The last great Medieval composer worth mentioning here was Jacopo da Bologna, who lived from 1340 to 1360. He was an Italian composer of the Trecento, the period sometimes known as the Italian ars nova. He was one of the first composers of this group, making him a contemporary of Gherardello da Firenze and Giovanni da Firenze. He is mostly known for his madrigals but also composed several cacce and caccia, madrigal hybrids. His burial place is unknown.
Jacopo’s style was known for sweet, clean melodies; fully texted voice parts that never crossed; and noncanonical writing. His setting of Non al suo amante, written about 1350, is the only known contemporaneous setting of Petrarch’s poetry. Noteworthly are the untexted passages which connect the textual lines in many of his madrigals. His most famous madrigal is Fenice fu’, written about 1360.
He is well-represented in the Squarcialupi Codex, the large collection of 14th century music long owned by the Medici family; 28 compositions of his are found in that source, the principal source for music of the Italian ars nova, alongside music by Francesco Landini and others. In addition to his compositions, Jacopo also wrote a short theoretical treatise, L’arte del discanto misurato.
Francesco Landini was born around 1325 and died in September 2, 1397. He was an Italian composer, organist, singer, poet and instrument maker. And not only that. 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. Our records show that the composer was blind from childhood (an effect of contracting smallpox), Landini became devoted to music early in life, and mastered many instruments, including the lute, as well as the art of singing, writing poetry, and composition.
A few facts of his life can be established with certainty, and the general outline has begun to take shape as more research has been done, especially into Florentine records. Most of the original biographical data on Landini comes from a 1385 book on famous Florentine citizens by chronicler Filippo Villani, who was born approximately 1325.
Landini was most likely born in Florence. His father, Jacopo del Casentino, was a noted painter in the school of Giotto. Landini was an inventor of instruments, including a stringed instrument called the ’syrena syrenarum’, that combined features of the lute and psaltery, and it is believed to be the ancestor of the bandura.
He was given a crown of laurel by the King of Cyprus, who was in Venice for several periods during the 1360s. Probably Landini spent some time in northern Italy prior to 1370. Evidence in some of his music also points to this: he dedicated one motet to Andrea Contarini, who was Doge of Venice from 1368 to 1382; and in addition, his works are well-represented in northern Italian sources.
He was employed as organist at the Florentine monastery of Santa Trinità in 1361, and at the church of San Lorenzo from 1365 onward. He was heavily involved in the political and religious controversies of his day, but he seems to have remained in the good graces of the Florentine authorities. Landini knew many of the other Italian composers of the Trecento, including Lorenzo da Firenze, with whom he was associated at Santa Trinità, as well as Andrea da Firenze, who he knew in the 1370s. Around or shortly after 1375, Andrea hired him as a consultant to help build the organ at the Servite house in Florence. Among the surviving records are the receipts for the wine that the two consumed during the three days it took to tune the instrument. Landini also helped build the new organ at SS Annunziata in 1379, and in 1387 he was involved in yet another organ-building project, this time at Florence Cathedral.
Numerous contemporary writers attest to his fame, not only as a composer, but as a singer, poet, organist, and passionately devoted citizen of Florence. His reputation for moving an audience with his music was so powerful that writers noted “the sweetness of his melodies was such that hearts burst from their bosoms.”
He is buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. His tombstone, lost until the 19th century and now again displayed in the church, contains a depiction of him with a portative organ similar to the one shown.
Landini was the foremost exponent of the Italian Trecento style, sometimes also called the “Italian ars nova”. His output was almost exclusively secular. While there are records of his having composed sacred music, none of it has survived. What has survived are eighty-nine ballate for two voices, forty-two ballate for three voices, and another nine which exist in both a two and a three-voice version. In addition to the ballatas, a smaller number of madrigals have survived. Landini is assumed to have written his own texts for many of his works. His output, preserved chiefly in the Squarcialupi Codex, represents almost a quarter of all surviving 14th century Italian music.
