Guillaume de Machaut

Guillaume de Machaut was the leading French poet and composer of the fourteenth century, and unusually for the era, we know his work in detail because he supervised handsome manuscript collections of it himself. He spent years as secretary to John, the blind king of Bohemia, traveling with him across Europe, and later settled as a canon, a salaried churchman, at Reims cathedral.

His love poems and songs were read and sung for a century after his death, and Chaucer borrowed from him. Musicians remember him above all for the Messe de Nostre Dame, the earliest complete setting of the mass that can be attached to a single named composer.

The Messe de Nostre Dame is the place to begin: four intertwining voices from the 1360s, austere at first hearing, hypnotic once your ear adjusts.