ABSTRACT
Adam de la Halle's motet Aucun se sont loe/A Dieu commant/SUPER TE opens with a polyphonic self-quotation. The very beginning of Adam’s motet triplum is itself replicated at the outset of the triplum of another motet, Aucun ont trouve/Lonc tens/ANNUN[TIANTES], attributed to Petrus de Cruce and recorded in Mo 7 and in Tu. The first five notes of Petrus's Aucun ont trouve triplum are an exact musical match for the opening of Adam’s Aucun se sont loe. This musically identical triplum incipit, in conjunction with the shared opening text incipit 'Aucun', cannot be pure coincidence. On purely stylistic grounds, and based on the scattered biographical details for both Adam and Petrus, Adam seems to have been the older of the two composers. Petrus, in his use of more than three semibreves within the time of a perfect breve, exceeds the theoretical definitions of the breve by Lambertus and by Franco, in his definitive and widely circulated Ars cantus mensurabilis musicae.
