The Refrain Composers Wrote First

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Guillaume de Machaut held two reputations at once in fourteenth-century France, the era's most sought-after composer and one of its most read poets, and the rondeau is where those two careers overlap most visibly. Machaut set his own rondeaux to polyphonic music and, unusually for the period, saw both the words and the music preserved together in manuscripts he had a hand in compiling himself, which is part of why his versions of the form became the template later poets worked from even after they stopped composing music to go with them. The refrain's job in a Machaut rondeau is audibly musical before it is anything else, a returning melodic phrase that the returning words simply ride on; later poets writing rondeaux with no music at all inherited a structure built to satisfy an ear listening for a tune, not a reader's eye alone.