Medieval music

Significant composers

Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179)

Perotinus (1155–1220)

Guillaume de Machaut (1300–1377)

John Dunstable (1385–1453)

Guillaume Dufay (1400–1474)

The most famous representative of the French ars nova was the diplomat, poet and musician Guillaume de Machaut (among others, the secretary of the Czech King John of Luxembourg). He wrote dozens of motets, ballads, songs (chanson) and virelai (a medieval musical and poetic form). His most important work includes the four-voice Messe Notre Dame written for the Reims chapter, of which he was a canon. It is the oldest known arrangement of the mass ordinary.

One of the types of medieval music is secular folk song, which was the basis for the emergence of European folk music as such. It undoubtedly existed much earlier, but the first preserved monuments of artificial secular song, such as the Carmina Burana collection, date only from the 9th and 10th centuries. Later, this also includes the beginnings of chivalric poetry and the singing of troubadours and trouvères, or minnesingers.