whom he is pursuing as courtly lover. Along with the letters there are some lyric poems addressed by
Machaut to his callow beloved, of which a few are set to music. In one of the letters accompanying a song
Machaut tells Peronelle that he will send another as soon as he has put a tenor and a contratenor to it.
Peronelle may not have been particularly interested in the implications of that statement, but to us they are
profoundly revealing.
The upshot of all this scattered evidence is that any of Machaut’s two-part virelais could have started
out, and probably did start out, as monophonic songs, to which tenors were added later. A corollary
implication is that monophonic performance was probably a standard option for all of Machaut’s virelais.
Another is that polyphonic performance was likewise a standard option: any monophonic virelai, that is,
was eligible for accompaniment by a tenor, whether set down in writing or extemporized. And because
Machaut’s monophonic melodies had to be eligible for accompaniment in this way, they had to differ
fundamentally in style from all previous monophonic melodies we have encountered.
Here is why: Whether set down or extemporized, any tenor had to make correct counterpoint with its
“cantus.” In addition to observing the rules of consonance, this meant making the proper kind of cadence
—i.e., a discant cadence. A discant cadence, as we recall, either moved by contrary motion inward to a
unison (i.e., made an occursus) or moved out by contrary motion to the octave. The latter type was by far
the more common, owing to the fact that most discants were constructed over a Gregorian cantus firmus in
the lower voice; and Gregorian melodies, as a result of their characteristic arch shape, almost always
made their last approach to the final as a stepwise descent. For that reason, the usual vox organalis or
duplum, just as characteristically, made its last approach to the final from below, via the subsemitonium
or leading tone.
As we may remember from chapter 4, high “Latinate” troubadour and trouvère melodies were often
all but indistinguishable, stylistically, from the late Frankish chants that were being composed at the same
time. Accordingly, they too made their final approach to the final from above. That is the way
unaccompanied melodies traditionally worked.
But now compare an unaccompanied (or a potentially unaccompanied) melody by Machaut. Both
Douce dame jolie and En mon cuer make their cadential approaches not from above but via the
subsemitonium. They are composed, in other words, on the model of a duplum, not a tenor, and they
established a basic melodic type for courtly songs that would last for several centuries. They are, in short,
monophonic melodies that were conceived in the context of polyphony, by a composer whose musical
imagination had been definitively shaped by polyphony. Even the tenor melody in Lasse/Se j’aime
POURQUOY (Ex. 9-3), that whimsical virelai-motet hybrid, makes its final cadences from below (see Ex.
9-2). In other words, it does not really behave like a tenor. Its eccentricity forces a peculiar cadence
structure on the polyphonic texture that adds another level of irony to the piece.
CANTILENA
The new style of song-melody, composed with polyphonic accompaniment in mind, was called cantilena.
By itself the melody was sufficient, making correct (subsemitonium) cadences and fitting the words. With
the addition of a tenor, a self-sufficient two-part discant texture was achieved, in which cadences (to
octaves or, more rarely, to unisons in contrary motion) were still correct according to the rules of discant.
With the addition of a third voice, whether a texted triplum in the range of the cantus or an untexted
contratenor in the range of the tenor, the two-part structure was sonorously enhanced and the harmonies
made “sweet.”
The most usual way of sweetening the harmony was to amplify the imperfect consonances into full