John Dunstable

English composer

• Born: c. 1390
• Birthplace: Probably Dunstable, Bedfordshire, England
• Died: December 24, 1453
• Place of death: Probably London, England

Dunstable was the first great English composer and one of the most influential composers of the fifteenth century. His strategic use of dissonance and harmonic structure laid the foundation for music in the Renaissance.

Early Life

Though he is unquestionably the first great English composer in the history of music and an important link between the medieval and Renaissance styles, little is known about the life and career of John Dunstable (DUHN-stuh-buhl). This uncertainty is not surprising when one considers the status of musicians and composers in the medieval period a status on a level with those anonymous craftsmen and artisans who designed and built the great cathedrals of the era or who worked diligently for their masters or in the service of the Church, the great stabilizing institution of the period.

Still, there is much circumstantial evidence that teases the imagination. A Latin inscription on the cover of an astronomy book states that the volume belonged to a John Dunstable, musician in the service of the duke of Bedford. The duke was the brother of Henry V, king of England from 1413 to 1422, and served as regent to the king’s nephew, Henry VI, in “occupied” France from 1422 until his own death in 1435. If, as seems likely, Dunstable, as court musician, accompanied Bedford to France, this period would be the earliest record of Dunstable’s career, however speculative. It was during this period, interestingly, that Joan of Arc was captured by the English forces under Bedford and burned at the stake in 1431.

What Dunstable’s formative years were and what training he received are unknown, but his connection with astronomy suggests that he was a learned man, probably versed in the other medieval academic disciplines of mathematics, arithmetic, and certainly music. The breadth of his learning is supported by one of several epitaphs written in Latin that commemorates Dunstable as “an astrologian, a mathematician, a musician and what not.”

Just when he began to compose is also problematic, but scholars have compared his work with some of the most important sources of the period, particularly the Old Hall manuscript, containing pieces by English composers, and the evidence is strong that his first work began to appear about 1415.

Ironically, the only fact about Dunstable’s life that is certain is the date of his death. Once again, an epitaph provides the information. Taken from the church in which Dunstable was buried, the Latin inscription declares him to be the glory of music, who passed among the constellation of the stars, “on the day before Christ’s birthday,” 1453.

Life’s Work

The extent of Dunstable’s influence on the development of Western music may be gauged by, among other things, the famous assessment of Johannes Tinctoris, a Renaissance musicologist who wrote De inventione et usu musicae (c. 1487; on the discovery and practice of music) and was the editor of one of the first musical dictionaries. He affirmed Dunstable to be the founder of “the English style” of music, which spread to the Continent and which became the standard of artistic achievement. Tinctoris had even let his enthusiasm for Dunstable’s work lead him to declare that nothing in music was worth hearing before Dunstable’s time. As overripe as Tinctoris’s esteem might appear, however, the existence of manuscripts of Dunstable’s works on the Continent, particularly in Italy, attests his influence and importance as a transmitter of this new style.

Both the variety and the number of his compositions are impressive. His works total about seventy-five pieces. All of them are for voices alone (a cappella), mostly for two or three parts, and the majority are religious works intended for church use, though not necessarily for any specific liturgical event. As with most music before 1500 or so, the human voice was the primary medium of expression, and though there was a significant production in secular music as early as the fourteenth century, vocal music centering on the church service was the primary focus of most serious composers.

The Latin church music of Dunstable shows a mastery of the polyphonic vocal technique then reaching its flowering. Originating sometime around the eleventh century, polyphony is the simultaneous singing of two or more independent melodies. By the fourteenth century, the texture of much polyphonic writing had become rigid, complex, and technically dense. Working within his English musical traditions, Dunstable produced compositions that were freer, less obtuse, and structurally clearer than much of the work of other composers. The key to this clarity was his control of dissonance.

To the modern ear, much medieval music sounds somehow unresolved. In that period before a major and minor tonal system (a development of the Baroque period, beginning about 1600), the melodic progression of a musical composition often depended on the main melody, called the cantus firmus, which was supported by a second, third, or fourth voice. These voices, or parts, often embroidered the cantus firmus so heavily that the work resulted in a rhythmic density, technically brilliant but hard to follow. Such a density is typical, for example, of the French polyphonic tradition of the fourteenth century, called ars nova.

Dunstable freed polyphonic writing from this density. By taking control of the dissonance inherent in such embroidery, he simplified the melodic progression and created work of unmatched sonority. His hymn Ave maris stella is an excellent example of controlled dissonance, an innovation that looked ahead to the harmonic principles of a later generation.

Several types of compositions distinguish the work of Dunstable. The largest group can be classified as ballades, freestyle compositions whose origins are in the secular music of the previous century. Dunstable’s ballades are characterized by a clear melody carried by one or more voices and are largely songs in praise of the Virgin. Such works as Sancta Maria, non est, Salve Mater, and Salve Regina are obvious examples of Dunstable’s skillful adaptation of secular models for sacred purposes. Like his other works in general, these are marked at once by their seeming spontaneity, their sonority, and their melodic charm.

