Machaut: Four Motets

Day 288

Machaut: Four Motets

Di Souspirant

Fine Amour

Puis qui la douce Rousse

Quis plus aimme

Hilliard Ensemble

I’m getting towards the final stretch of this project - less than 100 days to go. So for the next few weeks I will try to systematically fill in some gaps of important composers that I have not so far covered. Part of the pleasure of the project has been exploring some of the lesser known, and in some cases totally obscure composers I have met along the way, but I do want to make sure that I have not missed any significant figures. The best way to do this is to take a chronological approach. So the earlier important figure I have not previously covered is Machaut. 

Machaut is in fact one of the earliest composers for whom we have solid information. The only information we have about the earliest composer in this project - Perotin - comes from lecture notes complied long after his death. By contrast we know quite a bit about Machaut’s life and work and we know that he was celebrated as a composer in his own lifetime.

My earliest memory of Machaut is quite vivid. I’d had secured a place at University to read music and was sent a reading list before the course started. One of the books was Gilbert Reaney’s book on Machaut. I got a copy out of the library and was pretty taken aback when I understood very little of it. I had by that time a fair experience of a wide range of 18th to 20th century music but had no idea about much earlier music and found the whole discussion of Machaut’s musical style very difficult to grasp. It did make me wonder whether or not I would be able to cope with a music degree.  But when I got to University the book was never mentioned and it turned out that my tutor didn’t even know that the reading list had been sent out!

I heard the Machaut mass at University and probably a few other peices but I can’t recall which ones. So I selected these four motets at random. This is fascinating music - it offers a glimpse into some of the very earliest developments of music in three or four independent voices. Perotin’s 4-part organa are from an earlier generation but they are essentially in two parts - a slow bass and three upper parts moving at the same speed almost as one voice. Here these motets have quite independent parts (the first three are are for 3 voices and the last one is for 4 voices). There is still a slower moving lower part (not as slow as the Perotin) but the upper parts are much more independent of each other. There are some strong harmonic clashes between the voices at times but they come together from time to time in cadential figures. The rhythms can be complex. In modern transcriptions this can mean that the bar lines don’t coincide across voices, though of course the concept of the bar lines was still several hundred years away.

As I have said before in dealing with very early music we can only speculate on how this music might have sounded. We have no idea about speed, dynamics, expression or indeed exactly what forces would have been used. The performances I would have heard as a student tended to be quite colourful, with instrumental doubling and sometimes added effects but more recent performances have become more austere and use, as did the ones here, just solo male voices. The effect is compelling and ‘other-worldly’ though of course that is to project a modern sensibility onto the music - it would be fascinating to travel back in time to hear this music as it was performed in Machaut’s day - would be be thrilled or disappointed as to how matter of fact it was?