Machaut Tunes: Realizations of Ballades and Virelais (1982)
Piano Solo – 10 mins.
Audio
Score (Free Download)
Program Note
Being a composer, I can’t listen to any music without empathizing with the thoughts, choices, struggles and joys a composer feels when they fashion their ideas and available musical resources into a shared musical experience. Even listening to the simplest folk song, I hear some passionate musical mind at play in every turn of the phrase. Guillaume de Machaut is the earliest composer I feel I can identify as a distinct, living, recognizably poetic human being. Machaut left us an extensive and wide-ranging catalog of music and poetry. My love for his music centers on the secular love songs he composed, using the traditional forms of the Trouvère balladeers. These are above all catchy, wonderfully engaging tunes, but they display a masterful designing of so many elements of line, rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint that they have become illuminating models for my own composition.
Seven centuries ago, Machaut was writing in a period when for the first time composers could notate music with a full metric and rhythmic vocabulary, allowing not only subtle rhythmic shadings of his melodic lines but also unprecedented control over harmony and counterpoint. He also could make expressive use of notated chromatic alterations of diatonic pitches, which combine with the assumed functional “leading tone” inflections in the style to provide a kaleidoscope of harmonic colors, which Machaut uses to underline the dramatic shapes of his forms.
Some of the things you will hear in my “realizations” are not composed by Machaut, particularly in the monophonic virelais: the drone accompaniment in the first tune, Quant je suis mis (Virelai # 13) and the rhythmic grooves and flourishes of finale Douce Dame (Virelai # 4) are modeled after early-music performers’ renditions of these songs. And I’ve made free use of the range of the piano to vary the colors of all the lines. But the delicious harmonies and counterpoints heard in the three-voice canon Sanz cuer-Dame-Amis (Ballade #17), the rambunctious two-voice Se je soupir (Virelai # 36), and the exquisite melody with two-voice accompaniment of Je sui aussi (Ballade # 20) can all be found fully notated with little variance in scholarly transcriptions of the music of this 14th century musical giant.