Musical theorists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and scholars of our own time have been ananimous in regarding the Englishman John Dunstable as the "fount and origin" of a new kind of music, a "new art" that so influenced the musicians of his day that it is true to say that the whole course of European musical development was changed. In truth, it must be stated that what happened in the early fifteenth century is much more complex and that many influences combined. Just as we cannot put a date upon the end of what we call the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, so it is quite wrong to credit one individual composer with a whole stylistic revolution. Dunstable "stood forth as chief", as Tinctoris wrote in 1477.
The thirteenth century had witnessed (in what we now call the Ars Antiqua) the establishment of clearly notated musical forms with welldefined rhythmic patterns. They became rigid, and men sought new freedom and the excitements of irregular, syncopated melodies and more variable and sophisticated forms. What we call the Ars Nova of the fourteenth century produced a great flowering of the secular forms of the ballade and rondeau, and, as befitted the extravagant princely courts of Europe, the musical style became increasingly mannered. In the end, the French-dominated Ars Nova, no longer new, strangled irself in over-complication, its basically simple forms overlaid with jagged and restless melodic lines woven together in combinations of rhythmic extravagance of great complexity in notably dissonant sonorities. The style had to reach its end, and when it did the influential forces were from England and Italy.
Around 1400, the domination of French music came to a close. The Italian Landini and then Ciconia, an Italianised Netherlander, gad developed smooth expressive melody, and clarified harmonic texture to a degree in which we can now see the dawn of Renaissance humanism in music. In the North, the English had cultivated the earlier forms of the thirteenth century with typical conservatism, but clothed those forms in a sonority of sweet thirds and sixths. They, in the end, copied the angularities and agitated rhythms of the French in their own music, some of which is preserved in the oldest layers of the Old Hall Manuscript, but they had something special to offer. The English habit of discanting upon plainsongs had produced faburden; to mis quote du Bellay, they had la doulceur Angevine. English sonority and Italian clarity impinged themselves upon a new, extraordinary and seemingly inexhaustible fount of genius, the Low Countries, the Burgundian provinces - the birthplace not only of Dufay and Binchois, but Busnois, Ockeghem, Obrecht, Josquin above all, Willaert, Rore, Lassus and de Monte, to name a few from a period of one hundred and fifty years.
The dominating geographical line was a band from London to Rome. It went through Flanders, Hinault, Savoy and Florence. Dufay travelled the way south, Dunstable the northern part.
Dunstable is the master of asymmetry within ordered paragraphs. Dufay is the master of the shapely melodic sentence. Dunstable is the man of numbers if not actually of numerology, Dufay is the genius of expression. Dunstable was a musician mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, Dufay the courtly servant of the richest princes of Europe; Dunstable the maker of architectural objects in sound, Dufay the melodist who touched the heart. In fact, both these men were writing music that reflects the age of dying medieval concepts and of the early flowering of what we call the Renaissance.
What is it that stamps the music of Dunstable with greatness? Why is Dufay lovable?
You may read everything that has been written about early 15th century music and still you will find that Dunstable remains obscure and Dufay a definable person. Again a question; is it simply that Dufay's biography is quite accessible, that he wrote special music for the special peolple he served, for the Malatesta family, for Pope Eugenius IV, for his friends in Laon, that he wrote a motet for his own funeral, that he could be witty in chansons and be revered as a teacher of great successors?
What about Dunstable? We know so little that nearly the only sure historical fact is that he died on Christmas Eve 1453. Furthermore, the inscription of his epitaph is known that describes his different professions, and in a book on astronomy in St. John's College, Cambrifge, he states in his own hand that he was a musician in the service of the Duke of Bedford. All our heritage of his music is in the form of liturgical or votive church music; what may be counted as secular music amounts to so little that even the most celebrated, "O rosa bella", is not his for certain.
What is quire sure is that Dunstable was the greatest Englich composer before William Byrd. He was the man whose "contenance angloise" influenced music for a entury.
Here, in a little space, we offer a few fine works of the twin luminaries of the waning Middle ages and the Renaissance dawn.
