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Musicology:
Quant Theseus - Ne quier veoir is a polyphonic song composed by the fourteenth-century French composer and poet Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300-1377). It is an example of the genre known as the ballade, a polyphonic song of love. This piece is remarkable in that, not only is it for four voices, a rare achievement in its own right, it is polytextual, or more correctly in this case, bitextual, with the two cantes singing two different texts while the contratenor and tenor were performed, probably on instruments. Quant Theseus - Ne quier veoir is one of only three or (if the additional voice of De Fortune me doy pleindre is counted) four four-voice ballades.
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Quant Theseus/Ne quier veoir (a4)Genre: Chanson
Pr. Instrument: Chorus/Choir
Quant Theseus - Ne quier veoir is believed to date from the middle part of Machaut's period of ballade composition between 1335 and 1345 in the late years of his patronage by John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia. Unusually, for Machaut, the upper cantus is a setting of another poet's work, namely Thomas Paien, although Machaut himself composed the poem for the second cantus. It is catalogued by Schrade as Ballade No. 34.
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