Mode, in this style, still means more than a scale and a final. It is still to some extent a formula family.
The chief formula, of course, is the cadence: note the same doubled F#s between the two “accompanying”
voices (contratenor and triplum). And another important formula is the overall tonal progression. It is
easiest to see this in a ballade, since the repeated opening section has the same sort of “open” (ouvert)
and “closed” (clos) cadences we found in the monophonic songs of the trouvères, only now harmonically
amplified. The first ending makes its open (or “half “) cadence on what we would call the supertonic, and
the second makes its closed (or “full”) cadence on the final. The progression supertonic to final is also
the way the tenor itself moves at the full cadence, and so the overall tonal progression is a kind of
magnification of the full cadence.
Machaut reinforces the sense of cadential closure and rounds the whole piece off by means of a
musical rhyme. Not only the final cadence but the whole final phrase of the first section returns at the end
of the second (compare the first section from m. 22 with the second from m. 57); the repetition is made
extra conspicuous by the use of an ear-catching syncopation in the tenor, preceded by a prolonged
imperfect consonance (doubly prolonged in the second section!) that arrests the harmonic motion
precisely when the doubled leading tone is sounding and demanding resolution (compare mm. 22, 56–57).
In addition, the final line of poetry, which carries the musical rhyme, is a refrain uniting all three stanzas.
Music and text thus work in harness to delineate the form and heighten its rhetoric.
WHAT INSTRUMENTALISTS DID
Proof of this ballade’s distinction (or at least its popularity) is its inclusion, a generation or more after the
composer’s death, in a north Italian manuscript from about 1415 that is the earliest extant source of music
composed or arranged for keyboard instruments. It is called the “Faenza Codex” after the Italian town to
whose public library it now belongs. It may originally have been prepared by or for a church organist,
because it contains a certain amount of service music, including an arrangement of the Kyrie Cunctipotens
genitor, with which we are already familiar in both its original form (Ex. 2-14b) and as adapted for
polyphonic performance (Ex. 5-8). The organ arrangement in the Faenza Codex is somewhat like the latter
in concept. It is arranged in score, with the lower staff (left hand part) confined to the plainsong melody,
held out as a tenor, while the right hand part carols away in a very florid counterpoint. Ex. 9-9 contains
the first section.