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Recurring musical and poetic structures in Guillame de Machaut's lais

University of British Columbia

Analysis of the poetry of Guillaume de Machaut's lais reveals that a surprisingly large number of metric structures are repeated. This study focuses on two of these repeated metric structures and examines the musical settings to determine if there are corresponding musical structures that recur, thereby indicating a compositional approach to the setting of like poetic forms. The musical analyses reveal that, aside from a few instances of reused melodic and rhythmic material, the relationship among verses of like metric structure is purely formal. Each metric structure is set to a fixed pattern of musical phrases which, in the examples discussed, operates parallel to the poetic structure, obscuring some aspects of the poetic structure while highlighting others. The recurring musical/poetic structures which, in some cases, pervade Machaut's collection of lais, provide a glimpse at Machaut's compositional approach to the lai. The musical phrase, as suggested by Gollner, is analogous to the poetic line in that a verse's musical structure is developed by a combination of musical phrases. A verse's phrase structure is reused when a verse's metric structure is repeated suggesting that, for Machaut, these two structures bear an important, perhaps inextricable, relationship. The formal design of a lai must be considered, as mentioned above, as a cycle of formally unrelated structures on a given theme. Further, Machaut develops a repertoire of formal structures specific to the lai and reuses them throughout his lais. Some of these structures provide the foundation for quite a large number of lais.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-06-09

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/8885

Music

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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