The Motets by Guillaume de Machaut

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Motets by Guillaume de Machaut Alice V. Clark Guillaume de Machaut. The Motets. Edited by Jacques Boogaart, translated by R. Barton Palmer and Jacques Boogaart, with art historical commentary by Domenic Leo. (Guillaume de Machaut: The Complete Poetry and Music, vol. 9) (Middle English Text Series.) Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2018. [Acknowledgments, p. ix; pref., p. xi–xii; introd., p. 1–23; editorial policy, p. 25–32; The Motet Miniature: A Commentary, p. 33–45; score, p. 47–186; crit. commentary, p. 187–246; bibliog., p. 247–260. ISBN 9781580442879 (paperback) ISBN 9781580443029 (hardback) $39.95 (paperback); $99 (hardback).] Guillaume de Machaut is generally considered the most important poet and composer of fourteenth-century France. This assessment rests to a large degree on the fact that we have a large body of work securely attributable to him because he, unlike Philippe de Vitry and their mostly anonymous contemporaries, collected his poetry and music in books devoted entirely to his work. Six of these "Machaut manuscripts" containing both words and music survive, most copied during his lifetime and therefore representing different stages of his output; other sources exist, some only fragmentary and most without notation, and there are references to still others. All of this is clearly laid out in Lawrence Earp's magisterial 1995 study, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (Garland composer resource manuals, v. 36 [New York: Garland Publishing, 1995]), affectionately known as the "Machaut Bible" and still unsurpassed, though it has been supplemented by his more recent work, done in collaboration with Domenic Leo and Carla Shapreau, on the Ferrell-Vogüé manuscript. Because Machaut's works extend across genres, including both polyphonic and monophonic music as well as narrative and lyric poetry, they were edited in stages. Most of the narrative poems were published by Ernest Hoepffner in the early twentieth century (Œuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, 3 vols. [Paris: Firmin-Didot et Cie, 1908–1921]), following up on earlier editions and excerpts, while the lyric poems (including those set to music) were edited by Vladimir Chichmaref (Poésies lyriques, 2 vols. [Paris: H. Champion, 1909]). While individual narrative poems have been newly edited in recent decades, Lawrence Earp observes that "modern editions of Machaut's poetry are on the whole not as solid philologically as the material now available for, say, Froissart." (Earp 1995, 197) Machaut's music was first edited in full by Friedrich Ludwig. The initial work was done in the first few years of the twentieth century, although the edition was published mostly in the 1920s and the final volume, devoted to the lais and the Mass, only became widely available in 1954, decades after Ludwig's death (Musikalische Werke, 4 vols [Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1926–1954]). Another edition, by Leo Schrade, appeared only two years later [End Page 491] (The Works of Guillaume de Machaut, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vols. 2–3 [Monaco: Editions de l'Oiseau-Lyre, 1956]), but, as Earp has shown, it is "totally dependent on Ludwig" (Earp 1995, 281), though its use of modern clefs and convenient reprinting in 1977 means it is the edition most often encountered by students today. It is to be hoped that will change, starting with this new edition of the motets. The volume is part of a plan to edit anew all of Machaut's literary and musical works, overseen by R. Barton Palmer (a literary scholar at Clemson University) and Yolanda Plumley (a musicologist at the University of Exeter). Though it may seem strange at first to publish Machaut's works under the auspices of the Middle English Text Series (a program of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, associated also with TEAMS, the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), the edition fits well the series's goal of making available editions suitable for classroom use. The two volumes published so far in this series are eminently affordable: the volume under review lists for $39.95 in paper, or $99.00 in hardback. The first volume of the edition, on the debate poetry, appeared in 2016; in addition to the French text and a facing English translation of Machaut...