Machaut's Modernity - Spring 2011

     Guillaume de Machaut was known to his contemporaries as Guillaume; that appellation strikes us as incomplete or unfamiliar, because of our modern conception of surname.  There are many aspects of his music which seem ancient to us – the harmonies, the “double leading tone” cadence formula, the rhythms – and after all, he did write in two languages which are now “dead” (Latin for the religious music, and Medieval French).  The aspects of Machaut’s character and career that seem the most striking to us, however, are those which seem to foreshadow aspects of modern art and music.  Machaut was the first composer to take pains to ensure his music’s legacy, and to cement his role as composer and author of his own works; his oeuvre is dominated by secular music, as opposed to religious; and he can be considered usefully the forerunner to the modern “singer-songwriter” type.  His music, religious and secular, has a strong sense of identity and unity, especially the Mass of Notre-Dame, and the unity in the Mass is unusual for works of this time both for its single author and his undoubtedly conscious design for this piece. 

     Machaut’s influence, as discussed in class, would still be relevant today if he had never written or been associated with music.  He was a renowned poet and inspired Chaucer, and is a great representative of French literature in the 14^th century.  But his approach to music and words unified further ensures his value to modern culture: Machaut, though perhaps not actually singing his own poems as a roving artist, is considered the last link in the cultural-artistic troubadour lineage.  He brought this tradition forward into his era by enhancing the traditional style with a close attention to forms which are both complex and flexible in his hands.  The troubadour music was already a secular genre mainly concerned with courtly love, but the combination in Machaut of talented poet, fluent composer, and sole author gives his “troubadour” songs a stronger sense of being art music, as opposed to a performing tradition.  Machaut knew how to set “silly love songs” (pace Paul McCartney) in an educated polyphonic idiom, and the words he set were his own.  The most modern aspect of Machaut is his deliberate act of identifying his music with him, as composer and author; the majority of music before him comes to us in varying degrees of anonymity, which is the prevailing characteristic of early music composers. 
     Machaut’s focus on secular music, or rather, the bias in his complete surviving works towards secular music, contrasts with what we know of his predecessors and influential composers before the 18^th century.  The church of his day was still the Roman Catholic church, the Reformation being two centuries in the future, but there is a trend (beginning with the writing of secular motets, and later the work of Philippe de Vitry – composer of the Roman de Fauvel) of religious subversion or dissidence in music at this time.  Machaut’s appointments were courtly, not religiously affiliated positions, so the need to write Masses or other service music is absent (compared to Bach, for instance, or the works we identify as written by Leonin).  This shows that by the 14^th century, patronage still held the key to stable musical employment, but patronage could be non-religious and still furnish a viable opportunity for a composer or poet.  Machaut’s cyclic setting of the Mass also represents a divergence from previous composers: he wrote the piece himself, conceived it as having unity among the movements, and made sure it was identified as his for posterity and performed at his endowment.  This kind of identity – identifying as an individual, not as a Christian subject or clerk in an establishment – is very forward looking, and takes centuries to take permanent hold.