Je ne cuit pas

As part of this week’s Lenten series on saintly figures, this week’s features Simone Weil, most of the musical selections are French in her honor. The composer of this piece, Guillaume de Machaut, lived approximately 1300-1377 and wrote some of the earliest know true polyphony. To modern ears, his music is stark and sometimes uncompromising (often different parts of the counterpoint were in perfect relationship to a longer note melody–the cantus firmus–but not to each other). I wonder how his music sounded to ear of his time when prior to him they only knew single line music or music which paralleled a single line.