At least one contemporary observer described the ars nova, which was the avant-garde movement epitomized by Machaut, as a cultural revolt of youth made angry or cynical by the flagrant institutional abuses of power that were revealed through the fourteenth century. Although it's difficult to hear Machaut's music in its radical aspect now, the narrative of artistic progress being born from cultural cynicism is not unfamiliar in the history of western art. Machaut, himself, wrote in the true spirit of the avant-garde that a work is best when it is estranges et nouviaus: strange and new. Certainly, Tous corps/De souspirant must have struck its early listeners so, and it remains quite striking today. Tous corps/De souspirant crackles, as Machaut's motets do, with a volatile rhythmic energy; the sense of the vertical is developed far beyond anything merely banal, predictable, or accidental. The horizontal projective force of the lines -- on their strong, syncopated rhythms -- is consistently translated in interesting, effective ways into the vertical. If the expressive use of dissonance is thought to be the domain of the twentieth century avant-garde, listen to Machaut's early motets. Although mostly on passing notes, the dissonance between the voices is fairly extreme in Tous corps. They seem like noises sounded into, and echoing within, the open acoustic pockets of the more common fourths and fifths. The text of the triplum echoes the harmonic character of the piece by approaching the extreme moods of expressionism, as the lover/narrator declares various masochistic death wishes. More interesting, perhaps, are the themes of silence and sound that bind all three of the texts; triplum and motetus both revolve around the greater anguish of having to remain horribly silent about the great pain that afflicts the narrator, a cleverly ironic perspective for a song text. There is a rebelliousness in the irony here, and it seems a musician's elemental exuberance cannot but overcome the cold grip of silence. In the eloquent tenor, that ironic curve turns in upon itself: the entire, long melisma of it is on the meager two-word text "I sigh." It's exactly such conceptual gameplay that tell who the audience for Machaut's motets is likely to have been: a tiny, erudite courtly elite who indulged, in a spirit of fatalistic decadence, in a taste for things strange and new. ~ Donato Mancini, All Music Guide
