What Is a Motet?
Peter Lefferts has suggested that the use of a stratified texture, where slower-moving lower part/s without text serve as a foundation for faster-moving, texted upper parts, may begin to describe the motet in a way the scribe of the Trmoulle fragment might understand, since that type of texture is also characteristic of the chace and fourteenth-century Mass movements. (Bent also compares some features of the Italian motet to the caccia, an imitative genre similar to the chace, citing in part a fourteenth-century treatise that does likewise.) That would suggest that, as Bent has argued, bitextuality and chant-based tenors disposed in repeated taleae are indeed not essential to the motet, though those features are in fact present in most examples from medieval France. Such a definition still might not account for all examples from England, though it would describe the Italian motet reasonably well. A definition so broad might not be particularly helpful to scholars, except as a starting-
