Guillaume Du Fay: The Life and Works 1107166152, 9781107166158

Table of contents :
FM
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Music Examples
Tables
Acknowledgments
The Organization of the Cathedral of Cambrai
A Note on Currency
Abbreviations
1. The Life
Prologue
Origins and First Years (1397–1414)
The Beginnings of a Musician’s Career (1414–1428)
The Papal Chapel and the Court of Savoy (1428–1439)
At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)
The Courtier (1450–1458)
The Last Years (1458–1474)
Epilogue: Historical Aftermath
2. The Works
Guillermus Du Fay, Musicus
The Isorhythmic and Mensuration Motets
Cantilena, Chant Paraphrase, and New-Style Motets
Music for the Office
Ordinary of the Mass Movements
The Mass Propers
The Early Masses
The Late Masses
The Songs
Appendices
Appendix 1 Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century
Appendix 2 The Magistri puerorum of Cambrai in the Fifteenth Century
Appendix 3 Grammar Teachers and Rectores scholarum Connected to the Cathedral of Cambrai, 1400–1500
Appendix 4 Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Guillaume Du Fay

This volume explores the work of one of medieval music’s most important figures, and in so doing presents an extended panorama of musical life in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. Guillaume Du Fay rose from obscure beginnings to become the most significant composer of the fifteenth century, a man courted by kings and popes, and this study of his life and career provides a detailed examination of his entire output, including a number of newly discovered works. As well as offering musical analysis, this volume investigates his close association with the cathedral of Cambrai, and explores how, at a time when music was becoming increasingly professionalised, Du Fay forged his own identity as ‘a composer’. This detailed biography will be highly valuable for those interested in the history of medieval and church music, as well as for scholars of Du Fay’s musical legacy. alejandro enrique planchart wide-ranging and distinguished career as composer, conductor, and scholar began in Caracas, Venezuela and took him via Yale and Harvard to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is now Emeritus Professor. In 1963 he founded an early music ensemble, Cappella Cordina, with whom he issued a pioneering series of recordings of medieval and Renaissance music. His book The Repertory of Tropes at Winchester won the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities in 1979. In 2006 he received the Howard Mayer Brown Award from Early Music America, and in 2013 he received the Medal of the City of Tours. He was also winner, in 2009, of the Arion Prize from the Cambridge Society for Early Music, for his work on Guillaume Du Fay, of which this book is the long-awaited summation.

Guillaume Du Fay The Life and Works Volume I: The Life Volume II: The Works

alejandro enrique planchart University of California, Santa Barbara

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107166158 DOI: 10.1017/9781316694299 © Alejandro Enrique Planchart 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Names: Planchart, Alejandro Enrique, author. Title: Guillaume Du Fay : the life and works / by Alejandro Enrique Planchart. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom : New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017030749| ISBN 9781107166158 (set) | ISBN 9781107166004 (vol. I) | ISBN 9781107166042 (vol II) Subjects: LCSH: Dufay, Guillaume, 1397–1474. | Composers – Biography. | Music – 15th century – History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML410.D83 P53 2017 | DDC 780.92 [B]–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030749 ISBN – 2 Volume Set 978-1-107-16615-8 Hardback ISBN – Volume I Hardback 978-1-107-16600-4 ISBN – Volume II Hardback 978-1-107-16604-2 Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To Margaret Bent and Richard Sherr

Contents

List of Figures List of Music Examples List of Tables Acknowledgments The Organization of the Cathedral of Cambrai A Note on Currency List of Abbreviations

volume i.

page ix x xiii xv xviii xx xxi

the life

Prologue

3

1. Origins and First Years (1397–1414)

19

2. The Beginnings of a Musician’s Career (1414–1428)

48

3. The Papal Chapel and the Court of Savoy (1428–1439)

98

4. At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

157

5. The Courtier (1450–1458)

231

6. The Last Years (1458–1474)

265

7. Epilogue: Historical Aftermath

315

vii

viii

Contents

volume ii.

the works

8. Guillermus Du Fay, Musicus

331

9. The Isorhythmic and Mensuration Motets

351

10. Cantilena, Chant Paraphrase, and New-Style Motets

392

11. Music for the Office

420

12. Ordinary of the Mass Movements

465

13. The Mass Propers

501

14. The Early Masses

550

15. The Late Masses

583

16. The Songs

628

Appendices 1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century 2. The Magistri puerorum of Cambrai in the Fifteenth Century 3. Grammar Teachers and Rectores scholarum Connected to the Cathedral of Cambrai, 1400–1500 4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution Bibliography Index

689 784 792 798 857 909

Figures

2.1 The church of St-Géry. Reproduced by permission of the Musée de Cambrai. page 50 3.1 Letter of Eugenius IV appointing Du Fay as canon of Cambrai (opening). Reproduced by permission of the Archivio Segreto Vaticano. 110 3.2 Reconstruction of the original layout of Ecclesiae militantis. Reproduced by permission of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Librai e Archivistici di Trento. 119 4.1 Rota collationis, 15 October 1455, CBM 1059, fol. 170r. Reproduced by permission of the Médiathèque Municipale of Cambrai. 160 4.2 Floor plan of the Cathedral with the site of Du Fay’s house (after Pastoor). 164 4.3 Plan of the quarter of the cathedral and its quarter (after Pastoor). 165 4.4 The Cathedral of Cambrai, engraving (after Crystin, Les délices des Pays-Bas). 166 4.5 The cathedral of Cambrai ca. 1677 by H. Desicy (after van der Meulen, from Bègne, Histoire de Notre-Dame de Grâce). 167 4.6 Reconstruction of the cathedral’s quarter in the seventeenth century. Reproduced by permission of the Musée de Cambrai. 168 4.7 Floor plan of Du Fay’s house in the eighteenth century. Reproduced by permission of the Archives Départementales du Nord. 186 4.8 Second cellar underneath Du Fay’s house in 2008. Photo: author. 187 6.1 Du Fay’s funeral monument in 1981. Photo: author. 300 6.2 Du Fay’s funeral monument in 1990. Photo: author. 301 6.3 Du Fay’s face in the funeral monument in 1981. Photo: author. 302 6.4 Du Fay’s face in the funeral monument in 1990. Photo: author. 303 6.5 Du Fay’s face in 1982. Photo: author. 303 15.1 Lille, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 599 (opening 30 of second foliation). Fol. 30v shows the start of second Vespers of the Visitation of the Virgin. Photo author. 604

ix

Music Examples

5.1 9.1 9.2 9.3 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 11.8 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6 12.7 12.8 13.1 13.2

x

13.3 13.4

Antiphon O quanta est exsultatio (Paris, BnF lat. 811, fol. 13r) page 253 Tenors of Ecclesiae militantis (up to the Amen) 363 End of the Gloria of the Missa Caput 376 Anonymous (Benoit Sirede?), Elizabeth Zachariae (mm. 55–57) 388 Alma redemptoris mater 1 (mm. 19–37) 396 Flos florum (mm. 1–15) 398 Mirandas parit haec urbs (mm. 1–19) 405 Inclita stella maris (mm. 55–72) 406 Salve regina misericordiae (mm. 1–12) 414 Conditor alme siderum (stanzas 1–2) 431 Jesu Corona virginum (mm. 32–50 of CS 15 version) 438 Magnificat quinti toni (mm. 6–13 and 36–44) 444 Plainsong response to Du Fay’s Benedicamus Domino 2 449 Benedicamus Domino 2 (mm. 14–23) 449 Si quaeris miracula (mm. 154–61 and 222–29) 457 Antiphon Tenebrae diffugiunt 463 Responsory Omnipotens Dominus 463 Sanctus, OO Planchart 5/2 (mm. 47–52) 473 Gloria, OO Planchart 5/1 (mm. 53–62) 475 Credo, OO Planchart 5/5 (mm. 113–17) 478 Chant paraphrase in Kyrie 1 488 Contrapuntal structure of Kyrie 1 489 Kyrie 1, first invocation 489 Sanctus, OO Planchart 5/7 (mm. 1–4 and 120–24) 494 Gloria 10, beginning 498 Veni Sancte Spiritus, beginning 520 Isti sunt duae olivae, start of verses 4 and 5 (plainsong and cantus) 521 Introit antiphon, Benedicta sit 527 Introit, Nos autem gloriari, Psalm tone 530

List of music examples

13.5 Gradual Benedictus es (end) 13.6 Gradual for the Recollectio (version of Aosta 35) 14.1 Missa sine nomine, head motive, Kyrie and Sanctus, Resvelliés vous (beginning) 14.2 Missa sine nomine, Gloria, beginning, and Qui sedes 14.3 Lantins–Du Fay, Gloria–Credo 1, beginning of the Credo 14.4 Missa sine nomine, hocket sections 14.5 Missa sine nomine: Et ascendit 14.6 Plainsong, Alleluia V. Ascendit Deus 14.7 Communion, Vos qui secuti 14.8 Ligatures in the Gloria of the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua and St. Francis 14.9 Mass for St. Anthony of Padua and St. Francis, Credo, mm. 236–50 14.10 Hanns Wiser’s alternative reading of the Credo (mm. 235–50) 15.1 Tenor of the Gloria and Credo of the Missa Se la face ay pale 15.2 Isomelic passages in the Gloria and the Credo of the Missa Se la face ay pale 15.3 Head motto of the English and Ockeghem Missae Caput 15.4 Opening of the cantus in the Missa se la face ay pale and the two Missae Caput 15.5 Opening motives of the Missa L’homme armé 15.6 Tenor of the Gloria and the Credo of the Missa L’homme armé 15.7 Missa L’homme armé, Sanctus (mm. 89–95) 15.8 Missa L’homme armé, Credo (mm. 85–95) 15.9 Missa Ecce ancilla – Beata es Maria, Credo, corresponding passages 15.10 Opening motto of the Missa Ave regina caelorum 15.11 Missa Ave regina caelorum, Kyrie 2 as a duo 15.12 Missa Ave regina caelorum, Credo, polymetric section 15.13 Written pitch field in the Missa Ave regina caelorum 16.1 Dona gentile (mm. 20–24) 16.2 La belle se siet (mm. 13–21) 16.3 Se la face ay pale (mm. 12–18) 16.4 Helas, mon dueil, opening 16.5 De ma haulte et bonne aventure 16.6 Je ne puis plus

531 547 555 556 559 560 561 566 574 577 581 581 587 590 591 591 596 598 601 602 608 611 616 621 621 634 637 647 652 655 659

xi

xii

List of music examples

16.7 16.8 16.9 16.10 16.11 16.12

Belle plaisant Helas et quant vous veray? Quel fronte signorille Craindre vous vueil Le serviteur hault guerdoné (start of the B section) Les douleurs (beginning)

671 673 675 676 681 682

Tables

2.1 Singers of John XXIII at the Council of Constance (November 1414) page 57 2.2 First group of singers in the chapel of Pope Martin V (December 1417) 58 2.3 The Du Fay–Zachara–Loqueville Mass in Bologna Q15 60 2.4 Singers in Du Fay’s He compaignons and the chapel of Malatesta di Pandolfo 71 2.5 Singers in the chapel of Alfonso Carrillo in Bologna (1420–1424) 83 4.1 The common Mass for the Holy Ghost in CBM 158 174 4.2 The common Mass for the Virgin in CBM 158 179 4.3 Reconstruction of the contents of Du Fay’s Franciscan manuscript 220 5.1 Singers and musicians of the chapel of Savoy (1450–1460) 243 5.2 Continental or possibly Continental four-voice cantus-firmus Masses from before 1460 258 6.1 Masters of the small vicars at Cambrai in the fifteenth century 270 7.1 Copying of polyphony at Cambrai (1480–1512) 316 9.1 Du Fay’s isorhythmic and mensuration motets 355 10.1 Du Fay’s cantilena, chant paraphrase, and new-style motets 393 11.1 Du Fay’s hymns 422 11.2 Du Fay’s magnificats 440 11.3 Du Fay’s antiphons and responsory for Vespers 450 11.4 Du Fay’s Vespers for St. Anthony and St. Francis 451 11.5 The Office of the Recollectio festorum 461 12.1 Du Fay’s Ordinary movements, pairs, and trios 469 12.2 The Kyrie melodies and their liturgical assignations in the papal tradition 487 12.3 Liturgical assignment of the Gloria melodies in the papal tradition 491 13.1 Polyphonic settings of the proprium missae by Du Fay 507 xiii

xiv

List of tables

13.2 13.3 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4 15.1 15.2 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 16.5

Mensurations in the proper cycles Plainsong propers by Du Fay and their context Mass Ordinary and plenary cycles by Du Fay Sources of the Missa sine nomine Transmission of the Missa Sancti Iacobi Propers of the Apostles Propers for St. Anthony Abbot in Tr 88 and Tr 89 Formularies for St. Anthony Abbot in Cambrai and Dijon Italian songs with ascriptions to Du Fay Ballades with ascriptions to Du Fay Du Fay’s virelais and bergerettes Du Fay’s hybrid and combinative chansons Du Fay’s rondeaux

533 543 553 554 563 564 623 624 630 635 649 657 667

Acknowledgments

This is not a book I ever actually planned on writing. Its genesis owes a great deal to the charm and power of persuasion of the late Eric van Tassel, who in 1974 or thereabouts talked me into offering to write a book about Du Fay for Cambridge. At the time I told him that I believed that to write such a book properly could take twenty years, and yet he managed to convince me to make a foolish promise to Cambridge for a book in two or three years. Even in those comments I was absolutely unrealistic. It took me thirtyfive years to finish the book, and I am still not entirely sure that I have covered the ground in a way that remotely does justice to Du Fay and his music. By my own informal count it involved looking page by page into some fourteen million pages of documents, and every surviving manuscript with a work by Du Fay or possibly by Du Fay that came along. Still the length of time it took is mostly a function of my own lack of discipline, but also of the hard facts of my academic career. From 1976, when I started at the University of California, until my retirement in 2002, my teaching duties, except for an isolated term here and there, involved teaching the music of the Middle Ages up to ca. 1400, the music of the twentieth century, and toward my last years at the university, the music of the Classical era, but not the music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I also had under my charge a motet choir, a medieval ensemble, and a Baroque orchestra, and although I did perform a great deal of music of the fifteenth century, including all of Du Fay’s music over the years, I believe I owed it to my students in these ensembles to expose them to the performance of music from Beneventan and Gregorian chant to the music of Mozart and Haydn, with everything in between, so that they would go, after four or six years in these ensembles, with a living knowledge of the traditions of Western music from ca. 900 to 1800. Still, the joy of discovery, putting together the bits and pieces that what Bonnie Blackburn and Laurie Stras call “the Archive Angel” put on my path, and the extraordinary beauty and power of the music of Du Fay and his contemporaries, particularly Ockeghem and Josquin, made the journey as enjoyable as life can be, and the fact that research, and in particular

xv

xvi

Acknowledgments

performance, is never a solitary endeavor, put in my way a great number of people who illuminated not only my work, but my life. Coming to the end of this work, I want once again to thank Eric, whose sense of the beauty and the joy of this music was one of his most salient traits. The people who have helped me along the way are legion, and even at the risk of forgetting a name after so many years, I would be remiss if I did not thank all whom I remember. At the start three people were particularly helpful and encouraging: the late canon of Cambrai, Edmond Dartus, who, like Du Fay, was head of the musical establishment of his cathedral and had an immense knowledge of the archival material in Cambrai and Lille, as well as an abiding love for the music of the Renaissance; Craig Wright, who shared with me many of his discoveries long before their publication; and David Fallows, whose knowledge of the music of the fifteenth century is probably unparalleled, and with whom I have had an incredibly stimulating dialogue for more than three decades. I know very few people who can get as infatuated with a work of fifteenth-century music as he does, and who can communicate that infatuation with as much artistic and intellectual insight as he. The list of people to whom I am deeply indebted in my study of Du Fay and his music, as I said before, is immense; it includes, in addition to those I have already mentioned, Allan Atlas, Giuliano di Bacco, Robert Bradley, Mitchell Brauner, Camilla Cavicchi, Liane Curtis, Jeffrey Dean, Kristine Forney, Sean Gallagher, Marco Gozzi, Marian Green, Barbara HagghHuglo, Catherine Jones, Tass Jones, Louise Litterick, Lewis Lockwood, Birgit Lodes, Laurenz Lütteken, Monique Maillard-Luypaert, John Nádas, William Prizer, Christopher Reynolds, Joshua Rifkin, Adalbert Roth, Jesse Rodin, Kirsi Salonen, Brigide Schwarz, Pamela Starr, Peter Urquhart, Anne Walters Robertson, Flynn Warmington, Rob Wegman, and Anna Zayaruznaya. It also includes my colleagues and students from Yale, who sang much of this music with me, and those in Brandeis and the University of California at Santa Barbara. With them I had a chance to perform virtually all of the surviving music of Du Fay, and much of the repertory from his contemporaries and successors as well. I am also deeply indebted to a large number of institutions who received me with great courtesy and provided an ideal working environment and many months of happy labor. These include Archief van het Bisdom, Brugge, Archives Départementales de l’Aisne, Archives Départementales de Savoie, Archivio Capitolare di Ferrara, and Dr. Giovanni Sassu, Archivio di Stato di Bologna and its then director Dr. Giorgio Tamba, Archivio di Stato di Roma, Archivio di Stato di Savoia and its then director

Acknowledgments

Dr. Isa Ricci, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and its late prefect the Rev. Leonard Boyle (martyr), Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Bibliothèque Municipale de Besançon, Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the then conservateur of the music division, François Avril, Bibliothèque Universitaire et Cantonale de Lausanne, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna, Museo Medievale di Bologna and Dr. Giancarlo Benevolo, Palais des Beaux Arts de Lille and its then director Mme Florence Gombert. Three institutions went beyond professional courtesy and treated me with uncommon kindness: the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, under Rev. Josef Metzler and with the always helpful suggestions of Father Charles Burns, and the employees of the banco, who often alerted me to volumes they assumed (always correctly) I would be requesting during my visits, but which were being prepared for restoration or filming, so that I could see them before they became temporarily unavailable; the Archives Départementales du Nord, particularly under the late René Robinet and Michel Vangheluwe, who made my work in Lille an absolute joy; and the Mediathèque Municipale de Cambrai, and particularly the head of the manuscript section, Mme Annie Fournier. I am equally indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship in 1988–1989, which allowed me the time and peace of mind to do what amounted to “a second pass” of the entire archival material I had looked at in Rome and Cambrai between 1981 and 1987, a process that essentially closed virtually all the chronological gaps that were then in our view of Du Fay’s life, and sent the work in the direction it ultimately took, which included the separate preparation of a new Opera Omnia. Leofranc Holford-Strevens and Bonnie Blackburn provided me with constant and invaluable help in almost every aspect of writing this work: Bonnie read through and copy-edited the entire work and saved me from hundreds of errors and infelicities. Finally there are two people who have provided me with unending guidance and inspiration, not just in the research and writing of this work, but throughout my entire career as a student of the music of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Margaret Bent and Richard Sherr. They have been the stella maris (a double star at that) for my entire career, and to them this book is gratefully dedicated.

xvii

The Organization of the Cathedral of Cambrai

xviii

Chapter 4 presents a detailed structure of the structure, organization, and governance of the cathedral of Cambrai. Here, as a convenient reference, is a list of the different offices that have left traces in the written record, with a short description of their functions. These are listed in alphabetical order by the terms I use in this study to refer to them. In terms of income, virtually all of the offices listed here derived their income from three main categories: (1) rentals of houses and small plots owned specifically by the office, (2) sale of wheat from lands held by the office, and (3) sale of oats from lands held by the office. A few offices, specifically the chaplains, the fabric, and the wine, received a special gift from newly appointed chaplains (for the chaplain’s office) or canons (for the fabric and the wine) during the first year they were received to a benefice, and almost all offices received monies or property to support endowments, either as occasional gifts from patrons clerical and secular or legacies of the deceased. Assize (later divided into “Grand Assize” and “Assize of Cambrésis.”) The central financial office of the cathedral and the diocese, which oversaw the administration of all the lands and rents of the cathedral (although it did not include lands or property that officially belonged to another of the offices that occasionally owned such property). Aumonse. The charitable arm of the cathedral chapter, which also paid half of the expenses of the clothing and support of the small vicars and the choristers, as well as dispensing alms to numerous people and organizations. Bread. The office that supported the bakery of the chapter and all the purchase of materials for the making of bread and the distribution of bread to the members of the cathedral clergy, merged after 1419 with the office of wine. Cellar. The office that administered the cathedral’s vineyard and collected its rents and produce and stored the wine. Canons could buy into the cellar’s holdings and receive a yearly sum from its profits. Chaplains (great and small communities). The office that administered the finances of the community of chaplains, the functioning of the chaplaincies, and collection of the “taxes” on “foreign” chaplaincies

The Organization of the Cathedral of Cambrai

(when they were held in absentia but not ad privilegium). The records of the great community are extensive; those of the small community are almost wholly lost. Fabric. The office that administered the liturgical functioning of the cathedral in all its aspects, and payed for all the expenses of the liturgy, including the daily distributions to those participating, the monies for wax and lighting, vestments, the copying and repair of books (including choirbooks), as well as paintings and glasswork for the cathedral. Grand métier. The office that paid for most of the lay servants of the cathedral, gave the canons their stipend for each general meeting of the chapter they attended, and oversaw the gifts of wine and bread to visiting dignitaries and other guests honored by the chapter. Great vicars. The office that administered all the endowed services in which the community of great vicars took part (largely all the services tout court, apart from the daily liturgy), dispensing the sums stipulated by the donors to each member taking part in the liturgy). Small vicars. The office that appointed and dismissed all the small vicars of the cathedral, the choristers, and paid for half of their livery and for their daily distributions. Wine. The office that administered the distribution of wine, and after 1439 of bread as well, to all the members of the cathedral clergy. Beginning in 1439, this distribution included the bread given to each small vicar for his service in the choir, which led to the office keeping a detailed account of which vicars were present on a daily basis.

xix

A Note on Currency

The status of coinage in the fifteenth century, what the executors of Du Fay’s will call “monetary gold and silver” (or et argent monnoyer), was in constant flux, and most accounts were kept in theoretical “money of account,” whose relationship to actual money was often defined at the start of a given account and could vary from year to year. In Cambrai and Burgundy it was the pound of Tours, divided into 20 sols, each divided into 12 deniers. In the papal accounts it was the cameral florin, worth 20 soldi and 240 denari. In Savoy it was the florin “parvus pondus,” divided into 20 grossi, each divided into 12 denari. The relationship of these moneys to each other or to the actual coinage in each region was fluid and changeable throughout the fifteenth century.

xx

Abbreviations

Manuscript Sigla Ao II 9

Apt 16b Bo Q15

Br 5557

BU 2216

Bux

Ca 6 Ca 11

Ca 29 Cape Ch 546

Aosta, Biblioteca del Seminario Maggiore, MS II 9 (olim A 1° D 19). Complete color photographs available at http://www .diamm.ac.uk Apt, Basilique de Sainte-Anne, MS 16 bis Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica, MS Q15 (olim Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale, MS Q15, olim Liceo Musicale, MS 37). Facsimile: Margaret Bent, Bologna Q15: The Making and Remaking of a Musical Manuscript, 2 vols. (Lucca: LIM, 2008) Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, MS 5557. Choirbook of the Burgundian chapel. Facsimile: Choirbook of the Burgundian Chapel, Brussel, Koninklijke Bibliotheek MS. 5557, ed. Rob C. Wegman (Peer: Alamire, 1989) Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 2216. Facsimile: F. Alberto Gallo, Il Codice musicale 2216 della Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, 2 vols. (Bologna: Forni, 1970) Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cim. 352b (olim Mus. Ms. 3275) (Buxheimer Orgelbuch). Keyboard tablature. Facsimile in Bertha Amalie Wallner, ed., Das Buxheimer Orgelbuch, Documenta Musicologica, 2nd ser. 1 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1955) Cambrai, Médiathèque municipale, MS 6 Cambrai, Médiathèque municipale, MS 11. Facsimile: Cambrai Cathedral Choirbook / Livre de choeur de la Cathédrale de Cambrai . . . Cambrai, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 11, ed. Liane Curtis (Peer: Alamire, 1992) Cambrai, Médiathèque municipale, MS 29 Cape Town, The South African Library, MS Grey 3.b.12 Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 546. Facsimile: Codex Chantilly, Bibliothèque du château de Chantilly, MS 546, xxi

xxii

List of Abbreviations

Cord

CS 14

CS 15

CS 49

Di

Ed

EscA

EscB Fl 112b Fl 176 Fl 178 FP 26

FR 2794

ed. Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008) Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rothschild 2973 (I.5.13). Facsimile: Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu (ca. 1475), ed. David Fallows, 2 vols. (Valencia: Vicent Garcia, 2008) Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cappella Sistina, MS 14. Choirbook copied in northern Italy or perhaps even in Rome, early 1470s Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cappella Sistina, MS 15. Choirbook copied in Rome for the papal chapel, ca. 1491–1496 Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cappella Sistina, MS 49. Choirbook copied in Rome for the papal chapel, 1492–II 904 Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 517 (olim 295). Facsimile in Dijon, Bibliothèque Publique, Manuscrit 517, ed. Dragan Plamenac, Publications of Mediaeval Musical Manuscripts 12 (Brooklyn: Institute of Mediaeval Music, ca. 1972) Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Adv. 5. 1. II 9. Choirbook copied by Robert Carver, ca. II 901–946, for the Royal Chapel of Scotland El Escorial, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo del Escorial, Biblioteca y Archivo de Música, MS V.III.24. Facsimile in Codex Escorial, Chansonnier, Biblioteca del Monasterio El Escorial/Signatur MS. V. III. 24, ed. Wolfgang Rehm, Documenta Musicologia, 2nd ser. 2 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1958) El Escorial, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo del Escorial, Biblioteca y Archivo de Música, MS IV.a.24 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS Mag. XIX. 112bis Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS Magl. XIX. 176 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS Magl. XIX. 178 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS Panciatichi 26. Facsimile in Il Codice musicale Panciatichi 26 della Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, ed. F. Alberto Gallo, Studi e testi per la storia della musica 3 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1981) Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 2794

List of Abbreviations

GSB Ivr 15 Lab Lei 1084 Lu 238

MAE MC 871 Mel

Mer 13b MilD 1

ModA

ModB

ModD

Great Saint Bernard Pass, Bibliothèque de l’Hospice, MS Fragment 8 Ivrea, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS 15 Washington, Library of Congress, MS M2.1 L25 Case (Laborde Chansonnier) Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, MS 1084, fols. 225r–231v. Music added to a mixed manuscript after ca. 1450 Lucca, Archivio di Stato, MS 238; Lucca, Archivio Arcivescovile, MS 97; Pisa, Archivio Arcivescovile, Biblioteca Maffi, Cartella 11/III. Facsimile: The Lucca Choirbook. Lucca, Archivio di Stato, MS 238; Lucca, Archivio Arcivescovile, MS 97; Pisa, Archivio Arcivescovile, Biblioteca Maffi, Cartella 11/III, ed. Reinhard Strohm, Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Music in Facsimile 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) Mons, Archives de l’État Montecassino, Archivio della Badia, MS 871N Yale University, Beinecke Library for Rare Books and Manuscripts, MS 91 (Mellon Chansonnier). Facsimile and edition in Leeman Perkins and Howard Garey, The Mellon Chansonnier, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) Merseburg, Domstifsbibliothek, MS 13b (Bible concordance), guard folio Milan, Archivio della Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo, Sezione Musicale Librone 1 (olim 2269). Facsimile: Milan, Archivio della Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo, Sezione Musicale, Librone 1 (olim 2269), ed. Howard Mayer Brown, Renaissance Music in Facsimile 12a (New York: Garland, 1987) Modena, Biblioteca Estense, MS a.M.5.24. Facsimile: Il Codice a.M.5.24 (ModA) and The Manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, a.M.5.24, ed. Anne Stone, 2 vols. (Lucca: LIM, 2005) Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, a.X.1.11. Complete set of color photographs available in the Archive of Early and Medieval Music Manuscripts and Scores, www.diamm.ac.uk Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, MS a.M.1.13 (olim Lat. 456)

xxiii

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List of Abbreviations

ModE MuB 3224

MuEm

Niv

NYB

Ox 213

Pav 362

PC [1–5]

Pix Por

Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, MS a.M.1.2 (olim Lat. 457) Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus. Ms. 3224. Facsimile: Ein Liber cantus aus den Veneto (um 1440): Fragmente in der Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München und der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek Wien, ed. Margaret Bent and Robert Klugseder (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2012) Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm 14274 (olim Mus. Ms. 3232a, olim Cim. 352 c). Facsimile: Der Mensuralcodex St. Emmeram. Facsimile der Handschrift Clm 14724 der Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, ed. Ian Rumbold and Peter Wright, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2006) Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de Musique, Rés. Vmc MS 57 (Chansonnier Nivelle de la Chausée). Facsimile: Chansonnier Nivelle de la Chausée (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Rés. Vmc. ms. 57, ca. 1460), ed. Paula Higgins (Geneva: Minkoff, 1984) New York, Private collection of Stanley Boorman. Facsimile in David Fallows, “Ballades by Dufay, Grenon, and Binchois: ‘The Boorman Fragment’,” in Musikalische Quellen – Quellen zur Musikgeschichte. Festschrift für Martin Staehelin zum 65. Geburtstag, et Ulrich Konrad et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 25–35 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. misc. 213. Facsimile: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Canon. Misc. 213, ed. David Fallows, Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Music in Facsimile 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) Pavia, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS Aldini 362 (olim 131. A.17). Facsimile: Pavia, Biblioteca Universitaria, Aldini MS 362, ed. Frank D’Accone, Renaissance Music in Facsimile 16 (New York: Garland, 1986) Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. fr., MS 4379. Sections of five independent manuscripts, formerly in the Biblioteca Colombina of Seville, brought together in 1881 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr., MS II 9123 (Pixérécourt Chansonnier) Porto, Biblioteca Pública Municipal, MS 714. Facsimile: Porto 714, um manuscrito precioso, ed. Manuel Pedro Ferreira (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2001)

List of Abbreviations

Poz RCas

Rei

Ricc 2794 RU 1411

Sche

Sie K. I. 2

SP B80

Str 222

Poznań, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka im. Adama Michiewicza, MS 7022 Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS 2856. Facsimile: A Ferrarese Chansonnier, Biblioteca Casanatense 2856. “Canzoniere d’Isabella d’Este,” ed. Lewis Lockwood (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2002) Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. fr. MS 6771 (Reina Codex). The third section of the manuscript, fols. 89–119, will be referred as Rei 3 Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 2794 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Urbinas lat. 1411. Facsimile: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Urbinate Latino 1411, intr. Adalbert Roth (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2006). The original introduction, which could not be published with the edition but supersedes that of Roth, is James Haar, Città del Vaticano, Ms Urbinas latinus 1411 (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2006) Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. germ. mon. 810 (olim Mus. Ms. 3232 and Cim. 351a). Schedel Liederbuch. Facsimile: Das Liederbuch des Dr. Hartmann Schedel, ed. Bettina Wackernagel, Erbe Deutsche Musik 84 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1978). Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, MS K. I. 2. Facsimile: Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, MS K. I. 2, ed. Frank A. D’Accone, Renaissance Music in Facsimile 17 (New York: Garland, 1986) Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Archivio di San Pietro, MS B 80. Choirbook, San Pietro, 1470s. Facsimile: Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, San Pietro B 80, ed. Christopher Reynolds, Renaissance Music in Facsimile 23 (New York: Garland, 1986) Strasbourg, Bibliothèque de la Ville, MS C.33 (olim 222), destroyed in the fire of August 1870, known from an extensive thematic index and selected diplomatic transcriptions made by Edmond de Coussemaker (now Brussels, Bibliothèque du Conservatoire Royal de Musique, MS 56286). Facsimile of Coussemaker’s copy: Le Manuscrit musical M 222 C 22 de la Bibliothèque de Strasbourg, XVe siècle, ed. Albert Vander Linden, Thesaurus musicus 2 (Brussels: Office International de Librairie, 1975)

xxv

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List of Abbreviations

Stra 47 Tr 87

Tr 88

Tr 89

Tr 90

Tr 92

Tr 93

Tu J.II.9

Ven 145 Ver 759 Vie J094

Prague, Památník Národního Písemnictví, Strahovská Knihovna, MS D.G.iv.47 Trento, Museo Provinciale d’Arte, Castello del Buonconsiglio, MS 1374 (olim 87). Facsimile: Codex Tridentinus 87 [Rome: Vivarelli e Gullà, 1970]. Complete color photographs available at http://www1.trentinocultura.net Trento, Museo Provinciale d’Arte, Castello del Buonconsiglio, MS 1375 (olim 88). Facsimile: Codex Tridentinus 88 [Rome: Vivarelli e Gullà, 1970]. Complete color photographs available at http://www1.trentinocultura.net Trento, Museo Provinciale d’Arte, Castello del Buonconsiglio, MS 1376 (olim 89). Facsimile: Codex Tridentinus 89 [Rome: Vivarelli e Gullà, 1970]. Complete color photographs available at http://www1.trentinocultura.net Trento, Museo Provinciale d’Arte, Castello del Buonconsiglio, MS 1377 (olim 90). Facsimile: Codex Tridentinus 90 [Rome: Vivarelli e Gullà, 1970]. Complete color photographs available at http://www1.trentinocultura.net Trento, Museo Provinciale d’Arte, Castello del Buonconsiglio, MS 1379 (olim 92). Facsimile: Codex Tridentinus 92 [Rome: Vivarelli e Gullà, 1970]. Complete color photographs available at http://www1.trentinocultura.net Trento, Archivio Diocesano, MS 93 (olim BL). Facsimile: Codex Tridentinus 93 [Rome: Vivarelli e Gullà, 1970]. Complete color photographs available at http://www1.trentinocultura.net Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, MS J.II.9. Facsimile: Il Codice J.II.9, Torino, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, ed. Isabella Data and Karl Kügle (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1999) Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS it. IX. 145 (coll. 7554) Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS DCCLIX Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Handschriftenund Inkunabelsammlung, MS 5094 (olim Jur. can. 49; IX. C.8). Various fragments of text and some music, 15th century

List of Abbreviations

Other Abbreviations AH

ASV

BAB BAV

BL BNC BnF Bosse

BR CAO

CAS CBM c.f. ct DACO FAS fb Grove Music Online

Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi, ed. Guido Maria Dreves, Clemens Blume, and Henry Marriott Bannister, 55 vols. (Leipzig: O. R. Reisland, 1894– 1922. Reprint New York and London: Johnson Reprint, 1961) Vatican City, Archivio Segreto Vaticano Arm = Armadio DC = Diversa Cameralia I&E = Introitus et Exitus LA = Libri Annatarum RL = Registra Lateranensia RS = Registra Supplicationum RV = Registra Vaticana Bruges, Archief van het Bisdom Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana CS = Cappella Sistina SP = Archivio di San Pietro London, British Library Florence, Biblioteca Nationale Centrale Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France Detlev Bosse, Untersuchung einstimmiger mittelalterlicher Melodien zum “Gloria in excelsis deo,” Forschungbeiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 2 (Regensburg: Bosse, 1955) Bibliothèque royale René-Jean Hesbert, Corpus antiphonalium officii, 6 vols. (Rerum ecclesiasticarum documenta, Series maior, Fontes 7–12; Rome: Herder, 1963–1979) Chambéry, Archives Départementales de Savoie Inv. = Inventaire Cambrai, Mediathèque municipale cantus firmus contratenor Dijon, Archives départementales de la Côte d’Or Florence, Archivio di Stato fauxbourdon www.oxfordmusiconline.com

xxvii

xxviii

List of Abbreviations

GT LACV LAA LAN LBM LU MAS Melnicki (Mel)

MGG1 MGG2

MMMA OO RAS Schildbach

Schlager

TAS Thannabaur (Than)

VP

Graduale Triplex (Solesmes: Abbaye de SaintPierre, 1979) Lausanne, Archives cantonales Vaudoises Laon, Archives départementales de l’Aisne Lille, Archives départementales du Nord Lille, Bibliothèque municipale Liber Usualis missae et officii (Tournai: Declée, no. 780, 1954) Modena, Archivio di Stato Margareta Melnicki, Das einstimmige Kyrie des lateinischen Mittelalters, Forschungbeiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 1 (Regensburg: Bosse, 1954) Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Friedrich Blume, 17 vols. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1949–86) Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd edn., ed. Ludwig Finscher, 29 vols. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1984–2009) Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi Opera omnia Rome, Archivio di Stato Camerale = Fondo Camerale Schildbach, Martin, Das einstimmige Agnus Dei und seine handschriftliche Überlieferung vom 10. Bis zum 16. Jahrhundert (Erlangen: FriedrichAlexander Universität, 1967) Schlager, Karl-Heinz, Thematischer Katalog der ältesten Alleluia-Melodien aus Handschriften des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts, ausgenomen das ambrosianische, alt-römische und alt-spanische Repertoire (Munich: Walter Ricke, 1968) Turin, Archivio di Stato Inv. = Inventario Thannabaur, Peter Josef, Das einstimmige Sanctus der römischen Messe in der handschriftlichen Überlieferung des 11. bis 16. Jahrhunderts, Erlanger Arbeiten zur Musikwissenschaft 1 (Munich: W. Ricke, 1962) Variae preces ex liturgia tum hodierna tum antiqua collectae aut usu receptae (Solesmes: Abbaye de Saint-Pierre, 1888; 5th edn. 1901)

volume i

The Life

Prologue

One of the few points where opinion is nearly unanimous among fifteenthcentury writers and modern critics is on the extraordinary quality of the music of Guillaume Du Fay and his importance. As a number of recent studies have shown, the concept of a composer was very uncommon at the time,1 that is, someone who wrote music as his primary occupation, no matter what other skills he possessed and activities he undertook. In fact, the term itself and the verb “to compose,” in the sense of creating writtendown works of music, did not really exist at the time Du Fay began his career, and it is largely his generation, and Du Fay himself, who essentially began to create that concept, which was not to become common usage until nearly half a century after his death. One can see in Du Fay’s career how his view of himself and the view his patrons had of him evolved. In 1467 the organist of the cathedral of Florence, Antonio Squarcialupi, writing to Du Fay, reported that Piero de’ Medici considered the aged composer “the greatest ornament of our age.”2 As David Fallows noted decades ago,3 this is the age of Brunelleschi and Donatello, Botticelli and Alberti, the van Eyck brothers, Rogier van der Weyden, and Hugo van der Goes, Charles d’Orléans, François Villon, and Alain Chartier, to name but a few, all of them known to Piero. Even taking into account the flattery intended by the Florentine ruler in thanking someone who had helped improve the choir of the Baptistery in Florence, his statement places Du Fay in the company of men whose works were more readily tangible and accessible as “art” than the sounds of polyphonic music. Indeed, polyphonic music, including all of the surviving works of Du Fay’s generation, and those of the few generations that preceded and followed his, was a very small slice of the repertory of sounding music at the time. Two other repertories dwarfed it in terms of their ubiquity and the quantity of what anachronistically we may call the “works” they contained. The first of these was the plainsong used in the liturgy. It had roots and traditions going back to the seventh century and it was heard day in and day out in some semblance of uniformity all over Europe, but it was 1 2

3

Cf. Wegman, “From Maker to Composer,” with extensive literature on the subject. FAS, Mediceo Avanti il principato, filza 22, no. 118; Kade, “Biographisches zu Antonio Squacialupi,” 13–15. Fallows, Dufay, 1.

3

4

Prologue

still being expanded as new feasts were added to the calendars and local uses developed. Its function was well known and even taken for granted, in the same way that buildings in which it was most often heard, churches and monasteries, were used and taken for granted; even to this day, after more than two centuries of conscious aestheticizing of the past, we regard some of these buildings as artistic monuments, not just functional buildings. Much of this repertory has survived to this day; it remains tenuously alive as a functional repertory despite the changes that followed the Second Vatican Council, but is now the subject both of intense study and aesthetic contemplation by a surprisingly large number of people. The other repertory (probably several repertories) consisted of the music performed by the minstrels that were supported, sometimes extravagantly, by the numerous lords, small and large, as well as by a number of municipalities in the late Middle Ages. This was music that was passed from master to disciple by rote and imitation, without recourse to written notation. Some of it was monophonic, with any accompaniment likely to be a drone and some percussion, both equally independent of any kind of written notation. Some, however, was probably polyphonic and approached the style of the written repertory. This music was often used as a sonic backdrop to dinners and other festivities, and for dancing, and was probably sometimes heard with the same attention and pleasure that listeners to modern vernacular music experience when they are actually “listening” to music rather than using it as a backdrop to other activity. Most of the players of these repertories probably could not read any musical notation, and in most cases the clerics who sang the chant were nearly as illiterate, and also learned their chants by rote. Still, it will not do to draw the boundaries of the music performed by literate and illiterate musicians too sharply, particularly in terms of certain repertories, which include most of the song repertory of the fifteenth century and certain parts of the ceremonial repertory. Today thousands of performers in jazz, pop, and the numerous vernacular musics cannot read music, and yet learn a large number of pieces “by ear,” which they can perform with extraordinary accuracy over a period of years; many pieces in their repertories, particularly those of the Latin American traditional ensembles, can be more extended and intricate than anything we encounter in the tenors or contratenors of fifteenth-century songs. The ability to learn and perform some of these repertories “by ear” is attested by the activity of Conrad Pauman (ca. 1410–1473), who was blind, as was Francesco Landini before him and Antonio de Cabezón after him. In addition, there were probably a number of instrumentalists at the time who surely could read music. Jacob de Senleches, a priest and the composer

Prologue

of some of the most complex music of the Ars subtilior, was a harp player,4 as was Du Fay’s last teacher at the maîtrise in Cambrai, Richard de Loqueville, a layman,5 and possibly Baude Cordier, if he is indeed the Baude Fresnel who served Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy, as Craig Wright has suggested.6 The few references we have to the performances of Juan Fernandez and Juan de Córdoba, the blind Spaniards in the service of Isabel of Portugal, duchess of Burgundy,7 would also suggest they could play composed polyphony, and the same is surely the case with Fernandez’s sons, who were extravagantly praised by Tinctoris.8 Étienne Ferrier, the senior trumpet player at the court of Savoy, is listed as a member of the polyphonic chapel at the court between 1449 and 1454,9 and is occasionally referred to by the title magister.10 The inventory of the household of Arnold de Halle, doctor of medicine, physician to Pope Benedict XIII, and canon of Cambrai from December of 1397 to his death on 17 November 1417, included eight harps, three lutes, three gitterns, one rebec, three vielles, and a psaltery,11 which would suggest that among Arnold’s colleagues in the cathedral clergy there were men who could probably perform on these instruments as well. Later in the century the concubine of one of Cambrai’s dignitaries, Nicole de Fierin, canon from 1465 to 1486 and the cathedral’s official from 1480,12 was one Marie de Lamont, also known as “Marie the harp player” (Marie la Harperesse). The two remained together for a decade and possibly longer,13 defying numerous admonitions, penalties, and fines. At his death the chapter sought to annul some of his legacies to her, but in the end backed down and allowed them.14 One can also make a tentative assumption that there was some sort of domestic music-making at Cambrai in the homes of Halle, Loqueville, and quite possibly Fierin. Nonetheless, the main repertory of the late medieval instrumentalists was monophonic music, almost all of it not notated, and therefore lost to us except for a small number of melodies that were eventually incorporated in one manner or another into a polyphonic work, something that makes a 4 6 8 9 10 12

13

14

5 Günther and Gómez, “Senleches.” Pirro, Histoire, 55–56. 7 C. Wright, Music at the Court, 132–33. Cf. the discussion of Or me veult in Ch. 16. Weinman, Johannes Tinctoris, 45–46; Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, 58–59. CAS, Inv. 24, SA 3604, fols. 39v–43r and 71v–72r. Bradley, “Musical Life,” 295–96, no. 114. 11 LAN, 4G 1360, fol. 18r. CBM 1060, fol. 208r (reception, 20 Mar. 1465); 1061, fol. 96r (official, 24 Apr. 1480); 1061, fol. 254r (death on 1 Mar. 1486). An admonition to Fierin on 27 Jan. 1477 (CBM 1061, fol. 13v), refers to an earlier act of 14 Sept. 1470 (that volume of the chapter acts is lost). CBM 1061, fol. 256r. Fierin died deeply in debt, to the point that his executors sought legal protection against possible creditors (CBM 1061, fol. 254r).

5

6

Prologue

true evaluation of them as part of an independent repertory virtually impossible. Part of this repertory was surely also vocal, and again traces of it appear here and there in the polyphonic repertory;15 a reflection of it may be seen in the few monophonic chansonniers that have survived. Related to some of this repertory in terms of some of techniques used, but belonging entirely in the realm of liturgical music, was the improvised counterpoint described by Tinctoris as cantare supra librum, which had a long tradition by then with several “national” schools, and continued to be practiced until well into the seventeenth century. The result of these procedures (for they could be quite varied) was a king of liturgical Gebrauchmusik that served to solemnize the singing of “a chant” much in the way that the old organum settings did, albeit in a contemporary sounding manner. Written offshoots of this practice included the procedures known as faburden and gymel in England, as well as that known as faulx bourdon on the Continent.16 Another kind of music was also cultivated at the time: music as an exact science, which formed part of the quadrivium in the universities, together with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. The numerical ratios that produced the different intervals, something that had been known since the sixth century bc and whose discovery was credited to Pythagoras, were considered to govern not only actual sounding music, the musica instrumentalis, but the physiological and spiritual aspects of human life, musica humana, and the observable motions of the heavenly bodies, musica mundana. The study of musical proportions was then thought to reveal something about the basic design of the universe. But this study had virtually nothing to do with actual sounding music. Still, from the thirteenth century on, university music teachers had begun writing, almost as an appendix to their main topic of investigation, treatises on the notation of rhythm, and basic treatises on counterpoint or discantus. These treatises touched upon the principles that governed polyphonic music, but rarely went beyond what we would today call elementary counterpoint. The treatises dealing with the notation of rhythm, however, could deal with extremely complicated relationships, some of which were infrequent in the composed music of the fifteenth century. Toward the end of the century, largely on account of the systematic and almost encyclopedic work of 15

16

In Du Fay’s case we have two melodies incorporated into the Amen of a Gloria–Credo pair; cf. Ch. 12. The literature on these procedures is immense and has on occasion been quite contentious. See Trowell, “Faburden,” in Grove Music Online; idem, “Fauxbourdon,” in Grove Music Online; Bent, “Resfacta and Cantare super librum.”

Prologue

Johannes Tinctoris, the scope and nature of such treatises grew to encompass not only notation and counterpoint, but also the definition of musical terminology and even the earliest attempt to describe the affective aspects of music.17 Two men in fifteenth-century Cambrai took it upon themselves to write treatises of this nature, Du Fay and his colleague Gilles Carlier. Du Fay’s treatises are lost, although a copy of one of them was seen by Fétis in 1824, and only small citations of them survive, from which we can assume that at least one of them dealt with the notation of rhythm and proportions.18 The treatise of Carlier, which was more philosophical and less technical that that of Du Fay, has survived.19 But neither man was what one might call a “university musician.” Both studied music as children, Du Fay at the choir school of the cathedral at Cambrai, and Carlier at the choir school of Sainte-Croix, also at Cambrai.20 But Carlier eventually became a theologian, while Du Fay, at least at the beginning of his career, was a practical musician, a cantor. The cantores, usually graduates of one or other of the maîtrises supported by numerous churches in Europe, had been for centuries the “floating bottom” of the clergy at the cathedrals and collegiate churches, charged with the musical duties of the liturgy (since many were only in minor orders at this stage). They were the petit vicaires at Cambrai, or the clercs de matines at Notre-Dame in Paris,21 serving at the pleasure of the church authorities, and were hired, nominally, on an annual basis. At Cambrai, for example, they were hired on the eve of St. John Baptist for one year. Of course, some left or were fired for one cause or another, and others were auditioned to take their place, but their term of employment lasted until the eve of St. John Baptist the following year, at which time they could be rehired or let go. They would progress through the minor orders and eventually some would become priests. In the course of their career they would obtain a number of small benefices, a parish church here or a chaplaincy there, which allowed them to eke out a living. At Cambrai, with some exceptions, whenever one of them obtained one of the chaplaincies in the cathedral, which provided a modest but solid living, their career as small vicars, that is, as singing men, would end, which suggests that the 17

18 19 20

21

E.g., Tinctoris, Complexus effectuum musices, in Opera Theoretica, 2:165–76; translated in Cullington and Strohm, “That Liberal and Virtous Art.” Gallo, “Citazioni.” Edited and translated in Cullington and Strohm, “That Liberal and Virtous Art.” CBM 197, Obituary of Ste-Croix, fol. 63r: “Obitus sollemnis domini Egidii le Carlier . . . qui dum erat iuvenculus fuit puer altaris huius ecclesiae sanctae crucis.” Cf. C. Wright, Music and Ceremony, 20–27; Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 144–47.

7

8

Prologue

duties of a small vicars were viewed by many as onerous. A few of them would eventually obtain one of the nine grand vicariates in the cathedral, making them the elite of the working clergy of the church. No matter if they were ordained as priests, three of the grand vicars were intended to function as priests, three as deacons, and three as subdeacons, and it was they who performed most of the liturgy in choro throughout the year. But the majority of the small vicars eventually moved away from Cambrai to their parish churches, or to another church, either to work again as small vicars or as chaplains. Prior to the second quarter of the fifteenth century, few of them ever became a canon in Cambrai or elsewhere. Du Fay’s career would have been inconceivable in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. He belongs to the second or perhaps the third generation of cantores who were able to move up in the social hierarchy and obtain a canonicate or a dignity. The chapters of most of the cathedral and collegiate churches in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as Helène Millet’s careful study of the chapter at Laon shows, were populated almost exclusively by members of the nobility.22 A military or a clerical career was by far the most common choice for the younger sons of most noble households, and noblemen could expect a reasonably steady, if not always fast, advancement in their clerical life. By the middle of the thirteenth century another group of men was making slow but steady inroads into the ranks of the prebendaries in cathedrals and collegiate churches, children of the emerging urban bourgeoisie who had attended university and obtained a degree. The way to ecclesiastical preferment for these men was through their service as clerks to any of a number of important lords, at a time when the complexity of secular and ecclesiastic administration demanded an increased reliance on men with the skills to write letters and charters, and with the basic arithmetic necessary to keep track of and control the fiscal operations of the different households or institutions, or the legal training to serve as administrators in the court. No detailed study of the beginning of this transition has ever been undertaken, and the sense of when and how this change began to take place can only be teased out of dozens of studies of institutions, biographies, and social histories that touch upon it tangentially. The clearest image of the change itself, if not of the reasons for it, emerges in the volumes of the Fasti ecclesiae gallicanae.23

22 23

Millet, Les Chanoines. A particularly thoughtful study, though limited to papal servants, is Partner, The Pope’s Men, 47–110.

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Another requisite for admission to any of the ecclesiastical chapters in the central Middle Ages was legitimate parentage. Bastards were automatically excluded, and though from early on the possibility of a papal or an episcopal dispensation from the defectum natalium allowed men to enter holy orders and even advance to the priesthood, cathedral chapters were on guard against allowing bastards into their midst.24 But even from Carolingian times such strictures tended not to apply to the illegitimate offspring of the most powerful lords: kings and emperors used their influence, and often their raw power, to place those of their illegitimate children who had chosen to pursue an ecclesiastical career not just as canons of cathedrals and collegiate churches, but in positions of power within the church hierarchy. But until the end of the fourteenth century such advancement was essentially closed to anyone whose immediate bloodlines did not include an important lord with actual sway upon the conduct of the ecclesiastical institutions within his domains. In any case, the beginnings of the change in the constitution of the chapters in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries apparently did not affect the opportunities of the musicians, that is, the cantores, since the needs of the new institutions were for men of letters and lawyers. Craig Wright has successfully identified Leonin with Leo, a canon of both NotreDame and the Abbey of St-Victor in Paris in the second half of the twelfth century,25 and has provided a very plausible identification of Perotin with Petrus, succentor of Notre-Dame at the turn of the thirteenth century. It is, I believe, quite telling that the firmer of the two identifications concerns what we would call a “man of letters,” Leonin the didactic poet. It is in fact quite ironic that for several generations music historians looked in vain for him, while all that time his name and literary oeuvre were relatively well known to historians of medieval Latin poetry in France.26 Anonymous IV mentions a number of other musicians who were known to him either personally or by recent reputation, and from his description we could assume that some of them were magistri organorum, that is clercs de matines who had achieved some renown and proficiency as musicians. Many of them are called magister, which means that they had university training and might have taught at the university, but almost without 24

25 26

The basic studies on the ecclesiastical careers of the illegitimate deal, by and large, with the late Middle Ages. Among the most important are Illegitimität im Spätmittelalter, ed. Schmugge and Wiggenhauser; Schmugge, Kirche, Kinder, Karrieren; and Wertheimer, “The Ecclesiastical Construction of Illegitimacy in the Middle Ages.” C. Wright, “Leoninus”; id., Music and Ceremony, 281–94. C. Wright, “Leoninus,” 16–17, and nn. 42–45.

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exception they are absent from charter signature lists and from any documents that would place them among the administrative urban elite of Paris at the time.27 This might indeed mean that their skill as musicians was not yet viewed as something that the ruling authorities of the cathedral considered sufficiently important to influence their being granted a prebend in the institution. In this respect it is also worth noting that, from the few versified letters we have from Leonin, it would appear that from early on he had access to high ecclesiastical and to royal patronage,28 access that most likely came about not simply on account of his skills as a man of letters, an administrator, or a musician, but on account of family ties that are now lost to us. The careers of the two most important French composers in the middle decades of the fourteenth century, Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut, follow a related, if slightly different path. Their rise came through royal service precisely at the time when European rulers, particularly the French monarchs and those within their near circles, such as King John of Bohemia, needed clerks and secretaries.29 Their service to their royal and princely masters was, for the most part, in those positions, and they obtained their preferments in churches under the influence of their secular lords. Musicians, qua musicians, in most of these courts were still part of the “minstrel class.” It is also significant, I believe, that among their contemporaries, much as Vitry and Machaut are praised for their music, it is their work as poets that is mentioned most often and which, in Vitry’s case, kept his reputation alive in fifteenth-century humanistic circles.30 Their relatively exceptional situation becomes even clearer when one compares what is known about them and their careers with the galaxy of musicians of the following generation, the men whose names appear in the ascriptions in Ch 546 and ModA, and whose music appears also in Apt 16b and Ivr 115. Almost without exception they remained as part of what might be called the servant class in different European courts. Only Johannes

27

28 29

30

Reckow, Der Musiktraktat des Anonymus 4, 1:46 and 50; but see also Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 134–55. C. Wright, “Leoninus,” 23–27. The best summary of Machaut’s biography now is Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research, 3–52; in the case of Vitry a particularly thoughtful summary appears in Wathey and Bent, “Philippe de Vitry,” Grove Music Online; cf. also Planchart, “Institutional Politics,” 116–19. See Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry and the Fourteenth-Century Renaissance”; id., “The Motet Texts of Philippe de Vitry in German Humanist Manuscripts of the Fifteenth Century.”

Prologue

Alanus, if he is the Johannes Aleyn who died in 1373,31 and Jehan de Haucourt are exceptions, since Aleyn obtained a number of canonicates, and Haucourt became a canon of Laon and secretary of the Cour d’amour.32 But Haucourt may appear to be an exception only because he lived well into the fifteenth century and the change began taking place in the last decades of the fourteenth century. For most music historians, where the model we know best is that of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Haucourt’s final years at Laon and as secretary of the Cour d’amour appear normal, but they caught the attention of Hélène Millet, working, as she did, from the twelfth century onward, as relatively unusual.33 In another sense and perhaps even more unusual is the case of Jacob de Senleches, musician and harp player to the king of Aragon and later to Pedro de Luna, who would become Pope Benedict XIII.34 Although clearly a learned composer and a cleric, his work was that of a ministril rather than a chaplain, and thus, even more than the chapel singers, someone who would surely remain part of what I have called the servant class. And yet, in one of the coronation rotuli of Benedict XIII, dated 30 October 1394, we find an entry where one Jacobus de Senleches, clerk of Cambrai, is granted a canonicate with the expectation of a prebend at the church of St-Martin de Tours, a direct dependence of the Holy See.35 Clearly there had been a change in the opportunities for musicians between those open to men of the generation of Machaut and those of the one or two generations that followed. The roots of that change, I believe, lie in the politics of the papacy at the time of the schism. This is a topic that, insofar as it touches on the careers of musicians, has not yet been studied in any detail, and its scope would go well beyond the limits of this prologue. The general shape of this change has been adumbrated in the recent work of John Nádas and Giuliano Di Bacco,36 and will be presented more fully when their extended work on the papal chapels before the Council of Constance appears.37 The most important recent research on this kind of papal policy and its effect on clerical careers has 31

32 34 35

36 37

Some of the doubts and problems posed by this identification and the relevant literature appear in Fallows, “Alanus, Johannes.” Plumley, “Haucourt, Johannes.” 33 Millet, Les Chanoines, 361. See Günther, “Zur Biographie einiger Komponisten der Ars Subtilior.” Vatican, ASV, Reg. Sup. 93, fol. 254v. See also Suppliques de Benoît XIII, ed. Briegleb and LaretKayser, 419, who give his name as “Souleches.” Given the vagaries of medieval calligraphy, where “u” and “n” are usually indistinguishable, and “e” and “o” are often confused with each other, this man is surely Senleches. My own reading of the script is “Senleches,” with the “e” cramped against the “S.” Nádas and Di Bacco, “Verso uno ‘stile internazionale’ della musica.” I am deeply indebted to Professor Nádas for providing me with comprehensive transcriptions of the documentary material that underpins his planned work.

11

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been two studies by Brigide Schwarz.38 The acts of a relatively recent conference, edited by Hélène Millet, also provide important insights into what she calls “le gouvernement par la grâce,” and its consequences.39 To summarize what is an immensely long and complex process: in the course of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries the French monarchy, and to some extent the English monarchy as well, came to be increasingly reliant upon low-born but university-trained clerks both for its administrative functions and in an effort to impose its will upon the nobility. This is a process that continued in France throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and in the fifteenth was the source of some of the sharpest conflicts between Charles VII and Louis XI and their own nobles.40 The French-influenced papacy in Avignon essentially adopted this model for the administration of the church, or rather of the papal Curia, and found in the papal reservation of benefices both an important source of income and a convenient way of rewarding curial officials for their service. Already the French kings had used their influence upon the chapters of cathedrals and collegiate churches in their domains to reward their servants, and the popes followed suit. An early symptom of the way benefices were awarded can be seen in the qualifications for a canonicate: while in the earlier Middle Ages a man had to be of noble birth in order to be a member of a cathedral chapter, already by the thirteenth century the condition had changed in that the man had to be either of noble birth or a university graduate, and by the end of the fourteenth century university men outnumbered the nobles even in a relatively conservative chapter such as that of the cathedral of Laon.41 This situation still did not affect the church musician, who in this case was a cantor rather than a musicus.42 The latter would indeed be a university graduate but, by and large, would not be engaged in the singing of the new music of the time. Those who were what we call today “practical musicians,” the clercs de matines at Notre-Dame in Paris and the petits vicaires in Cambrai and elsewhere, were, so to speak, the lowest rung of the clerical personnel of the churches for which they worked. They were appointed each year for a single year, and could be let go for almost any

38

39 40

41 42

Schwarz, “Patronage und Klientel in der spätmittelalterlichen Kirche,” and ead., “Klerikerkarrieren und Pfründmarkt.” Suppliques et requêtes, ed. Millet. This is documented extensively in Vale, Charles VII, and Kendall, Louis XI, the Universal Spider. See Millet, Les Chanoines, 138–47. This term underwent an important change, or rather an expansion of its meaning in the middle of the 15th century; on this, see later in this chapter.

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cause.43 This was also the case of the men who sang for the papal services in Rome or in Avignon, and thus it is not surprising that many of the more talented and creative of them, men like Solage and Jacob de Senleches, sought rather the patronage of secular lords who valued them precisely as musicians. The career of Gilles de Bins, called Binchois, should remind us that this remained a reasonable option well into the fifteenth century.44 The schism changed the beneficial politics of the papacy, opening it considerably, particularly in the case of the later Avignon obedience. From early on, Clement VII and his successor were in desperate need of both financial resources and political support, and as Javier Serra Estellés has noted in his study of Spanish supplications to Clement VII,45 the late Avignon papacy opened wide the gates to simony and bribery. Granting benefices to curialists from different regions of Europe, and particularly where the obedience was less secure, was a way the pope could gain adherents to his obedience that could eventually have important local influence in partibus, and in few regions was this need more acute than in northeastern France and the Low Countries, where within a relatively small geographic area there were dioceses that were largely Clementine, such as Cambrai, dioceses that were largely Urbanist, such as Liège, and several regions that were bitterly contested.46 In this situation clerks in the service of the pope, even the singers in the papal chapel, could expect a favorable consideration of their supplications, and as the lists compiled by John Nádas and Giuliano Di Bacco show, they were not slow in taking advantage of the opportunity. The preponderance of French singers in the papal chapel during the fourteenth century is largely a consequence of the fact that the papacy for most of the century was in fact a French institution, particularly in terms of its artistic culture. Already Urban V had begun granting important benefices to the members of his chapel, most of whom were low-born clerics in lower orders,47 but the process accelerated noticeably under Clement VII and Benedict XIII. The Urbanist obedience was much slower 43

44

45 46

47

See C. Wright, Music and Ceremony, 20–27, for the situation at Notre-Dame. For the situation at Cambrai, see Appendix 1. The Burgundian dukes, like most of the major secular lords of the 15th century, had both a chapel and a separate group of musicians devoted to instrumental music, but a careful reading of Marix, Histoire, or C. Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy, will show that the dukes valued their chaplains “as musicians” in a way that an institution such as Notre-Dame did not. Serra Estellés, “Acerca de las súplicas dirigidas a Clemente VII de Aviñón,” 194–95. The literature on the political history of the schism is enormous. The fundamental study remains Salembier, Le Grand Schisme d’occident; in its direct consequences for clerical careers, see the studies by Schwarz cited in note 38 above. This can be gathered through a detailed examination of the published supplications of Urban V; see Fierens, Suppliques d’Urbain V; Hayez, Ut per litteras apostolicas [CD Rom]; and in Nádas

13

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in this respect, but as a careful reading of Nádas and Di Bacco’s study of the patronage of Cardinal Louis d’Alençon shows, his arrival in the Roman Curia brought with it an incorporation of the French model of musical patronage, and also, given Alençon’s ties to France and his sojourns as papal legate in the Low Countries, an increase in the number of northerners employed by the Roman and Pisan obedience popes in their chapels.48 Traditionally the constitution of the papal chapel is assigned by music historians to the reign of Sixtus IV, but as Bernhard Schimmelpfennig notes, by 1334 the number of papal chaplains who actually sang the Office and the Mass was fixed, at least nominally, at twelve.49 Originally they were to dine with the pope, but by 1395 the chapel of Benedict XIII had a constitution that duplicated the organization that we find in the northern cathedrals at the time. The rules for the papal chapel at the time of Benedict appear in a Ceremoniale compiled ca. 1406 by François de Conzié, BAV, Vat. lat. 4736, fols. 83v–84r. They establish that there should be at most twelve singers, a maestro di cappella, and two clerici caerimoniarii, and that the chapel should say Mass and Vespers, alta voce, whether the pope is present or not. These rules are the same as those found in 1334, but now the personnel of the chapel is not to live in the papal palace and not to eat at the papal table except on certain feasts, but they will be provided with a stipend stated in the cameral books. Thus technically they were, at this point, not truly familiares continui commensales of the pope, and yet in almost all the supplications that Nádas and Di Bacco have found by musicians of Benedict XIII, they refer to themselves as such, so that, at least as far as the outside world was concerned, the strictures found in Vat. Lat. 4736 were a dead letter when it came to these musicians to present themselves for a benefice in their homelands. The number of singers mentioned in Vat. lat. 4736 appears to have a purely symbolic significance, and in that the papal chapel again resembles those of the northern cathedrals. At Cambrai, for example, regardless of the number of small vicars (the primary singing men of the cathedral) being employed at any given time, the office itself was called “the office of the twelve small vicars.”50 We do not have a complete roster of the chapel at the Council of Constance, although, as I showed in an earlier study, there is considerable

48

49

50

and Di Bacco, “Verso uno ‘stile internazionale’”; but it becomes starkly clear in the still unpublished lists of chaplains and their benefices compiled by Nádas and Di Bacco. Compare the list of papal singers in 1400 in Sherr, “Notes on Some Papal Documents in Paris,” 7, with those in 1414 in Planchart, “The Early Career,” 355. Schimmelpfennig, “Die Organisation der päpstlichen Kapelle,” 92, citing also Baluze, Vitae paparum, 1:320. A convenient survey of the evolution of the papal chapels in the 14th century appears also in Tomasello, Music and Ritual, 47–75. LAN, 4G 87, pièce 1264; also 4G 1086, no. 306.

Prologue

overlap in personnel between the last surviving list of the chapel of John XXIII and the earliest list of the chapel of Martin V,51 but the mandates of the apostolic chamber and the payments recorded in the introitus et exitus record the composition of the papal chapel from July 1418 to March 1447 (the end of Eugenius’s reign) with three small and one large lacunae. The small lacunae often come when there was a switch from one register to another or when the scribes apparently skipped a month.52 The large lacuna, not surprisingly, coincides with the end of the reign of Martin V and the start of the reign of Eugenius IV, and goes from August 1430 to August 1431. The composition of the chapel between November 1417 and July 1418 can be determined with considerable accuracy from the list of inductions in the Liber officialium,53 and in a number of other such inductions recorded in the register that now form the diversa cameralia. Some of the singers who entered the papal chapel during the year-long lacuna in 1430–1431 are recorded in the Liber officialium, and in the middle of the lacuna falls the famous coronation rotulus of the chapel, petitioning Eugenius IV for benefices, which contains the entire roster, including the non-singing members as well.54 This means that we have almost certainly the entire roster of papal singers active between the end of 1417 to the spring of 1447, and because virtually all of these singers petitioned the pope at one point or another in their lives for a benefice, we also know their dioceses of incardination as well as, in most cases, their towns of origin. Papal singers between 1417 and 1447 totaled eighty men: sixty-one were French, eleven were Flemish,55 five were Italian, and three were Spanish.56 Two of the Spaniards, Alfonso Sanchez and Lambert Adzemar, served only for a few months.57 The third, Alfonso Garcia de Zamora, was the only non-Franco-Flemish member of the chapel with a long service: he served from April 1434 to his death in August 1445. The Italians served longer: Lucido Giovanni da Norme is documented in March and July 1431 and was among the chapel singers sworn in by Louis Allemand, the locumtenens of the papal chancery, two days after the 51 52 53 54 55 56

57

Planchart, “The Early Career,” 355–56. These are June to Sept. 1426, June and July 1434, and July 1444. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 1711. See also Le Liber officialium, ed. Uginet. BAV, CS 703, no. 1; cf. Haberl, Wilhelm Du Fay, 115–19. Here I include those from Liège, many of which had Flemish patronymics. Two of the Spanish singers, Alfonso Sanchez de Moya and Alfonso Garcia de Zamora, were conflated by Haberl (Du Fay, 117, misreading CS 703, no. 1), and the conflation has continued in all the literature on the chapel virtually to this day. Sanchez’s service fell during the year for which we have no payments. He joined the chapel on 15 Nov. 1430 (ASR, Camerale I, 1711, fol. 93v), and is documented in Mar. 1431 in BAV, CS 703, no. 1. No other document about him has surfaced. Adzemar served from Sept. 1435 to Jan. 1436 (ASR, Camerale I, Reg. 828, fols. 57r, 59r, 63v, 66r, 71v).

15

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crowning of Eugenius IV, so he must have been a member of the chapel during the last days of Martin V, perhaps as early as August 1430,58 but was no longer in the chapel when the record of payments resumes in August 1431. Jacopo Antonio Bartolomei, called Ranuzio, served from August 1433 to September 1435.59 Lodovico Bernardi da Narni served as a choirboy in the second set of choirboys used by the chapel, from October 1437 to February 1439, and again from June to December of that year; from January to November 1440 he served as an adult singer. Enrico Silvestri da Fondi probably joined the chapel in late July 1430;60 he appears among those inducted by Allemand in March 1431, and in the coronation rotulus of 24 March 1431, but had left the chapel by August of that year. He returned to the chapel in July 1435 and served until February 1439. Finally, Niccolò Pietro Zacharie, a singer in the Baptistery in Florence, joined the papal chapel in June 1420 when Martin V was in Florence and served until November 1422; he returned to it from September 1423 to July 1424, and again, under Eugenius, when the Curia was in Florence, and served from April to November 1434.61 This means that the papal chapel for virtually the entire first half of the fifteenth century was fundamentally a Franco-Flemish institution, heavily populated by men from northern and northeastern France and western Flanders, and it is precisely in the first quarter of the fifteenth century when the benefits of being papal curialists were most effectively extended to include the papal singers. This begins with singers of the chapels of Alexander V and John XXIII, but accelerated notably during the early years of the pontificate of Martin V, quite possibly because the post-conciliar papal Curia had the kind of political influence that its immediate predecessors could not muster. Mathieu Hanelle obtained a canonicate at Laon in 1410, although with a good deal of trouble,62 and Robert Sandewyn became a canon of St. Donatian in 1411,63 and his brother Hendrik, who apparently was a singer in the chapel of John XXIII, also was a canon of St. Donatian from 1410 to 1417.64 Among the singers of Martin V, Hanelle again had 58

59 61

62

63 64

RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 1712, fol. 82r; BAV, CS 703, no. 1 (damaged, but cf. Haberl, Wilhelm Du Fay, 118), and ASV, DC 16, fols. 59v–60r. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 828, fol. 15v. 60 Cf. ASV, RS 260, fol. 232r–v. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 824, fol. 114v; ASV, I&E 379, fol. 221v (first presence); ASV, I&E 382, fols. 100r and 141r (second presence); ASV, RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 827, fol. 210r; Reg. 828, fol. 12v (third presence). LAA, G 1850 ter, fol. 12r–v (second foliation, starting fol. 39 after fol. 251 and moving backward as one turns the pages), 10 Jan. 1410. The canons had reservations because apparently Hanelle came from a servile background. BAB, Reeks A 49, fol. 142r; see also Planchart, “Concerning Du Fay’s Birthplace.” ASV, RS 246, fol. 258r–v, 10 Oct. 1429, on Hendrik’s death, remembers him as a member of the chapel of John XIII, though his name appears in none of the surviving chapel lists.

