10 best medieval music composers and their music

Medieval music, and early music more widely, is often neglected by fans of the classical tradition that it founded. They're far quicker to look to Bach, Mozart and the rest. But the music of this expansive, turbulent and - now so long in the past - almost mystical era offers clarity and authenticity that much later music would do well to match.

The medieval period, also known as the Middle Ages, broadly covers the era spanning the fall of the Roman Empire circa 500 AD and the spread throughout Europe of the ideas of the Italian Renaissance, a millennium later in 1500.

As far as music’s concerned, little is known about what went down in the first five hundred years - the ‘early’ medieval period. It was only in the early eleventh century, through the innovations of the monk Guido d’Arezzo that musical notation was developed (read more about him in the blog’s history of sheet music). And for that reason, it’s only in the subsequent centuries that we begin to find composers that left behind written work.

So our composer countdown begins in the so-called ‘high’ medieval era, in the 1100s with Hildegard von Bingen, and ends with Guillaume Dufay, a transitional figure between our period and the revolutionary Renaissance developments, which were cultivated most of all by Josquin des Prez, Thomas Tallis and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.

Hildegard’s entry has been transferred from the list of the greatest classical composers - the only medieval artist to be featured there. No list of the Middle Ages’ greatest would be close to complete without that titan of the period.
 

The best composers of the medieval period
 

• Hildegard von Bingen
• Pérotin
• Blondel de Nesle
• Neidhart von Reuental
• Philippe de Vitry
• Guillaume de Machaut
• Francesco Landini
• Baude Cordier
• John Dunstaple
• Guillaume Dufay

Hildegard von Bingen

Classical music has been, for the vast majority of its history, a world dominated by men. It still is of course, though momentous and encouraging changes are well underway. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that from the farthest reaches of the tradition that we can call ‘classical music’, it is a woman’s voice that connects to us. From nearly a millennium ago, Hildegard of Bingen offers modern ears some of the most pioneering and expressive music of the first centuries of the story of classical music.

Middle Age Europe in general was an enormous boys’ club. Males prevailed in all aspects of life, and together worked to perpetuate their own dominance. A bastion of that society was of course the all-powerful Latin Church, which happens to be not only the very home of the tradition we’re exploring, but also an area where women were far more empowered than you might expect. 

In convents scattered across Europe, well-respected communities of nuns studied, wrote, prayed, and served God. As the abbess of two such convents in the German Rhineland, Hildegard would rise to become one of the most revered scholars in Europe. 

Composer, playwright, theologian, philosopher, healer, saint. She was a quite extraordinary individual. Her musical output, consisting of 69 compositions - each with its own original poetic text - is one of the largest surviving medieval repertoires. Composed circa 1151, her morality play Ordo Virtutum ranks among the most monumental achievements of the era.

Her music is entirely monophonic, featuring a lone melodic line like all plainsong of the period - Gregorian chant or otherwise - but it’s distinguished by constructive adventurousness and emotive power. Her use of elaborate melisma is another hallmark, which reflects an unusually close correspondence between music and text. In this regard her work anticipates the innovations that her later medieval and Renaissance successors would soon carry out.

Pérotin

Pérotin is a considerably more shadowy historical figure than Hildegard, in that very little is known about him (get used to that when dealing with indivudals from a thousand years ago). It's not even certain that the ‘portrait’ of Pérotin shown above is really of him. Most of what is known about him can be gleaned from sources written by someone known as ‘Anonymous IV’, an English student who likely studied with Pérotin. 

Anonymous’ writings inform us about the Notre-Dame School of Polyphony, a collective of composers and music theorists based at the famous Parisian cathedral who, now moving a few steps beyond the monodic chant that Hildegard and countless others practised for centuries, began to add more parts to their vocal compositions and exercise greater rhythmic control over the previously free-flowing, melismatic chant. In other words, we have the initial ventures into the realm of polyphony. This seismic change occurred through music called ‘organum’. It initially featured two voices moving in parallel motion a fourth or fifth apart, but the musicians at Notre-Dame soon explored three- and four-part textures.