Dunstable’s most complex works are motets. One of the most important medieval and Renaissance forms, the motet is a polyphonic composition using a biblical text. Sometimes a different, though complementary, text was assigned to each voice. Dunstable wrote more than a dozen motets in what is called isorhythmic structures, a precisely mathematical form in which the main melody is repeated several times, along with the rhythmic pattern, though the time values of the notes are proportionately reduced as the music progresses, the voices now coming together, now separating. Highly sophisticated, such works as Veni Sancte Spiritus (1431?) established Dunstable as one of the century’s leading composers. The arithmetical precision of these motets strengthens the validity of those epitaphs that praise him as a mathematician.

For all the complexity of such isorhythmic motets, Dunstable also produced, probably between 1420 and 1435, a number of declamatory motets that scholars praise as his most original contribution to the form. His most famous of this type is Quam pulcra es. In this motet, the rhythm is allowed to take the pattern demanded by the text, following the natural inflections and accents of the voice. Melody is thus subordinated to the sense and rhythm of the words, and the result is an expressiveness unmatched in the period. There is a quality of improvisation in these works, an easy freedom that anticipates much of the music of the Renaissance.

Finally, Dunstable seems to have been among the earliest composers to attempt a musical unification of the Mass. Previous to him, the sung parts of the Mass such as the Kyrie, the Gloria, and the Credo were conceived as independent, unrelated musical structures. Though the French composer Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-1377) is generally credited with producing the first polyphonic setting of the complete Mass in 1364, the thematic unity of the work is questioned by some scholars, and the piece is, in any case, virtually unique amid the composer’s vast body of secular compositions. Dunstable’s work, however, shows a clear attempt at thematic unification of the various parts of the Mass. His Rex seculorum Mass unites the five sections Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei through the use of a single common melody. The music is clear, expressive, and remarkably sonorous.

Little evidence suggests that Dunstable composed after the death of Bedford in 1435. Some scholars speculate that he “retired” to London to pursue his astronomical studies, especially in the light of a book of astronomical treatises to which he contributed about 1440. Certainly he was well known on the Continent by that date and was already being praised as a musical genius. By the time of his death, in 1453, the Renaissance was in full flower.

Significance

Dunstable was the acknowledged leader of a group of English composers at the end of the Middle Ages who were writing polyphonic compositions indigenous to their own musical tradition. In style and technique, the music was basically conservative, but there was an emphasis on the use of certain chords and harmonic structures that came closer to modern musical techniques than to any other music produced at that time.

The particular distinction of this English school was its development of what is called a “pan-consonant” style music characterized by a freer melodic line, a more impromptu and spontaneous use of rhythm, a greater flexibility in the arrangement and grouping of the voices, and, especially in the case of Dunstable, a control of dissonance what to a modern ear are those harsh and unresolved notes that do not seem to harmonize with the basic melody.

Like Johann Sebastian Bach, composing some three hundred years after him, Dunstable was less an innovator than a great synthesizer. He built his music on an older tradition, fusing it with newer elements from the French and Italian schools, and produced something fresh and original, works of unusual sweetness and euphony.

Dunstable’s musical strategy was toward clarity and simplicity. If much of the polyphonic music of the era can be compared to massive cathedrals of sound, aesthetically analogous to those stone-hewn monuments of prayer that are the glories of medieval architecture, then Dunstable’s music can be viewed as a magnificent church, lighter, less stupefying, but more personal, more intimate, and still wonderfully crafted.

Coming at the end of the Middle Ages, Dunstable’s music is a summation of much that went before and an affirmation of what was to come: a perfect transition between the medieval and Renaissance styles. Ironically, after his own time, little of his music was known until the end of the nineteenth century, and the complete edition of Dunstable’s works was not published until 1953, some four hundred years after his death.

Bibliography

Bent, Margaret. Dunstaple. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. A brief, close study of the technical aspects of Dunstable’s work, intended largely for the student of music rather than the general reader.

Carlerius, Egidius, Johannes Tinctoris, and Carlo Valguilo. “That Liberal and Virtuous Art”: Three Humanist Treatises on Music. Edited and translated by J. Donald Cullington. Newtonabbey, Ireland: University of Ulster, 2001. A translation of three fifteenth century treatises on church music by important musicologists of the time.

Davey, Henry. History of English Music. 1895. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1969. An enthusiastic account of the composer and his music.

Grout, Donald J., and Claude V. Palisca. A History of Western Music. 6th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Text includes an entry discussing Dunstable and his contributions to the history of Western music.

Harrison, Frank L. Music in Medieval Britain. New York: Praeger, 1959. A pioneering and exhaustive look at English choral and vocal music from the Norman Conquest to about 1550.

Reese, Gustave. Music in the Middle Ages. New York: W. W. Norton, 1940. An excellent, thorough study of the range of Western music up to the Renaissance. The final chapters deal with polyphony in England and the death of Dunstable and suggest a creative cross-pollination between Continental and English composers.

Walker, Ernest. A History of Music in England. 3d ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1952. Contains an early chapter on Dunstable and the period.