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Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician
At once a royal secretary, a poet, and a composer, Guillaume de Machaut was one of the most protean and creative figures of the late Middle Ages. Rather than focus on a single strand of his remarkable career, Elizabeth Eva Leach gives us a book that encompasses all aspects of his work, illuminating it in a distinctively interdisciplinary light. The author provides a comprehensive picture of Machaut's artistry, reviews the documentary evidence about his life, charts the different agendas pursued by modern scholarly disciplines in their rediscovery and use of specific parts of his output, and delineates Machaut's own poetic and material presentation of his authorial persona.
Leach treats Machaut's central poetic themes of hope, fortune, and death, integrating the aspect of Machaut's multimedia art that differentiates him from his contemporaries' treatment of similar thematic issues: music. In restoring the centrality of music in Machaut's poetics, arguing that his words cannot be truly understood or appreciated without the additional layers of meaning created in their musicalization, Leach makes a compelling argument that musico-literary performance occupied a special place in the courts of fourteenth-century France.
Leach treats Machaut's central poetic themes of hope, fortune, and death, integrating the aspect of Machaut's multimedia art that differentiates him from his contemporaries' treatment of similar thematic issues: music. In restoring the centrality of music in Machaut's poetics, arguing that his words cannot be truly understood or appreciated without the additional layers of meaning created in their musicalization, Leach makes a compelling argument that musico-literary performance occupied a special place in the courts of fourteenth-century France.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 2, 2016
About the 14th century interdisciplinary artist--poet, composer, bookmaker. Leach's book looks at Machaut as an interdisciplinary artist as a corrective to much of the specialist scholarship of the 19th and 20th century that either treats him as a poet or a composer. Leach shows how Machaut created meaning through the way the poetry, music, and manuscript worked together as a sort of multimedia experience.
Leach's criticisms of how the specialism of modern scholarship distorts the work of someone like Machaut are spot on. Since I was a teenager, I have loved Machaut's musical compositions. I knew the handful of music history factoids about his work as a composer that appear in most surveys of music history--first complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass by a single composer, developed a bunch of secular song forms. However, I knew nothing of his poetry or the importance of his poetry (he influenced Chaucer), much less anything about how his music and poetry and manuscript design interacted.
Machaut compiled several complete editions of his own work in single manuscripts and the way he organizes his compositions are important to the meaning of his work. His secular songs are often part of longer series of songs where the meaning comes from how they work together--in opostion or as a dialogue to each other. As a lousy analogy it is sort of similar to something like a concept album--not necessarily a narrative like an opera, but part of a larger, more complex whole.
The last chapter was especially fascinating to me. Machaut is often thought to have written a lot of secular songs. The way this was always presented to me was that there was clear demarcation between secular and liturgical music. Not even just a clear line between them but they were opositional. Leach suggests that much of his secular music, while not liturgical, is still concerned with types of christian contemplation that would have been very familiar to the members of the court at the time and that some of it even echoes other writing by christian mystics. For example, with a motet, exploring the relationship between the plainsong derived tenor with the newly composed upper voices--they are constructed in a way that show aspects of courtly love as allegories for christian love. Then, if you look at the plainsongs used for the tenor lines, indidivual motets can be connected together in ways that suggest larger religious allegories.
The book is a sort of compendium of modern Machaut scholarship, although it does include a survey of all 700 years of Machaut scholarship. It's interesting--by the end of the book, it becomes clear that the history of Machaut scholarship reflects Machaut's own conception and illustration of Fortune!
It's an academic book, technical, and I know there was a lot I didn't get. Ideally, one would read this along with a couple of facsimiles of some of the manuscripts, an edition of Machaut's music in modern notation, and a knowledge of medieval french. Nevertheless, it is really quite a remarkable book, imo.
Leach's criticisms of how the specialism of modern scholarship distorts the work of someone like Machaut are spot on. Since I was a teenager, I have loved Machaut's musical compositions. I knew the handful of music history factoids about his work as a composer that appear in most surveys of music history--first complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass by a single composer, developed a bunch of secular song forms. However, I knew nothing of his poetry or the importance of his poetry (he influenced Chaucer), much less anything about how his music and poetry and manuscript design interacted.
