Background
Guillaume de Machaut was born in 1300 at Reims, Grand Est, France.
(Messe de Notre Dame - Le vray remède d'amour - Le Jugemen...)
Messe de Notre Dame - Le vray remède d'amour - Le Jugement du Roi de Navarre / Ensemble Gilles Binchois - Dominique Vellard, direction
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Guillaume de Machaut was born in 1300 at Reims, Grand Est, France.
Guillaume de Machaut became a cleric, and in 1323 he joined the household of King John of Bohemia as a secretary.
The most beautiful of the five manuscripts that contain all Machaut's works was written for the duke under Machaut's personal supervision.
Two poems written byDeschamps in May commemorate his death; shortly thereafter they were set to music by a composer of the younger generation, Andrieu, and they constitute the earliest such "complaint" about a poet or composer.
Musical Technique
Machaut's musical technique represents the ars nova, or new music, of the 14th century, championed by Philippe de Vitry in the preceding generation.
It employs duple meter alongside the previously explored triple meter; the triad; isorhythm, that is, a lengthy rhythmic pattern applied to changing melodic phrases; and complex, often syncopated rhythm.
His lais are in 12 stanzas, each subdivided into two or four pairs of lines, sung to the same melody; all line pairs differ in length and rhythm, and therefore melodically, except that the last stanza is sung to the music of the first one.
Of Machaut's 25 lais 19 are set to music, monophonically (for one unaccompanied voice only), but in two of them monophonic stanzas alternate with canonic ones (of the type of the modern round, then called a chace).
The complaint is a poem of many (30-50) stanzas of 4X4 lines each.
When sung—only one of some 15 by Machaut is set to music (monophonically)—all stanzas are sung to the same music, each stanza falling into two repeated sections. The chanson royale is a poem of 5 stanzas of 8-11 lines and a refrain of 3-4 lines.
Only one of Machaut's eight chansons royales is set to music (monophonically).
Ballade, virelai, and rondeau are related forms, all derived from the dance, though only some rondeaux were still connected with dancing at the time.
All involve a refrain which is repeated in all stanzas and may comprise 6-20 lines or more.
Machaut's motets are among the most artful of the century.
Whereas isorhythm appears infrequently in the ballades and rondeaux and not at all in the other form types described above, it is ubiquitous in the motets.
They are all written for two sung parts—sung to different texts, two, indeed, to one French and one Latin text simultaneously—and either one or two instrumental parts.
The majority are secular, but some are liturgical. The hocket David is one of the last works, and the longest, of a type created during the 13th century.
In a hocket two parts alternately give out snatches of a melody, here above an isorhythmic cantus firmus (preexisting melody).
Machaut's Mass is probably the outstanding musical work of the entire 14th century.
It is a polyphonic setting of the entire Mass Ordinary (the portions sung at every Mass except at the Requiem Mass, the Mass for the Dead), consisting of six sections: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and Ite Missa Est (the last section is rarely set by other composers).
Only one such complete setting, the Mass of Tournai (ca. 1300), compiled from various composers, antedates Machaut's, and it is artistically not comparable.
The long texts of the Gloria and Credo are set simply in chordal style, each followed by an elaborate Amen.
All the other sections are composed in the style of the isorhythmic motet.
Almost the entire work is written in four melodic lines, for voices and instruments, and all the sections are unified by a pervasive motif, a technique not employed before or within the following 60 years or so. There was no one in France during the second half of the 14th century and the first quarter of the 15th to even remotely approach Machaut's musical eminence.
(Messe de Notre Dame - Le vray remède d'amour - Le Jugemen...)
Guillaume de Machaut was also the brother-in-law of one French king and later became the father-in-law of another, and his closest associations were with the French court.
