devout genre that stood closest to the tradition of fine amours was the antiphon to the Blessed Virgin
Mary, it is not surprising to find that Machaut’s grandest, most rigorous essay in the most exalted genre
available to him was an appeal to Mary in her role of divine “neck,” or intercessor.
This lofty, ambitiously structured work—Felix virgo/Inviolata/AD TE SUSPIRAMUS—is harmonically
amplified by a the addition of a contratenor, a fourth voice composed “against the tenor” and in the same
range. It also has a more formal introitus than any we have as yet encountered: it comes to a full cadence,
supported by the contratenor and the tenor, the latter playing “free” notes (that is, not drawn from the
cantus firmus or color) for no other purpose than sonorous enhancement.
The color, once it gets under way, turns out to be a tune we know, albeit in a somewhat different
version (or “redaction”). It is a phrase from a variant of a melody already encountered in chapter 3 (see
Ex. 3-12b): Salve Regina, the eleventh-century Marian antiphon that stood closest, formally and
melodically, to the contemporary Provençal lyric. Machaut selected a 48-note passage from the version of
this dirgelike Dorian melody that he knew by heart, encompassing the words “... to you we sigh,
mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. O, therefore, [be] our advocate...,” and applied to it a talea
consisting of twenty rhythmic durations (sixteen notes and four rests) encompassing 36 tempora divided
into two equal parts.
The first 18 tempora are organized into 6 longs under [O], the sign of perfection, and the second 18
are organized into nine longs under [C], the sign of imperfection, as shown in Ex. 8-5. It takes three such
taleae to exhaust the color (3 × 16 notes = 48 notes), following which the whole color/talea complex is
repeated in diminution, so that, relative to the motetus and triplum, the tenor now moves at the level of
tempus, in breves and semibreves.
EX. 8-5 Guillaume de Machaut, Felix virgo/Inviolata/AD TE SUSPIRAMUS, tenortaleaEverything we have observed about the tenor is true, in this motet, of the contratenor as well.
Although a newly invented part rather than a cantus firmus (something that we can state with near certainty
owing to its chromatic vagaries), the contratenor consists, like the tenor, of a color that is put through a
double cursus, with each cursus encompassing a three-fold talea and with the second cursus in diminution.
The contratenor’s talea is in fact the same as the tenor’s, except that it presents the two 18-tempora halves
in the reverse or reciprocal order, with the imperfect longs under [C] preceding the perfect ones under
[O]. Thus there is a constant interchange of time signatures between tenor and contratenor, and a
perpetually maintained “polymeter” of perfect and imperfect mensurations. Because of their close
relationship, we can be sure that the contratenor was composed at the same time as the tenor, and that both