John Dunstaple (or Dunstable) and his near-contemporary, …
Years: 1453 - 1453
John Dunstaple (or Dunstable) and his near-contemporary, Leonel Power, compose mass-ordinary cycles, their movements usually related by such musical themes as a common head motive or a cantus firmus (“fixed song”).
The cantus firmi, originally composed or preexisting melodies on which a polyphonic composition is based, include borrowed plainsong melodies and secular tunes.
The innovative Dunstaple bases his sensuous, constant harmony on interval of the third and the sixth.
One of the most famous composers active in the early fifteenth century, Dunstaple, also known as a mathematician and astrologer, is widely influential, not only in England but on the continent, especially in the developing style of the Burgundian School.
Very few manuscript sources of Dunstaple's works survived in England, as is similarly the case for other fifteenth century-composers.
Although England at this time is a center of musical activity, in some respects exceeding even the output of the Burgundian School, almost all of the music will be destroyed between 1536 and 1540 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII.
An influence on, and influenced by, the great composer Guillaume Dufay, Dunstaple dies at about seventy-three on December 24, 1453, leaving a body of work consisting chiefly of Latin church music, including motets and settings of sections of the Mass.
His few three-part chansons are distinguished by free melodic invention with smooth contrapuntal writing and consonant harmonies.
Dunstaple is probably the most influential English composer of all time, yet he remains an enigma: his complete works were not published until the quincentenary of his death in 1953, but even since then works have been added and subtracted from his oeuvre; we know very little of his life and nothing of his undoubted learning; we can only make an educated guess at most of the chronology of the small amount of music that has come down to us; and we understand little of his style—why he wrote as he did, what artistic or technical principles guided his composing, how his music was performed, or why it was so influential.
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Years: 1453 - 1453
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