The Works of Guillaume de Machaut: Music, Image, Text in the Middle Ages

This project has resulted in two sets of recordings. The first set, performed by The Orlando Consort and Le Basile, were specially commissioned to accompany a series of essays on this website illustrating issues associated with editing and performing; these will be discussed in greater detail below. Working with The Orlando Consort has led to an exciting new venture to record the complete polyphonic songs of Machaut using our musical edition. Seven CDs are now available from Hyperion.

From the inception of our project, it was important to us to maintain close links with performers and to understand how they would be interacting with the materials with which they are presented. To this end, we are grateful to be working with these specialist ensembles: 

The partnership between scholars and performers that our project has fostered has opened a meaningful two-way exchange, inviting the editorial team to incorporate feedback from practitioners into later stages of editing and also to request the recording of extracts of particular interest that might not have been recorded in a commercial context. To make the most of this advantageous position, we used these recordings as the kernel around which to generate a series of discussions concerning different aspects of Machaut's oeuvre, its wider cultural context, the task of editing it, and recommendations for using the edition further. In that context, the recordings are incorporated into the prose as appropriate, along with scores of the music performed and links to images of the sources they are based on.

These recorded examples rarely comprise full works, but present instead short sections for comparison between versions, or at most, the first iteration of the complete music. The combinations of performers for each example were conceived to match the discussions to which they are attached. Those examples that are designed to convey a more general appreciation of a work may present combinations appropriate for the concert-hall stage. Other examples are used to make a specific point about a technical aspect of the music, and in these cases instrumentation was chosen to clarify and enhance the audability of the example, and should not, therefore, be taken as recommendations for use in any other performative context.

These recordings were made at St John's Church, Loughton, February 4th-6th, 2013, and produced and edited by Mark Brown, with Dave Hinitt and Dave Rowell as engineers.

The following table gives an overview of the materials recorded for these online sound files, as well as links to the discussions as part of which the scores and sound files appear.