Machaut compiled several complete editions of his own work in single manuscripts and the way he organizes his compositions are important to the meaning of his work. His secular songs are often part of longer series of songs where the meaning comes from how they work together--in opostion or as a dialogue to each other. As a lousy analogy it is sort of similar to something like a concept album--not necessarily a narrative like an opera, but part of a larger, more complex whole.
The last chapter was especially fascinating to me. Machaut is often thought to have written a lot of secular songs. The way this was always presented to me was that there was clear demarcation between secular and liturgical music. Not even just a clear line between them but they were opositional. Leach suggests that much of his secular music, while not liturgical, is still concerned with types of christian contemplation that would have been very familiar to the members of the court at the time and that some of it even echoes other writing by christian mystics. For example, with a motet, exploring the relationship between the plainsong derived tenor with the newly composed upper voices--they are constructed in a way that show aspects of courtly love as allegories for christian love. Then, if you look at the plainsongs used for the tenor lines, indidivual motets can be connected together in ways that suggest larger religious allegories.
The book is a sort of compendium of modern Machaut scholarship, although it does include a survey of all 700 years of Machaut scholarship. It's interesting--by the end of the book, it becomes clear that the history of Machaut scholarship reflects Machaut's own conception and illustration of Fortune!
It's an academic book, technical, and I know there was a lot I didn't get. Ideally, one would read this along with a couple of facsimiles of some of the manuscripts, an edition of Machaut's music in modern notation, and a knowledge of medieval french. Nevertheless, it is really quite a remarkable book, imo.
October 9, 2012
Not for everyone - but really a fascinating guy, and the book is an exemplar of scholarship and detail-oriented research and explication....Machaut was one of the first truly multi-discipline artists aware of his place in society and of the role made-art can have....carefully crafted music, poetry and graphic information design/architecture all done as a piece, a holistic creation by a very self-aware artist intentionally placing and defining himself in relation to his artistic output through publication....the first multi-media production I've heard of - Ms Leach is a scholar's scholar, and thanks to Alex, my son, for providing this gift....
July 24, 2018
A scholarly work that delivers what its title promises.
I have long been a fan of Machaut the composer; now I am equipped to dig deeper into both his music and additional scholarship. Leach's work presents such a thorough picture of the man (as much as can be done) that she rightly makes reference to "my Machaut." Her analysis of both music and text (not to mention the art in the books that Machaut made to preserve his work) exhibits the highest level of exegesis.
The final chapter is also a real treat!
I have long been a fan of Machaut the composer; now I am equipped to dig deeper into both his music and additional scholarship. Leach's work presents such a thorough picture of the man (as much as can be done) that she rightly makes reference to "my Machaut." Her analysis of both music and text (not to mention the art in the books that Machaut made to preserve his work) exhibits the highest level of exegesis.
The final chapter is also a real treat!
August 10, 2022
A wonderful synthesis of scholarship on Guillaume de Machaut's life and works. I was drawn into the aspects of his work that contemporary audiences might describe as postmodern: He advanced the artistic use of the text, playing with things like mise-en-page, annotation, cross-references, and other paratextual innovations that help people interpret the text itself. Leach writes that Machaut was central to "the history of the manuscript book" which transformed into "a visual 'performance space' involving text, illuminations, musical notation, and paratextual rubrics and marginalia."
July 21, 2016
This book was a wonderful, if somewhat heavy reading. Leach takes a very interdisciplinary approach to Machaut's life and work. While she does give music just a bit more of the foreground, she gives equal importance and attention to Machaut's work as a writer and producer of books. Leach is very thorough without being long-winded or ponderous. She covers not only the content and substance of his work, but also how it interacts with and what it reveals about courtly culture in 14th century France. Machaut's life, work, and world are endlessly fascinating, and Leach really brings that out.
November 8, 2021
Not *quite* as dense as Nelson's Charlemagne biography that I read earlier in the year, but similarly difficult to recommend to the uninitiated. As a music geek, I appreciated this for aggregating any and all research on Machaut, this relatively prominent yet still hard-to-pinpoint artistic figure. Hard to find used for cheaper than $35-40, go the library route if you really want to check this out.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews