Throughout the development of music during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, the motet became the genre favored by composers and, as a result, became the canvas on which experimentation with new musical colors and textures took place. This new style of musical composition, entitled Ars Nova, was well accepted in France by the fourteenth century. Greater precision with regards to notation enabled more complex musical ideas to be developed and recorded by composers. As music's concentration shifted from spiritual to secular and increasingly more of the art being created displayed concerns of politics and romance, innovations in improved precision of rhythm and pitch notation were being developed. Specifically, the motet was imbued with a fresh hue following the naissance of a rhythmic apparatus called Isorhythm. .
As the name implies, isorhythm is the employment of a single rhythmic pattern repeated again and again by the tenor voice. Isorhythm lent coherence and unity to the motets of the age. Although he invented neither isorhythm nor the technique known as hocket, Guillaume de Machaut, who engaged in the religious (or perhaps more accurately, secularist) political, and intellectual movements of the fourteenth century, and who may be regarded as the quintessential Ars Nova composer, incorporated these two techniques as well as elaborations on them (such as pan-isorhythm), extremely effectively in his compositions. It was through his work these innovations became standard practice for composers who followed Machaut. His music was also characterized by an unprecedented secularism which manifested itself in the form of a grand, magnificent, and complex style. These represented a divergence from the church in that religious authorities refused to sanction "indeed regarded vaguely heretical "this more elaborate style. Dazzling harmonies and singers who were happy to use these new works as virtuosic show pieces represented a specific shift in the focus of the religious service from the divine to the individual.
