Here are the triplum and motetus texts, abridged to eliminate a lengthy honor-roll of famous
musicians:
Triplum: The science of music sends greetings to her beloved disciples. I desire each one of you to observe the rules and
not to offend against rhetoric or grammar by dividing indivisible syllables. Avoid all faults. Farewell in melody.Motetus: Rhetoric sends greetings to learned Music, but complains that many singers make faults in her compositions by
dividing simple vowels and making hockets; therefore I request that you remedy this.Every one of the “faults” for which singers are berated by Music and by Rhetoric are flagrantly
committed by the composer. The piece is a kind of satire. But such satire requires an attitude of ironic
detachment, a consciousness of art as artifice, and a wish to make that artifice the principal focus of
attention. These are traits we normally (and perhaps self-importantly) ascribe to the “modern”
temperament, not the “medieval” one. Only we (we tend to think), with our modern notions of psychology
and our modern sense of “self,” are capable of self-reflection. Only we, in short, can be “artists” as
opposed to “craftsmen.” Not so.
MACHAUT: THE OCCULT AND THE SENSUOUS
Formal introduction to Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377), the greatest poet-musician of mid-fourteenth-
century France, can wait until the next chapter. Suffice it for now to say that he was the chief extender of
the trouvère tradition, to which he gave a new lease on life by channeling it into new styles and genres
that would thrive for almost two centuries. Machaut carried on the tradition of the French love-song motet
into the fourteenth century and applied to it all the new technologies of the Ars Nova. But since the Latin