AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Medieval Era

c. 1390–1453 English composer Dunstaple was the best known of an influential group of English composers which included Power. To judge by the number of his works in continental manuscripts, he was probably one of the most important composers of his day in Europe, although he may not have travelled particularly widely. He wrote early Mass cycles, including ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Medieval Era

fast-moving upper voices and slower rhythm in the lower parts, to a smoother and more homogeneous rhythmic and melodic texture. His response to the music of his older contemporary Dunstaple is clear in a number of ways: for example, in his interest in fauxbourdon, which can be related to the English discant style, as well as in ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Medieval Era

d. 1445 English composer Power was a contemporary of Dunstaple and, although rather less famous than him, was nonetheless an important figure in a period when English music was extremely influential. The majority of his works are movements from the Mass Ordinary. He broke new ground in the composition of Mass cycles, linking the movements of his Mass ...

• Classical
• Renaissance

One of the most famous exponents of this was Johannes Tinctoris (1430–after 1511), who, in his writings, claimed that music had been reborn in the works of John Dunstaple (c. 1390–1453) and his followers around 1440. Also central to Renaissance thinking about music was a strong belief in the power of music to move the passions of its listeners ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Medieval Era

Winchester Troper: one of the earliest sources of polyphony, an English manuscript dating from the early eleventh century and originally used in Winchester; now in Cambridge. Montpellier Codex: an important source of motets, compiled during the thirteenth century; now in the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Montpellier. Roman de Fauvel: a satirical poem about the church written in the early fourteenth ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Medieval Era

The term contenance angloise (‘English manner’), was first coined by the poet Martin Le Franc in his poem ‘Le Champion des Dames’ (c. 1440–42), in which he described new French music and implied that Du Fay and Binchois had ‘taken on the contenance angloise and followed Dunstaple’. Although the poet did not define the term, the text immediately before this ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Medieval Era

not noticeably influence many later composers, although they must certainly have been aware of it. Around the beginning of the fifteenth century the focus shifted to England, where Dunstaple and his contemporaries were composing Masses (mostly in three voices) based on a cantus firmus in the tenor. The most influential of these compositions was the anonymous Missa Caput. Based ...