- Jared C. Hartt (Oberlin College Conservatory of Music), "Clap, Clap! Contextualizing Machaut in Ivrea"
The Ivrea Codex contains one of the most important collections of fourteenth-century polyphony. The document mixes three of Guillaume de Machaut’s motets with thirty-four others from the period; the group of thirty-seven represents the largest motet collection in any extant Ars Nova manuscript. As a whole, the motets exhibit a wide range of compositional styles and subject matter. The Ivrea Codex thus provides an interesting snapshot of Ars Nova composition, an especially appropriate lens through which to compare Machaut’s compositional style with that of his contemporaries, even though most of them remain anonymous. With the Ivrea Codex as a backdrop, this paper raises several questions concerning Machaut as “influencor” and “influencee.”
To date,
connections between various pairs and groups of
motets have been drawn based primarily upon isorhythmic and textual
similarities. In this paper, in addition to considering isorhythm, I
compare
three pairs of motets by focusing on recurring melodic patterns, voice
crossing, sonority usage and syntax. A close reading of each motet’s
musical
subtleties in turn suggests strong connections between a few Machaut
and Ivrea
motets.
- Justin Lavacek (Indiana University--Bloomington), "Contrapuntal Competition in the Motets of Machaut"
This paper presents an interpretive theory developed in response to what I conceive of as a contrapuntal power struggle in the motets of Guillaume de Machaut. An uneasy balance seems struck between the tenor voice, which conventionally provides the compositional foundation in the genre, and its supposed contrapuntal investiture, the upper-voice pair, which occasionally usurps control. I propose that this turbulent musical relationship may be correlated to those amorous ones of the texts which the medieval motet genre simultaneously counterpoints. If even the most faithful subservience of the chivalric Amant to his Lady and, by analogy, the spiritual Pilgrim to the path of Christ is met with great hardship, so too may the upper-voice pair be oppressed by conformance with the demands of an external tenor. Although the subordination of new polyphony to a revered model is customary in late medieval composition, I will show that Machaut’s is hardly complacent to domineering.
- respondent: Anne Walters Robertson (University of Chicago)
- Douglas Kelly (University of Wisconsin--Madison), "Apprenticeship in Machaut's Voir Dit"
The Voir Dit treats the apprenticeship proposed by Toute Belle in the art of poetry as Machaut practices it. But that is not the literal context of the Dit. How then may we contextualize the Voir Dit or any other Dit by Machaut as an art of poetry? Toute Belle is an advanced apprentice since she already knows how to write the standard lyric pieces of late medieval poetics. Therefore she enters that category of pupils who learn not from treatises but from exemplary works. Taking Machaut as mentor, the paper deals with the ways that apprentice poets might read, imitate, and emulate poetic masterpieces, especially when using examples, debate, and topical modes like autobiography.
- Brooke Heidenreich Findley (Pennsylvania State University--Altoona), "Toute Belle in Context: Gender and Writing in the Voir Dit and the Medieval French Narrative Tradition"
Toute Belle, the heroine of Machaut’s Voir Dit, has excited critical interest and historical speculation because of the literary talents that the text attributes to her. However, re-placing Toute Belle within Machaut’s literary context indicates that she may not be as unusual as we have supposed. An examination of the trope of the poet-heroine before Machaut indicates that poetic composition is an activity practiced by several heroines of romance and epic: Nicolette, Fresne, Josiane, Odée and Clarmondine, to name a few of the most prominent. Furthermore, the works of some of these heroines are portrayed as being at the origins of the texts in which they appear; to the extent that author figures exist in these earlier narrative texts, they are women.
This
paper will argue that, in light of the French narrative works that
preceded Machaut, it is the Voir Dit’s poet-hero rather than its
poet-heroine who is
truly unusual,
and around whose uncertain status the text’s interrogation of gender
and
writing revolves. It is well known that one of Machaut’s major
innovations is his placement of
the figure of
the clerk at the center of his narratives: in the Voir Dit, he engages
that
figure in dialogue with the more traditional figure of the
poet-heroine, finally exposing his
clerkly narrator
as resembling a woman. The resulting portrayal of a feminized redactor
figure
opposite a poet-heroine seems to have influenced the use of the
poet-heroine trope in at
least one
later romance, Ysaÿe le Triste. Thus, an examination of the Voir Dit’s
context
allows us, not only a new perspective on this remarkable text’s
examination of gender and
writing,
but a glimpse at its dialogue with some of the narrative texts that
influenced
and were influenced by it.
- Lawrence M. Earp (University of Wisconsin--Madison), "The Context of the Reception of Machaut ca. 1950: Boulez and Barthes"
This
paper uses
reception history to generate questions for the scholarly research of
medieval
music. I focus on a moment around 1950, when the repertory commonly
known as
the “isorhythmic motet” found a new resonance. The argument turns on an
article
by Craig Ayrey, “Nomos/Nomos: Law,
Melody and the Deconstructive in Webern's ‘Leichteste Bürden der
Bäume,’
Cantata II Op. 31,” published in Music
Analysis 21 (2002): 259-305. Concerned with aesthetic issues of
compositional pre-planning in Webern, the article proved
extraordinarily
suggestive not only for the late medieval motet, but also for Machaut
as
author, inasmuch as not just structural issues, but also aesthetic
issues
actively discussed in the mid-twentieth century mesh astonishingly well
with
the world of Machaut. Drawing upon Ayrey, Webern, Barthes, Boulez, and
Adorno,
I find aspects of Machaut that demonstrate a static aesthetic, in which
a
plethora of signs reciprocally reinforce a single central meaning. The
paper
addresses motets as well as literary works, especially the Voir
Dit.
- Joyce Coleman (University of Oklahoma), "Doctor of Love: Guillaume de Machaut's Academic Robes in Context"
A
famous image of
Guillaume de Machaut shows him reading aloud to a group of listeners (
- Lewis Beer (University of Warwick), "The Rose, Machaut, and Gower: A Spectrum of Love-Critiques"
Certain
medieval love
poets establish what seems to be a coherent ideology of love
comportment, but with the end goal of dismantling it and replacing it
with something better, usually drawing on both the didactic methods and
the
philosophical doctrines of Boethius’ Consolatio
in the process. I side with those
commentators who see Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman
de la Rose as an essentially moral
text which exposes, in scurrilous detail, the base acts to which its
protagonist is driven
by his desires. In the Confessio
Amantis,
John Gower invests 30,000 lines of verse in the idea
that erotic love fosters, and demands, virtuous conduct, only to
conclude that it does no
such thing, and that youth and virility are the only ‘virtues’ that can
guarantee
success
in love. As I read them, both these authors, though approaching the
subject from different
angles, conclude on a rather severe and, as it were, immoderate note,
leaving
us
overwhelmed by a sense of the carnality and/or futility of erotic love.
In between Jean and Gower, temperamentally as well as chronologically, stands Machaut, whose approach is characterised by moderation and a more sincere investment in the positive aspects of love than we find in the Rose or the Confessio. Above all, he tells us, love is complicated; perhaps it is a worthy activity for the young; certainly it can be a spur to virtue, and in that respect may be considered a true and lasting ‘good’; but eventually, upon mature reflection, the lover must recognise that he has enslaved himself to Fortune, and remedy his situation with the help of God. By comparing Machaut’s handling of this theme with those of other love poets, and by taking the morality of these texts more seriously than scholars have so far tended to do, we can learn a great deal about the way in which Boethian and Neoplatonic concepts informed the writing of poetry in the Middle Ages.
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