Under the leadership of music director Tim Keeler, the Grammy Award-winning ensemble Chanticleer presents an all-Machaut program juxtaposing the fourteenth century composer’s Messe de Notre Dame with his court chansons. The Messe de Nostre Dame reflects the fact that Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–77) spent the last four decades of his long life as canon of Reims Cathedral. A seminal work that is believed to be the first complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass by a single composer, the Messe de Nostre Dame features melodic, harmonic, and structural similarities throughout each section of the liturgy making it the first large-scale work in the Western music canon. As a poet-composer sponsored by a series of noble patrons, Machaut also produced a considerable amount of secular work in the courtly love tradition, like the chansons “Douce dame jolie” and “Riches d’amour,” among others recorded on the album. Machaut is also a unique representative of his time because his genius for self-promotion and attention to his own posterity ensured the survival of almost his entire oeuvre.