The two composers named in Anonymous’ texts are Pérotin and his predecessor, Léonin, whose more tentative experiments Pérotin would develop, expand and perfect. Although we’ve little insight into their lives, their music, and that of other anonymous Notre-Dame composers, survives in the Magnus liber organi - the ‘Great Book of Organum’. Originally compiled by Léonin, Pérotin enlarged it, including more works and improving existing ones through the addition of extra voices. Pérotin’s mature organum usually consisted of florid, rhythmically similar parts in the upper voices, and a sustained, anchoring tone in the lower voice, known as the ‘tenor’.

Making Paris a musical centre of Europe and arguably the cradle of the classical tradition, the Notre-Dame composers are the most influential representatives of the ars antiqua of sacred music - the ‘antique art’. The term is used to refer to wider musical practice on the continent between roughly 1170–1310, which the Parisians defined and advanced more profoundly than any other composers. 

Blondel de Nesle

Western classical music is usually traced back to the medieval Roman Catholic Church. To the sacred, chant-based music composed and sung by composers like Hildegard, those at Notre-Dame, and their contemporaries and precursors. However, there’s another key musical branch whose contribution to classical-music history should not be overlooked.

It’s what we might categorise as a kind of medieval ‘folk' music. It’s fluid and oral, but most importantly it’s secular - it’s got nothing to do with the Church. Of the myriad types of music of this kind that would have been practised across the continent in the period, the most important tradition was that of the troubadours, who were essentially bards - as much poets as musicians. Singing lyric poetry, mostly about love and chivalry, they would roam the land, indiscriminately entertaining kings, nobles and commoners alike.  

They came from the south of France - which further signals the nation’s significance - and spoke Occitan, but, making a major impression on their travels, other similar traditions began to spring up elsewhere. In northern France, the trouvères appeared, singing in the dialect of their own region, and it’s to this lineage that Blondel de Nesle belongs. Despite the impact of the troubadours and trouvères, few practitioners leave behind many works, and fewer still with music as well as text. Blondel not only has a comparatively large number of surviving compositions to his name, but he was also a particularly influential figure in his own time and beyond.

Historians are unsure whether the poet who signed his works ‘Blondel de Nesle’ was Jean I of Nesle or his son, Jean II. Both men were heroic nobles that fought in the crusades that sought to reclaim Jersualem for Christendom from the Ayyubid Muslims. For his part, Jean I fought alongside Richard the Lionheart and this gave rise to a legendary tale. It claims the poet found where the captured king was imprisoned having wandered from castle to castle, singing a song that only he and Richard knew. Hearing his words echoed from a high window, Blondel found Richard and secured his rescue. Thereafter the poet has inspired a variety of artworks over the centuries: Grétry’s opera, Richard Cœur-de-lion, Schumann’s Blondel's Lied, and even the 1983 musical Blondel, by Stephen Oliver and Tim Rice.

Neidhart von Reuental

The influence of the troubadours wasn’t only felt in the French kingdom. Over its eastern border lay the confusingly named Holy Roman Empire - corresponding to present-day Germany. In these lands, troubadours and trouvères would inspire the German-language tradition of Minnesang, which flourished in the 1100s, a little while after the emergence of the troubadours in the late 1000s. 

Their name derived from ‘Minne’, the Middle High German word for ‘love’, the Minnesänger waxed lyrical about similar subjects, and would usher in a golden age of medieval German literature. Where it’s quite difficult to single out the greatest figures in the French traditions, Walther von der Vogelweide is considered by many to be the finest of the Minnesänger for defining and consolidating the form. But the later Neidhart von Reuental really takes things to a whole new level, in many ways progressing beyond both Walther and his French counterparts.

These poetic traditions had always clung to the lofty, knightly topics of love and heroism, but Neidhart’s poetry represents a partial subversion of that classical refinement by introducing characters from peasant social classes, humorous wordplay, and a more elaborate compositional handling. What’s more, roughly 1500 strophes of his songs are with us today - that’s the biggest preserved lyrical corpus of any Minnesinger, which points to the huge popularity of his work.    

