The Research On Guillaume De Machaut's Polyphonic Virelais

The music history of France in the Middle of 14th century is dominated by one composer, whose name is Guillaume de Machaut. He is one of the most important composers in the Medieval Europe, and he is the first musician whose manuscript was preserved completely in the medieval music history.This paper focuses on the Machaut's 8 polyphonic virelais, which is a monophonic secular musical genre originated in 13th century, and developed into polyphony by Machaut in the period of "Ars Nova" of France.This article is divied into five chapters. The first part of introduction provides the backdrop of this paper, which encompasses the background and current status of the research by western musicologists, and the significance of research on Machaut's polyphonic virelais. At last, the author explains the methodology applied in the course of music analysis. In the first chapter, the topic is mainly about the life of Machaut and relation between Machaut's music and "Ars Nova". Then the content of second chapter is fixed on the origination of virelai, its main characteristic in 13th century, and main representative virelai composers, Adam de la Halle, and Jehannot de L'Escurel in the 13th century France, whose composition on virelai provide technical inspiration to Machaut's virelai composing. Then in the last past of this chapter depicts Machaut's biography and his important role in "Ars Nova" period.The second, third and fourth chapters play important role in this article. These chapters deal with the textual and musical analysis of each virelai. From the view of the contents of these virelais, their themes are "courtly love", so according to the course of love, they can be divided into three groups, the first group includes the 23th, 24th, and 26th three virelais, and the second group involves in 28th, 29th, 30th three virelais, and the last two virelais are belonged to the last group. The analysis fixs on the text, mode, rhythm, melody, and cadence phases, and every song will be discussed as exhaustively as possible. The last part of fourth chapter explains the reason of decline of virelai in the late of 14 century and early 15th century, and discusses the main traits in the post- Machaut generation musicians and secular composers in Renaissance.In conclusion, Machaut is a great musician in western medieval music history, whose composition on polyphonic secular songs is the origination of artificial songs in the Renaissance period, and his secular polyphony provides important techniques for the next generation on composing polyphonic secular songs.