Reconstructing and repositioning Regis's Ave Maria ... virgo serena DUMITRESCU, Theodor

RESUMEN: The five-voice sequence setting Ave Maria...virgo serena by Johannes Regis appears to be an irreparably damaged work, lacking one of its voice-parts and featuring numerous stretches where only one of the surviving voices sounds. Close examination of the composition´s contrapuntual structuring and use of pre-existent plainchant material, however, permits a confident reconstruction of a large portion of the missing music. The process reveals a forward-thinking work which departs notably from Regis´s "tenor motet" pattern. No long-note scaffolding cantus firmys is present: theguiding principle is the migration of paraphrased plainchant throughout all voices, expressed with a musical syntax based on lucid pairedduet structures, imitation and straightforward repetition of melodic material. These observations invite a reconsideration of the position of Ave María... virgo serena, both in Regis´s compositional output and in relation to motets of his younger contemporaries, who showed an increasing faascination with tha major structural approaches adopted in this setting. Particularly the celebrated motet Ave María... virgo serena by Josquin des Prez, already brought into connection with Regis´s setting by earlier scholars, affects the historical view of latter work´s dating and wider influence. The three -way relationship between the plainchant melodies and the two polyphonic compositions points unequivocally to the conclusion that Josquin took Regis´s sequence as the starting-point for his motet. Keywords:Johannes Regis, Josquin des Prez, Guilleume Du Fay, Johhannes Mouton, Mattheus Pipelare, motet, sequence, Ave María.