Most of the book concerns what Deschamps called musique naturele or “natural music,” meaning
poetic versification. (This was a time-honored use of the word “music”; recall St. Augustine’s treatise De
Musica, which concerned nothing but the meters of what we would call spoken poetry.) Nor is
Deschamps known to have been what we would call a composer. But in one passage he juxtaposes
musique naturele with musique artificiele or “artful music,” that is, music as we would use the term.
While either music can be practiced by itself, and while either is pleasant to hear, they achieve their
fullest beauty, Deschamps maintains, in “marriage,” through which “melodies are more ennobled and
made more seemly with the words than they would be alone,” and “poems are made more delightful and
embellished by the melody and the tenors, trebles, and contratenors of music.” This may seem an early
enunciation of the idea that the various art media are mutually reinforcing and achieve their full potential
in synthesis—an idea now typically associated with Romanticism and with Richard Wagner, an opera
composer who wrote his own librettos. More likely Deschamps was merely invoking what he and his
contemporaries took to be the normal state of affairs, in which poetry implied music and vice versa. The
division of the two was an arbitrary rhetorical device that enabled Deschamps to specify what it was that
each component—the verbal and the musical—contributed to the overall effect.
So it is noteworthy that the words are described as the bearers of gentility and seemliness—moral
qualities—and the notes are the agency of artifice, embellishment, and delight. The period in which
Deschamps lived was the period of the final (some say decadent) phase of the Ars Nova—an explosion of
convoluted musical artifice and intricate embellishment that, it is often said, reached a height of
sumptuous complexity unrivaled until the twentieth century.
To speak of rivalry in this case is quite appropriate, since the whole “explosion” was predicated on
the idea of emulation—not just imitation, but the effort to surpass. And since contests of this sort can be
objectively won or lost only on the basis of technique, technical virtuosity—in the handling of complex
contrapuntal webs, in the contrivance of new rhythmic combinations, in the invention of new notational
devices for representing them—became the primary focus. In the name of subtilitas, composers at the end
of the fourteenth century became involved in a sort of technical arms race.
A treatise on advanced notation (Tractatus de diversis figuris) attributed to Philippus (or Philipoctus)
de Caserta, an Italian-born composer who flourished around 1370–1390 at the papal court of Avignon,
spelled it all out. Philippus wanted to go beyond the limits of Philippe de Vitry’s practice, as set out in the
Ars Nova treatises (and as exemplified by the motets in Ex. 8-1 and 8-3). Where Philippe had posited his
four basic tempus/prolation combinations as alternatives, Philippus wanted to be able to combine them all
“vertically,” that is, as simultaneous polymeters.
To make these polymeters as explicit and unambiguous as possible, Philippus compiled or invented a
great slew of bizarre note-forms to supplement the standard time signatures; they involved two (or even
three) ink colors, filled and void note-heads, all kinds of tails and flags, sometimes employed in tandem
(one extending upward from the note-head, the other down or to the side). He did all this, he said, to
achieve a subtiliorem modum, a style or way of composing with greater subtilitas—with greater
refinement, greater decorativeness, greater sophistication, and especially with ever more flamboyant
technique. Since the 1960s this style has been called the “Ars subtilior” after Philippus’s assertion,
following a suggestion by the German musicologist Ursula Günther.^4 Previously it had been called the
“mannered style,” after the standard—that is, nineteenth-century—terminology of Germanic art history.
That name obviously connoted a certain disapproval of excess; the idea of discarding it seemed
remarkably timely in the 1960s, when many contemporary composers, especially in the academy, were
enthusiastically advancing an ars subtilior of their own.
Philippus cast himself demonstratively as Machaut’s heir by quoting the text incipit from one of
Machaut’s ballades, and the refrain of another, in a ballade of his own, En remirant (“While gazing at