After 1200 C.E. the most significant development in polyphonic music was its gradual distancing from church services. In one important new genre, composers took a fragment of a Gregorian chant and repeated it several times over in the bottom voice. On top of it they layered two more voices, each with its own words: love poems, commentaries on political developments of the day, even the cries of Parisian street vendors. This was a radical and strange development; how many kinds of music do you know today that present simultaneously two different sets of lyrics?

In such music, despite the fragment of chant on which it was built, there was little sign left of the church. The genre was named after its proliferation of words in the upper voices: motet, from the French mot (“word”).