Guillaume de Machaut
Guillaume de Machaut's songs of courtly love sit at the heart of fourteenth-century French music: virelais, ballades and rondeaux where longing, grace and intricate rhyme meet the rhythmic daring of the ars nova.
He wrote across the formes fixes with a poet's ear and a composer's craft, setting French texts of service, pleasure and pain against lines that can turn syllabic or bloom into long melismas. Motets often braid sacred Latin tenors with secular upper voices; the Messe de Nostre Dame stands as the earliest complete Ordinary by a single hand, conceived as a whole. On these recordings his pieces surface among troubadour song, dance and later lute airs: Douce dame jolie, Se je souspir, Quant je sui mis, Tres douce dame, the lai Tels rit au main. The music carries colour and bite without museum dust, still speaking of love's hold and release.
Guillaume de Machaut is featured on the following titles
Old Wine, New Bottles
Floyd Williams and JANUS illustrate the cross-fertilisation of folk, popular and jazz idioms within classical music. The premise was to play early music of the 14th–16th centuries on modern instruments, free of purist historical constraints.
Compositions by Guillaume de Machaut also appear on
Travellers' Tapestry
Cantigas weave mediæval and folk-based music from Europe, Asia and the Middle East into a tapestry of trade-route exchange, played on recorder, percussion and early string instruments.
Silk and Spice
Cantigas follow the mediæval Silk Road in dance, monophonic song and improvisation. Recorders, rebec, vielle, oud, lute and percussion carry music shaped by Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Joy
Joy names the intent behind much of this music: carols of piety, the longing of Landini and Machaut, and Hildegard von Bingen’s soaring beauty. The collection shows how song shaped everyday life in the Middle Ages.
Falling Through Time
All the colour and mystique of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance come alive in a presentation rich in music and drama, spanning troubadour song, Machaut, courtly dance and English lute song.