Landini is the eponym of the Landini cadence, a cadential formula whereby the sixth degree of the scale (the submediant) is inserted between the leading note and its resolution on the tonic. However this cadence is not unique to his music; it can be found in much polyphonic music of the period, and well into the 15th century, for example in the songs of Gilles Binchois. Gherardello da Firenze is the earliest composer to use the cadence whose works have survived. Yet Landini used the formula consistently throughout his music, so the eponym—which dates from after the medieval era—is appropriate.
In one of his madrigals, he set a text he wrote himself: “I am Music, and weeping I regret seeing intelligent people forsaking my sweet and perfect sounds for street music.”
Guillaume de Machaut, sometimes spelled Machault, was born around 1300 and died in April 1377. He was an important Medieval French poet and composer.
Guilllaume de Machaut was “the last great poet who was also a composer,” in the words of the scholar Daniel Leech-Wilkinson. Well into the 15th century, Machaut’s poetry was greatly admired and imitated by other poets including the likes of Geoffrey Chaucer. Machaut was and is the most celebrated composer of the 14th century. He composed in a wide range of styles and forms and his output was enormous. He was also the most famous and historically significant representative of the musical movement known as the ars nova.
Machaut was especially influential in the development of the motet and the secular song (particularly the lai, and the formes fixes: rondeau, virelai and ballade). Machaut wrote the Messe de Nostre Dame, the earliest known complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass attributable to a single composer, and influenced composers for centuries to follow.
Machaut was born c. 1300 and educated in the region around Rheims. Though his surname most likely derives from the nearby town of Machault, 30 km to the east of Rheims in the Ardennes region, most scholars believe his birthplace was in fact Rheims. He was employed as secretary to John I, Count of Luxemburg and King of Bohemia, from 1323 to 1346; in addition he became a priest sometime during this period. Most likely he accompanied King John on his various trips, many of them military expeditions, around Europe (including Prague). He was named as the canon of Verdun in 1330, Arras in 1332 and Rheims in 1333. By 1340 Machaut was living in Rheims, having relinquished his other canonic posts at the request of Pope Benedict XII. In 1346, King John was killed fighting at the Battle of Crécy, and Machaut, who was famous and much in demand, entered the service of various other aristocrats and rulers including King John’s daughter Bonne (who died of the Black Death in 1349), Charles II of Navarre, Jean de Berry, and Charles, Duke of Normandy, who would become King Charles V in 1364.
Our records show that, Machaut survived the Black Death which devastated Europe, and spent his later years living in Rheims composing and supervising the creation of his complete-works manuscripts. His poem Le Voir Dit (probably 1361-1365) is said by some to be autobiographical, recounting a late love affair with a 19-year-old girl, Péronne d’Armentières, although this is contested. When he died in 1377, other composers such as François Andrieu wrote elegies lamenting his death.
Guillaume de Machaut’s lyric output comprises around 400 poems, including 235 ballades, 76 rondeaux, 39 virelais, 24 lais, 10 complaintes, and 7 chansons royales, and Machaut did much to perfect and codify these fixed forms. Many of Machaut’s poems are without music, and Machaut stated clearly that for him, writing the poem always preceded (and had greater importance than) composing the music. Other than his Latin motets of a religious nature and some poems invoking the horrors of war and captivity, the vast majority of Machaut’s lyric poems partake of the conventions of courtly love and involve statements of service to a lady and the poet’s pleasure and pains. In technical terms, Machaut was a master of elaborate rhyme schemes, and this concern makes him a precursor to the Grands Rhétoriqueurs of the 15th century.
Guillaume de Machaut’s narrative output is dominated by the “dit” (literally “spoken”, i.e. a poem not meant to be sung). These first-person narrative poems (all but one are written in octosyllabic rhymed couplets, like the romance, follow many of the conventions of the Roman de la Rose, including the use of allegorical dreams (songes), allegorical characters, and the situation of the narrator-lover attempting to return toward or satisfy his lady. Machaut is also responsible for a poetic chronicle of chivalric deeds (the Prise d’Alexandrie) and for poetic works of consolation and moral philosophy. His unusual self-reflective usage of himself (as his lyrical persona) as the narrator of his dits gleans some personal philosophical insights as well.
