The Golden Age of the European Polyphony
Laudantes Consort





medieval.org

Arsonor 002-2
Church of Vieusart, Brabant, Wallonia
febrero de 1999







Guillaume de MACHAUT
Messe Nostre-Dame
a 4

01 - Kyrie   [5:37]
02 - Gloria   [5:32]
03 - Credo   [7:46]
04 - Sanctus   [4:55]
05 - Agnus Dei   [4:10]


John DUNSTABLE
06 - Magnificat a 4   [10:02]


Guillaume DuFAY
Missa Se la face ay pale
a 5
07 - Kyrie   [4:42]
08 - Gloria   [10:23]
09 - Credo   [9:59]
10 - Sanctus   [7:27]
11 - Agnus Dei   [5:54]



Laudantes Consort
Guy Janssens

Liz Coleman, Véronique De Herde, Catherine Janssens, Charlotte Ripperger, Hans van den Broeck, Clotilde Van Dieren · altus
Jacques Antoine, Laurent Jäger · tenor
Mike Hill, Charles King · bassus




IMAGEN



The origins and development of early polyphony
   
Guillaume de Machaut (ca 1300-1377)
John Dunstable (ca 1390-1453)
Guillaume Dufay (ca 1400-1474)


To measure music

Despite the obvious genius of Perotinus, the real musical revolution was still to come, that which was to measure music, that is to say, to attribute to each note a length in time in simple proportion to all the other notes of the same piece. This technique of proportional writing was basic to Ars Nova which was to illuminate the works of the 14th century.
   
To measure music... Was it a coincidence if this new step in musical notation came about at a moment when, for the first time in history, the precise mensuration of time had become a social priority? Up to then, sundials, sandglasses and clepsyders had done the job. Indeed, a society based on slavery where work is free or on a feudal economy where work is measured by the accomplishment of specific chores or payments in kind, had no need whatever for clocks or watches.

On the other hand, the precise measurement of time is indigenous to a merchant society where individuals are free to dispose of their talents, work and know-how within precise limits, defined contractually and in return for adequate compensations. The public disposal of the precise measurement of time rapidly became an indispensable public service: the first public clock was installed in France, at Caen, in 1314: Machaut was some 14 years old.

His life span was to coincide with the exile of the popes in Avignon (1309-1377), which explains his relative freedom in relation to the Roman tradition. All the more so, after the road to innovation had been paved by the great musical theorist, Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361) who, in his Ars Nova Musicae, introduced the proportional subdivision of notes. The extraordinary melodic and rhythmic liberation which this new technique permitted was largely responsible for the rapid growth of the potentialities of musical composition, more particularly by the development of counterpoint.


Machaut, heir of the past and announcer of the future

Although Machaut did not invent this new technique, he made such original use of it that he is a key figure in the history of music, all at once heir of the past and precursor of things to come.

Born in or around Rheims in north-eastern France, at the turn of the century (± 1300), his education was so brilliant that, at the age of 25, he had already become secretary to the powerful John of Luxemburg, King of Bohemia, son of the Germanic Emperor Henry VII. He led a fastuous and adventurous life in the service of this great Prince and several of his successors. As he was also a great poet, he described in his famous Dits, a sort of narrative text, the great exploits of the princes whom he served.

He finally retired in 1357 in his home town of Reims, having received a well paid canonry as a reward for his many public services. Henceforth, he concentrated essentially on his musical and poetic production.

Although popular songs obviously had his preference - he wrote hundreds of them - his masterpiece is undoubtedly the Notre-Dame Mass, first polyphonic mass conceived as an homogeneous whole. Thus Machaut created a new genre which was to know a considerable development in the centuries to come. Thanks to the new technique of proportional writing, he succeeded in attributing a greater autonomy to each of the four voices used while increasing at the same time the rhythmic variety of the different sections of the work. Here was at last the musical masterpiece on the sound basis of which the future of polyphonic writing could now be developed to reach its climax in 16th century Renaissance.


John Dunstable, promotor of the english style on the continent

The English composer, John Dunstable (± 1390-1453) came to the Continent in the suite of the Duke of Bedford, brother of the illustrious King Henry V of England who, after defeating the French at Agincourt, promptly claimed the heritage of William of Normandy (the Conqueror) and the Aquitaine of the Plantagenets.

One can surmise that Dunstable stayed on in the territories occupied by the English during the twelve year period of Bedford’s regency (1422 to 1435). Nevertheless, he wielded a major musical influence in fostering “le goût anglais” - the English style - which, by systematically introducing the interval of the third into the fifth used almost exclusively on the Continent, confered to music a much greater harmonic plenitude, a sonority much more familiar to our modern ear.

Furthermore, this innovation which formed the triad (C-E-G) was to progressively increase musicians’ awareness of the importance of harmony, i.e. vertical writing, in contrast with the horizontal structure of polyphony. This proved an essential element to the future of musical development.


Guillaume Dufay, first modern composer

Dunstable had many followers. The greatest among them was undoubtedly Guillaume Dufay (pronounced Du-fa-ee), (± 1400-1474), born exactly one century after Machaut, in what is today the Belgian province of Hainaut.

At that time, however, this region was part of the Dukedom of Burgundy which covered vast territories extending from Friseland in the north of Holland, through most of modern day Belgium, Alsace, Lorraine, Picardy, Cambrésis, Franche-Comté and Burgundy itself. Its capital was Dijon where a fastuous and brilliant court attracted the finest artists of the times.

