Guillaume de machaut music style

Medieval French composer and poet (c. –)

"Machaut" redirects here. For the crater, see Machaut (crater).

Guillaume de Machaut (French:[ɡijomdəmaʃo], Old French:[ɡiˈʎawmədəmaˈtʃaw(θ)]; also Machau and Machault; c.&#; – April ) was a French composer and poet who was the central figure of the ars nova style in late medieval music. His dominance of the genre is such that modern musicologists use his death to separate the ars nova from the subsequent ars subtilior movement. Regarded as the most significant French composer and poet of the 14th century, he is often seen as the century's leading European composer.

Machaut, one of the earliest European composers on whom considerable biographical information is available, has an unprecedented amount of surviving music, in part due to his own involvement in his manuscripts' creation and preservation. Machaut embodies the culmination of the poet-composer tradition stretching back to the t Hildegard of bingen!