Machaut’s poetry had a direct effect on the works of Eustache Deschamps, Jean Froissart, Christine de Pisan, René I of Naples and Geoffrey Chaucer, among many others. He was by far the most famous and influential composer of the 14th century. His secular song output includes monophonic lais and virelais, which continue, in updated forms, some of the tradition of the troubadours. However, his work in the polyphonic forms of the ballade and rondeau was more significant historically, and he wrote the first complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass which can be attributed to a single composer. He was the last important representative of the trouvère tradition.
The vast majority of Machaut’s works were secular in nature. His lyrics almost always dealt with courtly love. Machaut mostly composed in five genres: the lai, the virelai, the motet, the ballade, and the rondeau. In these genres, Machaut retained the basic formes fixees, but often utilized creative text setting and cadences. For example, most rondeaux phrases end with a long melisma on the penultimate syllable. Machaut’s motets often contain sacred texts in the tenor. The top two voices in these three-part compositions, in contrast, sing secular French texts, creating interesting concordances between the sacred and secular. In his other genres, though, he does not utilize sacred texts.
Machaut’s cyclic setting of the Mass, his Messe de Nostre Dame, was probably composed for Reims Cathedral in the early 1360s. It was the first Mass created by a single composer and conceived as a unit. Specialists agree that this mass is at best a forerunner to the later fifteenth century cyclic masses by the likes of Josquin des Prez. Machaut’s mass differs from these in the following ways. One: he does not hold a tonal centre throughout the entire work, as the mass uses two distinct modes, (one for the Kyrie, Gloria and Credo, another for Sanctus, Agnus and Ita missa est). Two: there is no extended melodic theme that clearly runs through all the movements, and the mass does not use the parody technique. There is considerable evidence suggesting that this mass was not composed in one creative motion; although the movements may have been placed together this does not mean that they were conceived so.
Stylistically the mass can be said to be consistent, and certainly the chosen chants are all celebrations of the mother Mary. Also adding weight to a claim that the mass is cyclic is the possibility that the piece was written/brought together to be performed at a specific celebration. The possibility that it was for the coronation of Charles V, which was once widely accepted, is thought unlikely in modern scholarship.
We know much more about Philippe de Vitry. We even know that time of his birth and death: October 31, 1291 - June 9, 1361. Philippe de Vitry was a French composer, music theorist and poet. He was an accomplished, innovative, and influential composer, and may also have been the author of the Ars Nova treatise.
He was born in Paris. Online we found very sketchy biographical details of his life. Given that he is often referred to in documents as “Magister,” he is thought likely to have studied at the University of Paris. Later he was prominent in the courts of Charles IV, Philippe VI and Jean II, serving as a secretary and advisor; perhaps aided by these Bourbon connections, he also held several canonries, including Clermont, Beauvais, and Paris, also serving for a time in the antipapal retinue at Avignon starting with Clement VI. In addition to all this, he was a diplomat and a soldier, and is known to have served at the siege of Aiguillon in 1346. In 1351 he became Bishop of Meaux, east of Paris. Moving in all the most important political, artistic, and ecclesiastical circles, he was acquainted with many lights of the age, including Petrarch and the famous mathematician, philosopher and music theorist Nicole Oresme. De Vitry died in Paris.
Vitry has been most famous in music history for writing the Ars Nova in 1322, a treatise on music, which gave its name to the music of the entire era. While his authorship and the very existence of this treatise have recently come into question, a handful of his musical works do survive, and show the innovations in notation, particularly mensural and rhythmic, with which he was credited within a century of their inception. Such innovations as are exemplified in his stylistically-attributed motets for the Roman de Fauvel were particularly important, and made possible the free and quite complex music of the next hundred years. In some ways the “modern” system of rhythmic notation began with the Ars Nova, during which music broke free from the older idea of the rhythmic modes, patterns which were repeated without being individually notated. The notational predecessors of modern time meters also originate in the Ars Nova.
