The greatest composer — and one of the greatest poets — of the fourteenth century: architect of measured rhythm, of the first Mass composed by one hand, and of the courtly songs that would rule European music for a hundred years.
History of Early Music · No. 05 — The Ars Nova
Guillaume de Machaut was a cleric who spent his early career as secretary to John of Luxembourg, the blind warrior-king of Bohemia, travelling across Europe in his service. He was later made a canon of Reims, where he lived out his long life. He was famous in his own time as much for his verse as for his music — and no medieval composer is so completely preserved.
A master of French narrative and lyric verse whose poems Chaucer read and imitated.
The central musical figure of the Ars Nova — songs, motets and the famous Mass.
A churchman of the great cathedral city, secure enough to compose freely for decades.
He personally supervised lavish manuscripts gathering his complete works — a rarity for the age.
Because he curated his own collected works, we can read Machaut's music and poetry from sources close to the composer himself.
Around 1322 a treatise associated with Philippe de Vitry — poet, bishop and composer — gave a name to a musical revolution: Ars Nova, the "new art", set against the older Ars Antiqua of the thirteenth century.
Its heart was rhythm. Where the old notation could only really measure music in threes (thought "perfect", after the Trinity), the new art admitted duple as well as triple division at every level, and introduced smaller, faster note values. For the first time, rhythm could be written — and thought — with real precision.
13th c. · Notre-Dame & the early motet. Rhythm mostly in triple "perfect" groupings; larger note values.
14th c. · Duple and triple division at each level; new short values; intricate syncopation and isorhythm.
Machaut did not invent the Ars Nova, but he became its supreme practitioner — the composer in whom its ideas found their fullest voice.
Machaut's life spans the flowering of the Ars Nova and the calamities of the fourteenth century — the Hundred Years' War and the Black Death — through all of which he kept composing at Reims.
In mensural notation the shape of a note fixes its duration. The Ars Nova extended the older scale of durations downward, adding the fast minim — the smallest value of the age.
How to read it: read left to right on the staff; a note's shape tells you how long to hold it. A longa contains breves, a breve semibreves, a semibreve minims — but whether each contains two or three of the next is decided by the mensuration sign (next slide). There are still no bar-lines.
The great Ars Nova question at every level was simple: does this note divide into three or into two? A mensuration sign at the start of the piece answered it.
A full circle meant perfect time — the breve worth three semibreves. A broken circle (a semicircle) meant imperfect time — the breve worth two. The division of the semibreve into minims was called prolation (major = 3, minor = 2), sometimes marked by a dot inside the sign.
That broken circle is the direct ancestor of our modern "C" time signature.
The same pitches grouped by threes, then by twos — hear how the mensuration changes the lilt
The signature intellectual device of the Ars Nova motet. In the slow tenor voice, a repeating rhythmic pattern — the talea — is laid over a repeating melodic pattern — the color. When the two are different lengths, they slip out of phase and realign only after several statements, giving the music a vast hidden architecture.
A repeating tenor pattern under a moving upper voice — the tenor's rhythm returns identically the second time round
Machaut left 23 motets — dense, learned works in which two upper voices sing different texts (often one French, one Latin) at once, over an isorhythmic tenor drawn from chant. The motet was the century's most cerebral genre: sacred and secular, sound and number, woven into a single structure.
Two upper voices carry independent poems simultaneously — layered meanings for a listener who knew both.
The foundation is a chant fragment shaped by talea and color — audible order beneath the words.
Proportion and repetition are the point: architecture you perceive over time rather than a tune you hum.
To medieval ears this structural rigour was not dry but sublime — an image of the ordered cosmos rendered in sound.
Machaut's most celebrated achievement: the first complete setting of the Mass Ordinary by a single named composer, conceived as one unified four-voice work. Earlier composers had set the Ordinary movements piecemeal; Machaut bound them into a coherent whole — a landmark that points straight toward the cyclic Masses of the Renaissance.
Built over a chant tenor in Machaut's grave isorhythmic manner.
Largely syllabic and chordal, so the long text stays intelligible.
The longest text, set with the same clear, declamatory approach.
Returns to florid, isorhythmic writing for the acclamation.
Threefold plea for mercy, richly worked in four voices.
The dismissal — Machaut sets even the closing formula.
Away from the church, Machaut perfected the fixed forms of French courtly song — patterns of refrain and verse that fused poem and music and would govern secular composition for the next century.
Grand and aristocratic: several stanzas, each ending in the same refrain line.
A single refrain that circles back, interleaved with new lines — compact and elegant.
Refrain–verse–refrain, dance-like and often sung to a single lilting line.
The longest and most elaborate: many contrasting stanzas, a virtuoso's form.
Most are for one to three voices; many survive both as monophonic melodies and in polyphonic settings by Machaut himself.
Machaut's best-loved virelai — "Sweet, pretty lady" — is a monophonic song of courtly love, its catchy refrain lilting in a clear triple rhythm. It shows the other face of the great architect of motets: a melodist of immediate, dancing charm.
A synthesised single voice · a lilting triple-time refrain in the first mode, in the manner of Machaut's virelai
The tune here is an idiomatic reconstruction of the virelai's spirit, not a transcription — listen for the dance-like swing of threes and the tender fall to the final.
Machaut's most ingenious rondeau — "My end is my beginning" — is a musical palindrome. The text describes exactly what the music does: one voice sings a melody that is then sung backwards, and the tenor is its own retrograde. Structure and meaning become one.
How to read it: the notes to the left of the green axis, read forwards, are mirrored by the notes to its right, read backwards — a retrograde. The song literally performs its own title.
To his contemporaries Machaut was, first, a poet — author of long narrative dits and of the lyric verse that fed his songs. His conviction that true art must spring from genuine feeling shaped a new, personal voice in French poetry, admired and imitated by Chaucer and Deschamps.
Machaut usually wrote both the words and the music of his songs — poem and melody conceived together, not one fitted to the other.
He supervised richly illuminated manuscripts of his complete works, arranged by genre in an order he chose — an author shaping his own legacy centuries before it was common.
This self-curation is why Machaut's output survives so fully and reliably — a gift to every later reader and performer.
Machaut's harmony is not our harmony: thirds are restless, not sweet, and the goal of every phrase is the pure fifth or octave.
A handful of search links to start exploring — from the monumental Mass to the intimate songs. Ensembles specialising in this repertory bring very different voices and instruments to Machaut's lines.
Search links are used so they never fall out of date; pick a recording and compare how ensembles voice the same music.
Machaut gathered the threads of the fourteenth century and handed them forward. His measured rhythm made complex polyphony writable; his Mass showed a composer could conceive the Ordinary as one work; his formes fixes ruled European song for a hundred years. Du Fay and Binchois are unthinkable without him.
Ars Nova notation, refined by Machaut, is the foundation of every later system of measured rhythm.
The first unified Ordinary by one hand — the ancestor of the cyclic Masses of Du Fay, Josquin and beyond.
The formes fixes he perfected shaped courtly music until the late fifteenth century.
"Ma fin est mon commencement et mon commencement ma fin" — My end is my beginning, and my beginning my end.
— Guillaume de Machaut, opening of the rondeau Ma fin est mon commencementc. 1300 – 1377 · The music that taught Europe to write rhythm.