John Dunstaple

John Dunstaple (or Dunstable, c. 1390 24 Decem-ber 1453) was an English composer of polyphonic mu-sic of the late medieval era and early Renaissance peri-ods. He was one of the most famous composers activein the early 15th century, a near-contemporary of LeonelPower, and was widely inuential, not only in England buton the continent, especially in the developing style of theBurgundian School.The spelling Dunstaple is preferred by Margaret Bent,since it occurs in more than twice as many musical attri-butions as that of Dunstable. The few English musicalsources are equally divided between b and p"; how-ever, the contemporary non-musical sources, includingthose with a claim to a direct association with the com-poser, spell his name with a p. Both spellings remain incommon usage.

1 Life

Dunstaple was probably born in Dunstable, Bedfordshire.His birth date is a conjecture based on his earliest surviv-ing works (from around 14101420) which imply a birthdate of around 1390. Many of the details of his life areconjectural. Nothing is known of his musical trainingand background. He was clearly a highly educated man,though there is no record of an association with eitherOxford or Cambridge universities. He is widely held tohave been in the royal service of John of Lancaster, 1stDuke of Bedford, the fourth son of Henry IV and brotherof Henry V. As such he may have stayed in France forsome time, since the duke was Regent of France from1423 to 1429, and then Governor of Normandy from1429 to his death in 1435. He owned property in Nor-mandy, and also in Cambridgeshire, Essex and London,according to tax records of 1436. After the death in 1437of another patron, the Dowager Queen Joan, he evidentlywas in the service of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, thefth son of Henry IV.Unlike many composers of the time, he was probably nota cleric, though there are links with St Albans Abbey (seebelow); he was probably married, based on the record ofwomen sharing his name in his parish, and he also owneda manor in Hertfordshire.In addition to his work as a composer, he had a con-temporary reputation as an astronomer, astrologer, andmathematician (for example, a volume in the BodleianLibrary, largely in the hand of William Worcester, ac-

knowledges that certain information within it had beencopied from Dunstaples writings). Some of his astrolog-ical works have survived in manuscript, possibly in hisown hand.Dunstaples connections with St Albans Abbey are at leasttwofold:

the abbot John Whethamstede is associated withthe Duke of Gloucester (who was buried at St Al-bans following his death in 1447), and Dunstaplesisorhythmic motet Albanus roseo rutilat, possiblywith some of the Latin words adapted byWhetham-stede from an older poem, was clearly written for StAlbans, possibly for a visit to the abbey by the Dukeof Bedford in 1426.

Whethamstedes plan for a magnicent library forthe abbey in 1452-3 included a set of twelve stainedglass windows devoted to the various branches oflearning. Dunstaple is clearly, if indirectly, referredto in some of the verses the abbot composed foreach window, not only music but also astronomy,medicine, and astrology.

He died on Christmas Eve 1453, as recorded in his epi-taph, which was in the church of St Stephen Walbrookin London (until it was destroyed in the Great Fire of1666). This was also his burial place. The epitaph stat-ing that he had "secret knowledge of the stars" had beenrecorded in the early 17th century, and was reinstated inthe church in 1904.

2 InuenceDunstaples inuence on the continents musical vocab-ulary was enormous, particularly considering the relativepaucity of his (attributable) works. Hewas recognized forpossessing something never heard before in music of theBurgundian School: la contenance angloise (the Englishcountenance), a term used by the poet Martin le Francin his Le Champion des Dames. Le Franc added that thestyle inuenced Dufay and Binchois high praise in-deed.Writing a few decades later in about 1476, the Flem-ish composer and music theorist Tinctoris rearmed thepowerful inuence Dunstaple had, stressing the new artthat Dunstaple had inspired. Tinctoris hailed Dunstapleas the fons et origo of the style, its wellspring and origin.

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2 5 REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

The contenance angloise, while not dened by Martin leFranc, was probably a reference to Dunstaples stylis-tic trait of using full triadic harmony, along with a lik-ing for the interval of the third. Assuming that he hadbeen on the continent with the Duke of Bedford, Dunsta-ple would have been introduced to French fauxbourdon;borrowing some of the sonorities, he created elegant har-monies in his own music using thirds and sixths. Takentogether, these are seen as dening characteristics of earlyRenaissance music, and both Le Francs and Tinctorisscomments suggest thatmany of these traitsmay have orig-inated in England, taking root in the Burgundian Schoolaround the middle of the century.

