One of these estates passed after Bedford’s death to a man named John Dunstable, who is named in the
deed as a servant and household familiar to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (serviteur et familier
domestique de Onfroy Duc de Gloucestre), but who is named in another document (a bookplate in an
astronomical treatise), and on his tombstone, as “a musician with the Duke of Bedford” (cum duci
Bedfordie musicus).
The man thus rewarded in 1436 with a lordship in France was famous in his day as “an astrologian, a
mathematician, a musitian, and what not” (to quote from one of his epitaphs). The striking thing about the
musical works attributed to Dunstable is that, out of more than fifty surviving compositions (all but five on
Latin religious texts), three-fifths are found only in continental manuscripts. This cannot be explained
solely by the scarcity of English sources, since previously there had been nothing approaching such an
English presence in continental ones. And the other striking thing about Dunstable’s works is the
enormous influence they had on continental composers—an influence readily, indeed enthusiastically,
acknowledged by a number of witnesses. The only hypothesis that seems to unite all of these scattered
facts and circumstances in a convincing pattern is one that places Dunstable in Paris at the head of the
Duke of Bedford’s musical establishment at the time when English prestige was at its height. That
political prestige, plus the novelty and sheer allure of the English style (as we have already come to know
it, but which was a revelation to continental musicians) conspired to produce a stylistic watershed in
European music, after which for the first time there was truly a pan-European musical style—a literate
musical lingua franca—of which the English, with Dunstable at their head, had served as catalysts.
DUNSTABLE AND THE “CONTENANCE ANGLOISE”
One of our best witnesses to Dunstable’s prestige and his role as catalyst comes in the form of an aside in
the course of an epic allegorical poem called Le Champion des dames, composed around 1440 by Martin
le Franc, a Burgundian court poet. Le Franc, an enthusiastic partisan of the French in the Hundred Years
War, wrote the poem to persuade Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy, to do what he eventually did:
sunder his ties to the English and help the French drive them out. The presence of the English on French
soil was baleful, Le Franc maintained; unchecked, it would lead ineluctably to an apocalypse, an end of
historical time. Listing its portents, Le Franc pointed with a mixture of pride and dread at the perfection
attained by the arts and sciences, beyond which no advance seemed possible. The fateful perfection of
music, he alleged, was due especially directly to those accursed Englishmen.
At the beginning of the century, according to Le Franc, the composers most admired in Paris had been
three: Johannes Carmen (whom we met in chapter 10), Johannes Césaris, and Jean de Noyers, called
Tapissier (“the tapestry-weaver”). Their work had astonished all Paris, and impressed all visitors. But
they had been totally eclipsed in recent years by a new generation of French and Burgundian musicians,
who ont prins de la contenance Angloise et ensuy Dunstable, Pour quoy merveilleuse plaisance Rend
leur chant joyeux et notable. (“have taken to the English guise and followed Dunstable, which has made
their song marvelously pleasing, distinguished and delightful.”)
Le Franc’s vaguely eloquent phrase la contenance angloise—“the English somethingor-other” (one
dictionary gives “air, bearing, attitude” as well as “guise” as equivalents for the poetic contenance)—
resists precise translation or paraphrase, and it is not clear whether Le Franc himself knew exactly what
he was talking about. (The lines preceding the quoted ones are a merry hash of mangled technical terms.)
But he was giving voice to the conventional wisdom of the day, and so it would remain for the rest of the
century.
When the theorist Johannes Tinctoris, writing in 1477, made his famous announcement that there is not