Dunstable's short Marian antiphon Beata mater is well composed but typical only of its period. If it had been attributed to Binchois no one would question it. With the spacious setting of the liturgical antiphon Salve Regina with its late-mediaeval extra verses - cum versibus - Dunstable sets his own seal. No other composer of the period could have written like this. Here he founds the pattern for the great insular English flowering of pan-consonant polyphonic lyricism that reached its culmination in the music of the Eton Choirbook, of Robert Fayrfax and John Taverner.
In his isorhythmic motets Dunstable's genius is at its height, and his greatness is overwhelming. In these he achieves an equipoise between arithmetical construction in the proportions of form, the lyricism of asymmetrical melody and the springboards of upbeat entries, the tradic vocal cpntours and the continuum of overlapping phrase structure, he is the true source of the Polyphonic Age.
Veni Sancte Spiritus should perhaps be entitled Veni Creator Spiritus. It was almost certainly intoned by Cardinal Henry Beaufort at the coronation in Paris in 1431, of the English King Henry VI. The Cardinal was the presiding cleric at the ceremony, and Dunstable, the senior musician of the Regent, the Duke of Bedford, English ruler of Paris and the conquered French domains, would have lavished his greatest art on such an occasion. He did. The work falls into three sections in the ratio of 3:2:1 and each section is itself divided in two. The second part of each section is a rhythmic, but not melodic, repeat of the first. The structural voice, the "tenor" carries the melody of the middle lines of the hymn "Veni Creator" in the isorhythmic scheme of reduction 3:2:1. The top voice sings the sequence Veni Sancte Spiritus but uses the melody of Veni Creator wheneyer the structural "tenor" is silent, so that the hymn melody is presented in total throughout the work. The second voice sings the text of a very free paraphrase of the sequence Veni Sancte. The third voice sings the full text of the hymn Veni Creator, except for the doxology verse. Thus Dunstable produced a fitting form to conclude a great ceremony, he filled the form with some of his finist sounds.
He lavished this art upon other texts including one to Saint Katherine that may have had Royal connotations, but we know of no special occasion for Preco preheminencic except that it is constructed upon an antiphon for Saint John the Baptist. Its structure is similar to that of Veni Sancte, but a glance at the text will show its curious alliterative scheme.
Dufay, like Dunstable, though with less exacting dedication, liked to use the isorhythmic structure for some of his early motets. Written at Rimini, Vasilissa ergo gaude a clue to its purpose in the first word, a compliment to a possible future Queen of the Eastern Empire. It is addressed to Cleofe Malatesta before her departure in August 1420 to Byzantium for her marriage to Theodore Palaiologos. After a short canonic introduction, this piece proceeds isorhythmically, the rhythms and note-values from Cleophe, clara gestis being repeated exactly in the second half from In porphyro est genitus. The tenor is based on the plainchant Graduale: Concupivit rex decorem tuum, very appropriately, being part of the Mass for a Virgin not a Martyr.
In 1433, Pope Eugenius IV signed the Treaty of Viterbo with King Sigismund, crowned Holy Roman Emperor later that year. The treaty was celebrated in music by Dufay in his Supremum est mortalibus, a splendid and festive work, in which isorhythm is present only in the tenor. Dufay, by this date, had abandoned the strict formalities of the techniqie and indulges in interludes of free fauxbourdon, that sweet simplicity of six-three chords deriving from the English faburden and discant style. To underline the significance of the occasion Dufay sets the names EUGENIUS ET REX SIGISMUNDUS to sustained block chords.
The three Marian motets are in Dufay's intimate manner, closely related to the chanson style, dominated by the upper voice. The liturgical antiphon Alma redemptoris mater quotes the proper plainsong and embellishes it most exquisitely. Flos florum and Ave virgo are votive antiphons with rhymed texts of devour if not very good clerical Latin. They do not appear to be based upon any known plainchants. These works are among the most beaytiful and dedicately wrought of all Dufay's varied creations. The ending of Flos florum, in particular, has a calculated perfection that is also deeply moving moving. It is this kind of music that places Dufay alonside Jan van Eyck as one of the artistic glories of the fifteenth century.