3 CompositionsThe musical output of medieval England was prodigious,yet almost all music manuscripts were destroyed duringthe English Reformation, particularly as a result of theDissolution of the Monasteries in 15361540.[1] As aresult, most of Dunstaples work has had to be recov-ered from continental sources (predominantly those fromnorthern Italy and the southern Alps).Because numerous copies of his works have been found inItalian andGermanmanuscripts, his famemust have beenwidespread. Two problems facemusicologists of the 15thcentury: rst, determining which of the many survivinganonymous works were written by which composers and,second, unraveling conicting attributions. This is madeeven more dicult for English composers such as Dun-staple: scribes in England frequently copied music with-out any ascription, rendering it immediately anonymous;and, while continental scribes were more assiduous in thisregard, many works published in Dunstaples name haveother, potentially equally valid, attributions in dierentsources to other composers, including Gilles Binchois,John Benet, John Bedyngham, John Forest and, most fre-quently, Leonel Power.Of the works attributed to him only about fty survive,among which are two complete masses, three sets of con-nected mass sections, fourteen individual mass sections,twelve complete isorhythmic motets (including the fa-mous one which combines the hymn Veni creator spir-itus and the sequence Veni sancte spiritus, and the lesswell-known Albanus roseo rutilat mentioned above), aswell as twenty-seven separate settings of various liturgi-cal texts, including three Magnicats and seven settingsofMarian antiphons, such asAlma redemptoris Mater andSalve Regina, Mater misericordiae.Dunstaple was one of the rst to compose masses using asingle melody as cantus rmus. A good example of thistechnique is his Missa Rex seculorum.He is believed to have written secular music, but no songsin the vernacular can be attributed to him with any degreeof certainty: although the French-texted rondeau Puisque

mamour is attributed to Dunstaple in two sources andthere is no reason to doubt his authorship, the ballade re-mained the more favoured form for English secular songat this time and there is limited opportunity for compar-ison with the rest of his output. The popular melody ORosa Bella, once thought to be by Dunstaple, is now at-tributed to John Bedyngham (or Bedingham). Yet, be-cause so much of the surviving 15th-century repertory ofEnglish carols is anonymous, and Dunstaple is known tohave written many, most scholars consider it highly likely for stylistic as well as statistical reasons that someof the anonymous carols from this time are actually byDunstaple.Dunstaple was probably the most inuential English com-poser of all time, yet he remains an enigma: his completeworks were not published until the quincentenary of hisdeath in 1953, but even since then works have been addedand subtracted from his oeuvre; we know very little of hislife and nothing of his undoubted learning; we can onlymake an educated guess at most of the chronology of thesmall amount of music that has come down to us; and weunderstand little of his style why he wrote as he did,what artistic or technical principles guided his compos-ing, how his music was performed, or why it was so in-uential.

4 Notes[1] Sources, May Homan, Latin Music in British Sources, c

1485 c 1610, The British Academy, 1987, cited in MS,IX, 19: Grove online

5 References and further reading Margaret Bent: John Dunstaple, GroveMusic On-line, ed. L. Macy (Accessed January 19, 2006),(subscription access)

Stanley Boorman, et al. Sources, MS. InGrove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/50158pg28 (accessed Decem-ber 29, 2008).

Margaret Bent: Dunstaple, Oxford Studies ofComposers. London, Oxford University Press,1981. ISBN 0-19-315225-8

Margaret Bent: Dunstaple [Dunstable], John (d.1453), composer, Oxford Dictionary of NationalBiography (subscription access)

Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. NewYork, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4

36 Recording 2003 Canticum Canticorum. In Praise of Love:The Song of Songs in the Renaissance. Capilla Fla-menca. Eufoda 1359. Contains a recording ofQuam pulchra es by John Dunstable

2012 O rosa bella, Ave maris stella and Quam pul-chra es by John Dunstaple have been recorded byLumina Vocal Ensemble

7 External links John Dunstaple Web Presentation Dunstaple biography on hoasm.org An incomplete discography About.com prole of John Dunstable Free scores by John Dunstaple in the Choral PublicDomain Library (ChoralWiki)

Free scores by John Dunstaple at the InternationalMusic Score Library Project

4 8 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

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