The Death of Arthur •

The Death of Arthur

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Motets

At perihelion, Icarus comes closer
Enkidu faces Gilgamesh
Main article: Orbital decay
Further information: Stellar collision

  • The Planets Bend Between Us
  • Please Forgive Me

@headspace-hotel, Asteroid

Medieval/early-modern motets are hella cool. Very roughly speaking1 motets involve polyphonic (many-voices or melodies) music where the different voices are singing actually different songs - even different genres2. You’re meant to understand the song as the conversation between the different topics - the bawdy drinking song might be reflecting something in the religious hymn being sung beneath it, or vice versa - but you’re getting them all at once.

The Pieces and the Whole

An interesting aspect of this - especially on the meta level - is the composition of songs from pieces of other songs. There’s a whole remix culture, harvesting the bones of songs to make their own pieces - which fascinates me.

It’s like those poems made from clippings of books or Wikipedia articles - they delight me, and they’re thematically resonant with how we’re constructing a game and story from what came before, and they’re a gameable element of the setting as they give a structure for talking about how a character composing a song is making a song on a meta-level3.

The Ears of God

Now it’s time for a digression about labyrinths4. We typically use the term today to distinguish between true mazes that have branching paths, and labyrinths which simply wind and turn but always get to the end if you keep on going. This is not that old of a distinction of what would be very similar terms with different etymologies before.

However, there’s a curious nature to labyrinths in ancient and medieval art. In writing, they’re a symbol of uncertainty, the chance to make wrong decisions and become lost in dead ends, etc. - i.e. a maze. But in art they almost never reflect this.

In medieval art in particular, this becomes an intentional message of religious depictions of the labyrinth - which become instructional or devotional tools. Cathedral labyrinths often wind around a goal - sometimes shooting quickly to almost within reach of it before darting away again, before of course eventually coming back. This can be a meditation on life and its turns and unexpected paths.

Someone imagining the labyrinth or even walking it as a meditative practice can both picture life as a maze as it seems in the moment, but also see the clarity and final destination of the labyrinth from their perspective - metaphorically allowing them to see with “the eyes of God”.

What does this have to do with motets?

Well, the whole “everybody is singing a different song” aspect is actually just as difficult as it sounds. Commentators point out as well that motet writers often put the pieces together in ways that were mathematically elegant and subtle… and impossible to hear.

In particular, it’s going to be hard to pick up the tenor cantus firmus. This is the usually religious piece that’s theoretically the base of the song that all the other songs are commenting on. If you lose it, you’re missing the link that ties everything else together. If you can’t hear it, you can’t really hear the meaning of the song.

Unless you’re the writer - or you’re the tenor voice, maybe the only singer who by virtue of singing the key part is maybe the only one who can hear with the ears of God.

Songs for Nerds

All in all, motets come across as art for nerds, with value in the ability to interrogate them and tease apart a greater structure - sometimes intentionally at the cost of popular appeal or being neatly explainable in any book I get on the subject.

I just think, in this nerdy and niche rpg space, that’s just amazing.

Footnotes

  1. Partially because it’s a complex subject, and partially because I don’t know the subject. This is maybe a bit of pop-history and my vibes off of it, just on an obscure topic rather than a common one where I’m wrong in more ordinary ways. Take it with a grain of salt as more of a worldbuilding concept than a perfectly authentic version of what this all meant. ↩

  2. A few at least across different languages, too. ↩

  3. Which is simpler than needing to describe it at the level of actually composing a song - so players can make points about what their characters are doing easier. ↩

  4. Largely from The Idea of the Labyrinth: from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages and I’ll be honest, I haven’t finished that book yet, so really from the first half or so. ↩