Tonight you will hear music from a single early Renaissance source, the Manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canonici Misc. 213, known as O to scholars, and Codex Canonici 213 to performers. It is one of the great surviving collections of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century secular polyphony, a treasure trove for musicologists and players in both its quantity and quality.
At around 1440, two or three Venetian scribes copied 326 compositions, both sacred and secular, in Latin, French, and Italian, covering the period 1380 to 1430. Many pieces are given dates and places of composition. The earlier works are in the late medieval French style called "ars subtilior," which, though it bristles with dissonances, complex syncopations, and abstruse literary references, was enormously popular throughout western Europe.
The pieces by Malbeque, Haspré, and Cordier in the second group on our program are fine later examples of this genre. These composers worked in Paris and at the court of Burgundy. While they are unlikely to have visited Italy, their works travelled with chapel singers and minstrels, whose organized itinerancy created an international acquaintance with the newest music, often within a very short time of its writing. The compilers of Canonici 213 concentrated particularly on musicians who were their contemporaries. These included some native Italians like Bartholomeo de Bononia and a great many Franco-Flemings.
The mass migration of singers from Paris, Cambrai, Bruges, and Liege southward began in the late fourteenth century, with the immigration of Johannes Ciconia of Liege to Padua. The Great Schism (1378–1417) and the collapse of the French court after the Battle of Agincourt (1415) made France an unpromising place for a career in music.
Musicians, especially singing clerics, seemed to travel along the mercantile arteries that connected commercial centers in the north, like Bruges, to those of Northern Italy, particularly Venice, Florence, and Lucca. In the generation following Ciconia's, other northern musicians spending time in Italy included Nicholas Grenon, Arnold and Hugo de Lantins, the lutenist Pietrobono of Brussels, and Guillaume Dufay.
It is interesting to note that minstrels, who commonly belonged to a different social class than clerical musicians, traveled a wide geographical circuit. They met yearly at Lenten international conferences, called "schools," where they traded and learned new repertoires.
Much networking was done at the minstrels' schools, with the result that minstrels often made contacts with new patrons. For instance, German fiddle and wind players were ubiquitous around 1400; they show up on the payrolls of every major musical court in Europe, from London to Avignon, Prague to Ferrara.
Because minstrels were such travelers, their lives differed markedly from those of other early Renaissance artists. In Italy in particular, localism in art prevailed. Few Italian visual artists travelled beyond their region before the later fifteenth century. In addition, even though minstrels' social status might be low, they were often exceedingly well paid in comparison to their counterparts in the realms of painting or sculpture.
Thus, internationalism was well established both among church musicians and minstrels by 1400. With this in mind, we can now tackle the question of why music in French, composed by Flemings, was so hospitably received by Northern Italians.
Various bits of internal evidence have satisfied scholars that Canonici 213 was compiled in or around Venice, for the delectation of the Venetian patriciate. In this most sophisticated courtly atmosphere, as in other intellectual centers in Northern Italy, French was still an important courtly language. Educated persons read French romances and collected French books. Canonici scribes were clearly comfortable with the language.
French polyphonic songs began to appear in Italy at the end of the fourteenth century, and from about 1417 to 1470 virtually overwhelmed native Italian musical genres, at least in written manuscripts. In actual performance, a very different story can be told.
The preponderance of French music in Italian manuscripts has a number of causes. First, the music was popular with important patrons—the Visconti, various branches of the Malatesta clan, and the Estes in Ferrara. Canonici 213 cannot be attached to any single patron, lay or clerical; rather it seems to be associated with Venetian humanist circles, who had a passion for copying, collecting, and circulating books of all kinds. In fact, Venetian scribes are responsible for the preservation of most early fifteenth-century polyphony. The Canonici copyists may also have been musicians themselves and close to the composers whose works they collected.
A few surviving literary sources give us some idea of how this repertoire was performed. In the middle ages, the most common venue for the performance of secular music was the banquet hall. This seems to have held true until the early sixteenth century, when monied music lovers began to design music rooms.