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obtained canonicates in Cambrai and St-Pierre de Lille in 1418.65 Similarly, between 1417 and 1423, Jehan le Bonure, called Hachot, Jehan Dornart, Adriaan Reyner, Jehan de Carnin, and Guillaume le Macherier all became canons of St-Pierre, as did two of the non-singing members of Martin’s chapel, Jehan Pigouche (custos iocalium) and Raoul Dandrenas (clericus missae).66 At Cambrai canonicates in the cathedral went to Mathieu Thorote in 1423,67 Nicole Grenon in 1427,68 and Gilles Flannel, called Lenfant, in 1433,69 in St-Géry to Jehan du Riez in 1419,70 Vincent le Tavernier by 1420,71 and Jehan Wyet in 1425,72 and in Ste-Croix to Jehan Mauclerc, called de Saint Pol, in 1419.73 It is particularly notable that all the papal singers who became canons in any of the Cambrai churches at this time, with the exception of Flannel, became residents in the city relatively shortly after their receptions, and many remained in the city for the remainder of their lives. Elsewhere Jehan de Romedenne became a canon of St. John in Liège in 1417,74 Willem van Hildernisse in St. Mary in Maastricht in 1418,75 Jehan Boulengier in Reims in 1420,76 Bertauld Dauce at Reims and Le Puy in 1420,77 Toussaint de la Rouelle in Autun in 1420,78 and Paris Justot at St-Étienne in Troyes.79 These are but a small part of the waves of curial officials who flooded the chapter houses, particularly in France, Flanders, Germany, and Spain during the fifteenth century and beyond. Secular lords, above all the dukes of Burgundy and the kings of France, were also quite efficient in providing their servants and courtiers with ecclesiastical benefices in the churches within their domains, and this tended, over time, to create tensions between the papacy, the secular lords, and the local chapters, tensions that were usually resolved through elaborate schedules that depended upon the month when a benefice had become vacant.80 What is important to note is that it is precisely at the time when Du Fay was 65

66

67 69 70 73 76 77 79 80

ASV, RS 105, fol. 300v; LAN, 16G 1330 (1417–1418), fol. 1v, concerning Lille; and ASV, RL 191, fol. 14r–v; CBM 1056, fol. 61r, concerning Cambrai. LAN, 16G 1330 (1418–1419), fol. 1v (Le Bonure, Dornart); (1419–1420), fol. 2r–v (Pigouche, Reyner, Carnin); (1420–1421), fol. 1v (Dandrenas); (1422–1423), fol. 1r (Le Macherier). CBM 1056, fol. 134r. 68 Ibid., fol. 176r. CBM 1046, fols. 117r, 154v; Flannel’s canonicate was contested between 1433 and 1438. ASV, RS 135, fol. 61r–v. 71 LAN, 7G 573, fol. 206r. 72 ASV, RL 263, fol. 187r–v. LAN, 6G 177, fol. 40v. 74 ASV, DC 4, fol. 53r–v. 75 Ibid. ASV, RS 143, fols. 272v–273r, Fasti ecclesiae gallicanae, 3, no. 591. ASV, RS 140, fol. 186v; Fasti ecclesiae gallicanae, 3, no. 591. 78 ASV, RL 216, fols. 60v–61v. ASV, RS 160, fols. 138v–139r. The nature of these schedules is explained in Planchart, “Out of the Shadows,” 113–14; also ASV, RV 367, fols. 241v–242r. Conflicts between the pope or the secular lords and the individual chapters persisted well into the 16th century, because canons resented “outside” collations.

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leaving the maîtrise at Cambrai that the beneficial horizons for cantores were opening, and that there were in the papal chapels of Alexander V, John XXIII, and the chapel of the Council of Constance a relatively large number of clerics from Cambrai and the surrounding dioceses, and the bishop of Cambrai at that time, Pierre d’Ailly, had most likely already sensed this change during the Council of Pisa. In addition, in the second and third decades of the fifteenth century, the kind of polyphonic music that men like Du Fay and Binchois were trained to sing and cultivate became something that a number of institutions, including cathedral chapters, but mostly secular courts, came to hold in high value, and this increased use of composed polyphonic music was viewed not just as an ornament of the liturgy (and sometimes as ephemeral, as the flowers placed on the altar),81 but as a manifestation of civic and courtly pride and splendor, and was to become a hallmark of the liturgical and ceremonial life of cities and courts throughout Europe.82 The clerics who performed and sometimes composed this music viewed their careers essentially as clerical careers, and many of them appear to have been active musicians only until the time when they secured a substantial benefice. A few of them, for example those who worked for a private chapel such as that of the duke of Burgundy, had relatively long careers as performers, and the length of such careers grew among musicians of the first two generations following that of Du Fay. But among musicians of the generation of Nicole Grenon (b. 1383) and that of Du Fay, this pattern tended to hold, particularly for composers. Using the papal musicians who wrote music as an example (leaving out only Fedé, who belongs to a later generation), Pierre Fontaine died ca. 1451, Brassart in 1455, Grenon in 1456, Lemacherier (Legrant) in 1460, Le Métayer (Malebecque) in 1465, Zacharie in 1466, Cardot de Bellengues in 1471, and Poignare in 1484, yet none of their surviving works appears to date from after the 1430s. In this Du Fay stands in sharp contrast to his colleagues; his earliest surviving work, a “short Mass” (Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus), surely dates from 1414, and the last datable work, the Missa Ave regina caelorum, was completed in 1472. So in many respects to study Du Fay and his music is almost synonymous with the study of the development the high art of Continental music in the first threequarters of the fifteenth century.

81 82

Cf., e.g., Bowers, “Obligation, Agency, and Laissez faire.” Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 199–212.

1

Origins and First Years (1397–1414)

Earliest Notices and Date of Birth Guillaume Du Fay enters the historical record for the first time in 1409. The account of the small vicars of the cathedral of Cambrai that goes from the eve of St. Barnabas (10 June) in 1409 to the same day in 1410 reports that on the tenth week of that fiscal year, that is the week beginning 5 August 1409, a new altar boy by the name of Willemet was accepted into the ranks of the choristers.1 Further entries that same year in the same account indicate that for eleven weeks prior to his induction Willemet had received instruction from one of the cathedral chaplains, Jehan Rogier de Hesdin,2 and that he had been provided with cloth for his robe and his hat.3 It is by pure chance we have this information, since the accounts of the small vicars are missing for virtually the entire first half of the fifteenth century.4 Two further bits of information concerning Willemet come from the accounts of the aumosne: in 1411–1412, he was given 22 sous “that he may have a doctrinale,”5 and in 1413–1414, when his voice had changed and he was a clericus altaris, he was given 3 francs, worth 72 sous, “on obtaining letters of possession for his chaplaincy.”6 This last entry gives Willemet’s full name for the first time as Willermus Du Fayt. From other such gifts to choristers over the years it is clear that this last was a farewell present. Willermus had been granted a chaplaincy elsewhere and was leaving the cathedral service, but he still had to pay the notaries for the production of his letters, and this sum would cover this expense and give him something 1

2 4

5

LAN, 4G 6789 (1409–1410), fol. 4r. This fascicle alone had a modern pagination in pencil, but it was incomplete and inconsistent. It now has a complete modern foliation in pencil, which is followed here. LAN, 4G 7758 (1409–1410), fol. 8r. 3 LAN, 4G 6789 (1409–1410), fol. 3v. LAN, 4G 6787 (1399–1400) gives us the first six months of 1400; LAN, 4G 6788 transmits drafts in French for the accounts of 1409–1410 and 1410–1411, containing some information not appearing in 4G 6789. This last register transmits the accounts for 1409–1410 and 1411–1412, 1453–1454, 1458–1459, 1459–1460, 1462–1463, 1465–1466, 1466–1467, 1467–1468, 1468–1469, and 1469–1470. One lacuna in 4G 6789 is filled by LAN, 6790, transmitting the accounts for 1463–1464. LAN, 4G 7758 (1411–1412), fol. 10v. 6 LAN, 4G 7759 (1413–1414), fol. 9r.

19

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Origins and First Years (1397–1414)

extra as a gift.7 After this his name disappears from the cathedral records until 1434. The documents thus far appear to tell us next to nothing, but viewed in the context of other entries concerning the choristers, earlier as well as later, they provide some useful information about Willemet’s career. David Fallows suggested that the eleven weeks of instruction that the boy received from Jehan Rogier prior to his entry into the ranks of the choristers represented a special form of instruction granted to someone who was not from a local family and thus needed extra preparation to understand the customs of the cathedral.8 As it turns out, what Jehan Rogier was doing was part of a relatively routine procedure. The number of choristers at the cathedral was officially fixed at six in the early part of the fifteenth century, which for some reason was expanded to seven after 1450.9 But given the fragility of their voices and the vagaries of their health, the chapter always admitted one or two supernumeraries who were boarded and taught either by the master of the children or by one or another of the chaplains. These supernumeraries joined the ranks of the regular choristers as places opened.10 In any case, the teacher always received an extra remuneration for doing this (even when the teacher was the master of the children) as well as money to cover the child’s necessities. This is also why the account of alms specifies the robe and hat for Willemet separately rather than including them in the lump sum spent for the livery of the other choristers. Rogier was one of the chaplains who were asked from time to time to board and instruct the extra choristers, and in 1407 he had been paid to do so for two other children, although in this case none of the names of his charges is given.11 In any event, in early August 1409 a place opened among the regular choristers and it was assigned to young Willemet.12 7

8 9

10

11

12

For example, about a year before Du Fay was to enter the maîtrise at Cambrai, his future colleague in the papal chapel, Jacques Robaille, was given £6 16s. “for a robe” (although £6 could buy considerably more than a robe) as he left the ranks of the choristers; LAN, 4G 7758 (1408– 1409), fol. 8v. David Fallows, “Dufay and Nouvion-le-Vineux,” 44–50; id., Dufay, 9–10. This can be gathered from the number of robes and capes that were bought each year for the choristers. The office of alms paid half of the expense for them, so that the records are reasonably complete. This was the case even with children of local families; the chapter was always reluctant to have the choristers live with their parents during their years of service. LAN, 4G 7758 (1407–1408), fol. 7r: “Item domino Iohanni de Hesdin pro augmento expensarum puerorum pro spatio septem septimanas 56 s.” The documentation on Jehan Rogier de Hesdin is both complicated and very fragmentary in Rome and in Cambrai. He is mentioned in 1409 as a priest ordained in Noyon (LAN, 6G 177, fol. 12v). In 1399 he became a chaplain at Cambrai (4G 6885 [1399–1400], fol. 6v), and on 31

Earliest Notices and Date of Birth

In contrast to the routine nature of the other entries, that for 1411–1412 is exceptional in that it is a gift of a book. Doctrinale was the name usually given to the Doctrina of Alexandre de Villedieu (ca. 1165–1240), the most widely used textbook of grammar and rhetoric at the time and one that concluded with a section on metrics and versification.13 In 1411 books were still rare objects, and a gift of a book to a boy is something normally encountered at this time only in the highest ranks of the nobility, ranks to which Willemet could make no claim. By its nature the gift indicates that someone in the cathedral hierarchy regarded Willemet as a boy of uncommon intellectual promise. That such a promise may have been noted early on also suggests a possible explanation as to why the young chorister may have eventually attracted the interest, as it appears he did, of no less a personage than the bishop of Cambrai at the time, Pierre d’Ailly, who was one of the leading churchmen of his time and whose protection a few years later seems to have given an impetus to the young man’s career. When and where was Du Fay born? In the late Middle Ages births and baptisms were recorded only in the case of the heirs of a dynasty. Most of the surviving documents record financial transactions, and neither the birth of a child nor the baptism involved the exchange of any sums of

13

Oct. 1404 became a grand vicar (CBM 1055, fol. 95r). Curiously, the lists of small vicars for 1409–1410 mention him as a small vicar as well, not an impossibility, particularly if he was musically gifted. From 1407 to at least 1409 he housed and taught some of the supernumerary choristers, including Du Fay. On 26 Sept. 1409 he obtained a canonicate and the treasurership of Ste-Croix in Cambrai in a permutation with Philippe des Moulins (6G 177, fol. 11r), who had been briefly a canon of Cambrai and its cantor (CBM 1055, fols. 146r and 147r). This might have been a setup, for the very same day he was arrested and charged with simony on this matter (CBM 1055, fol. 235v); the case was sent to the court at Reims (CBM 1055, fol. 237v), but apparently went nowhere, although Jehan resigned as grand vicar on 6 June 1411 (CBM 1055, fol. 250v). Nonetheless, he was still serving as canon and treasurer of Ste-Croix on 1 Feb. 1412 (6G 177, fol. 16r). Jehan Pochon, canon of Cambrai, denounced him to Rome on 8 Mar. 1412 (LAN, 6G 177, fol. 16v), and finally he was forced out of his benefices at Ste-Croix, which went to Nicolas Brassard, a notorious concubinary, on 12 May 1413. Jehan retained his chaplaincies in the cathedral and the parish church of Binch, which he had collated in 1411 (LAN, 4G 4616 [1411–1412], fol. 8r) and eventually resigned in a permutation with Mathieu Thorote, a former Cambrai chaplain, a papal singer, and eventually a canon of Cambrai in 1417 (ASV, RS 106, fols. 208v–209r and LAN, 4G 4622 [1417–1418], fol. 9v). In 1420 he was involved in litigation, which he apparently lost, with Jehan de Estokois over the curacy of Landreches (CBM 1056, fol. 84r), and in 1421 he was ordered by the chapter to settle a debt of two francs that he owed Marie Du Fayt (CBM 1056, fol. 84r). He is listed as a resident chaplain in Cambrai in 1421, part of 1422, and 1423 (LAN, 4G 6900–6902, passim), but by 1425 he was no longer resident at Cambrai (4G 6903 [1426–1427], fol. 42v). The last mention of his name in the records is in 1427 or 1428, when his chapel at Cambrai is listed as foreign, that is a chapel held by someone who was not a resident or not a member of either the grand or the small community of chaplains (LAN, 4G 6904 [1427–1428], fols. 28r, 31v). See Das Doctrinale des Alexander de Villa-Dei.

21

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Origins and First Years (1397–1414)

money. The individuals, of course, had an interest in their own age, and upon occasion had it recorded as a legend in their portraits or their epitaphs.14 Occasionally they gave it as part of testimony when serving as witnesses in a legal case15 or mentioned it in petitions made to the authorities.16 Du Fay’s entrance to the choir school of Cambrai as a choirboy in 1409 suggests that he was born sometime around 1400. In this context I have advanced a hypothesis concerning the date of his birth, based upon some documentation and what we know of his training, the milieu in which he moved, and some aspects of his character as evidenced in his own works.17 In the next few pages the basic elements behind this hypothesis are presented. The year Du Fay entered the choir school at Cambrai, the Schism that had divided Western Christendom between two papacies, one based in Rome under Gregory XII and the other in Avignon under Benedict XIII, was thirty years old, and calls for its end were increasingly frequent.18 All measures taken to end it, including the doctrine of compulsion – the withdrawal of obedience to both popes – proposed by the University of Paris in 1398 and embraced by the king of France until 1404, had failed. But in 1409 cardinals appointed by both popes, who had been meeting on and off in Savona since 1407, in preparation for a planned meeting of Gregory XII and Benedict XIII, deserted both claimants and called a general council in Pisa, which declared both popes deposed and elected the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, Pietro Filargo, as Pope Alexander V in 1410. Since neither Gregory XII nor Benedict XIII recognized the Pisan council and both retained some support from secular rulers, Alexander’s election at first compounded the division of the church into three obediences, Roman, Avignonese, and Pisan. Nonetheless, the Council of Pisa set the stage for the final act in the history of the Schism, the calling of the Council of Constance in 1414. In 1409, however, virtually the entire Avignonese

14

15

16

17 18

The recently discovered portrait of Jacob Obrecht is a case in point; see Wegman, “Het ‘Jacob Hobrecht’ portret.” For instance, LAN, 4G 1081, a notary’s commonplace book, has as piece no. 33 the records of a lawsuit where Philippe de la Folie, called Foliot, the papal singer and later Burgundian chaplain, his sister Mathilda, and Nicole Grenon were witnesses. Foliot states that he is fifty-three years old and Grenon states that he is seventy years old. The document is undated, but Foliot, who died in 1454, also states that he has been a canon of St-Géry at Cambrai for twenty-two years, which would place the document in 1452. CBM 1055. On 10 Sept. 1416 Jehan Hubert, a canon of Cambrai, swears that he is over sixty years old and requests that he be allowed not to attend Matins henceforth. See Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices.” What follows is based largely upon J. H. Smith, The Great Schism.

Earliest Notices and Date of Birth

obedience east of the Pyrenees went over to the Pisan pope, as did a number of German princes who had held fast to Rome, including the new king of the Romans, Sigismund of Luxemburg, who would eventually force the second Pisan pope, John XXIII, to convene the Council of Constance. Among the most active conciliarists in Pisa, and later in Constance, was Pierre d’Ailly, a thoroughgoing reformer who, as chancellor of the University of Paris, had begun the work to bring the Schism to an end.19 Ailly had been elected bishop of Cambrai in 1397 and actually entered his see despite the hostility of the duke of Burgundy. Although Cambrai was part of the Holy Roman Empire – the city sits on the riverbank of the Escaut, which was then the nominal frontier between France and the Empire – it was surrounded by lands under the dominion of the duke of Burgundy. Ailly’s election to Cambrai and his confirmation to the see by Benedict XIII in the hopes of retaining his support had been bitterly opposed by Duke Philip the Bold, who had sworn to capture and execute the bishop if he dared to enter the duke’s lands. Indeed, Ailly had to travel to Cambrai virtually incognito, and even as he entered the city and his cathedral the canons were cowed enough by the duke’s threats not to give the bishop a proper ceremonial reception, so that parts of the ceremony, including the bishop’s ringing of the cathedral’s bells, had to be carried out several days after Ailly had entered Cambrai and celebrated his first Mass in the cathedral.20 He resided in Cambrai, on and off, until early 1409, and took an active part in the liturgical and intellectual life of the cathedral, and after his participation in the Council of Pisa he was resident in Cambrai until his elevation to the cardinalate by John XXIII in 1411. His appointment as a bishop by Benedict XIII21 estranged him from his former intellectual and political base in the University of Paris, and in the course of the first decade of the fifteenth century Ailly became increasingly estranged from Benedict. In Cambrai, relatively isolated and surrounded by the dominions of a hostile lord, his intellectual and administrative energies were turned inward to the administration of his see and to pursuits that he had not cultivated at this point for decades, including the writing of poetry. It is from this period that his reading and commentaries 19

20 21

The standard biography of Ailly is Salembier, Le Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly; a shorter biography, which in some aspects supersedes the work of Salembier, appears in Guenée, Between Church and State, 102–258. Guenée, Between Church and State, 182–87. Benedict named Ailly bishop of Le Puy in Apr. 1395, in Nov. 1396 transferred him to Noyon, and in June 1397 transferred him to Cambrai; see Guenée, Between Church and State, 182.

23

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Origins and First Years (1397–1414)

on Le Roman de la rose and, more significantly, the poetry of Philippe de Vitry, date, and it is also from this time that that the final crystallization of his ideas on church reform begins.22 It is at the end of this period when Du Fay was at the cathedral school and when he came to the notice of the cathedral authorities, and perhaps of the bishop himself, as an exceptionally gifted young man. At the same time, it should not surprise us if Ailly’s views on a whole range of doctrinal issues made a strong impression upon the entire cathedral milieu at the time. Among his views, expressed in his Tractatus de Reformatione Ecclesiae, was that the age of ordination should be returned to thirty years, the age of Christ when he began his ministry.23 In the end Ailly stayed with the customary age of twenty-five for ordination, but the idea of waiting until thirty remained a powerful one throughout the fifteenth century, and many priests ordained before the age of thirty waited until that age to say their first Mass.24 Under these circumstances I believe that Du Fay, during his formative years, picked up something of the theological attitudes of Ailly. Further, it has become more and more clear that by 1414 Du Fay was something of a protégé of Ailly,25 most likely through Ailly’s nephew, Raoul le Prestre the elder, who was an influential canon at Cambrai from 1398 on.26 It is also interesting to note that most of his later patrons, Robert Auclou, Louis Allemand, and the house of Savoy, belonged on the conciliar side of the disputes between pope and council later in the century. It is therefore a strong possibility that Du Fay, who was also quite aware of the symbolic significance of numbers, as evidenced by much of his own musical production, waited until he had turned thirty to be ordained to the priesthood.27 The year of Du Fay’s ordination can be established from the summaries of two letters of privilege sent on Du Fay’s behalf by Louis Allemand, papal legate and governor of Bologna, to the chapter of St-Géry. The first is dated 22

23 24

25 26

27

Ibid., 193–99, for a discussion of Ailly’s interest in Vitry’s poetic work during his Cambrai years. Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concilium, 1:418–19. See Delmaille, “Age.” Note that even though the canon allowing ordination at twenty-five harks back to Pope Zachary (741–752), it presents it as an exceptional procedure: “Si triginta annorum non reperiuntur et necessitas exposcit, a viginti quinque et supra levitae et sacerdotes ordinetur.” Fallows, Dufay, 18–21, and Planchart, “The Early Career,” 357–60. Raoul became a canon in 1398, was Archdeacon of Hainaut from 1402 to his death in 1443, and was provost briefly in 1408. Du Fay’s interest in number symbolism has been extensively documented in studies of his music. See, for example, Atlas, “Gematria”; Sandresky, “The Golden Section”; and C. Wright, “Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores.”

Place of Birth and Parentage

12 April 1427 and the second 24 March 1428. The headings of each letter as entered in the chapter acts indicate that Du Fay was a deacon in April 1427, but had been ordained priest by March 1428;28 thus he probably had turned thirty during that time. In this context it is also worth noticing that when Du Fay set about establishing his obit in 1470, he picked as the date for it the feast of Our Lady of Snows on 5 August, a feast that at the time was all but unknown in Cambrai, and that he seems to have gone to quite extraordinary lengths to ensure that the obit was said precisely on that day.29 My sense is that he knew that day was his birthday, and that was also one of the reasons why he regarded the Virgin Mary as a special patron, as shown by his extraordinary setting of the Ave regina caelorum, composed in 1464, with a set of personal prayers interpolated as tropes into the liturgical text. Thus if he turned thirty between April 1427 and March 1428, his birthdate was 5 August 1397. This date is more consonant with what we know of Du Fay’s early life, including a relatively late entry into the maîtrise at Cambrai (at eleven instead of at nine years of age), the time his voice broke (between sixteen and seventeen),30 as well as the considerable amount of music we have from him from the years before 1430.

Place of Birth and Parentage Where he was born has also been the object of considerable speculation. His original patronymic was Du Fayt, a name meaning “of the beech grove,” a name that to this day is widely found in the entire region. The final line of his motet Salve flos Tuscae, which in its only source reads 28

29 30

LAN, 7G 573, fol. 107v: “Copia principii et finis privilegii Guillermi du Fayd diaconi capellani capellaniae du salve in hac ecclesiae presentati in capitulo per Io. Nicolay eiusdem procuratorem penultima maii in anno xxvii° / Ludovicus miseratione divina etc sancte Ceciliae sacrosanctae ecclesiae Romanae presbyter Cardinalis. . . Signatum et datum Bononiae in palatio nostre residentiae die duodecimo mensis Aprilis anno a nativitate domini m° quadrigentesimo vicesimo septimo. . .” and fol. 108r, “Copia principii et finis privilegii domini Guillermi du Fay presbiteri capellani capellaniae du salve ad altare Sancti Gaugerici in hac ecclesia fundato Presentati in capitulo per venerabilem virum magistrum Nicolaum Grenon canonicum Cameracensis Anno domini m°Cccc° xxviii° mensis Maii die xix / Ludovicus Alamandi miseratione divina etc Sancte Cecilie sacrosanctae Romanae ecclesiae presbyter Cardinalis . . . Datum Bononiae in palatio nostrae residentiae die vicesimaquarta mensis Martii anno a nativitate domini millio quadragesimo viceoctavo . . .” Planchart, “Notes on Guillaume Du Fay’s Last Works,” 65–68. Choristers in the 15th century seem to have retained their high voice often into their 17th year; for instance, Étienne Heldedroncque, one of the choirboys who were recruited in 1425 to sing in the papal chapel under Nicole Grenon, states in a petition to the pope that he is seventeen years old (ASV, RS 197, fols. 193r–194r).

25

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Origins and First Years (1397–1414)

“Guillermus caecini natus est ipse Fay,” has been taken as a statement concerning the composer’s birthplace, but Albert Vander Linden noted that the reading is probably corrupt and the line should read “natus et ipse Fay [born and called Fay].”31 This proposal clears the grammar of the passage and makes the line scan correctly as an elegiac pentameter. It should be noted that, whatever the level of inspiration of his Latin poetry, Du Fay (for I assume he is the poet of Salve flos) follows classical scansion punctiliously in those of his works that use classical meters.32 Nonetheless a number of the several dozen places called Fay or Fayt that dot the region between Cambrai and Brussels have been proposed as probable birthplaces for the composer, along with Chimay, Laon, and Cambrai. Since some of these claims continue to be found in the literature, a short survey of them may be useful. In 1829 François-Joseph Fétis proposed Chimay in Hainaut on the basis of a manuscript of a theoretical treatise that transmitted Du Fay’s ideas and gave them, as Fétis read it, “secundum doctrinam Dufais Cimacensis Hann.,” that is “according to the doctrine of Dufay from Chimay in Hainaut.”33 The treatise was sold to an English dealer in 1824 and has disappeared. Most scholars now agree that what Fétis read as “Cimacensis” (from Chimay) was probably an abbreviation for “Cameracensis” (from Cambrai), the place where Du Fay spent most of his adult life. Given Fétis’s tendency to mystification and even forgery,34 there were doubts about the existence of the treatise until citations from Du Fay’s theoretical writings were identified by F. Alberto Gallo.35 In all probability Fétis simply misread the town’s name when he saw the treatise. In 1966 Henry Leland Clarke proposed the small village of Fayt-leManage, taking as his basis the corrupt reading of the end of Salve flos Tuscae,36 and a similar proposal was advanced by Albert Lovegnée for the hamlet of Fay near Soignies, adducing as further evidence the obit founded by Jehan Le Roy (Johannes Regis) for Du Fay at St-Vincent de Soignies.37 31 32

33 34

35 36 37

A. Vander Linden, “Natus et ipse Fay,” 215. Indeed, the scansion in Salve flos is otherwise flawless, and this text is probably Du Fay’s most inspired Latin poem. On the authorship of the Latin poems set in Du Fay’s motets see HolfordStrevens, “Du Fay the Poet?” Fétis, Mémoire, 13–14. Flynn Warmington and Rob Wegman have both noted that Fétis added a spurious ascription to Binchoys to Br 5557, and altered the text of the canon in Antoine Busnoys’s motet Anthoni usque limina in the same source. See Wegman, “New Data.” Gallo, “Citazioni da un trattato di Dufay.” Clarke, “Musicians of the Northern Renaissance,” 73–74. Lovegnée, Le Lieu de naissance de Guillaume du Fay.

Place of Birth and Parentage

The problem with all such proposals is that Du Fay’s motet text really says nothing about his place of birth, and even if it did, there is little reason to assume one or another of the hundreds of villages and hamlets named Fay or Fayt spread over the region.38 In 1974 Edmond Dartus proposed Troisvilles, near Cambrai, where one of the three hamlets is called le Fayt,39 but in 1982, on the basis of documentation showing that Du Fay’s mother had lived in Cambrai continuously from 1420 to her death, he suggested Cambrai itself.40 In 1976 David Fallows, noting the seemingly unusual eleven weeks of instruction that Du Fay received from Jehan Rogier before entering the maîtrise at Cambrai, the fact that Nicole Grenon had been a master of the children at Laon in 1407 before coming as a grammar teacher to Cambrai in 1408, and that among Du Fay’s earliest benefices two of them were in Laon or the Laonnais, proposed Laon as a possibility, suggesting that the young man had come to Cambrai with Grenon.41 In his later study of the composer’s life Fallows accepted the view proposed by Dartus that Cambrai was Du Fay’s native city,42 and in any event, Du Fay’s connections with Laon are more easily explained by events later in his life.43 All through this, a passage in the execution of Du Fay’s will had been overlooked. In it the executors of his will refer to lands that the composer bought “in his homeland,” in order to endow his obit.44 The passage and its immediate context are worth examining in detail. It reads: Item, to complete and accomplish the acquisition of £15 of revenue at Wodeque, made by the aforesaid deceased for the foundation of the Easter crowns and the augmentation of his obit, for which acquisition he had borrowed while living £330, and thus for good account of this accomplishment it is allotted here £30. Item, in this year of 1474, by order of the provost’s office45 it was fitting to pursue and obtain the amortization of all the acquisitions in his homeland, for the last sixty years have been paid on account of half of the acquisition made by the said deceased, in conjunction with Jehan du Bois in Brussels of Brabant, to support

38 39 40 41 43 44 45

On the establishments of the obit, see later in this chapter. Dartus, “Un Grand Musicien cambrésien, Guillaume Du Fay.” Dartus, “Guillaume Du Fay de Cambrai?” Fallows, “Dufay and Nouvion-le-Vineux,” 49–50. 42 Fallows, Dufay, 9, n. 11. Planchart, “The Early Career,” 363–66. The entire will and its execution appear as Appendix 4. I read this word as “prevce,” a corruption of “prevotré”; Bonnie Blackburn reads it as “prince,” indicating the overlord of the lands in question (private communication). If she is correct, the “prince” is the abbot of Dielenghem, who is mentioned in Assize as the overlord of the lands (LAN, 4G 5431, fol. 4v), but the abbot was not a prince-abbot and is never referred to as “prince” in any document known to me.

27

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his obit, from which the provost’s office has had £28 15s. 5d., and on account of the expenses in the execution of the letters £7 15s. 7d. Together £36 11s.46

On the basis of this passage, and the fact that in the accounts of the assize the actual place “in Brussels” is specified as the town of Bersele, and that throughout his early years at Cambrai the composer’s given name was spelled as a form of Willaume, rather than Guillaume, I suggested that Bersele, now called Beersel, a suburb of Brussels, rather than Wodeque should be considered his birthplace.47 Concerning Du Fay’s name my reasoning was based on the careful distinction made in the text of papal supplications between Willermus (Willem or Wilhelm) and Guillermus (Guillaume, Guglielmo, Guillermo), a distinction that is quite consistent for the entire first half of the fifteenth century in thousands of cases. In a recent study Barbara Haggh-Huglo makes a point that such a distinction was probably not made in a linguistic frontier such as the area east of Cambrai, and she proposed Wodeque rather than Bersele as the place of birth for the composer.48 Her argument, however, flies in the face of the statement by the executors, where the phrase, “his homeland,” is set down in connection with the payment of the mortgage at Bersele. Further, contrary to what Haggh-Huglo maintains, it was the land at Bersele, and not that at Wodeque, that provided the main income for the establishment of Du Fay’s obit. There is nonetheless the nearly absolutely consistent spelling of his name as a form of Willermus in the local sources until around 1434, and the use of that form of the name by the supplication by Jacop van Werp, which is our only source for the fact that Du Fay was an illegitimate child and therefore comes from someone who had information about the composer’s early life that Du Fay was at pains to suppress;49 these 46

47

48 49

LAN, 4G 1313, p. 26: “Item pour parfurnir et accomplier l’acqueste de 15 lb de revenue a Wadeque, faite par le dict deffunct pour le fondacion des couronnes a la pasque et l’augmentacion de son obit, sur lequelle acquiste en son vivant avait baillie 330 lb, et cy pour a bon compte, pour l’acomplissement se fait mise de 30 lb. “Item en ceste annee iiiic lxxiiii, par le commandement du prevce a convenu poursievir et obtenir l’admortissement de toutes les acquistes faites en son pays puis lx ans encha se ont este payes ad cause de le moittie de l’acquiste faite par le dict deffunct a Bruselle en Brabant pour son obit a l’encontre de maistre Jehan du Bois, dont le prevce a eubt 28 lb 15s 5d, et pour se part des despens de le poursieulte et des lettres, 7 lb 15s 7d., ensamble 36 lb 11s.” Planchart, “The Early Career,” 345–48. Although the will mentions the place as “Bruselle” (Brussels), the accounts of the assize place the location of the lands Du Fay and Du Bois bought in Bersele, “in front of the church of Bersele.” LAN, 4G 5431, fol. 4v. Haggh, “Guillaume du Fay’s Birthplace.” In ASV, RS 272, fol. 206r (dated 1431), Jacob mentions that Du Fay is “de presbytero genitus et soluta,” as a possible impediment to Du Fay’s legal possession of the parish church of SaintPierre in Tournai, which Jacob was now seeking from the pope.

Place of Birth and Parentage

add some weight to the view that he was born in Bersele and that the prevailing tongue of Flemish-speaking Brussels left its mark in the early recension of his Christian name.50 Who were his parents? He took his patronymic from his mother, Marie Du Fayt, and from Werp’s supplication we know that his father was a priest and Marie was a single woman. Now, such children were legion in the late Middle Ages, as the hundreds of thousands of petitions for dispensation from the defectum natalium in various ecclesiastical archives of Europe demonstrate. Often their clerical progenitors were solicitous of their children’s welfare even at the risk of severe penalties, which included the loss of all ecclesiastical preferments.51 The wills of these men, as well as those of their children, often show such warm relationships,52 and thousands of them carried their father’s patronymic or toponymic, among them Du Fay’s colleagues Grégoire Nicole, Gilles Carlier, Gérard le Jay, Guillaume le Métayer [Modiator] called de Malbecque, and Jehan Augustin called Dupassage. But Du Fay is not one of them. Unlike those of his colleagues just mentioned, Du Fay did not carry his father’s patronymic, and as Edmond Dartus noted, the provisions of his own will are strangely muted and impersonal in terms of his parentage.53 Dartus came close to suggesting that Du Fay’s father was a canon of Cambrai, Jehan Hubert, in whose house Marie Du Fayt was living when he died and to whom he left some money, referring to her in the will as “ma cousine et servante,” which is an odd juxtaposition of terms.54 This is not impossible, but my reading of the extensive documentation that survives on Hubert and his relatives makes me think that it is unlikely. Hubert is one of the few canons of the cathedral in the early fifteenth century about whom the documents show no trace of any impropriety. In fact, he was one of the canons whom the 50 51

52

53

See also Planchart, “Concerning Du Fay’s Birthplace.” The Registra Supplicationum in the Vatican Archives have thousands of petitions for such stripping of benefices for concubinaries and fornicators, always initiated by someone who coveted the benefice. Such petitions were virtually always granted. How many of them were ultimately successful in depriving their intended victim of their benefices is not known, but the same records indicate that hundreds of these men managed to retain their benefices throughout their lives, despite all attempts by others to have them taken away. See, for instance, the description of the provisions of the will of the composer Lupus Hellinck providing for his son in Blackburn, “Johannes Lupi and Lupus Hellinck.” Du Fay’s colleague Grégoire Nicole, the son of a subdeacon, in his own will makes references to carrying out his father’s wishes concerning family property (AN, 4G 1039). Occasionally there is outright hostility between parents and their illegitimate offspring: on 13 Sept. 1419 Giovanni Zabarella asks Pope Martin V to deprive Calorio de Zabarella, his illegitimate son, of all his ecclesiastical benefices in favor of his legitimate son, Bartolomeo Zabarella (ASV, RS 131, fol. 16v). Dartus, “Guillaume Du Fay de Cambrai?,” 284–85. 54 Ibid., 284.

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Origins and First Years (1397–1414)

cathedral authorities entrusted to enforce the rules against concubinage in the Cambrai clergy.55 Further, the provisions of his will give a simpler explanation of what Marie Du Fayt was doing in the household: a first cousin (cousine germaine) of Hubert, Jehanne Huberde, was living with them as well; Jehanne was old and probably senile, and it was Marie’s job to look after her even after Jehan Hubert’s death.56 It would rather appear that Hubert was indeed a blood relative of Marie who provided the young woman a haven and a way to bring up her son. It is also possible to assume that such an arrangement was perhaps a consequence of his decision to retire to his prebend at Cambrai, a town where Marie’s past history would probably not be known. Jehan Hubert was born around 1355;57 he had been a chaplain of Cardinal Peter of Luxembourg, as well as a familiaris of the king of Navarre, and was a bachelor of canon law. He had canonicates in StPierre de Lille, Ste-Waudru in Mons,58 and St-Vincent de Soignies.59 He must have been a member of the court of Guillaume IV of Hainault at Mons, since he was a witness to a number of charters emanating from that court, where often one of his cosignatories is Jehan de Bins, the father of Gilles de Bins, called Binchoys.60 In 1406 he was named as a councilor to Louis I of Orléans, duke of Touraine.61 In 1403 Hubert obtained a canonicate at Cambrai that he had sought since 1384,62 but apparently he never held possession of it. Finally, on 2 March 1408 he collated a prebend in the cathedral that had been held previously by his patron, Cardinal Peter of Luxembourg.63 He was clearly a well-connected and influential cleric. His sister’s son, also called Jehan Hubert, was a doctor of law, conservator of the privileges of the University

55 56

57 59 61 62

63

CBM 1055, fol. 256r. LAN, 4G 1372, fol. 64, refers to her as femme anchienne. Further, it is worth noting that the one mention of Jehanne Huberde in the cathedral records in a payment concerning Hubert’s obit, she is mentioned as “Iehanne famula domini Iohannes Huberti” (LAN, 4G 6897, 18v). See n. 16. 58 Briegleb and Laret-Kayser, Suppliques de Benoît XIII, 2, no. 46. Demeuldre, Le Chapitre, 256. 60 See Fallows, “Binchois and the Poets,” 200. Devillers, Chartes, 3:284. On 27 Jan. 1384, Hubert, already a bachelor of law, presented letters of expectative for a benefice at Cambrai (CBM 1054, fol. 27r); the same took place on 17 Sept. 1396 (CBM 1055, fol. 11r). In 1403–1404 the office of the fabric reports his payment of one capa on his reception to “the prebend held by the Archdeacon of Antwerp [Jacques Mazuier], which he did not obtain, but has now the prebend of Mathieu [recte Marc] Bye” (LAN, 4G 4608, fol. 7v). Hubert was not then a resident canon and it is likely that he never obtained possession of either of these prebends. CBM 1055, fol. 121v. The cardinal died in 1388 and the prebend had been held by Robert de Flandres to his death in 1405 and then by André de Weyborck, who was displaced after a lawsuit from Hubert.

Place of Birth and Parentage

of Paris, and vice-regent of the bishop of Beauvais.64 As a papal judge in partibus he heard a number of cases, among them one involving Nicole Grenon.65 Like his uncle, the younger Hubert was a canon of St-Géry in Cambrai and Ste-Waudru in Mons,66 and in 1426 was elected provost of StGéry.67 In 1436 he was received as canon of Cambrai on the same day as Du Fay,68 but Hubert died the following year. On his death his canonicate at Cambrai went to Jehan Marsille, a papal singer and a married clerk, who promptly resigned it to Yves Gruyau;69 and his canonicate at Ste-Waudru went to Gilles de Bins, called Binchoys, on 17 May 1437.70 Thus Marie had at least two blood relations with influential positions in the Cambrai hierarchy. Still, the situation of Marie Du Fayt at Cambrai is in some ways something of an anomaly. Any woman who would have had a sexual relationship with a priest and borne him a child was, ipso facto, a mulier diffamata, and ecclesiastical authorities dealt with such women rather harshly. Marie, however, apparently lived in the house of Jehan Hubert at least from 1409 to his death in 1425. This is not the way ecclesiastical authority would have dealt with the former concubine of a priest, no matter how prominent her relations. A possible explanation of the circumstances of Marie’s life is provided by two cases documented in the chapter acts of St. Donatian in Bruges, both dealing with the forcible violation of a maiden. In one instance one Antonia, a sixteen-year-old who had been a servant of the composer Jacques Dufour [Jacobus de Clibano], was lured by canon Guillaume Belledame into his house, where he forcibly deflowered her. Belledame’s case was heard by the chapter and, because Antonia’s male relatives apparently had some social standing, the chapter found against Belledame. The case took from 22 February, when Antonia lodged her accusation, to 1 April 1444,71 when the chapter ordered a relatively mild official punishment for Belledame (£3 to Antonia and £1 to the chapter, although her relatives had asked for £100 in amends). By 20 April, however, things had taken a desperate turn: Antonia had been killed, either by or on the orders of Belledame, according to a written report by the cantor, 64 66

67

68 71

ASV, RS 210, fol. 66v. 65 ASV, RS 124, fols. 259v–260r. He obtained the canonicate in Ste-Waudru on a nomination of the count of Hainaut through an exchange with his uncle on 29 June 1424. See Devillers, Chartes, 4:132; id., Cartulaire, 4:132. LAN, 7G 26, piece 375. The full text of Hubert’s oath of induction was preserved to serve as a model for the induction of future provosts. LAN, 4G 4642, fol. 11v. 69 LAN, 4G 4643, fol. 12r. 70 Devillers, Chartes, 4:201–2. BAB, A 51, fols. 118r–121r, entries dated 24 Feb., 4 Mar., 9 Mar., 11 Mar., 13 Mar., and 1 Apr.

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Baudouin de la Poele, to the duchess of Burgundy, who apparently also implicated Clibano in these events.72 In the end, by 2 May 1444 Belledame resigned his canonicate at St. Donatian,73 and it is possible that the affair clouded Clibano’s years there, leading to his eventual removal to Soignies in 1449.74 The second case is that of Clementia Pardieu, sister of Josquin Pardieu, the decanus Christianitatis at St. Donatian, who had been violently deflowered (violenter oppreserat et defloraverat) by canon Thomas Bone, an intimate friend of her brother. The case was brought to the chapter on 1 June and concluded on 28 June 1442. Bone was placed on house arrest for one month, was sent away, and was deprived of his benefice for one year. Clementia had become pregnant and she went away to have the child somewhere outside Bruges, but apparently no monetary amend was made to her or her brother, and Pardieu even had trouble collecting £7 that Bone owed him.75 What is important in both cases is that the woman was held largely blameless, which probably mitigated the societal stigma and allowed Clementia, if not the unlucky Antonia, to lead her life without the added burden of being labeled a mulier diffamata. It is, of course, more than likely that her fate would have been much different if she had not had influential male relatives willing to stand up for her cause.76 A circumstance like that of Clementia Pardieu might explain why Marie Du Fayt eventually was able to be accepted and helped in some way by some of her relatives, including her cousin Jehan Hubert. Du Fay’s father, then, appears to have abandoned Marie and the child, either willingly or under pressure, and not to have played any part in his 72

73 75 76

BAB, 51, fol. 122r. The report itself does not survive; what the chapter acts record is a complaint that Clibano and Belledame lodge against the cantor for “slandering” them in the case of Antonia to the duchess of Burgundy. BAB, Reeks A 51, fol. 122v. 74 See also Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, 61. BAB, Reeks A 51, fols. 83v–88r, entries of 1, 4, 5, 12, 13, 15, 20, and 28 June. The modern literature on seduction and rape in the late Middle Ages, as well as that on clerical illegitimacy, is largely silent on the fate of the women because most of the victims essentially disappear from the historical record. The most important recent inquiries, Women, Marriage, and Family in Medieval Christendom, ed, Rousseau and Rosenthal; Illegitimität im Spätmittelalter, ed. Schmugge and Wiggenhauser; Schmugge, Kirche, Kinder Karrieren; Sheehan, Marriage, Family and Law in Medieval Europe; and Wertheimer, “The Ecclesiastical Construction of Illegitimacy in the Middle Ages,” present essentially statistical studies. Typical of the situation is that the most informative on this topic is the introduction, dealing with the pre-18th-century situation, in Demars-Sion, Femmes séduites et abandonées. A particularly telling instance of what probably was a rape that resulted in the birth of twins and of the woman who survived it and led her children to successful careers in music was presented by Wegman, with extensive archival documentation, in “Pater meus agricola est.”

Marie Du Fayt and the Du Fayt Families

son’s life, who might even not have known who he was. The composer’s efforts to hide his illegitimacy also seem to have been more thoroughgoing and vastly more successful than those of most other men in his circumstances, possibly driven by a sense of shame more acute than what one senses, for example, in some of his colleagues at Cambrai who were also illegitimate. Thus despite the hundreds of official documents that survive concerning Du Fay, it is only the chance mention of his illegitimacy by Jacop van Werp that has given us this information. In contrast to Du Fay’s silence on the matter of his father, the surviving record shows a number of acts of filial devotion of Du Fay to his mother.77

Marie Du Fayt and the Du Fayt Families In the absence of any knowledge concerning the father we are left only with Marie Du Fayt. The records of her life are painfully scanty and all come from after 1420. Briefly they are as follows: on 21 June 1420 she was living in Cambrai, and the chapter of the cathedral ordered Jehan Rogier de Hesdin, Du Fay’s old teacher, to pay her 1 franc that he owed her on that very day and another before the feast of the Assumption on pain of suspension and excommunication.78 In July 1424 she was living at the house of Jehan Hubert, taking care of Jehanne Huberde. In his will Hubert left her 20 francs worth £24,79 provided that she stay with Jehanne and attend his memorial Masses at the altar of the crucifix in the cathedral. Marie apparently did that faithfully for the entire year after his death, and a year later his executors granted her a further grace of £6 plus 13s. for the wax and silver she gave for the Masses throughout the year and 61s. for other small expenses.80 Since Hubert died on Christmas Eve of 1425 this means she was at Cambrai until the end of 1426.81 In August 1434, Du Fay left Savoy “to visit his mother.”82 He was at Cambrai by October of that year and the assumption is that his mother was still living there.83 From late 77

78 81

82

83

Du Fay apparently lived with his mother from his return to Cambrai to her death in 1445, and he obtained permission from the cathedral authorities to have her buried in the cathedral. See LAN, 4G 9090, fol. 142r. CBM 1056, fol. 84r. 79 LAN, 4G 1372, p. 16. 80 Ibid., p. 21. The date given by Le Glay, Recherches, 98 and 190, based on the epitaph and thus reported in all the literature up to now, is a full year too early; on this, see Planchart, “Concerning Du Fay’s Birthplace,” 228. AST, Camerale Savoia, Reg. 79, fol. 391r–v. Du Fay is given 10 fl. as he leaves “to visit his mother.” LAN, 4G 7434, fol. 7r. Du Fay presented with bread at Cambrai.

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1439 on Marie most likely lived with Du Fay, who had returned to Cambrai that year.84 On 15 April 1444 Du Fay obtained from the cathedral chapter permission to have his mother buried in the cathedral.85 On 23 April 1444, St George’s Day, Marie du Fayt died and was buried in the cathedral, as her epitaph, recorded in the eighteenth century by François-Dominique Tranchant and reproduced by André Le Glay, shows.86 Finally, on 15 May 1444 Du Fay presented to the chapter his mother’s will and swore to its execution.87 The chapter’s acceding to his request goes beyond a matter of Du Fay being an important canon: it argues further against Marie having been Jehan Hubert’s concubine, since the chapter would surely have looked askance at granting burial within the cathedral to anyone responsible in their view for leading one of their own into mortal sin; it also argues for Marie having come from a family with some social standing (not necessarily seigniorial status, as has often been mentioned in the literature), as would befit a blood relation of Jehan Hubert, who had a distinguished career. Marie, then, probably came from what for lack of a better name could be called the high bourgeoisie at the time, a class of prosperous artisans and merchants who often took an active part in the government of their towns and whose offspring also found in the church a ready means of advancement. The family name, under both of the most common spellings, Du Fay and Du Fayt, is quite widespread throughout the region even to this day. It is worth noting, however, that Cambrai itself seems to be one of the towns in the region with the smallest number of people with such a name. This, of course, could be a distortion caused by the virtually complete loss of the city’s archives during the brutal torching of the city’s center by the retreating Germans in 1918, but even the very extensive actes d’echevinage of the cathedral, which yield an extraordinary number of people with the last names of other canons known to have come from Cambrai or its environs, give a sparse number of entries concerning the Du Fays or the Du Fayts. Edmond Dartus called attention to most of these names in his study of the family at Cambrai.88 One of the names that occasionally turns up in the registers of the early fifteenth century, a Pierre du Fayt, canon of St-Géry, is 84

85

86

87

Solid documentation on this is entirely missing, but it is something that stands to reason. Du Fay changed houses upon her death. LAN, 4G 1090, fol. 143v; Le Glay, Recherches, 200; Houdoy, Histoire, 86; C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 176. Le Glay, Recherches, 200. Tranchant’s collection of epitaphs, which formed the basis for virtually all the later citations, was compiled in 1764 and is now CBM 1049. Le Glay, Recherches, 200; LAN, 4G 1090, fol. 147r. 88 Dartus, “Les Du Fay à Cambrai.”

Marie Du Fayt and the Du Fayt Families

a ghost: the name is a misreading by an occasional notary of a powerful and well-connected Limousin cleric, Pierre Faydit, who succeeded in collating a northern benefice and holding on to it. His uncle Jehan Faydit had obtained a prebend in St-Géry between 1392 and 1399,89 and was also a canon of the cathedral for two years (1398–1400).90 In June 1407 he resigned the St-Géry prebend in favor of his nephew Pierre Faydit,91 who, unlike his uncle, moved to Cambrai and spent the rest of his life there, eventually becoming a canon of the cathedral in 1431, succeeding Jacques de Templeuve.92 In a number of instances Pierre is referred to as Petrus du Fayt in the St-Géry registers. But St-Géry did have two other canons with the name Du Fay[t] in the fourteenth century, Jacques Du Fay [Jacobus de Fageto], who died in 1379,93 and a Jehan Bernier Du Fayt [Johannes Bernerii de Fayt], who can be traced in chapter acts to 1374 and who succeeded Jacques du Fay as master of the fabric of St-Géry in 1380.94 Looking into documents from throughout the fourteenth century, the indefatigable Edmond Dartus found scattered references to four Du Fayts connected with the cathedral, Gilles Du Fayt, a chaplain in the chapel of St. Maxellendis in 1301; Gilles Du Fayt, chaplain of the cathedral, mentioned in documents going from 1304 (together with his illegitimate daughter Marie Du Fayt, a Beguine) to 1328 (these two may be the same man); Pierre Du Fayt, also a chaplain, mentioned in documents from 1317 to 1326; and Jehan Du Fayt, franc-sergeant of the cathedral, mentioned in documents from 1339 to 1344. Further, Dartus found four Du Fayt households in Cambrai; in 1357, Jehan Du Fayt and his wife Piéronne owned a house in the Rue des Écoles, and it is not impossible that this man is the same as the franc-sergeant of the cathedral. A Mathieu Du Fayt, with three married daughters, Jehanne Du Fayt, wife of Colard du Haspre, Lebille Du Fayt, wife of Simon Petach, and Yde Du Fayt, wife of Jehan Flori, owned a garden [cortil] between 1381 and 1393, when he sold it to one Jaquemart de Lecourt.95 A third family is that of Gobers Du Fay, who together with his wife Jehanne de Villers disposed of their property in favor of their children, Nicaise and Jehan Du Fay, in 1390. A fourth household is that of Jehan Du Fay, son of Gobers, and his wife, Jehanne Li Crasse, who sold to one Maroie Domise a house in the Rue de la Porte Robert in 1408. 89

90 92 94

The St-Géry acts for this decade survive in a very incomplete and chaotic register. LAN, 7G 752, fol. 33r records a privilege of absence for Faydit in Jan. 1399/1400. The accounts for the fabric, which would record his reception, are missing from 1393 to 1400. LAN, 4G 7401, fol. 1v, and 4G 7403, fol. 1v. 91 LAN, 7G 2223 (fasc. 1406–7), fol. 1v. LAN, 4G 7431, fol. 1v. 93 LAN, 7G 2223 (fasc. 1380–81), fol. 1r. LAN, 7G 2223 (fasc. 1485–86), fol. 1r. 95 LAN, 7G 124, from the échevinage of St-Géry.

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Other men or families with the name Du Fay or Du Fayt include Guillaume Du Fay, a layman of Laon, who with his wife Jehanine received a plenary remission of sins from Eugenius IV in 1442,96 and a remarkably large number of men called Jehan Du Fay, references to which cannot be to the same person. In a rough chronology they are: Jehan Du Fay 1, a clerk of Cambrai who on 21 January 1415 presented letters for an expectative for any benefice with or without cure through his proctor Jehan Hubert.97 Jehan Du Fay 2 was a small landowner living in Troisvilles in 1435.98 Jehan Du Fay 3 was a chaplain of St-Amé de Douai in 143599 and died a canon of that church in June 1453, leaving the cape he was to wear on his deathbed to Jehan Du Fay 4, a chaplain of Saumur.100 Jehan Du Fay 5 was a young clerk of Arras about to enter orders when he asked Eugenius IV for a dispensation from illegitimacy on 8 April 1439.101 Jehan Du Fay 6 held a clericatura at St-Vincent de Soignies when he died shortly before March 1443;102 this last man could possibly the same as either Jehan 4 or Jehan 5. Finally there is Jehan Du Fay 7, a poverty-stricken priest and a musician, who received alms from the cathedral in 1494.103 This man is also the Jehan du Fayt who was a chorister of Ste-Croix in Cambrai in between 1454 and 1459, and for a time studied with Gilles Carlier’s brother Jehan.104 He was later a vicar at Ste-Croix and is surely the magister Jehan Du Fay, gubernator of the parish church of Oisy near Valenciennes, who received nine loaves of bread as a gift on 1 October 1493.105 Nonetheless, according to the extensive research done in city archives of the entire region by the art historian Ludovic Nys in his studies of local sculpture traditions,106 the center of gravity of the Du Fays in the region was Valenciennes,107 and it is interesting to note that this city was also the administrative center for the court of Duke Albert of Bavaria, in whose 96 97

98 99 101 102

103

104

105 106 107

ASV, RL 394, fol. 265v. CBM 1056, fol. 20v. This is particularly suggestive since by 1415 letters of John XXIII probably carried little force, but Jehan, like Marie, was perhaps a blood relative of Hubert. LAN, 4G 439, piece 5329, dated 22 Apr. 1436. LAN, 1G 125, piece 388, dated 25 July 1425. 100 LAN, 1G 155, fol. 17v. ASV, RS 356, fol. 14r. ASV, RL 401, fols. 117v–118r. The benefice went to Guillaume Tanelle, who resigned it before collation, and then to Guillaume Sandrart. CBM 1062, fol. 186v, 16 June 1494: “Domino Iohanni du Fay pauperi presbitero musico ordinant domini mei pietatis intentu super officio elemosine octo stuferos.” LAN, 6G 702, fascicle of 1454–1455 (Fabric), fol. 10v; fascicle of 1455–1456, fol. 12r; fascicle of 1458–1459, fol. 12r–v. LAN, 4G 7472, fascicle of 1493–1494 (Wine), fol. 11r. Nys, La Pierre de Tournai; id., Valenciennes aux XIVe et XVe siècles. I am particularly grateful to Professor Nys for numerous communications. A list of the Valenciennes Du Fay will eventually be published by Professor Nys.

Marie Du Fayt and the Du Fayt Families

service Jehan Hubert had been early in his career, which is suggestive in terms of the blood relation between Marie Du Fayt and Hubert. The Valenciennes Du Fayts were important city officers and small landowners. That early records of Marie have not surfaced is not surprising, however; she must have been relatively young at the time of her disgrace, and most records in the surviving archives report the economic doings of relatively well-established members of the society, and a disgraced girl became a nonperson in terms of her economic power at the time; whatever status she could ever hope to acquire depended on the career of her progeny. North of the Alps, the bastard child of a lord could hope to achieve some status either in the military or in the church; but the options for Marie’s child were more limited, and the only avenue that offered promise was the church. It would appear that Marie sensed that and sought to provide as best she could for Willemet, and this probably led her to seek Hubert’s assistance. The one trait of her personality that comes through the impersonal and minimal documentation we have for her is her personal devotion, and it seems to have affected her son, creating a strong bond between them.108 In the context of what has been presented here, Du Fay’s birth at Bersele, a town outside the geographic area where the Du Fayt families are most commonly found at this time, might have been the result of Marie having been sent, as was Clementia Pardieu, to carry and deliver her child outside of the social circle of her immediate relations. Such temporary (and sometimes permanent) exile of a disgraced girl remained a usual social reaction well into the twentieth century. In a certain sense, then, Jehan Hubert was Du Fay’s “father,” at least from 1408 or 1409 on. The provisions of his will as well as the bare facts of his ecclesiastical career suggest a kind and upright man who was nonetheless a controlling person. In contrast to dozens of other wills by his fellow canons, he is concerned with having his relatives follow his orders for daily life from beyond the grave, and shows a concern for his cousin Jehanne, who was, as he remarks, a femme anchienne, continuing to lead a virtuous life after his death, as well as a concern for the morals of those who were to officiate at his funeral.109 His own relationship to Willemet was 108

109

LAN, 4G 1372, p. 63. As mentioned earlier, Hubert left Marie 20 francs on the condition that she and/or Jehanne Huberde attend the monthly Masses for his soul for one year. Marie did so and, on the opinion of the executors, was deserving of further remuneration on account of her fidelity to the memory of the deceased. For at the end of the year they gave her £6 in addition (p. 21). Ibid., 55–58. Hubert specifies that the men who are to carry his body to the church and then to the grave should be “men of good morals.” I have found no similar statement in the several hundred wills from Cambrai now at Lille that I examined over the years.

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probably not a particularly easy one; he might have seen him as living proof of his cousin’s shame, and it is significant that he passes over him in absolute silence in a will that is notable for the large number of relatives to whom legacies are left. This might also explain some of the coldness that one senses in Du Fay’s own will toward his own relatives at the end of his life.110

Life as a Chorister and Training If Du Fay’s instruction prior to his induction as a chorister followed the usual practice in the cathedral, he probably lived with Jehan Rogier during those eleven weeks and then moved to the house of the choristers, where he was to spend the next four or five years of his life. Two sets of regulations concerning the life of the choristers survive in the archives of the cathedral. The first dates from 22 September 1458,111 and the second from 18 August 1739.112 The eighteenth-century regulations are far more extended and detailed, but are clearly based on those of the fifteenth century, just as the eighteenth-century copy of the statutes of the cathedral, written by the same hand that wrote the regulations for the choristers, are by and large a tissue of glossed and expanded citations from the chapter acts and two medieval collections, the Livre rouge and the Livre poilu.113 The choristers were housed with the master in one of the houses owned by the cathedral. The fifteenth-century regulations largely concern the need for the choristers to have the proper religious instruction and to observe decorum at all times, and to be taught the traditional plainsong. They should be taught the art of music and they should go and come together to the grammar school. The rules also emphasize that the choristers are to have healthful food and drink, without pastries and sweets, and clean linens throughout the year as well as the proper heat in winter. The master should also ensure that the choristers do not “overheat” themselves during the periods that they are free to play and that they observe proper behavior when there are other adults at their meals. A more specific rule indicates that the choristers were encouraged (and eventually required) to speak Latin rather than French, even among themselves. 110

111 113

This coldness was remarked upon both by Fallows, Dufay, 80–82, and Dartus, “Guillaume Du Fay de Cambrai?,” 284–85. There are a few curious parallels between Hubert’s will and Du Fay’s, including a payment for the chaplains and vicars to dine on Monday in albis and a legacy to the Grand Chartreuse, which is one of the still unexplained elements of Du Fay’s will. CBM 1060, fols. 25v–26r. 112 LAN, 4G 94, piece 1372. LAN, 4G 1995, fols. 1–66r (Statutes of the 18th century); 4G 1085 (Livre poilou; the Livre rouge apparently does not survive).

Life as a Chorister and Training

The eighteenth-century regulations expand this, presenting a relatively detailed daily schedule of instruction, rehearsal, and attendance to the services that left precious little free time. In fact, the regulations give the clear impression that the routine was deliberately designed to fill all the available time of the choristers. Given what their duties were, not only in terms of regular attendance in the choir, but their increased employment in newly endowed services, which grew dramatically throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,114 it is more than plausible to project the detailed regimen described in the eighteenth-century regulations back to the fifteenth century, just as such a fully regimented schedule survived in a number of French maîtrises well into the twentieth century. A summary of their schedule in the eighteenth-century regulations is as follows:115 Waking up and dressing before Matins Getting the church robes (laid out in the common room the night before) Leaving under the guide of the eldest chorister for the church, receiving holy water at the door from the bénitier Matins: during winter the master must be sure that a proper fire is lit for when the choristers return from Matins Return to the house; recitation of morning prayers Washing Breakfast (déjeuner) Rehearsal of the pieces for the Mass until prime [Return to the church for Mass] Mass After Mass: Latin class until midday; on Sundays the catechism Midday: lunch (diner) and recreation until 1:00 At 1:00: study of the Latin lesson delivered in the morning [Return to the church for Vespers and Compline] At the return from Compline and until supper: music lesson Supper (souper): at 6:30 from 1 April to 30 September, and at 6:00 from 1 October to 31 March After supper: half-hour of free time At 7:00: rehearsal for Matins and the daily Office, the obits, and the Office of the BVM for the next day At 8:00: evening prayer, bedtime, and silence

114

115

See Haggh, “Itinerancy to Residency”; Forney, “Music, Ritual and Patronage”; and Strohm, The Rise, 269–83 and 287–90. LAN, 4G 94, piece 1732.

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Origins and First Years (1397–1414)

One aspect of the eighteenth-century regulations that has no obvious echo in the fifteenth-century ones, but which can be detected through isolated comments in the chapter acts and even in the contemporary chronicles, concerns a certain alarm on the part of the chapter that the choristers were too often used for private secular festivities, both by the canons and by visiting dignitaries, and that family relationships sometimes tended to interfere with their daily routine. Accordingly, the eighteenthcentury regulations seek to forbid or curtail performances by the choristers in anything other than the church services, and to isolate them socially not only from their relatives but even from each other. Visits in the city were restricted and discouraged, as were contacts with family members, and the choristers were forbidden to visit among themselves in their rooms. An adult had to be with them at all times. From comments in the fifteenthcentury chapter acts we can infer that a similar attitude existed at the time, and that the life of a chorister was both highly regimented and strenuous both physically and psychologically, and the full responsibility for the upbringing and education of the choristers fell squarely upon the magister puerorum. The main break in this routine, documented extensively in the accounts of the aumosne and in the chapter acts, was a consequence of illnesses (including outbreaks of the plague), which were all too frequently fatal. Sick choristers were taken out of the house and placed in the house of someone who was then paid to nurse them back to health, and under the care of both doctors and apothecaries. It is therefore hardly surprising that on one hand a large number of children recruited as potential choristers or even admitted as such were deemed after some time to be unsuited to the task, and that the position of magister puerorum appears to have been a particularly unstable one for a good deal of the fifteenth century.116 The surviving accounts of the small vicars (the office in charge of the choristers as well) and those of the aumosne117 repeatedly mention children that were recruited but then found unsuitable, or the return of choristers to their families after a relatively short stay, as well as a relatively large number of children who became seriously ill and died while serving as

116

117

See the list of magistri puerorum for the 15th century in Appendix 2. Between 1413 and 1468 only Pierre du Castel lasted more than a few years as magister puerorum. The expenses of the small vicars were administered half by the office of the small vicars and half by the office of the aumosne, so that in many instances the lacunae caused by the loss of the accounts of the small vicars can be filled through the accounts of the aumosne.

Life as a Chorister and Training

choristers, so that the practice of having supernumeraries seems to have been an insurance against the illnesses and the disciplinary problems in the maîtrise. Students were taught Latin and grammar, music, and catechism. At a distance of more than five hundred years it is impossible to assess the quality of the instruction. Most of the fifteenth-century magistri puerorum at Cambrai, except for Nicole Grenon, have left no trace of their own work, but the recruitment of Grenon, who throughout his life apparently had a reputation as good teacher,118 and attempts to recruit Petrus de Domarto in 1451 and Jehan Regis in 1460,119 indicate that the chapter had a particular interest in the education of its charges. Students at Cambrai probably also had a relatively good training in the grammar school. Cambrai, unlike Paris or Chartres, did not have a studium generale, but in the fifteenth century it had both petites écoles and grandes écoles. The records of these institutions, as Damien Lourme has noted, are far too fragmentary and scattered to give us a consistent picture.120 The petites écoles were most likely housed at the residence of the choristers,121 while the grandes écoles were the College des Bons Enfants, founded in 1278 and housed in the domus bonorum puerorum.122 The rectors and teachers in both schools were under the authority of the scholasticus. For much of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth the scolastici were nonresident. Gautier de Beauvoir, canon from 1379 to 1401, was scholasticus briefly in 1384, but on 9 July 1384 Raymond de Sarazac, a papal official who was not even a canon, was sworn in as scholasticus.123 Sarazac was absent all of his tenure, and matters that required action by the scholasticus were done either by a committee of the chapter or through a proctor.124 No further documentation appears in the Cambrai records 118

119 121

122 123

124

Virtually all of Grenon’s known positions until his retirement to Cambrai in 1427 when he was forty-five years old (he reckoned his age at seventy years in 1452; see LAN, 4G 1081, no. 63), were as magister puerorum or as a grammar teacher. A convenient summery of Grenon’s entire career appears in C. Wright, “Nicolas Grenon.” See Appendix 2. 120 Lourme, “Chanoines, Officiers et Dignitaires,” 1:105–6. This is never specifically stated in the documents, but an extended entry for repairs and furniture of the house of the choristers in the accounts of the aumosne for 1420–1421 (LAN, 4G 7760, fascicle of 1420–1421, fol. 10r–v) notes the existence of a “study room,” that is, a classroom in the building. Bouly, Dictionaire historique de la ville de Cambrai, 43 and 75. CBM 1053, fol. 19v and CBM 1054, fol. 25r. Sarazac was sworn in person on 9 July 1384, but he is described in the acts merely as scholasticus cameracensium. Other details such as his status or provenance were probably recorded when he was accepted as scholasticus, but no record of his acceptance has surfaced. See examples noted in Appendix 3.

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Origins and First Years (1397–1414)

concerning the scholasticus until Robert Auclou was appointed scholasticus in 1438–1439.125 One would assume several scholastici between 1384 and 1438, but apparently Sarazac had a very long life: in a supplication dated 1 June 1438, Jaques Michael, a familiaris of the bishop of Thérouanne, asked Pope Eugenius IV for the scholastry of Cambrai, vacant on the death of Sarazac.126 Auclou remained scholasticus to his death in August 1452. At this time several canons, present and absent, vied for the position, including Michel L’Ami, Michiel van Beringhen, Gilles Flannel called Lenfant, Jehan Lambert, and Nicolas Plonchet; but late in 1452 or early in 1453 Plonchet became the scholasticus,127 although he was not resident at Cambrai until May 1454.128 Thereafter he was in residence to his death in January 1467.129 By 18 March 1467 Jacques Daussut was installed as scholasticus by procuration.130 The chapter acts from 1468 to 1476 are lost, but Daussut appears to have arrived in Cambrai not long after his appointment, and resided there more or less continuously until his death in 1513.131 The scholastici normally recruited and supervised the rectors of the schools as well as the teachers, and in at least one instance Plonchet served temporarily as rector of the grammar school from 3 January to 6 August 1459.132 The rectors of the schools and the teachers do not come up often enough in the record to allow us to have a continuous picture of them throughout the fifteenth century, and the entries in the documents do not always make a clear distinction between the rector scholarum and the magister grammaticae (who could well be the same person). When Du Fay was at the maîtrise the rector scholarum was Nicole de le Cambe, whose career is fairly well documented. Nicole was called to be the magister scholarum in 1410133 and was still in Cambrai in 1422, when he is called rector magnarum scholarum cameracensium.134 Thereafter he must have gone to Paris, for he was listed in a now lost rotulus of the university dated 30 January 1432, and by 26 September 1433 he had obtained the MA.135 In a petition to Eugenius IV for the matricularia of the parish church of Wodeque, granted on 28 September 1431, he is described as a married clerk.136 He returned to Cambrai probably in 1442 or 1443, for he appears 125 126

127 128 131 133 135

LAN, 4G 4644 (Fabric), fol. 11r. ASV, RS 347, fol. 264r–v. This is a nova provisio, so presumably Jacques had submitted an earlier petition. LAN, 4G 7451 (Wine), fol. 1v (undated but entered after 13 Dec. 1452). CBM 1059, fol. 88v. 129 CBM 1060, fol. 256r. 130 Ibid., fol. 258v. CBM 1046, fol. 154v. 132 CBM 1060, fols. 34v and 55r. LAN, 4G 7758 (1410–1411), fol. 7r. 134 LAN, 4G 7760 (1421–1422), fol. 7v. ASV, RL 105, fols. 100r–101r. 136 ASV, RS 270, fol. 220v.

Life as a Chorister and Training

in the lists of the chaplains from 1443–1444 to 1459–1460.137 The register of 1442–1443, which would record his adventus, is lost. Nicole died in April 1459.138 At the time Du Fay was a choirboy Nicole was clearly beginning his career. In addition to the schools, Cambrai had elements of what can be viewed as a proto studium in that some of the canons, who had doctorates or teaching licenses, offered university-level courses that were then certified by the cathedral. Thus, as Lourme notes, Jacques de Metz-Guichard, who was a doctor of both laws, followed a course in theology taught by Philippe Parent, master of theology, and was provided at the end with a certificate of scholarship by the cathedral authorities.139 In this milieu there can be no doubt that Du Fay received a thorough grounding in grammar and in music. As noted earlier, the gift of the book by Villedieu made to him in 1411–1412 indicates that he was apparently singled out as uncommonly promising. His grammar teacher at the maîtrise is unknown; Nicole Grenon had come to Cambrai as a grammar teacher (not as magister puerorum) in 1407–1408,140 but by the time Du Fay was accepted in the maîtrise Grenon had left Cambrai to become the magister puerorum at the Sainte-Chapelle in Bourges, replacing Jehan Cesaris.141 For the eleven weeks before he was accepted as one of the choristers de numero, he had been instructed by Jehan Rogier de Hesdin. His music teacher for most of his years as a chorister was Jehan Malin, who was magister puerorum at the cathedral at least from 1393 to early in 1413.142 This is an exceptionally long tenure in a post that was, by its very nature, a stressful and difficult one, and where a relatively rapid turnover was more the rule. The only other magister puerorum at the cathedral with a comparably long tenure was Denis de Hollain at the end of the century (1485–1503). Malin, unlike Hollain, was apparently not a composer, but must have been both a competent teacher and administrator or he would not have had such a long tenure. The early musical training and experience of young Du Fay was probably centered around plainsong even more than what would be the case a century or even half a century later. There is no evidence that there was much singing of polyphony in the regular liturgy in choro at Cambrai or the other northern cathedrals in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Both Reinhard 137

138

139 140

LAN, 4G 6910, fol. 19v; 4G 6926, fol. 22v. Beginning with 1460–1461 his chaplaincy is listed among the foreign chaplaincies, indicating that it had no beneficiary or had been assigned to someone outside the community. CBM 1060, fol. 42v. For the rectores and magistri scholarum at Cambrai in the 15th century, see Appendix 3. Lourme, “Les Chanoines,” 1:213, citing LAN, 4G 1086, fol. 21v. LAN, 4G 7758 (1407–1408), fol. 7v. 141 C. Wright, “Grenon.” 142 See Appendix 2.

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Origins and First Years (1397–1414)

Strohm and Barbara Haggh-Huglo have made a good case for the fact that much of the polyphony performed at this time was for specially endowed offices,143 and a survey of the different account series of the cathedral shows that such endowments were still very few throughout the first quarter of the fifteenth century. Still, Cambrai was something of a center for polyphony in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The evidence that survives is scattered and fragmentary: a Credo that survives complete but anonymously in Bo Q15 was ascribed in the lost Strasbourg manuscript Str 222 to “Cameraco,” and the rondeau Belle voliés was ascribed in that same manuscript to “Cameracy.”144 An entry in the accounts of the fabric of St-Géry for 1361–1362 records a payment to magister Nicolaus, the subcantor and succentor of St-Géry, for making and notating “a motet for our Lord St. Géry.”145 At this time “a motet” could only refer to an elaborate polyphonic work built on a cantus firmus along the lines of the motets of Machaut or Vitry, probably the kind of music that only an expert composer could produce and only well-trained singers could perform. There is also the repertory of the Cambrai fragments, a group of manuscripts that appears to have been produced locally.146 On the other hand, the records of the fabric of the cathedral, which survive almost complete from 1399 to 1489,147 show numerous entries for the copying, repairing, and binding of books for the cathedral,148 but with one exception there is not one entry that can be assumed to refer to a book with polyphony before the 1430s.149 The exception, however, is quite telling: in 1417–1418 a payment of 12s. was made to Jehan L’Escripvain for the correcting, regluing, cleaning, and putting new covers on “the book of motets of the children.”150 This entry indicates that the choristers occasionally sang polyphony already early in the century as the entry is for the repairing of 143 144

145

146 147

148

149

150

Strohm, The Rise, 270–87; Haggh, “Itinerancy to Residency,” 359–67. See Fallows, “Cameraco.” But the Iohannes de Comeriaco mentioned there after Haberl is a ghost: Haberl misread the name of the papal singer Iohannes de Semeriaco. LAN, 7G 2223 (1361–1362), fol. 14r. I thank Michelle Adamczyck for bringing this to my attention. The basic work on the fragments is now Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai. The only account lost in this period is that for 1400–1401. Afterward those for 1489–1490, 1490–1491, 1492–1493, and 1493–1494, as well as those for 1495–1496, 1496–1497, and 1497– 1498 are also lost. A complete list and transcription of all of the entries concerning the liturgical books of the cathedral from 1400 to 1481 appears in Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 213–56. In 1432–1433 Martin Willequin “Burgundian” was paid to copy “nine new fascicles of songs” (ix codices cantuum novarum), that is Glorias and Credos for the use of the small vicars in solemn feasts (LAN, 4G 4638, fol. 23v). LAN, 4G 4622, fol. 31v, cited in Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 219.

