The Complete Motets 18

Thirty-one motets first published in printed anthologies or copied into manuscripts between 1570 and 1579 appear in this volume. Le Roy and Ballard working in Paris included over half of them in their collections of Lasso's motets and chansons; the others appear in choirbooks from the Bavarian Hofkapelle and in the 1579 expanded reissue in Nuremberg of Gerlach's Selectissimae cantiones.

The proportion of secular texts in this volume is less than in CM 17; most of them are ceremonial or love poetry. Among them is "Anna, mihi dilecta," a strikingly chromatic piece that might date from a time earlier than its 1579 publication. The religious texts include Lasso's longest motet, a six-voice cantus firmus setting of the sequence "Lauda Sion Salvatorem."

Other motets in the volume call for large ensembles of seven, eight, nine, ten, or twelve voices. The five-voice "Domine Jesu Christe, qui cognoscis" is the motet that won for Lasso the first prize in the initial Puy d'Evreux in 1575.