Machaut, Douce dame jolie
Douce dame jolie (“Sweet, beautiful lady”) is a virelai in which the poet sings of his adoration and anguish that his attentions are not returned. Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) composed both the music and the lyrics. Since today is Valentine’s Day, you might want to send this along to someone special and hope for better results.
Machaut has a prominent place in the history of music in 14th-century France. I always found it relatively easy to remember his dates and how his biography coincides with some of the catastrophic events of the 14th century. In fact, we begin the final unit of our course in Early Sacred Music with this:
It seems that just about everything went right in the 13th century, and everything went wrong in the 14th. That is an exaggeration to be sure, but the two centuries present a stark contrast. The 13th century was characterized by growth and prosperity. The 14th saw famine, plague, schism, economic crises, and a seemingly interminable Hundred Years War.
Machaut was secretary to King John of Bohemia, who was killed at the Battle of Crécy in 1346. At that time, the war was already 9 years old and would last more than a century until 1453. The Black Death would sweep across Europe in 1347-1351, taking with it anywhere from 30% to 60% of the population.
Although Machaut stands out in music history as the first to compose a complete, unified setting of the ordinary of the Mass, he composed mostly secular music in the ars nova or “new style” (distinguishing it from the ars antiqua of the 13th century). The ars nova saw a growing flexibility in musical rhythms coupled with more sophisticated ways to specify rhythm in written notation.