Life as a Chorister and Training

an existing book, although no previous entry exists concerning its being copied. So it is possible that the book came to the cathedral after being copied elsewhere, perhaps as part of a donation connected with a foundation. If the records of the copying of music books and the very few mentions of liturgical offices that survive from the early fifteenth century at Cambrai do not give the impression that polyphony was frequently sung at the cathedral at this time, nevertheless among the men employed by the chapter in the first two decades of the century there are a number of composers. The singing men in the cathedral were usually the petits vicaires, often, though not always, young clerks who had begun as choristers, either in Cambrai or elsewhere, and whose voices had changed and stabilized. Their number, in principle, was pegged at twelve,151 but in fact throughout the century it fluctuated from as few as five to as many as twenty. Many of them obtained small benefices in the cathedral such as a chaplaincy, and tenure was, for the most part, relatively short as their ecclesiastical career progressed. A small number remained as small vicars and chaplains in the cathedral for most of their career,152 a few others eventually became grand vicars,153 and one or two obtained a canonicate,154 but the great majority moved on to other institutions as their ecclesiastical careers progressed. The records of the small vicars are woefully incomplete for the first half of the fifteenth century, but we have a few lists precisely from the years when Du Fay was a chorister or was about to join the maîtrise, as well as occasional names mentioned in the acts or the accounts of the aumosne, and during this time there is an unusual number of composers either among the small vicars or the teachers of the choristers. As mentioned earlier, in 1407– 1408, probably early in the fiscal year, Nicole Grenon came to Cambrai as a grammar teacher to the choristers and remained until July 1409.155 Among the 151

152

153 154 155

This number, although not mentioned in the surviving accounts, which refer only to “the office of the small vicars,” appears in documents concerning the financial underpinnings of the office, such as those dealing with the union of the parish church of Casterle to “the office of the twelve small vicars” in 1439–1440 (LAN, 4G 87, nos. 1247 and 1264, and 4G 1086, no. 352). It was probably based on the symbolism of the twelve apostles, and could be related also the organization of the papal chapel in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, where the number of chaplains was also pegged, in principle, to the number twelve (BAV, Vat. lat. 4736, fols. 83v–84r). For example, Jehan de Calais, documented as a small vicar in 1399–1400 (LAN, 4G 6787 [1399–1400], fol. 3r), served as such until his death on 13 Oct. 1453 (LAN, 4G 7452, fol. 6r). He was the receiver of the small vicars for a good deal of this time, and a chaplain at the cathedral from sometime between 1401 and 1405 (accounts are lost for these years) to his death. The best known of these is Symon Mellet, the prodigious music scribe of the cathedral. See the biographies of Pierre? Calonne and Denis de Hollain in Appendix 2. LAN, 4G7758 (1407–1408), fol. 7v, mentioning that Grenon had come from Laon. He had been abruptly dismissed as magister puerorum in Laon on 25 May 1407 (LAA, G 1850 ter, fol. 7r–v).

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Origins and First Years (1397–1414)

small vicars during those years we have the names of Franchois Lebertoul, Gillet Velut, and Jehan Hanelle, the last two of whom eventually ended up at the Lusignan court in Cyprus and are probably the authors of some of the music in the Cyprus Codex,156 and an entry in the aumosne for 1413–1414, copied before the start of Lent in 1414, indicating that by this time Richard de Loqueville was magister puerorum at Cambrai.157 Loqueville, like a few of the other magistri puerorum at Cambrai and elsewhere, was a married man, and in 1410 he had taught harp to the son of Robert, duke of Bar, and taught plainsong to the duke’s choristers. He probably left the court of Bar upon the duke’s death in 1411,158 but his whereabouts between that time and his arrival at Cambrai are unknown. He remained magister puerorum at Cambrai until his death, which must have occurred sometime in 1418,159 and it is most likely he who is referred to in a document from St-Géry in 1414 as “Du Fay’s teacher.”160 We have no music securely ascribed to Hanelle, and the surviving works of Grenon, Lebertoul, Velut, and Loqueville are, with the exception of a Sanctus by Loqueville, quite dissimilar from anything we have by Du Fay, even among what might be his earliest compositions,161 but as a group they show an unusual amount of variety and imagination in their work. This is particularly true of Lebertoul and Velut, so that perhaps what could be seen as the stylistic restlessness of Du Fay’s music, especially in the early works where he seldom repeats himself, might be something he did pick up early on from music by these composers that he probably heard and sang at Cambrai. The conditions that obtained at Cambrai early in the fifteenth century were perhaps replicated in a number of other centers throughout France and the Low Countries at the time, but at least in the records that have come down to us from the different cathedrals and collegiate churches in the first two decades of the century there were few other places that presented a talented young musician with as many currents and influences and with as much occasion to learn as Cambrai. Du Fay himself appears to have sensed this; in his epitaph one of the things he mentions about his life was that he was a choirboy at the cathedral, which is not the kind of information that epitaphs

156

157 160

161

See Bradley, “Musical Life,” 535; Kügle, “The Repertory of the Manuscript Turin,” 151–81; and Leech-Wilkinson, “The Cyprus Songs,” 395–431. LAN, 4G 7759 (1413–1414), fol. 9r. 158 Pirro, Histoire, 55–57. 159 See Appendix 2. See later in this chapter. The other man who probably could be referred to thus was Nicole de le Cambe, who almost certainly was Du Fay’s grammar and rhetoric teacher during those years. The music of Grenon, Lebertoul, Velut, and Loqueville is edited in Early Fifteenth-Century Music, ed. Reaney.

Life as a Chorister and Training

tend to give. And the impersonal tone of much of his own last will softens slightly only once, when he provides funds to allow the choirboys who were to sing at his funeral, and in all the memorials he had set for himself in permanence, to have some recreation. A final question, for which we have no completely clear answer, is: How did Du Fay learn to be what he called in his epitaph a musicus, that is (in his terms) a musician whose principal activity was what later generations would call “a composer?”162 He was surely trained in how to read plainsong and figural music, and had to memorize an enormous amount of the music used for the divine office, most of it plainsong. He probably also received a thorough grounding in discant. Now, most of the didactic writings on discant that circulated in the early fifteenth century, even such an “advanced” treatise as the Compendium de discantu mensurabili of Petrus Frater dictus Palma Ociosa, do not go beyond a simple two-voice counterpoint that, even though the figural voice imitates the rhythmic and melodic surfaces of the music of men such as Vitry, is barely one step above improvisation.163 Du Fay, like all his young colleagues, built up an enormous “memorial library” of basic twopart interval progressions, and from their experience as singers a similar “library” of melodic embellishments of these progressions.164 This was something that anyone with a very good ear, a solid memory, and good training could do, and what are probably Du Fay’s earliest surviving works already do it. What makes his music stand out is the rhetorical control he has over how he ornaments the basic progressions, as well as his ability to absorb not just the sound but the rhetoric of music he came into contact with and make it his own. This he did with the music of Ciconia in the 1420s, that of the master of Caput in the 1440s, and to a lesser extent that of Ockeghem in the 1450s and 1460s. Martin le Franc sensed some of that when he said that Du Fay and Binchoys “took the English countenance,” even though what Du Fay might have taken from Dunstaple remains to this day a matter of contention.165 162 163

164

165

For an extended treatment of this, see Volume II, Chapter 8. See Johannes Wolf, “Ein Beitrag zur Diskantlehre des 14. Jahrhunderts;” Leech-Wilkinson, “Petrus Frater dictus Palma Ociosa.” The fundamental work on this, with an extensive bibliography, is Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory. On this, see Fallows, “The Contenance angloise.”

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2

The Beginnings of a Musician’s Career (1414–1428)

Chaplain of Saint-Géry When his voice changed and eventually stabilized, a choirboy was faced with a number of choices, some of which he could make; others were simply the consequence of his changed status. From the Cambrai records that survive most of the choirboys simply left the service of the cathedral, sometimes going to the schools, as was the case of Jacques Robaille, who left the maitrîse a year before Du Fay joined it and would eventually be one of his colleagues in the papal chapel,1 although a few others became petits vicaires in the cathedral, at least for a while.2 Virtually all of these men had a clerical but not necessarily musical career ahead of them. In fact those whose later activity included singing anything beyond the plainsong sung by the entire clergy, much less writing music, were at most a very small minority. Choirboys or altaristae (probably a more accurate definition of their status) had received the tonsure by the end of their tenure and some had entered minor orders as acolytes. In the case of someone like Du Fay, that also required that he receive prior to this a dispensation from his defectum natalium, a dispensation that could be granted by the pope or more rarely by the local bishop. Given the situation of the church at the time Du Fay became a choirboy, such a dispensation was probably granted to him by Pierre d’Ailly, then bishop of Cambrai, who had the papal authority to grant such dispensations.3 The dispensation probably carried an added injunction allowing Du Fay never to have to refer to the matter again,4 and Du Fay, unlike many of his colleagues, both in Cambrai and in 1

2

3 4

48

Robaille received a considerable sum upon leaving the maîtrise, 32s. in 1407–1408 and £6 16s. for a robe in the following year (LAN, 4G 7758 [1408–1409], fol. 8v), followed that same year by a payment to the magister puerorum of 108s. for Robaille’s expenses (ibid., fol. 10v], and an outright gift of £13 10s. as he left for the schools (ibid.). The transition from choirboy to clerk or petit vicaire is one of the least well-documented aspects of the life of the members of the cathedral chapter, but see Appendix 1 for a number of instances where the transition can be gleaned from the documents. Cf. the reference to one such dispensation in ASV, RS 147, fol. 38v. Numerous supplications for such dispensation in the registra supplicationum request this clause. How effective this was apparently varied, as cathedral chapters often managed to ferret out

Chaplain of Saint-Géry

the papal chapel, managed to keep his illegitimacy a well-guarded secret throughout his life. The end of Du Fay’s tenure as a choirboy or as a clericus altaris is noted in an entry in the records of the aumosne for 1413–1414, granting him a gift of 4 francs, worth 72s., “on having the letters of possession of his chaplaincy.”5 The entry is undated but comes after an entry giving £6 to the small vicars so that they can buy herring during Lent, a gift usually made on Ash Wednesday, which in 1414 fell on 21 February. Thus Du Fay came into the possession of his chaplaincy sometime in the spring of 1414. The chaplaincy in question was that called “chaplaincy of the Salve,” at the altar of St-Géry in the church dedicated to that saint that was on a hill just outside the walls of the city (see Fig. 2.1).6 This was a moderately lucrative benefice that yielded about £20 a year to its titular.7 Du Fay was barely beginning his ecclesiastical career and was not a member of the community of chaplains at St-Géry, so it is likely that the benefice came to him through the influence of someone within that church, all the more so as St-Géry did not have a particularly large endowment and the canons had ordered several times that the chaplaincies should be reserved for servants of the church and not for outsiders.8 Du Fay’s possession of the chaplaincy made it automatically a “foreign” chaplaincy, which is fortunate for us because the foreign chaplaincies were listed separately at the end of the yearly accounts of the community, each with its titular and all of its financial transactions, while those held by members of the community were subsumed into the general account. Thus we can trace Du Fay’s career at StGéry in some detail. The account of 1412–1413 does not list the Salve among the foreign chaplaincies, which means it was held by one of the

5

6

7

8

information on the legitimacy of candidates for a benefice and fight their appointment if they were illegitimate. LAN, 4G 7758 (1413–1414), fol. 9r: “Item pro gratia facta Willermo du Fayt clerico altaris per ordinationem capituli ad habendo litteras possesionis capellanie sue 3 francis valent 72 s.” The church was demolished in 1505 by Emperor Charles V in order to build the citadel of Cambrai, but a painting depicting the 15th-century church survives (see Fig. 2.1). The present church of St-Géry is a 17th-century building built on the site of the abbey of St-Aubert. ASV, RS 236, fol. 234v. This is the income estimated for the benefice when Du Fay resigned in Sept. 1436 after obtaining a canonicate at the cathedral. From numerous references to benefices two or three decades apart in the Vatican registers it is clear that the income of many of these did not fluctuate over time except in exceptional circumstances such as war. LAN, 7G 710, fol. 15r. Statutes of St-Géry: declaration on the proper collation of chapels on 12 Apr. 1404. Copies of this document from the 17th and 18th centuries survive also in LAN, 7G 708, [fol. 21r], and 7G 710, p. 46.

49

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The Beginnings of a Musician’s Career (1414–1428)

Figure 2.1 The church of St-Géry before its demolition in 1543. Oil on canvas, Inv. p. 92. Photo Hugo Maertens, Bruges (by permission of the Musée de Cambrai).

members of the community,9 and the accounts of 1413–1414 are lost. But the account of 1414–1415 gives the chaplaincy of the Salve as a foreign chaplaincy and, exceptionally, without the name of the holder, although entries in the account identify him as one Willermus, and the account of the following years gives his name as Willermus Du Fait.10 The chaplaincy had been collated in 1401 to Jehan Flandrois the elder, a cathedral chaplain who lived until 1420,11 who must have held it ad privilegium, because even though he was not a member of the community of chaplains of St-Géry the chaplaincy of the Salve is never listed as foreign during those years. But something apparently happened during 1413–1414, because the accounts,

9

10

11

LAN, 7G 2917, foreign chapels on fols. 6v–12r. This is probably the place to mention a peculiarity of the records from St-Géry. Although at the cathedral and all other churches in the region chaplaincies are listed by their names, usually the name of the saint to whom the chaplaincy is dedicated, at St-Géry the chaplaincies are invariably listed by the name of the holder, so that the actual names of the chaplaincies are now lost to us and, by the same token, if a chaplain moved from one chaplaincy to another (as was often the case) the surviving records do not reflect that shift. The only exception to this in the 14th and 15th centuries was the chaplaincy of the Salve, which is always identified by its name in all the records from St-Géry. LAN, 7G 2918, fols. 17v and 19r, and 7G 2919, fol. 17v. It is interesting to note that among the canons of St-Géry at the time Du Fay became a chaplain was Gilles Carlier (cf. LAN, 7G 2411 [1414–1415] fols. 6v and 14r). CBM 1055, fol. 73r (collation), 1056, fol. 91v (death).

Chaplain of Saint-Géry

beginning with that of 1414–1415, mention a process against him by the community in the Curia at Reims and payments due to him after arbitration.12 Flandrois was also paid for Masses said during 1413, which suggests that he was removed in 1414, probably around the time Du Fay was granted the chaplaincy.13 That Du Fay was the newly appointed chaplain of the Salve in 1414 is also made clear by an extraordinary entry in the account of the chaplaincy, an entry that to my knowledge is unique in all the surviving accounts: Item, for the feudal relief made by the said Willermus, chaplain of the said chaplaincy, both for the homage and the meal given by order of the fellows to the said Willermus, his teacher and [the teacher] of some of the fellows, as shown by a note, 16s. 2d. ob of Tours.14

Feudal relief is a legal term that describes a payment to an overlord by an heir upon succession; it is very occasionally encountered in connection with the collation of a benefice, but never does a community undertake to cover the candidate’s expenses in this way; on the contrary, the iocundus adventus and its accompanying meal were usually paid by the person collating the benefice or being admitted to the community.15 This might indeed indicate that Du Fay had a certain social standing in Cambrai even at this time, probably a reflection of his mother’s blood relationship to Jehan Hubert. There is also the matter of “his teacher.” By this time all the men who have been associated with Du Fay’s instruction by most scholars were gone from Cambrai, except for Richard de Loqueville, who had become magister puerorum sometime in 1413.16 This would confirm that Loqueville was one of Du Fay’s teachers, something that Charles Hamm and other scholars had postulated on the basis of the relationship between one of Du Fay’s earliest Mass compositions, which uses the same unusual cantus firmus as a work of Loqueville.17 In any event, even though Du Fay was the holder of the benefice, there was little that he could contribute at 12 13 14

15

16

17

LAN, 7G 2918, fol. 19r; 7G 2919, fol. 18v; 7G 2921, fol. 20v; 7G 2923, fol. 17v. LAN, 7G 2918, fol. 19r. Ibid.: “Item pro relevio feodi facto per dictum Willermum capellanum dicte capellanie tam pro homagio quam prandio dato de mandato sociorum dicto Willermo magistro suo et aliquorum sociorum ut patet per cedulam 16 s 2d ob t.” The term varied; in the grand community of chaplains of the cathedral it was called iocundus adventus and, when the accounts switch to French, joyeux advenement. Canons in the cathedral and other churches in the region paid a capa (a one-time payment) when their claim to a canonicate was presented to the chapter. LAN, 4G 7759 (1413–1414), fol. 9r. The exact date of Loqueville’s appointment is not known, but it fell after 24 June 1413. Hamm, Chronology, 3. This connection was questioned in Fallows, Dufay, 14.

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this time to the liturgical functioning of the chaplaincy, which required three weekly Masses, since Du Fay was only an acolyte. The Masses were said by different members of the community of chaplains of St-Géry, who were paid accordingly from the proceeds of the benefice, and the chaplaincy had in addition a clerk, Adam Hocquet, who later would become a small vicar at the cathedral.18 This, coupled with settlements that had to be made to Jehan Flandrois, caused the chaplaincy to show a deficit of about £15 a year for the first few years of Du Fay’s tenure.

At the Council of Constance? During the summer and fall of 1414 Du Fay took part in the liturgical life of St-Géry. He is listed among those participating in the yearly obit for Emperor Charles the Bald on 6 October 1414,19 but his name is not among those listed in the accounts of the chaplains as receiving wine on the night of St. Martin, which indicates that by 11 November he was no longer in Cambrai.20 Scholars have long assumed that Du Fay must have traveled to Constance at the time of the Council, where earlier scholarship assumed he probably met Carlo I di Galeotto Malatesta, who as representative of Pope Gregory XII was one of the major players in the negotiations that led to the end of the Schism, and was to become one of Du Fay’s patrons in the 1420s. We have, in fact, no firm evidence that Du Fay was at Constance, but as Fallows has noted, his presence there can easily be explained and makes the best sense, in turn, in elucidating the composer’s career in the 1420s.21 As in a number of other instances, Du Fay’s music offers us biographical suggestions when solid documentary evidence is missing, and this is the case concerning his presence in Constance. In an earlier study I presented some of this evidence, but it may be useful to review it here.22 The Council of Constance, convoked on 1 November 1414 by Pope John XXIII and lasting until 22 April 1418, was probably the most memorable of the medieval councils. In a sense it represents the transition between the medieval and the Renaissance church, and its shadow determined the fate of the Council of Basel (1431–1449).23 In the course of his life Du Fay 18 20

21 23

LAN, 7G 2918, fols. 18v–19r. 19 LAN, 7G 2411 (1414–1415), fol. 14r. The chapter of St-Géry gave wine to all the chaplains and those holders of foreign chapels that were present on the night of St. Martin and at the carnis privium (Quinquagesima Sunday). Fallows, Dufay, 18. 22 Planchart, “The Early Career.” The basic work on the council remains Loomis, The Council of Constance.

At the Council of Constance?

would be involved with several of the major players in the events spawned by the councils of Constance and Basel: Pierre d’Ailly, Louis Allemand, and Popes Martin V, Eugenius IV, and Felix V (this last as Duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy), and in fact for a time he would be a representative of the cathedral of Cambrai at the Council of Basel. This bare list already hints at the possibility that Du Fay had for most of his life conciliarist sympathies, even though he also served the two principal enemies of the conciliar movement, Martin V and Eugenius IV. The councils also were major nodes in the dissemination of musical styles and repertories in the fifteenth century. Particularly in the case of the Council of Constance, Continental Europe outside the English-occupied areas of France were afforded a first extended acquaintance with English music. During the four years of the council some nineteen thousand persons were in attendance; many of the great lords temporal and spiritual who came brought with them extended retinues, including musicians.24 The chronicler Ulrich von Richental noted that the bishops of Lichfield and Norwich arrived with their musicians, and sang Mass and Vespers for the feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury “with organs and prosunen above which there were tenor, discant, and medius,” and he makes mention of numerous other musical events. It is interesting to note that Richental uses the musical designation of the voice parts that was common in the English sources but not in the Continental ones, which means he was not a casual observer but rather a relatively well-informed one.25 Two weeks before the English musicians arrived in Constance they had astonished the congregation at Cologne cathedral with their music.26 North Italian and south German music manuscripts of the first half of the fifteenth century transmit a large repertory of music that was probably current at the time of the council and in the decade that followed it, including a large amount of English music, something that is simply not found in Continental manuscripts of the late fourteenth century. The most reasonable explanation is that some of this repertory was transmitted to the Continent at the time of the council, and some of it must have been actively

24 25

26

McGowan, Pierre d’Ailly, 27. Richental, Das Konzil zu Konstanz, ed. Feger, 1, fol. 68v; 2, fol. 217: “Und mornends do begiengen sy das fest gar schon und loblich mit großen gelüt mit großen brindenden kertzen und mit Engelschen süssen gesang, mit den ordnen [organen] und mit prosonen, darüber tenor, discant und medius zu vesperzit.” See also Schuler, “Die Musik in Konstanz,” 159. Of the manuscripts of the Richental chronicle, only the one in the Rosengarten Museum in Constance includes the passages describing the performances in some detail. On the different manuscripts see Richental, Chronik, ed. Buck, 1–3, and also Höffler, “Trompette des menestrels,” 131, n. 143. Schuler, “Die Musik in Konstanz,” 158.

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sought by patrons and musicians even after the council ended, because they had become interested in the sound of English music. Constance was most likely not the only place where Continental musicians in the early fifteenth century were able to hear and to get hold of copies of a good deal of English music, but also where the musical traditions of northern Europe, central Europe, and Italy came into contact with each other, with results that played themselves out in the course of the fifteenth century in different ways in each region. Because of this it is disappointing that the nature of the surviving documentation about the council renders the musicians who were there essentially invisible. Until recently the only two musicians known to have been at the council were Oswald von Wolkenstein and Hugo de Montfort, both very peripheral figures in terms of the art polyphony of the fifteenth century, and the second of them was primarily a poet and not a musician. Two important early fifteenth-century composers, however, were also at the council: in a petition to Pope Martin V dated 11 December 1417, Guillaume Lemacherier, whose nom de plume as a composer was Guillaume Legrant, and whose works are found in many of the central sources of early fifteenth-century music, describes himself as a chaplain of King Sigismund and present at the council.27 Similarly, John Forest, one of the most important contemporaries of Lionel Power, in a petition to Martin V dated 3 January 1418, mentions that he was in the service of the bishop of Lichfield, precisely one of the two bishops whose musicians astonished the congregations in Cologne and later in Constance at the time of the conclave that elected Martin pope.28 Du Fay’s sojourn at Constance probably provided him with his first contact with English and with north Italian music, two styles that were to become crucial to his development as a composer. Du Fay probably traveled to Constance with the retinue of Jehan de Lens, Pierre d’Ailly’s successor as bishop of Cambrai. Jehan arrived at Constance on 11 January 1415; Ailly had arrived on 17 November 1414.29 The Cambrai delegation probably left Cambrai by mid-November 1414, since one of the delegates, the dean of the cathedral, Jacques de Metz-Guichard, sought

27

28 29

ASV, RS 107, fol. 81r–v. Lemacherier was a nobleman, which might explain why he used a nom de plume as a composer, because writing music was not at the time an activity common among the nobility. ASV, RS 108, fol. 134r–v. Salembier, Le Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, 265. BAV, Vat. lat. 12123, fol. 279v, a contemporary chronicle of the papacy of John XXIII and the council, notes that Ailly was present at the meeting on 19 Nov. 1414.

At the Council of Constance?

permission to absent himself on 6 November 1414,30 and this tallies with Du Fay’s absence from St-Géry by 11 November. Why was Du Fay, a young and inexperienced cleric, no longer part of the cathedral clergy, taken to Constance? This might have come as a suggestion from Pierre d’Ailly or a member of his circle. As mentioned earlier, it was probably Ailly who took an interest in the musical talent of Du Fay during his days as a choirboy, for the cardinal had been grand chantre at Noyon and chantre at Rouen, and probably had had a solid musical training.31 He continued to regard Cambrai as his cathedral and was buried there at his death.32 Two important canons in the cathedral at this time, Raoul le Prestre and Pierre le Prestre, were his nephews; Raoul was briefly provost, and Pierre was among the delegates to the council,33 so it is more plausible that Du Fay went to Constance as a clerk to Pierre le Prestre. This would further explain the obvious fact that at Constance Du Fay was clearly in the orbit of Pierre d’Ailly rather than that of the bishop of Cambrai, for it must have been through the circle of Ailly that Du Fay met members of the Malatesta family: Ailly and Carlo di Galeotto had been among the principal negotiators in the proposed abdication of Pope Gregory XII at the time of the Council of Pisa,34 and at Constance it was again Carlo di Galeotto who represented Gregory XII in his dealings with the council, which led to his abdication on 4 July 1415. Surely d’Ailly, one of the theological leaders of the council, was in close contact with Carlo during this time. This has been the view of the origins of Du Fay’s relationship with the Malatesta until very recently. Unremarked was the slightly incongruous circumstance that we do not have any evidence of Carlo’s interest in music, and that all of Du Fay’s works connected with the Malatesta family are for members of a different branch, the children of Malatesta di Pandolfo, Lord of Pesaro and 30

31

32

33

34

CBM 1056, fol. 18r. The chapter acts are curiously silent on the sending of a delegation to Constance. In Jacques’s case the absence of more than fourteen weeks could affect adversely his residence for 1415 and his tenure as dean, so he sought special dispensation from the chapter. Salembier, Le Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, 17–40, describes the education of Ailly, which included a magister artium degree (pp. 30–31), which would have included speculative music theory. But the grammar school education that preceded Ailly’s university training, about which nothing is known, but which must have been at a cathedral school, included a good deal of practical music training, allowing the future clerics to read plainsong. Ailly’s poetic works, as noted in Fallows, Dufay, 16–17, show that he was familiar with the concepts and terminology of counterpoint. Salembier, Le Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, 362. Ailly’s tomb was destroyed when the cathedral of Cambrai was demolished, but an important study of its surviving fragments and iconography appears in Nys, “La Tombe de Pierre d’Ailly.” CBM 1055, fols. 153r and 164v. Raoul was elected provost but refused the post within a week. Pierre was at Constance in Apr. 1415 when he was granted the fruits of his prebend in absentia in consideration of a letter from the cardinal to the chapter; CBM 1056, fol. 23v. Salembier, Le Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, 248–50.

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first cousin once removed of Carlo di Galeotto. One of these children was also at Constance, Pandolfo di Malatesta, the hunchback son of Malatesta di Pandolfo, who on account of his condition had pursued an ecclesiastical career. Pandolfo, born ca. 1390, was much younger than Carlo and not much older than Du Fay, and it is now clear that it was Pandolfo who eventually became Du Fay’s patron, as will be shown later. At Constance Du Fay would not only have made contact with future patrons such as the Malatesta, but most likely also with the singers of the council’s chapel. There is documentary evidence that the council had a chapel, much as each of the three popes at the time had a chapel, but the kinds of cameral documents that allow us to establish the composition of these chapels, such as lists of payments, are entirely missing for the years of the council. The Diversa cameralia of the Vatican Archives, a series of volumes of miscellaneous cameral documents that goes from 1389 to 1555,35 has a few entries that refer to the chapel of the council. These are as follows: 1. Giovanni da Pavia36 and “seven other singers continued serving the council.”37 2. Jehan le Bonure, called Hachot, admitted to the chapel on 21 January 1416.38 3. Frater Paulus de Monte Sancto, admitted to the chapel on 21 March 1416.39 4. François Gousserat, admitted to the chapel on 11 June 1416.40 5. Bernard Buc [Buxi], who in 1421 states that he served continuously as a singer in the council’s chapel.41 The entries are telling, particularly the first, when one compares it with the last list of the chapel of John XXIII that we have, a payment dated November 1414, right at the time the pope had opened the council. The singers are listed in Table 2.1.42 35 36

37 39 40

41

42

See Boyle, A Survey of the Vatican Archives, 43–44. Giovanni had become the maestro di cappella of John XXIII following the retirement of Antonio Bernardi da Teramo called Zacara, in May 1413 (Florence, BNC, MS Magl. XIX. 81, fol. 173r); Nádas, “Further Notes,” 178–81. ASV, DC 4, fol. 216r. 38 ASV, DC 3, fol. 27r. Jehan was a clerk from Tournai. Ibid., fol. 30r. No origin is given for this singer, so his provenance cannot be determined. Ibid., fol. 38v. Gousserat was a canon of Nicastro in Calabria, and according to the entry came “from the obedience of Gregory XII.” ASV, RS 155, fol. 111r–v, “qui in capella sacri generalis Constantiensis concilii continue et laboriose officium cantorem exercuit.” Guasti, “Gli avanzi dell’archivio,” 202 and 333. The identifications in brackets are based on papal letters and supplications, where the full names and the aliases and the status of the singer appear.

At the Council of Constance?

Table 2.1 Singers of John XXIII at the Council of Constance (November 1414) Number

Name in the list

Identification

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Magister Iacobus Matheus Brianth Iohathas Petrus Bordon

Giovanni da Paviaa Jacques de Romedenne, from the diocese of Liègeb Mathieu Hanelle, from Thérouannec Jehan Briant, clerk of Sensd Jehan de Semeries, OSB, called Ionathase Petrus Lair, clerk of Le Mansf Jehan Fréderic, called Bordon, canon of Angers by 1418g

a b c d e f g

Florence, BNC, Magl. XIX. 81, fol. 173r. ASV, RL 130, fol. 236v. Hanelle had been a singer of Alexander V; see LAA, G 1850 ter, fol. 12r. ASV, RS 135, fol. 64r–v. BAV, Vat. lat. 8502, fol. 99v. ASV, DC 4, fol. 40r–v. ASV, RL 105, fols. 125r–126v.

This list includes Giovanni and six other singers; thus, if we assume that between November 1414 and May 1415 another singer had joined the papal chapel (perhaps Buc), we have here the probable composition of the council’s chapel right after the deposition of John XXIII. The three singers admitted in 1416 may have been additions or replacements for singers who had left, and we have no records of the fluctuations of the personnel of this chapel between November 1414 and December 1417 when the chapel of Martin V was officially constituted. What we can see in the lists of payments for the last years of John XXIII and the first years of Martin V suggests that small fluctuations in the personnel occurred almost month by month.43 For that reason it is instructive to compare the last list of the chapel under John XXIII with the list of the group of singers inducted as the chapel of Martin V on 22 December 1417 (see Table 2.2). Almost all of the singers in the last list for John XXIII are in the first list for Martin V, and two other singers, Thorote and Sandewyn, had been singers for John XXIII and might have been among the singers of the council’s chapel. Since the lists of the chapel of Martin V generally reflect 43

The lists for John XXIII, apart from those published in Guasti, “Gli avanzi dell’archivio,” survive in Florence, BNC, Magl. XIX. 81, passim; those for Martin V from July 1418 to June 1421 appear in RAS, Fondo Camerale I, Conti della depositeria generale, Registro 824, passim. The constitution of the chapel in Dec. 1417 appears in RAS, Fondo Camerale I, Registro 1711, fol. 90r–v (the list of singers is on fol. 90v).

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Table 2.2 First group of singers in the chapel of Pope Martin V (December 1417) Name as in the list 1. Iohannes de Semeriaco, alias Ionathas 2. Matheus Hanelle 3. Matheus Thorote, alias Bruyant 4. Andreas de Mauro 5. Iohannes Frederich, alias Bourdon 6. Perchevaldus 7. Adrianus Reyneri 8. Iohannes Achoys 9. Robertus Sandewins 10. Stephanus de Vinariis 11. Nicasius Parvideig 12. Iohannes de Carnin 13. Iohannes Dornart a

b

c

d

e f

g h i j

Vernacular name

Previous employ

Jehan de Semeries Mathieu Hanelle Mathieu Thorote Andrieu de Maure Jehan Fréderic Percheval de Nokerstoke Adriaan Reyner Jehan le Bonuree Robert Sandewyn Etienne Chanelle Nicaise Petitdieu Jehan de Carnin Jehan Dornart

Chapel of John XXIII Chapel of John XXIII Chapel of John XXIIIa Burgundian chapelb Chapel of John XXIII —c —d Chapel of John XXIII Chapel of John XXIII?f Chapel of John XXIII —h —i —j

Thorote, in a petition to Martin V, describes himself as having been a singer of John XXIII; ASV, RS 106, fols. 208v–209r. C. Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy, 221–30. From 1404 to 1417 Andrieu was at Évreux, where he was a canon; ASV, RS 110, fol. 53r. Clerk of Cambrai; in 1391 he received permission to become a priest despite his illegitimacy (Nelis, Suppliques, no. 1953). He was a poet and one extended poem by him survives (cf. Govers et al., Het Geraardsbergse handschrift, 12 and 89–90). At his death in July 1418 he had benefices in Oorscamp (modern Ostkamp) and Haaltert (ASV, RS 112, fols. 232v–233r and 114, fol. 135v). Cf. also Brinkman, “Weerzien met Geraardsbergen.” Clerk of Liège; no trace of previous career. He died in Tiburtina in June 1421; ASV, RS 153, fols. 98v– 99r. This was his given name; Achoys, Hachot, Hassoas were forms of a sobriquet. The evidence of Robert having been a singer for John XIII is tenuous. His brother Hendrik, according to those seeking his benefices after his death, had been a singer of John XXIII (ASV, RS 189, fols. 225v– 226r). Both brothers were from the diocese of Tournai and held benefices at St. Donatian in Bruges (BAB, Reeks 49, fols. 116r and 136v). Spellings alternate between Pariudei and Parvidei. No trace of previous career; clerk of Meaux, died by Feb. 1420. Clerk of Tournai of noble parentage; no trace of previous career. Clerk of Tournai; no trace of previous career.

the seniority of the members, and Buc, by his own later claim, had been a member of the council’s chapel, it is quite likely that all the singers in Martin’s first chapel list had sung in the chapel of the council. Two of the most senior singers in the chapel, Hanelle and Thorote, are men with whom Du Fay could easily have made connection. Hanelle had

At the Council of Constance?

been a singer for Alexander V44 and was the first member of the papal chapel to be a canon of Cambrai: he petitioned for the canonicate in July 1418, was received on November of that year, and by October 1420 he was in residence at Cambrai, where he remained to his death in January 1457.45 Hanelle’s brother Jehan had been a small vicar at Cambrai precisely at the time when Du Fay became a choirboy.46 Thorote is mentioned as a small vicar at the cathedral on All Saints of 138647 and for the first eleven weeks of 1399–1400,48 which indicates he had a long tenure at Cambrai. On 31 October 1404, the chaplaincy of St. John Evangelist, held by Jehan Rogier de Hesdin, Du Fay’s future teacher, was granted to Thorote when Jehan became a grand vicar.49 He was still in Cambrai in 1407, when he bought oats from the office of the grand métier.50 Sometime during the pontificate of John XXIII he joined the papal chapel, and was a papal singer on and off until 1426.51 By December 1417, when he exchanged the parish church of Maudetour (Rouen) for that of Binche with Jehan Rogier de Hesdin, he was a canon of Noyon,52 and he was a canon of Cambrai from December 1423 to September 1426.53 These are two men who probably had some knowledge of who Du Fay was, and had reasons to be receptive to him and to any recommendations from members of the Cambrai delegation, which would suggest that indeed Du Fay may have sung at one point or another in the chapel of the council.54 What suggests that Du Fay not only was in Constance but was for a time a singer in the council’s chapel is not a document but the circumstances of the transmission of one of his works. In this sense Du Fay’s early years are similar to the last years of Johannes Ciconia in that the musical works themselves provide biographical information or at least indicate times, places, and circumstances in which the composers found themselves. The work in question is a short Mass cycle consisting of Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus that is probably the earliest work of Du Fay that we have.55 The

44 45 46 47 49 51 52 54

55

LAA G 1850 ter (second foliation), fol. 12r–v. ASV, 114, fols. 13r–14r; CBM 1046, fol. 143v and 1056, fol. 90v. LAN, 4G 6789 (1409–1410), fol. 4v, and 4G 6788 (1410–1411), fol. 2r. LAN, 4G 6787 (1386–1387), fol. 4v. 48 LAN, 4G 6787 (1399–1400), fol. 3v. CBM 1055, fol. 95r. 50 LAN, 4G 7378, fol. 3v. ASV, RS 106, fols. 208v–209r; IE 383, fol. 77v. ASV, RS 106, fols. 208r–209v; LAN, 4G 4622, fol. 9v. 53 CMB 1056, fols. 95r and 172r. Schuler, in his very careful study, “Die Musik in Konstanz,” 159, comes close to this hypothesis, but at the time neither the connection of some of the council’s singers with Cambrai nor the liturgical context of the cantus firmus of the short Mass by Du Fay were known. OO Besseler 4, no. 2; OO Planchart 5/2.

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Table 2.3 The Du Fay–Zachara–Loqueville Mass in Bologna Q15 New foliation

M no.

Movement

Ascription in the manuscript

17v–18r 18v–19r 19v–21r 21v–22r 22v–23r 23v–24r

17 18 19–20 21 22 23

Kyrie Gloria Credo Sanctus Sanctus Agnus Dei

du fay z. micinella z. cursor du fay Sanctus vineus secundum loqueville du fay

work survives uniquely in Bo Q15,56 although the Kyrie alone is also found in Ao 15.57 In Bo Q15 the work forms part of a composite Mass cycle that is unusual even by the standards of the scribe of that manuscript, who had some eccentric habits.58 The cycle as copied is shown in Table 2.3.

Bologna Q15 The presence of two settings of the Sanctus points to something beyond the mere desire of the scribe of Bo Q15 to compile a Mass Ordinary, all the more so in that the Loqueville Sanctus had, like the Du Fay Kyrie, an independent transmission.59 The “z” in the ascriptions of the Gloria and the Credo are the initial of Zacara, indicating Antonio Zacara as the composer. Each of these two movements has an independent transmission, but they were probably intended as a pair by the composer and not simply paired together by the scribe of Bo Q15;60 in fact, the titles give a clue to the pairing with the kind of indirection that characterizes a great deal of his work.61 The Sanctus and Agnus of Du Fay are also a compositional pair, for 56

57 58

59

60 61

Fols. 17v–18r, 21v–22r, and 23v–24r; M numbers 17, 21, and 23. I give the modern pencil foliation, which is the only one consistent and complete, and clearly visible in Bent, Bologna Q15, as well as the opening numbers added by Padre Martini, which can be seen in all older films and are continuous. The older foliations are all inconsistent and incomplete, and the numbers assigned to each work in De Van, “Inventory” are not in the manuscript. Fol. 24r. See Bent, “A Contemporary Perception of Early Fifteenth-Century Style,” “Music and the Early Veneto Humanists,” and “Musicisti vicentini intorno al vescovo Pietro Emiliani.” It appears anonymously in Ao 15, fols. 153v–154r. Modern edition in Reaney, ed., Early Fifteenth-Century Music, 3:1–5. See von Fischer and Gallo, Italian Sacred and Ceremonial Music, 11:3–16, and 263–64. Nádas and Di Bacco, “Papal Chapels and Italian Sources,” 56–58, postulating Zacara’s association with a Roman family, the Miccinelli, and the association of the papal cursores with the church of San Angelo de’ Miccinelli.

Bologna Q15

the two movements have the same music in all three voices. The connection with Loqueville’s Sanctus comes through their use of a common cantus firmus. This cantus firmus is the one element that indicates that Du Fay’s short cycle was most likely connected with his presence at the council. It is a cantus fractus, that is, a measured chant. It apparently had a very limited circulation and a relatively short history: it survives in three manuscripts from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century from Cambrai, Paris, and Tournai.62 The chant had no specific liturgical connection in Paris or Tournai, but it did have one at Cambrai, and it is a telling one, for it was copied at the end of what was apparently a fascicle manuscript containing the Missa ad tollendum schismam.63 This is, then, the sense in which Du Fay and Loqueville knew the chant, and their setting it as a cantus firmus makes sense only if it was done when the Schism was still open. The copy in Bo Q15 may well reflect knowledge on the part of the scribe, who appears to have had rather ready access to almost everything Du Fay wrote until the early 1430s and was also quite aware of the traditions behind much of the music he copied, of a performance of most of these movements as a cycle – a performance that makes the most sense if it was done in Constance by a chapel that from early 1412 until May 1413 was headed by Zacara – and where a young newcomer from Cambrai was present. Du Fay may well have written his short cycle at Cambrai, in preparation for his journey to Constance, and Loqueville’s Sanctus may well be a teacher’s commentary, so to speak, on the work of his pupil or a model he set for Du Fay to follow. Its odd inclusion as an extra movement 62

63

LAN, MS 134, liasse, piece no. 12; Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 204, fol. 22v, facsimile in C. Wright, Music and Ceremony, 138; and Tournai, Bibliothèque capitulaire, MS 471, fols. 18v– 19r. See also C. Wright, “A Fragmentary Manuscript of Early Fifteenth-Century Music in Dijon.” The manuscript is one of the fragments collected in the liasse catalogued as MS 134 in the Archives départementales du Nord in Lille. The fragments were numbered and foliated in 2002. Fragment 12 is a bifolium that was an internal bifolium of a gathering but not its center. Its contents are as follows: fol. 1r–v, Credo I in late 14th-century black mensural notation; fol. 2r, the end of the offertory Devotis deus idipsum beginning partway through the final melisma on “idipsum,” the communion Unus panis et unum corpus, and the Sanctus [vineux] with the rubric “Pie Vin[eu]x”; fol. 2v, the end of the Sanctus, starting with the trope Qui ianuas mortis, and what at first sight seem to be probationes pennae, but turns out to be an undistinguished exercise in two-voice counterpoint in white notation. Since the opening folio is lost, no rubric for the chanted Mass survives, but the offertory and the communion are part of a set of propers that were instituted by Clement VII in 1393 (cf. Salàville, “L’Origine avignonaise,” and Amiet, “La Messe”) in response to the Schism and usually rubricated Missa ad tollendum schismam. They were incorporated with this rubric in the modern chant editions until Vatican II, when the rubric was changed to Missa pro unitate ecclesiae. In the 17th century the bifolium served as the cover of the now lost will of Henri de Brochault, canon and treasurer of Ste-Croix (d. 1637), and have across the top of fols. 1r–2v: “Cachereau de l’execution de Monsieur de Borchault. 1669.”

61

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in the cycle in Bo Q15 adds to the possibility that the scribe had anecdotal information, probably from Du Fay himself, on the origins and tradition of his piece. Du Fay’s Kyrie shows no motivic connection to the other two movements; it is almost as though he showed his Sanctus and Agnus to the council’s singers and added the Kyrie when they decided to sing the movements as a composite Mass. The Kyrie, lovely as it is, is one of Du Fay’s simplest and most formulaic pieces, something that he could have written very quickly. The composition of this short Mass, however, makes little sense after the end of the Schism.

Return to Cambrai And the Schism did come to an end. On the night of 11 November 1417 the council fathers elected Cardinal Oddo Colonna as pope, who took the name of Martin V in honor of the very French saint on whose day he was elected, but Du Fay, unlike John Forest, was not in Constance; that very night he was receiving the allotment of wine given to the chaplains, resident and foreign, at the church of St-Géry in Cambrai. The accounts of the chaplaincy of the Salve in St-Géry for 1417–1418 contain the following entry: “Item to the said Willermus du Fait, chaplain of the said chapel, for the wine given to him on the night of St. Martin and in the carnis privium [Quinquagesima], 10s. of Tours.”64 In fact Du Fay had been back for a while, since he is listed on 6 October among those taking part in the procession during the obit of Emperor Charles the Bald.65 From the fall of 1417 to the spring of 1420 Du Fay’s life was that of a foreign chaplain at St-Géry, and perhaps also a small vicar at the cathedral, even though the cathedral records are silent on this, partly because, outside the relevant accounts, missing for the entire period, the small vicars are mentioned in the acts or in the aumosne for the most part only when they ran into some trouble.66 The accounts of St-Géry also give us some small details of Du Fay’s career in the years after his return. Unfortunately, those of the bourse, which contain lists of those present at different ceremonies during the year, have a lacuna from 1418 to 1447, but those of the chaplains survive and 64

65 66

LAN, 7G 2922, fol. 16r: “Item dicto Willermo du Fait cappellano dicte cappellanie pro vino sibi tradito in nocte sancti Martini et in carnis privii, 10 s t.” LAN, 7G 2411 (1417–1418), fol. 12r. A possible argument against his having been a petit vicaire in the cathedral is his status as a socius chori at St-Géry; see n. 83.

Return to Cambrai

offer some interesting details. The Masses at the altar of St-Géry, particularly those under the responsibility of the chaplain of the Salve, might not have been determined in a rigidly fixed manner by their endowment, for it appears that upon his return Du Fay was able to effect some changes in the weekly liturgy.67 When he received the chaplaincy, it was charged with saying three weekly Masses, but upon Du Fay’s return this was changed to two Masses, “una quae dicitur alta voce et alia submissa voce,” which indicates that one Mass was sung and the other was said,68 and indeed the clerk, Rogier Coquillart, was paid 26s. annually for helping in the Masses celebrated “cum cantu.”69 While in 1414–1415 the Masses were said throughout the year by three members of the community of chaplains, by 1418–1419 they were said by the chaplains following a specific order, although that order is not spelled out in the account. Du Fay, of course, said none of them since he was neither a priest nor a member of the community of chaplains: his position at St-Géry at this time was that of a socius chori, a position that parallels that of the petits vicaires at the cathedral. The account of 1418–1419, however, affords us another bit of information concerning Du Fay’s career, because the heading of the account for the chaplaincy of the Salve reads, for the first time, as follows: “Compotus capellanie du salve quam possidet Willermus du Fayt subdiaconus.”70 Du Fay became a subdeacon in 1417–1418; since the normal number of years that had to elapse between being an acolyte and being a subdeacon was four years, this confirms the suggestion made earlier that Du Fay had become an acolyte in 1413–1414, precisely the year in which he obtained this chaplaincy. Du Fay’s life between his return to Cambrai between the summer of 1417 and the spring of 1420 was probably that of a minor cleric in the life of Cambrai, a life regulated by the daily and weekly rituals of the city’s churches, each with its own calendar and customs, but punctuated several

67

68

69

For this he surely needed the approval of at least the cantor of St-Géry and perhaps of the chapter, but the acts, which are rather disorganized for the entire 15th century, are silent on it. LAN, 7G 2923, fol. 17v. The term alta vox in these documents invariably indicates singing, but usually in terms of plainsong. C. Wright, “Performance Practices at the Cathedral of Cambrai,” 305, notes that submissa vox, a term used by Du Fay in his will, was translated by his executors as en fausset, but its traditional meaning, “in a low voice,” is attested in hundreds of documents in Cambrai and elsewhere throughout the 15th century. In Du Fay’s will it was clearly intended to ask that the Ave regina, an impassioned and rather showy piece, should be sung softly on that particular occasion (as Du Fay was dying). This, by contrast, gives us an idea that 15th-century falsetto, unlike the loud hoot of many modern falsettists, was a rather soft sound. LAN, 7G 2293, fol. 17v. 70 Ibid., fol. 16v.

63

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The Beginnings of a Musician’s Career (1414–1428)

times a year, and particularly during Holy Week, by extended citywide processions that included the entire clergy of the city.71 The accounts of the fabric and of the bourse at St-Géry have lacunae going from 1409 to 1448 and from 1418 to 1446, respectively, and those for the chaplains are missing for 1420–1421 and 1421–1422; thus the last documentary reference to Du Fay we have is an entry for payment given to him and all the other chaplains and socii for the obits of the community of chaplains on the day after Ash Wednesday in 1420 (29 February).72 After this, with one problematic exception, Du Fay disappears from the documentary record until 12 April 1427. Within this gap, however, his own compositions provide us with a number of dates and places to the point that they become almost biographical documents, and virtually all of them are connected with events of the Malatesta families in Rimini and Pesaro.

First Sojourn in Italy; the Malatesta of Pesaro and Rimini Here it may be useful to review briefly the names and relationships of the Malatesta connected with Du Fay. The nearest common ancestor to all of them was Pandolfo I di Malatesta (d. 1325), lord of Rimini. Two of his children – Galeotto I di Pandolfo (1299–1385), and Malatesta II di Pandolfo (d. 1364) – became lords of Rimini and of Pesaro respectively. Two of Galeotto’s children, Carlo I di Galeotto (1368–1429), who was at the councils of Pisa and Constance, and Pandolfo III di Galeotto, became lords of Rimini and Brescia respectively, while Malatesta’s son, Pandolfo II di Malatesta (1325–1373) succeeded his father as lord of Pesaro. A further generation in Pesaro is represented by Malatesta III (sometimes listed as IV) di Pandolfo, also known as Malatesta dei Sonetti (1379–1429), who succeeded his father as lord of Pesaro. Three of his children received works composed by Du Fay: Pandolfo di Malatesta (ca. 1390–1441), born a hunchback, who became bishop of Brescia (1416) and Coutances (1418), and archbishop of Patras (1424); Carlo II di Malatesta (ca. 1390–1438), married to Vittoria di Lorenzo Colonna in July 1423, and successor of his 71

72

CBM MSS A 68 and A 71 are processionals that show, for rogation days, an extended procession that went to virtually all the churches in the city. Most of the chants were to be done by the canons and chaplains of the cathedral (or the petits vicaires in their stead), but there are rubrics indicating chants that were to be sung by the clergy of St-Géry, that of Ste-Croix, and the monks of St-Aubert. LAN, 7G 2926, fol. 7r; mention of Du Fay receiving 12d. for obits “on the day after Ash Wednesday.”

First Sojourn in Italy; the Malatesta of Pesaro and Rimini

father as lord of Pesaro; and Cleofe di Malatesta (ca. 1388–1433), married in 1421 to Theodoros II Palaiologos, despot of Morea. The Pesaro and Rimini branches of the family were close in the 1420s, something that was to change later, and for some reason many of the festivities for the children of Malatesta di Pandolfo took place at the court of Carlo di Galeotto in Rimini. But we have neither knowledge nor evidence that Carlo had a musical establishment, whereas his brother Pandolfo III di Galeotto had a significant one in Brescia,73 and Malatesta di Pandolfo also had a musical establishment in Pesaro. We do not know how or when the Malatesta, now almost surely Bishop Pandolfo, contacted Du Fay, but it is more likely in his case than that of Carlo di Galeotto that the two men had remained in contact during Du Fay’s years in Cambrai. In any case it would not have been difficult for an Italian prince or a prelate to lure a low-ranking cleric away from a relatively small church, even one in a city that was beginning to be known as an important musical center, especially once Du Fay had been abroad. In 1428 Philippe de Luxembourg, count of St. Pol, wrote that despite the English wars Cambrai exceeded all other churches “en beaux chants, en riche luminaire et en tres doulce sonnerie,”74 but this assessment comes precisely at the time when the musical institutions of the cathedral (and the city) had received new impetus with the arrival of a number of canons who had been members of the papal chapel – the first such influx – and when for the first time the canon in charge of the petits vicaires was someone with long experience and a solid reputation as a composer.75 Cambrai had been famous throughout the late Middle Ages for its bells (sonnerie), but the musical opportunities in the city in 1420 were still much less developed. Du Fay must have reached Rimini in the early summer of 1420, since it is unlikely that he would have left St-Géry before Easter, which in 1420 fell on 7 April. That he must have done so is revealed not by a document but by the nature of one of his works, the motet Vasilissa ergo gaude. The events celebrated by the motet, the betrothal and future wedding of Cleofe Malatesta to Theodoros II Palaiologos, despot of Morea and the second son of Emperor Manuel II,76 had their roots in the Council of Constance. The emperor sent a delegation to the council and requested that all his sons

73 75

76

Cf. Atlas, “On the Identity” and “Pandolfo III Malatesta.” 74 Houdoy, Histoire, 58–59. The former papal singers resident at Cambrai at this time included Nicolas Grenon, Mathieu Hanelle, and Mathieu Thorote in the cathedral, Jehan Wyet and Guillaume le Tavernier in StGéry, and Jehan du Riez in Ste-Croix. Grenon was master of the petits vicaires. On Theodore, see Zakythinos, Le Despotat grec de Morée, 165–225.

65

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be allowed to marry Italian Catholic princesses as a prelude to the union of the two churches. Two Italian princesses were chosen almost immediately, Sofia Montefeltro for his eldest son, and Cleofe for the second; neither union was a happy one. Sophia’s homeliness repelled her husband, who banished her to a separate wing of the palace,77 while Cleofe, famed for her beauty and learning, soon lost her husband’s love, as Theodoros was apparently something of a religious fanatic who for a while thought about becoming a monk.78 The marriage contract was signed on 29 May 1419, but Cleofe did not leave until 30 August 1420, when she and Sofia set sail in a Venetian galley for Constantinople, where they were married on 19 January 1421.79 The actual details of the journey are not entirely clear, but on 16 July 1420 the Venetian senate authorized the Byzantine ambassador to accompany Cleofe in a Venetian galley from Fano (about 12 km south of Pesaro), to Chioggia (about 28 km by sea from Venice), and on 30 August it gave Orsato Giustiniano, commander of the galleys, the necessary instructions to start the journey to Byzantium, including allowing two ladies on board, Cleofe and Sofia de Montefeltro.80 The festivities prior to Cleofe’s sailing could have taken place in Rimini, where Cleofe had spent much of her childhood, Pesaro, or Fano. The reason most scholars have assumed that they took place in Rimini was because it was also assumed that Du Fay was in the service of Carlo di Galeotto, and because some of the ceremonies connected with the wedding of Carlo di Malatesta and Vittoria di Lorenzo three years later did take place in Rimini.81 But with Du Fay probably in the retinue of Cleofe’s brother Pandolfo, it is more likely that these ceremonies, for which Hughes de Lantins, who was in the service of Cleofe’s father, wrote the ballata Tra quante regione,82 and Du Fay the motet Vasilissa ergo gaude, might have taken place elsewhere. The text of Vasilissa, with its line 77 78

79

80 81

82

Barker, Manuel II, 348–49, n. 95. Very little has been written on Cleofe; the best summary of her life is Falcioni, “Cleofe Malatesti nelle fonte epistolari mantovane”; also Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 104 and nn. 24– 26. Falcioni, “Cleofe Malatesti nelle fonte epistolari mantovane,” 960 and n. 29 (citing the wrong pages in Clementini); Clementini, Raccolto istorico, 2:101–02; Nicol, The Last Centuries, 346; Barker, Manuel II, 348–49 (with some misinformation on Du Fay and Lantins). After the engagement, Theodoros issued a silver bull (29 Mar. 1419) promising to respect Cleofe’s religion and allowing her, if Theodoros died first, to return to Italy. Zakythinos, Le Despotat grec de Morée, 188–89. Cf. Miglio, “Introduzione,” in Altieri, Li nuptiali, 10*–17*, showing how protracted and complicated the marriage ceremonies and festivities were at the time. I thank Elizabeth Randell Upton for pointing out this source to me. Ox 213, fol. 36v, edited in van den Borren, Pièces polyphoniques profanes, no. 32. Questions that have been raised about the date of this poem are based, by and large, on a misunderstanding of the “Elena” mentioned in it. As Holford-Strevens notes, she is neither Cleofe’s daughter nor her

Music for the Malatesta as Historical Documents

implying that Cleofe was already fluent in Greek and Latin,83 has given pause to some scholars as to the date of the work,84 but the line may be a mere poetic exaggeration of Cleofe’s linguistic abilities. Cleofe probably began studying Greek from the time her marriage contract was signed, as Besseler suggests,85 and that alone would have sufficed to a court’s poetaster to pronounce her eloquent; such hyperbole has always been a commonplace of certain kinds of court poetry.86

Music for the Malatesta as Historical Documents Vasilissa ergo gaude was written some five years after the short Mass cycle that Du Fay composed for Constance and shows an extraordinary growth in terms of musical sophistication. The Mass for Constance is a competent and even elegant work, but one that could be written by almost any composer working in the late 1410s. In Vasilissa ergo gaude Du Fay appears deliberately to invite comparison with one of the two most important composers of the previous generation, Johannes Ciconia.87 The piece, as Fallows noted, follows exactly the plan of Ciconia’s Ut per te omnes in its isorhythmic section,88 but this is simply a factor of Du Fay having set the cantus firmus as a single color in two taleae, probably the simplest and most straightforward construction for an isorhythmic tenor. The sound of the work, however, particularly in terms of its rhythmic drive, invites

83

84

85 86

87

88

husband’s mother, but rather Helen of Troy, mentioned to note that Cleofe was even more beautiful. See “Du Fay the Poet?,” 106, n. 19. Et utraque lingua facunda (And eloquent in both tongues), a standard idiom for “Latin and Greek”; cf. Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 106. The date of Aug. 1420 for the work was established by Besseler in “Neue Dokumente,” 161, with Fallows, Dufay, 21 in agreement. Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 270, agrees with the general date, and posits a proxy wedding at Pesaro as the occasion, which could be possible but for which we have no secure documentation. Cleofe’s Italian years were spent mostly in Rimini. Pirrotta, “On Text Forms from Ciconia to Dufay,” 677–78, suggests a later date. Besseler, “Neue Dokumente,” 161. I use the word poetaster advisedly: for an assessment of the poetic quality of Vasilissa see Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 105–106. In terms of the distribution of copies of their music Ciconia and Zacara appear to have been the two most widely admired composers writing between 1390 and 1410. Du Fay would eventually adopt some techniques first found in Zacara’s music such as extended divisi, but in terms of sound surface and motivic structure it seems to me that Ciconia’s poise and elegance appealed to him more than Zacara’s deliberately “surprising” and “bizarre” traits (cf. Fallows, “Zacara da Teramo, Antonio).” Fallows, Dufay, 21. Ciconia’s motet is edited in The Works of Johannes Ciconia, ed. Bent and Hallmark, 103–7.

67

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comparison with another of Ciconia’s works, the cantilena motet O felix templum iubila.89 The tenor of Du Fay’s motet also yields evidence of where the piece was composed, or rather of where it could not have been composed. It is the respond of the gradual Concupivit rex decorem tuum.90 The piece is not part of the early Gregorian repertory, but rather a contrafact of the gradual Ecce quam bonum.91 The opening is one of the most common intonations for mode 1 pieces: d–a–a–a–b–a, used in dozens of introits, graduals, and antiphons, but Du Fay uses the formula d–a–a–a–c–a, which follows what Peter Wagner called the “Germanic chant dialect.”92 The version with a B (flat) is the way in which the opening was sung west of the Rhine; the version with the C is found only east of the Rhine. In northern Italy and the Adriatic coast both traditions came into contact and the chant books from different towns within the region offer different readings. The version that Du Fay uses would have been available to him in chant books from the Adriatic coast, but not in chant books from France or from Tuscan or Romagna sources.93 If the surface of Vasilissa ergo gaude is inescapably Italian, its contrapuntal structure, particularly with its tightly built four-voice counterpoint, belongs firmly in a tradition rooted in the French motets of the late fourteenth and the early fifteenth centuries, a tradition that, as Michael Allsen takes pains to point out, includes the large repertory of motets from the Cyprus Codex,94 where the pervasive anonymity of all of the music in the manuscript hides in all probability the work of two northern French 89 90

91 92 93

94

Ibid., 68–72. GT 408; LU 1230. The version of the gradual that Du Fay uses shows a large number of variants from all versions I have seen, particularly in the second half of the melody. Noted in the GT 408 by a cross-reference. Wagner, Die Graduale des St. Thomaskirche, 2:v–vii. We have no late chant sources from the area of Rimini, and the gradual itself rarely shows up in Italian sources. It apparently originated in the late 7th century for the feast of St. Sabina (29 Aug.) and is a very loose contrafact of Ecce quam bonum for SS. John and Paul (Hesbert, Antiphonale missarum sextuplex, civ–cv). In Cambrai it was used for the Nativity of the Virgin (CBM, Missals 146, fol. 153r; 151, fol. 175r; 232, fol. 42v; and Graduals 60, fol. 84r, and 12, fol. 51r, and the Missale parvum (Paris: Simon Vostre, 1507), fol. 54v. In Arras it was used for Assumption, CBM 75, fol. 111r, and in Lille for St. Cecilia, CBM 61, fol. 123r. It is absent from most Italian graduals because the feast of St. Sabina fell on the same day as the more important Passion of St. John Baptist (I am grateful to Daniel Saulnier for a list of Italian sources for this gradual). Among those that transmit the gradual in diastematic notation and were available to me, Rome, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, C 52 (Norcia), fol. 120r, and significantly Modena, Biblioteca Capitolare, O.I.7 (Forlimpopoli), fol. 171r, and Padua, Biblioteca Capitolare, A 47 (Ravenna), fol. 208v, give the Germanic reading, while Piacenza, Biblioteca Capitolare, 65 (Piacenza), fol. 220v, has the French reading. In other words, the Germanic reading is found east of Rome and on the Adriatic coast. Tu J.II.9; see Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 39–76, summary in 72–73.

Music for the Malatesta as Historical Documents

musicians, Gillet Velut and Jehan Hanelle, whose early careers intersected with that of Du Fay at the start of Du Fay’s musical life.95 If Vasilissa ergo gaude was composed at the start of Du Fay’s sojourn in Italy, the other work for the Malatesta court comes from close to the end of his days there. It is the ballade Resvelliés vous, composed for ceremonies connected with the wedding of Carlo II di Malatesta, Cleofe’s brother, to Vittoria di Lorenzo Colonna, niece of Pope Martin V. The date of the wedding, given by Besseler following Cesare Clementini, is 18 July 1423,96 but a careful reading of Clementini’s text and a consideration of the nature of Italian upper-class weddings in the fifteenth century97 indicate that it could have been sung at any number of possible occasions between 17 June and 18 July 1423, the dates mentioned by Clementini,98 and possibly, as Elizabeth Randell Upton proposes, based on a close reading of the ballade text, at a festivity prior to the wedding itself and one attended largely by the Malatesta, rather than both the Malatesta and the Colonna.99 Nonetheless, the ballade certainly dates from the summer of 1423; by this time the ballade, like the motet, had become the kind of work that one wrote for a ceremonial occasion. Its French text for an Italian court is not particularly surprising; in Italian court circles at this time French was the poetic language of choice for certain occasions.100 The work is a display piece both for the composer and the performer and must have struck its listeners forcefully.101 The ballade also begins with a gesture that is clearly based on the opening of Du Fay’s pioneering Missa sine nomine, which existed by 1422 and must have been written for a Malatesta occasion now lost to us that was important enough to recall at the wedding ceremonies;102 it is reworked for the Qui sedes of the Gloria and then further tightened motivically to serve as the opening of Resvelliés vous.103 The connection between the works was first noted by Fallows, who proposed that the Mass should be called the Missa Resvelliés vous, but he noted that in this case the 95 96 97 99

100

101 102

103

See earlier in this chapter, pp. 45–46. OO Besseler 6, no. 11; see also Besseler, “Neue Dokumente,” 161–62. 98 Cf. Altieri, Li nuptiali. Clementini, Raccolto istorico, 2:105 Randell Upton, Music and Performance, 15–35. I am deeply grateful to Professor Randell Upton for sending me this material long before its publication. This represents a change from the late 14th century and the first decade of the 15th century, and the vogue for French-texted works was to last in Italy well into the middle of the 15th century. See the discussion of this piece on p. 639. See Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:139 and 165–67. It might also be that the connection was purely musical: that Du Fay recalled the passage in the Mass and regarded it, correctly, as a stunning opening for the ballade. See the discussion in Chapter 16.

69

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Mass preceded the ballade.104 Precisely because I agree with Fallows both in the relationship between the works and their chronology, I am unwilling to call the Mass other than Missa sine nomine, since traditionally the use of a name for a Mass has always implied a derivation from a model. Two other pieces can be added to this first group of Malatesta works, the rondeau He compaignons and a Credo that forms a pair in all its sources with a Gloria by Hughes de Lantins. The rondeau is an extravagantly virtuosic work. With its four-voice texture and its contratenor reaching down to gamma ut it has prompted scholars to place it in the late 1420s or early 1430s.105 Verse 5 of the rondeau runs as follows: Quant est de moy, je voy a vous, Ernoul, Huchon, Humblot, Henry, Jehan, Franchois, Hughes, Thierry, Et Godefrin dira a tous: It is an extraordinary list of names, including one that is exceedingly rare, Humblot, which unlike all the others is a last name and not a baptismal name. As it turns out, on 6 June 1423, Malatesta di Pandolfo, the lord of Pesaro and the father of Carlo and Cleofe, sent a rotulus to Pope Martin V asking essentially for two expectative benefices each for a number of his familiares. These include: Ambrosius de Petronibus de Bernadigis alias de Gualdaniga, clerk of Milan; Johannes, frater Gasparris, clerk of Fossombrone, eleven years old; Johannes Guillermus Castoris, clerk of Toul; Johannes Odoricus de Utino, scholar of Aquileia; Johannes Radulphus, clerk of Dole; Marinus Nauclerius de Agerulo, clerk of Amalfi; Jacobus Nicolaus de Mueglitz, clerk of Olomutz; Arnoldus de Lantins, clerk of Liège; Hugo de Lantins, clerk of Liège; Johannes Humblot, clerk of Liège; Egidius Bysenhay, clerk of Liège; Desiderius Thiricti de Villacuria, clerk of Toul.106 The presence of the two Lantins in the list as well as the unusual name of Humblot is quite suggestive; comparing the names in this petition with those in Du Fay’s text we arrive at a list of singers in Du Fay’s He compaignons and the chapel of Malatesta di Pandolfo (see Table 2.4). From the nature of the petition the impression one gathers is that they were all relatively young men beginning their clerical career, a hypothesis confirmed by the beneficial legacy of Arnold de Lantins at his death in Rome in July 1432: a single parish church of Fermes, in the diocese of Liège,

104 106

Fallows, Du Fay, 165–66. 105 Thus Hamm, Chronology, 35; Fallows, Dufay, 54, n. 6. ASV, RS 168, fols. 169r–170v.

Music for the Malatesta as Historical Documents

Table 2.4 Singers in Du Fay’s He compaignons and the chapel of Malatesta di Pandolfo No.

Song

Name in chapel

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Ernoul Huchon Humblot Henry Jehan Franchois Hughes Thierry Godefrin

Ernoul de Lantins Hughes de Lantins Jehan Humblot — Jehan Raoul or Jehan Castor —a —b Didier Thierry —c

a

Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 219, n. 31, proposes Franchois Lebertoul, whose music appears only in Ox 213 in close proximity to that of Du Fay and the Lantins, as the Franchois in Du Fay’s text. His hypothesis is particularly attractive. Lebertoul was a petit vicaire at Cambrai in 1409–1411 (LAN, 4G 6789 [1409–1410], fol. 3v and [1411– 1412], fol. 4r–v), and could well be among the musicians who traveled to Constance. See also Planchart, “The Liégoise Diaspora,” 94, proposing Jehan Franchois de Gembloux on the basis of his five-voice motet Ave virgo lux – Sancta Maria. b There are two Hughes in the list, either of whom could be Hughes de Lantins. I simply assume that the one mentioned in closest proximity to Arnold in the poem (albeit by a diminutive) is our man. c Godefrin is most likely the poet rather than one of the singers.

which went to his colleague Guillaume le Métayer, called Malbecque.107 It is particularly frustrating that none of these men makes further appearances in the papal documents except for Arnold, who was briefly in the papal chapel before his death, and Gilles Bysenhay, for whom a number of documents survive: I have found nearly two dozen references to him, from 29 August 1418, when he was rector of the altar of St. John Baptist at the church of St. Martin in Liège, and was dispensed from illegitimacy, being the son of a priest and a single woman,108 to 5 May 1444, at which time he was dean of St-Paul in Liège and conservator of the privileges of the University in Cologne.109 After serving Malatesta IV he was for a time in the retinue of Cardinal Niccolò Albergati,110 and in a letter to Eugenius IV dated 17 April 1443, requesting the deanship, he states that when he was in minor orders he had been a member of Eugenius’s Curia, and is now fifty 107 109

ASV, RS 278, fol. 31r–v, and RL 316, fols. 168r–170r. 108 ASV, RS 116, fol. 241r. ASV, RS 396, fol. 201r–v. 110 ASV, RS 199, fol. 147r–v (1426).

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years old.111 Born in 1390, he was probably a close contemporary of the Lantins. Du Fay’s name, however, is not in the rotulus, which indicates that he was not in the service of Malatesta di Pandolfo, but rather that of his son the bishop; this most likely was also the case of Henry, Franchois, and the second Hughes. For Henry and Hughes we have not even a plausible possibility. In contrast, for Franchois we have two. In 1993 Laurenz Lütteken proposed that Franchois could be Franchois Lebertoul, who was a small vicar at Cambrai between 1409 and 1412,112 whose music appears only in Ox 213 in close proximity to that of Du Fay and the Lantins.113 The second possibility is Jehan Franchois de Gembloux; the only documentation for him shows he was succentor of St-Martin in Liège by September 1417 and after a year’s absence again in 1418–1419,114 but all of his works survive only in north Italian or south German sources, and specifically those that transmit the music of Hughes and Arnold de Lantins.115 Given that the Malatesta apparently had a large number of clerics from Liège in their service, and that Jehan’s lone surviving motet, Ave virgo, lux Maria, shares a number of unusual traits with Du Fay’s Apostolo glorioso and was copied by the unusually well-informed scribe of Bo Q15 immediately before the Du Fay motet, the possibility that Jehan Franchois might be the Franchois of He compaignons has to be considered seriously. Another work by Du Fay that shows external evidence of being from the Rimini years is a Credo that in two of its six sources appears paired with a Gloria by Hughes de Lantins.116 The Gloria is ascribed to Du Fay in Ox 213 on account of a scribal error, made while correcting the wrong ascription of the Gloria that precedes it in the manuscript.117 That the two most authoritative copies of the Credo pair it with the Gloria of Lantins (correctly ascribed in both copies) indicates that the pair was apparently deliberately composed as such by both composers, something that could only have happened during Du Fay’s years in the Veneto. Fallows provides a very 111 112 113 114

115

116

117

ASV, RS 390, fols. 13v–14r. LAN, 4G 7558 (1409–1410), fol. 8v; 4G 6789 (1411–1412), fols. 4v–5r. Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 219 and n. 31. Quitin, “A propos de Jean-François de Gembloux,” 119–20; see also Planchart, “The Liègeoise Diaspora.” Franchois’s works survive in Ao 15, BU 2216, Bo Q15, Ox 213, and two later sources, MuEm and Tr 93. OO Besseler 4, no. 3; OO Planchart 5/3. There are eight copies of the work because Ao 15 and Tr 93 transmit two copies each (one of those in Tr 93 is incomplete). Details in Schoop, Entstehung und Verwendung, 48–49, and Fallows, ed., Canon. Misc. 213, 13, 15, and 40.

Greece and Laon

perceptive critical evaluation of both works, including musical similarities that support the pairing as being deliberate.118 There are other works that were surely composed during Du Fay’s years in Pesaro and Rimini, but these are the ones that can indisputably be placed in those years. The case of He compaignons should warn us of how difficult it is, all the more so in the case of a composer as ready to try new things as Du Fay, to attempt to construct a chronology of the works on purely stylistic grounds.119 In any event, Du Fay probably remained in the region at least until the summer of 1424 and perhaps beyond. Scholars have posited a stay in Laon between his early years in Italy and those in Bologna, a stay which is based on the texts of two of his works and the beneficial picture that emerges from a papal chancery letter of 30 April 1430 indicating that Du Fay’s earlier benefices, after that in St-Géry, were in the area of Laon.120 This document, as well as the letters from Cardinal Louis Allemand to the chapter of St-Géry, has long been known, but they require a fresh look, which will be provided later in this chapter.

