oa Sighting the Obrechtian Motet

Obrecht’s motets show an extraordinary diversity of style and approach. Yet despite their great range of invention and elaboration, and the impact Obrecht’s music clearly made on his contemporaries, their survival and transmission has been (to say the least) a little precarious. Subtracting the hugely important contributions of Petrucci and the Segovia manuscript from the inventory makes this point very clearly. The motets as a group are rich in Obrechtian musical thought, and show an even greater stylistic range than the masses. This is in part for reasons of genre, context, and function, naturally enough, and of indebtedness to different motet types and traditions, but is also intensified through Obrecht’s pronounced tendency to interrogate his own creative practice, and to set and solve compositional problems in ever-new ways. His creative solutions are invariably the result of a thoughtfully developed compositional approach, both in fulfilment of the motets’ cultural tasks and in their technical structure and style. Obrecht shows a consistency of contrapuntal method, while ensuring that his finished pieces present a distinctive and effective sound-world, well grounded in imaginative vocal textures of real flair and distinction. This article looks at patterns of transmission, at the presence of incomplete works and what they can tell us, at the ‘German dimension’ of Obrecht, and at compositional questions which seem to characterize his approach, including his liking for musical processes that embody both the intellectual and the sonic dimension of polyphonic form, and that are able to unfold—metrically, proportionally, contrapuntally—on the largest scale.