With 'Motets', Björn Schmelzer and Graindelavoix conclude their innovative exploration of musical worlds comparable to that of the Northern French artist Villard de Honnecourt, the producer of a carnet (or portfolio) of drawings made in connection with the new Gothic cathedrals being built in the 13th century. Villard’s diagrams reflect a working activity carried out on the move and is echoed both in Graindelavoix’s choice of repertoire for Motets – the 13th-century motets appended, in haste, to a 12th-century manuscript found in Cambrai (close to Villard’s home village) – and in the restlessness of the Belgian ensemble’s performance style, ever in motion and striving to combine the different layers of the bilingual sacred and secular texts.

Graindelavoix’s director Björn Schmelzer contributes another of his striking, iconoclastic essays, presenting the development of the 13th-century motet in France in a radical new light: as a mirror to the Gothic fascination with automata, to the experience of moving around the new and vast cathedrals, as well as the secrecy which surrounds medieval memory and oral traditions. In concluding this special, ground-breaking trilogy of recordings for Glossa, Schmelzer underlines the importance of the work of Villard in our modern-day understanding of how music in the 13th century was constructed and perhaps performed. The same such ideas inform the vocal (and instrumental) textures and delivery offered by Graindelavoix.