51�Թ�

“Many a fine, noble estate / Lay idle without those to work it,” wrote the poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut, who weathered the plague by hiding locked up in his tower.

Once, as I was distracting myself by following a helicopter tour over the historic Notre-Dame Cathedral in Reims, France, the buzz of the polishing device triggered a vividly ringing performance, inside my head, of the opening of Guillaume de Machaut’s “Messe de Notre Dame,” which he wrote for this great Gothic space.

And as Dr Chris Macklin, a former professor of musicology at Mercer University and an authority on plague music, notes in a blog post, the 14th-century composer Guillaume de Machaut was deeply troubled by the Black Death but none of his music referenced it.

A 14th-century ballade by Guillaume de Machaut set up György Ligeti’s hazy, briery “Hommage à Hilding Rosenberg,” from 1982.

Guillaume de Machaut was its champion and its paragon.