All but unique among his contemporaries, many song melodies also survive - nearly 70, to 55 different songs. All are monodic and there’s little indication of rhythm in the notation, but much of his poetry either mentions dancing or explicitly calls on listeners to dance. This suggests that performances of his music were involved, visceral and above all entertaining affairs. Long after his death Neidhart’s works remained popular, and like Blondel he took on a legendary quality, inspiring the fifteenth-century comic character ‘Neidhart Fuchs’. He featured in several plays in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and a number of visual artists have sought to portray scenes from his songs in various visual art froms, like woodcuts and frescoes.

Philippe de Vitry

Back to France, whose predominance in this list is reflective of its power and influence on the continent in this era - in terms of both politics and culture. If the output at Notre-Dame symbolises the thirteenth-century style of the ars antiqua, then the music of Philippe de Vitry demonstrates best of all the rise of the phase that followed it in the fourteenth century: the ars nova - the ‘new art’. 

The ars nova ushered in a range of innovations. Several centuries on from Guido d’Arezzo (see above), strides forward in notation enabled music to be written with greater rhythmic precision, and individual polyphonic parts with greater independence. Capitalising on this, composers cast aside the rhythmic modes that had limited earlier music and wrote with much greater horizontal freedom. The technique of ‘isorhythm’, which involved repeating and adapting a rhythmic pattern according to a specific method, came to dominate the era.   

Vitry was the first composer to seize on these new possibilities, and his music demonstrated the depth, intricacy and expanded scope that the new art could now attain. He led not only by example, through his music, but also by instruction, through the Ars nova notandi treatise of 1322 - a kind of manual on how to exploit these brand-new musical principles, which then lent its name to the style that soon gripped Europe. Vitry is thought to have written both secular and sacred music, but only his motets survive, a sacred genre prevalent since the days of Léonin and Pérotin. His development and mastery of isorhythmic writing in these works, and the later popularisation of the technique, symbolises the enormous importance of his innovations for late medieval music. 

Petrarch, the great Italian scholar of the early Renaissance, described Vitry as ‘the keenest and most ardent seeker of truth, so great a philosopher of our age’. The composer added an entirely new expressive dimension to European music, an incomprehensibly striking effect that can be likened to Giotto's contemporary introduction of 3-D perspective to visual art. It’s important to place this musical evolution in the context of the wider changes that were afoot in Italy, which would soon prove to be transformative for global history. 

Guillaume de Machaut

Whereas Vitry’s music signalled the onset of the ars nova and its innovations, the music of his countryman Guillaume de Machaut represents the more ambitious, more intricate, and mature articulation of that style. Machaut is the Pérotin to Vitry’s Léonin, the Mozart to his Haydn, and he's typically regarded as the fourteenth century’s leading composer.

Moreover, the incompleteness and relatively low quantity of Vitry’s output is contrasted by Machaut’s body of surviving work, which is unprecedentedly large among composers. This special status of his partly derives from his remarkable prolificacy, and partly from his own efforts to create, compile and preserve his manuscripts. Pivotal in the continued centralisation of the motet, the indiscriminate Machaut also composed widely and imaginatively in secular forms: the lai, virelai, rondeau and ballade. By far his most celebrated work, though, is the Messe de Nostre Dame, the first Catholic Mass setting attributable to one composer. It’s widely revered as one of the finest sacred works ever composed.

Despite all the plaudits for the Messe and motets, however, his tremendous achievements in secular music mark him out as the culmination in the poet–composer tradition initiated by the troubadours, a creative dynamic that would be increasingly segregated as poets and composers focused on a lyrical or a musical specialism. Machaut’s profile as a poet - who inspired figures like Geoffrey Chaucer - is also reflective of the ongoing importance of text in medieval European music. Bear in mind that, whether sacred or secular, music was almost exclusively vocal in this period. 

Mirroring the wide and exciting access we have to Machaut’s music is that we have to his biography. Born circa 1300 and educated around the northeastern French town of Reims, Machaut was employed by Count of Luxembourg and King of Bohemia, John I, with whom he travelled widely around Europe, disseminating his music and acquiring an international reputation as an artist. After John’s death in 1346, Machaut spent later years working in the service of various aristocratic rulers, including France’s King Charles V. Surviving the unspeakable tragedy of the Black Death to live until 1377, Machaut saw out the last of his days in Reims, overseeing the transcription of his music so that, centuries later, we might all share in the wonders of his artistry. 