By its geographical situation, the Dukedom of Philippe the Good (1396-1467) was a true microcosm of Europe, open to all influences: from Flanders to the north, Italy to the south, the German states of the Saint Empire to the east and France and England to the west.

If Dufay was indebted to Dunstable for his legacy of the English third, he did not hesitate to go much further: he completed the Englishman’s harmony, most of whose works are written for 3 voices, by the systematic use of a fourth voice and sometimes even a fifth. The sonority thus created is literally unheard of. This is the case of one of the four late masses composed by Dufay which we have recorded here Se la face ay pale. Written on the theme of a popular song, it belongs to the period during which, after having extensively travelled through Europe, including a long stay at the Pontifical Chapel (1428-1433), Dufay retired definitively in Cambrai in 1445 to concentrate on his musical production.

Thus Dufay is the first composer in history whose music sounds “modern” to our ears; that is to say, music on much the same harmonic principles that were to be used later by the great classical composers such as Bach, Haydn and Mozart: the archaisms of Middle Age music are totally abandoned and the technique used is far more supple, fluid and free. Compared to a certain harshness in Machaut, a new mellowness pervades this music without in any way hampering its expressive force. After the great collective tragedies experienced during the 14th century - wars, plagues and famines - the 15th century brought the blossoming of a renaissance based on a new sense of values, more personal and certainly more adapted to the evolution of the times. Much like in ancient Greece, man was once more becoming the measure of all things.

Musically, the works of Dufay were part of this cultural heritage. They constituted the harmonic ground on which the following generation of composers were to build their own sonorous cathedrals.

Last but not least, there is yet another characteristic of Dufay’s works which must be underlined. He is probably the first composer - or at least the greatest - who was genuinely preoccupied by a fundamental formal principle essential to all true artistic endeavors: the problem of the global unity of a work of art and, more specially, of works as vast as the holy mass and, additionally, made up of several different pieces.

Up to that time, most compositions were of small dimensions in which any unifying element - such as a Gregorian theme or a rhythmical contour - did not have the scope to engender monotony. Even in the case of the Machaut mass, we have 5 distinct parts (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) which are assembled according to the logic of the text of the ordinary and not in purely musical terms.

This is where Dufay innovates: in his mature masses and more particularly in the work recorded here, he attempts to devise a strictly musical unity between the different sections. This is why he is considered as the creator of the “cyclical mass”, a work whose different parts are unified by the use of a recurring musical theme which can be a sequence of Gregorian chant or even an element foreign to the traditional liturgy such as, for example, a popular song.

Here the real sacrilege is less the incorporation of popular music into liturgic works - although not uncommon at the time - than the unbelievable presumption, in the case of a true Christian, to impose his personal conception of a formal unity to works whose coherence had, up to then, depended on spiritual values.

To this extent, one can conclude that the composer’s quest for formal unity was a tangible manifestation of the growing autonomy of the individual creator with respect to the divine Creator. Henceforth and to this day, the principle of formal unity was to be paramount to all works of art, whether they be plastic, literary or musical.


The works recorded

The Notre-Dame Mass is a major work in the history of music: not only because it is innovative, but at the same time because it is a true masterpiece.

Innovative because for the first time it assembled in a coherent whole the five parts of the ordinary mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei), sections which up to then had been used separately according to the logical unfolding of the sacred ceremonials. In uniting the different parts, Machaut wrested these pieces from their purely functional role to create an authentic work of art which, by its very length, transcended the immediate needs of the religious services. Thus the notion of art for art’s sake was beginning to take root, a distinctive characteristic of the development of Western culture.

If the Gloria and Credo remain essentially homophonic – all four voices singing simultaneously the same syllables of the same text – with the exception of the two remarkable closing Amens which are treated in a lavish polyphonic style with an astounding rhythmic diversity – the other parts – and more specially the magnificent opening Kyrie – are more in the spirit of what we have come to consider as the traditional polyphonic style – without forgetting the essential fact that, here, it is Machaut who is forging single-handed the tradition that will blossom in the following centuries.

One last remark: besides the assembling of the five parts of the mass, Machaut did not endeavour to go further in the process of unification, be it understood that his very personal and recognisable style could not but serve this purpose as well.

Dunstable’s Magnificat is written for three voices like most of his other works. If the music produced seems somewhat more sonorous, it is simply due to the systematic use of the English thirds and sixths which, in France at that time, were considered as dissonances (or imperfect consonances).

From a musical point of view, this work constitutes a welcome transition to the Mass for four voices by Guillaume Dufay.

This work can be considered as the second great masterpiece of the Western polyphonic era. Having greatly benefited from Dunstable’s innovations, Dufay set about integrating the harmonic audacities of the English style in his later masses and, more particularly in his Se la face ay pale, by the introduction of the new chords and the general use of four voices.

Se la face ay pale was composed on a homonymous profane song by Dufay himself which he uses throughout the different parts as a unifying theme.

This example of one of the first “cyclical” masses of western music constitutes a work of an unprecedented sonorous splendour. The obvious risk of monotony through the use of the same theme is artfully avoided by subtle variations and transformations of this theme, of its rhythmic configuration, of its harmonic texture and of its vocal presentation. This is music of the highest quality of inspiration.

Thus it is no surprise that Dufay’s works were to constitute the firm harmonic foundation on which all the following composers were to find their own musical inspiration.