A French chanson, characteristically in three voices, with a lower voice that carries a Latin text and is usually based on chant. The term is used mainly for the substantial and very successful repertory of such works from the years 1475–1500, particularly by Compère, Agricola and Josquin. Quite often, as in the case of Josquin’s Que vous ma dame/In pace, the majority of sources carry only the Latin text, so it is likely that this repertory was larger than we now know: several pieces in the early 16th-century manuscript GB-Lbl 35087, for example, have the style of the motet-chanson but only Latin text; Obrecht’s Parce Domine is a notable case.
The term was introduced by Wolfgang Stephan (1937), who distinguished Motetten-Chanson from Liedmotette (‘song-motet’), which he defined as a brief motet with the style and scope of a vernacular chanson (the classic example being Walter Frye’s Ave regina celorum). But his usage was not consistent; the central and comprehensive statements on the genre are those of Ludwig Finscher, who also notes that there are many similarly designed songs of the 14th and early 15th centuries.
MGG2 (L. Finscher)
W. Stephan: Die burgundisch-niederländische Motette zur Zeit Ockeghems (Kassel, 1937), 51–9
L. Finscher: Loyset Compère (c1450–1518): Life and Works, MSD, xii (1964), 205–30
M.E. Columbro: ‘The Chanson-Motet: a Remnant of the Courtly Love Tradition in the Renaissance’, Music and Man, i (1975), 267–76
H. Meconi: ‘Ockeghem and the Motet-Chanson in Fifteenth-Century France’, Johannes Ockeghem: Tours 1997, 381–402
DAVID FALLOWS