Solomon, for which a long tradition of allegorical interpretation existed, now came into their own as
votive antiphons.
Nevertheless, the Song of Songs remains an erotic poem, and its surface meaning no doubt
conditioned the exceedingly sensuous settings its verses received from English composers, starting with
the “Old Hall” generation and, through Dunstable and his contemporaries, eventually infiltrating the
continent. A new style of discant setting emerged out of these Song of Songs antiphons; it is widely known
in the scholarly literature as the “declamation motet,” but a better name would be “cantilena motet”
because of its similarity to the texture of the continental courtly chanson. Its seductive sweetness is the
result of a control of dissonance so extreme as to remind Manfred Bukofzer, the historian who christened
the new genre, of a “purge.”^7 The homorhythmic texture of the old conductus is adapted in them to the
actual rhythms of spoken language rather than to isochrony or to any preconceived metrical scheme. But
the naturalistic declamation is not pervasive; rather it is used selectively to spotlight key affect-laden
words and phrases, chiefly terms of endearment and symbols of feminine sexuality.
In Quam pulchra es there are from beginning to end only nine dissonant notes (circled in Ex. 11-19),
and they all conform to the highly regulated dissonance treatment still codified in academic rules of
counterpoint. (In other words, they can be named and classified.) There is an “incomplete neighbor” or
“escape tone” on pulchra; there are unaccented passing tones on ut and eburnea; there is an accented
passing tone on videamus, and the reare four 7–6 suspensions at various cadences. Such a refining-out of
dissonance requires effort. It is indeed conspicuous, and therefore expressive, reminding us that we
normally take for granted a much higher level of dissonance as the norm.
No less expressive is the declamation. The words singled out for naturalistic setting in strict
homorhythm include carissima (“dearest”), collum tuum (“your neck,” perhaps symbolic as well as
erotic), and ubera (“breasts”), the latter singled out twice, once by the male lover and another time, at the
very end, by the female. Most dramatically set of all is the female lover’s command—Veni dilecte mi
(“Come, my beloved”)—set off not only by homorhythm and by long note values but also by time-stopping
fermatas. Whatever the allegorical significance of the Song of Songs verses within the Marian liturgy, the
music achieves its telling expressive potency by literally, if tacitly, “telling”—that is, unmasking the
allegory.
EX. 11-19 John Dunstable, Quam pulchra es