Greece and Laon We have assumed that Du Fay’s stay at Laon went roughly from 1424 until 1426.121 What might have brought him north was the impending death of his mother’s cousin, Jehan Hubert, at whose house Marie Du Fayt had been living while taking care of Hubert’s aged first cousin, Jehanne Huberde (see Chapter 1). Hubert made his will on 29 July 1424 and from this point on his name is absent from all the documentation that survives from the cathedral, where his presence was relatively constant until the early 1420s. Men at this time drew up their wills when they sensed that their end was near, and the disappearance from the acts of the chapter indicates that he had become incapacitated, but Hubert lingered on and died on Christmas Eve 118 119

120 121

Fallows, Dufay, 175–77. The case of Hamm, Chronology is slightly different. He sought to establish the evolution of certain technical and notational traits, and to use it as a chronological tool. It was written when knowledge of Du Fay’s music and his life were not only considerably less extensive than what we have today, but also seriously distorted by the presence of works like the Caput Mass in his canon. Moreover, Hamm relied on Besseler’s editions, which are extremely problematic in every respect. Still, in its large outlines Hamm’s chronology has stood relatively well, and his insights into the evolution of Du Fay’s notational practices are still useful. ASV, DC 13, fol. 61r–v. This is the view presented in Fallows, “Dufay and Nouvion-le-Vineux,” and with some revisions in Planchart, “The Early Career,” 362–67.

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of 1425.122 He was buried in the nave under the clock, and his epitaph, in rather clumsy hexameters, was recorded by François-Dominique Tranchant in the eighteenth century: Frater qui transis Huberti Ioh. precor assis Pro me devota prome Christo dari vota Ut mihi det portum cui Kievraing prebuit ortum Defunctis requiem viventibus undique pacem123 Marie du Fayt had been living in Hubert’s house and her livelihood most likely depended on his support, so it is reasonable to assume that Du Fay would have traveled to Cambrai to see what was to be done about his mother;124 it is also possible that he could have expected a small legacy from Hubert. At present the most plausible hypothesis is that Du Fay probably moved north after hearing of Hubert’s impending demise, and finding his relative still alive and his mother still under his care, he took a position in Laon, perhaps as a small vicar, a position that allowed him eventually to obtain the chaplaincy at the altar of St-Fiacre in the cathedral and later the parish church of Nouvion-les-Vineux, the benefices mentioned in the cameral letter of 1430. In support of this I pointed out that the collation of this parish church was reserved to the community of chaplains in the cathedral, which would naturally give it to a chaplain – in other words a situation very similar to that which Du Fay enjoyed in St-Géry.125 At Hubert’s death Du Fay found that Hubert, who left a large number of legacies to most of his blood relatives, left his mother 20 francs, worth £24, provided she would remain in Cambrai and take care of Jehanne Huberde, described as “bien impotente de sa veulle [sic],”126 and attend with Jehanne the Masses for Hubert’s soul for a full year, but Hubert left nothing to Du 122

123

124

125 126

The executors of his will, a formidable group that included Raoul le Prestre, archdeacon of Hainaut, nephew of Pierre d’Ailly, and, as I have suggested earlier, one of Du Fay’s early supporters; Jacques de Metz-Guichard, dean; Jehan Hubert, Jr., his nephew, conservator of the privileges of the University of Paris and less than a fortnight from becoming provost of St-Géry (LAN, 7G 26, piece 375); and Nicolas Ouden, chaplain (Oudard Saumon and Jehane Huberde were absent), presented his will to the chapter the very day of his death. Normally this was done the day after the death, but since that day was Christmas Day with its long liturgy the executors decided to do it a day early. CBM 1056, fol. 158v. CBM 1049, p. 33. “O brother who pass by, near Jehan Hubert, I beseech you to give devout prayers for me to Christ, that he may give me a haven to whom Kievraing gave life, rest to the dead, and peace everywhere to the living.” This is the interpretation posited in Planchart, “The Early Career,” 363–64, and with a slight revision in id., “Concerning Du Fay’s Birthplace,” 228. Planchart, “The Early Career,” 365–65, citing LAA G 1850 ter, fol. 99r–v. LAN, 4G 1372, p. 64. The expression could mean that Jehanne was nearly blind or was suffering from something affecting her spine, probably osteoporosis.

Greece and Laon

Fay. With his mother more or less taken care of (in Cambrai at the time £24 would allow Marie to rent a small house for several years),127 Du Fay left for Bologna, probably in early 1426, very likely having been recruited for the chapel of Louis Allemand, the papal legate, by Robert Auclou, who had been in the north of France studying law in Paris in 1425128 and had reached Bologna by 25 February 1426.129 Why Allemand decided to recruit a musician, and presumably form a chapel, is explained in some detail later, but if Du Fay traveled to Bologna with Auclou he would have left Laon shortly after the death of Hubert, that is, early in 1426. This scenario tallies well with one of the two pieces connected with Laon, the rondeau Adieu ces bons vins de Lannoys, dated in its only source to 1426.130 The other piece connected with Laon, or rather with the Laonnais, is the May Day song Ce jour le doibt,131 where the poet tells the lady: Je suy fermé a la plus joyeuse Qui soit jusques a Meuse ny a Euse. As Fallows points out, the rivers Meuse and Oise form the boundaries of the diocese of Laon,132 which would perforce place its composition in Laon and hence during the time Du Fay was there.133 A third piece, Je me complains piteusement, dated 12 July 1425, describes an unpleasant predicament Du Fay was facing on account of what the poem itself refers to as a consequence of his youth.134 Into this neat picture intrudes a newly discovered document, the only one concerning Du Fay that we have between his last mention in St-Géry in 1420 and the letter of Louis Allemand in 1427. It is both puzzling and frustrating, not least because it is damaged and we cannot read the beginning. It is a supplication to Pope Martin V dated 15 July 1425, in RS 188, fol. 292v. The top of the folio is entirely corroded so that the first two lines are virtually gone and of the third line barely half is visible under the stain of mold. The full name of the petitioner is gone, but his baptismal name, repeated at the end of the petition, was Denis. What remains of the

127

128 130

131 133

134

See, e.g., LAN, 4G 4630 (fabric, 1425–1426), fol. 2r, where yearly rents paid by tenants of the houses range widely, from 12s. to £36 (for a canonical house), with most around £6 a year. BAD, G 178, fols. 232r–233r. 129 ASV, RS 196, fol. 31v. OO Besseler 6, no. 17; OO Planchart 10/5/1. See Fallows, ed., Canon. Misc. 213, 18–19, and fol. 140r. OO Besseler 6, no. 18; OO Planchart 10/2/2. 132 Fallows, Dufay, 27. In Planchart, “The Early Career,” I also propose Ma belle dame souveraine, on the basis of Fallows dating it as a work written in Laon, but it does not fit the criteria used here of providing us with a non-stylistic reason for the dating, although Fallows is surely correct (Dufay, 93–95). OO Besseler 6, no. 14; OO Planchart 10/2/5. See Planchart, “The Early Career,” 366.

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document reads as follows (some rigid formulas allow a small reconstruction of parts of the lost text): Supp[licat sanctitatis vestrae devotus vester Dionysius . . . clericus vel presbyter?] Seno[nensis diocesis . . . quatenus sibi specialem gratiam facientes de cappellania perpetua] ad altare beatae M[ariae? . . . n . . . s . . . in] ecclesiae sancti Gaugerici Cameracensis sitis et fundatis cuius fructus etc. duodecim librarum Turonensium parvorum secundum communem extimationem valorem annuum non excedunt vacante per obitum quondam guillermi de fageto in civitate patracensis existenti defuncti ultimi eiusdem cappellanie possessoris / Seu premisso sive alias quovismodo et ex alterius persona vacet, etiam si generaliter vel specialiter reservati affecti aut devoluti Seu si super eis in Romana curia vel extra inter aliquos lis cuius cause statum hic habere dignemini pro sufficienter expressis pendeat indecisa / Etiam si tanto tempore vacaverit / quod ipsius collatio iuxta lateranensis statuta concilii legitime devoluta existat / eidem dyonisio dignemini misericorditer providere Non obstantibus gratia expectativa si quam habet in cancelleria eiusdem sanctitatis declaranda / Et cum ceteris non obstantibus et clausulis opportunis / Fiat ut petitur O / Datum Rome apud Sanctos Apostolos Idus Iulii Anno octavo.

Here, three days after the date given in Ox 213 for Je me complains piteusement, is one Denis, from the diocese of Sens, requesting a chaplaincy in St-Géry vacant on the death of Guillaume Du Fay in Patras! I went back and rechecked the Registra Lateranensia and the Registra Vaticana for 1425 for the papal letter that surely followed this supplication, but the search proved fruitless, and the chapter acts of St-Géry do not record the reception of any such letter. The papal letter would have provided us with Denis’s last name and the exact name of the chaplaincy as he had presented it in the supplication but no further information, and the acts in St-Géry would have allowed us at least to know who his proctor in partibus was. That the non obstantibus section of the supplication mentioned only an expectative to be declared in the chancery is a very good sign that Denis was in the beginning of his clerical career. It is also more than likely that even if the papal letter reached Cambrai, the proctor would probably have had a good idea of how futile it would be to present it to the chapter. First of all, Du Fay was not dead, and depending on where he was in the summer of 1425 that could have been known to the proctor; and second, Denis had not gotten the name of the benefice right, and these matters were immensely important in the collation process. Du Fay’s chaplaincy was that of the Salve and therefore a Marian chaplaincy, but at St-Géry it was never known as the chaplaincy of St. Mary; further, the chaplaincy was at the altar of StGéry, not, as the supplication states, at the altar of St. M[ary?]. Thus, much of the supplication is wrong, but still the mention of Patras is startling.

Greece and Laon

Pandolfo di Malatesta was made archbishop of Patras on 10 May 1424, at a time when Du Fay was still in Italy, and we know that he took personal possession of it. It is therefore more than likely that Du Fay accompanied Pandolfo to Patras and that something happened there that created the rumor of his death. In supplications per obitum, as Pamela Starr has shown, speed was of the essence for the petitioner, and petitioners sometimes assumed the worst when a colleague was sick or injured, and rushed a petition that became invalid when the holder of the benefice recovered or healed.135 In the case of Denis’s petition he has gotten so many details wrong that my impression is that he heard about the incident long after the fact and probably in a garbled manner. Still, we should add Patras to the list of places that Du Fay traveled to during his Wanderjahre. It would appear that in late 1424 Pandolfo traveled to Patras and took possession of his see,136 as he had done at Coutances, and in the process took Du Fay and at least four other singers with him. This would not affect Du Fay’s return to the north in 1425 and his stay in Laon during parts of 1425 and 1426, but it could affect the date some of his works. The first of these is the motet Apostolo glorioso, for St. Andrew, which mentions his place of burial in Patras as “questo sancto speco,” implying that the motet was written for and sung in Patras.137 Until recently, on the basis of Besseler’s work, the motet was connected with the rededication of the church of St. Andrew in Patras, which took place in 1426 after Pandolfo had restored it.138 But nothing in the motet speaks directly to a dedication (unlike the case of Nuper rosarum flores), so the work could have been written for Pandolfo’s ceremonial entrance into his new see. Moving Apostolo glorioso from 1426 to 1424 has another effect: it distances it from works of Du Fay written in 1426 or 1427, such as the motet Rite maiorem and the Sanctus papale,139 and places it considerably closer to the one work in Du Fay’s canon where the sonority of the music and the metric procedures are closest to those of Apostolo glorioso, the Missa sine nomine. In other ways the motet simply continues the mixture of Italian and French traits found in Vasilissa ergo gaude, albeit made more sonorous by the addition of a second contratenor. Another detail concerns the text: this is one of two motets by Du Fay to an

135 136 137

138 139

Starr, “Strange Obituaries,” 179 and n. 6, and 185–86. See Falcioni, “Pandolfo Malatesti,” 79. OO Besseler 1, no. 10; OO Planchart 2/4. The text of the motet, an Italian sonnet, makes the connection unmistakable. Besseler, “Neue Dokumente,” 163–65. The case for the dates of these works is presented later in this chapter, pp. 87–88, 95–96.

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Italian text:140 the simultaneous texts of the piece, as Nino Pirrotta noted, form a complete sonnet.141 Now Pandolfo’s father was a more than competent poet, often known to posterity as “Malatesta dei Sonetti.” He left behind a canzoniere of about sixty-eight poems, which was popular enough to have survived in numerous copies.142 Much of his poetry, including what a critic calls “squilibri e pesantezze, specie se raffrontati al magistero dei grandi,”143 is in fact quite similar to the poetic level of Apostolo glorioso,144 so the possibility should be considered that Pandolfo’s father was the author of the text of Du Fay’s motet. The evidence that Du Fay accompanied Pandolfo to Patras, and that the archbishop’s retinue surely included a group of musicians capable of singing Apostolo glorioso, also throws a new light upon a work that had thus far eluded efforts at dating, the motet for St. Nicholas, O gemma, lux et speculum. Besseler noted a resemblance between passages of the motet and the ballade Je me complains piteusement, dated 1425 in Ox 213,145 and Michael Allsen noted intertextual connections between this work, Hughes de Lantins’s Celsa sublimatur, and Du Fay’s O sancte Sebastiane.146 But in the absence of any more secure biographical evidence most authors placed the motet in Du Fay’s years in Bologna (1426–1428). Now, however, we have evidence that late in 1424 Du Fay accompanied Archbishop Pandolfo to take possession of his see.147 At the time ships sailing from Rimini or Pesaro to Greece would go along the coast of Italy, making calls at different ports, until they reached Bari, from whence they sailed into the high seas. Bari was also the port where the stopovers were the longest, since the ships had to be provisioned. It would stand to reason that the archbishop, arriving at the celebrated shrine with his entourage, including the musicians that were eventually to perform Apostolo glorioso in Patras, would offer homage before sailing on the most uncertain leg of his journey to the patron saint of sailors and seafarers. Further, since a port call in Bari would have been a given in any such journey at the time, Du Fay and the musicians would have known from before starting the journey that there would be a stop in Bari with the attendant ceremonies in honor of St. Nicholas. Viewing the motet in this light puts it in very close proximity 140 141 142

143 144 146

The other is the cantilena motet Vergene bella; see Planchart, “What’s in a Name?.” Pirrotta, “On Text Forms,” 677. See Angiolini and Falcioni, La signoria di Malatesta, 47–58, and Malatesta Malatesti, Rime, ed. Trolli. Angiolini and Falcioni, La signoria di Malatesta, v. Cf. Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 138–40. 145 OO Besseler 1:xiv. Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 268–86. 147 Planchart, “Four Motets,” 13–17.

Greece and Laon

to all of the works that scholars have shown to be related to it in one form or another. This, in turn, gives us a possible reason for the existence of another work, Hughes de Lantins’s Celsa sublimatur, a motet in honor of St. Nicholas and St. Sabinus, whose relics were in Bari. Schoop, Fallows, and Allsen have all sensed a relationship between O gemma, lux et speculum and Celsa sublimatur,148 and Allsen noted that Celsa sublimatur is not just a motet for St. Nicholas, but one for the saints buried in Bari, and therefore more of a civic work than Du Fay’s motet. For this reason he assumed that it might have been composed after the battle of Aquila (2 June 1424), when Ludovico Colonna, then an ally of the Malatesta, defeated the Aragonese forces and became for a short time Viceroy of Apulia, perhaps for an entrance of Ludovico in Bari.149 But now it is more plausible to assume that Arnold and Hughes de Lantins also accompanied Pandolfo to Patras, and that while Du Fay’s motet is an offering to St. Nicholas to beseech him for safe travel to Greece, Hughes’s motet would have been part of an homage to the city of Bari itself by the visiting archbishop. This also casts a new light on the biography of the Lantins. Hughes essentially disappears from the historical record at this point, and it may well be that some of Pandolfo’s chaplains might have been struck by illness and some died, Hughes among them, and others recovered, and that Denis wrote his supplication assuming that Du Fay was among the dead. As noted earlier, if Jehan Franchois was in the service of the archbishop, then his five-voice motet Ave virgo, lux Maria might have been part of the repertory of this group of singers. Like Hughes de Lantins, Jehan disappears from the historical record at about this time as well. Archbishop Pandolfo remained in Patras until 1428, when the future Constantine XI attacked the city and the archbishop was forced to flee and go to Venice to seek support, and if Arnold de Lantins had stayed with him it would be logical that he left for Venice at the same time.150 And it is precisely this year when the annotations in Ox 213 for Arnold’s Se ne prenés and Quant je mire place him in Venice in March 1428,151 so it is likely that Arnold remained with Pandolfo until his return to Italy. Du Fay must have returned to the north, perhaps early in 1425, so that he was 148

149 150

151

Schoop and Allsen, “Lantins”; Fallows, Dufay, 278–79 (n. 21); Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 270–76. Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 270–71. See Falcioni, “Pandolfo Malatesti,” 81 (citing Stephanos Thomopoulos); also Fedalto, La chiesa latina, 1:370–71, noting that Pandolfo was elevated by Martin V over the objections of the Latin community in Patras and the Venetians, both of whom wanted a Venetian archbishop. Martin’s letter of appointment in ASV, RL 239, fols. 3v–5v. Cf. Fallows, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Canon. Misc. 213, 19.

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probably in Laon by the spring of that year. In this case the dates I proposed for two of the three Du Fay pieces written in Laon, May 1425 for Ce jour le doibt,152 and Adieu ces bons vins in January or February 1426, remain valid. In the case of Je me complains the text uses the language of courtly love, and I think it would be a mistake to interpret it as referring to whatever might have happened that led to Denis’s supplication to Martin V.153 Du Fay’s return to the north must have felt to him like a case of nemo propheta in terra sua. We cannot be sure why he picked Laon rather than Cambrai, where he did have a benefice for his stay in the north after Rimini. But we should note that with but a few exceptions the cathedral of Cambrai throughout the fifteenth century was not really hospitable to its former choirboys and petits vicaires, and Du Fay might have sensed this. At this point he had what appears to have been the beginning of a brilliant career in an Italian court, but in the north he was still only a chaplain and probably a petit vicaire, and he might have thought, as did a number of his colleagues, that he could progress faster in a church other than the cathedral at Cambrai. It is true that he eventually obtained benefices at Laon, but from the documentation we have concerning these benefices, he did not acquire them while he was there,154 although he might have obtained them because he had established some contacts within the cathedral community, and in particular within the community of chaplains, which had the collation rights to the benefice he obtained in Nouvion-les-Vineux. Since the fifteenthcentury documentation at Laon does not survive beyond 1412, we cannot be sure of what his status was there or who his contacts or proctors were. But given what we know of the life of a petit vicaire it is hardly surprising that he accepted the call to the court of Cardinal Louis Allemand in Bologna when it came, probably in the person of Robert Auclou.155

The Bologna Years Almost from the time of Martin V’s election until the end of Du Fay’s years in Rimini and even beyond, central Italy was torn by turmoil and wars between shifting alliances that prevented the pope from reaching Rome 152

153 154 155

The work is a May Day song, and the only May Day that Du Fay could have been in Laon is that of 1425; see Planchart, “The Early Career,” 365–66. See the interpretation of the text in Planchart, “The Early Career,” 366. On this, see later in this chapter. In fact, a line of his farewell song to Laon, Adieu ces bon vins, pretty much appears to state that there is not much of a living to be made there; cf. Planchart, “Du Fay and the Style of Molinet,” 64–65 and n. 28.

The Bologna Years

until 29 September 1420. The papacy was in almost every way at the center of this struggle as Martin sought, after nearly a century of papal absence and the schisms, to restore the papal state as a political and territorial entity.156 Among the papal lands none was as important, politically and economically, at the time as the Romagna, with its capital in Bologna. But Bologna was also the point where the interest of the dukes of Milan and the republic of Florence came most often into direct conflict. Further, the Bolognese, divided into three main factions headed by the Bentivoglio, the Canedoli, and the Zambeccari, were more or less unanimous in resenting the papal government, which made the situation in Bologna permanently dangerous for the papal legates who governed the city. Martin’s way to Rome was opened by a decisive victory over the Bolognese in July 1420, and shortly before the final leg of his long journey to Rome Martin appointed Alfonso Carrillo, the Spanish cardinal of the title of S. Eustachio, legate of Bologna. As Peter Partner notes, “at no time during Martin’s pontificate was Bologna more firmly governed than under Carrillo.”157 Still, conflict with Florence at a time when the pope sorely needed the aid of the republic, which perceived Carrillo as too partial to Milanese interests,158 led Martin to replace Carrillo with the Venetian Gabriele Condulmaro, Cardinal of S. Clemente, in August 1423.159 Condulmaro was more openly pro-Florentine than Carrillo had been pro-Milanese and as legate showed the same lack of tact and diplomacy that he was to demonstrate later as Pope Eugenius IV, which finally caused Martin to remove him and appoint Louis Allemand, bishop of Arles, as legate in May 1424.160 Allemand, a neutral party between Florence and Naples, had by then had a long and successful administrative career in the Curia. Since July 1417 he had been vice-chamberlain of the apostolic chamber, a position that he obtained from his uncle, François de Conzié, the chamberlain, which he held until his appointment as legate and in which he had proven himself an able and even-handed administrator.161 Early on in his career in Rome Allemand had among his secretaries a Parisian clerk, Robert Auclou, who remained one of his secretaries until

156 157 158

159 160

161

A solid and detailed account of the entire period appears in Partner, The Papal State, 42–94. Ibid., 67. In this they were probably correct, but Carrillo was very likely reacting to what he perceived as papal interest since for the entire reign of Martin V he had no allies more constant and loyal than the Sforza. Partner, The Papal State, 77–78. Ibid., 89. See also Fink, “Die politische Korrespondenz Martins V.,” no. 437. The basic work on Allemand is Pérousse, Le Cardinal Louis Aleman. Pérousse, Le Cardinal, 29–59.

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his appointment as legate.162 When Allemand was appointed legate and left for Bologna, Auclou instead went to Paris, where he matriculated at the university.163 But Allemand obviously missed his secretary and by February 1426 Auclou was in Bologna, once again studying law at the university as well as being sent on a considerable number of diplomatic missions by the legate.164 It appears that as Auclou was preparing to go to Bologna one of Allemand’s requests was that he recruit musicians for the legate’s chapel. The evidence for this, like the evidence of Du Fay’s sojourn in Constance, is not based on specific documents but rather projected back from the course of Du Fay’s career. We have Auclou’s arrival in Bologna sometime in early 1426, Du Fay’s farewell to Laon’s wines dated also 1426, Du Fay’s presence in Bologna firmly documented in April 1427, and then a work of Du Fay, the motet Rite maiorem, with a text asking St. James to protect Auclou, with Auclou’s name and one of his many titles, curate of the church of SaintJacques (de la Boucherie in Paris), spelled out as an acrostic in the text of the motet.165 From 1426 on the careers of Du Fay and Auclou ran roughly a common course until Auclou’s death on 16 August 1452. In the course of a long career Allemand, an austere and saintly man,166 wrote hundreds of letters to three different popes requesting benefices and favors for members of his familia, but not a single one of these is for a musician or a singer in his chapel.167 My impression is that he, like his 162

163

164

165

166

167

ASV, RS 139, fol. 96r–v. Auclou’s tenure as secretary of Allemand is attested in hundreds of documents bearing his signature between 1420 and 1424 in the Diversa Cameralia series of the Vatican Archives. Auclou served not only as secretary to Allemand, but as secretary of Bona of Savoy (Allemand’s family was Savoyard), representative of the duke of Burgundy in Rome, and representative of the cathedral of Cambrai at the Council of Basel. In the course of his life he obtained an enormous number of benefices and left an immense paper trail that dwarfs that left by Du Fay and has probably never been completely covered. His study in Paris is attested by a privilege of absence of the chapter of the cathedral of Besançon, where he was a canon in 1425, in BAD, G 178, fols. 232r– 233r. ASV, RS 196, fol. 31v; BAS, Tesoreria e Controllore di Tesoreria, Reg. 80, fols. 122v, 124r, 127v, 151v, 152r. OO Besseler 1, no. 11; OO Planchart 5/5, 16–17. Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 116–17, makes a good case for Auclou being the author of the text. Auclou had been granted the church of St-Jacques de la Boucherie, which yielded an estimated yearly income of £300, on 31 Aug. 1420 (ASV, RS 146, fol. 141r). The church was demolished during the French Revolution, but its beautiful tower (built long after Auclou’s time, ca. 1500) survives at the center of a small park on the right bank. A measure of his saintliness may be taken by the fact that even though he was for ten years the president of the schismatic Council of Basel and a supporter of the Basilean Pope Felix V, he was beatified in 1527 by Pope Clement VII. A possible exception to this might be the large number of letters between November 1429 (ASV, RS 245, fols. 68v–69r) and June 1432 (ASV, RS 278, fols. 69v–70r), of letters for Jehan Blondelet, his secretary (probably following Auclou). Blondelet might be the Jehan Blondeel

The Bologna Years

Table 2.5 Singers in the chapel of Alfonso Carrillo in Bologna (1420–1424) Name

Other institutions where they sang

Bernard Guillaume de Anglade Jehan de Carnin Jehan de la Tour Jehan Tordoir Jehan Vincenet Philippe de la Folie Pierre L’Escuyer

Chapel of the Council of Basel, Chapel of Felix V Papal chapel Burgundian chapel — Papal chapel Papal chapel, Aragonese chapel, Burgundian chapel Papal chapel

eventual antagonist Pope Eugenius IV, had little interest in music per se. But his most important predecessor as legate in Bologna, Alfonso Carrillo, did have such an interest and apparently supported a polyphonic chapel. Carrillo’s interest in music preceded his appointment as legate since on 10 July 1419 he asked Martin V to renew the litterae de fructibus given to his singers by Benedict XIII.168 Petitions by the cardinal for his singers or by the singers of the cardinal identifying themselves as such allow us to reconstruct at least part of his chapel during his years in Bologna. It included a number of musicians who one time or another sang in the papal chapel, the chapel of the king of Aragon, the duke of Burgundy, and the chapels of the Council of Basel and Pope Felix V (see Table 2.5).169 It is interesting to note that all of the singers are French; Carrillo’s familia, as would be expected, included a large number of Spaniards, but never in any of the supplications is a Spaniard identified as a singer in the chapel. That the chapel sang polyphony is made clear by the fact that Bernard Guillaume is specifically identified as the tenorista.170 This is an impressive group of musicians and one that could perform the most sophisticated repertory of the day. It would appear that by 1426 Allemand had decided that he needed a similar polyphonic chapel and deputized Auclou to recruit some of the singers. In any event, Allemand might have wanted to have a polyphonic

168

169

170

who was a singer of Boniface IX (See Nádas and Di Bacco, “Papal Chapels,” 90), but by 1429 he is serving only as secretary of Allemand. By July 1432 Blondelet had entered the service of Louis of Anjou, king of Sicily (ASV, RS 278, fol. 201v). ASV, RS 119, fol. 127r–v. A littera de fructibus percipiendis, also known as a privilege of absence, allowed clerics to receive the rents from their benefices while absent, usually in the service of the pope or a lord, or attending the university. The men are documented as singers of Carrillo’s chapel in ASV, RS 145, fols. 259v–260r; RS 157, fols. 232r, 271v–272r; RS 161, fols. 35v–36r; and RS 171, fol. 260r, as well as in several other supplications. ASV, RS 166, fol. 143r.

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chapel, but he does not seem to have considered supporting the beneficial career of his singers as important as Carrillo did. Of course, if the archive of the legate had survived we probably could find payment lists and the kinds of information that allow us to reconstruct the personnel of the papal chapel and those of a number of secular lords, but Allemand’s archives probably disappeared in the assault and looting of the episcopal palace that took place in August 1428,171 for no trace of them survives either in the Vatican Archives or in the Archivio di Stato in Bologna. Thus the arrival of Du Fay was for a long time our only indication that Allemand had a chapel. But a supplication by one of the singers in the chapel of Eugenius IV, petitioning in 1430 to be allowed to enter higher orders, details an interesting story: Gilles Laury, an acolyte from Tournai, states that his only desire is to be a priest and preach the Gospel, but that when he was in the service of cardinal Allemand, during the final attack on the episcopal palace by the Bolognese, Laury, forgetting his clerical status, grabbed a crossbow, ascended the ramparts, and proceeded to kill a number of the attackers. He is seeking absolution from that lapse and to be allowed to proceed to higher orders.172 Needless to say, killing a few members of what Eugenius IV probably considered a despicable antipapal mob was easily pardoned, and Laury ended his days as a priest and a canon of St-Pierre de Lille.173 Laury, unlike Du Fay, did not go directly from the chapel of Allemand to that of the pope, for he was sworn into the papal chapel on 7 March 1431,174 but their early relationship is reflected in the fact that Laury obliged himself to pay for Du Fay’s annata for his canonicate at Lausanne in 1431.175 The question of how either Allemand or Auclou would have heard of Du Fay and of his abilities as a musician, since neither man appears to have been interested in music, has some possible answers. Du Fay’s former patron, Pandolfo di Galeotto Malatesta (from the Rimini branch) was archdeacon of the university of Bologna, and surely there was official communication between him and the legate. Other Malatesta, such as Carlo di Galeotto in Rimini and Carlo di Malatesta in Pesaro, as well as his father, were papal allies at the time and people to whom Allemand could also turn to recommend musicians. There is also someone perhaps 171 173

174

175

Partner, The Papal State, 90. 172 ASV, RS 245, fol. 74r–v. According to his epitaph, recorded in Hautcoeur, ed., Documents liturgiques et nécrologiques, 332, Laury died on 28 Mar. 1450. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 1711, fol. 82r, where a later hand gives the year erroneously as 1432, but cf. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 827, fol. 39r, the first mandate that survives after the death of Martin V, where Laury is being paid 5 fl. in Aug. 1431. ASV, LA 6, fol. 74v.

The Bologna Years

closer at hand, a brilliant canonist, Grégoire Nicole, who was probably known to both Allemand and Auclou. Nicole was from Cambrai, the son of a canon of St-Géry and a single woman, and might have been about five years older than Du Fay, but he would have been aware of him during the beginning of Du Fay’s career. By 1419 Nicole, who already was a magister artium, was enrolled at the university in Bologna and taught there in 1425– 1426, precisely at the time when Allemand might have been thinking of recruiting musicians; from 1426 to 1430 he studied in Paris. By 1430 he was a notary of the episcopal curia in Cambrai. He became canon of Ste-Croix in 1435, of St-Géry by 1438, and canon and the official of Cambrai in 1439,176 and was apparently a lifelong friend of the composer, who was an executor of Nicole’s will and modeled parts of his will on that of Nicole. Du Fay’s days in Bologna were probably filled with the usual activities of a chapel member in lower orders, singing in the services and helping in the officiating of the liturgy. It is also possible that he followed Auclou’s example and entered the university in Bologna as a law student, although we know for certain that he did not graduate there. At St-Géry the accounts of the chaplains give his name as the holder for the last time in the 1420s in 1422–1423, where he is referred to as a subdeacon.177 After this he had been away long enough that his name is not given in the account, although the accounts of the chaplaincy are given among those of other foreign chaplaincies. At some point between 1422–1423 and April 1427 Du Fay became a deacon, which is the title given to him in a letter from Allemand to the chapter of St-Géry, dated 12 April 1427, asking that Du Fay be paid the full rents from his benefice, a privilege due to him because he is in the service of the papal legate in Bologna.178 The letter itself does not survive; what we have is a copy of the beginning and the end, the salutation and the signature and the date, entered with an appropriate rubric into the register that also recorded the chapter acts. The procedure at St-Géry apparently was to let these documents accumulate for a while, and then to enter their opening and closing, with a rubric summarizing their content, in batches covering several years. After that the original parchments could be used as bindings or erased and reused by the local secretaries.179 The copy of the letter appears today, with several 176 177 179

Cf. Maillard-Luypaert, “Pour le salut de mon âme,” 7–13, with an immense documentation. LAN, 7G 2928, fol. 9r. 178 LAN, 7G 753, fol. 107v. I have found no bindings from St-Géry itself that reuse such documents, but in the cathedral records there are hundreds of such examples. A particularly interesting one is the cover to the account of the grand community of chaplains for 1499–1500, LAN, 4G 6894, which is the instrument recording the installation of Gilles Carlier as canon and dean of Cambrai on

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others, in a fascicle bound backward and upside down in the register, but with a modern foliation in the hand of André Pirro that takes this into account, numbering the folios as if the fascicle were correctly bound so that the real sequence of folios is apparent to the user.180 Du Fay’s proctor was Jehan Nicole, a canon of St-Géry and the father of Grégoire Nicole, probably on account of the friendship between Grégoire and Du Fay.181 It might be useful here to give in extenso what survives of the document: Copia principii et finis privilegii Guillermi du Fayd diaconi capellani capellanie du salve in hac ecclesia presentati in capitulo per Io Nicolay eiusdem procuratorem penultima maii in anno xxvii° Ludovicus miseratione divina etc sancte Cecilie sacrosancte ecclesie Romane presbyter Cardinalis Arelatensis vulgariter nuncupatus Bononie etc. apostolice sedis legatus. Venerabilibus viris dominis decano et capitulo ecclesie collegiate Sancti Gaugerici Cameracensis singulisque canonicis personis etc. Signatum et datum Bononie in palatio nostre residentie die duodecimo mensis Aprilis anno a nativitate domini m° quadrigentesimo vicesimo septimo Indictione quinta Pontificatus prefati serenissimi domini nostri pape Martini divina providentia pape quinti anno decimo Ro Pichardi.182

The St-Géry chapter acts mention the presentation of the letter and the reaction of the chapter; the canons decided to postpone a consideration of the letter by eight days. The discussion at that time, recorded immediately after that on the day of the presentation, gives a few details of Allemand’s letter that tally with the standard request such letters contained, namely that Du Fay should receive the fruits of his chaplaincy with the exception of the daily distributions (which were reserved for those actually present). The canons, however, decided to deny the legate’s request, even though Du Fay had once been a resident chaplain, on the grounds that he was not yet a priest.183 Although this appears, on the face of it, legal and reasonable, my own reading of similar requests by other men to St-Géry and to the

180

181

182

183

12 Oct. 1431, following letters of Eugenius IV dated 13 Apr. 1431, and recording the signatures of all the canons present, among them Mathieu Hanelle and Nicolas Grenon. All of the documentation from St-Géry and most of the material from the cathedral, including some registers of several hundred pages, remained unfoliated until the late 20th century. Most of the main series in both churches, at least for the late 14th and the 15th centuries, now carries a consistent foliation. Du Fay was one of the executors of the will of Nicole, who died 25 Dec. 1469, LAN, 4G 1039, and modeled some aspects of his own will on those of Nicole. Nicole, like Du Fay, was illegitimate, but from his will it becomes clear that his relations with his own father and his other relatives were close, warm, and long-lasting. Robert Pichard, one of Allemand’s secretaries from Rome who, like Auclou, followed him to Bologna; see Baix and Uytterbrouck, eds., La Chambre apostolique, 1:cccxxxvii. LAN, 7G 573, fol. 277v: “reperierunt quod eisdem bona non gaudebit idem G. quosque erit presbyter.”

The Bologna Years

cathedral throughout the entire fifteenth century make it appear as something of a subterfuge. To be sure, St-Géry was nowhere near as wealthy as the cathedrals, and the canons had already noted their displeasure with nonresident chaplains, and those who were not active servants of the church.184 In addition there might have been some animosity toward Du Fay, an animosity that one senses in many of his dealings with middle-level bureaucracies throughout his career.185 In any event, sometime between April 1427 and May 1428, when the receipt of a similar letter from Allemand, this time presented to the chapter by Nicole Grenon, is recorded, Du Fay became a priest. I have suggested that he waited until he turned thirty before taking this step.186 Allemand’s letter of 24 March 1428 is recorded in the acts of St-Géry immediately after that of 1427, and is followed in relatively short order by letters from the camera apostolica requesting the same privileges dated 24 April 1429, 20 April 1430, and 1433 (date of the letter not given, but it was received on 22 June).187 All these letters were accepted without discussion. The entries in the acts tell us that such privileges or litterae de fructibus were sent each year and were valid for the year, so that we are missing the record of the receipt of the letters for 1431–1432 and for 1434, years when Du Fay was a member of the papal chapel. A further consequence of the acceptance of Allemand’s letter of 1428 was that Du Fay now held the chaplaincy of the Salve not as a foreign chapel but ad privilegium. In the accounts of St-Géry the chaplaincy now becomes invisible. From 1428–1429 on the separate account for the chaplaincy of the Salve disappears because its accounts would now be subsumed into the general account of the entire community.188 Two of the five litterae de fructibus sent on Du Fay’s behalf and whose reception is recorded in the St-Géry acts have survived: those of 1429 and 1430, which were copied into volumes of the Diversa cameralia now in the Vatican Archives.189 A comparison of these with the entries in the St-Géry acts, particularly those coming from Bologna, tells us something about the progression of the composer’s beneficial career. The letter of 1429 is addressed to the chapter of Laon and to St-Géry, and it is recorded exactly in the same manner in the acts of St-Géry, the same applies to the letter of 1430. But at the end of the actual text, when the benefices that Du Fay holds 184 187 188

189

See p. 49. 185 This is discussed later in this chapter. 186 See Chapter 1. LAN, 7G 753, fols. 108v–109v. LAN, 7G 2935 and registers for the following years. The accounts for 1427–1428, which could have shown how the transition occurred, are lost. ASV, DC 11, fols. 257v–258r, and 13, fol. 61r–v.

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ad privilegium are enumerated, the letter of 1430 adds to the altar of St. Fiacre in Laon and that of St. Géry in St-Géry, the parish church of Nouvion-les-Vineux in Laon.190 The two letters from Bologna are addressed only to the chapter of St-Géry. What this tells us is that Du Fay, during his years in Bologna, still had only one small benefice, the chaplaincy of the Salve at St-Géry, which he had held since 1414. Du Fay surely continued writing during his years at Bologna, although we have external evidence of a Bolognese origin for only a few works, and the evidence is often indirect. The first of these is the motet Rite maiorem, for St. James the Elder, where the texts of the two upper parts add up to a single poem in sapphic hendecasyllables with the acrostic “Robertus Auclou curatus Sancti Iacobi.”191 The motet shares some traits with Apostolo glorioso, but its sound and structure are different.192 The acrostic refers to one of Auclou’s posts, as curate of the Dominican church of SaintJacques de la Boucherie in Paris, and this led to considerable confusion at first on the origins and date of the work.193 The motto of the cantus firmus, “Ora pro nobis dominum qui te vocavit Iacobum,” obviously came from a rhymed text and is not found in the liturgy from Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, which survives complete.194 As early as 1976 I suggested that the cantus firmus most likely came from what was probably a unique office for St. James, from the Augustinian church of San Giacomo il Maggiore in Bologna, where some of the surviving chantbooks indicated that the office for St. James made use of rhymed texts,195 but the volume of the church’s antiphoner with St. James’s office was then presumed lost. It had been hidden under an altar stone at the time of the suppression of 1866, and was not found again until 1881 in a very deteriorated state and was not catalogued or identified.196 Identification came after a heroic restoration in the late 1990s, and although the piece from which Du Fay took the cantus firmus is lost (there is a lacuna of four leaves), the context of the office (it is modally ordered) and the return of the phrase “ora pro nobis Dominum qui te vocavit Iacobum,” as the repetendum of the last responsory for Matins, indicate that Du Fay’s cantus firmus was the repetendum of

190 192 193

194 195

196

ASV, DC 13, fol. 61v. 191 See Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 116–20. See the discussion in Chapter 9. Cf. Discussions in Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1976), 27–30; Fallows, Dufay, 29– 30; Bent, “Music and the Early Veneto Humanists,” 124–27. Paris, BnF lat. 1051, fols. 192r–207r; also Ordo divini officii beati Jacobi. Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1976), 29, and “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 128–29. Cf. Alessandri, “I corali,” 141–51 and “Il restauro.”

The Bologna Years

the first responsory.197 The entire St. James office at San Giacomo is unique, and thus Du Fay must have composed the motet in Bologna. The confusion concerning Rite maiorem extended itself to Du Fay’s Missa Sancti Jacobi, that survives as such only in Bo Q15. That the Mass was in honor of the same saint as the motet again led early scholarship to associate it with Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie and with Auclou.198 The tortured transmission of the work also posed a number of questions.199 Bent’s view, that the Mass, as it survives in Bo Q15 (the only source for the full work), is the result of a provision in the will of Bishop Pietro Emiliani of Vicenza, providing for four pilgrims to travel to Compostela – a will dated April 1429 – is surely right, but her doubts (and those of Fallows) about the early stages of the Mass being intended for St. James are probably exaggerated.200 A more extended discussion of the Mass appears in Volume II, Chapter 14. Here only the details that have a bearing on its origins will be considered. The Mass most likely began as a Kyrie–Gloria– Credo cycle organized by a succession of textures and mensuration changes that are repeated in each movement until the end of the Credo, which has an Amen in cantus coronatus similar to the end of a number of Du Fay’s cantilena motets. The Kyrie is unique in Du Fay’s canon and virtually alone in the entire fifteenth century in that it sets each invocation to a separate section of music, but in addition sections 3, 6, and 9 paraphrase plainsong Kyrie IV (Melnicki 49) in the cantus. This was the plainsong Kyrie sung most often in the feasts of apostles, although not exclusively,201 but given the later history of the Mass this was surely Du Fay’s intention in using it. The movements were written in a texture that Margaret Bent has called a versi, where the music alternates between duos and trios, but where rather than one voice dropping out for the duos, both the tenor and contratenor drop out and the duo is sung by a divided cantus.202 In practical terms this is music for three voices that requires at least four singers to be performed. 197 198

199

200

201

202

Cf. the discussion in Chapter 9. OO Besseler 2:vi (getting the date more or less right but not the place); echoes of this view survive in Fallows, Dufay, 29–30, and Haggh, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Missa Sancti Jacobi.” Cf. Hamm, Chronology, 26; Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1976), 30–33; Bent, “Music and the Early Veneto Humanists,” 124–25; id. “Divisi and a versi,” 108–10. Bent, “Music and the Early Veneto Humanists,” 128; id., Bologna Q15, 1:157–58; Fallows, Dufay, 29–30. Kyrie IV (Melnicki 49) in the tradition of the Roman Curia, which was generally followed by Augustinian churches, was used for minor doubles, expanded to all doubles in the Dominican tradition (see Eifrig and Pfisterer, eds., Melodien zum Ite Missa est, xiii–xv), which included all the feasts of the apostles. San Giacomo was (and is) an Augustinian church and there is no evidence that Du Fay ever had any kind of liturgical connections with the Dominicans. Bent, “Divisi and a versi,” 95–103.

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As Bent notes, the practice may be an outgrowth of textures used by Antonio Zacara,203 and it had a relatively short life of no more than two or three decades. In Du Fay’s case it appears that he notated the texture by entering the entire cantus as one “part” where cantus 1 and 2 in the divided sections were entered seriatim within the part, and the tenor and contratenor as separate parts, most likely also without rests for the tacet sections, which were probably indicated by a rubric.204 This posed all kinds of problems to scribes, who edited the pieces by transferring the cantus 2 sections to the contratenor, sometimes changing the clefs and other times forgetting to do so, with usually chaotic results.205 At one point Du Fay began expanding this cycle in two different directions. He wrote a Sanctus and Agnus that echo (without exactly duplicating) the textural and mensural structure of the first three Ordinary movements, but, probably aware of the difficulties posed by the a versi texture, he expanded them to a simple four-part texture of two cantus, tenor, and contratenor, so that the texture now alternates between duos and four-part music, with each part copied separately. In addition, he used plainsong Sanctus II (Thannabaur 203) in the Sanctus and Agnus XI (Schildbach 220) in the Agnus, in both instances paraphrasing it in the tenor in the four-part sections and in cantus 1 in the duos. The sequence of Sanctus II and Agnus XI is entirely sui generis: Sanctus II was normally sung on major doubles, and could be used for the feasts of apostles, but Agnus XI was sung on Sundays infra annum, a much less solemn occasion.206 In this case, however, it might be that Du Fay chose those chants for musical rather than liturgical reasons: Kyrie IV, Sanctus II, and Agnus XI are all mode 1 chants. The common Sanctus and Agnus for minor doubles (and apostles) at the time would have been Sanctus IV in mode 8 and Agnus IV in mode 6. The other direction in which he expanded the Mass was in writing an introit, Mihi autem, and an offertory, In omnem terram, both for four voices using the same texture as the Sanctus and the Agnus, but without the alternation between duos and four-voice sections. Instead the introit is a densely written movement in four voices throughout, and the offertory, despite some sections in three voices, is equally dense. Both use the 203 204

205

206

Ibid., 95. This is essentially a reconstruction that reflects not only the way these movements were copied in some of the sources, but the ways parts were copied in some of Du Fay’s Kyries and proses. Cf. the very extended discussion in Bent, “Divisi and a versi,” with reference to all earlier studies. Eifrig and Pfisterer, eds., Melodien zum Ite missa est, xiii–xv.

The Bologna Years

appropriate plainsong as a cantus firmus and in their rhythmic and contrapuntal texture resemble Du Fay’s tenor motets. All of these movements were surely written in Bologna sometime before August 1428. For some reason work on the Mass apparently stopped at this stage. But the work as it stood then simply cannot be reckoned as a generic missa apostolorum. The structure of the Mass is discussed in Volume II, Chapter 14;207 here it is sufficient to note that even without the alleluia, the only movement to mention St. James, a Mass with the constellation of propers this work has would be a Mass either for SS. Simon and Jude or a Mass for St. James the Elder, and one of Bologna’s major churches was dedicated to St. James, San Giacomo il Maggiore. Further, we now know that Du Fay consulted the chant books of that church for the cantus firmus of Rite maiorem. This means that the work was intended from the beginning to be a Missa Sancti Jacobi, and there may be a historical explanation for it. The popular and learned Niccolò Albergatti had been made bishop of Bologna on 13 April 1418 by Martin V,208 and both the cathedral of San Pietro and the basilica of San Petronio were essentially his churches. From the beginning of his legacy Allemand used the church of San Giacomo and his church and even provided a subvention in 1425 when the Augustinians held a general chapter there in 1425.209 His relationship with the church probably became even closer when on 24 May 1426 Martin V created both Albergatti and Allemand cardinals. The official news reached Bologna on 12 June 1426,210 and Allemand’s Roman titulus and hence his “name” as a cardinal was the church of St. Cecilia in Trastevere. Now, the church of San Giacomo also served as a parish church, in the form of a large chapel to the left of the choir and the ambulatory; it was essentially a separate church like the Lady Chapels of a number of English cathedrals, and was dedicated to St. Cecilia.211 Du Fay sought and found the unique cantus firmus for Rite maiorem in the antiphoner of San Giacomo, which means that he had access to the chant books of that church, heavy and sumptuously illuminated volumes that were surely not accessible to any young man in lower orders, which is what Du Fay was at the time. However, they would be known to Du Fay and used by him and other singers of the legate if they were singing the liturgy at San Giacomo in a more or less regular manner. Neither the Gradual nor the Kyriale of San Giacomo has survived, but it 207 209 210 211

See pp. 562–64. 208 Eubel, Hierarchia, 1:141. BAS, Tesoreria e Contrallatore di tesoreria, Reg. 82, fol. 329r. Eubel, Hierarchia, 1:34; Pérouse, Le Cardinal, 74–75. The chapel still exists. It is denuded and closed to the public, but it is easily accessible by appointment.

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could be that the odd combination of Ordinary chants in the Missa Sancti Jacobi had its roots in the Kyriale of San Giacomo. By the time Du Fay left Bologna in 1428 the Mass was incomplete, at least in terms of a full plenary cycle. Given what appears to have been the original plan, it lacked a gradual, an alleluia, and a communion. Sometime in 1429, when Emiliani drew up his will, perhaps in the months before, if Bent’s hypothesis of a long devotion to St. James is correct,212 or perhaps afterward, someone in Emiliani’s circle who knew of the existence of the work contacted Du Fay and probably requested both a copy and a completion. Du Fay apparently fulfilled most of the request: he wrote an alleluia, a communion, and more incongruously, a repetendum for the introit, but he never wrote a gradual. The alleluia is in a style halfway between that of the Sanctus and the Agnus and that of the offertory and communion, and there is a good deal of evidence that he wrote it from scratch: text, plainsong intonations, and music.213 The communion and repetendum for the introit are written in the new style he had begun to cultivate in Rome, a threevoice texture with plainsong paraphrased in the cantus, and in the case of the communion a texture where the middle voice is derived canonically from the cantus, perhaps the first example of fauxbourdon.214 The manner in which he wrote the alleluia is probably the key to this situation. Du Fay must have realized that using the long and diffuse plainsongs of an alleluia or a gradual in his settings, as he had treated the plainsong introit and offertory, was virtually unworkable.215 Another work that is surely from the period in Bologna is one of Du Fay’s most ambitious among his early Mass compositions, a troped Sanctus that survives in Bo Q15 and in the Trent codices, and carries in Tr 92 not only an ascription to Du Fay (also present in Bo Q15), but the designation “papale.”216 The work is copied in Bo Q15 in the same manner as the Missa Sancti Jacobi, with the two cantus one after another on the same staff.217 Bent is surely right that the earliest version of the piece was probably 212 213 214

215 216

217

Bent, “Music and the Early Veneto Humanists,” 128. On this, see the discussion of the Mass in Chapter 14. The reputation of the communion as the first example of fauxbourdon, which has pervaded the historical literature to this day, is predicated on a date in the mid-1420s for the communion. With a date between 1429 or 1430 for it this becomes more problematic. It may still be Du Fay’s first fauxbourdon composition or even the first fauxbourdon ever, but it precedes the fauxbourdon settings of the hymns and Kyries probably by a few months at the most. Cf. the discussion in Chapter 14. OO Besseler 4, no. 7.1; OO Planchart 5/6; Bo Q15, M fols. 135r–137r; Tr 90, fols. 277r–279v; Tr 92, fols. 213v–215r; Tr 93, fols. 350r–352v. In addition, there are also divisi passages within the staff of cantus 1 and in some of the lower voices. On the various scorings, see Planchart, “Parts with Words,” 238–42.

The Bologna Years

notated in an a versi manner.218 Fallows has made a convincing case that the Sanctus was composed for two ensembles that alternate with each other and possibly join in the final Osanna, the first ensemble consisting of choirboys with their magister puerorum, and the second an adult choir.219 The rubric “papale” in Tr 92 has elicited no discussion in the literature, mostly because earlier scholarship placed it in the 1430s, when Du Fay was in the papal chapel.220 But the combination of its presence in Bo Q15, the rubric in Tr 92, and the unique texture of the work point to a terminus post quem non for it of November 1427. Twice in the first half of the fifteenth century the papal chapel sought to imitate the choirs of the northern cathedrals by adding choirboys to its adult choir. The beginning of the first such experiment can be dated with considerable precision to the end of 1424. On 1 January 1425, the pope gave one of his senior singers, Gilles Flannel called Lenfant, a littera passus that stated simply that Flannel was going to France on papal business.221 The Introitus et exitus shows that Flannel was paid his salary on 12 January 1425 and then received no payments until July of that year.222 Flannel was then a canon of Arras, but he was from Cambrai, since his family was there throughout the entire first half of the fifteenth century.223 It is more than likely that he had been a petit vicaire at Cambrai and traveled to Constance with bishop Jehan de Lens.224 He clearly was aware of the musical tradition of Cambrai and of the fact that at that moment the cathedral had a magister puerorum who had long experience and a good reputation as such, Nicole Grenon,225 and Flannel went to Cambrai to persuade him to come to Rome with some of his charges. We know this from a number of entries in the registers of the comune in Bologna. Flannel, Grenon, and the choirboys stopped there on their way to Rome, and Allemand had the city give them money and horses to continue their way. The archives and the accounts of Allemand’s court have disappeared, but the city accounts show the following entry on 31 May 1425: 218 219 220 222 223

224

225

Bent, “Divisi and a versi,” 110–11. Fallows, Dufay, 179–181, and “Specific Information,” 124–26. Besseler, “Dufay in Rom,” 6–7; Hamm, Chronology, 89. 221 ASV, RV 355, fol. 139r. ASV, I&E 382, fol. 170r and 383, fol. 44r. His brother Andrieu was a saddler who did leather work and carpentry for the cathedral; of the other relatives, Jehanne was a seamstress for the chapter, and Jacques was a cloth merchant from whom the chapter bought cloth for the robes of the small vicars. There are numerous references to all three in the accounts of the fabric and the aumosne. Flannel is not in the list of singers inducted into the papal chapel in Dec. 1417, but he joined it on 7 Jan. 1418 (RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 1711, fol. 91r); his first payment, however, is in Oct. of that year, when he received 3 fl. (RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 824, fol. 19v). On Grenon’s career, see C. Wright, “Nicolas Grenon.”

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To sire Gilles called Lenfant on the said day, £40 of Bologna for his expenses and [those] of seven young singers, including their teacher [Grenon], whom he brought from the parts of France to our lord the Pope, and for the conduct of their business, those made here for four days as well as those on their way up to Rome, for they had no money for themselves and their horses, paid them by sire Obizzo in the name of the above-mentioned [Antonio de Albertis]. In the Journal, fol. 70. £70 0s. 0d.226

The entry in Bologna probably included Grenon himself among the seven singers, making it Grenon and six choirboys, precisely the number of active choirboys that was viewed as normal at Cambrai at the time. In any case, the first payment for them in Rome, on June 1425, includes only Grenon and four choirboys: Étienne Heldedronque, Barthélemy Poignare, Jehan Rongh, and Jehan Wyet.227 The other two are paid for the first time in October 1426, although they could have joined the chapel as early as June of that year, since there is no record of payments for the chapel from June to September 1426. The newcomers were Pierre Chareton and Guibert Nettelet.228 Their dioceses of origin suggest that some of them were choirboys at Cambrai when Grenon was contacted by Flannel and others were recruited ad hoc. It is interesting to note that, in terms of the diocese of origin, Heldedronque, Rongh, and Wyet were all from Cambrai and Poignare was from Arras. The two latecomers were Chareton, from Troyes, and Nettelet, from Langres.229 What this suggests is that four of them had been working with Grenon at Cambrai and could begin immediately, and the other two required added training before joining the papal chapel. The ages of two of them, Heldedronque and Poignare, are also known; in a petition of 28 September 1426 Poignare gives his age as seventeen years, and Heldedronque in a petition of 10 April 1426 also gives his age as seventeen years.230 It would appear that Grenon brought with him a group of singers of about sixteen years, and that the ensemble ended its work for the papal chapel when their voices broke. The stint in Rome proved immensely profitable for all seven people concerned. Grenon obtained the canonicate in

226

227 229

230

BAS, Tesoreria e Contrallatore di tesoreria, Reg. 80, fol. 329r: “d. Egidio al Lenfant dicta die [31 May 1425] lb quadraginta bon pro expensa ipsius et septem iuvenem cantorum computato eorum magistro [Grenon] quos de partibus Francie conduxit ad.d. n. papam et pro conducta rerum suarum et aliis expensis tam hic factis quatuor diebus quam sui itineris usque Romam quod non habebant pecuniis pro ipsis et equibus eorum solutis ei per dominum Obizium nomine quo supra [Antonio de Albertis] In zornale fol. 70 lb 40 0 s 0 d.” The reference to fol. 70 of the journal is to Reg. 80, fol. 70r, where the same entry is dated 26 May 1425. ASV, I&E 383, fol. 44v. 228 Ibid., fol. 116v. Their dioceses are reported in papal documents, all in ASV: Heldedronque, RS 201, fol. 155r; Rongh, RS 202, fol. 108r; Wyet, RS 201, fol. 155v; Poignare, RS 208, fol. 184r; Chareton, RL 279, fol. 148v; Nettelet, RL 279, fol. 109v. ASV, RS 202, fol. 30v and RS 197, fols. 193r–194r.

The Bologna Years

Cambrai, where he spent the rest of his life; Rongh had the same fortune at St-Amé de Douai and Wyet at St-Géry de Cambrai.231 Heldedronque became a canon of St-Hermés de Renaix, and was there still in 1439,232 Nettelet became a canon the cathedral of Châlon-sur-Saône,233 and Chareton at his death in 1435 was a canon of Notre-Dame in Neuchâtel (Lausanne).234 Only Poignare, who had obtained a canonicate at NotreDame in Arras, remained in Rome: from January 1428 to July 1430 and from March 1431 to September 1433 he was a member of the papal chapel.235 In 1436 he is mentioned as an officer of the Council of Basel, and his autograph signature survives in at least two documents;236 one of the signatures (on the plica of the letter of 1431) is a highly ornamented calligraphic masterpiece. By 1437 Poignare had collated a canonicate at Notre-Dame in Arras,237 and he probably retired there as the Council headed toward an open schism.238 By 1446 he was in Arras and visited Cambrai, where he received wine,239 and given his skills as a scribe, he was asked to write the charter of what amounted to a peace treaty between the chapter and the city of Cambrai.240 In 1451 at Arras, he copied and signed the celebrated manuscript of Martin le Franc’s Le champion des dames, which contains the miniature showing Du Fay and Binchois now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.241 He died shortly before 30 September 1484.242 Most recently a detailed study of his career as a scribe by François Avril has appeared.243 Communication between Bologna and Rome was nearly constant during Du Fay’s years in the service of Allemand, and it could not have been 231

232 233

234 236

237 238

239 240

241 242 243

There is extensive documentation in the acts of the cathedral, the acts of St-Géry, and the acts of St–Ame for the presence of all three. Grenon died as a canon of Cambrai on 17 Oct. 1456 (CBM 1046, fol. 141r), Wyet as canon of St-Géry by 21 Apr. 1483 (LAN, 7G 575, fol. 238v), and Rongh as canon of St-Ame in “mid-January 1481” (LAN, 1G 155, fols. 160v–161r [a copy of his will]). ASV, RS 358, fol. 227v. ASV, RL 272, fol. 153r. No notices of him later than his leaving the papal chapel have been found thus far. ASV, RS 310, fol. 164v. 235 See table of singers, Appendix 1. TAS, Corte, Materie ecclesiastiche per categorie, Scismi, concilii generali e providenze concernenti la disciplina della Chiesa, Cat. XLV, Mazzo 1, no. 15 (2 July 1431) and no. 16 (7 July 1431), letters of King Sigismund from Nuremberg to his delegates and to the Council fathers, copied in Basel on 17 Sept. 1436 and proofread and countersigned by Poignare. ASV, RL 335, fols. 247v–248r (24 Jan. 1437). Most likely he left Basel shortly after 4 Feb. 1439, when he resigned his post as scriptor of the Council in favor of Jehan Ligier (Beckman, Consilium Basiliense, 6:318). LAN, 4G 5081, fol. 10r (12 and 14 Sept. 1446). CBM, 1058, fol. 92v (16 Dec. 1446); he was paid handsomely for this, £42. The document is LAN, 3G 135. Paris, BnF f. fr. 12476. ASV, RS 840, fols. 249v–250r. My thanks to Pamela Starr for this reference. Avril, “Un auteur, son copiste et son artiste.”

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lost on Du Fay that at that time the papal chapel had not just a group of choirboys, but a group of choirboys that came from his own maîtrise in Cambrai and was directed by a man who had already twice been a teacher in the cathedral school. Thus it stands to reason that he would compose a work that would be specifically scored for such an ensemble plus the adult choir singers of the chapel. The alternation of the two ensembles throughout most of the piece, already noted by Fallows, belongs in the traditions of these ensembles in the northern cathedrals, traditions that continued well into the sixteenth century.244 In Tr 92, where the Sanctus carries the rubric “papale,” it is paired with a complex motetlike anonymous Agnus Dei that has been accepted as a work of Du Fay by Besseler, who included it in his edition of Du Fay’s works;245 Fallows is quite noncommittal in his assessment of the authenticity.246 Craig Wright generally accepts Du Fay’s authorship and provides a hypothesis suggesting that the Agnus, with its use of retrograde motion in the cantus firmus, might have been sung with the Sanctus at the distribution of the waxen Agnus Dei figures by Eugenius IV on 7 April 1431, the same occasion that gave rise to Du Fay’s Balsamus et munda cera.247 In my view the Sanctus is actually the work of a devoted imitator of Du Fay, Benoit Sirede.248 Another work that might come from the Bologna years is the ballade Mon chier amy,249 a song of consolation to someone on the death of a relative or a friend. The occasion might be the death of Pandolfo di Galeotto Malatesta, brother of Carlo di Galeotto, as Fallows suggests,250 or that of Taddea di Malatesta, sister of Pandolfo di Malatesta,251 both of whom died in 1427. A more extended discussion of the possible origins of the piece appears in Volume II, Chapter 16.252 By mid-1428 Allemand had governed Bologna with a semblance of tranquility, but he had done so by allowing two of the noble families and their followers, the Zambeccari and the Canedoli, to amass power and act in defiance of the law to a point that alarmed Martin V. On 1 August 1428, in the midst of a festival, the Canedoli rose against the legate, who at first barricaded himself in the palace and mounted a reasonable defense. One or two days later he sought to parley with the rebels and allowed one of the palace doors to be opened. The rebels instead rushed the doorway, took Allemand and his court prisoner, and looted and burned what they 244 245 247 248 249 251

See C. Wright, Music and Ceremony, 180–94. OO Besseler 4, no. 7.2; see also Fallows, Dufay, 181. 246 Fallows, Dufay, 46, 181. C. Wright, The Maze, 109, and “Dufay’s Motet,” 345–46. See later in this chapter for a discussion of this matter. OO Besseler 6, no. 15; OO Planchart 10/2/7. 250 Fallows, Dufay, 30. Falcioni, La signoria di Malatesta, 53. 252 See p. 562 (Vol. II).

The Bologna Years

could. Niccolò Albergati, the bishop of Bologna, had to escape the city disguised as a monk, and on 23 August Allemand and presumably most of his familia, including Du Fay, and Auclou were expelled from the city.253 Allemand went to Imola in a futile effort to help the reconquest of Bologna,254 and reached Rome probably early in 1429, when we have a document from his secretary, Auclou, concerning a canonicate at SaintGerman-l’Auxerrois in Paris, that was clearly submitted from Rome on 5 January 1429.255 Du Fay, unencumbered by military or secretarial duties, had made his way to Rome by October or November 1428. During his stay at Bologna he had clearly established some contact with the papal chapel, if the Sanctus papale is an indication, and he was aware that by this time Martin V’s chapel was almost entirely a French, and more specifically a northern French, ensemble256 where his skills, both as a singer and as a composer, would be welcomed. The papal chapel already was, by this time, one of the most important musical ensembles in Europe, and a sojourn at the court of Rome also offered the possibility of a more rapid advancement in his ecclesiastical career. 253 254 256

Pérouse, Le Cardinal, 78–82; Partner, The Papal State, 90, with more extensive documentation. Pérouse, Le Cardinal, 82. 255 ASV, RS 235, fol. 100r–v. Cf. Planchart, “Institutional Politics,” 124–29.

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3

The Papal Chapel and the Court of Savoy (1428–1439)

Du Fay’s Arrival in the Papal Chapel The earliest document that places Du Fay in Rome is the papal chapel payment of 20 December 1428, which includes three new members, Jacques Robaille, a former choirboy at Cambrai, Gautier Libert, a clerk from Arras, and Guillaume Du Fay.1 At this point Libert and Robaille had been for some time in the Curia, Libert in the service of Alamanno Adimari, Cardinal of Pisa, since 1419,2 and Robaille at least since 1426.3 A second document concerning Du Fay, a littera de fructibus addressed to St-Géry and to the cathedral of Laon and dated 14 April 1429, states that Du Fay had been a papal chaplain and a singer in the chapel for nearly six months, which means that he would have been in the chapel since October or November 1428.4 The conflict between the times Du Fay joined the chapel as implied in the littera de fructibus and the first payment is not that 1 2

3

4

98

ASV, I&E 387, fol. 88v; RAS, Reg. 1752, fol. 114v. ASV, RS 127, fol. 199v. Libert was then an acolyte from Arras. Adimari had left Constance in Feb. 1418 and was part of the delegation sent to Aragon to convince Benedict XIII to abdicate; he returned to the Curia in Florence in Apr. 1419. He had also spent some years between 1413 and 1417 in France, so it is possible that he recruited Libert then; see Eubel, Hierarchia, 1:32. Curiously, all the supplications by Libert that appear to have survived come from 1419 and 1420, thus nearly a decade before his service in the papal chapel. The case of Robaille is very complicated. On 10 Apr. 1426, the same rotulus that begins with Grenon’s petition for a canonicate at Cambrai (ASV, RS 197, fols. 193r–194r) ends with a petition by Robaille (who had been a student of Grenon at Cambrai) for the parish church of Romeries, which Grenon will resign on assecution of the canonicate. On 2 Feb. 1427, Chareton, Nettelet, and Robaille seek a perinde valere that will treat petitions (now lost) dating from 26 Apr. 1425 in the case of Chareton and Nettelet, and 27 Apr. in the case of Robaille, as if the first two were already papal singers and the last was a chaplain (not singer) of the pope at the time (ASV, RS 208, fols. 225v–226r), which implies that Robaille was not a papal chaplain or a singer in 1425. By 18 June 1427, one Jehan Jovenin petitioned for the parish church of Romeries, being resigned by Robaille, a papal chaplain (ASV, RS 213, fols. 115v–116r), and on 17 Aug. 1428 Robaille petitions for a canonicate in Amiens and describes himself as a papal chaplain and singer (ASV, RS 244, fol. 194r–v). Robaille is not paid, either as a chaplain or as a singer, until Dec. 1428. ASV, DC 11, fols. 257v–258r: “capellanus ipsiusque domini nostri papae familiaris continuus comensalis suaeque capellae cantor et cappellanus a sex mensibus citra fuit et est in Romana Curia continue residens.”

Du Fay’s Arrival in the Papal Chapel

unusual in the Vatican records, although we have no idea of what the official status of the men was when they were nominally chaplains and singers but do not appear in the payment records.5 The littera de fructibus of 1429 indicates that sometime between April 1428 and April 1429 Du Fay had obtained a second benefice, a chaplaincy at the altar of St. Fiacre in Laon. A second littera de fructibus, dated 30 April 1430, indicates that he had added another benefice, a chaplaincy at the altar of St. John Baptist at the parish church of Nouvion-les-Vineux in the diocese of Laon.6 By the time Du Fay reached Rome he was already a prolific composer and probably a well-known and well-connected musician. He had served the house of the Malatesta for about four years and the papal legate in Bologna for about two. I have, within the biographical chapters, discussed only those pieces for which there is some external evidence of a date, but by 1428 Du Fay had written all of the music that can be traced to the first version of Bo Q15, a manuscript that, as Margaret Bent has shown, was finished by around 1425;7 this is already more music than what we have from all of his contemporaries with the exception of Gilles de Bins. But his ecclesiastical career was moving quite slowly. From 1414 to 1428 he had only one small benefice, the chaplaincy of the Salve at St-Géry; he obtained the chaplaincy of the altar of St. Fiacre in the cathedral of Laon some time before April 1429, and the chaplaincy at the altar of St. John Baptist at Nouvion-les-Vineux some time before April 1430. No records survive in any of the Vatican documentation of a petition or a bull for either benefice, but the timing suggests that they might have been obtained through petitions from Rome bolstered by his new status as a member of the papal chapel and a familiaris continuus commensalis of the pope, although not necessarily through papal collation. Given that he had spent some time in Laon and that he had, therefore, some local connections, the choice is hardly surprising. In fact, the chaplaincy at Nouvion-les-Vineux probably indicates that Du Fay had been a member of the community of chaplains at the cathedral of Laon, since the collation of that benefice ultimately resided with that community.8 Still, the impression that Du Fay’s beneficial career makes up to this point is that he had been more intent on being a musician and a courtier than on being an ecclesiastic. This was to change in Rome, but the process appears to have been, on the whole, a frustrating and not entirely successful one for Du Fay. True, in the end he obtained a few 5

6 8

One example among many will suffice: Gilles Flannel was inducted into the papal chapel on 7 Jan. 1418, but first appears in the payment lists in Oct. of that year; see Chapter 2, n. 224. ASV, DC 13, fol. 61r–v. 7 Bent, “Music and the Early Veneto Humanists,” 125–26. Planchart, “The Early Career,” 364–65.

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The Papal Chapel and the Court of Savoy (1428–1439)

lucrative benefices, but a comparison of his beneficial career with that of Auclou or with those of his colleagues in the chapel makes it clear that Du Fay met with little success for a good deal of his efforts in this direction while in the papal chapel. The early accounts of Du Fay’s beneficial career, based largely on the pioneering study of François Baix,9 have tended to paint Du Fay as someone who easily accumulated benefices. Later studies, particularly those of Brigide Schwarz and Pamela Starr, have made it clear just how laborious and litigious the process could be.10 Thus it may be useful here to sketch Du Fay’s beneficial career from his arrival in Rome until the time of his departure from the Curia.

Excursus: Du Fay’s Beneficial Career, 1414–1437 On his arrival in Rome Du Fay had only one benefice, the chapel of the Salve at the altar in St-Géry. This is one of his best-documented benefices, noted in the payment records of the community of chaplains at St-Géry, in the acts of its chapter, and in cameral documents from the Vatican. Within a year and a half of his arrival in Rome he had acquired two other small benefices in the region of Laon, where he had spent some time in 1425– 1426. In terms of the time when he acquired them it would appear that they were the first results of his attempts to gather benefices as a papal singer, but this might not be the case. The only documentation that we have for them, papal litterae de fructibus that allowed him to receive the rents in absentia, tell us nothing of how he obtained them, so it is possible that it was through collatio ordinaria, with a proctor presenting his case to the Laon chapter and to the community of chaplains without involving papal support, and that they were indeed a consequence of his residence in Laon.11 It is possible, however, that the chaplaincy in the cathedral of 9 10 11

Baix, “La Carrière.” Schwarz, “Klerikerkarrieren und Pfründmarkt,” and Starr, “Rome,” 229–34. The acts of the chapter of Laon do not survive beyond 1418. Those of the chapter at Cambrai record hundreds of those local collations; canons took turns during the year to present candidates, which were generally accepted almost as a matter of automatic courtesy to the presenter. The order in which the canons presented candidates for collation was often given in the chapter acts in the form of a diagram, a pie-chart divided into as many segments as there were resident canons, with a sign indicating the canon whose turn it was at the time. In the following months the chart would be followed by moving counter clockwise through it. These rotae collationis appear in CBM 1059, fol. 170r; 1060, fols. 120v and 223r; 1061, fols. 158r and 199r; 1062, fol. 242v (approval of the rota but no drawing); 1063, fol. 241r; 1064, fol. 266v; LAN, 4G 1086, no. 346.

Excursus: Du Fay’s Beneficial Career, 1414–1437

Laon might have been a papal collation, as will become clear later in this chapter. On 18 September 1430 Du Fay submitted a petition concerning the parish church of St-Pierre in Tournai.12 It had become vacant on the death of Nicolas Papin, and Du Fay had accepted it on the strength of an expectative granted to him by Martin.13 Du Fay had possession of it (possessionem ipsius existit assecutus),14 but doubts had arisen, probably in Tournai, concerning the validity of the collation, so Du Fay was requesting a nova provisio of the benefice.15 Unfortunately, unlike many other such petitions, this one does not indicate the date of the original expectative.16 The non obstantibus section of the supplication lists only the three benefices known thus far. The petition was approved by a routine concessum formula signed by “G. Cons.”17 If the original petition was framed like most expectatives, particularly those arising either from the coronation of the pope (which would not have been the case here) or as a first request by a new familiaris, it was for two benefices, either compatible or not, with or without cure, of which St-Pierre was one of them, and perhaps the other was the chaplaincy in the cathedral of Laon. This is the only document concerning Du Fay, apart from the litterae de fructibus mentioned earlier, that comes from Martin’s pontificate.

