Guillaume de Machaut (French: [gijom d mao]; sometimes spelled Machault; c.

1300 April 1377) was a medieval French poet and composer. He is one of the earliest
composers on whom significant biographical information is available. According
to Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Machaut was "the last great poet who was also a
composer". Well into the 15th century, Machaut's poetry was greatly admired and
imitated by other poets, including Geoffrey Chaucer.
Machaut composed in a wide range of styles and forms. He is a part of the musical
movement known as the ars nova. Machaut helped develop the motet and secular song
forms (particularly the lai and the formes fixes: rondeau, virelai andballade). Machaut
wrote the Messe de Nostre Dame, the earliest known complete setting of the Ordinary
of the Massattributable to a single composer.

Guillaume de Machaut, Machaut also spelled Machault (born c. 1300, Machault, Fr.
died 1377, Reims) French poet and musician, greatly admired by contemporaries as a
master of French versification and regarded as one of the leading French composers of
the Ars Nova musical style of the 14th century. It is on his shorter poems and his
musical compositions that his reputation rests. He was the last great poet in France to
think of the lyric and its musical setting as a single entity.
He took holy orders and in 1323 entered the service of John of Luxembourg, king of
Bohemia, whom he accompanied on his wars as chaplain and secretary. He was
rewarded for this service by his appointment in 1337 as canon of Reims cathedral. After
the Kings death, he found another protector in the Kings daughter, Bonne of
Luxembourg, wife of the future king John II of France, and in 1349 in Charles II, king of
Navarre. Honours and patronage continued to be lavished by kings and princes on
Machaut at Reims until his death.
In his longer poems Machaut did not go beyond the themes and genres already widely
employed in his time. Mostly didactic and allegorical exercises in the well-worked courtly
love tradition, they are of scant interest to the modern reader. An exception among the
longer works is Voir-Dit, which relates how a young girl of high rank falls in love with the
poet because of his fame and creative accomplishments. The difference in age is too

great, however, and the idyll ends in disappointment. Machauts lyric poems also are
based on the courtly love theme but reworked into a deft form with a verbal music that is
often perfectly achieved. His influencemost significantly his technical innovations
spread beyond the borders of France. In England, Geoffrey Chaucer drew heavily upon
Machauts poetry for elements of The Book of the Duchesse.
All of Machauts music has been preserved in 32 manuscripts, representing a large part
of the surviving music from his period. He was the first composer to write singlehandedly a polyphonic setting of themass ordinary, a work that has been recorded in
modern performance. In most of this four-part setting he employs the characteristic Ars
Nova technique of isorhythm (repeated overlapping of a rhythmic pattern in varying
melodic forms).
Machauts secular compositions make up the larger part of his music. His three- and
four-part motets (polyphonic songs in which each voice has a different text) number 23.
Of these, 17 are in French, 2 are Latin mixed with French, and 4, like the religious
motets of the early 13th century, are in Latin. Love is often the subject of their texts, and
all but 3 employ isorhythm. Machauts 19 lais (see lai) are usually for unaccompanied
voice, although two are for three parts, and one is for two parts. They employ a great
variety of musical material, frequently from the popular song and dance. Of his
33 virelais (seevirelai), 25 consist solely of a melody, and they, along with the bulk of his
lais, represent the last of such unaccompanied songs composed in the tradition of
the trouvres. The rest of his virelais have one or two additional parts for instrumental
accompaniment, and these are typical of the accompanied solo song that became
popular in the 14th century. The polyphonic songs he wrote, in addition to his motets,
consist of 21 rondeaux and 41 of his 42 ballades. The wide distribution of his music in
contemporary manuscripts reveals that he was esteemed not only in France but also in
Italy, Spain, and much of the rest of Europe.