Combinative music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries uses different methods to unite heterogeneous texts and melodies: simultaneous, successive, and a combination of the two. Franco-Flemish practice focused on the first two of these categories. Serious motets and melancholy songs combined texts and tunes with symbolic relationships. Double and triple chansons and compositions with mixed sacred and secular texts used satire to produce humor on an ironic level. The type of combinative writing most often found in German regions featured a combination of successive fragments within a loose form, producing a broader, nonsensical type of humor. Thus the term "quodlibet" should be understood to refer to this specific sixteenth-century German type.

Index Classifications: 1400s, 1500s

Contributed by: Felix Cox