12 13 14

15

16

17

ASV, RS 256, fols. 202v–203r. Neither Du Fay’s supplication to Martin nor the papal bull seems to have survived. The Latin term assecutio, one of the most frequent terms in papal documents dealing with benefices, had a fixed meaning not rendered correctly by its usual English translation, “pursuit.” Instead it means “the act of obtaining possession,” and with this meaning it entered French legal terminology in the Middle Ages. I shall use the neologisms “assecute” and “assecution” with that specific meaning. The nova provisio was a standard form of petition asking the pope to reaffirm or revalidate an earlier grant made either by the pope or by the local bishop or chapter; it was the usual first step to remove any doubts of the collation. After reading through several hundred thousand supplications over the last three decades, I retain the impression that Du Fay’s supplications tend to supply the absolute minimum of information. It seems that he did not want to give any more information about himself than absolutely necessary. It might be pure coincidence, but “G. Cons.” stands for “Giraldus Episcopus Conseranensis,” who had been vice chancellor under Martin V and was permitted to sign certain supplications by “concessum” (Ottenthal, Regulae cancellariae, 233). His name was Géraud Faydit, bishop of St-Lizier by the Pyrenees; two of his relatives, Jehan and Pierre Faydit, were among the very few Limousin clerics who were canons of St-Géry and of the cathedral. Jehan is documented as canon of St-Géry in 1399 (LAN, 7G 752, fol. 33r) until his resignation in 1407 in a permutation with his nephew Pierre (LAN, 7G 2223 [1406–1407], 1v), and was canon of the cathedral from 1398 to 1400 (CBM 1046, fol. 146v). Pierre was canon of St-Géry until 1431, and of the cathedral from 1431 to his death in 1441 (CBM 1046, fol. 109v). Pierre is sometimes called Pierre Du Fayt in the St-Géry documents.

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The Papal Chapel and the Court of Savoy (1428–1439)

The next document in Du Fay’s beneficial career is one of the best known and most widely misunderstood documents in the history of fifteenthcentury music. It is an original rotulus presented to Eugenius IV shortly after his coronation as pope, and signed by him on 24 April 1431, Cappella Sistina, MS 703, no. 1. In many ways it merits the attention lavished upon it because it is an almost unique artefact, an original supplication that has actually survived.18 Because it is a formal rotulus for the entire chapel it was prepared on parchment and written with considerable elegance. It is an enormous piece of parchment, over two meters long and a meter wide. For centuries it has been preserved folded in two, and the wear and the humidity have caused the text at the fold to become illegible.19 Much of the misunderstanding of what the document represents is due to the company it has kept for the last few hundred years. CS 703 is a collection of the privileges that a number of popes granted to the papal singers. The compilation probably took place sometime in the late fifteenth or the early sixteenth century, after the college of singers had been formally established by Sixtus IV.20 It is the oldest document in the compilation but the only one that is neither a grant nor a privilege, but rather the formal petition by the members of the chapel for two benefices for each member. But because the rotulus is housed with a collection of privileges, scholars have interpreted it as being something that Eugenius decided to do for his singers, and have even used it as proof of Eugenius’s interest in music.21 Eugenius, in fact, was a singularly austere man and did not have much of an interest in the arts, although he did favor education per se.22 The rotulus of the singers is one of several thousand that poured into the papal court in the weeks following Eugenius’s (and every other pope’s) coronation, and he signed hundreds of them in a single day. Most of them were recorded in volumes of the Registra supplicationum, but by and large none of these volumes survives from any of the fifteenth-century popes, which probably means that the volumes de expectativis were destroyed at the end of each 18

19

20 22

What we have in the registers are copies of the originals, which were kept by the chancery for a while and then discarded. A few of them survive, but none of the big coronation rotuli except CS 703.1. The illegible section is part of the non obstantibus in the petition of Enrico Silvestri; fortunately, much of the same information appears in an earlier petition, ASV, RS 260, fol. 232r–v, which allows much of the missing text to be reconstructed. See Planchart, “Sixtus IV.” 21 Fallows, Dufay, 33. Platina, The Lives of the Popes, 233–34. In this I disagree with the position taken by Fallows in Dufay, 33 and 248. More than a patron of the arts, Eugenius was a patron of learning; his artistic commissions are completely in line with the minimum of what a secular ruler at the time felt incumbent upon himself to do for his own city or state.

Excursus: Du Fay’s Beneficial Career, 1414–1437

papacy.23 References to these rotuli, however, appear in later supplications, and from these references it is clear that Eugenius signed or had his officials sign perhaps over a hundred of these on the same date as the rotulus of the chapel. The chapel rotulus does have the autograph signature “G” for Gabriel, the pope’s personal name. In this rotulus Du Fay, like all other members of the chapel, that is the singers, the clerici caerimoniarii, and the campanarius, was granted expectatives to two benefices. The non obstantibus section of his petition lists the three early benefices he had plus the church of St-Pierre in Tournai with no further qualifications, which indicates he had possession of all four. His income from these benefices “did not exceed” £50 of Tours.24 The next document is a papal letter dated 21 August 1431 granting Du Fay a canonicate in the cathedral of Lausanne, vacant on the death of Giovanni Colonna.25 This appointment is not a fulfillment of one of the two expectatives of April 1431, which are mentioned in the non obstantibus section, giving for the first time an indication of where they were: one at the cathedral of Tournai, and the other at St. Donatian in Bruges.26 It would be tempting to see this as the first portent of Du Fay’s association with the house of Savoy, but even though the petition that began this process has not survived, had it come from an outside source, such as the duke of Savoy or Allemand, it would have been mentioned in the letter. Giovanni Colonna died in the Curia and Eugenius was already concerned with not increasing the benefices and power of the Colonna family, which had grown too powerful under Martin V and was already causing trouble for Eugenius, so he gave it to one of his officials.27 Still, one may perhaps sense 23

24

25 26

27

In contrast, the Registra Avinionensia still transmit a good number of these coronation rotuli. A few of the smaller rotuli addressed to the post-schismatic popes were copied in books not devoted entirely to expectatives and thus survived. Similarly, a few libri de expectativis were bound in volumes that began with supplications of a different nature and also escaped destruction; in the pontificates of Martin V and Eugenius IV this is the case with ASV, RS 241, fols. 145–304; RS 265, fols. 50–185 and 297–309; RS 250, fols. 161–250. BAV, CS 703.1, “quorum omnium fructum etc. quinquaginta librarum Turonensium parvorum secundum communem extimationem valorem annuum non excedunt.” This, however, is a conventional value, which reflects only vaguely the actual income Du Fay received from his benefices. ASV, RL 303, fols. 19v–20v. The Tournai chapter acts were fed to a bonfire in the nave of the cathedral by the iconoclasts in the 17th century, but those of St. Donatian record the presentation of the papal letters for Du Fay, dated 24 Apr. 1431 (the same date as the rotulus), a statement of his prerogatives as a papal singer, and a process dated 12 June. They were presented to the chapter by canon Jehan Polon and were admitted (BAB, Reeks 50, fol. 201r). The canons then proceeded to do absolutely nothing about them. Gill, Eugenius IV, 41.

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here a subtle push, perhaps by Allemand, who was already connected to Savoy, and had been Du Fay’s patron, but a push that was done in such a manner as to leave no documentary evidence (not an uncommon trait in the Curia then or now). Apart from the expectatives, the other benefices mentioned in the non obstantibus section of the letter are those in Laon and in St-Géry. One would have expected some trouble for Du Fay, a complete foreigner, from the chapter in Lausanne, but apparently that was not the case. On 8 October 1431 Du Fay promised to pay the annates for Lausanne, which had been collated on 22nd August.28 In 1435 he is listed among the canons of the cathedral,29 and on 25 and 26 August 1437 he was present at a chapter meeting.30 He may even have written some works for the cathedral.31 The papal letter enjoined him to resign the parish church of St-Pierre in Tournai as a condition for collating the canonicate in Lausanne, but this is something that Du Fay most likely had offered to do in his supplication for the benefice. On 15 September 1431 one Jacob van Werp petitioned the pope for the parish church of St-Pierre in Tournai, which, according to Jacob, Du Fay would have to resign as he was preparing to collate a canonicate in the cathedral of Tournai (which was one of the two benefices that had resulted from the expectative of April). Jacob got wrong the canonicate that Du Fay was about to collate, but his petition is immensely important because among its clauses it includes one on Du Fay’s possible disqualification for the possession of the parish church because he was born of a priest and a single woman.32 The clause about Du Fay’s illegitimacy was inserted to avert any problems that might arise if Du Fay was in fact unqualified to have had that benefice, which would then create problems for Jacob. Jacob must have known that Du Fay had an expectative at Tournai and was about to resign St-Pierre, so he apparently connected the two. In any event, he did not stand a chance: the resignation had already taken place and the benefice had gone to someone else closer at hand in the Curia. Again, the main documents are missing, but on 7 October 1431, Gilles Laury, Du Fay’s colleague from Bologna, the part-time crossbowman on its ramparts and now a papal singer, promised to pay the annates for St-Pierre, vacant on Du

28 29 30 31

ASV, LA 6, fol. 74r. Lausanne, Bibliothèque Cantonale Universitaire, Section de Manuscrits, MS 57, fol. 38v. Archives Cantonales Vaduoises, MS DG 7/1 (chapter acts), fols. 47r–48v. See pp. 517–18. 32 ASV, RS 272, fol. 206r.

Excursus: Du Fay’s Beneficial Career, 1414–1437

Fay’s assecution of the canonicate at Lausanne.33 Laury had already collated St-Pierre by 22 August, the same day Du Fay collated Lausanne, and he obliged himself for the annates a day before Du Fay.34 On 7 July 1433, Du Fay was granted a revalidation of part of the expectative of 24 April 1431.35 The revalidation indicates that Du Fay had indeed attempted to collate the canonicate in Tournai but apparently had run into some opposition. There is no mention of the nature of the opposition, but notice is made of the great efforts and expenditures that Du Fay had incurred in attempting to collate the benefice before renouncing it in some agreement with the pope.36 The pope then revalidated Du Fay’s expectative to another canonicate in Tournai. One possible explanation might be connected to Werp’s apparently unusual knowledge of Du Fay’s illegitimacy, which clearly was a secret closely guarded by the composer. This, in turn, might be tied to the presence of relatives of Du Fay in Tournai, where they were even at the end of the composer’s life;37 the canons could have known about Du Fay’s illegitimacy and be determined not to admit a bastard into their ranks. A supplication dated 29 July 1434 tells a familiar story made strange only by the geographical locus of the benefice. Jehan Redoys, a cleric of Tournai who served briefly in the chapel of Martin V and more than a decade later in that of Eugenius IV, had obtained a benefice in the parish church of Moux in the diocese of Narbonne. He resigned it and the pope had granted it to Du Fay, but Du Fay never sent the papal letters granted to him and had by then obtained a benefice in a different parish church in Versoix in the diocese of Geneva;38 hence Jehan Aynard, a priest from Embrun, requested it.39 This precedes by about two weeks the first mention of Du Fay as curate of Versoix in the Savoy archives.40 Du Fay had taken a leave of absence from the papal chapel by August 1433, and was at the court of Savoy by February 1434.41 The church of Versoix apparently had been collated to Du

33

34 36

37 38 39 41

The annates were the profit of the first year of any benefice, which were to be paid to the papal Curia by the beneficed cleric upon assecution of his benefice (or sometimes within a year of collation). ASV, LA 6, fol. 74v. 35 ASV, RS 287, fol. 1v. “Guillermo qui gravibus laboribus et expensis super premissis ut etiam accepimus sustinuit necnon pro certa de super hoc habita concordia iure sibi in eisdem canonicatu et prebenda renunciaverit . . .” See p. 305. The actual church was the church of Saint-Loup in Versoix; cf. ASV, RL 353, fol. 80r–v. ASV, RS 297, fol. 88r–v. 40 TAS, Inv. 16, Reg. 79, fol. 448v. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 827; cf. fol. 157r, chapel salaries for Aug., with Du Fay present, fol. 160v, chapel salaries for Sept. with Du Fay absent. In TAS, Inv. 16, Reg. 79, fol. 464r, 24 Mar. 1434, Du

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Fay by the duke himself, auctoritate ordinaria, perhaps shortly after the composer’s arrival in February. This is confirmed by a petition of Du Fay to the pope dated 7 November 1435 where he describes himself as the rector of the parish church of Versoix and a chaplain, familiaris continuus commensalis, and a singer of the pope, and asks that he be allowed to hold another benefice, presumably with cure, for three years together with the church of Versoix, which he defines as being part of a lay patronage.42 In the non obstantibus section of the petition Du Fay lists his current benefices: the parish church at Versoix, a canonicate in Lausanne, the chaplaincy of the Salve in St-Géry, a canonicate and semiprebend in Tournai, which is in litigation, and a canonicate at Notre-Dame de Condé, which he believes he possesses.43 Gone are the two chaplaincies in Laon, and this is the first mention of the benefice in Condé, which could have been obtained in partibus,44 perhaps in exchange for the two benefices in Laon. The three secure benefices, according to this petition, yielded him £120, while Tournai and Condé would yield £60. Again, it is possible to sense a sustained local resistance to Du Fay at Tournai. Eugenius, with his usual parsimony, granted Du Fay’s petition but for only three months, that is, what the pope considered enough time for Du Fay to arrange a permutation. A long and complicated petition by one Guillaume Anserin, beneficiatus in the cathedral of Narbonne, dated 30 September 1435, throws some light on several of the documents mentioned earlier. The litigation over the canonicate in Tournai was between Du Fay and Redoys, an unusual altercation between two papal singers. Redoys gave Du Fay the parish church of Moux in exchange for the rights that Du Fay claimed in Tournai, but Du Fay did not send the papal letters to Moux on time (probably he realized how difficult it would be to collate any benefice near Narbonne); in any case, Du Fay had now an incompatible benefice, namely the church at Versoix, and Anserin was requesting the church in Moux.45 This explains at least part of the protracted problems between Du Fay and Tournai, since Redoys was from Tournai, and it also might explain

42 43

44

45

Fay is paid his salary as magister capellae of the duke of Savoy, for a whole year beginning on 1 Feb. 1434. ASV, RS 308, fols. 123v–124r: “dicta ecclesia quae de iure patronatu laicali existit.” ASV, RS 308, fol. 124r: “necnon canonicatu et semiprebenda Tornacensis quos possidet super ipse tamen litem moveri dubitat ac canonicatu et prebenda collegiate Beate Marie de Condato Cameracensis diocesis ecclesiarum quos credit possidere.” When a benefice was collated not by the pope but by the local bishop or cathedral chapter, that is locally, it was said to be collated in partibus and auctoritate ordinaria. ASV, RS 312, fol. 173r–v.

Excursus: Du Fay’s Beneficial Career, 1414–1437

why Du Fay wanted to be allowed to hold two incompatible benefices, so that he would be able to use the church in Moux for a permutation. It also suggests that Aynard was not able to collate the church in Moux, which is not surprising, since even though Embrun is not quite as distant from Moux as Cambrai or Tournai, Moux was still very far and in a part of France with very different traditions from those of the north or Savoy. Anserin, with local connections, eventually collated the church in Moux, for no further mention of it appears in Vatican documents after this petition. On 13 October 1435, Du Fay submitted to the pope a routine request to be allowed to exchange any of his benefices, which was granted to him for any two of them, also a routine permission.46 Whatever Du Fay expected to do with this permission apparently never came to pass. A new set of problems opened for Du Fay in Savoy itself. A petition of Duke Amadeus VIII dated 11 November 1435 indicates that the pope had given the duke the power to nominate a certain number of candidates for benefices in his domains. He proposed to nominate Du Fay for a canonicate in the cathedral of Geneva, but the cathedral statutes dictated that all canons had to be either noble or graduates of a university, and Du Fay was neither. The duke was asking the pope essentially to overrule the statutes of Geneva in Du Fay’s case.47 This is an important document because it shows that, even if Du Fay had attended the university in Bologna and then in Rome, something for which we have no real evidence, but which has been suggested by a number of scholars because Du Fay did eventually obtain a bachelor of law degree,48 he had no degree even by the end of 1435. This is followed by three petitions by Du Fay in quick succession, dated 4, 10, and 22 January 1436, the last two identical in their wording. In these Du Fay again rehearses the history of his two expectatives of 1431, one at Tournai and the other at Bruges, which had yielded essentially nothing thus far, and Amadeus’s nomination of Du Fay at Geneva, which was also stalled, apparently by resistance from the chapter, asking the pope to remove all difficulties in the collation of these benefices: “Therefore he [Du Fay] supplicates Your Holiness that, in order to remove every manner 46 48

ASV, RS 313, fols. 253v–254r. 47 ASV, RS 315, fol. 110r–v. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 186, and following him Fallows, Dufay, 31, state incorrectly that Du Fay’s prebend at Cambrai was reserved for a lawyer (prebenda libera iurista), citing CBM 1046, fol. 86r. This is incorrect on two counts: on that folio the manuscript contains only a list of the archdeacons of Antwerp; the prebend that was to become Du Fay’s is listed as Prebend 41 on fol. 183r (Du Fay’s name appears in the list of its holders on fol. 183v), and the prebend is described simply as prebenda libera sinistri lateris, a free prebend on the left side of the choir.

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of difficulty you may deign to provide him in your mercy that he can and may freely use both, namely the grace and nomination aforesaid and obtain from each the fruits comprehended in them.”49 In the case of Tournai Du Fay was trying for yet a third canonicate, this one vacant on the death of Guillaume du Quesne. This continued to be beyond his reach, and on 17 March 1436 he requested yet again nova provisio from Eugenius for the Tournai canonicate.50 The pope probably was reasonably solicitous of Du Fay, but the facts of the matter are that until the middle of 1436 Du Fay, despite all his efforts, had obtained almost nothing from Eugenius. The chaplaincy in St-Géry and almost certainly those in Laon were obtained auctoritate ordinaria, and the canonicate at Condé was also most likely obtained auctoritate ordinaria, probably in exchange for the Laon benefices. Versoix he obtained directly from Amadeus VIII, the two benefices granted to him as expectatives by Eugenius were at this point dead letter. St. Donatian had received Du Fay’s letters in 1431 and done absolutely nothing about it (and it appears that Du Fay had not pursued that matter),51 and Tournai was placing every kind of obstacle imaginable to collation. Geneva, likewise, was adamant in not admitting Du Fay. The one bit of evidence of the pope’s solicitude for Du Fay is a letter sent to the provost of St-Omer on 19 April 1436. Apparently, the duke of Burgundy had requested the authority to nominate a number of persons to benefices in his domains, and the pope instructs the provost of St-Omer that persons nominated by the duke should have precedence in the collation of benefices with the exception of three persons, namely Anselmus Fabri, a corrector of papal letters, and Guillaume Du Fay and Jehan Marsille, both papal singers.52 On 3 September 1436, the pope provided Du Fay with a motu proprio, one of the strongest possible papal documents, granting him a canonicate that Jehan Vivienne had resigned in the hands of the pope upon being elevated to the see of Nevers. But again, this need not be considered a sign of Eugenius’s solicitude for Du Fay. There were two kinds of motu proprio, which can be distinguished by the signature. Those that truly originated 49

50

ASV, RS 317, fols. 37r, 212r; RS 318, fol. 382r–v: “Supplicat igitur e. s. v. quatinus ad omnimodam difficultatem removendum sibi quod utrasque [sic in both, should be utrisque] videlicet gratia et nominations predictis uti et ex qualibet fructum sub eis comprehensum assequi libere possit et valeat dignemini misericorditer providere [originally concedere in both petitions, crossed out and corrected to providere in RS 317].” I thank Leofranc Holford-Strevens for his translation and comments. ASV, RS 318, fol. 279r–v. 51 BAB, Reeks 50, fol. 201r. 52 ASV, RV 365, fols. 106v–107r.

Excursus: Du Fay’s Beneficial Career, 1414–1437

with the pope were signed by the pope with the rubric “Fiat motu proprio” and the pope’s initial. Others, which had been requested by the petitioner as a motu proprio, were most often signed with the “Concessum” rubric. This is the case of the one for Du Fay, which is not signed by the pope but “Concessum. G. Cons.”53 This indicates that it had been requested by Du Fay, who was probably concerned that anything short of the strongest papal endorsement might not work. Given that the papal letters never mentioned how the motu proprio was signed, there was no danger of anyone in partibus realizing that the document was a legal fiction, although one endorsed by the pope. The motu proprio as entered in the register or supplications is short and to the point, probably one of the shortest such documents I have encountered in the papal registers. The papal letter sent to the officials at Cambrai is far more prolix; it also has survived and is dated on the same day, as was required.54 It is also an extraordinary document in the ornamentation of the initial E of Eugenius: the horizontal line in the center of the E is used as a fa line, and Du Fay’s rebus is incorporated in the initial (see Fig. 3.1). It is worth remembering that this was a copy to be stored in the archive, not to be seen by anyone unless there was a legal dispute; nothing quite so “personal” has turned up again in any of the thousands of Vatican letters I have examined.55 It might be that the ornamentation of the initial was in the parchment bull that was sent to the cathedral and the copyist of the Lateran register simply duplicated it. Still, it remains a unique instance, to my knowledge, and a sign of the regard for Du Fay among one of his colleagues in the curial bureaucracy. Some time after the execution of the letters, however, a small inaccuracy was noted: Vivienne had resigned his benefice at Cambrai not directly into the hands of the pope but through a simple resignation through the imperial notary Roberto Paradisi, and to avoid any possible problems, on 26 September Du Fay requested a perinde valere, that is, a papal letter that would correct the inaccuracy and confirm the validity of the motu proprio. Du Fay’s petition and the papal letter also survive.56 Still, in this case Du Fay was more confident of the results, and by 20 September he was set to 53 54 55

56

ASV, RS 326, fols. 212v–213r. On the identity of “G. Cons,” see n. 17. ASV, RL 343, fols. 76r–77v. There are occasionally very ornamented initials, mostly in the supplication registers, but virtually never in the Lateran or Vatican registers. This has been confirmed to me by Professors Pamela Starr and Richard Sherr, who have examined the registers for the second half of the 15th century. ASV, RS 326, fols. 289v–290r, and RL 338, fols. 145v–146r.

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Figure 3.1 Letter of Eugenius IV appointing Du Fay as canon of Cambrai (ASV, RL 343, fol. 76r) © 2016 Archivio Segreto Vaticano, used by permission.

resign the one benefice that had been his connection to Cambrai since the beginning of his career, the chaplaincy of the Salve. A former notary of StGéry now in the Curia in the service of cardinal Jean de la Rochetaillée,

Du Fay in Rome: The Work in the Papal Chapel

Firmin Aubron, petitioned for the chaplaincy and obtained it.57 Du Fay promised to pay the annates on his canonicate on 28 November.58 The motu proprio of 3 September arrived in Cambrai on 12 November and was presented to the chapter by Grenon. The chapter’s notary began a copy of the documents, but stopped after three words, “Reverendo in Christo”; this was probably one of the notarial documents connected with the entire process of resignation and collation.59 The canons of Cambrai had accepted Du Fay as one of them without any apparent reservation. This provided Du Fay with the one thing most of his clerical colleagues strove for, a substantial benefice in his homeland, to which he could turn at the end of his career if he lived long enough. It is most likely that Du Fay and the pope viewed this as the fulfillment of one of the two expectatives granted to him in 1431. The other, at St. Donatian in Bruges, was essentially dormant, and it is interesting to note that Du Fay made no efforts to obtain that benefice while in the papal court. Bruges was essentially a Flemishspeaking town, and Du Fay was probably aware that the language requirement would be a powerful obstacle in his case. Throughout the fifteenth century the Bruges chapter had a number of canons who mostly likely spoke only French, but most of them had close associations with the court of Burgundy and had the immediate patronage of the duke behind them.

Du Fay in Rome: The Work in the Papal Chapel With the end of this excursus we may turn again to Du Fay’s life and activities upon his arrival in Rome in the fall of 1428. According to the payment record, the papal chapel in December 1428, the first month that Du Fay appears in the list, consisted of eleven singers and two servitores, described also as bell-ringers (campanarii).60 A miscellaneous manuscript containing chronicles and descriptions of ceremonies from the first year of Benedict XIII until 1425 has on fols. 70r–86v a short treatise on the papal officials and their duties dating most likely from 1395. It includes a section dealing with the chapel, indicating that it should consist of a magister 57

58 60

ASV, RS 326, fol. 234v, dated 20 Sept. 1436. Du Fay’s resignation and Aubron’s installation through his procurator, Pierre de la Rouelle, canon of St-Géry, were recorded in the acts of that church on 14 Nov. (LAN, 7G 753, fol. 171v). In 1427 Aubron had copied some of the privileges of Du Fay into the acts. He died shortly before 7 June 1438 (LAN, 7G 753, fols. 109r, 271v, and 273v). ASV, LA 7, fol. 20r. 59 CBM 1057, fol. 39r. ASV, I&E 387, fol. 83r–v, and RAS, Reg. 1752, fol. 114r–v.

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capellae, at most twelve singers, and two clerici caerimoniarii, with no mention of the bell-ringers.61 That the bell-ringers were not the clerici caerimoniarii is made clear by the rotulus presented to Eugenius IV by the chapel, which begins with fifteen cantori et capellani, then one clericus caerimoniarius, three capellani, one custos paramentorum et iocalium, and finally two campanarii. In the ledgers of the apostolic chamber, the singers are paid as a group, and the two bell-ringers are also paid as a group, sometimes called campanarii and other times servitores capellae. The keeper of the jewels and the non-singing chaplains are not paid as a group, which means that their service in the papal chapel, mostly as celebrants of the Mass and the Office, was not considered an expense “of the chapel.”62 The duties of the papal singers, as detailed in the short constitution of 1395, were to say Mass alta voce (that is, in plainsong) every day, whether the pope was present or not, and to sing Vespers and even Matins when these were required; among them should be priests (most frequently these were probably the non-singing chaplains) who should in alternate weeks say Mass in the presence of the pope (coram domino nostro missas dicere); they were not to eat in the papal palace except on certain feasts, but would receive livery (vestes communes) and a stipend stated in the cameral books. They were to live outside the palace.63 From this is clear that the singers of the papal chapel had a common liturgical life that was very similar to what the resident canons, or rather their vicars, would have in a collegiate church. In all probability the sung Masses and Vespers were sung virtually all the time in plainsong, and polyphony was used rarely during the liturgical year. The singers during Martin’s pontificate were paid a month in advance and their wages varied depending on seniority. The list of 20 December 1428, which is the first to include Du Fay, comprises Bertauld Dauce64 and 61 62

63

64

BAV, Vat. lat. 4736, fols. 83v–84r. One should distinguish here between the status of these chaplains, called elsewhere capellani missae, and those men who were granted the honor capellani, usually bishops and important dignitaries. The later was an honorific title that did not involve regular services in the papal chapel. BAV, Vat. lat. 4736, fols. 83v–84r. The rent for the singer’s house was paid by the apostolic chamber, although the entries for it are not consistently entered in the Introitus et exitus. This man is referred to in all modern scholarship as Bertauld Dance. The difference between n and u in the scripts of the 15th century is almost impossible to detect, and when it can be it is clear that his name was spelled sometimes Dauce and others Dance, but the correct orthography can be determined by a few phonetic spellings in the mandata cameralia, written by Italian-speaking notaries, who give his name as Bertaldus Dosse (RAS, Reg. 824, fols. 98r, 105r).

Du Fay in Rome: The Work in the Papal Chapel

Jehan Augustin called Dupassage, 6 fl.; Jehan de Lesme, Toussaint de la Rouelle, Gilles Flannel called Lenfant, Philippe de la Folie called Foliot, and Jehan Vincenet, 5 fl.; Barthélemy Poignare, Guillaume Du Fay, and Gautier Libert, 4 fl.; and Jacques Robaille, 2 fl.65 The two bell ringers were Guillaume Hubert and Jehan des Chevals (Johannes de Equis).66 A payment a few months earlier mentions the custos iocalium, Jehan Pigouche.67 Men who refer to themselves or are referred to as papal chaplains in various documents between 1428 and 1431 include Jacques de Beaufort, Jehan Lecomte (Johannes Comitis), Nicolas Gilquin, Robert Malederre, Ghiselbert Overal, and Giovanni Rosario da Airola. Some of them, like Lecomte, Malederre, Overal, and Rosario, had been in the Curia for a decade or more.68 While the singers and the bell-ringers identify themselves as such in virtually all their supplications and sometimes long after leaving papal service, the Mass chaplains seldom do, and given the silence of the payment lists it is impossible to reconstruct who they were at any given time. Of those named here Beaufort, Lecomte, and Overal are mentioned as capellani missae in the list of those sworn into the papal chapel of Eugenius on 5 March 143169 and in the coronation rotulus. It is likely that these three and perhaps some of the others mentioned earlier were serving occasionally in the chapel of Martin V when Du Fay joined it. Early in Martin V’s reign, when the Curia was in transit from Constance to Rome, a few months apparently went by when there is no record of payments.70 The chapel salaries varied under Martin V from 6 fl. a month for the most senior singers to 3 fl. for the youngest ones (including the choirboys who sang under Grenon). With the advent of Eugenius IV the system changed; all singers were paid at the end of each month and all

65 66 67 68

69 70

ASV, I&E 387, fol. 83v, and RAS, Reg. 1752, fol. 114v. ASV, I&E 387, fol. 83r, and RAS, Reg. 1752, fol. 114r. For example, ASV, I&E 387, fol. 75v. The earliest notices I found (and there may be earlier ones since my documentation begins with the Council of Constance (all in ASV), are Lecomte (Comitis), 1417 (RS 107, fols. 202v–203r), Malederre, 1418 (RS 214, fol. 262r), Overal, 1417 (RS 108, fol. 217v), and Rosario, 1419 (RS 127, fols. 27v–28r). The case of Lecomte is made difficult because there are at least two Johannes Comitis in the record, a Limousin and a Normand. From the dioceses where Lecomte asks for benefices in the coronation rotulus of Eugenius IV, the papal chaplain was the Limousin Lecomte. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 1712, fol. 82r. A relatively consistent account of the payments to the chapel survives only from July 1418 on, beginning with RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 824, a register of the mandata cameralia, i.e., orders of payment. Records of the actual payments begin in Apr. 1421 with ASV, I&E 379.

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received 5 fl.,71 a sum that was to remain constant throughout his entire pontificate and beyond. Despite the inflation from 1431 to 1447 and the fluctuations in the value of coinage, this remained a substantial salary for the entire term. At the time the chapel was an overwhelmingly French institution. All the singers and the two bell-ringers were French, and among the possible Mass chaplains there were only two who were not French, Overal, a Fleming, and Rosario, an Italian. This was the pattern of the papal chapel, particularly the musical part of it, for the entire reign of Martin V.72 Among the singers, Libert and Poignare were composers. From Libert we have three rondeaux, all of them probably composed before he joined the papal chapel, and their transmission suggests that between his service to Cardinal Adimari and his joining the papal chapel he spent some time in the Veneto.73 Poignare has left us only one work, a Gloria copied in Tr 87,74 which is one of the very few pieces by any composer other than Du Fay that could have been composed for the papal chapel in the first half of the fifteenth century. Among his colleagues in the choir Du Fay might already have known Flannel if Flannel was indeed a petit vicaire at Cambrai sometime in the years before 1414, as well as Libert and Dauce, who in 1414–1415 was in the service of Pandolfo III Malatesta, lord of Brescia.75 Besides Libert and Poignare, who were recent arrivals,76 there had been a few composers among the singers in the papal chapel in the years between the coronation of Martin V and Du Fay’s arrival: Richard de Bellengues called Cardot, who served from January 1422 to January 1428; Pierre Fontaine, from April 1420 to November 1428; Nicole Grenon, from July 1425 to November 1427; Guillaume Lemacherier, whose nom de plume was Guillaume Legrant, from October 1418 to July 1421; and Niccolò Pietro Zacharie, from June 1420 to July 1424; all except Grenon and Lemacherier 71

72

73

74 75 76

There is a gap in the records, going from Aug. 1430 to July 1431, from which no payments or mandates survive. The first payments under Eugenius are recorded in RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 827, passim. See the table of singers under Martin V in Planchart, “Institutional Politics,” 124–29. The statistics can be summarized as follows: of fifty-four singers active in the papal chapel between Dec. 1417 and Feb. 1431, forty-six were French, four were Flemish, one was Italian, and one was Spanish. They are: Belle plaisant/Puis que je suis, De tristesse de dueil, and Se je me plains, all in Ox. The second is dated 1423 at the end of the text. They are edited in Reaney, ed., Early FifteenthCentury Music, 2:90–93. Fols. 51v–52r, edited in Planchart, “Music for the Papal Chapel,” 98–102. Atlas, “On the Identity,” 14; id., “Pandolfo III,” 61–62. Libert first appears in the chapel together with Du Fay. Poignare, as noted earlier, was one of Grenon’s choirboys.

Du Fay in Rome: The Work in the Papal Chapel

took extended leaves from the chapel during their years of service.77 Of these the only ones from whom any liturgical music survives are Grenon, Lemacherier, and Zacharie.78 This tends to support the view that polyphony was used sparingly in the liturgy of the papal chapel. And yet there are also indications that traditions of using some polyphony went back a considerable time. The library of Boniface VIII contained a number of books of polyphony.79 The famous constitution Docta sanctorum patrum issued by Pope John XXII in 1324–1325, by condemning the new styles of music used for the liturgy, implies that some polyphony was being used in the liturgy not only in the church as a whole but within the immediate circle of the papacy,80 and what might be the repertory of the papal chapel in the second half of the fourteenth century is surely reflected in the manuscripts Ivrea 115 and Apt 16b.81 From the short description of the duties of the papal singers in 1395 it is interesting to note that Apt 16b includes repertory of polyphonic hymns for Vespers, so that there might already have been in Avignon a tradition of using polyphony during some of the Vespers services. But we must also note that Ivrea 115 and Apt 16b are not direct sources of it. In other words, either there was no tradition of copying the polyphony of the papal chapel repertory, or whatever copies existed were either the property of the singers themselves or were fragile fascicle manuscripts that have not survived; we are basically in the dark about this.82 The schism created two traditions. Clement VII in Avignon recruited mostly northern French and Flemish singers for his chapel; the administration of Urban VI was in some ways too chaotic for any true musical traditions to have developed during his pontificate (1378–1389). It is during the longer and more settled pontificate of Boniface IX (1389– 1404) that we encounter an expanded musical establishment and the presence of an important composer, Zacara, in the chapel of the Roman pope. It is also probably significant that much of the first decade of Boniface’s reign coincides with the presence of Ciconia in Rome in the 77 78

79 80

81

82

See the table for the chapel of Martin V in Planchart, “Institutional Politics,” 124–29. From Lemacherier we have two Glorias and a Credo, all edited in Reaney, ed., Early FifteenthCentury Music, 2:53–68, and from Zacharie a troped Gloria Spiritus et alme, also in Reaney, 6:138–43. See also Staehelin, “Reste,” 13–15 and pl. 3. See Jeffery, “Notre Dame Polyphony,” 119 and 121, but cf. Jeffery’s caveats, 122–23. The literature on Docta sanctorum patrum is quite extensive. The most thoughtful treatments of the document, with extended references to earlier literature, are those in Hucke, “Das Dekret,” and Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 89–104. On Ivrea 115, see Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea; and on Apt 16b see Tomasello, Music and Ritual in Papal Avignon, and also Moll, “Folio format.” On fascicle manuscripts and their reflection in the surviving anthologies from the 15th century see Hamm, “Manuscript Structure.”

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service of Cardinal Philippe d’Alençon.83 The entourage of the first Pisan Pope, Alexander V, and perhaps his chapel, included Matteo da Perugia.84 The Pisan popes, and in particular John XXIII, profited from the desertion of a number of musicians, including Zacara, from the Roman obedience. The dwindling chapel of Gregory XII might have profited for a short time from the presence of Antonio da Cividale in its proximity.85 The Avignon tradition, if that is what is reflected in Ivrea 115 and Apt 16b, included polyphonic settings of all of the sections of the Ordinary of the Mass, including the Ite, missa est, as well as Vespers hymns. The Roman and Pisan traditions, as reflected in the music of Zacara, but also what we have of Ciconia, Matteo da Perugia, and Antonio da Cividale, apparently restricted fully composed polyphony mostly to the Gloria and the Credo. Given the political events surrounding the Council of Constance, and Benedict XIII’s recalcitrant absence from all of its proceedings, it should come as no surprise that the traditions of the papal chapel of Martin V were probably a continuation of the Roman and Pisan traditions. Viewed in this light, it makes some sense that the young Du Fay, coming from the north, would have contributed a Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus to the “traditional” Gloria and Credo pair of Zacara for a performance in the council that was trying to bring together the traditions of the Avignonese and Roman–Pisan obediences (for in terms of music Rome and Pisa were essentially the same), or that Du Fay, writing from Bologna in 1427 or 1428, would contribute a Sanctus to the repertory of the papal chapel. But it is equally interesting to note that all of the liturgical music that survives from composers who were members of the chapel of Martin V, except for Du Fay, consists of Glorias and Credos.86 During his Roman years Du Fay wrote a number of pieces of dazzling brilliance when necessary, and the three motets that can be securely dated from the years in Rome are ample proof of this. The earliest of these, Balsamus et munda cera, written for the distribution of the Agnus Dei,

83 84 85

86

Nádas and Di Bacco, “Verso uno ‘stile internazionale’,” 13–26. See Günther and Stone, “Matteo da Perugia.” Cf. Schoop and Nosow, “Antonius de Civitate Austrie.” The presence of music by Antonio in leaves of the graduals from Santa Maria Assunta in Cividale would suggest that he was there, perhaps during the Council of Cividale in 1409. That is not to say that all of it was written for the papal chapel. We do not have, in terms of our present knowledge of the sources or the transmission, any way of dating even the liturgical music of Grenon, about whom we know considerably more than we do than about Lemacherier, Zacharie, or Poignare.

Du Fay in Rome: The Work in the Papal Chapel

waxen figures of the Lamb of God, by Eugenius IV on 7 April 1431,87 despite its use of melodic retrograde in the lower voices88 and mensural shifts in the upper voices reminiscent of Ars subtilior procedures, manages to present the listener with a rhapsodic surface, where the upper voices sound almost improvisatory despite their isorhythmic construction. Its formal structure, however, is that of a traditional French motet, while each of his preceding motets had shown a fusion of French and Italian traits, with the Italian aspects predominating.89 The second, Ecclesiae militantis, was assumed by Besseler and De Van to be for the coronation of Eugenius IV on 11 March 1431.90 This would imply that Du Fay had time to write what is probably his most complicated and difficult motet, make a fair copy of it, and rehearse it, in the week between the election of Eugenius on 3 March and his coronation, something that strains credibility. Charles Hamm proposed 1436, following Haberl, and David Crawford proposed 1439.91 Both of these dates appear very unlikely. Ecclesiae militantis, with its imitative introitus, is closer to the motets Du Fay wrote in the 1420s and early 1430s. Nuper rosarum flores and Salve flos Tuscae, both securely datable to 1436, are very different kinds of pieces. As for 1439, by then Du Fay had long left the papal chapel and was, if anything, sympathetic to Eugenius’s opponents at the Council of Basel. Julie Cumming has a long and perceptive discussion of the circumstances surrounding the motet, and favors a date close to the coronation, but perhaps after it, such as the first anniversary of the coronation in 1432.92 Cumming’s tentative dating is by far the most convincing, and it is supported, albeit obliquely, by a detail of its copying in its only source, Tr 87. The end of cantus 1 and the two tenors (copied twice) appear on fol. 85v; the beginning of cantus 2 is on the facing page, fol. 86r, then the opening of cantus 1 is on fol. 95v, and the end of cantus 2 and the entire contratenor are on fol. 96r, which makes the motet impossible to perform from the manuscript. But in fact the odd copying becomes comprehensible when one examines the structure of the 87

88

89

90 91 92

OO Besseler 1, no. 13; OO Planchart 2/6; on the occasion see OO De Van 2:xi–xiii; C. Wright, “Dufay’s Motet.” Retrograde melodic motion apparently has a symbolic connection with the Lamb of God for Du Fay, which returns in several of his works, most elaborately in the final Agnus Dei of the Missa L’homme armé. On this, see C. Wright, The Maze, 106–15, and Planchart, “The Origins,” 331– 32. Bent, “The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet,” 112–13, is surely right when she points out that it is Du Fay rather than Ciconia, whose motets are entirely within an Italian tradition, who represents the fusion of the French and Italian motet traditions. OO Besseler 1, no. 12; also id., Bourdon und Fauxbourdon, 11; OO De Van1 (2):xxx. Hamm, Chronology, 67; Crawford, “Guillaume Dufay,” 83–90. Cumming, “Concord,” 340–60, esp. 342.

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fascicle. The motet is copied in two bifolia that form the outer bifolia of a sexternion. In the first bifolium the motet is copied on fols. 85v and 96r, while fols. 85r and 96v are blank. In the second bifolium the motet is copied on fols. 86r and 95v, while fol. 86v is blank and fol. 95r has a part of a Kyrie that was added later.93 When the second of these bifolia was folded to become part of the fascicle, it was mistakenly folded backward. If one could detach both bifolia and place fol. 85v/96r directly above fol. 95v/86r, we would have a large sheet of paper where the entire cantus 1 and the two tenors would be on the left side of the sheet, and the entire cantus 2 and the contratenor on the right side. The back of the sheet would be blank except for the Kyrie added in the lower right quadrant. A reconstruction of what such a sheet would look like is shown in Fig. 3.2. Andrew Hughes, Margaret Bent, and I came to this conclusion independently, but Hughes arrived at it earlier, spurred by the discovery of a motet for Jost von Silenen, bishop of Sion, in a presentation copy that follows the layout that can be reconstructed for Ecclesiae militantis in Tr 87.94 Cumming, altering one of Hughes’s assumptions, proposed that the copy in Tr 87 was not a draft for such a presentation copy but rather was derived from an original (however distant stemmatically) copied in such a manner.95 Her hypothesis is particularly attractive and may have some bearing on the possible date of the motet. A presentation copy of the work would need to have been copied on a very large piece of paper or parchment, and by its nature it would physically resemble the many rotuli of supplications submitted to the pope after his coronation.96 If the motet was composed for the first anniversary of Eugenius’s coronation in 1432 there would have been ample time for its composition, copying, and rehearsal, and the shape of the copy could be seen as both a manner of thanking Eugenius for signing the expectatives for the chapel and perhaps even reminding him obliquely that most of them were still 93

94

95 96

The actual order of the copying and the different paper types in the fascicle are described in P. Wright, “The Compilation,” 257–58. Cumming, “Concord,” 344–45, citing two unpublished papers of Hughes, “A Rediscovered 15th-Century Motet to Jodocus of Silenen, Bishop of Sion” (1974) and “The Manuscript Layout of 15th-Century Motets” (1975). Bent in a private communication to me recounting her own “experimentation with folding pieces of paper.” Cumming, “Concord,” 344–45. Bonnie Blackburn, in a private communication, posits an unusually attractive hypothesis: that in the original performance manuscript the initial E of “Ecclesiae” would have been quite eyecatching, like the initial E of the papal letters of Eugenius, and might also have been the model for the very unusual nesting of Du Fay’s rebus in the E in ASV, RL 343 (cf. Fig. 3.1).

Du Fay in Rome: The Work in the Papal Chapel

Figure 3.2 Reconstruction of the original layout of Ecclesiae militantis © 2016 Castello del Buoconsiglio, Trento, Italy (used by permission).

unfulfilled. This last possibility is not improbable given that the texts of the motet are in places hortatory and even admonitory toward Eugenius.97 The texts of the motet are hopelessly corrupt and have not yielded an entirely sensible reading even after heroic emendation 97

There is a tradition of such texts in 14th-century motets, even papal motets (cf. Margaret Bent, “Early Papal Motets”), but Du Fay’s other motets invariably follow a different, more purely laudatory and prayerful course.

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by a number of scholars,98 but they appear to refer to the pope’s coronation in past tense. The text of the contratenor, Bella canunt gentes, which requires no emendations, appears to reflect directly the unstable and warlike conditions of Rome during the first year of Eugenius’s reign, conditions that led to his escape into exile in 1434. The third securely Roman motet, Supremum est mortalibus bonum, for the meeting of Eugenius with King Sigismund on 21 May 1433,99 is as different from Balsamus et munda cera and Ecclesiae militantis as these are from each other. It is the longest of Du Fay’s motets and in many ways quite unlike not just his other motets but any other fifteenth-century motet. The cantus firmus is not derived from a preexistent melody but apparently composed ad hoc. This is something common in Ciconia’s motets but quite infrequent otherwise. Only at the end, in a coda outside the isorhythmic scheme, the tenor quotes the antiphon Isti sunt duo olivae100 in an almost epigraphic manner, as it precedes the mention of the names of the pope and emperor set in cantus coronatus.101 Only the opening of the antiphon is cited, the music that sets the phrase cited earlier, but there may also be something of a jeu d’esprit in the citation, because the continuation of the antiphon, which would have been known to Du Fay’s singers is, et duo candelabra lucentia ante dominum, and the rubric of the tenor in Bologna 2216, one of the two earliest copies of the motet reads: Pro pace, pro duobus magnis luminaribus mundi. Technically a three-voice motet, the introduction, the postlude, and two internal passages, ostensibly written as duets between triplum and motetus, are expanded to three voices by the use of fauxbourdon, a texture never before or after used in an isorhythmic motet, which give the work an aspect of sound that the audience at the time 98

99

100 101

Details in Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 131–36. Even after assuming the worst in the transmission, one has to conclude that the originals were for the most part awful poetry, overstraining for grandeur. Holford-Strevens says “it is inconceivable that the triplum and the motetus should have been written by one of Eugene’s learned secretaries” (135), but perhaps he underestimates the corrosive effect, both on literary style and even on grammar, of working in the papal chancery. The formularies of the chancery are rife with legalistic terminology that is patently ungrammatical and sometimes appears to strain to confuse the reader. The motet was connected to the Peace of Viterbo (Apr. 1433) through a long chain of misreadings by Rudolf von Ficker, De Van, and Besseler, detailed in Fallows, Dufay, 280, n. 23. As usual, Pirro, Histoire, 70 has the correct date, but his account was ignored by scholars who wrote later. An extended discussion of the dating appears also in Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 289–91. The ceremonial meeting between Eugenius and Sigismund is described in a letter of Poggio Bracciolini to Niccolò Nicoli; see Bracciolini, Lettere, 1, no. 44. A full historical account of the meeting appears in Joseph Aschbach, Geschichte Kaiser Sigismund’s, 4:107–14. See also Gregorovius, Geschichte, 7:38–39. Antiphon to the magnificat for SS. John and Paul, CAO 7015. Cf. Elders, “Dufay as Musical Orator” for an interpretation of this citation.

Du Fay in Rome: The Work in the Papal Chapel

probably found quite startling, all the more so in that fauxbourdon was, by and large, associated with rather simple liturgical music.102 Further, this is the first motet by Du Fay where, instead of a double cantus, the second texted voice lies well below the first and sometimes crosses below the tenor. Indeed, in a perceptive reading of the motet as heard by an educated listener of Du Fay’s time, Julie Cumming shows not only how startling and innovative Supremum est mortalibus bonum is, but the extent to which the different textures and rhythmic surfaces of the piece appear to have been deliberately composed to reference the union of sacred and secular traditions reflected in the meeting of the pope and the king.103 These motets show the versatility and stylistic variety of Du Fay’s music at the time. Each of the works is very different, but all three are extraordinarily impressive and, in the case of Ecclesiae militantis and Supremum est mortalibus bonum, quite startling by comparison with other music being written at the time. This is not to say that Du Fay was not composing simpler and more functional works during his early years in the papal chapel, but even in these works there are signs of an attempt at large-scale planning. Two groups of works appear to have been begun in Rome but perhaps were completed elsewhere, even though they seem to have been intended for the papal chapel. The first is a cycle of settings of the Kyrie eleison, which would, in a sense, complement the Gloria–Credo pair repertory that was apparently a tradition in the papal chapel, and the second is a cycle of hymns for the whole year. These, as well as the one song of his that has survived with the rubric Romae conposuit,104 are better discussed in the chapters devoted specifically to the music, for they pose a number of complex problems. The situation in Rome in the years after Eugenius’s coronation was extremely complicated, but it must be summarized briefly here, for it impinges upon Du Fay’s career not only during these years but much further in the future. Pope Martin V had convoked the Council of Basel shortly before his death, and Eugenius had confirmed the convocation with very little enthusiasm shortly after his coronation. The council opened officially on 23 July 1431, but Eugenius, profoundly suspicious of the direction of the council from the beginning, attempted to dissolve it and 102

103 104

For an interpretation of the significance of fauxbourdon in this piece see Elders, “Dufay as Musical Orator,” 9–14; id., “Guillaume Dufay’s Concept of Faux-bourdon”; Blackburn, “On Compositional Process,” 227–28. Cumming, The Motet, 158–63. Quel fronte signorille in paradiso, OO Besseler 6, no. 7; OO Planchart 10/1/5.

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transfer it to Bologna on 18 December 1431. The council fathers refused to accept the transfer and the stage was set for a tug of war between pope and council that would last for the rest of Eugenius’s papacy and lead to a schism. Between 1431 and December 1433 Eugenius tried alternately to dissolve the council and to placate the council fathers, without much success. In December 1433, under pressure from Emperor Sigismund and the doge of Venice, he issued a revised version of an earlier bull, Dudum sacrum, essentially capitulating to the demands of the council, but in the end even this did not satisfy the council fathers. In addition, Eugenius had to deal from the beginning with wars on almost all the frontiers of the papal state, and sedition within Rome itself fostered by the Colonna, the family of Martin V, who saw their power and prerogatives threatened and diminished by the new pope. The need to buy out some of his enemies, and to pay for condottieri and their armies, essentially emptied the papal treasury, and the internal unrest in Rome made life extremely uncertain for all members of the papal Curia from the end of 1431 on.105 Under these circumstances it is no surprise that the personnel of the papal chapel declined sharply late in 1433. One earlier loss that might have affected Du Fay more personally occurred in the summer of 1432: Arnold de Lantins, whom he had met in the Malatesta court, and whose name is mentioned in He compaignons, had joined the papal chapel together with Guillaume Le Métayer called de Malbecque, on 28 September 1431.106 Their simultaneous arrival suggests that they had come together and were friends, and perhaps it is through Lantins that Malbecque and Du Fay began a lifelong friendship as well. Arnold’s name last appears on a payment mandate dated 3 June 1432,107 but less than a month later, on 2 July, Malbecque presented a petition to the pope asking for the parish church of Fermes in the diocese of Liège, vacant on the death of Arnold within the Curia.108 At the end of May, when Supremum est mortalibus was presumably sung, the papal chapel had ten singers, but by the end of June Clemens Liebert, who had rejoined the chapel in February after an absence of four years, and Gilles Laury left; a month

105

106 107 108

Pastor, History, 1:287–97, and particularly Gill, Eugenius IV, 39–58, give a good account of both the conflict with the council and the political situation in the Rome and the papal state at this time. Gregorovius, Geschichte, 3:13–23, gives an account centered on the situation in the papal states. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 1312, fol. 82r. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 827, fol. 83v; payment dated the next day in ASV, I&E 390, fol. 66v. ASV, RS 278, fol. 31r–v.

Du Fay in Rome: The Work in the Papal Chapel

later Gilles Flannel and Du Fay also left. The decline was slightly stemmed by the arrival in August of a Roman cleric, Jacopo Antonio Bartolomei called Ranuzio, but at the end of September Barthélemy Poignare and Jacques Ragot left,109 so that from October 1433 to January 1434 the papal chapel had only five singers, its lowest ebb for the entire fifteenth century. Two of the singers, Du Fay and Ragot, sought what amounted to a leave of absence that would allow them to retain their status as papal singers, particularly in the all-important matter of the collation of benefices; the others, however, left the chapel permanently.110 Du Fay’s absence from the papal chapel, albeit temporary, is also reflected in the documents in faraway Cambrai. From the time when the second letter of Louis Allemand to the chapter of StGéry reached Cambrai in 1428 the accounts of the chaplains at that church omitted any separate account of the chaplaincy of the Salve as a foreign chapel, but beginning with the accounts for 1434–35, the chaplaincy of the Salve “quam de presenti possidet dominus Guillermus Du Fayt,” appears again with a separate account as a foreign chapel.111 Du Fay’s leave was prompted perhaps not only by the perilous circumstances in Rome but also by an offer from Amadeus VIII, Duke of Savoy.112 In any event, in late 1433 and early 1434 the political situation in Rome continued to deteriorate, and on 24 May 1434 the people revolted, a number of the cardinals fled or were taken prisoner, and Eugenius became a virtual prisoner at his residence in San Calisto in Trastevere. On 4 June, the pope and one of his officials, disguised as monks, managed to leave the residence and reach a boat in the Tiber. The flight was discovered relatively early. They were pelted with stones and an attempt was made to block the channel at the mouth of the river; still, they barely managed to reach a ship in Ostia, which took the pope

109 110

111

112

RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 827, fols. 153v, 157r, 160v, 165r. This is the gist of an extended papal declaration dated 15 Mar. 1435 in ASV, RS 303, fols. 90r– 91r. It refers back to a now lost chancery letter of 7 July 1434 indicating that Du Fay, Jehan de la Croix called Monamy, Jacques Ragot, Guillaume de Malbecque, Richard Herbare, and Jehan Marsille were considered at that time members in good standing of the papal chapel, and that Du Fay was absent with the proper license, and Ragot was absent on account of a grave illness. LAN, 7G 2940, fol. 8v. Du Fay apparently sought no litterae de fructibus during his final year in the papal chapel, for the accounts indicate the chaplaincy as foreign until after Du Fay resigned it in 1436. His successor, Firmin Aubron, was in the Curia, and probably did not send a privilege to St-Géry for the first year of his possession, since the chaplaincy is listed as foreign for 1437–1438 (LAN, 7G 2945, fol. 6r), but after that it again disappears from the accounts. There is no actual record of such an offer, but the events in Savoy in the first months of 1434 make an offer the most reasonable explanation for Du Fay’s travels to Chambéry.

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to Livorno, from where he proceeded to Florence, which he reached on 12 June. He would not see Rome again until 1443.113 During his last months in Rome Du Fay had undertaken to act as proctor in a permutation between the heads of two monastic houses in the diocese of Lausanne: a supplication dated 19 June 1433 notes that Henricus Militis, prior of the Cluniac priory of Villard, had arranged a permutation with Étienne Rupare, prior of the Benedictine priory of Cossenay, both in the diocese of Lausanne.114 Du Fay was the proctor of Rupare in this transaction, which had been approved by Rome, but it turns out that Rupare was a Franciscan and doubts had arisen as to whether he could properly hold the priory of Cossenay, much less exchange it, so Militis was requesting a papal confirmation of his possession of Cossenay with all the necessary non obstantibus.115 It would be tempting to see in this a portent of Du Fay’s first connections with Savoy, but far more likely is that the two monks from Lausanne were seeking the help of a canon in their cathedral who was at the time a member of the Curia and could make the necessary arrangements in Rome.

First Sojourn in Savoy Du Fay’s last payment as a papal chaplain in 1433 is dated 2 July 1433.116 The next document we have concerning him is an entry in the accounts of the tesoreria generale of the duke of Savoy, dated 21 March 1434, giving Du Fay 25 fl. as his salary as maestro di cappella of the duke for one year beginning on 1 February of that year,117 so it is clear that Du Fay had reached the court of Savoy at least by that date. It is more than likely, however, that he had reached the court earlier, for within a week of this date took place the event that had probably prompted the duke to recruit Du Fay in the first place, the ceremonies connected with the arrival of the 113 114

115

116 117

Gill, Eugenius IV, 64–67; Gregorovius, Geschichte, 3:21–22. Cossenay is a village north of Lausanne. Villars could be any of a dozen such named towns in the vicinity of Lausanne in the canton of Vaud. ASV, RS 289, fols. 35v–36r. This is already a nova provisio, so the original exchange had been made sometime earlier. A second nova provisio, asking not only a confirmation of Henricus as prior of Cossenay and the absolution of any penalties incurred in the process, is dated 25 Oct. 1433 (ASV, RS 189, fol. 242r–v). ASV, I&E 390, fol. 157r. TAS, Inv. 16, Reg. 79, fol. 464r: “Salarium Guillermi du Fay / Libravit dicta die de precepto domini relatione Iohannis Veteris Guillermo de Facto magistro capelle domini in exonerationem salarii sui unius anni integri incepti die prima inclusive Februarii anno domini millesimo iiiic trigesimo quarto videlicet 25 fl pp.” See also Bradley, “Musical Life,” 2, doc. 901.

First Sojourn in Savoy

wife of his son Louis, Anne of Lusignan, daughter of King Janus I of Cyprus, an event that brought among its guests Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy. Anne and Louis had been married by procuration on 3 October 1433,118 but the bride took a long time to make her way to Savoy. She finally sailed late in October, stopping at Rhodes and Naples, and arriving in Nice on 1 January 1434, where she remained nearly a month. At every city her entourage met with festivities and ceremonies that slowed the travel. Finally, on Sunday, 7 February, she arrived in Chambéry accompanied by her uncle, Cardinal Hughes de Lusignan, and an enormous retinue.119 That same day the duke of Burgundy had arrived with a retinue of more than two hundred, which included his entire chapel; the Burgundian entourage remained in Chambéry for five days.120 The wedding was solemnized the day of Anne’s arrival with a nuptial Mass, followed by four days of festivities. The nuptial Mass was surely sung by the chapel of Savoy, but our main account of the events comes from the Burgundian chronicler Jehan le Févre, who is naturally more concerned with telling of the activities of the Burgundian guests than those of the Savoyard hosts. Thus he reports that on the day after the wedding the Burgundian chapel sang a high Mass, “so melodiously that it was a fine thing to hear, since at this time the duke’s chapel was considered the best in the world.”121 The wedding and its attendant festivities were sumptuous to the point of extravagance.122 This was a very important dynastic event for Savoy. Amadeus had increased his domains immensely since the turn of the century, acquiring the Genevois in 1401 and Piedmont in 1419. He thus controlled all the Alpine crossings between Italy and France as well as a number of important cities: Geneva and Lausanne, Chambéry, and Nice, as well as Turin and the entire valley of Aosta. In 1416 King Sigismund, in an attempt to create a southern duchy as powerful as that of Burgundy had become in the north with Philip the Good’s acquisition of Flanders and Brabant, promoted Amadeus from Count to Duke. Amadeus’s wife was 118 119 120

121 122

Guichenon, Histoire, 3:364. See Maria José, Amedée VIII, 1:415–19; Guichenon, Histoire, 1:521. H. Vander Linden, Itinéraires, 117, indicating that the duke left Chalon-sur-Saône on his way to Chambéry on 4 Feb. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 179, gives 3 Feb. as the date of the duke’s arrival in Chambéry, citing H. Vander Linden, Itinéraires, and Buet, Les Ducs de Savoie, 91; Guichenon, Histoire, 1:521. Jehan Le Févre, Chronique, 239. See Maria José, Amedée VIII, 1:319–22. Here Maria José, like a number of early historians, makes the mistaken assumption that Le Févre is describing the singing of the Savoy chapel in the nuptial Mass, when he is actually describing the singing of the Burgundian chapel the following day; cf. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 139.

125

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Philip the Good’s aunt, so Duke Philip had good reason to come to the wedding and display the power and prestige of the Burgundian court. Naturally, for that very reason, Amadeus had to make sure that his own court would not be eclipsed by the Burgundian visitors. Amadeus was surely aware that his own chapel was no match for the tradition and prestige of the Burgundian musical establishment, but by hiring Du Fay in time for the festivities he could be sure that he had among his musicians a man who was already by then one of the most important musicians on the Continent and surely one who could match the eminence of Binchois, since by this time Du Fay had become, if anything, a more cosmopolitan figure than his compatriot. Given all of this, it is hard to believe that Du Fay did not reach Chambéry until a week before the wedding, as the payment entry would indicate. He was probably in charge of the music for the nuptial Mass, and might have composed some of it himself and contributed music for the festivities that followed. Gino Borghezio, in his pioneering study of the Savoy chapel, noted that the previous maestro di cappella, Adam Grand, is referred to as magister puerorum rather than magister cappellae on 24 December 1433, and suggested that this might indicate that Du Fay was already in Savoy by then.123 This reads too much into the document itself, which is a payment to Adam and to the children for their livery.124 In fact, for most of the fifteenth century the maestri di cappella at Savoy served also as magistri puerorum (Du Fay being the sole exception),125 and in a document of 1 January 1434 Adam is referred to both as magister puerorum and as magister cappellae.126 Thus we have no way of determining how far in advance of the date when he became officially magister capellae did Du Fay reach Chambéry. It is quite probable that on his way to Savoy Du Fay stopped for a time in Ferrara. As with much of his early biography, it is not a document but one of his works that points to this: the ballade C’est bien raison in praise of Niccolò d’Este.127 The ballade has been connected with Niccolò’s efforts as a peacemaker, particularly the peace between Florence, Venice, and Milan signed on 26 April 1433.128 But Hans Schoop, noting that this aspect of Niccolò’s activity is not mentioned until the third stanza, cautioned against too close a connection between that event and Du Fay’s piece.129 Originally 123 124 125 126 127 129

Borghezio, “La fondazione,” 209. TAS, Inv. 16, Reg. 78, fol. 131r; Bradley, “Musical Life,” 2, no. 764. Cf. Bradley, “Musical Life,” 1:106–109 and 153–56. TAS, Inv. 26, Reg. 79, fol. 443r; also Bradley, “Musical Life,” 2, no. 765. OO Besseler 6, no. 16; OO Planchart 10/2/3. 128 Besseler, “Neue Dokumente,” 166. Schoop, Entstehung, 120–21.

First Sojourn in Savoy

Lewis Lockwood sought to connect the ballade with a payment made to Du Fay when he visited Ferrara in 1437.130 Later, however, Lockwood changed his opinion, partly following Fallows’s view, and saw the ballade as the product of an otherwise unrecorded visit by Du Fay to Ferrara on his way to Chambéry late in 1433.131 Still, Lockwood’s earlier concern, that the text of the ballade is not so much about the peace treaty but rather a praise of Niccolò’s virtues and of his rule (which echoes Schoop’s view), is also correct. The peace treaty was a relatively fresh memory when Du Fay came through Ferrara, but the ballade is not really about the peace treaty.132 This visit was the opening contact in what was to become a long and productive relationship between the Ferrarese rulers and the composer, a relationship that would result not only in a number of other works, but also in the preservation of a large number of Du Fay’s most important works from the 1430s and 1440s, many of which survive only in a Ferrarese manuscript.133 In any case, this suggests that of two possible routes from Rome to Chambéry, one going through the coast, up to Genoa, before turning toward Turin, and the other going through Bologna and Florence, with a detour to Ferrara, Du Fay took the latter route. Had he traveled it headlong, the route is about 900 km, and the entire Ferrara detour adds about 100 km. From the dates when Grenon stopped in Bologna in 1425 and when he reached Rome, we know that he and the six choirboys traveled some 400 km in twenty days, so it is probable that the entire journey, with a detour and a short sojourn in Ferrara, took Du Fay something like two months. He might have reached Chambéry by October or November, particularly if he wanted to avoid crossing the Alps in the dead of winter. The events in Chambéry also mark the one occasion where Du Fay, Binchois, the blind Castilian vielle players Juan Fernandez and Juan de Córdoba (Jehan Fernandez and Jehan de Cordoval), who were in the

130

131

132 133

Lockwood, “Dufay and Ferrara,” 3, and n. 10. See also Besseler, “Neue Dokumente,” 166. But cf. also pp. 146–47. Fallows, Dufay, 40–41, is actually rather noncommittal on the two possible dates of the ballade, but he notes that the later date would require a revision of the terminus post quem non for the completion of Ox 213, its only source. Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 36, gives his revised dating, and Fallows, The Songs, 70, comes out more clearly in favor of 1433. Lockwood, “Dufay and Ferrara,” 3. ModB; see Hamm and Scott, “A Study,” and Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 51–63 for a detailed study of this source. New views of the manuscript place its origins in Florence in the 1430s with a continuation in Ferrara in the 1440s. On this, see Phelps, “A Repertory,” and Haar and Nádas, “The Medici, the Signoria, the Pope.”

127

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service of the duchess of Burgundy,134 were together in one place. This meeting is reflected in one of the so-called musical stanzas of Martin Le Franc’s poem Le champion des dames, written some six or eight years later and dedicated to Philip the Good.135 This enormous poem, running to 24,384 lines in 3,048 eight-line stanzas and divided into five books, is as well-known as it is unread, except for stanzas 2033–34 and 2037. The stanzas come at the end of a long digression in Book IV, where Franc Vouloir is declaring that the end of the world is near and that one of the symptoms of this is that the arts have been brought to a state of perfection. A short history of each art up to the present is then presented, beginning with music in stanzas 2032–37. Stanza no. 2037 closes the section on music at its highest state:136 Tu as les aveugles ouÿ Jouer a la cour de Bourgogne N’as pas? certainement ouÿ. Fust il jamais telle besogne? J’ay veu Binchois avoir vergogne Et son taire emprez leur rebelle, Et Du Fay despite et frogne Qu’il n’a melodie sy belle.

You have heard the blind [men] Play at the court of Burgundy, Haven’t you? Surely you have. Has there ever been anything like it? I have seen Binchois shamed And fall silent before their fiddling, And Du Fay vexed and scowling Because he has no melody as beautiful.

Although Le Franc places this scene in the present and at the court of Burgundy, this is something of a deliberate rhetorical gambit. Its most likely point of reference was the meeting at Chambéry in 1434,137 although this point of reference is also the product of a report, for we have documentary evidence that Le Franc was not at Chambéry in 1434.138 By contrast, a letter of Le Franc to the Savoy chancery, probably dating from the 1430s and dealing with the nature of rhetorical eloquence as an example of imitatio, has an important musical reference: a musician is 134

135

136 137 138

On the vielle players see H. Vander Linden, “Le Voyage de Pedro Tafur”; A. Vander Linden, “Les Aveugles”; Paviot, Portugal et Bourgogne au XVe siècle, 9. no. 37; Fiala, “Les Musiciens étrangers”; and Margaret Bent, “The Musical Stanzas,” 100–1. The first 8,114 lines were edited by Arthur Piaget, Le Champion, in 1968; Book IV, which has the music stanzas, was published in a rhymed translation by Steven Millen Taylor, The Trial, in 2005, and the entire work was edited by Robert Deschaux, Le Champion, in five volumes, in 1999. On the poem and its significance for music see Fallows, “The Contenance angloise”; Bent, “The Musical Stanzas”; Page, “Reading and Reminiscence”; and Strohm, “Music, Humanism.” I follow here largely the text and the translation in Bent, “The Musical Stanzas,” 126. See C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 180. The fundamental work on Le Franc’s life is still Piaget, Martin Le Franc, but see also Strohm, “Music, Humanism,” esp. 371–73 and n. 80.

First Sojourn in Savoy

deemed excellent when he imitates the “celestial concords” of Du Fay, and the “most agreeable melodies” of Binchois.139 Here, at a date closer to the wedding and apparently before his official connection with Savoy, we have the poet connecting the two composers mentioned in the poem. An enormous amount of ink has been spilled on the meaning of these stanzas, particularly stanzas 2033–34, which describe the music and the musicmaking of Du Fay and Binchois. These are discussed elsewhere in this book.140 For Du Fay’s life the biographical significance of stanza 2037 is that it presents a vividly reported meeting of the composer with Binchois and the Spanish vielle players and confirms, from a Savoyard point of view, the enormous impact that the Burgundian musical establishment made upon the festivities. The wedding was also an occasion for Du Fay to meet two men whom he surely had met at Cambrai as a choirboy, Jehan Hanelle and Gillet Velut, both of whom had been petits vicaires at Cambrai when Du Fay was there.141 Hanelle stayed for some time in Savoy, but officially he remained a musician of the king of Cyprus.142 The animosity that the high-handed new countess provoked almost from the start may have rendered them, together with many of her entourage, invisible to historians, since the Savoyard chroniclers tended to ignore them. There is no music of Du Fay that can be securely placed during his first sojourn at Savoy. Pirro suggested that the Gloria de quaremiaux, an appealing but curious little piece built on a recurring tenor that might be a dance tune, was composed for Shrove Tuesday in 1434, two days after the wedding ceremonies, where the mixture of wedding festivities and carnival dances might have affected the music for the Mass of the day.143 Fallows regards this as an unsubstantiated guess,144 but in fact it is an absolute impossibility. Any Mass celebrated on Shrove Tuesday was bound to omit the Gloria. In fact, in most of Europe only three feasts between Septuagesima and Holy Saturday allowed the Gloria to be said (but not sung) at Mass: Purification, Annunciation, and Maundy Thursday.145 139 141

142

143 145

C. Wright and Gallagher, “Martin Le Franc.” 140 See later in this chapter. Hanelle is documented at Cambrai from 1408 to 1411, Velut from 1409 to 1411. Both entered the service of the king of Cyprus, and Hanelle certainly and Velut possibly accompanied Anne to Savoy; cf. Kügle, “The Repertory,” 170–71. TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 79, fol. 473v (16 Aug. 1434): gift of 20 ducats to Hanelle; Reg. 81, fol. 207v (16 Nov. 1436): repayment of 6 ducats the treasurer had borrowed to give to Hanelle, described as “Mestre de la Chapelle du Roy de Chippres.” Cf. Bradley, “Musical Life,” 2:535. Pirro, Histoire, 75. 144 Fallows, Dufay, 42. Other feasts where the Gloria could be said during Lent varied from diocese to diocese. Pirro’s guess would make sense, in a general way, if one assumes that the cantus firmus is a mardi gras (= Shrove Tuesday) dance tune, but it is still most likely not a piece written in Savoy in 1434.

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Further, the only source for the work, Bo Q15, has no music later than 1433 in it, so the Gloria is surely a much earlier piece. It would be reasonable, however, to assume that Du Fay’s presence in a secular court probably spurred him to compose songs, and that a good number of his songs in Ox 213 probably date from his years at Savoy. Among them perhaps the ballade Se la face ay pale could be a product of his first sojourn, since he chose it nearly two decades later as the cantus firmus of a Mass that was possibly written for an immensely important liturgical and dynastic occasion, the acquisition of what is today called the Shroud of Turin, by the duke of Savoy.146 One intriguing possibility, however, is an enormous and elaborate setting of the Gloria that survives only in a section of Tr 92 copied between 1435 and 1440, where it is preceded by a Kyrie that was ascribed to Du Fay in the index of Tr 92, but not in the music.147 Du Fay authorship of the Kyrie has been rejected by Monson and P. Wright, Monson suggesting that it is English,148 and Wright, more plausibly that it is by Binchois, and that the Kyrie and Gloria were a collaborative project.149 These pieces are discussed in more detail in Volume II, Chapter 5. Du Fay’s first sojourn at the court of Savoy was relatively short. The accounts of the tesoreria generale record three times the payment of 10 florins to Du Fay. The entries are odd and suggest that Du Fay had some trouble collecting the money. The first entry, dated 4 June 1434, indicates a payment of 10 fl. “for the cause and reasons described in a letter” from the prince of Piedmont, one of Louis of Savoy’s titles.150 The second, dated 12 August, records the allocation of the money and refers both to the letters of 4 June and another letter of 8 August, as well as a receipt signed by Du Fay on 10 August.151 The third, also dated 12 August, records an “actual payment” on 12 August on the order of the count of Geneva.152 The third entry identifies the payment as a gift from Louis, but the second indicates the reason for it, to pay for Du Fay’s expenses as he journeyed home “in

146 147 148 150

151 152

See Robertson, “The Man with the Pale Face,” 417–24. Du Fay, OO, ed. Besseler, IV, no. 29; OO, ed. Planchart, 5/6. Monson, “Stylistic Inconsistencies.” 149 P. Wright, “Englishness in a Kyrie.” TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 79 ter, fol. 35v: “Libravit domino Guillermo Du Fay domini nostri principis Pedemontum [one or more words left out here, perhaps magister capellae] causis et rationibus descriptis in littera missoria dicti domini nostri principis et confessione ipsius domini Guillermi . . .” TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 79, fol. 391r–v. TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 79, fol. 448v. This entry is curious in that the count of Geneva was not Louis, but his younger brother Philip. Thus, apparently we have both brothers endorsing the gift to Du Fay.

