March 1479). English composer. He was clerc and chappelain in the chapel choir of the Burgundian court from 1457 to 1476, the final decade of the long reign of Philip the Good and the first eight years of the brief and tumultuous reign of his son Charles the Bold. The document of late 1457 appointing Morton and authorizing payment for clothes describes him as ‘chappellain angloix’ and is the only evidence that he was English. Because of a lacuna in the documents for the following years, the first surviving payment to him as a member of the chapel is from October 1460: here, and in all subsequent documents, he is styled ‘Messire’ – a title which, in the context of these particular documents, means that he was a priest.

Morton was seconded to the household of Charles, Count of Charolais, the future Duke Charles the Bold, from 1 June 1464 to 12 March 1465 and again for three months some time between 1 October 1465 and 31 September 1466. He was given leave of absence from 20 July to 13 August 1470. After 19 February 1475 he appears in the daily payment scrolls only for 13–14 June; on 1 February 1476 his position as a chaplain was taken by Pierre Basin, apparently in immediate fulfilment of an expectative granted a year earlier (see Pirro, 118). However, contrary to some earlier statements, he did not die then: in January 1477 a papal document records his paying the annates for a benefice at St Paul, Liège (Roth, 542); and on 13 March 1479 he resigned the parish of Goutswaard-Koorndijk (Holtkamp, 108).

Morton’s career in the Burgundian court chapel is perplexing because he remained in the humble position of clerc for almost 15 years, becoming chappelain only in 1471–2. Normally singers were promoted within three or four years. This delay cannot be explained by the famous emnity between Duke Philip the Good and his son, for Morton was a clerc for four more years after Charles became duke. There may have been political reasons for the delay in his promotion, if the composer is identifiable with the Robert Morton (d 1497) who later became Bishop of Worcester. During the years 1457–76 none of the documents for the future bishop attests his presence in England. He succeeded his uncle John Morton (later cardinal) as canon of Salisbury Cathedral and St Paul’s Cathedral, London, in 1478 and as Master of the Rolls in January 1479 (having been granted the reversion of it on 30 May 1477). It is an intriguing coincidence that John Morton was an envoy to the court of Burgundy from January to June 1474 and from December 1474 to January 1475, that is, the last months of Robert Morton’s tenure in the choir.

Further oblique clues to Morton’s life survive. His rondeau Le souvenir recalls the arms of Claude Bouton (b ?1488), ‘Souvenir tue’, and might indicate some connection with the Bouton family, at least one of whom was prominent at the Burgundian court during Morton’s time there. The poem Mon bien, m’amour, ma joye et mon desir, printed in Le jardin de plaisance (Paris, 1501) and normally considered the correct poem for the music Mon bien ma joyeux, has the acrostic MARIE M[O]RELET, though no person of this name has been identified. The anonymous rondeau La plus grant chiere (ed. in Marix, 1937, p.86; text in Marix, 1939, p.207) describes vividly how Morton and Hayne van Ghizeghem astonished everybody with their singing and playing at Cambrai.

Only secular works survive; and all are ascribed simply ‘Morton’. However, four of them, ascribed to him only in I-PEc 431 (c1490), may well be by other composers. Three have more convincing ascriptions elsewhere: Pues serviçio to the Spanish composer Enrique (see Fallows, 1992); Vien’avante morte dolente to Adrien Basin, a colleague at the Burgundian court; and C’est temps perdu to Caron. The other doubtful song appears with many different texts in different sources: ‘Vive ma dame’ in F-Dm 517; ‘Hellas madame et que serrace’ in E-TAc; ‘Tu sine principio’ in CZ-HK II A 7; ‘Motectus’ in I-PEc 431; ‘Lent et scolorito’ in I-Bc Q16; and, most convincingly, ‘Ellend du hast umbfangen mich’ both in the Schedel Liederbuch (D-Mbs Cgm 810, c1460) and in Hans Gerle’s printed lutebook (Nuremberg, 1533). Moreover, its tenor matches the melody for that text in other German sources, and its style is thoroughly German.

