Editing Guillaume de Machaut (section)

===Secular music===
The lyrics of Machaut's works almost always dealt with [[courtly love]]. A few works exist to commemorate a particular event, such as M18, "Bone Pastor/Bone Pastor/Bone Pastor." Machaut mostly composed in five genres: the lai, the virelai, the motet, the ballade, and the rondeau. In these genres, Machaut retained the basic ''formes fixes'', but often utilized creative text setting and [[cadence (music)|cadences]]. For example, most rondeau phrases end with a long [[melisma]] on the penultimate syllable. However, a few of Machaut's rondeaux, such as R18 "Puis qu'en oubli", are mostly syllabic in treatment.

Machaut's motets often contain sacred texts in the tenor, such as in M12 "Corde mesto cantando/Helas! pour quoy virent/Libera me". The top two voices in these three-part compositions, in contrast, sing secular French texts, creating interesting concordances between the sacred and secular. In his other genres, though, he does not utilize sacred texts.