Visit to Cambrai

order to visit his mother.”153 This indicates not only that Du Fay left Chambéry shortly after 12 August, a little over six months after his first recorded presence in Savoy, but also that he was already planning such a journey by the beginning of June of that year.

Visit to Cambrai We do not know where Marie Du Fayt was living after the death of Jehan Hubert in December 1425. From the account of the executors it is clear that for at least one year she was at Cambrai, since she was given an extra gift from the estate for having attended all the Masses for Hubert’s soul quite faithfully, presumably in the company of Jehanne Huberde.154 After Hubert’s death his house went to Quentin Menard, archdeacon of Brussels, but in the process two small houses and a plot of land that had been held by Hubert were separated administratively from the main house and rented separately, but not to Marie Du Fayt or to Jehanne Huberde.155 What most likely happened is that the two women were taken in by Hubert’s nephew, Jehan Hubert, Jr., who had been a resident canon of St-Géry since May 1423,156 and less than a month after his uncle’s death had been elected provost of St-Géry.157 Thus presumably Marie was living at Cambrai in 1434 and indeed, as the accounts of the wine and bread at Cambrai report, Du Fay received four loaves of bread on 14 October 1434,158 and the next day, as the accounts of the grand métier indicate, he was presented with two lots of wine.159 Sometimes these entries indicate where the person was staying when the gifts were presented, but neither of these entries does so, although presumably he was with his mother at the time. There were surely other things in addition to filial piety that brought Du Fay to Cambrai in 1434. He had a small benefice in St-Géry, and the cathedral presented him with what he must have regarded as the best chance to obtain a major benefice in the region where he had grown up, something that was a common motivation of almost all clergymen at this 153

154 157

158 159

TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 79, fol. 391r: “pro suis expensis fiendis eundo ad patriam ipsius causa visitando eius matrem.” See earlier in this chapter. 155 CBM 1056, fol. 160r. 156 LAN, 7G 573, fol. 106v. LAN, 7G 573, fol. 218v. Hubert was elected on the Saturday after Epiphany, and confirmed on 20 Jan. 1426. LAN, 4G 7434, fol. 7r: “Item. xiiiia octobris domino Guillermo Du Fayt iiii°r panes.” LAN, 4G 5069, fol. 12r: “xv die octobris domino Guillermo Dufayt ii lotis valent 7 s 6 d.”

131

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time. Both the city and the cathedral would have appeared now more congenial to a member of the papal chapel than they were when Du Fay had last been in the north, probably in 1425, since there were a number of former papal singers among the Cambrai clergy. Grenon and Hanelle were resident canons in the cathedral,160 Jehan du Riez and Jehan Wyet were at St-Géry,161 and Jehan Mauclerc was as Ste-Croix.162 In addition, the Du Fay who now visited Cambrai was different from the small vicar in Laon who had been in the city at the end of 1425 when Jehan Hubert, Sr. died. He was the magister capellae of both the pope and the duke of Savoy, and a canon of the cathedral of Lausanne. Thus, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, given some of the troubles that he had encountered with the benefices at the cathedral of Tournai and the cathedral of Geneva, Du Fay was in Cambrai trying to make sure that, should he be presented for a benefice in Cambrai, he would not face any obstacles from the chapter. There are, however, a number of musical reflections of Du Fay’s visit to Cambrai. The only surviving fifteenth-century choirbooks from the cathedral, Ca 6 and 11, probably copied in the late 1430s and early 1440s respectively,163 contain a number of works by Du Fay, all of which must date from before 1434.164 Some of these pieces Du Fay might have sent to Cambrai before his journey there, but it is just as likely that he bought some of them with him in 1434. But we should note that, as Liane Curtis has shown, Ca 11, the later manuscript, is not a copy of Ca 6 despite the many concordances they share; both are rather copies of earlier exemplars and,165 in the case of Du Fay’s Credo no. 5, the work was subjected to some editing. There is, however, one work that probably is a direct product of the visit. Both Ca 6 and 11 transmit a Gloria for three voices with an added contratenor labeled “contratenor du fay.” This is the only ascription to be found in either manuscript.166 The Gloria, found only in these two manuscripts, 160

161

162 163 164

165

Hanelle had been in residence since Oct. 1420 (CBM 1056, fol. 90v), and although old Register F (1428–1435) of the acts is lost, Grenon’s presence in the cathedral is documented from 1428 on (LAN, 4G 4633, fol. 34v). Du Riez is documented as resident in Cambrai from 1422 on (LAN, 7G 753, fol. 135v); Wyet became a resident canon in Aug. 1430 (LAN, 7G 753, fol. 292v). At this time Jehan de la Croix, called Monamy, a colleague of Du Fay in Rome and later canon of the cathedral, was also a canon of St-Géry, where he had been resident already in 1425 (7G 753, fol. 257v), but in Oct. 1434 he was still at the Curia (RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 828, fol. 10v). Mauclerc was a resident canon at Ste-Croix from 1421 on (LAN, 6G 177, fols. 45v–46r). Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 17. These are, following the order in Besseler’s edition, Kyrie of no. 1 (OO Planchart 5/1); Gloria– Credo no. 4 (Planchart 5/4); Gloria–Credo no. 5 (Planchart 5/5); and Gloria no. 21 (Planchart 5/21). Kyrie no. 19 (Planchart 12/8) is in the Cambrai manuscripts, but it is not by Du Fay. Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 48–74. 166 OO Besseler 4, no. 30; OO Planchart 5/29.

Return to Savoy and to the Papal Chapel, Florence

is clearly a local work. It is a competent piece with a few contrapuntal infelicities here and there (cf. mm. 16, 19, 26, 28, 38, 44, 65, 81), written by a composer who had come into contact with the equal-discantus style that had been used in Italy in the early fifteenth century,167 but had not a very clear understanding of it. For this reason I suspect that the composer is Nicolas Grenon, who spent two years in the papal chapel as magister puerorum (1425–1427). Further, if Du Fay was going to ornament a work by a local composer as part of his campaign for a canonicate at Cambrai, it would stand to reason that he would choose a work by Grenon, the one composer among the cathedral canons who had also been a papal singer.168 The contratenor adds a good deal of sonority to the work as well as a few problems (cf. mm. 31, 61, 75, and 81). It is not as imaginative or as effective as the contratenors Du Fay wrote for his own works. My sense is that in his own music the contratenor, no matter if he composed the parts successively, was part of his aural conception from the beginning and he could plan those places where it was to add rhythmic motion or harmonic color, which is why in the late works the contratenor is compositionally so important. This added contratenor, on the other hand, behaves like most such added contratenors, simply adding impressive low sonorities and fanfare-like figures to the texture. It is intended to flatter the sound of the Gloria (and by extension to flatter its composer), a clever bit of musical diplomacy where Du Fay takes pains not to upstage the host piece.

Return to Savoy and to the Papal Chapel, Florence By April 1435, when he received clothing at the court, Du Fay was back in Savoy.169 Undertaking a long journey in the dead of winter was not customary in the fifteenth century, so it is most likely that Du Fay either returned to Savoy in the late fall of 1434 or else waited until spring 1435. The latter is more likely, since the accounts of the tesoreria generale show a few payments to members of the chapel late in 1434 and early in 1435 and 167 168

169

Nosow, “The Florid and Equal-Discantus Motet Styles,” 108–9 and 147–51. In 1435 the only other cathedral canon who had been a papal singer, Mathieu Hanelle, was not a composer. Gilles Flannel, also a papal singer, but not a composer, had been “received” as a canon in 1433, but twice his prebend had been held up in litigation. He did not become a canon until 1438, and was not in residence before 1441 (CBM 1046, fols. 117r, 123r, 154v). TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 80, fol. 161v. Cordero di Pamparato, “Guglielmo Dufay,” 34, and Fallows, Dufay, 220, give the date as 18 Apr. The entry is part of a rotulus going from 1 Mar. to 15 May 1435 (fols. 158v–163r) and the dates are approximate. See also Bradley, “Music,” 2:454, no. 681.

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Du Fay is not mentioned in them.170 His second stay at the court was even shorter than the first, since an order of payment for the singers of the papal chapel dated 1 June 1435 includes Du Fay. The impression one gathers from Du Fay’s sojourn at Savoy from 1434 to 1435 is indeed that Amadeus wanted him at court to serve as a counterweight to the prestige of the Burgundian chapel during the wedding festivities in February 1434, but after that he had, at the time, little else for Du Fay to do or to offer the composer. The duke had granted Du Fay the curateship at Versoix, but his nomination of the composer to a canonicate in Geneva would come only after Du Fay had returned to the papal chapel. Du Fay resumed service in the papal chapel because he probably judged, correctly as it turned out, that from the Curia he stood a better chance than from Savoy of obtaining a canonicate in Cambrai or another of the northern cathedrals, something that would assure him a lifetime income and security in his homeland. The payment order of 1 June 1435 shows Du Fay as the second singer in the list, following Gilles Flannel, called L’Enfant, a member of the chapel from 1418 to July 1433, who had returned in March 1435.171 Flannel was gone for two months in July and August, and during this time Du Fay was listed as the first singer and was the collector of the salaries for the chapel.172 Flannel returned as first singer in September, but from October on he is listed as the second singer after Du Fay.173 At this time Eugenius IV was in Florence, where he had been living since he fled Rome in 1434. He had taken up residence at the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, and the papal chapel had grown back to nine singers, almost the strength it had at the start of Eugenius’s pontificate. Singers still came and went in short intervals, but the chapel now had a core of stable personnel that included Jacopo Antonio Bartolomei called Ranuzio, Jehan de la Croix called Monamy, Du Fay, Flannel, Alfonso Garcia de Zamora, Richard Herbare, Jehan Marsille, Guillaume Le Métayer called de Malbecque, Jacques Ragot, and Enrico Silvestri da Fondi.174 In addition the chapel made occasional use of the

170 171 172

173

174

TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 80, fols. 144r and 148r. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 828, fol. 41v. The singers were paid on 17 June (ASV, I&E 398, fol. 86r). RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 828, fols. 45v and 51v; ASV, I&E 398, fols. 88r and 92r. The I&E lists the collector inconsistently, but usually it was the first singer. I&E, fol. 88r specifies Du Fay as the collector in July. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 828, fols. 57r and 59r. The order of the lists in these mandates reflect an ambiguous mixture of seniority and reputation. Flannel vastly outranked Du Fay in seniority, but Du Fay was at that point already a celebrated musician. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 828, fols. 41v, 45v, 51v, 57r.

Return to Savoy and to the Papal Chapel, Florence

singers of Florentine institutions, particularly the singers of the Baptistery, although the documentation for this is very sparse.175 The end of 1435 and the first half of 1436 were, as noted earlier,176 a time of professional frustration for Du Fay in terms of his beneficial career. Virtually every one of his requests, and even a nomination from the duke of Savoy for a substantial benefice in Geneva, were blocked by resistance from the chapters in Tournai and Geneva, and by lawsuits between him and one of his fellow singers. At the same time this was a period of enormous artistic ferment in Florence; the city, under the unofficial rule of Cosimo de’ Medici, was flourishing both economically and artistically. Luca della Robbia had finished his cantoria for the cathedral in 1435 and Donatello was beginning his own cantoria. The immense cupola over the cathedral, designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, and which even today dominates the skyline of the city, astonishing contemporary observers in that it was built without the usual scaffolding used in the construction of such domes, was nearing completion, and the architect was turning his attention to the church of Santo Spirito.177 Andrea del Castagno, Masaccio, and Fra Angelico were producing their extraordinary frescos, Ghiberti was working on the doors to the Baptistery in front of the cathedral, and Leon Battista Alberti was writing his masterpiece, De pictura. Poets and orators cultivated an elegant Latin based on classical models (which probably would have sounded extremely precious to a contemporary of Vergil). On Sunday 18 March 1436 the pope presented the cathedral, and by extension the city of Florence itself, the gift of the golden rose, which the pope traditionally blessed on Laetare Sunday and presented to a ruler or an institution as a sign of special favor.178 Normally the recipient of the rose was a closely guarded secret, but it must have been known to at least a number of members of the Curia not only that the rose would be presented to the cathedral, but that on the following Sunday, which would be both 175

176 177

178

On the singers at the Baptistery see D’Accone, “The Singers”; on those in the cathedral see Seay, “The 15th-Century Cappella.” That the papal chapel during the Florentine years occasionally used supernumeraries is also implied by a papal letter dated 25 Feb. 1343, given to one Giustiniano di Francesco (Justinianus Francisci), canon of San Giovanni in Urbino, granting him a benefice at Santa Maria di Roseto (diocese of Todi), and stating that at the time of the letter Giustiniano was a papal singer (“Nos tibi qui presbiter ac in capella nostra cantori existis”) (ASV, RL 334, fols. 229r–230v]. But Giustiniano never appears in any of the mandates for the chapel, which survive complete for all of 1434. See pp. 107–8. On Brunelleschi, see Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi, and Battisti, Filippo Brunelleschi, both with extensive bibliographies of architectural studies. On the golden rose, see Cartari, La Rosa d’oro pontificia; Müntz, “Les Roses d’or”; Cornides, Rose und Schwert; and Burns, Golden Rose.

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Passion Sunday and the Feast of the Annunciation, the pope intended to consecrate the Florentine cathedral even though the cupola was not entirely finished.179 This was an extraordinary liturgical occasion since, as a rule, the pope did not officiate at the dedication of a church, and Eugenius clearly commissioned Du Fay to write a ceremonial work for the occasion. The composition, copying, and rehearsing of a relatively complex and large-scale work probably took more than just the single week between the presentation of the rose and the dedication. In the event, Du Fay apparently wrote two works for the ceremony, the motet Nuper rosarum flores and the plainsong prose Nuper almos rosae flores,180 both of which describe the ceremony itself with varying degrees of detail and end with a prayer to the Virgin.181 The dedication was described in more than half a dozen reports.182 The most extended of these, and the only one that talks about the music at the ceremony, is that of Gianozzo Manetti,183 but his report, an elegant panegyric, tells us nothing of when, where, or how Du Fay’s motet was performed. As all the chroniclers report, the dedication was an event of immense importance in the life of Florence; the civic and ecclesiastical authorities were there in full force and it would appear as though almost the entire population of the city thronged to the cathedral. Du Fay surely was aware of the importance of the occasion and the motet is an extraordinary work. It combines an immediate sonorous appeal, largely on account of the melodic elegance of the two top voices and a rich sonority that at times reaches six voices through the use of double notes in the upper parts, with an extraordinary architecture built entirely upon number symbolism that includes, as do other late medieval motets, particularly those of the northern French tradition, not only the music but the text itself, in terms of the number of syllables per line, lines per stanza, and the number of stanzas. In many ways Nuper rosarum flores seems to build deliberately upon traits found in Du Fay’s earlier motet for Eugenius, 179 180

181

182 183

Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi, 276. A convincing case for Du Fay’s authorship appears in C. Wright, “A Sequence for the Dedication,” 57–62. C. Wright, “Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores,” 399, gives the best translation available of the motet text; an edition of the prose and a translation appear on pp. 436 and 440–41. The motet refers to the recent presentation of the golden rose and the fact that Eugenius has come to consecrate the cathedral; the prose goes beyond that, with a reference to the procession that led from Santa Maria Novella to the cathedral, as reported by Gianozzo Manetti. The use of the plural flores in both the motet and the prose merely reflect the fact that by the 15th century the actual sculpture of the rose had more than one bud on it. Cf. Burns, “Golden Rose,” plates ii and vi. See C. Wright, “Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores,” 430 and n. 64. See Smith and O’Connor, “The Consecration of Florence Cathedral,” and Zak, “Der Quellenwert.”

Return to Savoy and to the Papal Chapel, Florence

Ecclesiae militantis. Like the earlier work, it is built upon a double cantus firmus184 and is a mensuration motet, where the cantus firmi are sung four times in four different mensurations, , , , and . Since the tenors, which determine the length of each section, include the opening rests, each section consists of a duet for the upper voices twenty-eight breves in length, followed by a passage in four voices also twenty-eight breves in length. The mensural shifts produce a structure in which the sections are related to each other in the proportion 6:4:2:3, which is unique not only among Du Fay’s motets but among all motets of the early fifteenth century, and is unusual also in that the final section is longer than the preceding one. A short Amen outside the rhythmic scheme concludes the piece. The upper voices are not isorhythmic, but use isomelic returns that are clearly audible and relate the four-voice sections to each other. The duets that introduce each section, however, are quite different from each other, and the result is an audible form of great complexity, where variety and unity are carefully balanced. At one point scholars thought that the structure of the motet was connected through number symbolism to the structure of the Florentine cathedral itself,185 but it became clear that the dimensions of the cathedral were laid out according to geometric principles that are incommensurable with the arithmetic ratios that govern Du Fay’s motet.186 Instead, as Craig Wright has shown, the motet is connected to the dimensions of the temple of Solomon as reported in the Bible,187 an edifice that throughout the Middle Ages was viewed as the symbol of all churches and was particularly prominent in the entire liturgy for the dedication of a church.188 Beyond that, an equally strong medieval tradition equated the Virgin herself, and even more specifically her womb, with the temple, and this is also reflected with extraordinary detail in the number symbolism and even in the polyphonic structure of the motet.189 Two other works of Du Fay appear to have been composed at around the same time as Nuper rosarum flores. The first is an isorhythmic and mensuration motet, Salve flos Tuscae, and the second a cantilena motet, 184

185 186

187 188

In this case the two tenors present the first fourteen notes of the introit for the dedication of the church, Terribilis est, in two different rhythmic patterns and set a fifth apart in a form of pseudo-canon. See Warren, “Brunelleschi’s Dome.” Smith, Architecture, 93–94; Brewer, “Defrosted Architecture” (unpublished; I am grateful to Professor Brewer for a copy of this paper); C. Wright, “Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores,” 404, n. 24 mentions a study of the motet by Arjan De Koomen as forthcoming, but it has not been published and was unavailable to me. 1 Kings 5:1–20; see C. Wright, “Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores,” 406 and n. 31. Ibid., 407–29. 189 Ibid., 431–33.

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Mirandas parit. The first of these is virtually a structural twin of Nuper rosarum: each of its four sections consists of fifty-six breves (the same length as the sections in Nuper rosarum but without the 28+28 division into duets and four-voice sections),190 but the succession of mensurations: , , , and , yields the proportion 6:3:4:2. These numbers are the same as those of Nuper rosarum, and consequently those symbolic of the temple of Solomon, but their ordering is what one would expect in most fifteenthcentury motets, with the shortest section at the end. This indicates that the reversal in Nuper rosarum was not only deliberate but also had symbolic significance. Salve flos Tuscae is built upon a double tenor, but in this case the second tenor is a freely composed voice (as it would be in most of Du Fay’s later motets). The chant cited in the cantus firmus is the phrase viri mendaces, from the responsory Circumdederunt me viri mendaces, used most often on Matins of Palm Sunday, but also on Passion Sunday. In Florence at the time the responsory was used only on Passion Sunday, that is, on the same day that Santa Maria was consecrated,191 so that it is more than likely that a definite connection exists between both motets, and they were probably sung on the same day, but the texts of Salve flos Tuscae do not point to a specific occasion. The triplum sings the praises of the city of Florence and the motetus sings the praises of the women of Florence, ending with a personal statement from the poet, who is surely the composer himself:192 Ista, deae mundi, vester per saecula cuncta, Guillermus cecini natus et ipse Fay.193 The tenor refers to “lying men,” which might be the enemies of Eugenius IV who drove him out of Rome, as Lütteken suggests,194 or the

190

191

192

193

194

Nonetheless, Du Fay uses isorhythm in Salve flos to divide each section in two sections of twenty-eight breves; cf. Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 219–20. CAO 6287. Virtually all the Italian antiphoners inventories in the Cantus database have the responsory for Palm Sunday. The exceptions, however, are telling: one is Lucca, BC 601, from Lucca, and the other is Florence, Archivio Arcivescovile, s.c., from Santa Maria del Fiore. These are the two sources that transmit the melody of viri mendaces, note by note, as it appears in Du Fay’s motet. Later Florentine sources, giving the respond for Palm Sunday, have substantial variants. The Latin text here follows the emendations proposed in Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 108–9. “These things, O goddesses of the world, yours throughout all ages, I Guillaume have sung, who by birth am also Du Fay.” Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 294.

Return to Savoy and to the Papal Chapel, Florence

enemies of the Medici in 1433, as Holford-Strevens suggests.195 Still, the interrelationship of the three texts remains problematic, but there can be little doubt that Salve flos Tuscae is a sister work of Nuper rosarum flores.196 A careful reading of the number symbolism of both motets presented in the excellent and detailed analyses of Craig Wright for Nuper rosarum flores197 and Laurenz Lütteken for Salve flos Tuscae198 shows an extraordinary amount of intertextuality in the symbolic structure of both works.199 The third motet, Mirandas parit, is a three-voice cantilena and one of Du Fay’s most immediately ingratiating works; it would appear to be utterly unrelated to the two other works except that its text, like the motetus of Salve flos Tuscae (if the text of that motet is read literally), is in praise of Florentine women in the first part, narrowed to praise of a single unnamed maiden in the second. In addition, both Michael Allsen and Robert Nosow have pointed to features that create a relationship between Mirandas parit and the other two Florentine motets in the use of divisi at certain places and the length of the sections,200 and in the unusual aspect that Mirandas parit and the motetus of Salve flos Tuscae address the women of Florence at a time when most ceremonial motets were not addressed to women.201 While the occasion for Nuper rosarum is clear, those for Salve flos Tuscae and Mirandas parit are far less so. Salve flos Tuscae, if its texts are read as Phelps does (see note), could be for the dedication ceremony; otherwise it and Mirandas parit were clearly for a civic occasion rather than a liturgical one,202 but no occasions that would lend themselves to the performance of these two works are mentioned in any of the surviving chronicles. The texts for these three works are some of the motet texts that we can postulate with 195 196

197 198 199

200 201 202

Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 109; see also n. 33. Fallows, Dufay, 46, suggests that Salve flos Tuscae bears similarities to Du Fay’s music of the 1450s, but, as he admits, so does Nuper rosarum flores, and on p. 291, n. 3, claims that the harmonic style of the motet “puts it alongside the lament for Constantinople,” and suggests that until the motet can be firmly dated it should not be discussed too fully. This ignores the fact that after Apr. 1436 Du Fay would have had no reason to write such a work. C. Wright, “Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores,” 397–400 and 437–38. Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 398–407. Phelps, “The Pagan Virgin?” presents an intriguing interpretation of the texts of Salve flos Tuscae in the light of traditions of exegesis based upon Dante’s Commedia where “the flower of Florence” is the cathedral itself, and the “maidens,” (puellae) and the “goddesses of the world” (deae mundi) are the Florentine towns and possessions. Under such a reading, which is not impossible in the classicizing atmosphere of Florence at the time, Salve flos Tuscae can be heard as another work that could be properly sung at some point during the dedication ceremony. Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 220 and n. 50. Nosow, “Du Fay and the Cultures of Renaissance Florence,” 106. This is also suggested by Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 402–6.

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some confidence are the work of Du Fay.203 The text of Nuper rosarum, with its stanzas of heptasyllabic lines, is extremely unusual and probably, as Wright notes, written that way on account of its significance in terms of number symbolism,204 but the other two texts, one in elegiac distichs and the other in moderately competent hexameters, suggest that Du Fay was indeed affected by Florentine culture. These texts, according to HolfordStrevens, give the impression of “a talented amateur attempting the neoclassical poetry fashionable in Florence.”205 The three motets are astonishing works, and even if we assume that the composition of some of this music began a few weeks before Laetare Sunday in 1436, we have here three complex pieces that are closely related in terms of their intertextuality and at the same time widely different in their sound, composed over a period of about six weeks at the most, and this at a time when Du Fay’s beneficial career was going through what was surely a turbulent and frustrating time for the composer. A recurring comment in Fallows’s study of Du Fay mentions a sense of insecurity reflected in his music, particularly in the very early works but also in the last works, as if the composer were, in Fallows’s words, “trying too hard.”206 This may also be the case with these motets, and it suggests a possible explanation. Du Fay apparently did not have the kind of diplomatic skills that allowed a number of his colleagues, for example Robert Auclou, to amass an enormous amount of benefices from very early on. Contrary to the views expressed about him by Wright,207 Du Fay apparently viewed himself primarily as a musician, and indeed as a composer in a sense that was not to become common until one or two generations later.208 This attitude, I suspect, was valued by some of his patrons, particularly the dukes of Savoy and Burgundy and perhaps even Eugenius IV, but would easily be misunderstood by many of his colleagues (particularly those who were not musicians) and his immediate bureaucratic superiors, and it could be one of the causes for the persistent difficulties in his beneficial career well into middle age. His reaction was apparently to try to write even better music, not an uncommon one among artists of any kind, and yet one that never addressed the resentment of the bureaucrats.

203 204 205 207

See Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 107–14. C. Wright, “Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores,” 399 and n. 11. Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 110. 206 Fallows, Dufay, 22, 213–14. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai.” 208 See Wegman, “From Maker to Composer.”

The Papal Chapel in Bologna; Du Fay as Canon of Cambrai

The Papal Chapel in Bologna; Du Fay as Canon of Cambrai Less than a month after the dedication of Santa Maria del Fiore, on 18 April 1436, Pope Eugenius left Florence, where he had resided since his flight from Rome in 1434, but where he had met increased hostility, and took up residence in Bologna. The pope was preparing for yet another attempt at dissolving the Council of Basel by ordering a transfer to the papal city of Bologna with the bull Doctoris gentium. His effort proved fruitless in terms of dissolving the Council of Basel, but led to the eventual opening of the Council of Ferrara,209 and among the diplomatic visits that he received during the time he was preparing the bull was that of the Marquis of Ferrara, Niccolò III d’Este, on 22 April. This occasion probably provided for a renewed contact between Du Fay and the Este family, since surely the visit involved musical entertainment of the marquis. On 2 August 1436 Ferry de Grancey, bishop of Autun, died. This set off a series of moves that eventually provided Du Fay with what would be his one major benefice. Eugenius transferred Jehan Rolin, the third son of chancellor Nicolas Rolin (and eventually a cardinal) from the see of Châlon-sur-Sâone to that of Autun on 20 August, and that same day he transferred Jehan Germain from the see of Nevers to that of Châlon-surSâone. To replace Germain at Nevers he tapped Jehan Vivien, archdeacon of Baume in Autun and canon of Cambrai, but living then in Rome.210 Vivien was made bishop of Nevers on 26 September,211 but must have resigned his canonicate at Cambrai through the imperial notary Roberto Paradisi before 3 September,212 because on that day the pope provided Du Fay with a motu proprio and a papal bull granting him Vivien’s canonicate at Cambrai.213 The papal letters and the process of Vivien’s resignation were presented to the chapter on 12 November, by Nicole Grenon (probably not by coincidence the composer whose Gloria Du Fay ornamented with a contratenor during his visit to the cathedral), and were accepted without any of the troubles that had plagued the composer elsewhere.214 In all likelihood Du Fay’s visit to Cambrai in 1434 had paved the way for this acceptance and may indeed explain the visit, which may have included some contact with the court of Burgundy as well.

209 211 212 214

Gill, Eugenius IV, 95–96. 210 Eubel, Hierarchia, 1:73; 2:80, 112, 204. The bull appointing Vivienne bishop of Nevers appears in ASV, RL 346, fols. 138r–140r. ASV, RL338, fols. 145v–146r. 213 ASV, RS 326, fols. 212v–213r and RL 343, fols. 76r–77v. CBM 1057, fol. 39r.

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A great deal was always known and rumored about the careers of the important papal servants in the Roman court. Vivien had been in Rome since 1421, for many years as a representative of the duke of Burgundy at the papal court, and from early on had acquired an enormous number of canonicates and dignities.215 By 1433 surely there was talk in Rome that he was a prime candidate for an episcopal see, which would require his resignation from a number of other benefices, including that in Cambrai, and indeed, a careful reading of Eubel indicates that Vivien was in fact the only French cleric raised to the episcopate between 1433 and 1436.216 Du Fay’s swift acceptance by the chapter and the absence of any other claimants for what was an important benefice suggest that both the duke of Burgundy, who was Vivien’s patron, and Vivien himself were involved in the assignation of the benefice, and in fact events in Du Fay’s life not very long after his reception at Cambrai also indicate that the composer was being supported by the duke of Burgundy.217 Another thing that might have helped is that between 10 March and 20 April 1436 Du Fay’s relative, Jehan Hubert, Jr., who was provost of St-Géry and conservator of the privileges of the University of Paris, also became a canon of Cambrai, on the resignation of Jehan Chevrot.218 A littera de fructibus dated 21 March 1437 is addressed only to the chapter at Cambrai, indicating that at that time Du Fay had apparently no other secure benefice in the north.219 This is important to note because another Vatican letter dated 10 May 1437 could be read as indicating that the composer had finally collated a canonicate at Tournai. The letter addresses Du Fay as a canon of Tournai, but not as a canon of Cambrai, and for the first time as a Baccalarius in decretis: “Eugenius etc. Dilecto filio Guillermo Du Fay canonico Tornacensis, Bacallario in Decretis, salutem.” The letter mentions that on 24 April 1431 (the date of rotulus for the chapel) Eugenius provided Du Fay with canonicates at Tournai and at St. Donatian in Bruges, as well as a personatus in Harlebeke. Du Fay had also 215 216

217 218

219

Cf. ASV, RS 149, fol. 11r; DC 9, fol. 38v. Most of the few vacant French sees at the time were filled by translation of Italian clerics, most of them relatives of Eugenius, who held them in commendam, as was the case of Amiens, given on 5 Nov. 1436 to Cardinal Francesco Condulmaro; see Eubel, Hierarchia, 2:86. See later in this chapter. CBM 1046 gives 10 Mar.; CBM 1057, fol. 54v, gives 20 Apr. This is one of the very few instances of a discrepancy between Tranchant’s lists (CBM 1046) and the chapter acts. Chevrot was on his way to becoming bishop of Tournai that November (Eubel, Hierarchia, 2:253). Hubert had died by May 1437. His Cambrai prebend went for a short time to Jehan Marsille, a colleague of Du Fay in the papal chapel (CBM 1057, fol. 66r), and a prebend he held at Ste-Waudru in Mons went to Binchois (Devillers, Chartes, 4:201–2). ASV, DC 19, fol. 256r.

The Papal Chapel in Bologna; Du Fay as Canon of Cambrai

the rectorship of the church of St-Loup de Versoix, and the duke of Savoy had proposed him for a canonicate in Geneva. The pope allowed Du Fay, who was a papal singer, to keep all his benefices.220 The absence of any mention of the canonicate at Cambrai and the references to the two benefices implied in the rotulus of 1431 indicate very clearly the legal context of this letter: it goes back to the nomination of Du Fay by the duke for a canonicate in Geneva in 1435 and its main thrust is to clear any difficulties that Du Fay was facing with the chapter in Geneva. One of these difficulties was that Du Fay was neither of noble lineage nor a university graduate, and this letter indicates that at least the latter obstacle had been removed. The pope had the authority to grant university degrees by fiat through any of the universities in the papal states. Now in residence in Bologna, this is apparently what Eugenius did. The actual letter granting Du Fay the degree has not survived, but the event took place most likely between the arrival of the papal court in Bologna on 22 April 1436 and 10 May 1437 and was directly connected to the nomination to the Geneva benefice. Ironically, if Du Fay did study some law during his nearly two years in Bologna (and though this is possible we must realize that there is not a shred of evidence for it), given the time when the pope granted him his degree, it is all but certain that it was from the university in Bologna.221 This event is commemorated in a curious cantilena motet by Du Fay, Iuvenis qui puellam,222 which unfortunately survives incomplete in its only source.223 The ascription, which in this case surely goes back to the composer, is “Decretalis Guillermus dufay.” The text begins with a citation of a letter of Pope Eugenius III (1145–1153) “ad Aesculapium presbyterum,”224 dealing with propriety of the marriage of a youth to a girl who is not yet seven years old, which was a staple of canon law discussions on matrimony,225 followed 220

221

222

223 224 225

ASV, RL 353, fol. 80r–v. Another papal letter, ASV, RL 355, fols. 288r–289v, dated 6 July 1437, grants Du Fay a dispensation from all incompatibilities, but also a licentia permutandi for all his benefices. Fallows, Dufay, 47, states that the canonicate at Cambrai was also for a jurist, a prebenda libera iurista, but he is in error: the prebend was a simple prebenda libera sinistra latere, a free prebend on the left side of the choir; cf. CBM 1046, fol. 183r. OO Besseler 6, no. 9; OO Planchart 1/24. Besseler, “Neue Dokumente,” 170–73, referred to the work as a “Scherzmotette,” but eventually published it among the songs. See also Planchart, “What’s in a Name?,” 173. MuB 3224, fols. 105v–106v (new numbering, pp. 14–16). This was first noted by Elders, “Dufay as Musical Orator.” Fallows, The Songs, 51 presents a summary of the text sources and notes that the letter appeared in Pope Gregory IX’s Decretals (1234), a text that was part of Du Fay’s library at his death (see Appendix 4). Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 152–53, provides a detailed history of interpretations of this text.

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by a parody of a legal disputation. One reading of this text associates it with Du Fay’s appointment as a delegate to the Council of Basel in 1438, and at a time when the council was not yet seven years old.226 This is an attractive hypothesis, but far less plausible than assuming, as Besseler did, that the motet was part of a tradition of quaestiones quodlibetales, which were part of the often ribald festivities with which new graduates celebrated their degrees.227 The arguments advanced by Holford-Strevens, which include the mocksolemnity of the piece’s resemblance to sacred music (including some particularly sonorous divisi), make the work more likely a self-parody at a time of merriment, something that does not tally with the political situation in 1438. In a number of ways Iuvenis qui puellam, particularly in its use of sections in fauxbourdon, appears to hark back to Supremum est mortalibus bonum, and it may be part of an in-joke in the piece, since his law degree and his benefice at Cambrai were, for Du Fay, the bona suprema, and to judge from his selfwritten epitaph, remained so for him. The last few months of Du Fay’s stay in the papal chapel after becoming a canon of Cambrai have left no apparent trace in the composer’s work. This is not surprising; Eugenius was increasingly preoccupied with the tug of war with the Council of Basel even though his move to Bologna was, in fact, a sign that his cause was improving as secular princes and prelates were growing weary of what some viewed as the intransigence of the council fathers.228 Still, this was probably not so apparent at the time. On 7 May 1437, partly in response to Eugenius’s bull Doctoris gentium, the conciliar party obtained a majority in Basel, and declared that any discussion of the union of the Eastern and Western church should take place in Basel, Avignon, or somewhere in Savoy.229 In this the council fathers disastrously underestimated their influence upon the Greek Church, and with this declaration they set themselves firmly on the road to a schism. Eugenius, who was never a particularly fervent patron of music, was now distracted by conciliar politics and there were no occasions in Bologna for the kinds of religious-civic ceremonies that had taken place in Florence in the spring of 1436. In terms of the papal chapel itself the last months of Du Fay’s stay saw the first signs of a new experiment with the use of choirboys. On 28 December 1436, Daniele Scoto, bishop of Concordia and treasurer of 226 227 228

229

Trumble, “Autobiographical Implications,” 60–63; Fallows, Dufay, 49. Besseler, “Neue Dokumente,” 172–73, endorsed in Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 157. Gill, Eugenius IV, 81–86. To be sure, Gill’s account is openly anticonciliar, but as he notes, around 1436 the tide had begun to shift in favor of the pope in most of northern Italy, and the papal forces had some military success in Rome itself. Stieber, Pope Eugenius IV, 19–44.

The Papal Chapel in Bologna; Du Fay as Canon of Cambrai

the Apostolic Chamber, had a payment of 22 florins made to Du Fay (12 fl.) for a new robe and to Filippo da Rimini (10 fl.) for instructing the pueri of the chapel in grammar.230 A similar payment was made to Filippo on 20 April 1437,231 but the payments to the singers themselves include no mention of the pueri until October 1437, when four pueri, but no magister puerorum, begin to appear in the cameral mandates.232 The four pueri are Guillaume Scoblant, Pierre de Bomel,233 Jan Jonckin, and Lodovico Bernardi, the first three from Liège and the last from Narni.234 At this time the church of St-Jean in Liège had developed a considerable reputation as a choir school, and it would appear that the papal chapel turned to them for the new choirboys. The experiment lasted a bit longer than that in 1425: Scoblant dropped out by March 1438,235 but Raoul Guéroult, called Mirelika, came in and sang as a chorister from October to December 1438 before joining the adult singers.236 Lodovico began singing as an adult singer in January 1440.237 Jonckin switched to the adult choir in April 1441,238 and Pierre apparently dropped out in November 1441.239 Since Filippo was instructing them at least from December 1436 the choristers were connected in some manner to the papal chapel during the last six months of Du Fay’s stay, but by the time their names first appear in the payment mandates the composer had left the Curia. 230

231 232

233 234

235

236 238 239

RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 828, fol. 108v (mandate, countersigned by Cardinal Francesco Condulmaro and the notary Roberto Paradisi), I&E 399, fol. 79v and I&E 400, fol. 80v (actual payment). ASV, I&E 399, fol. 87v; I&E 400, fol. 22v. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 828, fol. 136r. The introitus et exitus registers merely state that the payment is for eleven adult singers and four boys, but give no names, e.g., ASV, I&E 402, fols. 73v, 76r, 78r, etc. Bomel is nowadays part of Namur in Belgium. Of these Jonckin poses a special problem. He is first mentioned as Johannes Iouleini, afterward almost invariably as Johannes Ionckini, alias de Viseto, but after ca. 1447 he appears as Johannes Foulsini (cf. Starr, “Music,” 139–40). From the supplications that survive, it is clear that his patronymic was Jonckin; “Foulsini” was a sobriquet, and he came from the town of Visé. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 828, fol. 150r (Feb. 1438) is his last payment; he later became a campanarius of the chapel (ASV, RL 371, fols. 175v–177r [16 Aug. 1440]). RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 828, fols. 189r and 196r. 237 RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 829, fol. 11v. Ibid., fol. 76r. Ibid., fol. 110v (Oct. 1441) records his last payment. Given the situation with Jan Jonckin’s name, where we have a patronymic, a toponymic, and a sobriquet that are used exclusively for long periods of time in the documents, there is a small possibility that Pierre de Bomel could be the same man as the singer Pierre Langhe, who sang in the chapel from Oct. 1442 to Dec. 1443 (RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 829, fol. 182r and Reg. 830, fol. 25v for the terminal dates) and has left no other trace in the papal archives, which is in itself unusual. Langhe was magister puerorum at Tournai in 1450 and was still alive in 1466 (Grunzweig, “Notes sur la musique,” 73–75 and 85).

145

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The mandate for Du Fay’s last payment as a papal singer is dated 1 May 1437 and the actual payment was made on 7 May.240 The same day he received his salary he also paid in person the annates for the canonicate at Cambrai.241 The day before, a memorandum for a payment of 20 ducats to Du Fay was entered into the account books in Ferrara.242 The payment at Ferrara has long been viewed as evidence of a visit by Du Fay to the Este court;243 if this is the case, the visit probably took place at the end of April or the beginning of May. It is just possible for Du Fay to have collected the payment in Ferrara on one day and to be in Bologna the next, since the cities are about 52 km from each other, but that would have required an almost uninterrupted horseback ride of several hours. The document in Ferrara is an internal accounting memorandum that does not specify when the money was paid or if Du Fay collected it in person at Ferrara itself. What probably took place is that Du Fay went to Ferrara with Niccolò’s retinue after the Marquis took leave of the pope in late April and was back in Bologna by 7 May; the monies from Ferrara could have been given to him a few days before the date of the memorandum or, more likely, sent to him in Bologna sometime in May. The Este payment is quite substantial, the equivalent of Du Fay’s salary for four months as a papal singer and twice as much as he received from the duke of Savoy when he went to visit his mother in 1434.244 Earlier scholarship had associated it with the composition of the ballade C’est bien raison, which would call for a redating of the completion of its source, Ox 213, which is in itself improbable;245 Lockwood suggests that perhaps the payment is simply a gesture of munificence toward Du Fay similar to such gestures toward Jehan Mouton in the

240

241

242

243 244

245

RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 828, fol. 120v (mandate); ASV, I&E 399, fol. 70r; I&E 400, fol. 90r (payment). There is a discrepancy in the date of the payment: I&E 399 dates it 1 May, the same day as the mandate; I&E 400 dates it 7 May. The later date is surely the correct one since as a rule there was always some time between the mandate and the actual payment. ASV, I&E 399, fol. 53v; I&E 400, fol. 54v: “Dicta die habuit prefatus D[aniel] episcopus thesaurarius predicto domino F[rancisco] recipiendo ut supra a venerabili viro domino Guillermo Du Fay pro compositione annatis canonicatus et prebendae ecclesiae Cameracensis per manus suas florenos similes sexdecim. 16 fl.” MAS, Camera marchionale Estense 4986/99, fol. 158v, ed. in Besseler, “Neue Dokumente,” 166. See also Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 38. Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 38. Even allowing for inflation and the vagaries of exchange, between 1434 and 1437 the cameral florin of the popes, the Savoyard florin, and the Venetian ducat (which was the currency of account in Ferrara) were roughly equivalent. See Lockwood, “Dufay and Ferrara,” 3, but also id., Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 38–39, and Fallows, Dufay, 48.

The Return to Savoy

next century.246 This may indeed be the case, but now we may have a further context for the payment. One of the pieces added to ModB after the manuscript had reached Ferrara in the 1440s247 was Du Fay’s setting of the antiphon O gemma martyrum. It is a relatively extended work, about ninety breves long, setting a text in honor of St. George. The cantus paraphrases a plainsong and the melody is that of the Great Antiphons of Advent. Until very recently no plainsong source was known for this contrafact, but now it turns out that it was used as a Magnificat antiphon for St. George, the patron saint of Ferrara, and its only sources anywhere are the chant books from that city.248 The piece has the kind of modest texture one finds in the Kyries and other strictly liturgical works of Du Fay, but its style is that of his music of the late 1430s, and it was surely written at the request of the duke. That he rewarded the composer so extravagantly for such a simple work might mean that there was more music than what was copied into ModB, perhaps a complete set of Vespers, since it is around this time that Du Fay began composing the Vespers for St. Francis and St. Anthony of Padua, which are also found among the additions to ModB.249

The Return to Savoy By August 1437 Du Fay was back in Savoy; the chapter acts of the cathedral of Lausanne record his presence at the chapter meeting on 25 and 26 August,250 and we have at least one work of Du Fay that was almost surely composed for the cathedral. It is the prose Isti sunt duae olivae, for SS. Peter and Paul;251 the sources for the plainsong are virtually all from the diocese of Lausanne or from southern Germany, and the prose was sung nowhere

246 247 248

249 250

251

Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 38; id., “Jean Mouton and Jean Michel,” 212–13. Cf. Haar and Nádas, “The Medici,” 85–86. Ferrara, Museo de la Cattedrale, Antifonario X (ca. 1490), fols. 19v–20r; Cornell University Library, MS Rare BX C 36 0635 (olim MS B 31), fol. 2v (incipit), a 14th-century ordo from outside Ferrara brought to Ferrara ca. 1400 and provided with two introductory gatherings of local origin (cf. Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 80); BL, Add. MS 28025, fol. 263r (incipit), Ferrarese ordo of ca. 1400. I am deeply thankful to Dr. Giovanni Sassu, curator of manuscripts at the Museo de la Cattedrale, who tracked the office of St. George in the antiphoners and provided me with excellent photographs of the entire office. See p. 346. LACV, MD DG 7/1, fols. 47r–48v. The canons present are Raoul Gavard, Girard de Verell, Jehan de Maglans, Antoine Gopet, Pierre Frenier, Girard Pattin, Jehan Falquet, Guillaume Cochard, and Guillaume Du Fay. OO Besseler 5, no. 8; OO Planchart 6/7.

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else.252 Some time after 13 November 1437, probably early in 1438, Du Fay received clothing at the court.253 At this point Du Fay had obtained one major benefice that assured him of a comfortable retirement in his old age, the canonicate at Cambrai, and had moved from the papal court to an environment that, from all we can tell, he found more congenial, the court of Savoy. On 8 October 1434, while Du Fay was in Cambrai, Amadeus had founded the Order of Saint Maurice, to be housed in the castle of Ripaille near Thonon, and on 11 November, with a solemn ceremony, he retired from the rule of the duchy (although keeping the title), making his eldest son, Louis, prince of Piedmont, and his second son, Philip, count of Geneva.254 Louis was, from then on, the effective ruler of the duchy. These were decisions that Amadeus had been considering since 1431, when the construction of the castle of Ripaille and the entire enclosure that would become the seat of the order, began to be built.255 Unfortunately, his son Louis, an idle man entirely in thrall to his beautiful and capricious wife, proved an ineffectual ruler,256 but he was apparently an avid supporter of music and appears to have developed something as close to a real friendship with Du Fay as the distinctions of class allowed at the time. Fallows noted that Du Fay’s connection with Savoy, even as early as his first sojourn, opened the floodgates and that Du Fay composed a great deal of music between 1433 and 1436.257 This now appears to be the historical equivalent of an optical illusion: the two manuscripts that transmit the bulk of Du Fay’s music before 1440, Bo Q15 and Ox 213, were finished by around 1434 in one case and 1436 in the other, and their repertory goes back to the earliest music we have from Du Fay. From Du Fay’s Roman years we have most of the Hymn cycle, the Kyries, and the plainsong-based Glorias, which are an enormous amount of music. Still, it is hard not to assume, and not just from the documentary record of the late 1430s, but from similar records in the 1450s, that in Savoy Du Fay had something like the privileges of a favored courtier, unconstrained by the regular duties of a chaplain.258 252 253

254

255 256 258

See AH 40, no. 321, and also Planchart, “Music for the Papal Chapel,” 109. TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 83, fol. 165v. The entry is in an account that runs from 13 Nov. to 3 Mar. (fols. 164r–166v). Bradley, “Music,” 2, no. 693. Maria José, Amedée VIII, 2:125. Court documents, however, refer to Louis and Philip by these titles even before Nov. 1434. Ibid., 2:110–22, including an archeological reconstruction of the original site. Ibid., 2:272–301. 257 Fallows, Dufay, 43. Fallows, ibid., 49, suggests this. Equally telling are the accounts of the Savoy chapel beginning in 1449, when regular records are beginning to be kept apart from those of the tesoreria generale. For the years when Du Fay was again in Savoy, and is referred to in several official

The Return to Savoy

In many ways these years in Savoy must have appeared to the composer as a particularly happy and promising time. Some of the earlier troubles lingered, however. Papal documents from 6 July and 17 August 1437 show that Du Fay was still trying to obtain a dispensation for any incompatibilities created by his being the rector of the church of St-Loup in Versoix, which was a benefice with cure,259 and was still trying to obtain the canonicate in Geneva to which Amadeus had nominated him, even though one of the obstacles, namely his not being a university graduate, had been removed.260 It may be that the chapter in Geneva, like a number of other cathedral chapters in Europe at the time, resented any intrusion by a secular lord into what they regarded as their own structure. In the end Du Fay never succeeded in collating the benefice in Geneva. If life at the court of Savoy was congenial and pleasant for Du Fay, nonetheless a number of historical forces were already in motion that would soon put the composer in an untenable position. On 8 January 1438 Eugenius IV opened the newly convened Council of Ferrara, which the pope had called as a transferal and continuation of the Council of Basel, even though the council fathers in Basel had refused to recognize their dissolution by Eugenius. On 14 February the Council of Basel elected as president of the council Louis Allemand, head of the antipapal party in the council and a man whom Eugenius had distrusted and disliked since Allemand had replaced him as governor of Bologna in 1424. By coincidence, the day after Allemand’s election Eugenius pronounced an anathema upon any decisions of the Council of Basel. As tensions rose, all dioceses in Europe were in a quandary and many decided to retain connections with both the pope and the council, among them Cambrai. On 21 February 1436 the chapter had appointed a number of persons that were to deal with the Roman Curia and with the Council of Basel; these included members of the cathedral chapter then in Cambrai and clerics not connected to the cathedral except in this respect. Among them were Gilles Carlier (the dean), Thomas Freuet, and Robert Auclou, canons, Jehan Collemanque, canon of Ste-Croix, Robert de Fardel, and Jehan Ligier, as well as one or two whose names are now illegible on account of water damage.261 Of these Fardel and Ligier, the last a priest from Rouen, were

259 260

261

documents as the maestro di cappella of the duke, his name never appears in the accounts of the chapel itself. ASV, RS 337, fols. 66v–67r. ASV, RS 339, fols. 276v–277r. The benefice in question is identified here as one vacant on the death of Henri Faure. CMB 1057, fol. 21r.

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not part of the cathedral clergy and were probably in Basel at the time. Auclou had been in Rome as a representative of the duke of Burgundy at least until 1434,262 but had made his first residence at Cambrai by 11 March 1435.263 Thus most of these men were actually in Cambrai rather than in Basel and Rome. On 7 May 1438 the chapter decided to ratify its representatives to the council, the pope, and the emperor, adding new names to the list. The entry in the acts is incomplete and breaks off after the four names, so we have no idea of who was empowered to do what. The men named are Robert Auclou, Klaus Vriend (Nicolas Lami, Nicolas Amici), and Du Fay, canons, and Robert de Fardel. The text breaks after Fardel’s name, so again we are not told what his connection with the chapter was, and he appears only in these two entries.264 It is worth noting that the list of canons present at that meeting includes Vriend but not Auclou, so that it is most likely that Auclou was at this time in Basel at the council. In political terms it made a great deal of sense to appoint Auclou and Du Fay as delegates to the council. Du Fay was in Savoy, close at hand, and Auclou was a skilled diplomat who had been for nearly a decade the secretary of cardinal Allemand, the newly elected president of the council, and Du Fay had been in the employment of Allemand as well when he was in Bologna. If Du Fay attended some of the sessions of the council or spent any time in Basel in the late 1430s it is also likely that he encountered there Martin Le Franc, and probably his former colleagues in the papal chapel, Barthélemy Poignare, who was an officer of the council by 1436,265 and probably was a representative of Notre-Dame in Arras at the council, as well as Guillaume le Métayer.266 He surely also met Nicole Merques, who became a singer of the council’s chapel on 9 November 1433,267 and then passed on to the chapel of Pope Felix V, where he was serving still in 1445.268 Merques appears to have had access to a great deal of Du Fay’s music at the time. Peter Wright has made an intriguing and largely convincing case for Merques being the scribe of Tr 921,269 and an anonymous setting of Sancti Spiritus assit nobis gratia in that manuscript, which had 262 263

264

265 267 268 269

ASV, RL 320, fols. 130v–132r. CBM 1057, fol. 4v. Auclou had been received as canon on 16 Dec. 1433; see CBM 1046, fol. 136r. CBM 1057, fol. 66v. The first half of the entry concerns setting up proctors to deal with a lawsuit against the chapters of the cathedral and Ste-Croix. See Chapter 2, n. 257. 266 Haller, Concilium, 6:216; also Tegen, “Baselkonciliet,” 129. Haller, Concilium, 2:516. TAS, Archivio di Corte, Bollario di Felice V, Reg. 7, fols. 312r–313r. Unpublished paper presented at the International Conference on Early Music in Novacella in 2009. I am deeply grateful to Professor Wright for allowing me to see his work.

The Return to Savoy

been attributed to Du Fay by Hamm,270 is a reworking of Du Fay’s Rex omnipotens.271 Since Notker’s prose is largely a contrafact of Rex omnipotens, any polyphony based on Rex omnipotens could be used for Sancti Spiritus, but some of the verses in Sancti Spiritus cannot be reworked from Du Fay’s polyphony and are newly composed in a slightly different style. Moverover, in one of Du Fay’s stanzas the arranger went off in a couple of measures and wrote some odd counterpoint. This arrangement, as well as the very attractive Mittit ad virginem found in Tr 92 and Bo Q15, might well be, as Wright suggests, by Merques.272 Although Du Fay was not in the service of the duke of Burgundy, he apparently maintained contacts with the court of Burgundy and benefited from Burgundian patronage. This becomes apparent in his relations with the church of St. Donatian in Bruges, where he had received an expectative in April 1431, but where neither the canons of that church, nor apparently Du Fay himself, had done much to advance his cause. On 7 January 1438 Jehan de Bourgogne, the illegitimate stepbrother of Duke Philip the Good, was elected provost of St. Donatian,273 and soon afterward, on 28 April, probably under pressure from the new provost, as Strohm surmises, Du Fay was received into the twenty-fourth prebend of the church, succeeding the late Guillaume Meyere (Guillermus Maioris).274 The entry in the acts is quite detailed and gives us a glimpse of the legal trail that followed the expectative of 1431, which had been presented to the chapter by Jehan Polon in September 1431.275 This time Du Fay’s proctor was Guillaume de Nieppe, who presented, in addition to the papal bull, a “public instrument,” written down by Pierre David, clerk of Poitiers, and dated 16 June 1431, and a process written down by Hughes Scully, canon of Orleans, dated 12 June 1431 (both documents drafted in Rome at the time). The canons were chary and, should there be a lawsuit connected with Du Fay’s 270 271 272

273

274

275

Tr 92, fols. 36v–37v; cf. Hamm, Chronology, 76–78. Cf. Laubenthal, “Eine zum Teil neue Sequenzbearbeitung Dufays.” On Mittit ad virginem, see Planchart, “The Polyphonic Proses,” 5–7 and 11–13. The attribution to Merques was communicated to me privately by Professor Wright. BAB, Reeks A 51, fol. 247v. The illegitimate half-brothers of the new provost included not only the duke of Burgundy but the provost of St-Pierre de Lille and Willermus Iuvenis, a canon of St. Donatian, who signed the entry in the acts and mentioned that the provost was his brother. For an incident concerning Binchois at this election see Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, 153, n. 49. BAB, Reeks A 51, fol. 253r; Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, 24. From the language of the letter where David de Bourgogne, Jehan’s successor as provost, appoints Nicaise Du Puit to this prebend after Du Fay’s resignation in 1446, it is clear that this benefice was at the collation of the provost himself; cf. BAB, Reeks 51, fol. 182r. BAB, Reeks A 51, fol. 201r.

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reception, required a surety, which was provided by two of the canons, Guillaume Belledame and Georges Martin, who had been a colleague of Du Fay in the papal chapel.276 This was not an auspicious beginning for Du Fay’s tenure as canon of St. Donatian. Shortly after Du Fay became a canon of St. Donatian, Louis of Savoy, prince of Piedmont, and his brother Philip, count of Geneva, who had been at war with each other for several years, concluded a peace treaty, nominally between the cities of Bern and Freiburg, which was signed in Bern on 3 May 1438. Both brothers brought large retinues to the signing, and the celebrations continued for several days later in Freiburg, where the city paid for Louis’s musicians.277 For this occasion Du Fay wrote the motet Magnanime gentes.278 Like Nuper rosarum flores, the piece is a mensuration motet, where the cantus firmus, the first phrase of the responsory Haec est vera fraternitas for Matins of the common of martyrs, consists of a single tenor talea/color that is subjected to four mensurations: , , , and , and a canon that doubles the length of the notes of the first section. Like Apostolo glorioso and Ecclesiae militantis, the piece opens with an extended introitus for the triplum and motetus that lies outside of the main rhythmic structure of the piece. The upper voices are neither isorhythmic nor isomelic, recalling instead the melodic freedom of Balsamus et munda cera. The text, in elegiac distichs, resembles the writing found in Salve flos and to some extent in Mirandas parit, and according to HolfordStrevens it could be by Du Fay, if he is indeed the person HolfordStrevens calls “the Salve poet.”279 The piece is remarkable also in that it manages to create a good deal of the grandeur of the two big Florentine motets with only three voices and no divisi anywhere, which means that it could be performed with a far more modest ensemble than that of the papal chapel at the time, something consonant with what we know about the size of the ducal chapel in Savoy at the time.280 In an unostentatious manner, the piece is in a sense a true summa of Du Fay’s motet writing from Vasilissa to Nuper rosarum flores. A little over five months after the peace of Bern, Duke Louis’s court crossed the Alps to spend the winter in Pinerolo. We know that the chapel went with them only because there was a mix-up and the chaplains had to remain behind for a few days because there were no horses for them, so on 16 October they had to remain at Le Bourget and the court paid for their 276 278 280

Ibid., fol. 253r. 277 Besseler, “Neue Dokumente,” 167–70. OO Besseler 1, no. 17; OO Planchart 2/11. 279 Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 116. TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 84, fols. 353r–354r, shows that in Oct. 1438 the ducal chapel consisted of Du Fay and four other singers.

The Return to Savoy

lodging and meals. The next day horses arrived and they were on their way.281 The court, and surely its chaplains, spent all winter in Pinerolo, where during the carnival of 1439 the morality play Tempio dell’Onore e delle Vertù was performed with very elaborate scenery.282 It is quite possible that Du Fay might have contributed some songs for the festivities, but we have no trace of what they might have been. At this point we might pause and consider briefly what Du Fay might have written for his Savoyard patrons. The Savoy chapel was relatively small and the life at the court, particularly under Louis and Anne, was far more geared toward secular music. Given the source situation, it appears that almost all of Du Fay’s early settings of music for the Ordinary of the Mass was composed before 1435, much of it for the papal chapel.283 The possible exceptions are those works for which the earliest sources we have are Tr 87 and Tr 92, but some of these, such as the Agnus with the trope Custos et pastor, associated by the scribe of Tr 92 with Du Fay’s Sanctus papale,284 is also associated by its trope with the papal chapel and is also surely not by Du Fay.285 Others, such as the Kyrie settings of Vatican XIV (Mel 68) and the second setting of Vatican II (Mel 48),286 could have been nearly a decade old when copied in the sources that we have for them, and as I have noted elsewhere were part of a cycle of Kyries written for the papal chapel,287 although one of the isolated Glorias could perhaps be a product of the Savoy years.288 One of the proses, Isti sunt duae olivae, is surely a Savoyard work,289 and so might be at least five others, Epiphaniam domino, Victimae paschali, Rex omnipotens, Veni sancte spiritus, and Lauda Sion.290 But together with Laetabundus, which certainly predates 1433,291 these five form a coherent cycle that covers what in the fifteenth century were considered all of the important festivals de tempore, which suggests that they were written as a cycle that could have been started about the time Du Fay left Rome and continued during his years in Savoy. Their absence from Bo Q15 could be viewed as a symptom of their being written too late for 281 282 283 284 286 287 288

289 291

TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 84, fols. 353r–354r. Also in Bradley, “Musical Life,” 2:462. Cordero di Pamparato, “Guglielmo Dufay,” 34. Cf. Planchart, “Music for the Papal Chapel,” 110–14. OO Besseler 4, no. 7; OO Planchart 5/6. 285 See p. 483. OO Besseler 4, nos. 13 and 17; OO Planchart 5/14 and 11. Planchart, “Music for the Papal Chapel,” 110–14. OO Besseler 4, no. 28; OO Planchart 5/28. Some of the other isolated Glorias with Tr 92 as their earliest source are most likely papal pieces of very early works that somehow escaped the attention of the scribe of Bo Q15. The one Gloria surviving only in MuEm has to be a spurious work. Cf. Volume II. See earlier in this chapter. 290 OO Besseler 5, nos. 3–7; OO Planchart 6/2–6. OO Besseler 5, no. 2; OO Planchart 6/1.

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The Papal Chapel and the Court of Savoy (1428–1439)

inclusion in the manuscript, or it could simply be another consequence of the compiler’s idiosyncrasy.292 One important group of works that has been placed in Savoy by Tom Ward is the main sequence of Du Fay’s hymn cycle293 because three of the pieces for the commune sanctorum do not use the melodies of the Italian tradition used throughout the fifteenth century in Vatican chant books.294 The three hymns using melodies outside the Italian tradition are Sanctorum meritis (common of martyrs), Iste confessor (common of a confessor), and Jesu corona virginum (common of a virgin), which use melodies nos. 70, 146, and 115 in Stäblein’s edition,295 rather than the Italian tradition melodies, nos. 159, 160, and 750.296 But Du Fay’s melodies for these hymns do not agree with the Savoyard tradition either. The hymnal of the cathedral of Lausanne, for example, uses melodies nos. 108, 160, and 525 for these three hymns.297 The problems posed by Du Fay’s hymn cycle are discussed later in the chapter on his music for the Office; here it is sufficient to note that their melodic tradition is not that of the Savoyard hymnals. There is, however, a relatively large group of works with a transmission pattern that suggests that they may be the product of Du Fay’s years in Savoy. These are songs whose earliest sources are manuscripts copied in the mid- to late 1430s and early 1440s both in Italy and in southern Germany, specifically Tr 87, MüB 3224, and the second part of Str,298 songs apparently written after Ox 213 was completed ca. 1436, although this last manuscript probably has a few pieces from Du Fay’s first sojourn in Savoy, most notably Se la face ay pale. The songs in the three sources just mentioned include a number of doubtful works, made so sometimes on

292

293

294 296 297 298

Given the enormous repertory in Bo Q15, it is worth noting that it transmits only three sequences, Du Fay’s Laetabundus (M 316) and two others, Veni sancte spiritus (M 317) and Mittit ad virginem (M 325). Hamm, Chronology, 76–78, attributes them to Du Fay. See later in this chapter. The question of Du Fay’s hymns is very complicated and is discussed later in this chapter. He apparently wrote a hymn cycle for the entire liturgical year, beginning probably in his last year in Rome and intended for the papal chapel. The cycle survives in part in Bo Q15, and more complete in ModB and CS 15, but the redactions in ModB and CS 15 show a number of revisions, some probably by the composer and other by late editors. In addition, Du Fay wrote occasional hymns later in his career. All of the later hymn settings ascribed to Du Fay that do not appear in the three sources mentioned earlier have been rejected as spurious by Besseler. A detailed examination of the hymns appears in Chapter 11. Ward, “The Polyphonic Office Hymn,” 184–86. 295 Stäblein, Hymnen (I). Ward, The Polyphonic Office Hymn, 16–17. Lausanne, Bibliothèque Universitaire et Cantonale, V 1184. Descriptions and added bibliographic references in Fallows, Catalogue, 26, 45–47.

The Return to Savoy

account of poor transmission,299 but others of unquestionable authenticity, such as the early version of Donnez l’assault.300 Even the doubtful pieces point to the area of Savoy and Basel in the late 1430s. This is particularly the case of Or me veult, also known as Portugaler.301 Fallows gives a detailed account of the source situation and the evolution of the research on this curious piece,302 and notes that we remain at a loss to explain the title Portugaler. Still, the title comes only in German sources that probably can be traced to Str, copied near Basel in the late 1430s. Helmut Hell, who discovered the ascribed version in MüB 3224, tentatively suggested that Du Fay wrote only the contratenor.303 Thus we have a piece of possibly English origin for two voices, which of course could be played by two vielle players and which a local tradition connected also with Du Fay, being copied in the milieu where Le champion des dames was being written, a milieu where stories about the wedding of 1434 are probably still being told. Here one can see how the association with the vielle players of Isabel of Portugal could be made (and there is no evidence that it could not be true). The nationality of the vielle players in this case has been subsumed by that of their patroness. The point is this: even if the title Portugaler is nothing more than a reflection of a bit of legend, it is a legend that could arise most readily in the Savoy–Basel axis of the late 1430s. In any event, there are a dozen or so songs with ascriptions to Du Fay in these sources, and this represents a considerable repertory for the period of about eighteen months that Du Fay spent in Savoy after he left the papal chapel. This contrasts with the almost absolute dearth of sacred music from this period and suggests that Du Fay in Savoy was not just a chaplain, but more of what in the Burgundian court was called a valet de chambre, a musician whose main purpose was to produce music for the court itself, not the court’s chapel. As Du Fay spent at least part of the winter of 1438–1439 in Pinerolo, events in Basel were creating what would become an impossible situation for him. The tension between the Council of Basel and the pope had reached essentially a breaking point with the opening of the Council of Ferrara in January and the anathema pronounced upon the Council of Basel by Eugenius in February. This led eventually to the deposition of Eugenius by the Council of Basel on 25 June 1439 and the election of 299

300 301 303

See, for example, the comments to Bien doy servir, OO Besseler 6, no. 20; OO Planchart 10/2/1, in Fallows, The Songs, 82. OO Besseler 6, no. 70; OO Planchart 10/5/17; cf. Fallows’s comment in The Songs, 185. OO Besseler 6, no. 88; OO Planchart 10/2/9. 302 Fallows, The Songs, 243–45. Hell, “Zwei weitere Blätter,” 47.

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Amadeus VIII of Savoy as Pope Felix V on 5 November.304 Du Fay could not afford to be caught the middle of that struggle. His only major benefices were in the north, at Cambrai and Bruges, and by early 1439 it would have been clear to anyone in Basel that the duke of Burgundy, and therefore the entire region under his influence, which included Bruges and Cambrai, supported Eugenius, even if at that point a open break between Burgundy and Basel had not taken place.305 With considerable prudence, Du Fay left the court of Savoy before the deposition of Eugenius by the Council of Basel. Unlike the case of his previous journey from Savoy to Cambrai, we have no documents telling us when Du Fay left or his reasons for doing so. The earliest reference we have to Du Fay at Cambrai in 1439 is a payment to him of two virlands on 9 December 1439.306 Fallows surmises that he might have arrived in the summer or fall, but the volume of the chapter acts for 1439–1442 (old Register H), which could have told us of his exact arrival, is lost.307 Still, the document registering the payment in December allows us to narrow down Du Fay’s arrival at Cambrai, because the payment is for his presence, together with all the resident canons, in the capitulum generale that took place the day after the feast of the Conception of the Virgin, when thirty-four canons were present. The earlier capitula throughout that fiscal year list only thirty-three canons, and the entry on this one specifically states that the thirty-fourth canon is Du Fay. The previous capitulum generale had taken place on the day after All Souls (3 November) and Du Fay was not present. It would be inconceivable for a resident canon not to be present at such a meeting, thus we can be virtually certain that Du Fay arrived in Cambrai some time between 3 November and 9 December. He would remain there for the duration of the Schism. 304 306

307

Stieber, Pope Eugenius IV, 44–57. 305 Toussaint, Les Relations, 160–68. LAN, 4G 4074, fol. 17r. The virland was a coin of Cambrai, worth 20d. in 1470 (cf. LAN, 4G 1503, fol. 19r [Grand Métier]: “fructus recepti fuerunt ad monetam Cameracensis videlicet 20s. t. pro libra et virlando pro 20s. computatis.” Fallows, Dufay, 59.

4

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

The Cathedral of Cambrai and Its Organization In the late Middle Ages the cathedral of Cambrai was one of the architectural glories of France and the center of an enormous diocese that extended on the northeast as far as Antwerp, which means that it included a considerable population of Flemish speakers.1 The diocese was part of the archdiocese of Reims; it bordered on the east and northeast with the diocese of Cologne, on the east with the diocese of Liège, on the south with the dioceses of Noyon and Laon, and on the west and northwest with the dioceses of Arras and Tournai. The entire diocese was part of the Holy Roman Empire: since 925 the Escaut had been the frontier between the Empire and what was to become France. From the eleventh century it had been divided into six archdeaconates, created to allow the proper administration of the diocese: these were the archdeaconate of Cambrai, called the grand archdeaconate, and those of Valenciennes, Hainaut, Brabant, Brussels, and Antwerp. Apart from the bishop, the diocese was governed by eight dignitaries and three personati:2 the dignitaries were the provost (its head), the dean (the adjunct head), and the six archdeacons, the personati were the cantor, the scholaster (who was also the chancellor), and the treasurer. The official was the bishop’s representative in the administrative structure of the cathedral but not part of its governance. Because the bishop was the temporal lord of the city his administrators included the chastellain, the bailli, who was the bishop’s judicial representative, and the douze 1

2

The two basic works on the cathedral itself, which also contain a great deal of information on the diocese, are Le Glay, Recherches, and Thiébaut, “La Cathédrale,” but equally valuable are the numerous manuscript collections of notes on the cathedral and its history by three 18th-century historians, the dean, Henri-Denis Mutte (1706–1774), canon Albert de Carondelet (1720–1784), and the chaplain and librarian François-Dominique Tranchant (1722–1794), whose works are found in CBM 1046. This description of the diocese and the cathedral is based essentially upon Le Glay, Thiébaut, and the writings of Tranchant. The term personatus has no simple translation or equivalent in English, where it is translated as “a minor benefice.” In French the term was taken over as personnat, and defined as “Bénéfice qui, dans une cathédrale ou une collégiale, donne préséance sur le simple chanoine” (Centre National des Resources Textuelles et Lexicales, www.cnrtl.fr).

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pairs de cambrésis. Apart from the episcopal authority, the city itself was administered by the échevins. The cathedral chapter consisted of fifty canonicates with prebends, although not all of them were held by a canon; one of them had been assigned to the grand vicars in 1268, and a second would eventually be assigned to the small vicars in 1499. By the end of the Renaissance five other prebends were attached to certain offices, the mensa episcopi (in 1568), the abbacy of Saint-Aubert (in 1194), the provostship (in 1572), the grand archdeaconate (no date given), and the decanate (in 1472). Some were sacerdotal and could be held only by a priest, while others were reserved for a theologian, a jurist, or a physician; those without a precondition attached were called free prebends. Even though many of these prebends, as well as some of the dignities, were held in absentia by papal or ducal officials, for most of the fifteenth century the cathedral had a substantial body of resident canons, ranging in number between thirty-five and forty. Just below the canons in the cathedral hierarchy were the nine great or perpetual vicars, originally called minor canons. Three of these posts were sacerdotal, three diaconal, and three subdiaconal, even though most of those serving as grand vicars were ordained priests. Their main function was to ensure the continuity of personnel in the celebration of the divine office. In this they were assisted by the small vicars, nominally twelve, but whose number fluctuated throughout the century from as few as eight to as many as twenty or more. These men were also the main corpus of singing men in the cathedral, including those who sang polyphony. They were auditioned and appointed for a term that went from the Friday before St. Barnabas (11 June) to the same day a year later.3 By 1439 the annual date of the appointment had been changed to the day before St. John Baptist (24 June). Many of them eventually became grand vicars, so it goes without saying that the grand vicars were also skilled musicians. A further layer of benefices existed in the form of fifty-seven chaplaincies, many of them the result of private endowments, whose members were connected not only with specific chapels in the cathedral but even with specific altars, including several chaplaincies at a given altar. Some of the duties of the chaplains, such as the saying of certain Masses and Offices, were specified by the foundation documents, but otherwise the chaplains 3

Of course, each year a good number of small vicars were auditioned and appointed after the beginning of the term, but their term would always come to an end, and they would need to be reappointed, on the Friday before St. Barnabas.

