(b Paris, 31 Oct 1291; d there, 9 June 1361). French theorist,poet and composer. He studied at the Sorbonne and held numerous prebends, but his main sphere of activity was the French court, where he was secretary and adviser to Charles IV, Philippe VI and Jean II, and known as a leading intellectual. He undertook many diplomatic missions, some to the papal court in Avignon. In 1351 he became Bishop of Meaux. In his capacity as a musician, for which he received many tributes, he wrote a famous and authoritative treatise, Ars nova (c1322-3), and composed motets and other music. The most original part of Ars nova is the last ten chapters, on mensural rhythm and notation. Vitry presented normative formulations of new concepts of rhythm and notation; the two main features are the minim (half-note, for which he established the notational symbol) and imperfect mensuration (the division of note-values into twos as well as threes at every level). Much of his creative and literary output is lost, but he probably wrote the fine poetic texts of his surviving motets. The earliest of them were inserted into theRoman De Fauvel, where some of the monophonic contributions may also be Vitry s. His original approach established a hierarchic concept of the voices, in which the sustained tenor had a clearly defined structural foundation. He combined a slow-moving, patterned tenor with a superstructure of two faster moving voices, allowing increased melodic and contrapuntal flexibility. Each composition is an entity with a specific structural and poetic indivduality. Of the 12 motets that can be ascribed to Vitry, none has a chanson tenor, and only one has French texts. His structural use of isorhythm clearly influenced Machaut.

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