Guillaume de Machaut: Biography from Answers. Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) was the greatest French composer of his century, the creator of the first complete polyphonic Mass setting, and a renowned poet. Guillaume de Machaut was born in the village of Machault in Champagne, near Reims. He became a cleric, and in 1323 he joined the household of King John of Bohemia as a secretary. John was the son of one German emperor and the father of another; his ancestral castle was Luxembourg. He 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. Later John settled Machaut at Reims with a canonicate.
In 1374 Machaut's brother died, and in April 1377 Guillaume followed him. His Works In his poetry and in his life Machaut shows himself conscious of his lowly origin but also of his worth. Machaut's works can be divided into four categories. Musical Technique The complaint is a poem of many (30-50) stanzas of 4X4 lines each. Further Reading. Music History 102. The traditions of Western music can be traced back to the social and religious developments that took place in Europe during the Middle Ages, the years roughly spanning from about 500 to 1400 A.D. Because of the domination of the early Catholic Church during this period, sacred music was the most prevalent. Beginning with Gregorian Chant, sacred music slowly developed into a polyphonic music called organum performed at Notre Dame in Paris by the twelfth century.
Secular music flourished, too, in the hands of the French trouvères and troubadours, until the period culminated with the sacred and secular compositions of the first true genius of Western music, Guillaume de Machaut. Music had been a part of the world's civilizations for hundreds of years before the Middle Ages. Primitive cave drawings, stories from the Bible, and Egyptian heiroglyphs all attest to the fact that people had created instruments and had been making music for centuries.
Gregorian Chant Notre Dame and the Ars Antiqua. Ars Nova / Ars Antiqua. Ars Nova (Lat.: ‘new art’). In the most general terms Ars Nova is used as a synonym for ‘14th-century polyphony’ just as Ars Antiqua stands for ‘13th-century polyphony’. The concept of Ars Nova is based on the enormous new range of musical expression made possible by the notational techniques explained in Philippe de Vitry's treatise Ars nova (c1322). The term was first used as a historical slogan by Johannes Wolf in his Geschichte der Mensural-Notation (1904) in which the treatise was seen as one of the major turning-points in the history of notation; and it was perhaps the chapter titles rather than the specific content of Wolf's work that brought about the use of ‘Ars Nova’ to include all 14th-century French music in the work of subsequent scholars.
Ars Antiqua [Ars Veterum, Ars Vetus] (Lat.: ‘old art’). The definition of the term ‘Ars Antiqua’ is often extended now to include the music of the Notre Dame period and its main composers, Leoninus and Perotinus. Ars Nova (music. Ars nova. Page of the French manuscript Livres de Fauvel, Paris, B.N. Fr. 146 (ca. 1318), "the first practical source of Ars nova music".[1] Ars nova refers to a musical style which flourished in France and the Burgundian Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages: more particularly, in the period between the preparation of the Roman de Fauvel (1310–1314) and the death of the composer Guillaume de Machaut in 1377 (whose poems were a large inspiration for Johannes Ciconia). Sometimes the term is used more generally to refer to all European polyphonic music of the 14th century, thereby including such figures as Francesco Landini, who was working in Italy.
Occasionally the term "Italian ars nova" is used to denote the music of Landini and his compatriots (see Music of the Trecento for the concurrent musical movement in Italy). Controversial in the Roman Catholic Church, the music was starkly rejected by Pope John XXII, but embraced by Pope Clement VI. Ars nova versus Ars antiqua[edit] Discography[edit]