The Cathedral of Cambrai and Its Organization

functioned as part of the regular clergy of the cathedral and thus chaplaincies were one of the sources of revenue and livelihood for many of the younger clerics, particularly the small vicars. Thirty of the chaplaincies were reserved for the vicars of the church and twenty-seven others were assigned by the canons on a temporary basis, meaning they could collate them to a cleric of their choice. These collations followed a prescribed order, and the chapter acts from time to time show the rota collationis, a pie chart with the names of the canons and a finger indicating the beginning of the order at the given date (see Fig. 4.1). The holders of forty-three of these chaplaincies formed the grand community of chaplains, while holders of nine others formed the small community.4 A number of these chaplaincies were held in absentia by clerics with some form of privilege. The smallest group of people connected with the liturgy consisted of the children of the cathedral school with their two main teachers, the magister puerorum, who was also the music teacher, and the grammar teacher. Nominally the number of children in the school was held to six or seven, but given the fragility of their voices and their health there were also between two and four other children receiving instruction as well. The relationship between the choir school and the grandes écoles at Cambrai in the fifteenth century is entirely opaque, but as noted in Chapter 1, those rectores magnarum scholarum whose names we know were chaplains at the cathedral. Finally, there were a number of lay servants of the chapter – vergers, custodians, franc-sergeants, and messengers or couriers. Other nonliturgical offices such as those of the official notary and lawyers (promotores) of the chapter were held by some of the chaplains. The social structure of the cathedral chapter was duplicated exactly, except for the absence of a bishop and an official, in the two most important collegiate churches in the city, St-Géry, right outside the walls, which was demolished by Charles V in order to build the citadel, and Ste-Croix, a direct dependence of the cathedral, some five hundred meters to its west. The two main abbeys in the city, St-Aubert, right next to the cathedral on the north, and St-Sepulchre, about six hundred meters away,5 had a straightforward monastic structure. 4

5

While the grand community has left behind a fairly complete set of accounts from the 15th century, the small community is virtually invisible in the records. A few accounts survive, beginning in 1462. The present-day cathedral at Cambrai is the 17th-century church of the Abbey of St-Sépulchre. The modern-day St-Géry, also a 17th-century building, is on the site where the church of StVaast was in the 15th century. About St-Vaast, St-Martin, and other smaller churches in 15thcentury Cambrai virtually nothing is known. In the aftermath of the French Revolution all the city churches except for St-Sépulchre and St-Vaast/St-Géry were demolished. The tower of St-

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Figure 4.1 Chapter Acts, Rota collationis (CBM 1059, fol. 170r) (by permission of the Médiathèque d’Agglomération de Cambrai).

The business of the cathedral was conducted through twelve to fourteen different offices, each with a head elected each year, who was responsible for the activity of the office and keeping its accounts.6 The heads of each

6

Martin, deprived of its spiral flèche, which was replaced in the 17th century by a lantern, survives today as the Cambrai belfry. The chapter acts begin to report the election of officers in 1443, although the reports are seemingly uneven because often when a canon was continued as the head of an office it is passed over in silence in the acts.

The Cathedral of Cambrai and Its Organization

office were usually canons, assisted in some cases by a chaplain. The most important of these offices were those of the Assize (later divided into large and small Assize), which oversaw the entire financial foundation of the cathedral and its chapter, and administered the lands given to the cathedral and the chapter to support its functioning. The Fabric, which oversaw the physical plant of the cathedral and everything necessary for the performance of the liturgy, from repairing and cleaning the building to commissioning paintings, the copying of liturgical books, and the purchase of the wine and hosts for the Masses. The aumosne served as the principal charitable arm of the chapter, supporting monasteries and other foundations throughout the diocese, giving alms to the poor and the deserving, and covering half of the expenses of the small vicars and the choir school and the teachers. The offices of the grand métier, the wine and bread, and the cellarer were separate but related. The first regulated the wine production of the chapter, the second the distribution of wine and bread by the chapter (which represented a considerable source of income), and the third regulated the cellars of the chapter and the investments of the canons in it. Finally, the offices of the community of chaplains, the great vicars, and the small vicars regulated the functioning of the three communities and their membership, and oversaw the appointment and discipline of their members and the faithful performance of their liturgical duties. The bulk of the financial support of these offices was agricultural work, the sale of wheat, barley, and oats grown by tenant farmers in lands granted to these offices. This, by and large, was regulated by and went through the assize, but the sums received and spent are also recorded in the accounts of the individual offices. In addition, many of the offices, including the assize, the fabric, the aumosne, the wine and bread, and the community of chaplains, owned a considerable amount of real estate in Cambrai and the neighboring towns and collected rent directly from the tenants. The houses where the canons lived were owned by different offices, mostly the assize, the fabric, and the aumosne, while the grand community of chaplains also owned numerous houses where its own members as well as some of the clergy of St-Géry lived. In addition, the offices of the fabric and the wine received substantial gifts from each candidate for a canonicate in Cambrai once his letters had been presented to the chapter, and the office of the chaplains received a similar but smaller gift from each chaplain who joined the community, a gift called the “joyful arrival” (iocundus adventus, joyeux avènement) of the chaplain. This outline is a very simplified one and barely touches the surface of the liturgical, financial, and social structure of the cathedral. No detailed

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account of it exists and for the fifteenth century alone the Archives in Lille hold several kilometers of shelf space and enough work for several lifetimes of studies of economic and social history. The cathedral was built in the form of a Latin cross with chapels radiating around the choir. Construction had begun with the west front in the early eleventh century and was delayed by fires in 1148 and 1167. In 1161 the towers of the west front collapsed and were replaced by a single tower. The choir was built in the thirteenth century following plans attributed to Villard de Honnecourt.7 By 1251 the entire building was essentially finished, although a number of side chapels were added to the nave in the fourteenth century.8 The nave was Romanesque but the choir Gothic and much higher than the nave; the transepts, like those of the cathedral of Tournai, were rounded. All reports, from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, speak of it as one of the most beautiful buildings in Europe, and emphasize the beauty of its stainedglass windows and the many notable works of art inside it. In one of the more grotesque acts in the wake of the French Revolution, the cathedral was sold on 6 June 1796 and largely demolished. The tower was left standing, but it collapsed during a storm on 30 January 1809.9 Reports of the size of the cathedral vary: Cyrille Thelliez gives summary dimensions as follows: 131 meters long (including nave and choir), 72 meters wide, including walls and buttresses, 32 meters high on the inside, and the tower 107 meters high.10 Canon Albert de Carondelet, who was a member of the chapter before the Revolution, gives the following more detailed dimensions: the tower and the flêche were 330 feet, surmounted by a cross of 15 feet (which does add up to about 107 meters), the choir was 130 feet long (42.22 meters) and 100 feet high (32.48 meters),11 the nave was 185 feet long (60.09 meters), 75 feet wide (24.36 meters) and 80 feet high (25.98 meters), the arms of the transept were 76 feet (24.68 meters).12 The only major discrepancy is in the width, which disappears entirely if we assume that Carondelet’s dimensions were those of each aisle. The tower held one of the most famous carillons of the late Middle Ages, with thirty-nine bells,13 and it is perhaps for this reason that canons resisted the use of any other musical instrument within the cathedral until well into the 7

8 9 11

12 13

On Honnecourt see Barnes, Villard de Honnecourt; Zenn, ed., Villard’s Legacy; and Barnes, ed., The Portfolio. Thiébaut, “La Cathédrale,” 1:124–26; Thelliez, Découvertes, 5. Le Glay, Recherches, pl. 1, between pp. 24 and 25. 10 Thelliez, Découvertes, 5. From the surviving images, the flêche was not “solid” but a filigree, like that of the church of StMaurice in Lille. CBM 1260, cited in Thelliez, Découvertes, 5. Cf. the remark by Philip of Luxembourg cited in Fallows, Dufay, 13, regarding the “tres doulce sonnerie” of the cathedral.

The Cathedral of Cambrai and Its Organization

seventeenth century.14 A curious peculiarity of the cathedral was that the west portal opened into the courtyard of the bishop’s palace, so the faithful had to enter through a gallery that led to a side door. A number of these details from a long-lost monument were confirmed by a series of archeological excavations in 1954,15 but we also have a number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century depictions of the cathedral. All surviving plans of the cathedral were done in the nineteenth century. According to Jacques Thiébaut the best plan is that by Aimé Boileux, published in André Le Glay’s Recherches and reproduced with small additions in Andreas Pastoor’s study (Fig. 4.2).16 Figure 4.2 reproduces the plan of the cathedral in Pastoor’s study without the numerical key, unexplained in his article, which appears to be quite disorganized. It has been replaced here by a new numerical key to the cathedral’s chapels and portals as follows: (1) Chapel of the Trinity (NotreDame de Grace); (2) Sacristy; (3) Chapel of St. Elizabeth and St. Eloy; (4) Chapel of St. Géry and St. Lawrence; (5) Side entry; (6) Chapel of the Crucifix or Saint Sépulchre (Notre Dame d’Albâtre or La Belle); (7) Chapel of St. Stephen; (8) Portal of St. Stephen (entrance for the choristers); (9) Chapel of the Holy Name; (10) Chapel of All Saints; (11) Chapel of the Cross and the Holy Face; (12) Chapel of St. Vincent and St. Eustace; (13) Chapel of St. Thomas and St. Jerome (below it is the gallery to the chapter house); (14) Chapter house; (15) Chapel of St. John Baptist “under the bells”; (16) Gallery of entrance to the nave by the faithful; (17) Chapel of St. Philip, or of the dead; (18) Chapel of the Ascension; (19) Chapel of Notre Dame la Grande; (20) Portal of St. John Evangelist (unnumbered, where the choir meets the transept, Chapel of St. John Evangelist); (21) Chapel of Notre Dame des Fiertes (St. Maxellendis); (22) Chapel of St. Anne; (23) Chapel of St. Nicaise; (24) Chapel of SS Peter and Paul; (25) Chapel of St. Catherine and St. Nicholas; (26) Chapel of St. Blaise. Two other plans in the Musée Diocesain at Cambrai are worth considering. One of them shows the entire quarter around the cathedral and was reproduced in Pastoor’s study (Fig. 4.3).17 I have altered the image in Figure 4.3 in one instance: opening a small alleyway starting at the corner of the Rue des Ratelots and the Rue de l’Ecu d’or, which had been closed by the time this drawing was made. This was the Longe allée, which abutted 14 15 16 17

C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 199–200, and n. 140. Reported in full in Thelliez, Découvertes. Thiébaut, “La Cathédrale,” 1:80–82; id., La Cathédrale, 90–91. Pastoors, “Monographie de l’ancienne cathédrale,” 118. This plan has a very complicated and opaque history. It is a slight expansion of the plan published by Le Glay. The version of this plan published by Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” as that found in Pastoor’s study, is not the one in that article; rather, it is a version of the same plan with written designations and a different heading, found today in the Musée de Cambrai.

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Figure 4.2 Floor plan of the Cathedral of Cambrai (after Pastoor).

the courtyard of Du Fay’s house, which is indicated with the D in the figure. There is also a particularly clear engraving from the seventeenth century,18 also reproduced by Pastoor and others; in it the artist did not show the surrounding houses in order to show the building more clearly, but the scale he used makes the cathedral look narrower than it was (Fig. 4.4). According to Thiébaut what are probably the best images of the cathedral before its demolition are sketches attributed to Adam Frans van der 18

Christyn, Les délices, III, unnumbered page between 350 and 351 [I used the sixth edition of 1769, which is the only one generally available; the first edition appeared in 1697].

The Cathedral of Cambrai and Its Organization

Figure 4.3 Plan of the quarter of the Cathedral with the site of Du Fay’s house (after Pastoor).

Meulen, court painter of Louis XIV, done during the siege of Cambrai in 1677, which were the basis for a number of images, including the one given here (Fig. 4.5).19 This is a view very close to what Du Fay would have seen from his 19

Thiebaut, “La Cathédrale,” 1:90; id., La Cathédrale, 105–6 and note 32.

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Figure 4.4 The Cathedral of Cambrai, engraving (after Christyn, Les délices des PaysBas).

house (the roof of which can be seen in the painting; it is the fourth one, closest to the cathedral on the right). The small semicircular structure in the right side of the transept is the chapel of St. Stephen, where Du Fay was buried. The image in Figure 4.5 has an extremely complicated history, made more complex on account of the rather casual reference to the design by van der Meulen, ambiguously attributing to him a number of derivations (and referring to them as being in the Musée des Gobelins). Van der Meulen’s original is a design in lead pencil with a few touches of watercolor. It shows the cathedral from the east, and the top of the flèche is not drawn. It is reproduced in Starcky.20 A lithograph by Godefroy Engelmann, based upon van der Meulen’s design, was published most likely around 1825, it completes the flèche of the cathedral and some of the landscape at the bottom of the design.21 This is the image that is often reproduced either as van der Meulen’s original 20 21

Starcky, Paris, Mobilier National, 124, no. 113. I have been unable to trace down the origin of the lithograph. Not a single one of the art or architectural historians (many of them listed earlier) who reproduce it give its origin, and as noted in the text many of them identify is as a “painting” by van der Meulen or a lithograph “after van der Meulen.” Branner, “The Transept,” 71 states that the origin of the lithograph may be found in Lassus, Album, 118, note 2, but this note refers only to the Boileux plan and not the lithograph, but since Le Glay’s book has lithographs by Engelmann I believe that this one must have been done around then.

The Cathedral of Cambrai and Its Organization

Figure 4.5 The Cathedral of Cambrai ca. 1677 by H. Desicy (after van der Meulen, from Bègne, Histoire de Notre-Dame de Grâce).

or “after van der Meulen” by Serbat in 1929,22 Heliot in 1956,23 Branner in 1965,24 and Thiébaut in 1976 and 2015.25 Houdoy published an etching based on this lithograph as a frontispiece to his Histoire;26 and in 1910 Dean Bègne published a color lithograph also based on Engelmann’s design, signed by H. Desicy in his Histoire de Notre-Dame.27 The image published by Bègne was also published by Thièbaut in a web page on Cambrai.28 All these images are quite accurate in terms of their representation of what we know of the cathedral, and I have used Desicy’s image for Figure 4.5 since in many ways it is the most detailed one. In this image the fourth housetop from the right is that of the house where Du Fay spent the last decades of his life, and the semicircular structure in the arm of the transept is the Chapel of Saint Stephen, where he was buried. In 1695 a plan-relief of Cambrai was made on a scale of 1:600. In 1870 it was taken by the Germans to Berlin, and the French failed to ask for it to be returned in 1919. Subsequently it was destroyed during the bombardments 22 23 25 26 27 28

Serbat, “Quelques églises,” unnumbered page between 406 and 407. Heliot, “La Nef et le clocher,” 99. 24 Branner, “The Transept,” 71. Thiébaut, “L’iconographie,” 406; id., La Cathédrale, 105. Houdoy, Histoire, opening before p. 1. Bègne, Histoire de Notre-Dame, unnumbered page between 64 and 65. http://www.recherche-fenelon.com/page-11768-cambrai.html.

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Figure 4.6 Reconstruction of the cathedral’s quarter in the seventeenth century. Restored Plan Relief, Musée de Cambrai. Photo Hugo Maertens, Bruges (used by permission).

in 1945. A few photographs were taken but they are unsatisfactory. In 1990, the Musée de Cambrai had a second plan-relief made that incorporates archeological information of the last 200 years. Figure 4.6 shows part of it with the cathedral as seen from the front; to its left is the church of the Abbey of St-Aubert, and on the top right the church of St-Martin. Off from the right transept is a green space leading to a set of streets forming a “Y”; at the point where the arms of the “Y” separate, on the right side of the right arm, the second house was where Du Fay spent his last years.

Arrival at Cambrai, and Relations with the Duke of Burgundy These, then, are the city and the institution that Du Fay reached in late November or December 1439, but other documents, or rather references to

Arrival at Cambrai, and Relations with the Duke of Burgundy

them, allow us to posit that he had left Savoy much earlier and had reached the north early in the summer. In fact, these documents also allow us to surmise that Du Fay probably gave as his reason for leaving Savoy the need to be in contact with the duke of Burgundy, whether to assure the safety of his benefices or for other reasons, since in Savoy the opinion appears to have persisted during his absence that he had gone to the duke of Burgundy. And this is in fact what happened at first. In letters to the church of St. Donatian, sent in connection with a dispute over the payment of Du Fay’s prebend in 1440, both Du Fay and the duke claimed that Du Fay had been in the service of the duke, and thus part of his familia, from the octave of the apostles of 1439 (6 July) to the Purification in 1440 (2 February).29 In his previous journey north the last mention of Du Fay in Savoy is on 12 August and his first mention at Cambrai is 14 October. On this admittedly imprecise basis we may posit that Du Fay probably left Savoy early in May 1439 and must have reached St-Omer, where the duke was, some time in late June or early July. If the letters of the duke and Du Fay to St. Donatian mean that Du Fay was with the court for all this time, this indicates that he spent most of the second half of 1439 at St-Omer, for the duke remained there until 10 January 1440.30 Du Fay, therefore, left Savoy before the deposition of Eugenius by the Council of Basel and before the opening of the schism. In some ways this allowed him to retain a measure of neutrality and the favor of Duke Louis and of his father, the future Pope Felix V, a favor that is reflected in the language of the papal letters dealing with the resignations of his benefices in Savoy.31 In going to the duke of Burgundy and in a sense putting himself under his protection Du Fay was also being politically very prudent. Philip the Good’s policy toward Eugenius and the Council was one of steadfast support for the pope while keeping open communications with the Council.32 Given that Emperor Frederick III at first favored the council fathers and eventually Pope Felix V, the support of Philip the Good was crucial for Eugenius; the duke used this to allow himself the possibility of continuing to communicate with Savoy even after the election of Felix V; 29

30 31

32

BAB, Reeks A 51, fol. 38r–v. The duke wrote that Du Fay was his familiaris and chaplain. The dates appear to have been in a communication of Du Fay that no longer survives. See later in this chapter. H. Vander Linden, Itinéraires, 190–94. TAS, Archivio di Corte, Bollario di Felice V, Reg. 2, fols. 265v–268r and 298v–299r. Whereas clerics of an opposite obedience are often termed filius perditionis in these documents, Du Fay remains dilectus filius in the letters of Felix V. Toussaint, Les Relations, 160–95, gives a detailed account of the relationships between Burgundy, Basel, Rome, and the Empire.

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At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

moreover, Philip had particularly able diplomats to present his views in Rome.33 In the event, Eugenius, who would eventually declare an automatic excommunication for anyone dealing with the schismatics, made an explicit exception not only for Philip the Good, but for his familia.34 Thus Du Fay, as a familiaris of the duke, could, if he needed to, remain in discreet communication with Savoy without fear of losing his benefices in Cambrai and Bruges or of excommunication. Du Fay’s name is never found in any of the documents from the Burgundian court that have survived, so it appears that his relationship with the duke and the court was unofficial, but there are all kinds of indirect evidence that it existed and that it lasted until the composer’s death. In 1439, however, Philip had a specific task he wanted Du Fay to undertake. In 1430, on the day of his wedding to Isabel of Portugal, Philip founded the Order of the Golden Fleece, a chivalric order under the patronage of St. Andrew, the patron saint of Burgundy, and the Virgin Mary.35 In January 1432 he dedicated the SainteChapelle in Dijon as the official chapel of the order,36 and he established a cycle of missae communes or votive Masses to be said every day of the week “a haulte voix a chant et a deschant fors quand le service sera de requiem.”37 This was, in itself, a very unusual foundation in that it called for polyphony not for a festal Mass nor even for a memorial Mass to be said once a year, but for a cycle of daily missae communes or votive Masses. Such Masses for the most part were never sung with polyphony anywhere except for the Lady Mass. The order established for the Masses was as follows: Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday

Missa pro defunctis (in plainsong) Missa de Angelis Missa de Sancto Andrea Missa de Sancto Spiritu Missa de Sancta Cruce Missa de Beata Virgine Missa de Sanctissima Trinitate

All of these votive Masses except one can be traced back to Carolingian times. Some of them were traditionally attributed to Alcuin,38 and had 33 34

35

36 37

Ibid., 177–79; also Planchart, “Connecting the Dots,” 21–22. ASV, RV 360, fols. 186v–187r and 195r–196v. The first is dated 9 Nov. 1440, the second is undated: “Datum Florencie etc.” See Prizer, “Music and Ceremonial,” 114 and n. 4, citing a copy of the statutes. The fundamental work on the order remains Baron Fréderic de Reiffenberg, Histoire de l’Ordre de la Toison d’or. DACO, G 1128, no. 1. See Marix, Histoire, 33, and Quarré, La Sainte-Chapelle, 26. Prizer, “Music and Ceremonial,” 116. 38 Ellard, Master Alcuin, Liturgist, 144–73.

Excursus: The Golden Fleece Masses

become something of a standard set of Masses in the late Middle Ages. One of them, the Lady Mass, was always associated with a day of the week, Saturday, and the same, for obvious reasons, was the case with the Mass for the Holy Cross on Friday. The association of the Mass for the Holy Ghost with Thursday was also traditional. The one Mass that was not part of the usual set of votive Masses was the Mass for St. Andrew. Such a votive Mass was not part of the liturgy anywhere in Europe and had to be produced ad hoc. The performance of these Masses at the Sainte-Chapelle was to be, as the foundation states, “a chant et a deschant,” that is with plainsong and with polyphony, except for the Requiem. The way these Masses were said at first was most likely with a polyphonic Ordinary and chanted propers. What the duke apparently asked Du Fay to do was to provide a set of polyphonic propers for the six Masses that were sung in polyphony. Du Fay’s settings for five of them survived, mostly but not entirely anonymous, in the Trent codices and the Strahov manuscript.39 They were ascribed to Du Fay by Laurence Feininger in 1947 in an edition of the proper cycles in Tr 88,40 but a promised explanation of his reasons for the attributions was never published, so later scholarship all but ignored Feininger’s attributions until the time when in 1972 and later in 1988 I presented further evidence that corroborated Feininger’s hypothesis.41 Still, the argument for Du Fay’s authorship of these Masses, in the absence of consistent ascriptions to all the cycles or documents showing payments to him for the composition, is circumstantial although very strong. Its strength is based on a constellation of unique circumstances that were found and presented piecemeal in several studies. Because their authorship has profound implications for Du Fay’s biography it might be as well to present it here in as full a form as possible.

Excursus: The Golden Fleece Masses The liturgy of the each of the votive Masses was, in terms of its proper chants, the same as the liturgy of a specific feast day. The Requiem used the propers for All Souls’ Day (2 November), the Mass of the angels those for 39

40 41

Tr 88 has the cycles for the Angels, St. Andrew, the Holy Spirit, the Holy Cross, and the Trinity as complete cycles. Tr 93, Tr, 90, and Strahov have the introits for St. Andrew and the Trinity, and Tr 90 has a version of one of the Alleluias for the Holy Ghost. Feininger, ed., Auctorum Anonymorum, ii–viii. Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1972), 14–19; id., “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 148–60.

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the dedication of the basilica of St. Michael (29 September), the Mass of the Holy Ghost those for Whitsunday, the Mass for the Holy Cross those for the Finding and the Exaltation of the Cross (3 May, 14 September), and the Mass for the Trinity those of Trinity Sunday. The one exception to this was the Lady Mass, which had a liturgy that changed seasonally and borrowed its chants from a number of feasts of the Virgin. The missae communes were, as a rule, copied in a separate section at the end of the missal or gradual, particularly the Lady Mass, with its multiple chants for each season. Except for the Requiem the models for most of the Masses come from the part of the liturgical year when the normal cycle consisted of introit, gradual, alleluia, offertory, and communion.42 But if these Masses were to be sung throughout the year, they required a tract instead of the alleluia during Lent and two alleluias instead of a gradual and an alleluia during Eastertide, that is from the Octave of Easter to the Saturday after Pentecost. In contrast, the Mass of the Holy Ghost, modeled on that of Whitsunday, which has two alleluias, needed a gradual when said outside Eastertide. The Lady Mass borrowed the appropriate chants from those of the feasts of the Virgin that fell in the appropriate liturgical season, and the Requiem remained unchanged throughout. The universal practice with these Masses when entered in the missal was to copy the model liturgy except in the case of the Mass of the Holy Ghost, which was copied with a gradual Beata gens sung on Wednesday of the fourth week in Lent and also on the seventh Sunday after Pentecost,43 since this was the form of the Mass that would be used most frequently throughout the year. The Lady Mass was the only one copied in extenso with all the changing chants. For the changes required when saying these Masses during Lent or during Eastertide the liturgy provided a model in the Masses of those feasts of saints which fell on either side of Septuagesima or on either side of Easter, depending on the date of Easter for each year. After Septuagesima the alleluia was dropped and a tract was sung instead. This was done in one of two manners: either the tract of the day was sung (since throughout Lent every day had its own liturgy), or one of a small group of tracts suitable for the feast in question was sung.44 After Easter the gradual was dropped and 42

43 44

The liturgical year has two main feasts for the Holy Cross, the Finding (3 May), which always falls in Eastertide and has two alleluias, and the Exaltation (14 Sept.), which has a gradual and an alleluia. Hesbert, ed., Antiphonale missarum sextuplex, nos. 63a and 179. At Cambrai these were Desiderium or Qui seminant for martyrs, Beatus vir for confessors, and Diffusa est gratia for virgins. This is derived from a collation of CBM MSS 60, 146, 147, 151, 152, 232, and the Missale parvum.

Excursus: The Golden Fleece Masses

a second alleluia sung. This alleluia is indicated in most missals as being de resurrectione and thus an alleluia from one of the days of the week after Easter or one of the five Sundays after Easter – in other words, an alleluia de tempore. The only other change took place in the Mass for the Holy Ghost during Lent. Since the introit antiphon for Whitsunday includes several repetitions of the word “alleluia,” it was replaced by the introit Dum sanctificatus fuero, sung on Wednesday of the fourth week in Lent.45 When a votive Mass was needed that was not part of the traditional group of missae communes, such as a Mass of the patron of an order or a church, the missals usually included a gradual and two alleluias, and only occasionally a tract written ad hoc. This is most common in missals of the mendicant orders, particularly the Franciscans.46 Among liturgical books I have examined in the last three decades, however, there is a startling exception to the pattern for missae communes described earlier. It is a missal devoted largely to such Masses copied at the cathedral of Cambrai, CBM 158. This is a small manuscript (forty-two folios) without music but with the complete liturgy for five missae communes with all their prayers and lessons, and three other votive Masses that are not intended for year-round celebration.47 The missae communes are presented with detailed rubrics. The first one can serve as an example (see Table 4.1; I give here the incipits of the liturgical texts, which appear in full in the missal, and omit the readings and prayers, which are not relevant to the argument at hand). It presents the usual votive Mass of the Holy Ghost as sung throughout the year, including the introit to be said during Lent, but the first of the two rubrics that follow Dum sanctificatus fuero has no parallel in any other of the thousands of missals and graduals that survive from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. It prescribes not only the omission of the Gloria in excelsis during Lent, but directs that instead of an alleluia the verse of the Alleluia Veni sancte spiritus be sung without the respond, which would then become an ad hoc tract. This rubric is both needless and incomprehensible in terms of the plainsong liturgy, where a plainsong tract was assigned to every day in Lent and would traditionally have been sung in place of any alleluia, whether the Mass being said was the Mass of the day or a votive Mass. But the rubric becomes crucial if the 45

46 47

Hesbert, ed., Antiphonale missarum sextuplex, no. 63a. This is the same formulary that has the gradual Beata gens. It occurs in a votive Mass for St. Anthony Abbot in the Missale parvum of 1507. Its contents are the Masses for the Holy Ghost, the Cross, the Virgin, prefaces, canon, and prayers going from the Lord’s Prayer to the kiss of peace, the Mass for the Trinity, the Requiem, collects, and the Masses for the five wounds of Jesus, the Holy Sacrament, and St. Barbara.

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Table 4.1 The common Mass for the Holy Ghost in CBM 158 Fol.

Rubric and Mass

1r

Sequitur missa communis de sancto spiritu per totum annum dicenda notatis additionibus infrascriptis per lxx et tempore paschali [I] Spiritus domini Ps. Exsurgat deus Gloria in excelsis semper dicitur excepto in adventu et a lxx usque ad pascha GR Beata gens V. Veni sancte spiritus Credo in unum deum semper dicitur OF Confirma hoc deus CO Factus est repente Notandum vero est quod a septuagesima usque ad pascha omisso introitus Spiritus domini dicitur introitus iste, videlicet [I] Dum sanctificatus fuero Ps. Benedicam et dabo vobis Nec dicitur Gloria in excelsis et omisso Alleluia dicitur simpliciter V. Veni sancte spiritus. Cetera omnia super dicta non mutantur Item ab octavas pasche usque ad octavas penthecostes omittitur graduale et sumitur primum Alleluia Alleluia V. Emitte spiritum tuum et creabuntur Alleluia V. Veni sancte spiritus cetera omnia ut supra

1v 2r

2v

repertory of propers to which it refers has no tracts, and this is the case with the cycle of votive Masses by Du Fay in Tr 88. In fact, the propers for the Holy Ghost found in Tr 88 (fols. 113v–121r) duplicate those of the Cambrai missal exactly: [I] [G]

[O] [C] [I]

Spiritus domini Ps. Exsurgat deus Beata gens V. Verbo domini Alleluia V. Emitte spiritum Alleluia V. Duo: Veni sancte spiritus Confirma hoc deus Factus est repente Dum sanctificatus fuero Ps. Benedicam dominus

We have in Tr 88 all the elements found in CBM 158 with a further coincidence: the verse of the second alleluia, which would furnish the tract during Lent, is for two voices, and virtually all of the surviving polyphonic settings of tracts from the fifteenth century are extended duos, some with a third voice entering near the end of the piece.48 This means that the

48

Cf. the setting of the tract Desiderium animae in Tr 88, fols. 157v–158r, edited in Feininger, Auctorum Anonymorum, 90–93, and the tract in Ockeghem’s Requiem in his Collected Works, 2:90–93.

Excursus: The Golden Fleece Masses

propers in Tr 88 follow a unique liturgical practice for which the only other witness we have is a missal copied in Cambrai when Du Fay was in charge of the liturgical music of the cathedral. But it would be a mistake to assume that the Masses in Tr 88 reflect a liturgical practice from Cambrai; they were written for the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon, and follow the tradition of Dijon.49 That the missal comes from Cambrai indicates that at one point polyphonic propers began to be sung at Cambrai, which included the missae communes, and at a time where the polyphonic repertory of the cathedral did not include tracts, so the missal formalizes in its rubric a procedure that was clearly devised by Du Fay ad hoc for his votive Masses of 1439–1440.50 This situation might have changed somewhat by 1449, when two large volumes of polyphonic propers that surely included some tracts were copied by Symon Mellet.51 In other words, CBM 158 is a missal for the cathedral that posits a performance of its three missae communes outside the Lady Mass in a manner derived from a pattern apparently initiated by Du Fay in his Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece. Thus CBM 158 has to be a missal compiled specifically for the performance of Masses with polyphonic propers and must date from the decade between 1439 and 1449. Tr 88 transmits four other proper cycles that have two alleluias besides that for the Holy Ghost: one for the Trinity (fols. 121v–128r), one for St. Andrew (fols. 128v–134r), one for the Holy Cross (fols. 135v–140r), and one for the Angels (fols. 147v–154r). Moreover, in each of these cycles one of the two alleluias has a verse for two voices, which can be used as a 49

50

51

This is the case, for example, for the Mass for the Cross, which contains the communion Per signum crucis, sung in Dijon but not at Cambrai. Rebecca Gerber, “Dufay’s Style,” suggests that Du Fay’s proper cycles, even the five Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece, are a later assemblage, and seeks to question the authenticity of some of the communions. Her arguments, however, are based on a misunderstanding of the nature and function of these votive Masses, conflating them with the festal works used for the grand chapters of the order, and upon analysis of the approaches to the cadences in the communions that assume that Du Fay would not use certain contrapuntal progressions that are both correct and relatively common. This restrictive approach to his musical language in pieces that represent a new departure for him are very similar to the earlier arguments by Hamm and others, which assumed that Du Fay would not have used some of the mensuration signs found in these cycles and in the Masses for St. Anthony of Padua and St. Francis. On this, see Fallows, Dufay, 189. Another argument, that the presence of isolated introits from these cycles in the introit collections of Tr 93 (and Tr 90) and in Strahov 47 also supports the view that the votive cycles were not conceived as cycles, is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of these three sources, particularly Tr 93 and Tr 90, where the scribes were deliberately breaking down cycles and copying the movements in series organized by genre – introits, Kyries, Glorias, sequences, Sanctus, and Agnus. See later in this chapter.

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pseudo-tract. In this manner each of these Masses can be used as a votive Mass that follows the unique rubrics of CBM 158. An examination not just of Tr 88, but of all the surviving sources of sacred polyphony from the fifteenth century, yields a further result. These five cycles are the only ones that include two alleluias, making them the only surviving cycles that are not only votive Masses but ones that follow a particular way of constructing a votive Mass that is reflected elsewhere only in CBM 158. Given these coincidences, two other elements become crucial. One is the presence among these cycles of a votive Mass for St. Andrew, something that did not exist anywhere else in Europe outside the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon. The other is that when we compare the votive Masses in Tr 88 with those in CBM 158 in terms of the actual repertory, we find four discrepancies: 1. The psalm of the introit Dum sanctificatus fuero is Benedicam et dabo vobis in CBM 158 but Benedicam domino in Tr 88. In this case the Cambrai missal transmits a version restricted to Cambrai, and Tr 88 preserves a pan-European one going back to the earliest chant books and used in Dijon. 2. The gradual for the Trinity is the same in both sources in terms of the respond, but the verse in Tr 88 begins Benedictus es, domine, in firmamento and the verse in CBM 158 begins Benedictus es in firmamento. CBM 158 has no music, but Cambrai graduals from the eleventh to the sixteenth century transmit this piece with the melody that is found throughout Europe and in the modern chantbooks.52 The variant with the extra word and a slightly different melody appears only in two manuscripts from the area of Dijon, Montpellier H159 and Brussels, BR II.3824.53 3. The communion for the Mass for the Holy Cross in CBM 158 is Per lignum servi facti sumus; in Tr 88 it is Per signum crucis de inimicis. The first is a tradition restricted largely to Cambrai and Picardy; the second is the pan-European chant going back to the earliest chant books.54 4. The two alleluias for the Holy Cross in CBM 158 are (in that order) Dulce lignum and Nos autem gloriari, while in Tr 88 they are Dicite in gentibus and Dulce lignum. The first three variants align the Masses of Tr 88 with the liturgical tradition of Dijon, while CBM 158 keeps the structure of those Masses but makes the changes necessary to have such Masses sung at Cambrai. This last difference between Tr 88 and 52 53 54

CBM, MS 60, fol. 53v; MS 12, fol. 28r; cf. Graduale Triplex, 372. Cf. Paléographie musicale 8:167, Brussels, BR II.3824, fol. 137r. See Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 150–51; id., “Guillaume Du Fay’s Second Style,” 326–27.

Excursus: The Golden Fleece Masses

Cambrai 158 is perhaps the most interesting. In the plainsong tradition none of the missae communes had two alleluias since the second one was always de tempore, so when Du Fay decided not only to write two alleluias for each Mass, but in addition to make all the alleluias liturgically specific to each feast, he had to find the second alleluia ad hoc. In the cases of the Holy Ghost, the Holy Cross, and St. Andrew the choices would have been relatively obvious: the Masses for Whitsunday and the Finding of the Cross usually have two alleluias, since they are part of Eastertide, and in the case of St. Andrew the commune apostolorum provides a number of them. Still, in the case of the Mass for the Holy Cross Du Fay avoided the second alleluia used in Dijon.55 Instead he used Dicite in gentibus, which was unknown at Cambrai and though known in Dijon, it apparently had fallen out of use.56 Du Fay may have chosen the alleluia for its triumphal text, appropriate for a crusading order: Dicite in gentibus quia dominus regnavit a ligno. Its most frequent use was as the alleluia for Friday in albis, which made it an attractive choice as the Eastertide second alleluia of the Mass for the Cross. Du Fay might have found it in the liturgical books of St-Omer during his stay with the duke there. Although no missals or graduals survive from that church, it is suggestive, however, that in the most important church in a major Burgundian city, St-Pierre in nearby Lille, Dicite in gentibus is in fact the main alleluia for the feast of the Invention of the Cross.57 This last variant indicates that although some of these Masses were written away from Cambrai, some of them were probably later adapted to the Cambrai liturgy. The versions in Tr 88, however, are those intended for Dijon, and this suggests that even at Cambrai in the 1440s and 1450s there might have been two different redactions of these works. In any case, Du Fay’s solution to the problem of the tract in these Masses, to provide one of the alleluias with a verse for two voices, the predominant polyphonic texture in a tract,58 was brilliant and economical, and Du Fay is surely the originator of the tradition where virtually all early polyphonic

55

56

57 58

Brussels, BR II.3284, fol. 180v, shows the alleluias Nos autem gloriari and Dulce lignum for the Finding of the Cross, that is, the same alleluias found in CBM 158 although in reverse order. It appears in Montpellier H159, p. 189 (cf. Paléographie musicale 8:116), but not in Brussels, BR II.3284. Cambrai, Mediathèque municipale, MS 61, fol. 96r–v. In this respect, we should remember that the tract is a solo chant; in polyphony the use of a duet as “solo” and a three-voice texture as “chorus” had a tradition that went back to the early 15th century and is attested in numerous rubrics in Bo Q15, Ao 15, and the early Trent Codices.

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tracts are largely duets. That the only echo of this solution is found in a missal from Cambrai speaks for itself. The cycle for the Holy Ghost in Tr 88 has two movements with contemporary or near contemporary ascriptions to Du Fay. A version of the Alleluia Veni sancte spiritus was copied in Tr 90 with an ascription to Du Fay,59 and a passage of the tenor of the offertory was cited as belonging to the “offertorio delo spiritu sancto” by Du Fay in a letter written by Giovanni Spataro to Pietro Aron ca. 1535.60 This cycle shares material with the Masses for the Trinity and for the Angels, and the Mass of the Trinity shares material with the Masses for St. Andrew and for the Holy Cross.61 The sharing of material essentially follows the principle that James Jackman called “liturgical economy” in the music of William Byrd,62 and it points to the fact that the entire cycle of votive Masses is the work of one man, who on the authority of the ascription in Tr 90 and Spataro’s letter, strengthened by the correspondence between the structure of these cycles and the unique rubrics in CBM 158, has to be Du Fay. The weekly cycle of Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece required six of them to be sung in polyphony, but only five have come down to us in Tr 88. The lost Mass is the Mass for the Blessed Virgin, and its loss might be explained by the nature of that cycle in terms of its liturgy. Given both the correspondence of the Masses in Tr 88 with those in CBM 158 in terms of their repertory, even allowing for the break of that correspondence in the Mass for the Holy Cross on account of the different liturgical use in Cambrai and Dijon, we may use Cambrai 158 as a window to allow us to postulate what Du Fay’s propers for the Blessed Virgin could have included. The Lady Mass in CBM 158 is shown in Table 4.2.63 It is interesting to note that the Masses in CBM 158 begin with the Mass for the long season after Pentecost, using that as the norm for the Lady Mass. A number of the pieces used in this manuscript were surely not part of the liturgy in Dijon; for example, of the seven alleluias on fol. 4v probably only two were included, although it may well be that for this Mass the Dijon cycle did include a tract. Similarly, the offertory Regina caeli, which was sung only in northern France, was surely not part of the 59 60

61

62 63

Tr 90, fol. 402r. See Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1972), 14–16; Blackburn et al., eds., Correspondence, 589–90. See Feininger, ed., Auctorum Anonymorum, vi, and Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Second Style,” 326–37. Jackman, “Liturgical Aspects,” 17–37. This table includes the propers and the rubrics; it omits the lessons and the prayers found in the missal.

Excursus: The Golden Fleece Masses

179

Table 4.2 The common Mass for the Virgin in CBM 158 Fol.

Rubric and Mass

4r

Sequitur missa communis de beata virgine maria IN Salve sancta parens Gloria in excelsis semper dicitur GR Benedicta et venerabilis V Virgo dei genitrix Alleluya V Post partum virgo ALIUD: Alleluya VERSUS Dulcis mater dulcis virgo Alleluya V Ave Maria gratia plena Alleluya V Ora pro nobis pia virgo Alleluya V Virga iesse floruit Alleluya V Ant thronum trinitatis Alleluya V Nobilis atque pia nos protege Credo in unum deum semper dicitur OF Felix namque es OF Recordare virgo mater CO Beata viscera Sequitur missa de beata virgine per adventus IN Rorate caeli P Celi enarrant Nec dicitur Gloria in excelsis GR Prope est dominus omnibus V Laudem domini loquetur Alleluya V Ave Maria gratia plena Credo in unum deum OF Ave Maria (incipit) CO Ecce virgo concipiet Item a circumcisione domini usque ad purificatione beate virginis Marie erit IN Salve sancta parens (incipit) P Et gaudium Gloria in excelsis GR Benedicta et venerabilis (incipit) V Post partum Credo in unum deum OF Felix namque (incipit) CO Beata viscera (incipit) Item notandum est quod a lxx usque ad pascha omittitur alleluia loco eius dicitur tractus Gaude Maria virgo cuncta hereses V Que gabrielis archangelus V Dum virgo deum et hominem V Et post partum virgo V Dei genitrix intercede Cetera qui ordinata sunt in communi observantur a purificatione usque ad pascha Item ab octavis pasche usque ad oct penthecostes omittitur Graduale et sumitur duo alleluia ad voluntatem celebrantis OF Regina caeli laetare alleluia Cetera ut supra in communi ordinata sunt. Sed post ascensione domini dicitur Evangelium Loquetur OF Felix namque VEL Ave Maria ANT Recordare virgo

4v

5r

5v

6r 6v

7r

7v 8r

8v

180

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

Dijon cycle.64 But it probably included at least two introits, Salve sancta parens and Rorate caeli, two graduals, Benedicta et venerabilis and Prope esto, two offertories, Felix namque and Ave Maria, and two communions, Beata viscera and Ecce virgo. A particularly interesting trait of CBM 158 is that it includes no proses, which were often included when the Lady Mass was entered in graduals and missals. This could mean that the Lady Mass at Dijon likewise did not include a prose, since it appears that, mutatis mutandis, CBM 158 is a reflection of the structure of the Dijon cycles. It would be easy to see how such a collection of propers as that of the Dijon Lady Mass would not stay together in transmission, for it would not, at first sight, look like a cycle, and Tr 88 is a problematic source for much of the music from Cambrai and for Savoy that it transmits. For example, Du Fay’s Mass Se la face ay pale is unperformable from Tr 88 on account of serious lacunae.65 Still, as Fallows has noted, the transmission of the Du Fay propers is by and large better than that of some of the other music from the north found in the Trent Codices.66 One could read the claims made by the duke and by Du Fay to the chapter of St. Donatian that the composer had been in the service of the duke from the octave of the apostles in 1439 until Purification 1440 to infer that this is probably the time that it took Du Fay to write the six Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece, which means that it took him a little over a month to write each cycle. This may or may not be an indication of Du Fay’s fluency as a composer, since in these cycles, particularly in the alleluias, the graduals, and the offertories, he faced problems in terms of deriving the cantus part from the plainsong that no composer before him had faced, since the melodic ductus of the plainsong, particularly in the case of the graduals, is utterly different from what one encounters in Kyries, hymns, sequences, or office antiphons, which were the most commonly used chants for paraphrase settings in the early fifteenth century.

Du Fay at Cambrai, the Early Part of the Decade We may now return to Du Fay’s biography. Du Fay apparently spent most of the second half of 1439 in St-Omer, but by 9 December he was at Cambrai. During the spring and summer of that year a number of events 64 65

66

The only surviving plainsong sources for this offertory are manuscripts from Cambrai and Lille. See OO Besseler 3, no. 1, notes. The Mass is unperformable from any of its surviving sources, but luckily the large lacunae in Tr 88 do not coincide with those in CS 14, so modern scholars have been able to reconstruct a complete text for the work; cf. OO Planchart 3/4. Fallows, “Dufay and the Mass Proper,” 50–51.

Du Fay at Cambrai, the Early Part of the Decade

took place that would have a definite impact on his career. In May 1439 the bishop of Cambrai died and the duke of Burgundy managed to get the chapter to elect his half-brother, John of Burgundy, as bishop. The new bishop had no great interest in being in Cambrai, preferring the life of the court, so he was installed by procuration on 10 August,67 but one consequence of elevation to the see of Cambrai is that he ceased being provost of St. Donatian in Bruges, and Du Fay lost the main supporter of his position at St. Donatian within that chapter. This probably marks the beginning of the long tug of war that eventually led to Du Fay’s resignation from St. Donatian.68 On 25 June, less than a fortnight before the date mentioned by Du Fay as the start of his service to the duke of Burgundy, the antagonism between the Council of Basel and Pope Eugenius IV came to a head; the council fathers deposed Eugenius and on 5 November elected Duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy as Pope Felix V. A new schism had opened up in the Western church. Although the emperor and most German princes favored the council, virtually every other ruler in Europe sided with Rome, but both the French King Charles VII and Philip the Good maintained diplomatic relations with Basel and with Felix V as well, and so, at least nominally, did the cathedral of Cambrai.69 Throughout the 1440s the chapter at Cambrai strove to maintain the kind of neutrality that would allow the occasional contact with the council fathers in Basel while remaining within the fold of the Roman papacy. There is no record, for example, of the Cambrai chapter rescinding the appointment of Du Fay and Auclou as delegates to the council, and Auclou, who had been a close associate of Louis Allemand since 1419, clearly retained conciliar sympathies to the end of his life. Indeed, one of his legacies to the chapter has survived: it is a manuscript collection of canons by the Council of Basel.70

67 69

70

Toussaint, Les Relations, 175; Houdoy, Histoire, 375. 68 See later in this chapter. The position of Cambrai was particularly delicate: it was an imperial city, but one located much too close to the center of Burgundian power and, after 1439, under a Burgundian bishop. An example of the cathedral’s dealing with both Rome and Basel well into the schism appears in CBM 1058, fol. 97v: in Feb. 1447 canons Jehan Artut and Pierre Leclerc write from Rome concerning charges by Quentin Gerard, who is litigating a canonicate at Cambrai. Gerard accuses the chapter of sympathizing with the Council of Basel. That canonicate had been given to Nicole L’Ami (Klaus Vriend) in 1437 on a recommendation from the Council (CBM 1057, fol. 61v) and Gerard had presented against it documents from Rome in 1444 (LAN, 4G 1090, fol. 167r). L’Ami was one of Cambrai’s delegates to the council and had been a resident canon, so the chapter resisted Gerard. It took until 1450 for Gerard eventually to prevail, and he was never a resident canon. Gerard died in 1468 (CBM 1046, fol. 194r). Now CBM 1045.

181

182

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

Du Fay was to remain at Cambrai, despite short trips to other cities in the region, from December 1439 until around March 1450.71 In a number of ways his situation at this point was very unusual. For a musician who had been essentially a courtier for most of his life up to this time, going to live in a church where one had a major benefice was for all intents and purposes a form of retirement from an active musical career. Even though some musicians would work as administrators in the musical establishment of their church, there is little evidence that they continued to perform or compose. The career of Nicole Grenon is typical: although he lived until 1456, virtually all of his surviving music dates from before his final arrival at Cambrai in 1427, but he was the master of the office of the small vicars for most years between 1428 and 1438.72 The same can be said of several of Du Fay’s colleagues in the papal chapel, such as Niccolò Pietro Zacharie, who lived until 1466, or Barthélemy Poignare, who lived until 1484.73 But from everything we know about him and the transmission of his music, Du Fay regarded himself primarily as a musician, and indeed as a composer, in a sense of that term that, as Rob Wegman has shown, was not to become common until the early sixteenth century,74 and in 1439 Du Fay was at the height of his powers and in no mood to retire. The years from 1439 to 1447 present the most complicated picture in terms of Du Fay’s biography, with processes that took several years to work themselves out in Cambrai, Bruges, and Savoy, and in his relations with the Burgundian court. Were it possible to write a form of polyphony in prose, as Gustave Reese wished one could do in his introduction to Music in the Renaissance,75 that would be the best way of covering these years, but in the absence of that possibility it is perhaps best to cover these years process by process, in several passes. In his account of Du Fay at Cambrai Craig Wright presents in tabular form and largely from the chapter acts all the instances when the documents show unequivocally that Du Fay was present.76 The volume of the chapter acts for 1439–1442 (old register H) is lost, but another set of documents records Du Fay’s relatively consistent presence during those years, the registers of the grand métier, which dealt with the wine 71

72 73

74 75

Du Fay’s last documented presence in Cambrai during this period is on 11 Mar. 1450, when he serves as proctor of Jehan Macheclier, brother of one of the small vicars, Henri Macheclier, and a nonresident chaplain in the cathedral, in a triple permutation with Jan Meelbroucq and Gerard Sutoire (CBM 1058, fol. 226r). See later in this chapter. On Zacharie see Starr, “Strange Obituaries,” 179–80. Poignare’s death is attested in ASV, RS 840, fols. 249v–250r. I am grateful to Professor Starr for this reference. Wegman, “From Maker to Composer,” 474–76. Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance, xiii. 76 C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 182–85.

Du Fay at Cambrai, the Early Part of the Decade

production of the chapter. It was the grand métier that gave the canons their payments for attending the general chapters, which convened each fiscal year on the day after each of the following feasts: the Assumption (15 August), All Souls (2 November), the Conception of the BVM (8 December), Epiphany (6 January), Purification (2 February), Annunciation (25 March), and Ascension (Thursday of the fifth week after Easter). The entry on the chapter that met on 9 December 1439 specifically mentions Du Fay’s presence and the number of canons present.77 Thereafter there are no names, but the number of canons attending each chapter remains constant. Changes such as two more canons in the Annunciation chapter of 1440 are explained by the arrival of Michiel van Beringhen and Grégoire Nicole, or later for the Annunciation chapter in 1442 as a reduction brought about by the death of Toussaint Mercier.78 Following this, the entry for the Ascension chapter mentions the absence of Pierre Faydit (who had died) and Du Fay.79 Du Fay’s absence from Cambrai on that day was temporary, as are many of the absences noted by Wright,80 for by 17 July he is recorded as witnessing the process concerning the gavelle [gorge] in Carnières and Busigny.81 At about the time Du Fay reached Cambrai canon Wautier Dopstal died.82 The death of a canon always set in motion a chain reaction in terms of canonical houses. The house of the dead canon was requested by one of his colleagues, and another canon then would request the house being vacated by whomever obtained the house of the deceased. These processes sometimes involved a half dozen or more of the canons. Pierre Leclerc, usually called Pierre Beye because he was the nephew of Paul Beye, the grand archdeacon, moved to the house of Dopstal, across the street from the chapter’s bakery oven in the Rue de l’Écu d’or,83 and Pierre Faydit, who had been living in a house called La maison du bregier near St-Aubert, in what is today the Rue du Marché, moved to the house of Pierre Beye in the Rue des Chanoines.84 The maison du bregier had remained “in the hands of

77 79 80 82

83

LAN, 4G 5074, fol. 17r. 78 Ibid., and 4G 5076, fol. 15v. LAN, 4G 5076, fol. 15v. Ascension fell on 10 May 1442; the chapter met the following day. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 185–86. 81 LAN, 4G 1090, fol. 2v. The date of his death is not recorded in any surviving document, but from the accounts of the fabric and the wine it is clear that he died shortly before 24 June 1438. Dopstal was the master of the accounts of the fabric for 1437–38, and no mention is made in them of someone else finishing the account (LAN 4G 4644, fol. 1r), but in the wine account Jehan Bont paid his fee on his reception to Dopstal’s prebend in 1437–1438, and thus before 24 June 1430. Another candidate for the same prebend, Jehan de Bourgogne (the future bishop of Cambrai), paid his fees to the wine account in 1438–1439. Both candidates paid their fees to the fabric account in 1438–1439. LAN, 4G 4645, fol. 3r. 84 Ibid., fol. 2r.

183

184

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

the chapter,” and it was assigned to Du Fay.85 On 2 January 1445 canon Jehan Pochon died, and two days later the chapter gave his house to Du Fay, “as a special grace, even though the term for the delivery was not completed.”86 Three days later the chapter decided to demote the maison du bregier from its status as a canonical house and use it to store grain.87 Du Fay, however, was apparently not happy with Pochon’s house, and wanted to remain at the maison du bregier, which was owned by the assize. In exchange, the chapter asked him to pay for the necessary repairs to the house, which amounted to a goodly sum of £35 10s, which Du Fay paid to Michiel van Beringhen, the master of the assize, on 5 March 1445.88 Despite the expense, Du Fay remained there for less than a year. An entry in the acts on 14 August 1445 mentions that a number of canons considered their houses properly repaired: this was a normal procedure when canons moved to a new house.89 The last entry states that Du Fay considers “the house that was of Pierre Beye properly repaired to be retained as canonical,” but not that it is his house at that point.90 Pierre Beye is another of those canons whose death date is not given anywhere. His will was presented to the chapter on 21 December 1445;91 normally such readings took place within a day of the death, but this may not be the case here since there were problems with the estate, and on 27 January 1446 the chapter enjoined the executors not to sell any of Beye’s property until the accounts were examined and Beye’s debts to the church satisfied.92 Similarly, Beye’s house was assigned, according to the acts, to two different persons on the same day, his uncle Paul Beye and Robert Auclou.93 Still, beginning with the fabric accounts of 1444–1445, it is Du Fay who is shown to be living there,94 and this is confirmed in the elaborate charter establishing the rents of all the canonical houses in 1446.95 This was to be Du Fay’s 85

86 87 89

90

91 93

94

LAN, 4G 5411, fol. 9r. The house was controlled by the office of the assize; for 1439–1440 the rent is reported as being paid by Faydit, but with the note that the house remained in the hands of the chapter. The accounts of the assize have a lacuna after this all the way to 1446, but the acts indicate that in Jan. 1445 Du Fay was living at the Maison du bregier (LAN, 4G 1090, fol. 192v). CBM 1046, fol. 148v (date of death); LAN, 4G 1090, fol. 192r (assignment of house). LAN, 4G 1090, fol. 192v. 88 Ibid., fol. 205r. CBM 1058, fol. 14v; the canons are Gilles Carlier representing Raoul Bouvier, Klaus van Valkenisse, and Reignault des Lions. Ibid.: “Magister Guillermus Du Fay canonicus tenet domum canonialem que fuit magister Petri Beye pro sufficienter reparata canoniali retentione.” CBM 1058, fol. 25v. 92 Ibid., fol. 30r. Ibid., fol. 25v. The marginal rubric states that the expedition is to Paul Beye; the text has Robert Auclou; there is probably a scribal confusion here because the rent for the house is given as £32, but Beye’s house rented for £26. LAN, 4G 4651, fol. 2v. 95 LAN, 4G 792, no. 7215.

Du Fay at Cambrai, the Early Part of the Decade

house for the rest of his life. It was on the Rue de l’Écu d’or and across the street from the oven of the chapter, that is, the house in which Wautier Dopstal had lived until around the time Du Fay reached Cambrai. Facing the front from the street, it had on its left the house of Grenon and one door further the inn called L’Écu d’or. A seventeenth-century plan of the house survives that, as Wright has shown, shares so many traits with the descriptions of the house in the execution of Du Fay’s testament and in documents dealing with repairs to the house in the 1450s, that we can assume that it gives us a reasonably good idea of what his house was like.96 This plan is given in Figure 4.7. The place where Du Fay’s house stood is now occupied by a massive apartment building, dating perhaps from the second quarter of the twentieth century, but it holds an astonishing surprise. Although Cambrai has been devastated over the centuries by having been far too often in the path of warring armies, and the entire city was savagely torched by the retreating German army in 1918, since the Middle Ages the city has had a huge network of tunnels and deep wine cellars.97 The modern house has access to two deep cellars, in the lower of which mason markings in the stones can be dated to the early fifteenth century: this is surely the wine cellar mentioned in the execution and where Du Fay stored his wines. It is a very small space at the bottom of a steep descent, so there is no space to produce an image of the entire cellar. There is a mason’s inscription with a date of 1417 in one of the stones; this inscription, visible in 1976, is now hidden behind a steel drum for heating oil installed since then. Figure 4.8 shows the back wall and floor of the cellar, as well as some ledges in the side walls as it appeared in 2008; the steel supports were added at the time the oil drum was installed, since drilling through the roof of the chamber to install the piping weakened the structure. The documents at Cambrai reveal that Du Fay had a number of administrative assignments during his decade at the cathedral. These are entirely consonant with what other canons in the cathedral did. Some were onetime assignments: on 12 December 1442 the chapter ordered the documentation for all its legal actions to be compiled in a book, and Du Fay was among those committed to collecting and organizing what was to be copied therein.98 On 20 November 1444 he and Auclou were asked to review and correct the accounts of the community of chaplains,99 and on 16 February 1446 he was put on and then taken out of a committee that was to inspect the “small chest” (armariolum) of the chapter, and assigned instead, 96 97 98

LAN, Plan Cambrai 548, p. 25; see also C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 212–15. The classic work on this aspect of the city is Bouly and Bruyelle, Les Souterrains de Cambrai. 99 LAN, 4G 1090, fol. 28v. Ibid., fol. 186r.

185

186

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

Figure 4.7 Floor plan of Du Fay’s house in the seventeenth century. Plan Cambrai 548, p. 25. (by permission of the Archives Départementales du Nord).

Du Fay at Cambrai, the Early Part of the Decade

Figure 4.8 Second cellar underneath Du Fay’s house in 2008. Photo author.

together with Jehan de la Croix, to inspect the coffers of the chapter.100 On 18 August 1446 he is among the signatories of the accord between the chapter and the city.101 This accord, which put an end to several years of strife, to the point that in some of the documentation it is termed “a peace treaty,” was eventually elaborately copied into a parchment bull by Barthélemy Poignare.102 On 7 October 1446 Du Fay was sent to the court of Burgundy in Bruges to obtain letters from the duke (and eventually from

100

CBM 1058, fol. 45v.

101

Ibid., fol. 70r.

102

See p. 209.

187

188

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

the papacy) concerning the protracted litigation between Nicole L’Ami and Quentin Gérard over one of the prebends.103 Other assignments were part of the normal administration of the cathedral: Du Fay was master of the grand and small vicars uninterruptedly from 1442 to 1448. The accounts of the small vicars have large lacunae and no account survives for the entire period from 1439 to 1450. But beginning in 1443 the chapter acts record each June the election of officers, including the master of the small vicars. Further, the expenses for the robes and caps for the vicars and choirboys were paid jointly by the office of the small vicars and the aumosne, and every year around All Saints the masters of both offices went to the fair to buy cloth. Often the accounts of the aumosne give the names of two canons; one is always the master of the aumosne and the other, whenever we have other records to check, is always the master of the small vicars.104 Thus the head of this office can be determined for most of the fifteenth century. Du Fay was also nominally master of the cellar in 1447,105 and was one of the custodians of the keys to the small coffers from 1444 to 1448. Most of these, as well as the routine entries when he was a witness or served as a proctor, are given by Wright in a useful tabular form in his study on Du Fay at Cambrai.106 In terms of the music and liturgy of the cathedral the 1440s were a period of change, quite possibly on account of the number of canons with musical backgrounds. When Du Fay arrived in Cambrai in 1439 four other resident canons were former papal musicians, Mathieu Hanelle, Nicolas Grenon, 103

104 105

106

CBM 1058, fol. 80r. Litigation over this prebend began as early as 1433 in the Council of Basel, and continued variously in Cambrai, Reims, Basel, and Rome until 1450, when Gérard, a papal scriptor, collated the prebend (cf. CBM 1064, fol. 194r). L’Ami remained in Basel as a schismatic (ASV, RS 376, fol. 206r–v) and eventually was made canon of Lausanne by Felix V in 1441 (TAS, Sezione Corte, Museo Storico, Bollario di Felice V, Reg. 8, fols. 226v–227v). Cf. Planchart, “Institutional Politics,” 132–34. CBM 1508, fol. 129v; LAN, 4G 7303, fol. 1r. Both the time (6 Sept.) of the appointment and its nature are unusual, Du Fay is to be advised and assisted by Jehan Grenet and Jehan de la Croix. The acts of 16 and 17 Aug. (CBM 1058, fol. 128r–v) show that the master of the cellar, Gerard Muguet, had created a confusion and his work was to be reviewed. Du Fay, then, was his nominal replacement, but at the end of the fiscal year the account was presented by Jehan Grenet (LAN, 4G 7447, fol. 1r). C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 182–85. The one entry in Wright’s list that could be open to misinterpretation is on p. 183, “hears a confession,” on 2 May 1443. The acts have a laconic entry: “Nota hic dicta die confessione Mathei Bibet factam coram domini Egidio Carlier, decano, Guillermo Du Fay, Reginaldo de Leonibus, canonici ecclesiae Cameracensis” (LAN, 4G 1909, fol. 67r). The only other mention of Bibet in the documents is that he received £10 from the aumosne on 10 Mar. of that year (LAN, 4G 7762 [1442–1443], fol. 11r), and this may be his report of what he did with that money, or else an admission that he had obtained it unduly. In the acts the term confessio is always used in a legal manner, usually someone acknowledging a pecuniary debt to someone else.

Du Fay at Cambrai, the Early Part of the Decade

Gilles Flannel, and Jehan de la Croix, called Monamy. Another canon with a lively interest in music was the dean, Gilles Carlier, and Du Fay’s former colleague in Bologna, Robert Auclou, was the scholasticus of the cathedral. This was an environment considerably different from what Du Fay would have encountered at this time in most other northern churches, including St. Donatian in Bruges, where he also had a benefice. Carlier had been appointed master of the small vicars in 1439;107 coinciding with his appointment and probably at his instigation, an administrative reform took place concerning the vicars. From this year on a detailed accounting, virtually day by day, took place of which vicars were present at the services in order to give them the bread that was part of their daily distributions, and a grand vicar was appointed to write down any marrantia or defect in the performance of their duties. These records were set down not in the accounts of the small vicars but rather in the accounts of the office of the wine and the bread, which unlike those of the small vicars survive from 1439 to 1500, with but a single lacuna, 1450–1451, giving us a detailed picture of the composition of the group that was, for all intents and purposes, the main singing group in the cathedral.108 This suggests that musical and liturgical life at the cathedral was beginning to undergo a revision just around the time when Du Fay arrived at Cambrai, and that the circumstances at Cambrai provided him with an environment in which he did not have to regard his life in the cathedral as a form of retirement from music. From the documentary evidence it would appear that Du Fay’s involvement with this process began with his election as master of the small vicars in 1442. The early part of 1440 was probably spent, as the letters of the duke of Burgundy to St. Donatian in Bruges claim,109 in the service of the duke, probably completing the Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece, and at least as far as the documentary evidence allows us to see, for most of 1441 Du Fay apparently was carrying out the normal administrative and liturgical functions of a canon in the cathedral. The first notices of what would become an immense project appear in the accounts of the fabric precisely in the first year that Du Fay is master of the small vicars:

107 108

109

LAN, 4G 7761, fol. 9r; cf. Planchart, “Institutional Politics,” 132–34. See Appendix 1. The organization of the lists of the vicars in the accounts of the wine and the bread change frequently depending on the scribe, and the men are referred to mostly by first names, diminutives, or sobriquets. But a detailed comparison of these lists with mentions of the vicars in the acts, with the lists of chaplains, and even with records of the papal chapel and the court of Burgundy, have yielded the full names and identities of virtually all the vicars listed in these accounts. See pp. 195–96.

189

190

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

Item, for writing several Patrem, Et in terra, and other songs in music, the Lord Provost of Harlebeke previously gave one noble. But for such writing, beyond Master Nicole Grenon’s note that he had done it gratis, William the scribe was given, including parchment and illumination 103s 4d.110 Item, repaid to Master Nicole Grenon for the sample of a scribe from Douai, to see if his writing was adequate to do the antiphoner for the church 3s 4d.111

Fallows tentatively suggested that the first entry might refer to Grenon copying the choirbook that survives today as Cambrai 6,112 but in her excellent study of the production of music manuscripts at Cambrai Liane Curtis points out that the payment indicates that Grenon wrote only the music, while in Cambrai 6 both music and text are in the same hand.113 Further, the language of the payment suggests that this book was copied not for the cathedral but for the church of Harlebeke. Still, Curtis is surely correct in noting that 1442 was a pivotal year at the cathedral. No music scribes active at the cathedral before this year appear in the records. But soon after 1442 a new set of scribes begins a systematic recopying of the plainsong books of the cathedral and at the same time a second group of scribes begins copying an immense amount of polyphonic music.114 Very little polyphony had been copied at Cambrai before this time although there is a payment in 1442–1443 to one Martin Willequin, Burgundian, for copying nine “codices” of Credos and Glorias.115 A year later Thomas le Roigniet bound two books of proses and included in them “those new codices where were written numerous Credos and Glorias.”116 Curtis tentatively suggests that Cambrai 6 is one of the nine codices copied by Martin;117 I doubt that this is the case. A “codex” (and later “cahier”) as used in the fabric accounts, always means “fascicle,” and could range from a bifolium to a sextern. What we have here is probably a group of nine 110

111

112 114 115

116 117

LAN, 4G 4649, fol. 26r: “Item pro scribendo pluribus Patrem, Et in terra, ac aliis carminibus musice / alias datum fuit per dominus Prepositum Harlebeckensis unum noblem. Sed pro dictam scripturam ultra notulam factam per magistrum Nicolaum Grenon gratis / fuit solutum Willermo scriptori Incluse pergameno et illuminatione 103 s 4 d.” Also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 227. Ibid.: “Item restituti fuerunt magistro Nicolao Grenon pro exemplo cuiusdam scriptoris de Duaco ad videndum si sufficieret eius scriptura ad faciendum antiphonarium pro ecclesia 3 s 4 d.” Also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 227. Fallows, Dufay, 288, n. 10. 113 Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 26–34, 40–42, and 154. Ibid., 80–85, particularly tables 5.1 and 5.2. LAN, 4G 4638, fol. 23v; also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 223 (reading “rescribendo” for “scribendo”). The entry is undated, but from its placement in the list of payments it comes from the end of that fiscal year, thus the first half of 1433. LAN, 4639, fol. 27v; also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 224. Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 153, n. 16.

Du Fay at Cambrai, the Early Part of the Decade

fascicles containing Glorias and Credos.118 Thus what Martin copied was apparently a collection of fascicles adding up to 72 or 108 folios that were later divided among the two prosers. If these were to be used, as seems probable, on both sides of the choir, as was the case with numerous other manuscripts copied at Cambrai, the resulting pair, if the fascicles were quaterns, were two collections of exactly the same size as Cambrai 6 (36 folios of polyphony), or if the fascicles were sexterns just slightly larger (54 folios of polyphony) but comparable in size to Cambrai 11 (48 folios of polyphony). The repertory of these fascicles is very close to, but cannot be identical with, that of Cambrai 6 and 11, which also contain Kyries. The copying of polyphony at the cathedral begins in earnest with the arrival of a young clerk, Symon Mellet, first documented at Cambrai in April 1443.119 Mellet was to become a prodigious music scribe; Curtis, who has carefully traced the history of his copying at Cambrai and identified a number of manuscripts in his hand, cautions against regarding him as “Du Fay’s scribe,” or assuming that his musical career at Cambrai is basically coterminous with that of Du Fay.120 She is certainly correct; Mellet was a scribe for the cathedral chapter and his career as such continued until 1480,121 but it is also true that Mellet and Du Fay had probably known each other since the early 1430s, since both were then in the papal Curia, where Mellet remained until 1441. At the time, Mellet had benefices in Laon, but upon his return north he went to Cambrai instead, and his arrival coincided roughly with the beginning of Du Fay’s tenure as master of the small vicars, so it is likely that Mellet came to Cambrai at the urging of Du Fay. His career at Cambrai was closely intertwined with that of Du Fay until the composer’s death.122 A more detailed view of Mellet’s career as a copyist is given later in this chapter. What became a musical change at Cambrai in the 1440s began as a liturgical revision, not in the sense that there were to be changes in the 118

119

120 122

Dozens of entries in the accounts of the fabric as well as the structure of Cambrai 6 and Cambrai 11 indicate that throughout the 15th century Cambrai scribes used fascicles of either four or six bifolia, although in connection with the copying of the great antiphoners the fascicles were single bifolia (see later in this chapter). In addition, the entries in the fabric accounts are usually reasonably specific, so that the term used both times, “Patrem, Et in terra,” as opposed to the 1449 entry in LAN, 4G 4656, fol. 30r: “kyrieleison, et in terra, patrem, sanctus, agnus et cetera talia,” should be taken at face value. LAN, 4G 7442, fol. 8r. This is the account of bread given to the small vicars, reporting the reception of Mellet on 18 Apr. 1443. Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 91. 121 See ibid., 255. For a summary biography of Mellet, see Appendix 1. Mellet’s decision to go to Cambrai instead of Laon was, in terms of his benefices, a step back, since the small vicars were at the bottom of the social pyramid in all of the northern cathedrals, so there must have been other inducements, such as the possibility of working with Du Fay.

191

192

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

liturgy – although there were a number of those brought about by new endowments and by the augmentation in rank of many feasts – but by the feeling on the part of the canons that some of the books of the cathedral needed a new redaction. The scribe tested by Grenon in 1441, perhaps Girard Sohier,123 was sought to recopy the antiphoner of the cathedral, elsewhere mentioned as “the great books,”124 since the antiphoner was the longest and most complex book used in the service and usually consisted of several volumes.125 Eventually Jehan de Namps, a cleric from Amiens residing in Arras, was contracted to copy the antiphoner on 9 February 1446,126 but Sohier was also brought in to copy some of the music.127 From the contract between the chapter and Namps we know that he was to produce two antiphoners, probably one for each side of the choir, each antiphoner in two or three volumes “at the pleasure of the lords,” and a payment of 1454– 1455 mentions the copying of sixty-two large letters with floral decorations into six volumes,128 which might mean that each antiphoner was divided into three volumes. Liane Curtis has assembled the payments to the two scribes who worked on the antiphoners; eventually Namps was paid for 532 fascicles and Sohier for 447,129 but since Sohier only added music to text copied by Namps, the antiphoners probably consisted of 532 fascicles. In the accounts of the fabric, where the payments are recorded, the term quaternus and later cahier probably should be rendered as “fascicle,” and it could mean something as small as a bifolium. This is clear from an entry of 1446–1447, when Namps was provided, in connection with another project, with one hundred sheets of parchment in small format (c pelles pergameni parvi), which yielded fifty fascicles (quinquaginta quaternis).130 This is important because if the 532 fascicles copied by Namps were quaterns, the antiphoners at Cambrai consisted of an astonishing 4,256 folios, which divided among six 123

124 125

126

127

128 129 130

This is based on the fact that Grenon went to Douai in this case, and that a number of members of the Sohier family, several of which had connections with the cathedral, were from Douai; see C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 204–5. Far more information on the Sohiers is now available in Alden and Fiala, “Dialogus de Johanne Sohier.” LAN, 4G 4653, fol. 23r; also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 230. Cf. Planchart, “Four Motets,” 20, with an inventory of a comparable antiphoner from San Giacomo il Maggiore. CBM 1058, fol. 34v; also Appendix 1. Namps eventually became a canon of Reims (1456–1471) and chaplain of Ste-Geneviève in Paris (1471); he died in 1471. See Desportes, Diocèse de Reims, 184. The first time Sohier appears in the accounts is 1448–1449 (LAN, 4G 4655, fol. 27v; also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 232). LAN, 4G 4661, fol. 22v; also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 162 and 238. Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 161. LAN, 4G 4653, fol. 22v; also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 229–30.

