1310 - 1377
Ars Nova
A French movement from the 13th century that greatly refined notation and polyphonic writing from the Ars Antiqua era.
Philippe de Vitry
1291 - 1361
French theorist, poet and composer. He studied at the Sorbonne and held numerous benefices, but his main area of activity was the French court, where he was secretary and advisor to Charles IV, Philip VI. and Jean II, who was known as a leading intellectual.
In 1351 he became Bishop of Meaux. In his capacity as a musician, for which he received many honors, he wrote a famous and authoritative treatise, Ars nova (c. 1322-3), and composed motets and other music.
The most original part of Ars nova is the last ten chapters on mensural rhythm and notation. The two main features are the minim (half a note, for which he established the notation symbol) and the even and odd division (the two and three division of note values at each level).
Much of his creative and literary output has been lost, but he probably wrote the beautiful poetic lyrics of his surviving motets.
His original approach established a hierarchical concept of voices in which the tenor held had a well-defined structural foundation. He combined a slowly moving, patterned tenor with a superstructure of two faster moving voices, which allowed increased melodic and contrapuntal flexibility.
Machaut influenced his structural use of isorhythm.
Guillaume de Machaut
1300 - 1377
Guillaume de Machaut is one of the undisputed top geniuses of Western music and the most famous composer of the Middle Ages.
Today his four-part mass Notre Dame is a textbook example of medieval counterpoint.
A series of carefully prepared illuminated manuscripts made for members of the French royal family preserve all of his artistic work.
Machaut's poetry is one of the most impressive French works of the Middle Ages. The theme of courtly love dominates his writing and is heavily symbolized in the dramas in which they appear. Some of the love themes come from Ovid and beyond, from which they were first elaborated by the troubadours of Provence and then the trouvères of the north, and therefore they really belong to a classic tradition.
Machaut marks the end of the line of Trouvères and with it the development of the monophonic art song in the West. Although he wrote music for more than a hundred of his French poems and even half a dozen motets in Latin, Machaut is best known for his Notre Dame Mass. Machaut's Mass is not the earliest cycle of measurements preserved, but it is the earliest of any single composer and, in fact, the earliest to show this degree of unity. While the chants used as cantus firmus vary, opening gestures and motivic figures are used to confirm the cyclical nature of the work.
Francesco Landini
1325 - 1397
Francesco was an Italian composer, organist, singer, poet, and instrument maker. He was one of the most famous and revered composers of the second half of the 14th century and by far the most famous composer in Italy.
Landini was the most important representative of the Italian Trecento style, which is sometimes referred to as the "Italian Ars Nova". His compositions were almost exclusively secular. Although there are records in which he composed sacred music, none of them have survived. What remains are eighty-nine ballates for two voices, forty-two ballates for three voices and a further nine, which exist in both two-part and three-part versions.
In addition to the ballate, a smaller number of madrigals have survived. Landini is said to have written his own texts for many of his works. His work, most completely preserved in the Squarcialupi Codex, represents almost a quarter of all Italian music of the 14th century.
