Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in his Musical Works. By Anne Walters Robertson. pp. xx + 456. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, £65. ISBN 0-521-41876-3.)
2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 87; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ml/gci143
ISSN1477-4631
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis
ResumoThe Prologue that initiates Machaut’s late manuscripts of his collected works famously narrates Nature’s gift to him of three of her children: Scens, Retorique, and Musique (Meaning, Rhetoric, and Music). Taking Scens as the foundational force driving Machaut’s creative oeuvre, Anne Walters Robertson proposes an erudite and detailed interpretation of his works that incorporate borrowed tenors: the twenty-three motets, the Hoquetus David, and the mass. In her view, Reims and Reims Cathedral, where Guillaume de Machaut spent the last forty years of his life (from 1337 to 1377), hold the key to the understanding of his tenor-based works. She presents Reims as a rich formative environment for the poet–composer with its established religious institutions and traditions, complex liturgical practices, imposing cathedral architecture and decorative iconography, receptivity to contemporary spiritual and intellectual currents, and experience of civic crises and major political events from sieges to coronations. Robertson examines all these constitutive elements of the Reims sphere and brings them to bear on the body of works that Machaut composed on pre-existing melodies. Justification for the focus on this portion of Machaut’s oeuvre rests on the cultural links and allusive associations borrowed melodies can entail, the substantial period spanned by such pieces, and the opportunity for extensive, detailed scrutiny of individual works such a limitation provides.
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