In 1555, the Parisian printing firm of Le Roy and Ballard issued a collection of 32 selected motets of the "most excellent" composer Jean Mouton. It contains a number of his greatest "hits," but also several pieces unique to this posthumous anthology; without it, several of this composer's works would be lost today. Among the unique motets is a rich and vibrant collage of Marian devotion, Mouton's six-voiced setting of "O Maria piisima/Nativitas unde gaudia." Five of the six voices sing a rhymed Latin hymn to the Virgin. Its lengthy text is rich in both worship imagery ("most bright star of the sea...palace of modesty...mistress of angels") and in allusion. The hymn text references, in fact, all four of the most famous Marian Antiphons: it quotes the title "regina coelorum," its image "stella maris" appears in the Alma redemptoris mater, and its final prayer here paraphrases St. Bernard's appendix to the Salve regina. In the sixth voice, Mouton skillfully intertwines the text—and Gregorian melody—of the Magnificat antiphon for the Feast of the Virgin's nativity, Nativitas unde gaudia; even as five voices plead with Mary to pray for everyone, the sixth proclaims the inexorable joy brought by her feast.



The motet's structure revolves subtly yet elegantly about three varied elaborations of this tenor cantus firmus. The three different paraphrases sound at different pitch levels, yet regulate the proportions of the entire piece: the first statement cadences at the motet's exact midpoint, the second begins precisely at the perfect proportion of the "Golden mean," and the second and third occupy equal lengths of time. The composer gracefully masks this "medieval" constructivism by the variety of his chant paraphrase, and by imperceptibly suave melodic gradations between the free and cantus firmus voices. The chant paraphrase does not enter for a very long time. First two pairs of imitative duets are heard, whose respective melodic shapes foreshadow the chant melody, followed by a phrase of five-voiced writing, and only then (at the textual image that titles Mary the "empress of all queens") does the chant enter, bracketed by the first conclusive cadences. Twice more Mouton juxtaposes the full six voices and thinner imitative textures; his imitative melodies most often are gentle variations upon one another. He concludes the motet powerfully, with numerous imitative reiterations of the final prayer (in which the imitative melody echoes the very opening), the sustained strength of full six-voiced textures, and a rhythmic drive that marches through the repeated invocations.

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