SUBTILITAS
Machaut’s art, like all “high” art in aristocratic France, was a connoisseur’s art: an art of literati whose tastes were flattered by tours de force. Such a taste flattered the artist as well, and encouraged the fashioning, even in “secular” contexts, of complex artworks full of hidden meanings and arcane structural relationships. One might even look upon the musico-poetic legacy of the Ars Nova as another resurgence of the trobar clus favored by the noblest troubadours—“artistic art,” as an early twentieth-century philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, put it in trying to come to grips with the artistic avant-garde of his own day. The seeming redundancy of the expression is actually very apt. As Ortega explained, indulging his own elitism by using a fashionably obscure Greek term for “the common people,” artistic art is “an art for artists and not for the masses, for ‘quality’ and not for hoi polloi.” Its outstanding feature is subtilitas.
- Citation (MLA):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 9 Machaut and His Progeny." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 6 Dec. 2023. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780195384819-div1-009015.xml>.
- Citation (APA):
- Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 9 Machaut and His Progeny. In Oxford University Press, Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century. New York, USA. Retrieved 6 Dec. 2023, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780195384819-div1-009015.xml
- Citation (Chicago):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 9 Machaut and His Progeny." In Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 6 Dec. 2023, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780195384819-div1-009015.xml
