Playing with the performer in Medieval music: Machaut’s ideas on love and order in Quant vraie Amour / O series summe rata / Super omnes speciosa (Motet 17)

Machaut’s seventeenth motet might be one of his earliest works. Under its simple appearance it hides essential poetic reflections about the problematic relationship between paradoxical Love and the regular order of the universe, a problem which he kept pondering all his life. This problem is expressed both by the texts and by the music. To bring his performers to an understanding of his thought, Machaut first misled them, in a clever play with the ambiguities of the notational system of his time. We can still enjoy that play when reading and performing his music