Elizabeth Eva Leach

Counterpoint and Analysis in Fourteenth-Century Song

This paper advocates the use of fourteenth-century counterpoint teaching in analysis of the harmony of fourteenth-century secular songs. Specifically, basic counterpoint, as taught in treatises, is employed as a way of understanding the style of Machauts ballades, although it is hoped that the notation and procedure of the analysis will find a broader application. The basic consonant dyads proper to simple counterpoint are posited as underlying and governing the rhythmically decorated and often highly dissonant musical surface of these pieces, even those in more than two parts. Elements of Machauts ballade style, such as dissonance treatment, rhythmic figuration and melody, are accessed by an investigation of the relationship of an arhythmic, consonant contrapuntal background to the rhythmic, and frequently dissonant, foreground.

Music and Verbal Meaning: Machaut's Polytextual Songs

Our modern experience of songs and singing, whether expert, amateur, or entirely uninformed and passive, is almost completely misleading when it comes to appreciating the singing of late-medieval lyric. My focus in this article is on polyphonic songs that align several texts for simultaneous delivery—a somewhat special category of work. However, the fact of musics indispensability for these pieces reflects the broader cultural use of music as a meaningful—and not just a pleasant—component of lyric performance. My exposition aims to bring out the potential significance of the dimension of performance—specifically sung musical performance—to scholars who normally consider only written forms of such works, whether poetic or musical. It thus addresses both those literary scholars who might want to know what kinds of meanings a musical setting might add to a written poem that they usually consider just as verbal text (written or spoken) and those musicologists who might want to consider the performed moment of a piece in conjunction with their more usual “reading” of it as a notated modern score.

Machaut's Balades with Four Voices

Based on principles found in fourteenth-century counterpoint treatises, this study divides Machauts balades with four voices into three groups according to their performance possibilities. The pieces of group 1 ( Se quanque amours, Il mest avis, De toutes flours , and Quant theseus/Ne quier ) can be performed either in all four parts or in three parts by omitting the triplum. Group 2 ( De petit po and De Fortune plus Vgs redaction of Se quanque amours ) includes those pieces that can be performed in three parts with either contratenor or triplum but not with all four parts. Pieces in this group are often found with all four parts copied together, thus highlighting the difference between the presentation of a piece in the sources and its performance options. The pieces in group 3 ( En amer and Dame de qui ) are less clearly delimited in their performance possibilities.