9. Music of the Middle Ages; Isorhythmic motet {de Machaut}

Music of the Middle Ages
An Anthology for Performance and Study by
David Fenwick Wilson
ISBN 0-02-872952-8 Schirmer Books

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Part IX The Continental Motet in the Fourteenth Century

1. Guillaume de Machaut - Quant en moy/Amour et biaute/Amara valde (Isorrhythmic motet) (0:00)
2. Guillaume de Machaut - De bon espoir/Puis que la douce/Speravi (Isorhythmic motet) (3:32)

The Hilliard Ensemble

Isorhythm (from the Greek for "the same rhythm") is a musical technique that arranges a fixed pattern of pitches with a repeating rhythmic pattern.

Isorhythm consists of an order of durations or rhythms, called a talea ("cutting", plural taleae), which is repeated within a tenor melody whose pitch content or series, called the color (repetition), varied in the number of members from the talea. The term was coined in 1904 by Friedrich Ludwig (1903–04, 223) to describe this practice in 13th century polyphonic motets, but it later became more widely applied, especially to periodic repetition or rhythmic recurrence in tenors and other parts of 14th- and early 15th-century compositions, motets in particular (Bent 2001).

Guillaume de Machaut (also Machau and Machault; c. 1300 – April 1377) was a French composer and poet who was the central figure of the ars nova style in late medieval music. His dominance of the genre is such that modern musicologists use his death to separate the ars nova from the subsequent ars subtilior movement.Regarded as the most significant French composer and poet of the 14th century, he is often seen as the century's leading European composer.

Machaut's music comprises a wide variety, from complex masses to short songs, and despite the differences of genre, most still contain "typical Machaut motifs". He lived after the flowering of both the secular troubadour and trouvère song movements and the ars antiqua church style.[citation needed] The musicologist Gilbert Reaney notes that "before [Machaut], composers either wrote songs or church music. Machaut did both, though it could be said that he neglected the area of liturgical church music." Besides his mass, Hoquetus David and a few Latin motets, Machaut's surviving output is exclusively secular. Regardless, Reaney notes that his unique mastery of both secular and sacred Western music is only precedented by the work of Adam de la Halle.