Banquets with musical accompaniment were enjoyed by aristocrats, wealthy merchant and professional families, churchmen (who relished courtly love songs as well as anyone), guildsmen, and confraternal societies. All were important patrons of polyphony in the early Renaissance.
In the early fifteenth century, the poet Simone Prudenzani (Il Saporetto) described an idealized series of musical entertainments that came between and after courses of food: singers and instrumentalists performed a wide variety of monophonic and polyphonic music, both old and new, foreign and domestic.
Solo virtuosi also performed during and after meals: in the Paradiso degli Alberti of Giovanni da Prato (1420), the organist Francesco Landini performs an Orphic function, charming human and avian listeners; in the Sforziade (Antonio Cornazano) the lute virtuoso Pietrobono sings epic stories of heroes and lovers, to which he improvises an accompaniment on the lute; the Florentine ambassador to Venice described in 1448 a feast during which young aristocrats sang French, Venetian, and Sicilian "cantilenas," "melodias," and "symphonias."
From these documents and others, we have learned that Northern Italians in the fifteenth century cultivated a number of musical genres, which were performed by professionals and amateurs. Certain professionals, like Landini, Pietrobono, and the fictional Solazzo of Il Saporetto, were held in the highest esteem by patrons and the poets who wrote about them.
We also have learned that a great deal of what people listened to at this time was never written down, because this music belonged to improvised, popular, or folk traditions.
Hints of these genres appear in Canonici 213. Dufay's "La belle se siet" contains fragments of an old trouvère narrative; Bartholomeo de Bononia's "Morir desio" is a giustiniana, a type of love lyric cultivated by the Venetian humanist Leonardo Giustianian, who, like Pietrobono, improvised accompaniments to his own singing. Dufay's incomparable "Virgine bella," with a text by Petrarch, is melodically related to several popular laude, or devotional songs.
Pride of place in Canonici 213 is given to Guillaume Dufay, the greatest composer of the early Renaissance. The manuscript contains fifty-one of his pieces, twenty-five of which are unique to Canonici 213.
Between the years 1414 and 1437, Dufay spent most of his time in Italy, singing for a number of secular and ecclesiastical patrons, meanwhile priestly orders and a degree on canon law. His early career was all too dependent on the vicissitudes of contemporary church politics.
Dufay may have made contact with his first important patron, Pandolfo Malatesta da Pesaro, at the Council of Constance, between 1414 and 1418, when Dufay was an adolescent singer in the entourage of the Bishop of Cambrai. That massive gathering of prelates ended the Great Schism and brought literally thousands of musicians, both clerks and minstrels, together for an extended period of time, changing the course of music history.
Among Dufay's earliest works are two motets and a brilliant ballade, "Resvellies vous et faites chiere lye," all written for Malatesta celebrations. The ballade honors the marriage of Carlo Malatesta da Pesaro to Vittoria di Lorenzo Calonnia in Rimini in 1423. It is in many ways reminiscent of the witty "ars subtilior" chansons written for Gaston Fébus in the 1390s, with its syncopations, tricky proportional subdivisions, instrumental flourishes, and the isolation of the aristocratic name in "cantus coronatus," that is, long notes.
The Malatestas may have been responsible for placing young Dufay in the papal choir of Martin V, which was a lucrative but hardly secure position. In 1431, Martin V was succeeded by the Venetian Gabriele Condulmer as Eugenius IV, a great friend to musicians but, unfortunately, an enemy of the Malatestas and of another old and important patron, Bishop Aleman of Cambrai.
While briefly in Rome, Dufay acquired his law degree and seems to have written relatively little. One surviving piece from this period is the ravishingly simple "Quel fronte signorille in paradiso."
After a two-year leave of absence at the court of the eccentric Amadeus VIII of Savoy, Dufay returned to the papal choir, at this time with Eugenius in Florence. In 1434, Florence was run by Cosimo de' Medici and peopled by the likes of Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Donatello, Brunelleschi, and Ghiberti.
