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John Dunstable and the Music of his Time
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
It is not the first time that your Association offers an opportunity to discuss the importance of John Dunstable in the history of music. I only recall the paper read by my esteemed colleague Professor Van den Borren who had the honour of speaking to you about The Genius of Dunstable seventeen years ago. Moreover, I am convinced that this paper will not be the last one on the same subject; for Dunstable is a figure who has a fascination which the contemporaries of the composer must already have felt more than we do to-day. The fame of Dunstable spread over the whole cultured world in a short time as the theorists of the fifteenth century give evidence and as the places of origin of the manuscripts which contain Dunstable's compositions prove. These sources were written in England, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Germany and even Spain. And still, in the sixteenth century when all preceding composers lived in the shadow of such masters as Okeghem and Josquin, Dunstable figures in public opinion as a mythical ancestor of music art, and is regarded even as the “inventor of counterpoint.” Though it is evident that this legend was nothing but a confusion it was seriously maintained by modern writers. It is true, Johannes Tinctoris, the greatest theorist about 1480, tells us in the introduction of his Ars Contrapuncti (1477) that the music of the last forty years was more perfect than all preceding music, and that only that music which was written by most excellent musicians as Dunstable, Dufay and Okeghem really was worth hearing. A Spanish monk goes so far as to add to Tinctoris's statement his own conviction that the music of these three masters was not only the best of that time but, also, not surpassable in the future.
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- Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1938
References
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