Vitry is reputed to have written chansons and motets, but only a few have survived. Each motet is strikingly individual, exploring a unique structural idea. Five of Vitry’s three-part motets have survived in the Roman de Fauvel; an additional nine can be found in the Ivrea Codex. He was widely acknowledged as the greatest musician of his day, and even Petrarch wrote a glowing tribute of him: “he is the great philosopher and truth-seeker of our age.”
Not much is known about Franco of Cologne, even his birth and death are hidden under the veil of mystery. Yet, this German music theorist and possibly composer was one of the most influential theorists of the late Medieval era, and was the first to propose an idea which was to transform music notation permanently: that the duration of any note should be determined by its appearance on the page, and not from context alone.
Dureing our research we found just a few details known about his life. and more can be inferred. In his own treatise he described himself as the papal chaplain and the preceptor of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John at Cologne, an extremely powerful position in northern Europe in the 13th century. Other documents of the time refer to him as “Franco of Paris” as well as “Franco teutonicus”; since his writing on music is intimately associated with the Notre Dame School of Paris, and his Teutonic origin is mentioned in several sources, he was probably German, and, possibly, traveled between Cologne and Paris, (which had close relations during that time). Franco, probably, had a musical position at Notre Dame at some point, perhaps as a teacher, composer or singing master.
Jacques of Liège, in his early 14th century Speculum musice, a passionate defense of the 13th century ars antiqua style against the new “dissolute and lascivious” ars nova style, mentioned hearing a composition by Franco of Cologne, a motet in three voices. No music of Franco with reliable attribution has survived, although some works of the late 13th century, from Parisian sources but stylistically resembling German music of the time, have on occasion been attributed to him.
Franco’s most famous work was his Ars cantus mensurabilis, a work which was widely circulated and copied, and remained influential for about a hundred years. Unlike many theoretical treatises of the 13th century, it was a practical guide, and entirely avoided metaphysical speculations; it was evidently written for musicians, and was full of musical examples for each point made in the text.
The topics covered in the treatise include organum, discant, polyphony, clausulae, conductus, and indeed all the compositional techniques of the 13th century Notre Dame school. The central part of Franco’s treatise, and by far the most famous, is his suggestion that the notes themselves can define their own durations. Formerly, under the system of the rhythmic modes, rhythms were based on context: a stream of similar-appearing notes on the page would be interpreted as a series of long and short values by a trained singer based on a complex series of learned rules. From the evidence of the spread of his treatise and the writings of later scholars, this innovation seems to have been received well.
The consensus date of most medieval music theory scholars on the Ars cantus mensurabilis is about 1250. Clearly the mid-13th century was a time of progress in music notation and theory, even if it were only catching up with the current state of composition and performance. The composer who most notably followed Franco’s treatise in his own music was Petrus de Cruce, one of the most prominent composers of motets of the late ars antiqua.
Adam de la Halle, also known as Adam le Bossu which is translated into English as Adam the Hunchback was a French-born trouvère, poet and musician, who broke with the long-established tradition of writing liturgical poetry and Catholic funeral music to be an early founder of secular theater in France. Researches say, that he was born around 1237 and they are positive that he died in 1288.
Adam’s other nicknames, “le Bossu d’Arras” and “Adam d’Arras”, suggest that he came from Arras, France. The sobriquet “the Hunchback” was probably a family name; Adam himself points out that he was not one. His father, Henri de le Hale, was a well-known Citizen of Arras, and Adam studied grammar, theology, and music at the Cistercian abbey of Vaucelles, near Cambrai. Father and son had their share in the civil discords in Arras, and for a short time took refuge in Douai. Adam had been destined for the church, but renounced this intention, and married a certain Marie, who figures in many of his songs, rondeaux, motets and jeux-partis. Afterwards he joined the household of Robert II, count of Artois; and then was attached to Charles of Anjou, brother of Charles IX, whose fortunes he followed in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Italy.