Francesco Landini

No list compiling the great composers of medieval Europe would be complete without one to represent the exemplary achievements of Italy. There the so-called Dark Ages were especially bleak in the wake of the catastrophic sacking of the city of Rome and the spectacular fall of its empire, but after centuries of recovery the complex network of Papal and city states across the land got themselves back in the game, and would contribute music as influential as it was distinctive to the European cultural scene. 

The best ambassador for this national input is Francesco Landini, the most widely known Italian musician of his day, and the most vital exponent of the style that dominated Italian musical practice in the late Middle Ages. In the fourteenth century, activity in the arts flourished up and down the peninsula, with new forms of expression pioneered in painting, literature and of course music. This was the ‘Trecento’ - translating literally as ‘1300’ - the term that collectively refers to these artistic achievements. 

Drawing on ars antiqua conventions and unfolding parallel to the ars nova, Trecento music of sacred and secular kinds is similarly characterised by increased melodic, harmonic and rhythmic expressivity, particularly in the upper vocal part. For its textural sophistication and a tendency towards imitation between voices, it anticipates the contrapuntal polyphony of later Renaissance music. 

Written in the middle part of the century, Landini’s mostly secular music typified the style, solidified its innovations, and was especially admired by its contemporaries for its intense lyricism. Likely born in Florence, he spent the entirety of his life in that city where, blind since childhood, he worked as an organist and instrument-builder as well as a composer and - drawing again on the troubadour lineage - poet. As far as music is concerned, he is Mr Trecento.

Baude Cordier

Befitting its name - meaning ‘subtler art’ - the ars subtilior isn’t quite as central or continental a musical movement as its predecessors antiqua and nova. It developed and prospered in southern France and northern Spain at the end of the 1300s, winning back some regional status for the ancestral troubadour heartlands. These were good times for the area after Pope Clement V moved the papacy to Avignon in 1309 - though they were chaotic for Christendom in general, as Rome simultaneously elected its own popes from 1378 to counter the French ‘antipopes’. Still, the changes put Avignon on the map, and the town soon attracted ambitious, experimental musicians who would make the city the subtilior capital of Europe. 

Of the subtilior composers, Baude Cordier is the most exemplary. Yet again, little - in fact virtually nothing - is known of his life and times, just that he lived in the early 1400s and (as an inscription on one of his compositions tells us) was also from Machaut’s city, Reims. Fortunately his music endures, and offers phenomenal insight into the imagination that was beginning to grip composers in the twilight years of the Middle Ages. 

The scores above are those of Belle, bonne, sage, plaisant (left) and Tout par compas suy composés (right), both Cordier compositions in the genre of rondeau. Most obviously they demonstrate the subtilior tendency towards experimenting with notation itself, a practice with astonishing ramifications that would not be pursued until 20th-century Postmodernism. But they also - particularly Tour par compas - exhibit an intense rhythmic complexity that is typical of subtilior techniques. Again, the likes of this wouldn’t be heard for some time. Works like Cordier’s are extraordinarily complicated and difficult to sing, and it’s likely that they were performed and enjoyed by a niche audience of musical connoisseurs. 

Cordier’s surviving output is relatively small, but it’s important for epitomising the subtilior style and for making his influence felt on the widest of scales, from early Renaissance composer Gilles Binchois to - centuries later - one of the most avant-garde figures of them all, Karlheinz Stockhausen.
 

John Dunstaple

Speaking of influence, few composers of the Middle Ages would be quite as repercussive as John Dunstaple, the first great English composer of international stature. Indicative of England’s typically anomalous relationship to continental developments, its music is quite distinct from the broader movements already outlined. This is precisely why composers in Europe christened the polyphonic style practised by Dunstaple and his countrymen the Contenance angloise - the ‘English manner’.

This characteristic ‘manner’ arose in fifteenth-century England, largely following the work of Dunstaple. The quirks of his music effectively defined the style that soon became fashionable in the country and influenced various continental composers like Binchois and, as we’ll see, Guillaume Du Fay. The court of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy and super-hip patron of arts, would be instrumental in the spread and popularisation of the Contenance. Characteristic features include the use of denser, richer vocal harmonies and the liberal use of the third and sixth, which were still treated as dissonances across Europe. Nowadays the third in particular is heard as one of the most consonant of all intervals. Strange how listening habits change.

