ABSTRACT
Ludwig Senfl's motet has received little recent attention, despite current fascination with both imitation and Josquin reception. A detailed consideration of Senfl's overt use of Ave Maria seems not to have been undertaken. Josquin and Senfl's teacher Isaac both used polyphonic imitation in mass settings. As Honey Meconi has pointed out, accounts of musical imitation can suffer through the use of broad and even vague generalizations like 'humanist', 'medieval' and 'rhetorical'. This chapter considers three broad kinds of imitation within music: the contrapuntal textures of paired imitation and pervasive imitation; intertextual imitation, either of one pre-existent voice or of a network of voices; and imitation of words by music. Pervasive imitation describes a contrapuntal texture in which a motive appears in many voices of a polyphonic network. Imitation, supposedly a marker of the Renaissance, thus might blend with medieval Boethian theory about the corresponding harmonies between music, man and the cosmos.