At the court of Charles, after Charles became king of Naples, Adam wrote his Jeu de Robin et Marion, the most famous of his works. His shorter pieces are accompanied by music, of which a transcript in modern notation, with the original score, is given in Coussemaker’s edition. His Jeu de Robin et Marion is cited as the earliest French play with music on a secular subject. The pastoral, which tells how Marion resisted the knight, and remained faithful to Robert the shepherd, is based on an old chanson, Robin m’aime, Robin m’a. It consists of dialogue varied by refrains already current in popular song. The melodies to which these are set have the character of folk music, and are more spontaneous and melodious than the more elaborate music of his songs and motets. Musicologists consider Le Jeu de Robin et Marion and Le Jeu de la feuillée forerunners of the comic opera. An adaptation of Le Jeu Robin et Marion, by Julien Tiersot, was played at Arras by a company from the Paris Opera Comique on the occasion of a festival in 1896 in honour of Adam de le Hale.
His other play, Le jeu Adan or Le jeu de la Feuillee, written around 1262, is a satirical drama in which he introduces himself, his father and the citizens of Arras with their peculiarities. His works include a conge, or satirical farewell to the city of Arras, and an unfinished chanson de geste in honour of Charles of Anjou, Le roi de Sicile, begun in 1282; another short piece, Le jeu du pelerin, is sometimes attributed to him.
His known works include thirty-six chansons (literally, “songs”), forty-six rondets de carole, eighteen jeux-partis, fourteen rondeaux, five motets, one rondeau-virelai, one ballette, one dit d’amour, and one congé.
Léonin, is also known to us by different names - Leoninus, Leonius, and Leo, whose birth date is believed to be somewhere around 1150s and death aabout 1201, is the first known significant composer of polyphonic organum. He was probably French, and he probably lived and worked in Paris at the Notre Dame Cathedral, and was the earliest member of the Notre Dame school of polyphony who is known by name. The name Léonin is derived from “Leoninus,” which is the Latin diminutive of the name Leo, thus it is likely that Léonin’s given French name was Léo. Online friends, tell me, that there is no information about the death of this composer.
All that is known about him comes from the writings of a later student at the cathedral known as Anonymous IV, an Englishman who left a treatise on theory and who mentions Léonin as the composer of the Magnus Liber, the “great book” of organum. Much of the Magnus Liber is devoted to clausulae—melismatic portions of Gregorian chant which were extracted into separate pieces, with the original note values greatly slowed down, and provided with a fast-moving upper part. Léonin was also probably the first composer to use the rhythmic modes, and possibly also to invent a notation for them. It was Léonin’s incomparable achievement to introduce a rational system of rhythm into polyphonic music for the first time, and, equally important, to create a method of notation expressive of this rhythm.
The Magnus Liber was intended for liturgical use. According to Anonymous IV, “Magister Leoninus (Léonin) was the finest composer of organum; he wrote the great book (Magnus Liber) for the gradual and antiphoner for the sacred service.” All of the Magnus Liber is for two voices, although little is known about actual performance practice: the two voices were not necessarily soloists.
According to Anonymous IV, Léonin’s work was greatly improved and expanded by the later composer Pérotin. See also Medieval music.
Some reknown musicologists believe that Léonin may have been the same person as a contemporaneous Parisian poet, Leonius, after whom Leonine verse may have been named. This would make Léonins use of meter even more significant.
Pérotin was a European composer, believed to be French. He lived around the end of the twelfth and beginning of the 13th century, and he was the most famous member of the Notre Dame school of polyphony. Pérotin was one of very few composers of his day whose name has been preserved, and can be reliably attached to individual compositions; this is due to the testimony of an anonymous English student at Notre Dame known as Anonymous IV, who wrote about him. Anonymous IV called him “Perotin Magister”, which means Pérotin the master or expert. Nothing is known about his time of death or his burial place.
