Guillaume de Machaut - Biaute qui toutes autres pere

Описание: Biaute qui toutes autres pere, ballade for 3 voices

Gothic Voices
Christopher Page

Biaute qui toutes has a particularly personal feel among Machaut's ballades. Although written early in his life, one of the most poignant lines reflects a line from a passage in "Voir dit," his autobiographical poem of love and loss that he wrote when in his sixties. The lines, from Biaute, are "I have no pleasure, joy or song/nor do I sing anymore like I used to." In "Voir dit," just before the last ballade in the poem, he says he is so melancholy at his rejection that he will never compose another ballade, rondeau, virelai, or lay. It's curious just how conventionalized and personal these statements were. Machaut emerges as an epitome of the late medieval musician/poet and in his works it can be seen that through his long life, he distinctly remained the same person. But the interest of Machaut's music is not just as a record of his colorful life. Machaut's polyphonic songs, his ballades and rondeaux particularly, show him in a forward-looking aspect as the leading exponent of the ars nova. If the works are hard to hear as "radical" now, as they would have been in his time, at least how varied they are can be acknowledged. Every chanson of Machaut's is quite distinct from the others, creating its own little musical world with a particular set of conditions and aims. Originality is certainly something Machaut treasured in music, writing that a piece is best when it is "strange and new." One "strange and new" element Machaut introduces in Biaute qui toutes is a literal melodic sequence. It's his only ballade with such a blatant sequence. The six-note motif (rising a step, then falling by five) is heard in three transpositions, nine times. In each of the three turns, it's harmonized differently, including with some very medieval-sounding dissonances and the effect is oddly gripping. Machaut carefully works his music around his text and takes advantage of the meter, but never falling slave to it. The melodic phrase of the triplum doesn't end at the end of the poetic line, but continues into the first words of the next, so the musical unit is structured around the couplet and the quatrain, not the individual line. The eloquent result can be described as "beautiful and antique." [allmusic.com]