This, it is worth noting parenthetically, is only the first of many times that we will see music speaking
the unspeakable and naming the unnameable, in many contexts of constraint. Its unique if largely unsung
power to subvert the texts and occasions it adorns has already been given occasional notice in these
pages, largely through the words of churchmen (Saint Augustine, Pope John XXII) who were sensitive to
its potentially treacherous allure. In the case of the English declamation motet, the secret the music
betrayed was as open a secret as could be.
One can well imagine the kind of impression music as voluptuous as this must have made on
continental musicians when they finally had an opportunity to hear it. It opened up a whole new world of
musical expressivity, and gaining access to it became item number one on the continental musical agenda.
The first thing continental musicians must have noticed about the “English guise” was its luxuriant
saturation with full triads, most conspicuous of all when they came in chains. Those chains, we recall,
were a standard feature of English descant; now, in Dunstable’s work they were absorbed into a more
varied and subtly controlled compositional technique.
The only kind of parallelism Dunstable allowed was the kind that avoided perfect consonances in
favor of the more mellifluous, more characteristically English imperfect ones. Thus, for example, the
phrases assimilata est palme (“like the palm tree”) and ubera mea (“my breasts”) are made to stand out
by the use of an exhaustive parallel motion of imperfect consonances, the contratenor shadowing the tenor
at the third, the cantus at the sixth, as in the English descant setting of the Beata viscera Communion motet
sampled in Ex. 11-9. And that is why Beata viscera has become the most famous piece of fourteenth-
century English descant. It fortuitously foreshadowed the fifteenth-century pieces that marked an epoch in
European music history, and has therefore been singled out in retrospect as “typical,” which it was not.
The continental response to this exotic euphony came in surprisingly concrete form. Beginning in the
1420 s—right on schedule, as it were, following the Council of Constance and coinciding with the Duke
of Bedford’s regency in France—pieces like the one in Ex. 11-20 turn up in profusion. Like Beata
viscera, it is a Communion antiphon, based on a gregorian chant (Ex. 11-20a). It is notated as a “duo” (a
piece “for two”), but a very curious one (Ex. 11-20b). The only intervals employed are octaves and
sixths, with the octaves at the beginnings and ends of phrases and the sixths dominating in the middles,
moving in parallel.
Now sixths are strange intervals for music in the “mainstream” theoretical tradition; while nominally