EX. 8-9 Proportional numbers in Nuper rosarum flores represented as pitch intervalsMoreover, the complex of durational ratios also contains a symbolic perfect fifth (3:2) and a perfect
fourth (4:3), all of it summed up in the final chord of the piece. Thus Du Fay’s motet embodies a hidden
Pythagorean summa, or comprehensive digest of the ways in which music represents the enduringly valid
harmony of the cosmos. With its four different integers, it is the most complete symbolic summary of its
kind in any isorhythmic motet. (By way of comparison, the proportional ground plan of Ciconia’s motet,
3:2:2, incorporates only two integers, one of them repeated. The only harmonic intervals it can be said to
express are the unison and the fifth.)
But that is by no means all. As Craig Wright has shown in detail (far more of it than we can pursue at
the moment), the number symbolism in Du Fay’s motet, reaching far beyond the specifically musical
domain, makes contact with a venerable tradition of biblical exegesis that bears directly on the
circumstances that inspired the work and the occasion that it adorned.^11 As we read in the second book of
Kings, where the building of the great temple of Jerusalem is described, “the house which king Solomon
built to the Lord, was three-score cubits in length, and twenty cubits in width, and thirty cubits in height”
(2 Kings 6:2); that the inner sanctum, the “Holy of Holies,” was forty cubits from the doors of the temple
(2 Kings 6:18); and that the feast of dedication lasted “seven days and seven days, that is, fourteen days”
(2 Kings 8:65). These, of course, are precisely the numbers that have figured in our structural analysis of
Du Fay’s motet. The durational proportions of the tenor taleae are precisely those governing the