Guillaume de Machaut 700 years on

Abstract

This year marks the seventh centenary of Guillaume de Machaut's presumed birth date, an anniversary to be celebrated by at least one radio tribute and a conference. Now seems an apt moment to review some recordings of his music that have appeared in the past two or three years. These recent offerings bear testimony to Machaut's mastery in combining those two art forms that in his own day were viewed as two distinct representations of music: that is, poetry (known as 'natural' music), and music proper ('artificial' music). These performances also well illustrate some of the different interpretative possibilities that this repertory affords to the modern-day ensemble. Indeed, each disc offers a different perspective on our composer, conjuring up some of the varying personas he assumes in our present-day collective imaginations: Machaut the intellectual churchman, Machaut the romantic courtier and Machaut the last of the trouvHres. In their disc Guillaume de Machaut: Motets and music from the Ivrea Codex (Signum SIGCDOll, rec 1998), The Clerks' Group, directed by Edward Wickham, present an imaginative programme that reconstructs a musical context for Machaut's motets. In addition to the nine motets