Chapter 4: Island and Mainland: Toward a Pan-European Style

I. Introduction
A. As the title of this chapter indicates, European musical style of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries moved from distinct national styles (particularly of the Ars nova and
Trecento) toward a more unified, international style.
B. English music figures in this mix as well, as the popularity of Sumer is icumen in
illustrates. This work includes elements of the old (open and closed endings) as well as new (a
harmonic style that sounds familiar to us but does not sound like the music we listened to in
Chapters 1–3).

II. English Music and Its Influence

A. Fragmentary Remains
1. English music had a style that was distinct from continental music of the
Middle Ages (especially in its use of thirds), but our evidence for it is fragmented.
2. Medieval commentaries describe English music, and Anon. IV suggests that
English singers included the third among the consonant intervals.
3. Thirds existed in continental music, too, but not to the extent heard in English
music.
4. The Thomas gemma Cantuariae/Thomas caesus in Doveria (Ex. 4-3) includes
many features associated with English music, such as almost equal ranges in the top two parts
and frequent voice exchanges. The lower two voices are also similarly matched. The harmonic
framework also repeats.

B. Kings and the Fortunes of War

1. The Old Hall Manuscript contains the earliest English polyphonic church music
that can be read today.
2. Copied for a member of the royal family (notably that of Henry IV and V),
most of its contents belong to the Mass Ordinary.
a. Its 147 pieces include 100 with attributions amounting to twenty-four
English composers.
b. Triadic harmony features throughout the repertory.
3. Henry V, who is associated with the Old Hall Manuscript, holds a prominent
place in history of this period. Famous names such as Joan of Arc are connected in some way to
his legacy.
4. When Henry’s army occupied part of northern France in the early fifteenth
century, his brother was in charge. This brother, John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford, included
the composer John Dunstable (ca. 1390–1453) among those who received part of his estates
when he died.
5. Dunstable’s music influenced continental composers and may be seen as a
watershed moment leading to a truly pan-European musical style.

C. Dunstable and the “Contenance Angloise”

1. Dunstable’s arrival in Paris caused the major composers to follow his style,
known as la contenance angloise (English guise).
a. Major-mode tonality
 b. Triadic harmony
c. Smooth handling of dissonance
2. Dunstable wrote in the old styles of the fourteenth century, including
isorhythmic motets, but he imbued it with the new sounds listed above.
The smooth sound associated with Dunstable can be heard in Quam pulchra es.
3. This is known today as a “declamation motet” because it declaims specific
words by expressing them appropriate to the spoken language.
4. Only nine dissonant notes appear in this piece.
5. The triads stand out. [Suggested activity: back-to-back listening of Machaut
Messe and Quam pulchra es]

D. Du Fay and Fauxbourdon

1. Continental composers responded immediately to the English style, as can be
demonstrated by Du Fay’s early Communion antiphon Vos qui secuti estis me.
a. This work emphasizes sixths, which had previously been considered
dissonant.
b. A rubric tells the performer that it is possible to make this a three-part
piece by adding a voice singing the uppermost part down a fourth.
c. The result is called fauxbourdon.
d. In this style, the melody is in the cantus (top part).

E. Du Fay and Binchois

1. Du Fay (ca. 1397–1474) and Binchois (ca. 1400–1460) were the two leading
song composers of the first half of the fifteenth century.
2. Du Fay’s career took him to Italy, Savoy, and Cambrai (on the Franco-Flemish
border).
a. He wrote songs in all the formes fixes.
b. He based a lot of his sacred music on secular tenors, including some of
his own pieces.
c. Du Fay also wrote hymns that reflect different styles, including chant,
courtly chanson, and fauxbourdon.
3. Binchois spent his career at the court of Burgundy, renowned for its
magnificence.
a. Of his more than sixty chansons, the most admired are his ballades.
b. His setting of Christine de Pisan’s Deuil angoisseux exemplifies several
characteristics of this style, and these sometimes contradict what we in the twenty-first century
might expect of such a text, such as its tonality and rhythms.

