Still, what was discouraged by the church was embraced by the people; the Ars Nova period inevitably and irreversibly changed the course of western music.
A prime example of Ars inNovation is Ha! Fortune, a motet composed by Machaut. Isorhythm is definitely present, as well as other defining elements of the tenor line, such as the color and talea. The repetition of the cantus firmus was called the color, and the talea was a rhythmic unit which repeats throughout the motet. The color and the talea were not necessarily linked, although the two often coincided at key points during the work. In Ha! Fortune, each color of the tenor line encompasses four taleas. There are three colors, each twelve bars long. .
This motet consists of three voices: tenor, duplum and triplum. The textual content of the three voices are rather similar in that they all discuss fortune, personified as a woman who seduces men with her temptations of hope and proceeds quickly to present the spectacle of her dungulous heaps. Their temporal qualities differ in that the triplum shares its knowledge of Miss Fortune from the perspective of one who has seen and experienced her treachery but is now in a position to be somewhat didactic while the duplum is sorrowfully stranded in a sea of death and pain presently. The tenor states its opinion in an enigmatic utterance, which could only be understood by une vrai franzaise du myen age, resembling the slow resonance of a clock's chime at midnight as if saying dead men tell no tales'. The text of the triplum possesses a rhyme scheme of abacdbdccccccccccccccccc while the duplum sports a cool abababababab. The cccc section of the highest voice appears to contain a quasai-cadential pattern of two quarter notes for the last two syllables of each line of text (mm 20, 31, 36, 41, 47, 58, 63, 68, 74, 85, 90, 96, 101). .
With regards to structural relationships between the voices, and larger rhythmic alignments, the discovery of patterns begins to become a rather arduous task.