In contrast to the stable and prosperous thirteenth century, the 1300s were a tumultuous time for Europe. Over the course of the century, Europeans were plagued by war (the Hundred Years' War); famine brought about by flooding in northwestern Europe; reduced agricultural production caused by climate changes; and disease (the Black Death, a combination of pneumonic and bubonic plagues that decimated about a third of the population). The Church, which had long been a unifying force across Europe, faced problems of its own: election of French Pope Clement V, who remained in Avignon instead of residing in Rome, was known as the Babylonian Captivity, with the popes essentially serving as puppets of the French monarchy. This was then followed by the Great Schism, with rival “popes” in Rome, Avignon, and later in Pisa.
Music, then, sought a balance between structure and pleasure—a way of counteracting the uncertainty, turmoil, and misery in the other aspects of European life at the time. Structure was introduced in the forms of new rhythmic and melodic patterning and the standardization of song forms; and pleasure through the composition of more interesting and engaging melodies and harmonies, with innovations in rhythm and meter. One of the leading innovators of the time was Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361) who pioneered a “new art”: the Ars Nova, a Latin term that refers to this new French musical style in the fourteenth century.
The Ars Nova featured two main innovations in rhythm and musical notation. In regards to rhythm, the “new art” allowed for two different divisions of any note value: the “imperfect” double division along with the long-standing “perfect” triple division. Additionally, the semibreve (which previously was the smallest possible rhythmic duration) could now be divided further into minims. Around the middle of the century, the Ars Nova began incorporation mensuration signs, symbols placed at the beginning of music that indicated the rhythmic and metric profile of the music and which are the ancestors of today's modern time signatures.
By far the most important composer in the fourteenth century was Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377), who, under the patronage of the aristocracy and royalty, produced a body of musical compositions numbering nearly 140. Machaut collected his work into manuscripts which he prepared for his patrons, marking a shift in self-awareness of musicians as artists in their own right—prior to this, anonymity was the norm. Machaut composed in nearly every genre of music, from masses to motets to secular songs.
Machaut composed both secular and sacred song, although his composition of motets dates primarily to the early part of his career. His motets continued in the established style of multiple voices above a cantus firmus, although were rhythmically more complex than those of his predecessors. Machaut, who was also a poet, composed a number of secular songs, mostly on the subject of love. The most popular genres of secular song came from the formes fixes (fixed forms), which prescribed particular patterns of repetition for both the text and the music. These formes fixes applied not only to monophonic songs, but also to the newly developed polyphonic songs known as chansons (French for “songs”). All of the fixed forms derived their forms from genres associated with dancing.
Machaut's most significant contribution to the musical canon is his Messe de Nostre Dame (Mass of Our Lady), which is one of the earliest known polyphonic settings of the Mass Ordinary. Additionally, it is most likely the first polyphonic mass to have been composed entirely by a single composer and conceived of as a cohesive musical unit. Previously, polyphonic settings of mass movements could easily be combined with various other settings in a service. Machaut, in contrast, treats the six movements of his mass as a single composition. Machaut received high regard as a poet and composer by his contemporaries and for several decades after his death, and his works are a large part of the canon of that time because he ensured their survival through carefully preserved and numerous manuscripts.
France and Italy in the Middle Ages were very distinct countries; France, for instance, was ruled by a monarch, while Italy was a collection of city-states, each with its own distinct dialect, culture, and political system. Despite these differences, the music of France did have a significant impact on Italian composers in the later part of the fourteenth century. Italian composers lost more of their specific regional characteristics and absorbed the new styles of French music. Italians set their music to French texts and used French forms. In fact, even manuscripts of Italian compositions were sometimes notated in French!
Despite the French influence on Italian musical compositions, Italian Trecento music (which comes from the Italian “mille trecento” for 1300) produced innovations in its own right. While French composers made their mark in both sacred and secular forms, Trecento music thrived primarily in the form of secular polyphonic songs. Church polyphony at the time was mostly improvised, and very little Italian church music actually survives in manuscript. The polyphonic songs of the Italian Trecento, which like the French were composed as entertainment for the aristocracy, were preserved and survive in much greater numbers. The fourteenth-century madrigal was a song for two or three voices to be sung unaccompanied by instruments. In the next section, we'll take a look at the sixteenth-century madrigal, which was a completely different genre of music (and much more well-known than its earlier counterpart). The Trecento madrigal features all voices singing the same text, usually one that was pastoral, satirical, or amorous in nature. Each stanza of the madrigal was closed with a refrain called a ritornello (this term will reappear throughout the development of classical music and serve in very different roles). Unlike the French Ars Nova (where the melody in one voice dominated the others), the voices in Trecento madrigals were essentially equal, with no one voice dominating.
The leading Trecento composer was Francesco Landini (ca. 1325-1397), who composed a host of secular songs, in particular the very popular ballata. The word ballata comes from the Italian verb ballare (“to dance”), and seems to have been influenced by the French chanson style, in which the melody in one voice predominated. Landini composed around 140 ballate, which were originally intended to accompany dancing. He also composed 12 madrigals and a couple of songs in other forms, thus demonstrating the overwhelming popularity of the ballata.
In hindsight, the French and Italian composers of the fourteenth century made significant contributions to the development of both sacred and secular art music. Unfortunately, their music did not have much staying power at the time, replaced with the innovations of the fifteenth century and with much of it unperformed for centuries until the music's rediscovery in the twentieth century.