Research Paper On John Dunstable

John Dunstable was an English Composer that had a strong influence on English classical music. Experts have pieced together the facts to fill in the missing information about his life, it’s hard to even determine his exact birth date. Much of his biographical information is skeptical due to the lack of evidence. His earliest works was around 1420s so his birth must have been born around 1390s. He was believed to have died on December 24, 1453 in London, England.

Music wasn’t really the biggest career choice during Dunstable’s life. Most musicians during this time made their living as clergy in the church because music was considered to be a hobby or an interest. Not only was Dunstable a musician, he was also a very educated man. Dunstable studied

mathematics and astrology. It’s unsure on how he got his education, some people say he got his education while he was serving for the Duke of Bedford. There was quite of bit of evidence that proves Dunstable was in the service to the Duke of Bedford, on top of that Dunstable was given land in Normandy by the Duke. John was also in the royal service to the fourth son of Henry IV and his brother.
Dunstable was one of the most famous influential composers of his time.

He was known for his unique polyphonic style which he influenced not only in England but around the whole continent. Although his music was a big influence to the people, it wasn’t really popular for a long time. Historians and people that work closely with music history, faced many problems when trying to recover his music. Many of his pieces and manuscripts had been destroyed during the Reformation period. The reformation was “A 16th-century movement in Western Europe that aimed at reforming some doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church and resulted in the establishment of the Protestant churches” (isorhythmic). Due to his pieces being destroyed, they had to be recovered from different outside countries that he visited earlier around Italy and the Southern Alps. This explains why Dunstable’s music took a long time for people to actually hear his

music.
He spend most of his life composing pieces.

But of all the work he created only about fifty of his things survived. Which included two complete masses, three sets of connected mass sections, fourteen individual mass sections, twelve complete isorhythmic motets- (including the famous one which combines the hymn Veni creator spiritus and the sequence Veni sancte spiritus), and twenty-seven separate settings of various liturgical texts, including three Magnificent and seven settings of Marian antiphons, such as Alma redemptoris Mater and Salve Regina, Mater misericordiae. (Encyclopedia)

Dunstable was known for introducing many things into the English music. He was one of the first to compose in a mass with a single melody as cantus firmus. A great example of this style was seen in his famous piece “Messa Rex Seculorum”. This particular piece presents a single cantus firmus melody in the tenor voice in each mass movement, according to the isorhythmic motet. An isorhythmic motet “consists of a single rhythmic phrase pattern repeated, usually in the tenor, throughout the composition." (isorhythmic)

In order to get to know Dunstable’s traits and characters, you take a look at his motet,

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“Regina caeli laetare”. This piece is mostly homorhythmic and its written in a Latin text. Dunstable uses his common style in the way that no two measures in successions have the same rhythm and the melodies move mostly by a step or steps mixed with thirds, making it a triad. The triple meter was especially attractive to the medieval mind as it symbolizes The Trinity. Even though Dunstable was not a member of the clergy he was a very religious man as he did spend a lot of his time in monasteries.
Throughout the semester we learned about many different types of classical music and many of them can be compared to Dunstable’s style. His influence in the renaissance music was widely seen in many different songs. The idea of using the cantus firmus as the base foundation was starting to be seen more commonly in musical pieces. Composers such as Guillaume Du Fay used chants or sometimes popular songs as the basis for the mass. This technique was used to unify the movements in the mass by providing a fixed element that can be embellished.
You can really see that John Dunstable was overall, one of the most influential composers of early music. If not for his work, some of the more historically important composers of which came later in time would not have been writing nearly the same material that he did. Due to the work Dunstable did, composers such as Guillaume Dufay and Gilles Binchois got their start in writing in the direction that he did. It allowed for later composers to take Dunstable's principles and expand even further leading musical history to where it is now. The fact that so few of Dunstable's pieces were actually recovered really makes you wonder what else he had written that didn't survive the test of time.