Dufay appears to have fallen in love with the city. For the completion of the dome of Florence cathedral, he provided one of his most splendid motets, "Nuper Rosarum Flores" (1436). Two other fine pieces, "Salve Flos Tusce Gentis" and "Flos Florum" demonstrate Dufay's great affection for the city and its ladies.
After only ten months in Florence, the pope was again forced to move, this time to Bologna. It must have become increasingly clear to Dufay that an alliance with the papacy was at this time unsafe for him. Yet another patron, Amadeus VIII, now something of a monastic recluse, allied himself against Eugenius; he was elected Antipope by the Council of Basel in 1439. Meanwhile, Cambrai had come under the political control of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. The Duke may have been influential in hiring Dufay back to Cambrai, where he was fully resident by 1440.
It is clear from the works preserved in Canonici 213 that Italian Renaissance culture profoundly influenced Dufay's creative processes, as well as those of the innumerable northern musicians who followed him. Dufay's northern scholastic upbringing was tempered by the simplifying trends which dominated Italian poetry and music. Giustinian's verse forms, so popular in Venice and elsewhere, were put to good use by Dufay and his contemporaries and successors. Simple, eloquent melodies that derived from unwritten and popular traditions took the place of the sophisticated, brainy polyphony in vogue at the turn of the century.
Dufay, over and above his colleagues, was very much the humanist. His Latin was masterful; there is every reason to believe that he wrote his own motet texts, which are thoroughly classical, replete with mythological illusions and rhetorical ornament.
Brown, Howard M. Music in the Renaissance. Prentice Hall, 1976
———. "Guillaume Dufay and the Early Renaissance," Early Music 2, 1974
———. "On the Performance of Fifteenth-Century Chansons," Early Music 1, 1973
Burke, Peter. The Italian Renaissance. Princeton Univ. Pr., 1986
Cole, Bruce, The Renaissance Artist at Work (Harper and Row, 1983)
Fallows, David. Dufay. Vintage, 1988
———. "French as a Courtly Language in Fifteenth-Century Italy: The Musical Evidence," Renaissance Studies 3
———. "Specific Information on the Ensembles for Composed Polyphony," Studies in Performance, ed. by Boorman Lane, Frederic C. Venice, a Maritime Republic. Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr., 1973
Strohm, Reinhard. The Rise of European Music, 1380–1500. Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1993
Wilkins, Nigel. Music in the Age of Chaucer. Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1979
Codex Chantilly. Ensemble Organum. HMF 901252
Medieval Romantics. Gothic Voices. Hyperion CDA66463
Service of Venus and Mars. Gothic Voices. Hyperion CDA66238
Ciconia—Vocal and Instrumental Music. Ensemble PAN. New Albion NA 048CD
The Garden of Zephyrus. Gothic Voices. Hyperion CDA66144
Il Solazzo. The Newberry Consort. HMU907038
A Song for Francesca. Gothic Voices. Hyperion CDA66286
Hymns and Songs. Capella Antiqua. Elektra Nonesuch 71171-4
Masses. Ensemble Heidelberg. Bayer 100082
Missa Ecce Ancilla Domini. Ensemble Gilles Binchois. Virgin Classics CDC45050
Missa L'Homme Arme, Motets. Oxford Camerata. Naxos 8.553087
Missa L'Homme Arme, Motets. Hilliard Ensemble. EMI CDC 747628
Missa Se La Face Ay Pale. Ciaroscuro Ensemble. Nuova Era 6741
Missa Sine Nomine. Clemincic Consort. Musique D'Abord HMA 190939
Triste Plaisir. Ensemble Gilles Binchois. Virgin Classics Veritas VC7 59043-2
Le Banquet du Voeu. Ensemble Gilles Binchois. Virgin Classics Veritas VC7 50943-2
These expanded notes are made possible in part by a grant from the Illinois Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Illinois General Assembly.
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