Motet

In Western music, motet is a word that is applied to a number of highly varied choral musical compositions.

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The name comes either from the Latin movere, ("to move") or a Latinized version of Old French mot, "word" or "verbal utterance." The Mediaeval Latin for "motet" is "motectum". If from the Latin, the name describes the movement of the different voices against one another.

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According to Margaret Bent (1997), "'a piece of music in several parts with words' is as precise a definition of the motet as will serve from the thirteenth to the late sixteenth century and beyond. This is actually very close to one of the earliest descriptions we have, that of the late thirteenth-century theorist Johannes de Grocheio."

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Western music: Western music is a broad category of music that includes all musical genres that use a 12-note chromatic scale, including Western classical music, rock and roll, and many other forms of popular music. The word Western may be misleading; although much of this music came from Europe and North America,...

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Latin: Latin is an Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. It gained great importance as the formal language of the Roman Empire. All Romance languages are descended from Latin, and many words based on Latin are found in other modern languages such as English. The ...