Dunstaple's music pioneered all these traits that would lastingly impact European music. He also utilised isorhythmic writing in emulation of the popular French motet - a device he may have encountered travelling to France with his local benefactor, the Duke of Bedford. His association with the duke is one of few things known for certain of his life: he was likely born in Dunstable, Bedfordshire circa 1390, was also patronised by the Duke of Gloucester as well as Joan of Navarre, Queen of England, and was somehow affiliated with the historic cathedral at St Albans. He died on Christmas Eve, 1453.

Almost the entirety of the composer’s musical manuscripts were lost in the chaotic midst of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the English monasteries in the 1530s. Intriguingly, it was with the help of copies of his music found in other parts of Europe that his body of work has been partially reconstructed, with the existence and survival of these materials indicating the scope of his fame and influence. It’s because of this huge impact on classical-music history that he’s now regarded alongside William Byrd and Henry Purcell as one of the greatest composers of early English music. Shout out to John Dowland, John Taverner and the aforementioned Thomas Tallis, too - all well worth checking out.

Guillaume Dufay

The achievements of the last few composers on this list in the twilight years of the Middle Ages set the stage for the revolution that would soon engulf European music. This was of course the Renaissance, made in Italy and matured in Europe. Although the developments of the Renaissance by and large spread north only gradually, some of the earliest, biggest musical breakthroughs came not from Italy, but from the so-called Low Countries, an area encompassing modern-day Belgium, the Netherlands, and the tip of northern France.

This creative surge was spearheaded by Franco-Flemish composer Guillaume Dufay - you might also see it spelled ‘Du Fay’ or ‘Du Fayt’. The emergence and impact of Dufay’s music reflects the larger prospering of the region, partly fuelled by economic growth spurred by the rich and powerful Duchy of Burgundy. Its cultural provenance would last even through the Renaissancce, as figures such as Josquin des Prez and Johannes Ockeghem would successfully mantain competition with the ever-rising power of Italy. Dufay paved the way for those giants of Renaissance music - at once the first great composer of that period and the last great composer of the Middle Ages. He is a transitional figure between the two eras, and it’s for playing precisely that role that he earns the last spot on this countdown. 

Dufay was one the composers associated with the Duke of Burgundy’s court. Although he himself was more independent of the court than the others who would form the so-called Burgundian School, he was instrumental in its absorption and propagation of Dunstaple’s style (and that of the English works in the Old Hall Manuscript), something that would prove crucial to the group, which long stayed at the frontier of European music. Dufay’s wide travels allowed him to spread that influence even further, too. Integrating these musical attributes with those of other international styles - in practically every existing genre of vocal music - he achieved a musical synthesis that functioned as the cornerstone of a new continental idiom, a benchmark for the emergent generation of Renaissance composers. This was total music, and it made Dufay the most celebrated composer of his day.

His greatest work is the sophisticated motet, Nuper rosarum flores. It was written for the 1436 consecration of Filippo Brunelleschi’s dome atop the cathedral in Florence, birthplace of the Renaissance. Even if it isn’t quite when and where historians would position the precise beginning of the era, that event is still perfectly symbolic of the dawn of the golden age of art, philosophy, science and exploration that would put a decisive end to a millennium’s worth of medieval Europe, and change the world forever. Fitting that it took place to a Dufay soundtrack.

Access sheet music from your favourite medieval composers
 

From Hildegard to Dufay, beyond and before, you can find, analyse, decipher and perform all this historic music in nkoda’s digital sheet music library. Medieval music just scratches the surface, too - there’s content for players of strings and synthesisers, fans of folk and funk, and musicians from beginner to advanced. Start your free trial and discover the music that will take your practice to the next level today.

If you’re more keen for text than tones, though, you’re in luck. There’s plenty of articles yet to sift through on the blog, including the others in the ‘best composers’ series to which this post belongs - check out the finest classical, women, modern, film and video-game composers. Best music composers, meanwhile, compiles the top figures from each list, and features a few newcomers. Read to see which medieval composers made the cut…