Guillaume de Machaut

In his own words, "artisan of the old and the new forge", musician and poet Guillaume de Machaut symbolizes thears nova movement, a new method of rhythmic notation that revolutionized musical practice in the late Middle Ages. From Machault, a small village in the Ardennes not far from Reims, where he was born around 1300, this composer of commoner origin leaves little information about the first twenty years of his life, other than that he received minor orders and training as a cleric in Reims, before probably studying theology in Paris and obtaining the title of "magister" (master of the arts). Around 1323, he entered the service of John I of Luxembourg, known as "the Blind", King of Bohemia, to whom Machaut paid tribute in his poem Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne (1330). Employed as a clerk, notary and secretary until 1346, he learned much about chivalry and the art of falconry, accompanying his master and protector on his travels and military campaigns across Europe. He stayed with the knight-king in Prague and took part in actions in Silesia and Poland in 1327, in Lithuania in 1329, and in Russi and Italy in 1330. As early as 1324, Machaut composed the motet Bone Pastor Guillerme - Bone Pastor qui pastores in honor of the new archbishop of Reims, Guillaume de Trie. At the time, the motet was the most elaborate musical form, in which the composer displayed all his polyphonic artistry in the twenty-three works of the genre recorded, alongside numerous ballades (forty-two set to music), rondeaux (twenty-two), lais (nineteen), virelais (thirty-three) and complaintes (ten). Thanks to his patron, he was granted canonical prebends in Verdun (1330), Arras (1332), Reims (1333) and Saint-Quentin (1337). However, he did not fully exercise his function at Reims until 1359, continuing his service to Jehan de Bohême until the latter's death at the battle of Crécy on August 26, 1346, then maintaining relations with the princes, which enabled him to maintain a link with secular life and to compose poems and musical works other than religious ones. He placed himself at the service of several lords, starting in 1347 with his former master's daughter, Bonne de Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy and Countess of Maine and Anjou, for whom he wrote the famous Remède de Fortune and a motet. After his death from the plague two years later, he remained cloistered in Reims for a year, before serving Charles II of Navarre, known as "Charles le Mauvais", to whom he wrote Confort d'Ami (1357), during the latter's imprisonment by Jean le Bon. Machaut then entered the service of Jean de Berry, son of Jean le Bon and Bonne de Luxembourg, and later of his brothers Philippe le Hardi, Duke of Burgundy, and Charles le Sage, future King of France under the name of Charles V, crowned in 1364. That same year, the last of the trouvères completed his ten-thousand-verse autobiographical masterpiece, Le Voir Dit, alternating prose and poetry. In what is arguably the first epistolary novel in French literature, the master of the arts offers advice to a young admirer, Péronne d'Armentières. Five years later, he offered the Dit de la Fleur de lis et de la Marguerite for the wedding of Philippe le Hardi and Marguerite de Flandres, then paid tribute to one of his last masters, Pierre I de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, who had just died in 1370, with the Prise d'Alexandrie in nine thousand verses recounting his exploits. Conceived for the collected edition of his works in 1371, the Prologue is a manifesto in which he asserts his dual allegiance to both sacred and secular music. Other texts include La Louange des Dames and dits, including the Dit de la Harpe. No one else in his century was able to combine lyric poetry and music so well, adapting notes perfectly to previously written verses, taking advantage of the Roman de Fauvel (1310-1314), mainly due to Germain de Bus, and ofArs nova as theorized by Philippe de Vitry, without however renouncingArs antiqua. Taking up the language of plainchant and polyphony, he added rhythmic innovations in three or four voices to his motets, according to new principles of syncopated time division. One of his most accomplished works, the Messe de Nostre-Dame (dated between 1360 and 1365), reflects this musical revolution, with a tenor part written in cantus firmus style, while the other voices adopt isorhythmic short values. Another example is the Hoquet David, a tribute to Pérotin, one of the founders of polyphony, a textless three-voice motet that applies the diminution of rhythmic values, the mathematical possibilities of which he clearly delighted in combining. Although not the inventor of the new form, Machaut nonetheless brought it to perfection, initiating a movement that would influence even the most modern composers, dodecaphonists and serialists such as Stravinsky, Webern and Boulez. His other compositions, such as the rondeaux Ma fin est mon commencement (a mirrored form for which the text provides the key) and Rose, liz, printemps, verdure, or the ballades from Voir Dit and Remède de Fortune, are among the most essential pieces of his time. After his final services to the Duc de Berry, for whom he composed the Dit de la Fontaine amoureuse (c. 1360), and then to Amédée de Savoie, Machaut retired to Reims, where he continued his work, comprising almost four hundred poems, including one hundred and forty-three pieces of music. After a life devoted to his allegorical inspirations of Nature and Love, the canon of Reims died in 1377, probably in April, leaving a lasting legacy.

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