syncopes and its little rashes of polyrhythm.
The tonality of the whole is unabashedly disunified in the old French manner, recalling the In seculum
motets encountered in chapter 7 whose wayward, unpredictable cadence structure was seen as a plus, as
an aspect of variety (discordia concors). The three pan-isorhythmic taleae in Tapissier’s motet all begin
with fanfares on C, but make their respective cadences on F, C, and G. And then, just as in the In seculum
motets, a single note evidently left over in the tenor’s unidentified color comes out of the blue and forces
a final chord on F that in no sense resolves the harmony but confuses it—pleasurably (or at least
impressively) for its original listeners, one must assume, if not for us. Ex. 11-17 shows the last talea and
its surprise ending.
The only fair comparison with Tapissier’s motet would be another isorhythmic motet. Although he
looms in traditional historiography (thanks to Le Franc and Tinctoris, among others) as a stylistic divider,
Dunstable was at least as much a continuer and an adapter of traditional genres. He wrote a considerable
number of isorhythmic motets, of which a dozen or so survive; indeed he was particularly expert in this
loftiest of genres, as one might fairly expect “an astrologian, a mathematician, a musitian, and what not” to
be. Like all his contemporaries, Dunstable was still brought up musically in the spirit of the quadrivium.
But the content with which he invested the old forms—the new wine, as the old metaphor has it, that he
poured into the old bottles—was indeed something different.
His motet Salve scema/Salve salus, in honor of St. Katharine (Ex. 11-18), is every bit as rigorous in
its structural design as Tapissier’s. The tenor and contratenor both have strictly maintained colores that
sustain a triple cursus. Each color, moreover, supports a double cursus of a talea that is maintained
strictly in the lower parts from beginning to end, for a total of six statements. With each repetition of the
color, the talea undergoes a change in mensuration that increases its speed: the second color runs at 112
times the speed of the first, and the third is double the speed of the first. Moreover, the texted parts are
pan-isorhythmic within a color statement of the lower parts: that is to say, whenever the lower parts
repeat their talea at a given speed, the upper parts repeat their talea, too (compare mm. 145–62 with 163–
end). The difference is that the lower parts never change their talea while the upper parts do so twice, as
indicated.
Yet if the structure of Dunstable’s motet is traditional, its sound is worlds away (well, at least a
channel away) from Tapissier’s, thoroughly informed by sonorities we have learned to associate with
English descant: uniform F-major tonality and euphonious triadic harmony, with thirds enjoying full rights
(except in final chords) as consonances. When in each statement of their color the tenor and contratenor
enter after the introitus, we even get a deliberate whiff of what old Giraldus Cambrensis had called the
“sweet softness of B-flat” (what we would call “plagal harmony”). Most of all, Dunstable’s music
displays an unprecedentedly smooth technique of part writing, its dissonances consistently subordinated
to consonances in ways that begin to approximate the rules of dissonance treatment still taught in
counterpoint class and analyzed in harmony class (passing tones, neighbors, and so on). Ex. 11-18
contains the last color statement. Note the double cursus of the pan-isorhythmic talea: after the eighteenth
measure all the rhythms in all the parts repeat exactly.
EX. 11-17 Jean de Noyers (Tapissier), Eya dulcis/Vale placens, mm. 77–115