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Proportion in the Music of Dunstable

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1978

Brian Trowell
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Extract

How did John Dunstable compose? What principles did he follow when he sat down to plan a piece of music? Manfred Bukofzer's collected edition of his works is now twenty-six years old, and when we consider how little of his music is performed and known as sound, over a quarter of a century after its publication, it is plain that I am not the only person to find him an enigma. We hear a great deal more of Dufay's music: his concise, elegant phrasing, neat, sectional, easily apprehended construction, constant variety of texture and integrated, purposeful bass-lines make Dunstable seem obscure, remote and inhuman by comparison – for all his mastery of the long melodic vault and springing ribs of cross-rhythm. One can follow the harmonic logic and the bar-to-bar detail of rhythm and phrasing, but not the plan of the whole, with the one exception of the isorhythmic works, which accordingly are performed more frequently than his other sacred music. One feels much more at home with their clear, logical structure and steady, purposeful crescendo of rhythmic excitement.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 105 , 1978 , pp. 100 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

NOTES

1 John Dunstable: Complete Works (Musica Britannica, viii), ed. M. F. Bukofzer (London, 1953); second, rev. edn., prepared by M. Bent, I. Bent and B. Trowell (London, 1970).Google Scholar

2 His epitaphs refer to him as ‘astrorum conscius ille’ and ‘Michalus alter, novus et Ptolomeus’, and three astronomical treatises survive which he owned or copied.Google Scholar

3 Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral (London and New York, 1956); R. Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London, 1952, rev. edn., 1962).Google Scholar

4 Bukofzer, M. F., Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music (London, 1951), 56–73.Google Scholar

5 Strunk, O., review of L. Feininger's edition of Power's mass on ‘Alma redemptoris mater’, in Journal of the American Musicological Society, ii (1949), 109.Google Scholar

6 F. Ll. Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain (London, 1958), 251–5.Google Scholar

7 Jacobus Obrecht: Opera Omnia (published by the Vereniging voor nederlandse musiekgeschiedenis), Missae, vi and vii, ed. M. van Crevel (Amsterdam, 1959 and 1964).Google Scholar

8 Henze, M., Studien zu den Messenkompositionen Johannes Ockeghems (Berliner Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, bd. 12), Berlin, 1968.Google Scholar

9 Warren, C. W., ‘Brunelleschi's Dome and Dufay's Motet’, in The Musical Quarterly, lix (1973), 92–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Fr. Feldmann, ‘Numerorum mysteria’ in Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, xiv (1957), 102–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum Musicae, ed. R. Bragard (Corpus Scriptorum de Musica, iii), 4 vols., Rome, 1955–65; see also id., ‘Le Speculum Musicae du compilateur Jacques de Liege’, in Musica Disciplina, vii (1953), 59–104, and viii (1954), 1–17a. Jacobus devotes an enormous amount of space to the theory of proportions; compare this with Tinctoris' workaday approach, largely confined to practical questions of time-signatures and notation, in E. de Coussemaker (ed.), Scriptorum de musica medii aevi nova series (1876), 154ff.Google Scholar

12 Curtius, E. R., translated by W. R. Trask, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Bollingen Series, xxxvi), New York, 1953; I have not been able to consult the later German editions of this work, originally published as Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern, 1948); see especially pp. 501–9.Google Scholar

13 Walker, D. P., Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanilla (London, 1958).Google Scholar

14 Yates, F., French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1947); and Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964).Google Scholar

15 See for example his Triumphal Forms (Cambridge, 1970), and Silent Poetry: Essays in Numerological Analysis (London, 1970).Google Scholar

16 New York, 1938. We badly need a fuller study of number symbolism, showing the chronology and continuity of its medieval tradition; while this paper's main purpose is to analyse Dunstable's proportional mathematics, I have not been able to avoid noting his use of symbolic numbers, though I am only too well aware that our knowledge of gematria comes largely from the early medieval writings of the patristic fathers who deplored its practice. 152 (‘MARIA’), 888 (‘JESOUS’) and 1480 (‘CHRISTOS’) are, however, all to be found in Kircher's Arithmologia of 1665: see van Crevel, op. cit., vii, pp. cxxxixf.Google Scholar

17 London, 1970.Google Scholar

18 One of them, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, read an interesting paper, still unpublished, on the structure of Machaut's ‘Hoquetus David’ at the Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Music held at Durham University in 1978.Google Scholar

19 Liber Sapientae, xi, 21: See Bukofzer, M.F., ‘Speculative Thinking in Medieval Music’, in Speculum, xvii (1942), 180.Google Scholar

20 In her monograph Dunstaple, shortly to be published by Oxford University Press, London (Dr Bent wishes, with good justification, to return to the fifteenth-century spelling of his name).Google Scholar

21 Easily available in The Penguin Classics with an introduction by its translator, H. D. P. Lee (Harmondsworth, 1965); see especially pp. 47–9; also F. M. Cornford, Plato's Cosmology (London, 1948), 36ff. For evidence of widespread medieval knowledge of this portion of the Timaeus, See Klibansky, R., The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition during the Middle Ages (London [1939]), 28–9; and Simson, op. cit., 22 and 26f.Google Scholar

22 See The Writings of Irenaeus, translated by A. Roberts and W. H. Rambaut, i (Edinburgh, London and Dublin, 1880), 61.Google Scholar

23 Ib., pp. 60, 65, 205.Google Scholar

24 See Butler, op. cit., 27; Migne, Patrologia Latina, xxxv, col. s1961, and xxxvi, col. 1170; also xxxiii, col. 219f.Google Scholar

25 See C. Brown (ed.), Religious Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1924), 259 (note to no. 40).Google Scholar

26 See Fowler, Triumphal Forms, op. cit., chapter 5, pp. 89ff.; also G. E. Duckworth, Structural Patterns and Proportions in Vergil's Aeneid (Ann Arbor, 1962), 21–4.Google Scholar

27 Alejandro Planchan, however, makes out a good case for the date 1451 (see ‘Guillaume Dufay's Masses : a View of the Manuscript Traditions’, in Papers read at the Dufay Quincentenary Conference, ed. A. W. Atlas (New York, 1976), 38–41.Google Scholar