Messe de nostre dame: Kyrie Guillaume de MachautThe Messe de...

Messe de nostre dame: Kyrie Guillaume de Machaut
The Messe de...:

Messe de nostre dame: Kyrie
Guillaume de Machaut
The Messe de Nostre Dame of the great fourteenth-century poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) is the earliest musical treatment of the Mass by a single composer. In this first movement, Machaut spins out a vast web of music from just three little lines of text: “Kyrie eleison / Christe elesion / Kyrie eleison.” (As the first and simplest unit of the Ordinary Mass, the Kyrie has always provoked the most sublime and inventive approaches among composers who have set it to music.) The labyrinthine polyphonic weft of voices, with its jarring dissonances and microtonal inflections, and the raspy, almost guttural vocal timbre of this performance by the Ensemble Organum, create an effect at once visceral and otherworldly—an atmosphere far removed from the stereotypical images of cherubic sweetness with which we are likely to associate medieval music.
Source: Guilaume de Machaut, Messe de Nostre Dame, performed by Ensemble Organum