Of Morton’s remaining eight works, all are French and in the rondeau form that dominated French song composition of those years, especially at the court of Burgundy. There is no hint of English style in them, unless it be in the open triadic F-tonality of Mon bien ma joyeux. The two most successful were Le souvenir de vous me tue and N’aray je jamais mieulx, both found in sources from the mid-1460s onwards. Cousine trop vous abusés seems to match a group of similar pieces dating from the early 1460s; and Il sera pour vous, superimposed over the famous melody L’homme armé, refers jokingly to Simon le Breton (see Simon, (1)), whose retirement from the court chapel in 1464 may have provided the occasion for the song (see Fallows, 1978, pp.204ff). Que pourroit plus faire une dame, with its refreshingly irregular metre, is puzzlingly ascribed to Morton only in I-PAp 1158, an autograph of Gaffurius.

Given that context, certain individual stylistic traits can be noted. All Morton’s secure pieces have an extreme melodic economy; they avoid the simple ‘filling’ patterns that a composer such as Hayne van Ghizeghem would often give to the contratenor between musico-poetic lines in the discantus and tenor; the contratenor often uses wide leaps more frequently than in the works of his contemporaries; a preference for the contratenor to use leaps of a 5th tends to anchor the tonalities.

Only N’aray je jamais mieulx is ascribed to Morton in more than one source, yet there is ample testimony to his achievement. He was mentioned by Hothby (see JAMS, viii, 1955, p.95) and praised by Tinctoris (CoussemakerS, iv, 200) as being world-famous. As well as this his most famous pieces were exceptionally widely distributed: Le souvenir survives in 15 musical sources and was used as the basis for two works by Tinctoris, one by Arnolfo Giliardi and a lost mass by Gaffurius; N’aray je jamais mieulx has 16 musical sources and was used for a motet and three mass cycles (among them Josquin’s Missa ‘Di dadi’). These two songs represent a peak in Burgundian court music to be equalled only by the early works of Hayne van Ghizeghem; they are Morton’s true claim to recognition.

WORKS

all 3 voices and probably rondeaux

Edition: Robert Morton: The Collected Works, ed. A.W. Atlas (New York, 1981) [incl. all works listed]

doubtful works

forms uncertain

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

MGG1 (P. Gülke)

PirroHM

A. Pinchart: Archives des arts, sciences et lettres, iii (Ghent, 1881)

C.P.M. Holtkamp: Register op de parochien, altaren … van den officiaal des aartsdiakens van den utrechtschen dom, vii: Zuydhollandia, Voorne en Putten, ed. P.M. Grijpink (Haarlem, 1937), 108

J. Marix: Les musiciens de la cour de Bourgogne au XVe siècle (Paris, 1937/R)

J. Marix: Histoire de la musique et des musiciens de la cour de Bourgogne sous le règne de Philippe le Bon (1420–1467) (Strasbourg, 1939/R)

A.B. Emden: A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500 (Oxford, 1957)

B.L. Trowell: Music under the Later Plantagenets (diss., U. of Cambridge,1960)

D. Fallows: Robert Morton’s Songs: a Study of Styles in the Mid-Fifteenth Century (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1978)

L.L. Perkins and H. Garey, eds.: commentary on The Mellon Chansonnier (New Haven, CT, 1979)

R. Taruskin: ‘Antoine Busnoys and the L’Homme armé Tradition’, JAMS, xxxix (1986), 255–93

P.M. Higgins: Antoine Busnois and Musical Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century France and Burgundy (diss., Princeton U., 1987)

A.E. Planchart: ‘Two Fifteenth-Century Songs and their Texts in a Close Reading’, Basler Jb für historische Musikpraxis, xiv (1990), 13–36 [on Il sera pour vous]

A. Roth: Studien zum frühen Repertoire der päpstlichen Kapelle unter dem Pontifikat Sixtus’ IV (Vatican City, 1991)

G. Thibault and D. Fallows, eds.: commentary on Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu (Paris, 1991)

D. Fallows: ‘A Glimpse of the Lost Years: Spanish Polyphonic Song, 1450–70’, New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. J.R.B. Wright and S.A. Floyd (Warren, MI, 1992), 19–36 [on Pues serviçio]

DAVID FALLOWS