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“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.

Machaut may have relied on ancient musical modes because that’s what composers had to work with in the 14th century.

I chose Machaut’s luminous “Messe Notre Dame,” for instance, because it helped to show where our music came from.

In Machaut’s Kyrie, where there is little text, rigorous formalism is the guiding principle.

It is with Machaut that the looking-back stops.