distinctive. The second half of each talea (mm. 5–8 and 13–16), where most of the hockets and syncopes
occur, is fully pan-isorhythmic. Balancing that, during the first three measures of each talea (mm. 1–3, 9–
11) the tenor and contratenor are briefly identical in pitch as well as rhythm. Near symmetry, near
congruence, near uniformity—that is the very interesting interactive space, between sameness and
difference, that Machaut loved to explore.
SUBTILITAS
Machaut’s art, like all “high” art in aristocratic France, was a connoisseur’s art: an art of literati whose
tastes were flattered by tours de force. Such a taste flattered the artist as well, and encouraged the
fashioning, even in “secular” contexts, of complex artworks full of hidden meanings and arcane structural
relationships. One might even look upon the musico-poetic legacy of the Ars Nova as another resurgence
of the trobar clus favored by the noblest troubadours—“artistic art,” as an early twentieth-century
philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, put it in trying to come to grips with the artistic avant-garde of his own
day. The seeming redundancy of the expression is actually very apt. As Ortega explained, indulging his
own elitism by using a fashionably obscure Greek term for “the common people,” artistic art is “an art for
artists and not for the masses, for ‘quality’ and not for hoi polloi.” Its outstanding feature is subtilitas.
The easiest way of translating the word subtilitas into English would be to give its cognate,
“subtlety.” The word literally denotes fineness and delicacy, which are already aristocratic values (as
anyone knows who knows the story of the princess and the pea). From the artistic point of view, even
more pertinent are the word’s connotations—the meanings it suggests by analogy or indirection. These
include both allusiveness and elusiveness, qualities that point to something easily missed (as when we
speak of “subtle wit” or “subtle irony”); or something faint and mysteriously suggestive (as when we
speak of “a subtle smile”); or something requiring mental acuteness or agility to perceive (as when we
speak of “a subtle point” in argument). In most general terms, the word suggests a focus on the small, on
details.
Machaut created several works notable for intellectual cleverness and intricacy of detail. Of these the
most famous was a “rondeau,” the complete text of which reads as follows:
But this is not really a rondeau at all, nor is the text really a text. The original notation of the piece, as
entered in one of Machaut’s personally supervised manuscripts, is shown in Fig. 9-4. The whole piece is
transcribed as Ex. 9-18. For maximum amusement, compare the explanation that follows with the original
notation before looking at the transcription.
The “text,” although it makes reference to a famous religious proverb about eternity, is really a
description of the piece, or a direction (rubric) for performance. The piece is notated as a rondeau among
Machaut’s other rondeaux as a sort of joke. The whole point of the piece is the strange way in which its