Guillaume de Machaut

Round about the year 1320 the French composer and theoretician Philippe de Vitry wrote a treatise entitled Ars Nova (New Art) in which he claimed that the recent technical innovations in music amounted to a major break with the music of the immediate past. Musicologists later employed the term Ars Nova for the developments that took place in French and Italian music in the fourteenth century, designating the previous period – the period of early polyphony (c.900–1250) – Ars Antiqua.

Guillaume de Machaut was the outstanding Ars Nova composer, exploiting new musical techniques that make much of his work sound startlingly modern. One of the most significant innovations was that of isorhythm, whereby a fixed rhythm was applied to the cantus firmus, the borrowed melody that often underpinned a new composition. This fixed rhythm might have a different number of notes from the main melody, so that each time it was repeated it would begin at a different point along that melody – a numerical system of composing that has led to Machaut being bracketed with Schoenberg as an essentially intellectual composer. In addition, Machaut also employed musical forms that were ... // 79% Remaining