Guillaume de Machaut
Music

Machaut's music comprises a wide variety, from complex masses to short songs, and despite the differences of genre, most still contain "typical Machaut motifs". He lived after the flowering of both the secular troubadour and trouvère song movements and the ars antiqua church style. The musicologist Gilbert Reaney notes that "before, composers either wrote songs or church music. Machaut did both, though it could be said that he neglected the area of liturgical church music." Besides his mass, Hoquetus David and a few Latin motets, Machaut's surviving output is exclusively secular. Regardless, Reaney notes that his unique mastery of both secular and sacred Western music is only precedented by the work of Adam de la Halle.
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