F. The Internationalism of the Upper Crust

1. Most of the fifteenth-century music studied in the course of music history was
not heard by the average European of the period, but was reserved for an elite and educated
audience.
2. The theorist Tinctoris (ca. 1435–1511) provides a list of the composers of note
during his lifetime.
a. Tinctoris did not think any music written more than forty years before
1477 was worth hearing.
 b. His preferred composers were Ockeghem (ca. 1410–97) and Busnoys
(ca. 1430–92). These two have been paired ever since Tinctoris’s time.
3. Ockeghem wrote a lament on the death of Busnoys. He was the pre-eminent
composer in Europe at the time of his death.
a. The Chigi Codex contains almost all of Ockeghem’s known works, and
some of Busnoys’s. That his works figure in such a beautifully prepared book signifies the
respect accorded the composer.
b. Busnoys may have studied with Ockeghem. He is the earliest composer
for whom autograph manuscripts survive.
c. Both composers wrote music that demonstrates highly organized
technical prowess in composition.

III. Organization and Polyphony

A. The Cyclic Mass
1. During the fifteenth century, the cyclic Mass was the genre into which
composers poured the most intellectual and creative energy.
a. All five movements of the Mass Ordinary are set.
b. Each movement began with a “head motive” (the same for each
movement), announcing the connectivity among movements.
2. Other aspects might also be modeled on each other, such as a foundation
melody or formal scheme.
3. The cyclic Mass unified the entire service.

B. “Caput” and the Beginnings of Four-Part Harmony

1. Continental composers adopted the cyclic Mass from the English and
developed it further.
2. A long melisma on the word “caput” in the antiphon Venit ad Petrum used at
Salisbury Cathedral during Holy Week became the basis for a group of masses known as Caput
Masses.
3. The first of these dates from around 1440 and is English. Constructed for four
voices, the sound is particularly sonorous for this period.
a. The top voice, superius, becomes known as the soprano.
b. The lowest voice, bassus, occupies its own space in a manner typical of
later bass voices: defining harmony by leaping and defining cadences.

C. Patterns of Emulation
1. An emulation is an homage to an earlier composer/composition that seeks to
surpass it as well.
2. Ockeghem and Obrecht wrote Caput Masses in emulation of the anonymous
English one described above.
a. Ockeghem’s is especially noteworthy in that he transposes the tenor
down an octave, to the bass range.
b. This transposition also has implications of the harmony as it forces
reconciliation of the tritone B/F, as well as unexpected harmonic movement between successive
triads.
 c. Ockeghem may have known who composed the English “original.”
Because of astrological references, suspicion has fallen on Dunstable.
d. Obrecht’s setting demonstrates that he knew Ockeghem’s.
Fifteenth-century composers wrote pieces considered “tour de force” compositions.
3. Ockeghem composed several such pieces, including his Missa Prolationum (in
which he exploited time signatures, with two canons sounding simultaneously) and the Missa
cuiusvis toni (in any mode, so that singers can choose from clef combinations resulting in
different modes).

D. The Man at Arms

1. The most celebrated and numerous group of Masses from this period are those
based on the L’Homme armé (“Man at Arms”) melody.
a. More than forty Mass settings on this melody survive.
b. The earliest Missa L’Homme armé dates from sometime after 1454.
2. Almost all of the composers recommended by Tinctoris composed at least one,
as did Tinctoris himself.
3. The Missa L’Homme armé was initially tied to the Burgundian court,
particularly the Order of the Golden Fleece.
4. A cycle of six Masses on the L’Homme armé that has been associated with
Charles the Bold reflects the interest in numerical structures and highly technical compositional
prowess seen in other works dating from the late fifteenth century.
a. Busnoys’s Missa L’Homme armé is particularly illustrative of this
approach. It contains unifying aspects on multiple levels as well as virtuoso feats in technical
organization.
b. His setting seems to have been highly respected by his contemporary
composers and theorists.

