a single piece of music more than forty years old that is “regarded by the learned as worth hearing,” he
was dating the beginnings of viable music to precisely the time when Le Franc had been writing. Anything
earlier, he contended, was “so ineptly, so stupidly composed that they rather offended than pleased the
ear.” And in a slightly earlier treatise Tinctoris had already identified “the English, of whom Dunstable
stood forth as chief “ as being the “fount and origin” of the “new art” that marked the boundaries of the
viable.^6
The “contenance angloise,” whatever it was, had already made a sensation among the continental
churchmen and musicians who heard the choirs of the bishops of Norwich and Lichfield, and the
instrumentalists in the retinue of the Earl of Warwick, at the Council of Constance that negotiated the end
of the Great Schism in 1417. English musical influence reached its peak in music composed on the
continent, in the wake of this council, for the newly reunited Roman Catholic church.
The French musicians named by Martin Le Franc as having absorbed the new manner and brought it to
perfection were Dunstable’s contemporaries Gilles Binchois and Guillaume Du Fay. Tinctoris named
them too, but as members along with Dunstable of the musical generation that had mentored Tinctoris’s
contemporaries, the truly perfect ones. It was just as much the fashion in “premodern” Europe to regard
the present as a summit as later it became the fashion to regard the past as a “golden age.”
Thus by the end of the sixteenth century Dunstable had grown sufficiently remote in time so as to lose
his aura completely. Thomas Morley, a later composing countryman of Dunstable’s, writing in 1597,
produced a little scrap from a Dunstable motet just so he could show what “some dunces have not slacked
to do, yea one whose name is John Dunstable (an ancient English author),” whose quoted passage “is one
of the greatest absurdities which I have seen committed in the dittying of music.” Or maybe Morley just
couldn’t resist a pun. In any case it was nothing personal, nor did it signal any substantive change of mind
or heart among music theorists. Morley was merely doing what Tinctoris and Le Franc had done before
him—namely, despising music that was older than he was.
If Martin Le Franc was right, it should be possible to show how Dunstable’s music mediated between
the music of Carmen, Cesaris, and Tapissier on the one hand, and that of Le Franc’s Franco-Burgundian
contemporaries Binchois and Du Fay on the other. It is indeed possible to do this, and very instructive.
From such a comparison we learn that precisely those features that until the end of the fourteenth century
most distinguished “English descant” from the music of the continent—features like “major-mode”
tonality, full-triadic harmony (or at least a greater reliance on imperfect consonances), smooth handling of
dissonance—had the most decisive impact on continental musicians in the early fifteenth century, and
therefore must have constituted the so-called contenance angloise.
A pan-isorhythmic motet by Tapissier, Eya dulcis/Vale placens, is actually about matters the Council
of Constance was convened to settle—“Rome, all Rome cries out, ‘Away with the Schism,”’ shrills the
triplum at one point—though it probably was composed earlier, possibly in Avignon, where the
composer, who died around 1410, had worked. Another possibility is that the motet was composed for the
court of Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy, who was then the chief rival to French power in northern
Europe. In any case, one can easily see why Martin Le Franc said that music like this had stunned all
Paris. It radiates power and authority.
Like the motet by Ciconia discussed in chapter 8 (also connected indirectly with the Council of
Constance through its dedicatee, Francesco Zabarella), Tapissier’s motet sports robust ceremonial
fanfares preceding each talea, which suggest outdoor performance on loud winds. (Such wind bands did
often accompany the choirs at the Council of Constance, we learn from literary descriptions, and the
English trombones were particularly admired.) The text setting is hortatory, orotund, even a shade
bombastic. It consists at times of longish strings of syllables on a reciting—or rather, a haranguing—tone.
The rhythmic writing shows traces of the ars subtilior, the Avignon specialty, in its long chains of