This page hosts links to all six Machaut lectures for Prelims at Oxford. Listening to the audio and following the tasks it mentions should take at least an hour for each podlecture.
NOTE: As I couldn’t see why not, I thought I’d make these recordings publicly available (see the CC licence below), but please don’t think that these six podlectures represent the whole Machaut course that a student gets at Oxford! Lectures at Oxford (which is what these podlectures replace during pandemic restrictions) are recommended but optional, and are nowhere near as useful as the tutorials, which are both compulsory and are the USP and chief cost/benefit of the Oxford UG degree. In tutorials, students typically do c.11 hours of self-directed reading and writing for each hour of tutorial time and have to produce a 2000-word essay or a 15-minute presentation for each weekly session, on which they receive extensive personal feedback (often instant = the best kind!). There are typically three tutorials for this topic, which is one of five ‘Special Topics’ that form part of one of six papers set for the first year exams. So, in short, these podlecture are a very introductory part of a much bigger pedagogical picture.
Podlecture 1: Introducing Machaut
Podlecture 2: Machaut’s material trace (the Machaut manuscripts)
Podlecture 3: Machaut multimedia
Podlecture 4: Machaut’s notational technology
Podlecture 6: Machaut’s motets
TEST YOURSELF
Listen to this concert and see how well you can identify a) the genres of the songs performed by listening to their repetition patterns; and b) the specific pieces. If you’re feeling brave, add a programme note to the YouTube channel!
Machaut Prelims lectures by Elizabeth Eva Leach is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Elizabeth Eva Leach 