E. “Pervading Imitation”
1. In Busnoys’s Missa L’Homme armé, some sections have places where the tenor
is absent. Composed without the organizing L’Homme armé melody, they demand an alternative
organization. The composer accomplishes this through the use of brief imitative entrances known
as “pervading imitation.”
2. The melodic lines of pervading imitation are known as “points of imitation”
and are fitted to a phrase in the text. The point comes to a close, at which point a new text and
point of imitation begins.
3. Busnoys’s Missa L’Homme armé contains a discrete ordering principle that is
not heard in performance, but betrays a desire to tie the work closely to the Order of the Golden
Fleece (through the number 31).
4. Du Fay also wrote a Missa L’Homme armé, and his is the oldest and most
distinguished. It too shows off his compositional ability in a tour de force of a different
mensuration in each voice (simultaneously) during the Credo.
5. Later in the tradition of setting masses on the L’Homme armé, the Missa
L’Homme armé was published by Petrucci in 1502 (actually two settings). These were placed at
the positionally significant places of beginning and ending the publication.
 6. The first setting is the Missa L’Homme armé super voces musicales, in which
Josquin begins the cantus firmus on ascending pitches throughout the Mass (beginning on C and
ending on A).
7. The head motive of this setting is modeled on Busnoys’s use of Ockeghem’s
name in In hydraulis (and which Ockeghem responded with his own compliment to Busnoys).

F. High, Middle, and Low

1. Following literary models, Tinctoris set out three musical styles and associated
them with genres.
a. Magnus, great (high-ranking) = Mass.
b. Mediocris, middle = motet.
c. Parvus, small (low-ranking) = vernacular chanson.
2. The Mass replaced the motet in ranking through the course of the fifteenth
century.
3. During this period, the motet evolved into a sacred song in Latin, associated
more with devotion than ceremony.
4. Paraphrase technique became common in motets.
5. Motets, as the “middle being,” continued to address the Virgin Mary (also a
“middle” of sorts between God and human).

G. The English Keep Things High

1. At the end of the fifteenth century, English music epitomizes the musical cult
of Mary in High Church style.
2. This repertory is preserved in the Eton Choir Book, compiled during the reign
of Henry VII.
3. Eton College was connected by its statutes to honor the Virgin Mary.
a. The choir was famous for is virtuoso singing: high melismas for the
boys singing the top parts and five parts was the norm (and some pieces go further to six or
more).
b. The music, though astoundingly sonorous, is necessarily impersonal.

H. The Milanese Go Lower Still

1. In the later fifteenth century, Milanese composers wrote substitute motets for
the Mass, known as motetti missales.
a. The patron family for these composers was the powerful Sforza family.
b. Their composers included Johannes Martini and Loyset Compère (d.
1518).
2. Compère’s Ave Maria exemplifies a low style motet, which suggests a dual
focus: both the Virgin Mary and Galeazzo Maria (his patron).
a. This piece borders on silliness in its text declamation, and its use of
humor in church music can be likened to a “humane” (as in for the humans listening) setting—in
opposition to the high style of the Eton Choir Book music.

I. Love Songs
1. The bergerette originated in the fifteenth century.
a. It combines two of the formes fixes (rondeau and virelai).
 b. Ockeghem’s Ma bouche rit et ma pensée pleure is an early example of
the bergerette.

J. Instrumental Music Is Printed

1. Instrumental arrangements of popular chansons led to a purely instrumental
genre of chanson arrangements.
a. The practice of instruments playing popular pieces undoubtedly extends
far back, but the late fifteenth century saw the emergence of them in manuscripts, as well as
treatises on how to create them.
b. Petrucci printed textless chansons in the Harmonice musices odhecaton
A in 1501.
c. Masses and motets could be similarly treated.
d. Abstract instrumental music, based on imitation and without a cantus
firmus, derived from these textless chansons.
2. Henricus Isaac (b. ca. 1450–55, d. 1517) was the most prolific composer of
these “songs without words.”