Though arguably atypical of his rondeau practice in particular and his song style in general, Guillaume de Machaut's Ma fin est mon commencement is one of his best-known works. This should come as no surprise, as fans of early music seem to prefer pieces that stand out of a genre and propose new methods of composition and new modes of listening to compositions typifying a genre. The ingenious construction of Ma fin gives a glimpse of the composer at his wittiest and most resourceful, while at the same time managing to fulfill the expectations of the ars nova aesthetic and also respecting the stipulations of the rondeau form.

One of the 21 surviving rondeaux by Machaut, Ma fin exhibits the bipartite musical form and poetic layout that one would expect. The rondeau was often presented in an "ABaAabAB" form, where "a" and "b" (upper or lower case) represent the two musical sections and capital letters represent the refrain text. A refrain text fills out both musical sections, followed by a new text set to the first musical section, then a repetition of the first half of the refrain text and music, then new text lines are set to the first and second musical sections, followed by a return of the full refrain. Within this standard rondeau form, however, Machaut introduces a rather elaborate performance trick, elaborate to listeners, that is, for notational games and musical puns were fairly common among medieval and Renaissance composers. Nevertheless, the craftiness of Ma fin is quite unusual and would perhaps be lost on the lay listener were it not for the clue provided by the composer, who was also an esteemed poet, in the opening lines. The text of the refrain states that "My end is my beginning, and my beginning my end." In the lowest voice, or tenor, this text refers to the palindromic nature of the musical line, which, whether read forward from the beginning or backwards from the ending, articulates the exact same sequence of notes and durations. In fact, Machaut originally provided the singer with the first half of the line only, and instructed him simply to sing it forward then backward. The melody sung by the triplum (or "third voice"), when turned around, is exactly the same as the music sung by the cantus (which sings in the same general range as the triplum and above the tenor). In fact, in the original sources, one singer read a line of music left to right while the other read the same line in the opposite direction. This creates a uniquely unified musical structure in which the music occurring above the palindromic line of the tenor is symmetrical across a double axis: the first half of the triplum's melody is a mirror image of the last half of the cantus', while the cantus' first half mirrors the triplum's last.

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