Stylistic Layers in the English Mass Repertory c. 1400–1450

Abstract

That the English style of the early fifteenth century was crucial to the development of later music seems undeniable. The oft-cited, passages from the writings of Martin le Franc and Tinctoris, whatever their obscurities of detail, are unequivocal in their placing of the English in general and Dunstable in particular at the head of a completely new style, and to set against this, we have a large and varied corpus of music, especially music for the mass Ordinary, which amply testifies to the richness of the insular tradition. Not only was this music considered distinctive in its own day, but it has also proved readily recognizable to modern scholars despite the relative dearth of ascriptions. Even so, one feels that any suggestion that it is the English style as such which is so obvious remains surprisingly premature. The main reason for this is not hard to find; in fact, nearly all the most convincing evidence for assigning English authorship to anonymous works has turned out to be either essentially non-musical (e.g. the presence of a piece in an insular source, the use of a distinctively English variant of a given plainsong, the presence of telescoping in settings of the Credo, the use of characteristic notational procedures) or concerned with relatively superficial aspects of style (e.g. the use of a standard mensural scheme, the appearance of one or more of a handful of melodic clichés). Since there are clearly much easier ways of recognizing English music than from the niceties of musical style, efforts at more specifically stylistic analysis have lagged behind somewhat, despite the important work of such scholars as Brian Trowell and Margaret Bent. Certainly, it has not proved possible to tease out that arcane quality, the contenance angloise, which has sometimes been assumed to infuse the entire repertory from the Old Hall Manuscript onwards.

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