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The
fourteenth century
The fourteenth century
marks a period of musical changes in both sacred and secular music. Philippe
de Vitry (1291-1361), an esteemed intellectual who served as a court official
and later served as Bishop of Meaux, used the phrase 'Ars nova' to describe
the new art of the period, contrasting it with the ars antiqua with its
uniform triple meter and old-fashioned musical styles. The innovations
of the ars nova included changes in notation, including the use of a new
rhythmic shape (called the minim) for short notes, as well the use of
color (a switch from black to red ink, for instance) to help demonstrate
the switch from duple to triple or vice versa. In addition, Vitry
discussed the use of isorhythm, a structural device in which the tenor
of a motet or mass movement would be organized into a pattern of exactly-repeated
pitches, the so-called color (kuh-LOR), and exactly-repeated rhythmic
material, the talea. The color and talea were usually of different
lengths. For example, there might be two statements of the color and six
statements of the talea. The upper voices could be independent of this
structure, but sometimes had recurring rhythmic motives to help mark the
ends of the talea, in which case the piece could be called 'pan-isorhythmic.'
The earliest manuscript to contain isorhythmic motets is an elaborate
rendition of the Roman de Fauvel, Paris, B.N. fr. 146, copied around 1316-1318.
This copy expands the original text with new poetry (nearly doubling the
length of the poem), and adds miniatures and over 100 musical pieces.
From a musical perspective, the volume serves as a retrospective anthology:
in addition to the isorhythmic pieces, it contains examples of plainchant,
organum, ars antiqua motets, courtly love songs, bawdy songs, and a final
motet extolling the virtues of drinking. Since this is the only polyphonic
musical manuscript to survive intact from the early fourteenth century,
it is a particularly significant musical source. Other manuscripts of
the period survive as scraps and fragments, giving a scant but tantalizing
view of the repertory. (See Hasselman.)
The poet-musician Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) is probably the
best-known composer of his era, due at least in part to the fact that
he arranged to have his poetic and musical works copied into manuscripts.
Hence, where other composers' works are anonymous in many of the surviving
sources, we can reconstruct virtually all of Machaut's work. Machaut wrote
in all of the significant musical genres of his day, creating isorhythmic
motets, one of the earliest settings of the ordinary of the Mass (the
Messe de Nostre Dame), a hocket (in which the continuous line is
created as one part fills in the rests in another part; any one part sounds
like a series of 'hiccups,' giving the technique its name), and secular
works. The lais are elaborate compositions in which the structure of the
poetry and music (including line length, rhyme scheme, and even number
of lines) changes from stanza to stanza in a manner reminiscent of the
paired sections of the old Latin sequence.
Machaut's other secular works fall into the category of the formes fixes,
established poetic/musical structures in which part of the delight of
the work is in the subtle manipulation of predictable language and form.
His forme-fixe songs, mostly on courtly love themes, included all of the
major genres of his day: virelai (AbbaA), rondeaux (ABaAabAB), and ballades
(a a b X), where a capital letter designates a refrain text and lower
case designates new text. The predictability of the formes fixes, along
with a growing sense of melodic and harmonic cogency, encouraged the development
of tonal expectations and thus facilitated the beginnings of a two-part
tonal structure.
Machaut's sense of rhythmic play, his rich counterpoint, and his well-crafted
melodies have guided our understanding of French musical style throughout
the century. The generation after Machaut has been labeled that way (see
Wilkins). The more involved style at the end of the century,
sometimes called the Ars subtilior, has suffered by comparison with the
'clarity' of Machaut's oeuvre. The ars subtilior, however, reflects an
intellectual and stylistic maturity in which self-referential poetic and
musical gestures were intended to be understood by the cognoscenti
for whom the pieces were written. The intricacies of music by Solage,
Jacob de Senlesches, and Philippus de Caserta involve sophisticated rhythms
and harmonies, but the context for the repertory remains courtly love
and a primarily melodic inspiration characteristic of the period as a
whole.
In Italy, predictable
poetic-musical forms also guided secular composers. The trecento composers
(composers of the '300s, that is, the 1300s) adopted the form of the madrigal
(AAB), the ballata (AbbaA), and the caccia (a canonic piece). The most
famous and prolific composer in Italy was the blind composer and organist
Francesco Landini (ca. 1325-1397), whose characteristic melodic ornament
at phrase endings (with two half-steps down and a leap up to the final)
became known as the Landini cadence. To the modern eye, Italian trecento
repertory often seems simpler than its French ars nova counterpart, but
at the end of the century, a musical cross-fertilization enriched both
traditions as prelates and their attendant musicians traveled to the great
church councils to re-unify the papacy. Johannes Ciconia (ca. 1370-1411),
for instance, was born in LiŠge and spent time both at Avignon and in
northern Italy, particularly Padua. He adopted Italian language and forms
for most of his secular works but imported the rich texture of the northern
isorhythmic motet and some of the complexities of the Ars Subtilior. In
that synthesis, Ciconia helped to lay the foundation for the pan-European
style of the early Renaissance.
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