Guillaume Mussot

Some years ago Austrian radio ORF started a series of recordings with polyphony from the renaissance on its own label. The ensemble The Sound and the Fury has recorded music by well-known masters like Nicolas Gombert, Pierre de la Rue and Johannes Ockeghem. But they have also paid attention to some forgotten composers of the 15th century. One of them is Guillaume Faugues. As so often there is quite a difference between his reputation in his own time and in modern times. It is very likely nothing of his oeuvre has ever been recorded before.

Guillaume de Machaut was one of the great composers of a pivotal period at the intersection between the late medieval times and the Renaissance. His works include sacred compositions, such as his Messe de Nostre Dame, which took polyphonic music to new summits, as well as popular dances and songs that reveal the influence of the trouvères.
Yet this disc actually contains little music by Machaut. Only the last two pieces are by him. This leads to a bit of confusion: is Calliope trying to use Machaut’s name to sell a compilation of medieval music? This barely seems necessary, yet there is clearly some ambiguity.

Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300 – April 1377) was a medieval French poet and composer. He is regarded by many musicologists as the greatest and most important composer of the 14th century. Machaut is one of the earliest composers on whom substantial biographical information is available, and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson called him "the last great poet who was also a composer".[This quote needs a citation] Well into the 15th century, Machaut's poetry was greatly admired and imitated by other poets, including Geoffrey Chaucer.

What did it mean for Guillaume Du Fay (ca. 1397-1474), chameleon-like expert in every musical genre of his day, to compose four settings of the Mass Ordinary toward the end of his life? Looking back from the vantage point of the next generation, when the polyphonic mass reigned supreme, it might be tempting to interpret these works as a self-conscious summa of Du Fay’s career – an achievement akin to Haydn’s London Symphonies or Beethoven’s late string quartets. On a purely musical level these comparisons are apt. Each mass stakes out unique musical terrain; they are often strikingly experimental; and the entire set is shimmeringly beautiful from beginning to end, revealing a composer at the height of his powers.

The works of the 15th-century composer Guillaume Dufay are often considered to be where medieval music ends and Renaissance music begins. Yet Dufay sounds quite different from later, better-known Renaissance composers such as Palestrina, Victoria, and Josquin: Dufay's music is less densely scored, with more stratified voice ranges, very complex rhythms, and a somewhat neutral emotional affect. Pomerium, a New York-based choir with extensive experience in Dufay, presents here one of the composer's largest works: a setting of both the ordinary (Kyrie, Gloria, etc.) and the propers (texts specific to the occasion) of the Mass for the feast of St. Anthony of Padua. Pomerium's polished performance makes this a fine addition to the Dufay discography.

The cube made with matches which appears on the cover of this disc, showing on flames in the inside of the digipak and afterwards completely burnt, plays with the ideas that inspire this dazzling recording: the four ways to the knowledge of numbers through the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy), which are expressed through something as ephemeral assound, where also the unexpected and the emotion of the moment take place.