MACHAUT (MACHAULT), GUILLAUME. – Poet and musician, b. ca. 1300 at Machaut (Champagne). A cleric in 1323, d. in 1377, canon of the cathedral of Reims.
In addition to his abundant production of secular works, lais, virlais, chausous ballades, rondeaux, ballades notées, in which the most distinctive aspect of his art is found, he also composed 23 motets in 3 and 4 parts on Latin and French texts, in which the typical isorhythmic workmanship predominates, also apparent in a ballade and a rondeau, and a hoquetus on the word David inserted into the liturgical text Alleluja, Nativitas ex stirpe David, a piece in which scholars have wished to see a derivation from Perorinus’s organum triplum, based on the same Alleluja. The work, however, deserving of particular mention is the 4-part Messe Notre Dame, the first example of a polyphonic mass composed entirely by a single author (the only historical precedent, in fact, the Messe de Tournai, was an assemblage of pieces by various composers, written in different periods). The Messe possesses, besides the historical value of priority in its genre, an aesthetic primacy of ideal beauty.
The Messe brings together various genres of composition, from the fugal type, with imitations and repetitions found in the Kyrie, to the type characteristic of the conductus form in the Gloria; while in the Credo, free of every melisma owing to the dogmatic nature of the text, great and solemn chords are woven, against which the Gregorian melody forms a background; in the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei, the thematic material of the Gregorian Messe (today XVII of the Vatican edition) becomes more concretely the melodic basis of a compositional procedure possessing all the stylistic characteristics of the isorhythmic motet, just as the entire Messe was rightly defined as “a gigantic motet” (L. Lachs). The Messe was recently printed (1949) under the direction of the American Institute of Musicology in Rome (Corpus mensurabilis musicae, 2), in the transcription of G. de Vau. Distinguished historians had already published substantial portions of it, and Chailley had issued a transcription for practical use (1948). The motets and other works are scattered among approximately 37 codices in the libraries of Paris, Chantilly, Florence, Padua, Modena, etc.