triads; and the most characteristic place to observe this is, again, at cadences. A typical three-voice
cadence in cantilena style has the cantus and the tenor describing their characteristic progression from
sixth to octave, with a contratenor (or, less often, a triplum) doubling the cantus at the lower fourth (if a
contratenor) or upper fifth (if a triplum), thus creating what we have already learned to identify as the
“double leading-tone” cadence.
This full harmonic texture began to influence the composition of motets, as we saw in the previous
chapter, when contratenors were added to the vocal complement. Although we now associate the
contratenor-enriched texture primarily with Machaut, it may actually have been yet another innovation of
Philippe de Vitry. Several of his extant motets do have contratenors; and, although they do not survive,
Vitry is known to have written ballades, probably in the 1320s (when the polyphonic ballade is described
as a popular novelty by Jacques de Liège), some twenty years before Machaut’s earliest three-part
cantilenas began appearing, at first in the Remède de Fortune.
One of the manuscripts containing the virelai En mon cuer, which we have considered in one part and
in two, contains some extra ruled lines reserved for a triplum Machaut never got around to writing. That
would have created three interchangeable versions of the song—or rather, three performance
possibilities: cantus alone, cantus plus tenor, cantus plus triplum and tenor. Any of these possibilities is
harmonically/contrapuntally correct; none of them can claim to be, in any exclusive sense, the “real
thing.” Again we are reminded that the line between creation and performance was still a blurry,
permeable one. Machaut corroborates this in an odd way when he asks Péronelle, in one of the Voir Dit
letters, to receive a special song from him and have it played by her minstrels “just as it is, without
adding or taking away.” For the sake of their special relationship, in other words, he was asking for
something exceptional.
FUNCTIONALLY DIFFERENTIATED COUNTERPOINT
As an example of the standard cantilena texture “just as it is, without adding or taking away,” we can look
at yet another Machaut virelai, Tres bonne et belle (Ex. 9-6), the only one to come down in all its sources,
exceptionally, as a three-voice composition. The final is C, putting the song in what we would call the
major mode (and what Machaut, if he thought about it at all, would probably have called a transposition
of the Lydian mode, normally pitched on F). The texted part or cantus has a plagal ambitus that puts the
final smack in the middle of its range. The lower tenor and contratenor share a single authentic ambitus,
from c to d’.
EX. 9-6 Guillaume de Machaut, Tres bonne et belle (virelai a 3)