This work is a polyphonic song composed by the fourteenth-century French composer and poet Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300-1377). It is written for three voices (a tenor against which is placed a countertenor and contratenor), and is an example of the genre known as the ballade. This work makes use of the then radical technique of polytextuality, which means that each voice has a different text.

Machaut was the foremost of a very radical generation of composers. As the Ars antiqua ('Old Art') of the thirteenth century gave way to the Ars Nova ('new Art') of the fourteenth century, rhythm grew very complicated and virtuosic and increasingly neglected the canonically prescribed triple rhythms. Some techniques, such as isorhythm, a highly complex and extremely mathematical technique used in the tenors of Machaut's motets, have not resurfaced until this century. The reaction to this complexity was severe, and in 1324-5, Pope John XXII, then in the 'Babylonian exile' of the Papacy's stay in Avignon prior to the Great Schism, issued a papal bull in which, in no uncertain terms, forbade the compositional techniques of the Ars Nova. Needless to say, this bull had little effect on the composition of this music.

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