John Dunstaple

John Dunstaple (or Dunstable) was born around 1390 in England, perhaps in the town of Dunstable in Bedfordshire, whose name he may have carried. Almost nothing is known of his youth or training: like many musicians of his time, he was probably a choirboy and then a cleric. Yet he became the most admired English composer of the fifteenth century, one whose influence crossed the Channel and transformed music on the Continent.

The documents concerning him show him in the service of the royal house of Lancaster. Around 1422 he joined the household of John, Duke of Bedford, brother of Henry V, who governed the French territories occupied by the English during the Hundred Years’ War on behalf of the young Henry VI. Dunstaple therefore probably lived part of his life in France, in Paris or Normandy, where he held land around 1427. This was the era of Agincourt, the Treaty of Troyes and then Joan of Arc, burned at Rouen in 1431 in a city held by the Duke of Bedford.

After his patron’s death in 1435 he served the dowager queen Joan of Navarre and then Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, another brother of Henry V and a great lover of books and learning. Dunstaple was not only a musician: his epitaph, once visible in the church of St Stephen Walbrook in London, also describes him as an astronomer and mathematician, and several astronomical manuscripts belonged to him. He died in London on 24 December 1453, the very year the Hundred Years’ War ended.

His style is what contemporaries called the “contenance angloise”, the English manner. Around 1440 the poet Martin le Franc, in Le Champion des Dames, explained that Du Fay and Binchois had found a “new practice” of making “lively concord” by following Dunstaple. What struck continental musicians was the sweetness of his harmonies: he made generous use of thirds and sixths, intervals French music still regarded as unstable, and avoided harsh dissonances. His melodic lines are supple and singing, and the voices form full, luminous chords.

His surviving output numbers around sixty pieces, almost all sacred: isorhythmic motets for the great feasts, such as Veni Sancte Spiritus / Veni creator, Marian antiphons and mass movements. The motet Quam pulchra es, on a text from the Song of Songs, is one of the most famous: the three voices move almost together, declaiming the text clearly in harmony of great sweetness. He is also credited with the song O rosa bella, one of the most widely circulated of its century, although the attribution is sometimes disputed in favour of his compatriot John Bedyngham.

Remarkably, most of his works survived not in England, where manuscripts were largely destroyed during the Reformation in the sixteenth century, but in Italian and German copies, notably the great Trent and Aosta codices. This shows how far his music had travelled and how much it was sought after on the Continent. Dunstaple also contributed to the development of the cyclic mass, whose movements rest on the same borrowed melody, as in the Missa Rex seculorum attributed to him: a principle taken up by Du Fay, Ockeghem and the whole Renaissance.

Rediscovered by musicologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Dunstaple now holds a pivotal place in histories of music: he marks the passage from the learned, sometimes angular medieval Ars nova to the gentler, more consonant polyphony of the Renaissance. The complete edition of his works, published in 1953 for the five-hundredth anniversary of his death, revealed the full extent of his talent and influence.