Du Fay at Cambrai, the Early Part of the Decade

volumes still results in books of more than seven hundred folios each, a figure wildly at variance with the size of most surviving antiphoner volumes from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. If the fascicles mentioned in the fabric accounts were bifolia, the antiphoners consisted of 1,064 folios, yielding six volumes ranging from 170 to 180 folios each, which is the usual size of such books as they survive from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.131 These books were nonetheless enormous and heavy objects: the surviving volumes of the antiphoner of San Giacomo in Bologna measure 40 × 60 cm, and those preserved in the library at Cambrai from institutions other than the cathedral are even larger. With their wooden boards and metal guards each weighs from 10 to 20 kilograms. They were in constant use and their weight put an enormous strain on the binding. Already in 1457–1458, two volumes of the antiphoner were sent to Valenciennes to be divided into four volumes.132 Unfortunately, not a single volume of this antiphoner or of the graduals used in choro at Cambrai, which would have been just as large, has survived. The antiphoners, which were beautifully decorated by Namps, probably fell prey to vandalism once their chants were superseded by the reform of the liturgy in the sixteenth century, although a reflection of the music they contained might survive in the printed antiphoner of Cambrai published early in the sixteenth century.133 Of the plainsong for the Mass the only survival is a much later private gradual copied in 1542 for Bishop Robert de Croy,134 since none of the surviving missals is notated. It is probably no coincidence that the beginnings of this immense project coincide roughly with the election of Du Fay as head of the small vicars in the summer of 1442. Still, for about three years the entries in the accounts of the fabric show largely the same kinds of activity encountered in the 1430s: rebinding and repairing of the chant books, and the occasional copy of relatively small books such as the processionals.135 On 23 June 1445 Mellet is paid for the first time for writing the ceremonies of the church in two tablets and adding new offices, a Magnificat foundation by Jehan 131

132 134 135

For example, a series of volumes of a 16th-century antiphoner in the Médiathèque municipale in Cambrai are as follows: 1274 (summer), 192 fols.; 1276 (winter, continuation of 1274), 112 fols.; 1277 (common), 105 fols.; the surviving volumes of the early 15th-century antiphoner of San Giacomo in the Civico Museo Medievale in Bologna are as follows: 598, 172 fols.; 599, 237 fols.; 601, 159 fols.; 604, 227 fols.; 605, 138 fols.; 606, 120 fols., and the cantatorium of the antiphonale from St-Pierre de Lille, Lille, Bibliothèque municipale, 599 (part 2), 136 fols. LAN, 4G 4665, fol. 24v; also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 243. 133 CBM, Impr. XVI C 4. CBM 12. The documentation is collected in Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 227–29. The one payment for new books is to Guillaume Caudel, for copying two processionals; LAN, 4G 4651, fol. 34r.

193

194

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

Martin and “the new office of Saint Mary,” to the ordinaries of the church.136 A laconic entry in the acts on 9 September 1445 gives the order to make the antiphoners, to find an appropriate scribe, and to deputize several people to oversee the project.137 In 1445–1446 four dozen pieces of parchment were bought in Bruges and selected by an unnamed scribe.138 This man was probably the same “scribe from Arras” who in the vigil of Pentecost in 1446 received four dozen pieces of parchment “ordered the year before” in order to make the new antiphoners.139 That the scribe was Namps is confirmed by a complete copy of the contract in French, made between him and the chapter, and entered in the acts on 9 February 1446. Namps is described as a clerk of Amiens resident in Arras, and agrees to produce two ferial antiphoners (antiphonaires pheraulx in the MS) for the cathedral,140 starting on the Dominica Laetare that was coming up or within eight days thereof. The antiphoners were each to be in two or three volumes, and to be copied in fascicles of eight leaves, each leaf of two pages, and each page was to have seven lines of text and music. Namps also would provide red and blue initials and other decorations. The chapter promised to deliver to him a sufficient amount of parchment, and Namps promised to undertake no other work while copying the antiphoners. The main representative of the chapter in this contract was Du Fay.141 The first mention of Namps in the accounts comes in 1446–1447, when he was paid for copying two smaller books of graduals and alleluias according to a contract he had made with Du Fay.142 Thus, virtually from the beginning, the composer was associated with the refashioning of the liturgical books and possibly the liturgy itself at Cambrai. 136

137

138 139 140

141 142

LAN, 4G 4651, fol. 34v; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 228. The “novum officium Beatae Mariae” was a term used in a number of books, from the 14th until well into the 15th century, for the Feast of the Visitation (2 July), proclaimed officially by Pope Urban VI on 5 Apr. 1389; the decree was published by Pope Boniface IX on 9 Nov. of that year. CBM 1058, fol. 16v: “Fiant libri antiphonarii pro ecclesiam ista et querantur scriptores / scriptore autem recepto / deputabuntur aliqui / ad intendendum facture duorum librorum.” LAN, 4G 4651, fol. 34v; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 228. LAN, 4G 4652, fol. 30v; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 228. The term probably indicates that these were antiphoners de tempore. A comparison with the late 14th-century antiphoner of San Giacomo il Maggiore in Bologna, which survives essentially complete, is instructive: the Bolognese antiphoner consists of fifteen volumes, eight de tempore (which are the counterpart of Cambrai’s ferial antiphoner), five de sanctis, one for the commune sanctorum, and one for the invitatories and their psalms. CBM 1058, fol. 34v; also C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 183. LAN, 4G 4653, fol. 22v; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 229. With admirable foresight, the payment specifies that Namps wrote only forty out of fifty fascicles in these books; the other ten, divided into two groups of five, were left blank and placed at the end of each book to accommodate the copying of any new feasts that were to be added to the liturgy. This in itself is unusual but probably symptomatic of the attitude of the cathedral authorities at the time.

The Canonicate in Bruges, 1439–1447

The Canonicate in Bruges, 1439–1447 The documentation that survives gives us at best small glimpses of Du Fay’s life at Cambrai. The chapter acts are missing from 1439 until June 1442, and a number of other registers, which often provide details about the canons, notably those of the fabric and the aumosne, are mostly silent about him. He was paid for saying five of the missae de parvo requiem in 1439–1440, but not again until he said two more in 1442–1443,143 and his name begins to appear among the canons earning distributions from the large vineyards at Waisne-au-Bac, north of Cambrai, from 1440 on.144 The other biographical information we have for these first years at Cambrai comes from outside the city and was nothing to bring comfort. On 28 April 1438 the chapter of St. Donatian in Bruges, probably under pressure from new provost, Jehan de Bourgogne, had granted Du Fay the prebend vacant on the death of Guillaume Meyere.145 At the declaration of prebends, when the chapter decided how to tax each prebend on 3 December 1438, Du Fay’s prebend was not decided upon but put ad deliberationem.146 Quite plainly the chapter was stalling on the matter; they were probably resentful of having been forced to accept Du Fay by their provost, as Reinhard Strohm has surmised,147 and by 2 December 1439 no decision had been reached. In the meantime, however, their provost had become bishop of Cambrai and no longer held sway over the chapter, and on 17 February 1440 Du Fay’s prebend was declared ad fabricam.148 This meant that the entire revenue of Du Fay’s prebend would go to the fabric of St. Donatian and not to Du Fay. The chapter’s declaration, however, contains a proviso added to this and a few other such declarations: “saving payment to him if he were in a privileged place and provided proof at the proper time.”149 This suggests that Du Fay had sought to have his prebend declared ad privilegium, something that could be extended to up to thirty members of the court of the duke of Burgundy according to a compact between the duke and the church.150 The text of this compact has not survived, but if its 143 145 148 149

150

LAN, 4G 4645, fol. 31v, and 4G 4658, fol. 27r. 144 LAN, 4G 7440, fol. 3v. BAB, Reeks A 50, fol. 253r and 262v. 146 BAB, Reeks A 51, fol. 8v. 147 See p. 151. BAB, Reeks A 51, fols. 22r and 26r. Ibid., fol. 26r: “prebenda Du Fay ad fabricam salva sibi taxa si fuerit in loco privilegiato et docuerit tempore debito.” References to this compact appear in several entries in the acts, e.g., BAB, Reeks A 50, fol. 217v, 31 May 1434: the duke writes to the chapter that Gautier de Mandra is one of thirty persons he has named to an indult that they may receive the fruits of their prebend in absentia; Reeks A 51, fol. 36r, 8 June 1440: Guillaume Belledame, acting for Étienne de Petault, presented letters of the duke stating that Petault was a familiaris and a chaplain in his chapel and one of the thirty

195

196

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

conditions resembled those described in the hundreds of litterae de fructibus issued by the papal court, the person claiming the privilege had to be in the service of the duke and living at court or at least within a day’s journey from it. It is possible that when Du Fay made his initial request he was indeed at the court, but after 9 December 1440 he was at Cambrai, a good deal more than a day’s journey from the court, and this was information that the canons in Bruges were very likely to be privy to. Du Fay was in Bruges on 4 June 1440, probably to plead his case,151 and on 23 June 1440 the chapter was waiting for letters from the duke, and had been given to understand by Du Fay’s procurator that Du Fay had been in the service of the duke from the Octave of the Apostles until the Purification just past (7 July 1439 to 2 February 1440); on this basis they decided that whatever income from the prebend should be given to Du Fay, if he was privileged, should be sequestered in the coming declaration of prebends.152 The letters were received on 30 June; in them, according to the summary in the acts, the duke claimed that Du Fay was his familiaris and chaplain. Guillaume Belledame, Du Fay’s proctor, then requested that Du Fay be paid the fruits of his prebend for the past year. The canons were suspicious and wanted to make certain that the time of service was indeed what had been claimed and perhaps more importantly that Du Fay was indeed one of the thirty persons entitled to privileged status in terms of his prebend.153 Since we have only a reference to the duke’s letter we cannot tell if it did mention the length of Du Fay’s service to him or Du Fay’s position as one of the thirty privileged persons. We have only a report from the chapter, but the report is of considerable importance in that the summary states that the duke claimed that Du Fay was one of his chaplains, even though the composer’s name never appears in the Burgundian chapel lists, because this situation parallels exactly what we encounter in the relationship between Du Fay and the duke of Savoy a decade later.

151

152 153

persons entitled to the full fruits of his prebends. A slightly different wording is used in Reeks A 51, fol. 36v, 13 June 1440: Guillaume de Nieppe, acting for Gilles de Bins, presented letters of the duke, “super familiaritate eiusdem domini Egidii,” which the canons admitted in the usual manner. BAB, Reeks G 65 (1439–1440), tabula. Reeks G 65 consists of a series on immense parchment leaves, one for each year, written only on the recto, and divided into a series of sections, one of which is a table of daily distributions for all the canons organized by month. BAB, Reeks A 51, fol. 38r. Ibid., fol. 38v: “Eadem die [iovis xxxa et ultima Iunii] domini mei receperunt litteras clausas domini ducis testificantes quod dominus Guillermus Du Fay erat familiaris et cappellanus suus et domino Guillermo Belledame procuratore eius sedicens petens pretextu eiusdem littere sibi renderi de fructibus sue prebende pro anno preterito / Domini reponderunt quod si ipse diceret se fuisse in servitio domini ab octava apostolorum usque ad purificationem ultimam preteritam et rem verum de numero xxxa etc domini se advisarent.”

The Canonicate in Bruges, 1439–1447

On 21 November 1440 the chapter of St. Donatian made a declaration of the prebends and Du Fay’s was declared simply ad foraneitatem, indicating that he would receive nothing.154 On 19 December an unnamed representative of the composer (quidam procurator domini Guillermi Du Fay) complained of this to the chapter, this time specifying that the duke had written and specified that Du Fay was one of the thirty persons entitled to receive the fruits of his prebend in absentia.155 This apparently refers to yet another letter of the duke, probably in response to the chapter’s request for clarification. In addition, the entry tells us that Du Fay had collated a chaplaincy of St. Lawrence and was requesting the revenues from this benefice as well.156 The reply of the canons is testier than their earlier one, stating that if Du Fay were to reside for a proper time in a privileged place or if he were in any manner entitled to privileged fruits they would give him his due; otherwise they had to follow the law of foraneitas, which all of them and even Du Fay had sworn in terms of their prebends, and that in the case of the chaplaincy of St. Lawrence, its fruits belonged to the fabric, which was poor, and to whose luster they all had to contribute, unless Du Fay were to document his privilege and grace.157 This stands in marked contrast with the chapter’s reception of letters of privilege for Auclou and Binchois, on 23 February and 12 June 1441, which were accepted without further ado.158 This is all the more telling because the canons knew, from Auclou’s letter, that he was, like Du Fay, resident at Cambrai. On 7 December 1441, when the prebends were declared, those of Auclou and Binchois were declared ad privilegium and that of Du Fay ad fabricam, once again indicating that Du Fay would receive nothing. Du Fay spent three days in Bruges in January 1442, again most likely arguing his case,159 and on 24 January the chapter granted him, per modum expedientem gratiam, £40, a very small portion of the revenues of his 154 155

156

157

158

Ibid., fol. 46r. Ibid., fol. 48r: “quia dominus dux pro eo scriptis fiat et per suas litteras testificatus facerat eum esse suum cappellanum et familiarem et unum de numero xxxa pro quibus sibi concessum fuerat uti privilegio percipiendo fructus in absentia etc.” Ibid.: “quo ad fructus huius prebende quod quo ad fructus capellanie sancti Laurentii in litteris mediis.” This chaplaincy was not in St. Donatian; in later entries it is referred to as “infra limites parochia de Dudzeele” (Reeks A 51, fol. 95r), a town northeast of Bruges. Ibid.: “domini mei prima deliberatione responderunt eidem quod si ipse Du Fay decenter tempore et loco debitis se fecisse residens in loco privilegiato aut se quo ad huiusmodi fructus privilegiatum fore / domini fateretur debitum eorum alioquin necessarie habebant servire legem foraneitatis quam ipse omnes et etiam ipse iuravit quo ad prebendam suam et quo ad capellaniam sancti Laurentii illi fructus pertinebant fabrice que erat pauper et quilibet debebat ei favore sicut et ipsi omnes favore nitere debant nisi ipse Du Fay docueret de privilegio ut s[upra].” Ibid., fols. 52v and 60r. 159 BAB, Reeks G 65 (1441–1442), tabula.

197

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At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

prebend.160 On 9 May 1442 Guillaume Belledame presented letters of the duke stating that Pierre Maillart was one of the thirty persons nominated by the duke to receive the fruits of his prebend in absentia while in the service of the duke. At the same time Belledame presented “similar letters” on behalf of Du Fay, and Guillaume de Nieppe presented similar letters on behalf of Binchois.161 The canons admitted those for Maillart and Binchois “simpliciter,” but those for Du Fay they admitted “as far as they needed to and not beyond, with the necessary lawful restrictions.”162 For whatever reasons, the canons of St. Donatian were apparently quite hostile to Du Fay. Still, on 24 September the canons decided to grant Du Fay another £40 from the fruits of his prebend, letting him “live in whatever place he wants.”163 Du Fay and the duke continued to press his case; he spent ten days in Bruges in September 1442 and four days in October 1443.164 But he must have had a sense of how futile things were becoming, because on 4 October 1442 he exchanged the chapel of St. Lawrence with Gilles de Benerflins, the scholasticus, for the custodia of St. Andrew in Strate (West Flanders).165 In January 1443 Du Fay’s prebend was assigned to the fabric “except for his grace,” and on October of that year he was given the £40 that the canons had decided upon.166 It could not have helped Du Fay’s case that around this time his procurator at the chapter, Guillaume Belledame, together with Jacques du Four (Clibano), were involved in the rape and possibly the murder of a young woman.167 The duke of Burgundy and another patron of Du Fay, François II, count of Étampes, continued to press his case. On 12 May 1445 the canons, at the request of these lords, granted Du Fay £40 from his prebend and two days later wrote to both the duke and the count asking not to be bothered again on this matter.168 On 4 April 1445 they refused to grant Du Fay even the small grace that he had received in previous years,169 and on 23 June 1446 an armed knight sent by the count of Étampes, the Seigneur or Archy, came to request the funds due to Du Fay for 1445, but the canons stood their ground and reminded him that they had told the duke 160 162 163

164

165 167 168

BAB, Reeks A 51, fol. 76r. 161 Ibid., fol. 82r. Ibid.: “domini mei admisserunt quantum debuerunt et non ultra et salvo iuris cuiuslibet.” Ibid., fol. 95r: “ad supplicationem domini Guillermi Du Fay huius ecclesie canonici domini mei fecerunt sibi gratiam quo residendo quo sibi placuerit loco habeat hoc anno xlii pro fructibus sue prebende xl librarum parvorum Flandrie de qua ipse dominus regrantus fuit.” BAB, Reeks G 65 (1442–1443) and (1443–1444), tabulae. The visit of 1443 probably was to argue for his revenues, since the canons made him a “grace” of £40 on 4 Oct. 1443 (BAB, Reeks A 51, fol. 110v). BAB, Reeks A 51, fol. 95r. 166 Ibid., fols. 99v, 110v. Ibid., fols. 118r–121v; see Chapter 1. The episode cost both men their canonicates in Bruges. Ibid., fols. 142v–143r. 169 Ibid., fol. 168v.

The Canonicate in Bruges, 1439–1447

and the count that the matter was closed. The knight issued vague threats that apparently came to nothing.170 There is no hint of why there was such antagonism toward Du Fay, who was treated very differently from the other canons supported by Philip the Good. From reading the chapter acts it is clear that the chapter of St. Donatian was uncommonly fractious and the canons carried their grudges sometimes even beyond the grave, as they did with their cantor Robert Sandewyn, a former papal singer; but at least in Sandewyn’s case the acts show what he had done to upset and even embarrass the chapter;171 nothing like this is evident in Du Fay’s case, but for whatever reasons the canons were openly hostile to him. Du Fay must have realized that his case in Bruges was hopeless and in October 1446 he resigned his canonicate at St. Donatian in an exchange with Nicaise Du Puit. On 4 October Du Fay constituted his proctors at Cambrai: Charles de Rochefort, knight, Gilles de Bins, Nicolas Boidin, and Pierre Maillart, chaplains of the duke of Burgundy, and Clement Maillart, chaplain of the count of Éstampes,172 and on 24 October Nicolas Long, proctor of Nicaise Du Puit, presented his letters of collation to the chapter of St. Donatian.173 Du Fay’s canonicate was apparently at the collation of the provost of St. Donatian, and he resigned it into the hands of the provost,174 in this case David de Bourgogne. Strohm has misunderstood the document where Du Fay sets his procurators, and views the long list as a way of soothing his bruised feelings, parading his important representatives in front of the canons of St. Donatian;175 but this was the usual number of procurators used for any exchange of benefices and Du Fay’s representatives went not to St. Donatian but to the Burgundian court, where the provost resided. From the provost’s letter granting the canonicate to Nicaise Du Puit, we learn that Du Fay received in exchange the custodia of the parish church of St. Catherine in Duysborch in the diocese of Cambrai.176 A curious aspect of this exchange is that Nicaise seems to have been something of a benefice broker. The Vatican registers and those of the cathedral at Cambrai record several dozen instances of Nicaise exchanging benefices with another cleric, holding the benefice for a short time, sometimes only a few weeks, and exchanging it again. He held the canonicate at St. Donatian for eight months before 170 172

173 174

175

Ibid., fol. 176r. 171 See Planchart, “Concerning Du Fay’s Birthplace,” 229. LAN, 4G 1086, no. 375; also C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 226–27. This is the earliest mention of Du Fay as a Baccalarius in decretis in an archival document, and the title was added after his designation as canon of St. Donatian. BAB, Reeks 51, fol. 182r. This strengthens the case that it was under pressure from Jehan de Bourgogne that the canons had finally accepted Du Fay in 1438. Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, 25. 176 BAB, Reeks 51, fol. 182r.

199

200

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

exchanging it in a permutation with Nicole Boidin.177 Three days after appointing his procurators, Du Fay was sent to the court of Burgundy to obtain letters from the duke concerning a bitter dispute over a prebend between Nicole L’Ami and Quentin Gerard, which had involved the courts at Reims and Rome and the Council of Basel, and continued to fester.178 During this time Du Fay apparently exchanged the church in Duysborch for a canonicate at Ste-Waudru in Mons with the Burgundian almoner, Mathieu de Braecle, and on 17 October he traveled to Mons, in the company of Binchois, who was one of the ten male canons at Ste-Waudru, to be installed in person.179 He retained this canonicate to the end of his life, and from his epitaph it is clear that he was profoundly grateful to the well-born canonesses of Ste-Waudru for their reception of him, which was in such stark contrast to what had happened in Bruges.

Relations with Savoy and Ferrara in the 1440s The early 1440s were clearly not a happy time for Du Fay in terms of his relationship with St. Donatian or his beneficial career; apart from the troubles in Bruges he resigned his benefices in Savoy. He had to resign them outright, not exchange them for other benefices, since they were now in a region in the obedience of a schismatic Pope, and this probably meant a considerable loss of income for him. He had written to Rome in June 1441 with a fairly common request to be allowed to say the hours according to the use of Rome no matter where he would be,180 then in September he wrote twice requesting license to resign or exchange three of his benefices.181 These were surely his three benefices in Savoy, namely the parish church in Versoix, the canonicate in Lausanne, and his claim to a canonicate in Geneva. The chaplaincy of St. Lawrence in Dudzeele, mentioned earlier, which was surely collated auctoritate ordinaria, did not require a papal 177 179

180 181

Ibid., fol. 193r. 178 CBM 108, fol. 91v; also C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 184. Devillers, Chartes, 3:231, summary. The documents themselves were destroyed in the bombardment of 1944. The installation documents, according to Devillers, called him “chapelain du duc de Bourgogne”; C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 185, called this “an error that can be understood in the light of the fact that Dufay had just come from the court of Burgundy at the time of his reception,” but this view might no longer be tenable. ASV, RS 374, fols. 119v–120r. The first letter is lost, but mentioned in the second, which corrects the number of benefices from two to three; ASV, RS 377, fol. 79r. The pope’s bull appears in ASV, RL 379, fol. 226r–v, and the payment of the annates was paid on 2 Feb. 1442 by Pierre Philippron in Rome in Du Fay’s name, ASV, LA 8, fol. 288v.

Relations with Savoy and Ferrara in the 1440s

license to resign, but two of the Savoy benefices had included dealings with Rome, and it was probably prudent under the circumstances to include the parish church of Versoix in the license. Of course, all three benefices were now under the control of Felix V, and thus Du Fay resigned them in Felix’s curia through a procurator, Guillaume Robert. The resignation itself has not survived; the disposition of the benefices is known only from the bulls of Felix V to the new holders: the church at Versoix went to Étienne Seclier and the canonicate at Lausanne to Guillaume Hugo.182 The claim to a canonicate in Geneva, which was still tied up in a lawsuit with Thomas de Fruyn, was granted by Felix V to one of his scriptores, Jehan Ligier of Rouen.183 Withal, Du Fay had the support of Duke Philip the Good and of the count of Étampes. As a familiaris of the duke of Burgundy he was probably able to communicate with his former patron in Savoy without fearing papal sanction, so he could arrange proctors for the resignations, and he might have written of his troubles to Duke Louis. This might explain a letter of Louis to Philip the Good dated 5 November 1441, where Louis asks Philip to grant permission for Du Fay to return to Savoy: My beloved chaplain and the master of my chapel, mesire Guillaume Du Fay, who had for some time the direction of my said chapel and served there in such a manner that I would gladly see him here again; according to what I understand he would be happy to return to my service if it was your pleasure to command him to do so and to assure him that the benefices he has in your lands [riere vous] would not be taken away from him.184

There is no record of a response from Philip and possibly there was none. Fallows reads this letter as another example of Louis’s tactlessness, since Philip supported Eugenius IV and Louis’s father was Felix V.185 But I think Fallows misunderstands the circumstances and the import of the letter. Philip and Louis continued to have friendly diplomatic relations. Even as late as 1443, much to the irritation of Eugenius, Philip received Louis at Chalon-sur-Saône and for forty days the two princes entertained each 182 183

184

185

TAS, Archivio di Corte, Bollario di Felice V, Reg 4, fols. 259v–261v. Ibid., Reg. 2, fols. 165v–168r (19 Oct. 1441), fols. 298v–199r (6 Feb. 1443). Ligier had been a representative of Rouen at the council since 6 Mar. 1431 (Haller, Concilium, 2:364), and probably knew Du Fay. Ligier also succeeded Barthélemy Poignare as a scriptor of the Council (Haller, Concilium, 6:318). Fruyn apparently made as much trouble for Ligier as he had made for Du Fay: his lawsuit continued into 1445; cf. TAS, Archivio di Corte, Bollario di Felice V, Reg. 6, fols. 121r–v, 188r–189r. Aosta, Archives Regionales, Archives Challant, carton 247, lettres; also Lange, “Une lettre,” 103–4, with a complete transcription; also C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 191–92, with a translation, and Fallows, Dufay, 59–60. Fallows, Dufay, 59–60.

201

202

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

other with jousts and banquets,186 so it would not have been tactless of Louis to write as he did. Moreover, from the text of the letter it is apparent that in some way or another he had received news of Du Fay. It is more than likely, however, that Du Fay, whatever his feelings for the court of Savoy, did not think it was safe to return to Savoy and that Philip was happy to have Du Fay remain in Cambrai and nominally in his service. In fact, there is evidence that Du Fay continued to write music for the court of Savoy during his years at Cambrai. Among the proper cycles that Feininger identified as a work of Du Fay in Trent 88, and one that has all the earmarks of being his work, is a cycle for St. Maurice and his companions that follows not the liturgy of Cambrai but rather a southern French liturgy used in Aquitaine and in parts of Savoy, where Amadeus VIII had founded the Order of St. Maurice in 1434 when he withdrew from the rule of the duchy.187 Feininger misunderstood the nature of the cycle, which uses the introit Venite benedicti as the first of two introits, which he assumed would be used only in Eastertide, since in the modern liturgy and in most medieval uses it is sung only on Wednesday of the week in albis.188 But this was the normal introit for St. Maurice in southern France,189 and the Mass for St. Maurice in Trent 88 is structured like Du Fay’s Mass for St. Francis, which included the introit for the saint’s feast and the introit for the octave. A crucial detail of this cycle in Tr 88 is the unusual ending of the offertory, which indicates that Du Fay received the texts to be set, probably in a letter similar to that which Antonio Squarcialupi wrote him decades later, in which he included a poem by Lorenzo de’ Medici that Antonio wanted Du Fay to set to music.190 But the offertory text in Savoy ended with a long alleluia, and none of the chant books available to Du Fay in the north had that alleluia, so Du Fay created a strong cadence when the paraphrase of the chant was four notes from the end, and wrote a change of texture and an extended setting of the last four notes of the chant available to him, to make room for the singing of the alleluia.191 What, we might ask, would have prompted the commission of a 186 188 189

190 191

Toussaint, Les Relations, 177–78. 187 Maria José, Amedée VIII, 2:125. Feininger, ed., Auctorum Anonymorum, 108. The introit, with tropes for St. Maurice, appears in Paris, BnF, lat. 909, fols. 49v–50r; 1084, fol. 82r–v; 1118, fols. 88v–89r; 1119, fols. 69v–70r; 1121, fol. 37v; n.a.l. 1871, fol. 31r; and BAV, Reg. lat. 222, fol. 98r, and without tropes, but as part of the Mass for St. Maurice, in BL, Harley 4951, fol. 296r. These sources go from the late 10th to the late 11th century, and cover an area from the Spanish border to Bourges. The tropes, including the absolutely specific one Haec legio duce Mauritio, are published in AH 49, nos. 309–11. See later in this chapter. Cf. Planchart, “Connecting the Dots,” 22–28 and example 6, as well as OO Planchart 4/6.

Relations with Savoy and Ferrara in the 1440s

set of propers from Savoy to Du Fay? Proper cycles were almost nonexistent in the 1440s, but if we assume, as I have suggested earlier, that there was some communication between Du Fay and the court of Savoy in the 1440s, Duke Louis might have been apprised of the fact that Du Fay was now engaged in the composition of polyphonic propers for Dijon and probably wanted the cycle for St. Maurice. The patronage that Du Fay enjoyed from Philip the Good and François II d’Étampes extended to other lords as well; on 23 October 1443 he named Romuald Kruye and Jacques du Four as his procurators to collect 20 ducats that Marquis Ercole d’Este had sent him through the Banco Borromei in Bruges.192 There is no explanation of why he was receiving this money, which was a substantial sum. Fallows tentatively associated it with the composition of the song Seigneur Leon.193 Plamenac’s ascription of the song to Du Fay on the basis of what can be seen of a cut-off ascription194 and Fallows’s assumption that it was for Leonello d’Este195 are now generally accepted, but the association of the song with the rise of Leonello to the rank of marquis in 1442 and its connection with the payment nearly a year and a half later are weak. Only the refrain of the rondeau that served as the text for the song has survived, but it states that Seigneur Leon has been granted the “noble cutting sword,” as an honor by God’s militant church.196 Sean Gallagher’s detailed investigation of the dates when the popes gave the blessed sword to the Este rulers, with Leonello as the only exception, has found the payments for the forging of such a sword in 1448, with no recipient recorded. The dates coincide with a time when Leonello was in high favor with the pope and this would explain the text of Seigneur Leon, which then probably dates from that year.197 Even though the piece is a rondeau, it has a liturgical cantus firmus, and the sonority and the rhythmic language of the piece approach those of Du Fay’s motets of the 1430s and 1440s rather than those of his songs. This, of course, breaks the connection between the payment of 1443 and the song, but puts the composition of the song in a wider context: the Este clearly had a continuing relationship with Du Fay, going back to the 1430s, and the payment could be for music sent to Ferrara that no longer survives or, as 192

193 195 196

197

LAN, 4G 1090, fol. 122r; also C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 183, and Lockwood, “Dufay and Ferrara,” 13. Fallows, Dufay, 63. 194 Plamenac, “An Unknown Composition.” Fallows, Dufay, 63. Cf. Fallows, The Songs, 234: “A grant honneur avés esté reçus / De l’eglise de Dieu militant; / Donné a vous la noble espee trenchant.” Gallagher, “Seigneur Leon’s Papal Sword.”

203

204

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

Lockwood surmises, for help in recruiting singers.198 Among the Ferrarese singers sent north by Leonello less than two years after this payment, surely to recruit singers, was Gérard le Jay, a former colleague of Du Fay in the papal chapel, who surely contacted Du Fay about possible singers.199

Cambrai: Other Music for Dijon, for the Cathedral, and the Later Years of the Decade An important event during Du Fay’s years at Cambrai and one Fallows has suggested elicited some music from him was the first entry in Cambrai of the new bishop, Jehan de Bourgogne, who had been elevated to the see in 1439 but had been consecrated in Hesdin and much preferred the life of the court to what Cambrai could offer.200 His entry was announced in May 1442 but the bishop did not arrive until 10 July, when he went to Mass at the cathedral, which was sung with extraordinary solemnity. He stayed until 3 August, and on his last day there was a dinner in his honor at StAubert, the abbey of the nobility in Cambrai, with a great deal of music, and with the choirboys of the cathedral and St-Géry singing.201 Fallows has advanced a hypothesis that this was the occasion for the composition of Du Fay’s motet Moribus et genere, in honor of St. John the Evangelist, which mentions Dijon, the capital of Burgundy and perhaps the birthplace of the bishop, in its text.202 Guillaume de Van, and Besseler, following an account in Pirro’s Histoire,203 proposed that the work dated from 1446, because that year Du Fay was sent on a mission to the court of Burgundy, which they assumed was in Dijon.204 But as Henry Clarke has noted, the court was in Brussels at the time.205 Laurenz Lütteken, however, rightly points out that the text itself makes not even an oblique reference to the bishop or to an entrance into the city or to the cathedral, which would be serious omissions in a panegyric poem, even one as utterly incompetent as Moribus et genere 198 199

200 201 202 203

204

Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, rev. edn., 51. Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, rev. edn., 52, following Ferrarese documents, gives his name as Leay; Starr, “Music,” 126, lists the large number of variants of his name in Vatican documents. The form of the name I use is found in the majority of the Vatican documents as well as his will (cf. Desportes, Diocèse de Reims, 3, no. 595); he was from Reims and held a canonicate there (his father was also a canon of Reims). Toussaint, Les Relations, 175; also Houdoy, Histoire, 375–76. Dupont, Histoire ecclesiastique, 2:xii–xiv; Houdoy, Histoire, 402. Fallows, Dufay, rev. edn., 62; OO Besseler 1, no. 9; OO Planchart 2/13. Pirro, Histoire, 87, citing CBM 1058, fol. 80r. Du Fay was commissioned to go on 7 Oct.; he was back at Cambrai by 16 Dec. (CBM 1058, fol. 91v). OO De Van 2:xxiii; OO Besseler 1:v. 205 Clarke, “Musicians,” 70.

Cambrai: Other Music for Dijon, for the Cathedral, & the Later Years of the Decade

is.206 Accordingly Lütteken proposed that the work was composed most likely for the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon, which was under the double patronage of St. John Baptist and St. John Evangelist, either in 1441 or 1442, since Duke Philip spent Christmas in Dijon both of those years.207 A few years ago this would have appeared implausible, but now that we have evidence of the continuing patronage of Du Fay by the duke it makes better sense, all the more since it would follow closely on the heels of the Masses for the Sainte-Chapelle. Lütteken’s proposals strike me as by far the most plausible. If Du Fay was present for the performance of the motet, a reasonable assumption in most cases, we must rule out 1442, when the composer was definitely at Cambrai,208 so 1441 is the most plausible date for this work, which places it very close chronologically to the missae communes that Du Fay wrote for the Sainte-Chapelle in 1439 and 1440.209 The motet is a long work and represents a further consolidation of techniques used in Nuper rosarum flores, Salve flos Tuscae, and Magnanime gentes. It is also unusual in that it has a single text of six stanzas of four hexameters, but creates a temporary illusion of polytextuality because the triplum sings all six stanzas but the motetus goes from the third stanza to the end, so near the end the piece becomes monotextual. It is a remarkably placid work full of beautiful sonorities but the melodic writing is strangely unfocused and it is hard to avoid the feeling that Du Fay’s heart was not quite into writing it. These years at Cambrai, with all of the troubles with Bruges, the tensions produced by the schism since he had benefices in Savoy, and probably simply getting used to a life very different from that of a courtier, may have taken a toll on Du Fay’s productivity. The Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece are remarkably beautiful and well-written works, and the challenges they posed, particularly in the graduals, alleluias, and offertories, seem to have fired Du Fay’s imagination in a way that perhaps writing yet another ceremonial motet 206

207 208

209

Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 297–98. On the quality of the poem, Lütteken, 298, calls it “most pretentious,” and Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 122–24, refers to it as “incompetent and incoherent.” Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 298–99. LAN, 4G 1090, fol. 27r (5 Dec.; Du Fay as witness when Grenon, as proctor of Nicole Boidin, collates his prebend), fol. 28v (12 Dec.; Du Fay among those commissioned to oversee the writing of the statues of the chapter); fol. 31r (22 Dec.; Du Fay among the witnesses to the presentation of the will of Nicole Calvet, chaplain); cf. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 182 (omits the entry on fol. 31r). To be sure, the chapter acts for 1441 are missing, which could place Du Fay in Dijon or away from it. But the relatively extensive documentation in other registers does not mention Du Fay as being in Cambrai in Dec. of that year. David Fiala kindly informs me of a very recent discovery of a payment to Du Fay of 20 Rhenish Florins in mid to late 1442, which must be a payment for Moribus et genere (AD1 21 G 1513, fol. 73v). I am immensely grateful to him for this.

205

206

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

did not. To his troubles in these years we have to add the death of two people close to him: Marie Du Fayt died on St. George’s day, 23 April 1444. Shortly before her death, on 15 April 1444, Du Fay requested from the chapter permission to have his mother interred in the cathedral, which was duly granted.210 She was buried near the portico of St. Gengulph, and her epitaph was still visible in the eighteenth century, when François-Dominique Tranchant recorded it in 1764: “Chi devant gist demiselle Marie Du Fay / mere de Me Guillaume Du Fay canone de / ceens laquelle trepassa lan mil iiiic et / xliiii le jour de S George. Prier dieu / pour lame.”211 Marie had made a will, and on 4 May of that year her son presented it to the chapter.212 She left the cathedral a modest legacy of a few jewels that were eventually sold for 62s 6d.213 Less than two years later, shortly before 14 November 1445, another family friend, Marie Caminet, widow of Jacques Hardi, Sr., franc-sergeant of the cathedral and mother of his compère Jacques Hardi, Jr., died and Du Fay was one of the executors of her testament.214 The second half of Du Fay’s decade at Cambrai appears, at least from the distance of more than 500 years, as more settled and productive than the first half. He had a spacious and comfortable house; from its door he could see the choir of the cathedral across from a small green space where some of the canons grew flowers and vegetables; his reception at Ste-Waudru had been vastly different from what he had encountered at St. Donatian, and Du Fay was grateful enough to the canons and canonesses of that church to include the figure of Ste-Waudru in the iconography of his own funeral monument. The canonicate at Ste-Waudru was important to him not only on account of the added income but also for the social structure within the Cambrai chapter. At particularly important occasions when the canons met they had the habit of identifying themselves not simply as canons of Cambrai, but rather in terms one of their other major benefices. It is this tradition that tells us that by 9 February 1447 Du Fay had a canonicate at Notre-Dame de Condé.215 There are numerous such acts where the Cambrai canons identify themselves by their other benefices; this occasion was important for the chapter because it marked the end of a long process of litigation, hence the formality of the meeting, but it is also important to the biography of Du Fay beyond the notice of his canonicate at Condé. 210 212 213 215

LAN, 4G 1090, fol. 143v; also C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 183. 211 CBM 1049, p. 62. LAN, 4G 1090, fol. 147r; also C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 183. LAN, 4G 4650, fol. 10v. 214 CBM 1058, fol. 23r. CBM 1058, fol. 96v; C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 195, n. 119, wrongly dated 7 Jan. 1447. In this act the other Cambrai canon serving as witness, Jehan de la Croix, called Monamy, is identified as a canon of Chartres.

Cambrai: Other Music for Dijon, for the Cathedral, & the Later Years of the Decade

One process that would result in one of Du Fay’s longest friendships of his old age also began in the middle years of the 1440s. On the death of canon Jehan Martin on 12 July 1443,216 the duchess of Burgundy, as was her prerogative, put forth Jehan Conseil (Sinodi), called Le Jeune, for the canonicate,217 but by 27 August Nicaise Wallet, a papal abbreviator from Amiens, who had relatives in Cambrai and had succeeded Jehan de Rietz, the papal singer, as canon of St-Géry (even though he was not in holy orders), contested the collation.218 Wallet had powerful friends in Rome and a legal stalemate ensued.219 Conseil died in Rome early in 1447, and on 9 February Fursy de Bruille presented papal letters granting Pierre de Ranchicourt, chancellor of Amiens, Conseil’s rights to the canonicate at Cambrai.220 Ranchicourt was relatively young, since a papal letter of 1443 granting him the chancellorship of Amiens states that he was fifteen years old. But he was from a noble family and a nephew of Cardinal Jehan Le Jeune, bishop of Thérouanne, who had been bishop of Amiens from 1433 to 1436.221 On 9 June 1447 the canons declared the litigation closed and Ranchicourt the possessor of the canonicate.222 In time Ranchicourt was to become one of Du Fay’s closest friends. The years after 1445 appear to have provided Du Fay with the time to work on a number of projects of which today we have only a few glimpses because of the loss of sources. These are probably the years when he turned his attention to the writing of the one or two music treatises that are reported to have been written by him, the Musica and the Tractatus de

216 217

218

219 220 221

222

CBM 1046, fol. 188v. On the prerogative of the duchess see ASV, RL 392, fols. 98v–100r; also Planchart, “Out of the Shadows,” 110 and n. 24. On 24 June 1428 a Jehan (Conseil) Sinodi, clerk of Arras, had requested of Martin V a Cambrai canonicate presumed vacant when Fursy de Bruille, then in Rome, changed prebends at Cambrai (ASV, RS 277, fol. 194v). The chapter acts for this period (old register F) are lost, but Tranchant, who saw them, reports his reception on 10 Mar. 1429 (CBM 1046, fol. 168v), but not the exchange claimed by Conseil, who has left no traces whatsoever in the Cambrai documents. The Conseil in this instance may be a son or a nephew, hence the qualifier “the younger.” ASV, RS 350, fol. 6r. The records of St-Géry never mention Nicaise because he remained in Rome to his death. CBM 1058, fol. 201r; the chapter declares the prebend litigious on 15 Feb. 1445. CBM 1058, fol. 96v. ASV, RV 376, fols. 57v–58r. In Planchart, “Notes on Guillaume Du Fay’s Last Works,” 61, I erroneously reported him as chancellor of Arras. On Le Jeune see Eubel, Hierarchia, 2:8, 86, 196. Given the identity of Conseil’s sobriquet and the cardinal’s patronymic it is possible that they were blood relations; cf. the case of Paul Beye and Pierre Leclerc, called Beye, who were uncle and nephew. CBM 1058, fol. 115r.

207

208

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

musica mensurata et de proportionibus.223 The Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece contain a number of mensural innovations, among them the reinterpretation of the so-called modus cum tempore signs, particularly , but other works use , , and as well,224 and at least one of these treatises might have contained a theoretical explanation of their meaning. In the first chapter I mentioned the evidence that some of the Cambrai canons offered advanced instruction in some disciplines to their fellow canons and perhaps others who came to seek them.225 We have records of two younger musicians who, already established, came to Cambrai and seem to have come specifically to work with Du Fay; the best known of them is Johannes Tinctoris, who in 1460 spent four months at Cambrai in habitu ecclesiae and received a gift from the aumosne at the end of his stay. Scholars have assumed that he was a small vicar during that time, but the detailed accounts of the bread distributions to the small vicars show that this is not the case.226 A similar visit occurred during the 1440s. Jehan de Fontenay, who was to become a singer in the chapel of Savoy from 1449 to 1457,227 and that of Louis XI from 1461 to 1475,228 and would eventually send Du Fay a portrait of Louis XI, mentioned in the composer’s will and its execution,229 was made a gift of 25s by the aumosne in 1447–1448 at Du Fay’s instance.230 In this case the account of the aumosne refers to Fontenay specifically as a small vicar, but the account of the daily distribution of bread to the small vicars never shows him among them.231 Because the order for the gift came from Du Fay, who was the master of the small vicars, the notary of the aumosne probably assumed that Fontenay was a small vicar. It seems rather that Fontenay, like Tinctoris, most likely sought to study with Du Fay. This appears also to have been the case with a few of the small vicars as well, who begin precisely at this time to contribute compositions to the repertory of the cathedral. The complete loss of polyphonic sources from Cambrai from the second half of the fifteenth century means that virtually nothing of their music survives.232 223

224 225 227 229 232

If the titles refer actually to two treatises the first is known only through short citations in other works; see Gallo, “Citazioni”; the second is reported to have been seen by Fétis in a 16thcentury manuscript sold at auction in 1824 to an English bookseller; see Fétis, Mémoire, 12–13, but both might be references to a single treatise, with the “Musica” cited by the theorists being just a shorthand reference for the treatise Fétis saw. See Busse Berger, Mensuration and Proportion Signs, 155–56. See earlier in this chapter. 226 See Planchart, “The Early Career,” 367–68. Bouquet, “La cappella,” 283. 228 Perkins, “Musical Patronage,” 554. See Appendix 1. 230 LAN, 4G 7762 (1447–1448), fol. 12r. 231 LAN, 4G 7447, fol. 6r–v. The most active of these is Jacques le Mannier, called Cobe, who served the cathedral from 1431 to his death in 1464 (see Appendix 1) and was second to Mellet in the amount of

Cambrai: Other Music for Dijon, for the Cathedral, & the Later Years of the Decade

There were other visitors as well: every July, for the feast of St. Mary Magdalene, which was celebrated with special solemnity at Cambrai,233 a number of canons from Arras came to Cambrai,234 and among them was surely Du Fay’s old colleague from Rome, Barthélemy Poignare, who had become a canon of Notre-Dame in Arras in 1424,235 and had been an officer of the Council of Basel from 1435 to 1438.236 In August 1446, after some strife between the bishop, the chapter, and the city, an accord was reached that all parties agreed to observe.237 The agreement was set down in a splendid bull and the canons engaged Poignare, who clearly was a very skilled calligrapher, to write it down,238 paying him the enormous amount of £42 for his work.239 Twice during this period Poignare was in Cambrai, probably in connection with this project: the accounts of the grand métier report gifts of wine to him on 12 and 14 September 1446, and again on the Saturday after 20 January 1447.240 Poignare’s skills as a scribe and his elegant hand are unwittingly known to everyone who has ever seen a reproduction of the famous double portrait of Du Fay and Binchois in the copy of Martin Le Franc’s Le champion des dames in the Bibliothèque nationale de France,241 since he was the scribe of that manuscript, which he signed and dated at the end: “Escript ou cloistre de l’eglise nostre dame d’Arras en lan del incarnation nostre seigneur m.ccc.l.& ung. Poignare.”242 As it turns out, he was also most likely the illuminator of the manuscript, and among his other paintings is the magnificent crucifixion at the Te igitur of the missal that Paul Beye gave to the cathedral in 1436.243 François Avril has recently published a detailed study of Poignare as a scribe and

233

234

235 236

237 238

239

240 243

polyphony he copied for the cathedral. The accounts of the fabric record the copying of some of his works. The accounts of the fabric from 1413 to 1505 always record an extra payment to the small vicars for the Mass of St. Mary Magdalene’s day. Payments for bread given to the canons of Arras appear every year in the wine and bread accounts. ASV, RL 249, fols. 26v–27v. TAS, Materie ecclesiastiche, catalogo 45, Mazzo 2, no. 2, and Mazzo 11, no. 3; see also Hermann Herre, Deutsche Reichstagsakten, 177, 181. CBM 1058, fol. 70r; also C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 184 (18 Aug. 1446). LAN, 4G 148, pièce 2269A (= Musée 1 4); partial facsimile in Avril, “Le Champion des Dames,” 14–15. CBM 1058, fol. 92v (16 Dec. 1446). It is interesting to note that in 1447–1448 Mellet was asked to enter this agreement and other documents concerning the liberties of the church into a parchment volume, but this was not a ceremonial parchment but an archival collection, and he was paid 2 guillaumes, worth 46s. 8d. See LAN, 4G 4654, fol. 28r; also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 230. LAN, 4G 5081, fol. 10r–v. 241 BnF, f. fr. 12476, fol. 98r. 242 Ibid., fol. 147v. CBM 151, fol. 129v; see also Avril and Reynaud, Les Manuscrits à peinture en France, 101–2; Avril, “Le Champion des Dames,” 12–13, including a reproduction of the crucifixion and

209

210

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

illuminator, showing a number of documents copied and illuminated by him in the course of his career.244 Another visitor who spent a considerable amount of time in Cambrai during these years was the Burgundian singer and composer Symon le Breton. In what is one of the fastest transmissions of a prebend in the history of fifteenth-century Cambrai, Symon had been received as a canon of Cambrai on 10 October 1435 on the nomination of the duke of Burgundy to the vacated canonicate of Gilles Du Bois the elder, who had died two days earlier.245 On 14 January 1445 Grenon, acting as Symon’s procurator, put an option on the house being vacated by Flannel in the Rue des Waranches, and two days later the chapter assigned it to Symon.246 But Symon’s house was not regarded as “properly repaired” until July 1446, when Grenon as his procurator testified to that effect.247 Symon probably moved to Cambrai to make his residence before August 1446, since the acts show that he was in Cambrai in 10 August 1446.248 On 4 November 1446 there is a record of a payment of 40 écus for a banquet that Symon gave for his fellow canons,249 but by January 1447 the duke of Burgundy wanted him back at court with a privilege of absence from Cambrai; the chapter, however, replied that only Philip’s first chaplain could be granted such a privilege; nonetheless, Symon could do his residence “in stages.”250 Symon was still in Cambrai in February, when the chapter met to receive letters sent by its procurators from Rome,251 but he probably was not in Cambrai on 30 June, when the chapter proposed that he be given the house that had belonged to the archdeacon of Brussels, Jehan Trouffon.252 Most likely he was back in the city on 3 July, when he put instead an option on the house being vacated by Fursy de Bruille.253 At the end of July he received “the fruits of his prebend,” which indicates that he had finally finished his residence at Cambrai and had returned or was about to return to the court of Burgundy.254 During his stay in the city Du Fay and Breton had become friends, and Du Fay undertook the task of watching over Symon’s

244 245

246 248

249 253

another miniature representing Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly in CBM 954, fol. 1r, which Avril also ascribes to Poignare. Avril, “Le Champion des Dames.” CBM 1057, fol. 12r–v. Symon presented himself in person and was installed in the choir by Mathieu Hanelle. CBM 1058, fol. 29v. 247 Ibid., fol. 65r. LAN, 4G 1090, fol. 169r, 10 Aug. 1446: Symon and Du Fay are witnesses when Quentin de Boussoyt brings letters from the court of Reims concerning a long and bitter dispute between Auclou and Carlier. That Symon is acting as a witness indicates that he had been residing at Cambrai for a while at that point. CBM 1058, fol. 85v. 250 Ibid., fol. 92v. 251 Ibid., fol. 98r. 252 Ibid., fol. 119v. Ibid., fol. 120r. 254 Ibid., fols. 122v and 126r.

Cambrai: Other Music for Dijon, for the Cathedral, & the Later Years of the Decade

house when necessary. Their friendship lasted to the end of Symon’s life; in his will he left Du Fay two particularly personal tokens of his friendship, a book of songs and a diptych with an image of the Virgin and a portrait of himself, which Du Fay, in his own will, instructed should be placed on the altar of the Chapel of St. Stephen on major feasts and on the anniversaries of the deaths of Symon and of himself.255 Another friend of Du Fay who came to Cambrai in those years was Guillaume le Métayer called de Malbecque, who had been a colleague of Du Fay in Rome,256 and shared with him the fact that he was illegitimate.257 He was probably just a few years younger than Du Fay, since he had been a choirboy in Condé in 1415–1416.258 As early as April 1421 he had sought a canonicate in Soignies without success,259 but was granted an expectative at the collation of the chapter of St-Vincent de Soignies by Eugenius IV in 25 April 1431, one day after the famous rotulus for the papal chapel was issued.260 Nevertheless, no opening presented itself until September 1436 after the death of Baudouin de Froymont,261 when the pope granted the canonicate to Malbecque.262 Again there were problems, and the duke of Burgundy intervened on Malbecque’s behalf but without success.263 Malbecque remained in the papal chapel until March 1438;264 he then traveled north, apparently spending the rest of 1438 and most of 1439 at the Council of Basel, possibly as a representative of Soignies or Condé, which 255 256 257

258 260

261

262 263

264

See Planchart, “The Origins and Early History,” 322–23, with added documentation. See earlier in this chapter. Malbecque was the son of a deacon and a single woman (ASV, RS 258, fol. 80r). His father was obviously well known in Soignies. He too was illegitimate (subdeacon and single woman). He held briefly a canonicate at St-Vincent in 1421 (ASV, RS 151, fol. 224r), and at his death in 1439 he was canon of Condé and had a chaplaincy in the lazar house outside Soignies (ASV, RS 361, fol. 295r–v, RL 380, fols. 263v–264r), so Malbecque could not hide his own illegitimacy as well as Du Fay did. Fiala, “Condé-sur-l’Escaut et les musiciens” (Abstracts, p. 19). 259 ASV, RS 151, fol. 224r. Malbecque had been in the papal chapel under Martin V from Aug. to Oct. 1427, but did not join the chapel of Eugenius IV until Oct. 1431; the supplication of Apr. 1431 is lost but is referred to in a papal letter of 2 Mar. 1435, ASV, RL 331, fols. 250r–251r. Froymont had died before 31 May 1432. At Soignies he was a nonresident canon. He had been received as canon of Cambrai on 14 Feb. 1400 (CBM 1046, fol. 133r; LAN, 4G 7403, fol. 1v), and was provost from 1412 to 1421 (CBM 1046, fol. 72r; CBM 1056, fol. 108r; LAN, 4G 4617, fol. 7v], and died in Cambrai. His canonicate at Cambrai went to Gilles Carlier (CBM 1046, fol. 133v). ASV, RS 326, fol. 183v. ASV, RL 341, fols. 286r–287v, recounting the papal grant of Soignies to Malbeque, a lawsuit against Jehan d’Amiens over the benefice, and an exchange of benefices brokered by Antoine de Croy and Philip the Good, where a canonicate at Condé that Malbecque had would be exchanged with that in Soignies, dated 18 Feb. 1437. Also ASV, LA 7, fol. 235r, payment for a papal bull effectively dissolving that permutation, dated 14 Mar. 1437. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 828, fol. 152v.

211

212

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

indicates that he had collated his benefice there; he was also a canon of Condé.265 By 1440 he had arrived at Soignies, where he obtained a prebend, most likely through the duke of Burgundy rather than through a papal provision,266 and remained a canon until his death on 29 August 1465, having eventually become dean.267 In any event, on 27 May 1447 Malbecque was in Cambrai in order to exchange two chaplaincies, one of St. Mary at the main altar of St. Rombaut in Mechelen, and the other of SS Mary and Anthony in the parish church of St. Mary, also in Mechelen, with Jehan de Restehen, for the parish church of Izier. Restehen was absent and was represented in the exchange by Du Fay.268 One of Du Fay’s duties as master of the small vicars was to be one of the supervisors, together with the master of the aumosne and the scholaster, of the instruction of the choirboys and to make sure that the choirboys and their master, as well as the small vicars, met their obligations to the cathedral and were musically satisfactory. Since Du Fay’s arrival at Cambrai the magister puerorum was Pierre du Castel, who had come to Cambrai from St-Barthélemy de Béthune in 1433, and in the early years was referred to also as Pierre de Béthune.269 He succeeded Renaud Liebert as magister puerorum after Renaud was dismissed on 14 July 1434.270 By 1447 he had been in what was by all accounts an onerous position for thirteen years, and in the last year or so had some difficulty recruiting choirboys.271 Fallows assumed he was dismissed a bit in disgrace, which is part of his argument for not wanting to date Du Fay’s motet Fulgens iubar ecclesiae, which mentions Pierre as a performer in an acrostic in the

265

266

267 269 271

Haller, Concilium, 6:216, and hence Tegen, “Baselkonciliet,” 129, place Malbecque in Basel on 7 May 1437, but the year must be 1438, since in May 1437 Malbecque was still in the papal chapel. There is no record of exactly when Malbecque collated the canonicate at Soignies, although his name appears in the accounts in 1440 (Demeuldre, Le Chapitre, 162). By 15 Jan. 1437 he was canon of Condé (ASV, RS 343, fol. 140r–v). Then there are two separate supplications, one for his canonicate at Condé (ASV, RS 361, fol. 295r–v, 10 Oct. 1439; the petitioner is a Cambrai clerk with the improbable name of Aristotiles de Vialapida), and another for a chaplaincy in a lazar house outside Soignies (ASV, RS 375, fol. 216r–v, 18 Aug. 1441). Both request these benefices “on the death of Malbeque,” and the second adds “in the Council of Basel.” It is possible that Malbecque stayed in Basel until after the election of Felix V; in any case, rumors that he had died had reached Florence and Ferrara by 1439. The Soignies document mentions him as a canon in 1440; cf. Demeuldre, Le Chapitre, 162. The earliest Vatican document that firmly refers to him as a canon of Soignies is a licentia permutandi, ASV, RS 373, fols. 258v–259r, of 15 May 1441. Such licentiae were often used after collating a major benefice to streamline one’s beneficial situation. Mons, Archives de l’état, CS 44, fol. 1r. 268 CBM 1058, fol. 111v. De la Fons, “Documents inédits,” 42. 270 LAN, 4G 7761, fascicle of 1434–1445, fol. 10r. LAN, 4G 7762 (1447–1448), fol. 11v.

The Copying of Polyphony in Cambrai and Du Fay’s Compositions for the Cathedral

motetus,272 in 1445 or 1447, where other scholars had placed the piece.273 But the documentary record shows that Pierre, in all likelihood, wanted to leave the more direct service of the cathedral. He had been a grand vicar from the time he was magister puerorum in 1437,274 but in May 1446 he resigned his grand vicariate in exchange for the chaplaincy at the altar of All Saints with the small vicar Henri Macheclier.275 On 10 December 1447 he is referred in the chapter acts as “recently dismissed” as magister puerorum;276 nonetheless, his parting from the post was probably a mutual decision. He retained his chaplaincy in the cathedral, but by 1447–1448 had become a canon of St-Géry,277 by 1454 he was a resident canon at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris,278 and at his death, probably in 1465 or 1466, he was a canon of Noyon and was remembered in perpetuity by the community of the grand vicars at Cambrai.279 As Pierre’s successor the canons thought first of Paul le Josne, magister puerorum at Tournai, but eventually settled on a local singer, Gobert le Mannier, who was almost certainly a student of Du Fay.280

The Copying of Polyphony in Cambrai and Du Fay’s Compositions for the Cathedral In 1446–1447 a series of entries begins to appear in the accounts of the fabric concerning the copying activity of Symon Mellet, who on occasion copied plainsong or simply text,281 but most of the time was being paid for copying what the accounts call novo cantu or cantus modernorum, which surely meant polyphony. Using the payments records of the fabric that point to specific surviving manuscripts (mostly missals) and a detailed paleographic analysis, Liane Curtis has been able to identify Mellet’s hand and also to build a very plausible case that one of the two surviving fifteenth-century choirbooks from Cambrai, CBM 11, was not only copied by Mellet but perhaps served as a kind of trial of his scribal skills,282 which may explain why no record of payment for it exists.283 Payments to Mellet 272 273 276 279 281

282 283

OO Besseler 1, no. 18; OO Planchart 2/4; Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 145–50. Fallows, Dufay, 60–61. 274 CBM 1057, fol. 59v. 275 CBM 1058, fol. 46v. Ibid., fol. 140v. 277 LAN, 7G 2412 (1447–1448), fols. 17v–18r. 278 CBM 1059, fol. 90r. LAN, 4G 2009, fol. 3v. 280 CBM 1058, fol. 140r; see also Appendix 1. Payments to Mellet for copying text appear, for example, in LAN, 4G 4654, fol. 28r; also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 230; and for copying chant, in LAN, 4G 4663, fol. 29r; also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 242. Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 75–106. One of the mysteries of the preservation of the polyphonic sources at Cambrai is that the two surviving choirbooks, MSS 6 and 11 in the Médiathèque municipale, cannot be identified with

213

214

At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

for the copying of polyphony between 1446 and 1450 present an interesting pattern. In 1447–1448 and 1448–1449 the accounts make reference to what appears to be two large-size paper books where Mellet copied and notated facta nova cantorum modernorum, which clearly refers to newly composed music and was surely polyphony. For this he was paid £10 in 1447–1448 and £13 13s 4d in 1448–1449.284 The language of the entries could lead one to think that both refer to the same book, but a payment to Petit Jehan in 1448–1449 for binding the two books of music copied by Mellet makes it clear that we have here two collections of newly composed music.285 The accounts in this case do not mention the number of leaves or fascicles, but both books must have been quite substantial because he was paid more than £23 for them, which is a considerable amount. It is hard not to see Du Fay’s influence in what appears to be a sudden burst of copying of polyphonic music at the cathedral; furthermore, the fact that the two books are described in identical fashion makes it probable that this was polyphony to be sung in choro and not just in services restricted to this or that chapel. That in itself would make it a further departure from the traditions of the cathedral. The entries for copying polyphony in 1449–1450 are more explicit and bring us even closer to Du Fay, even though they do not mention him. These consist of a series of remarkably detailed entries specifying the contents, the number of leaves, the number of fascicles, and even how many fascicles were actually written on. The project involved four books in two pairs, one containing Et in terra, patrem, sanctus, agnus et cetera talia, and each book contained twenty-nine sexterns and one quatern, that is 236 folios. The other two books contained Introitus missarum, gradualia, alleluia, sequentie, offertoria, et cetera talia, that is propers of the Mass, and each book consisted of fourteen sexterns, that is 168 folios.286 At this time Mellet had copied music in thirteen sexterns of the first pair of books

284 285 286

any payment for their copying, even though the accounts of the fabric survive without break from 1401–1402 to 1479–1480. LAN, 4G 4654, fol. 28r, and 4G 4655, fol. 27r; also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 230–31. LAN, 4G 4655, fol. 27r; also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 232. LAN, 4G 4565, fol. 30r; also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 233. The fabric accounts, when describing copying, particularly in the later 15th century, use the terms “folio” and “feullet” as a synonym of folio or sometimes of page, but when describing the putting together of a manuscript these terms are used as a synonym of bifolium, that is a sheet of parchment or paper that will be folded and bound into a fascicle. The entry indicates “29 sexternos de 6 foliis papiri et unum quaternum de 4or foliis,” which adds up indeed to 118 “sheets” of paper, but then it continues and specifies the number of sheets in terms used for unbound paper, “4or manus cum 18 foliis,” which would indicate leaves to be folded and gathered into fascicles, that is bifolia in the modern sense.

The Copying of Polyphony in Cambrai and Du Fay’s Compositions for the Cathedral

and ten and a half sexterns of the second book. This is consistent with a policy of the fabric, which was to produce books for the service deliberately with blank pages at the end that could be used to add new items when there was a change in the repertory or in the liturgy itself.287 This means that, at the time of the payments, Mellet had filled 156 folios in one pair of books with music for the Ordinary and 126 folios with music for the Proper in the other pair. From the language used in the payment it would appear that music for the Ordinary was still being copied as it was in CBM 6 and 11, that is, grouped by genres. Still, given that most surviving mid-fifteenthcentury Mass movements tend to be laid out with Kyries and Agnus in one opening each, and Glorias, Credos, and Sanctus in two openings each, the number of folios copied by Mellet would provide enough space for fifteen to eighteen Mass cycles if they were large-scale four-voice works, and even more if the pieces were for three voices. In the case of the propers, a set of propers without a prose usually took six openings,288 and a prose usually added an opening to that length. Thus the number of folios copied by Mellet probably accommodated between eighteen and twenty complete cycles. Since these books were copied in pairs, it is virtually certain that they were intended for the liturgy in choro and not for the special liturgies in the side chapels. Polyphonic propers were probably sung only on the most solemn feasts. A basic list of these at Cambrai, excluding important local saints, would be as follows: Feasts of the Lord

Feasts of the Virgin

287 288

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Christmas Epiphany Easter Ascension Pentecost Corpus Christi Trinity Conception Purification Annunciation Visitation Assumption Nativity

See earlier in this chapter and n. 117. Cf., e.g., the propers for St. Stephen in Tr 88, fols. 194v–200r. Du Fay’s Masses for the Golden Fleece are atypical in that they have two alleluias.

215

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At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

Feasts of the Saints and the Cross

Common of Saints

14 15 16 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Stephen John Evangelist Innocents John the Baptist Peter and Paul Magdalene289 Exaltation of the Cross Michael All Saints Apostles Martyrs Confessors Virgins

This is about eight cycles more than would have been copied by Mellet in the number of folios he had written by 1449–1450, but one should remember that Du Fay’s cycles for the Order of the Golden Fleece were already available at Cambrai, which means that the cycles for Pentecost, Trinity, all the feasts of the Virgin, the Cross, and Michael, would not need to have been entered in the volumes Mellet copied, bringing the total down to seventeen cycles, which would fit in the number of folios copied by Mellet, and it is possible that one of the two books he had copied in the previous year also contained music for the propers. Not all the saints important at Cambrai are in this list because the propers for virtually all the local saints and many important Roman and French saints, such as St. Lawrence and St. Martin, had liturgies that could be assembled largely from the common of saints. In the same year Mellet produced these four books Barthélemy Guiselin290 was paid for producing two books in parchment containing plures hymni, Te deum et alia quamplurima de cantibus modernis,291 that is, music for the Office, which may have included the magnificat as well. That the books were 289

290

291

I include this feast because the payments in the aumosne and the small vicars indicate that it was a particularly important feast in the liturgy of the cathedral; the small vicars always received an extra stipend, and a visiting delegation from Notre-Dame d’Arras was always in attendance as well. Barthélemy or Bertremien Guiselin is a shadowy figure in the cathedral. The entry in the fabric accounts is our earliest notice of him, although he might be the Guiselin who was paid 20s. in 1442–1443 for writing down the names of the player in the Easter play (LAN, 4G 5077, fol. 22r). In 1452–1453 he held the chaplaincy of St. Lawrence, formerly held by Lucas Warner, the papal singer, as a foreign chapel (LAN, 4G 6918, fol. 37r). He said his first Mass in 1452–1453 (LAN, 4G 5087, fol. 16r), and the following year he paid for his iocundus adventus into the grand community of chaplains (LAN, 4G 6920, fol. 11r); after that he disappears from the record. LAN, 4G 4656, fol. 30r; also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 233.

The Copying of Polyphony in Cambrai and Du Fay’s Compositions for the Cathedral

copied on parchment would suggest that they contained chant, but the locution “cantibus modernis,” particularly in connection with the Te deum, which seldom received new plainsong melodies, suggests polyphony; again that there were two copies points to the use of this music for the liturgy in choro. If the two books of “modern music” copied by Mellet between 1447 and 1449 are also polyphony, something that is virtually sure, we have an astonishing amount of polyphony being copied at Cambrai between 1447 and 1450, apparently for the main liturgy of the cathedral. Nothing remotely comparable is occurring this early in any other of the northern churches, even those where polyphony was actively cultivated like St. Donatian in Bruges or St-Pierre in Lille.292 So it is hard not to see in this surge of activity at Cambrai the influence of Du Fay, who, as I have noted earlier, very clearly saw himself primarily as a musician and specifically as a composer. The other question that we must pose in the face of what the accounts tell us is: where did all of this music come from? The simplest answer is that some of the music was probably imported from elsewhere, and some of it was composed at Cambrai. By the mid1440s a relatively large repertory of polyphonic music for the Ordinary of the Mass was available throughout Europe; north Italian and south German manuscripts copied in the 1430s and the early 1440s transmit a large international repertory of such pieces by English, Flemish, and French composers as well as a few Italian and German ones. The music for the Ordinary could be assembled from the existing repertory, and surely a good deal of it came from England, possibly by way of Bruges or Antwerp.293 Among these ordinaries were surely the group of English Masses (albeit without the Kyries) that open the section of Glorias, Credos, and Sanctus in Trent 93, including the Missa Caput,294 whose texture first turns up in Du Fay’s music in the motet Fulgens iubar ecclesiae, indicating that Du Fay knew that work by the middle of the 1440s. 292

293

294

The fabric accounts for both of these churches survive for most of the 15th century, and they do not show payments for the copying of music comparable to those found at Cambrai. This kind of activity, as Strohm shows, picks up in Bruges but only a decade or two after Cambrai; cf. Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, 29–31. St-Pierre, however, had an organist and a succentor. The earliest reference I saw to the organ is 1394, LAN, 16G 1330 (1394–1395), fol. 4v. That fascicle, in the cover, transmits the text of the ballade Lune en descours, attributed to Deschamps (cf. Deschamps, Oeuvres Complètes, x). From a later time we have a specific reference to music brought from Antwerp in a payment to Symon Mellet in 1463–1464 for copying two Masses “qui in este rapportez d’ampvers” (LAN, 4G 4671, fol. 24v; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 248; Houdoy, Histoire, 195). See Strohm, “Quellenkritische Untersuchungen,” 168.

217

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At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

In contrast, the repertory of polyphony for the Proper that survives from before 1440 is minuscule, restricted to plenary Masses by Du Fay and Renaud Liebert, and some introit settings by Brassart, Arnold de Lantins, Jehan du Sart the elder, and Binchois.295 Under these circumstances it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that if the repertory of polyphony for the Ordinary of the Mass copied at Cambrai between 1446 and 1450 could have varied origins, that of polyphony for the Proper of the Mass must have been largely a local production, and the most likely composer for this repertory is Du Fay, who had already tackled the problems involved in this kind of music when writing the Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece.

The Franciscan Masses Among the proper cycles in Trent 88 that Laurence Feininger ascribed to Du Fay when he published them in 1947, there are a few that were not part of the Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece. One is the cycle for St. Maurice, whose genesis has been discussed earlier. For two others of these cycles independent attributions to Du Fay have surfaced and a connection with an Ordinary cycle has turned up as well. The two cycles are the Masses for St. Anthony of Padua and for St. Francis and the Ordinary is the Mass that Besseler published as the Mass for St. Anthony Abbot, which Fallows showed, from citations in a number of treatises, was actually the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua.296 Later I demonstrated that the propers for St. Francis were closely related to those of St. Anthony of Padua.297 It was probably in the late 1440s that Du Fay established a yearly celebration of the polyphonic Mass on St. Anthony’s Day, with his own polyphony for the service, an establishment that is mentioned in the execution of his will, and that continued to be observed at Cambrai at least until 1579.298 Du Fay’s will and its execution mention four times a book that contained the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua: 295

296

297 298

The Liebert is published in Reaney, ed., Early Fifteenth-Century Music, 3:64–94; the Brassart introits, including some with attributions to Du Sart, are in Brassart, Opera Omnia, 1:1–15; the introit by Binchois is in Binchois, The Sacred Music, ed. Kaye, no. 46a. Feininger, ed., Auctorum Anonymorum, nos. 11–12, and OO Besseler 3, no. 3; Fallows, Dufay, 182–89 with further bibliography. See also OO Planchart 3/3. Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 144–45. LAN, 4G 1313 (Du Fay’s will and execution), pp. 23, 30, 73; 4G 6749 (1501–1502) (great vicars), fol. 9r, and in approximately the same location in every surviving account until 1578– 1579, 4G 6751 (1578–1579), fol. 9r.

The Franciscan Masses

A. In the accounts of the executors p. 6: Item pour i livre en grant volume en parchemin contenant les messes de Saint Anthoine de Pade aveuc plusieurs aultres anthiennes en noire note, 40 s.299 p. 21: Item a la capelle Saint Estiene ont este legats ii livres, l’un en grant volume de papier, contenant la messe Saint Anthoine de Vienne et la messe de Requiem composee par le dict deffunct, prise 15s, et l’autre en parchemin, contenant la messe Saint Anthoine de Pade, prise 40s, ensamble, 55 s. p. 65: Item i livre en grant volume en parchemin, contenant les messes de Saint Anthoine de Pade, avec plusieurs altres anthiennes en noire note, 40 s.

B. In the will itself. p. 71: Item lego capelle sancti Stephani una cum libro in quo continetur Missa Sancti Anthonii de Padua in pergameno, unum alium librum papireum magni voluminis continentem Missam Sancti Anthonii Viennensis, et missam meam De Requiem.

The will, the entries for the evaluation, and the inventory, all coincide in identifying the contents of this manuscript. It contained the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua, and, according to one of the entries in the inventory, the “Masses” for St. Anthony of Padua plus “many other antiphons.” In an earlier study I provided a reconstruction of the contents of this manuscript based on the elements that survive, a reconstruction that becomes possible, in terms of the size of the manuscript, because the most unpredictable items in terms of their length, such as the Ordinary of the Mass and the propers, as well as the responsory and motet for Vespers, have survived, and the missing elements, simple antiphons, usually took no more than a page.300 Here I give a summary of its contents with one or two additions beyond what I presented earlier (see Table 4.3). The entire text and plainsong for both Vespers come from the office for both saints composed by Julian von Speyer.301 Postulating such a large number of lost works requires some explanation, as does the ascription to Du Fay of the hymn En gratulemur hodie, which survives presumably anonymously in ModB. The history of how the authorship was determined was 299

300 301

Haggh, “Nonconformity in the Use of Cambrai Cathedral,” 374 and n. 20, claims that Du Fay’s manuscript contained “several masses for St. Anthony of Padua,” based on the plural in this entry. This misinterprets the evidence. The singular in the other three entries, including the important one coming from Du Fay himself in the will he dictated to Bouchel, contradicts the plural of this entry. The plural, however, offers a hint to what the manuscript contained and what the executors saw in it. This is explained later. Planchart, “The Books,” 181–89. Cf. Weiss, Die Choräle, i–iii, xx, xxii–xxiv, xxxii–xxxiii, xxxvii–xxxviii.

219

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At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

Table 4.3 Reconstruction of the contents of Du Fay’s Franciscan manuscript No.

Ordinary of the Mass

1 Kyrie 2 Gloria 3 Credo 4 Sanctus 5 Agnus Dei Propers for St. Anthony 6 I: In medio ecclesiae 7 G: Os iusti 8 A: Antoni compar inclite 9 O: Veritas mea 10 C: Domine quinque talenta Propers for St. Francis 11 I: Gaudeamus omnes 12 I (Octave): Os iusti 13 G: Os iusti 14 A: O patriarcha 15 O: Veritas mea 16 C: Fidelis servus Vespers of St. Anthony 17 A1: Gaudeat ecclesia 18 A2: Sapiente filio 19 A3: Qui dum sapientiam 20 A4: Augustinus primitus 21 A5: Quorum vita moribus 22 Hymn: En gratulemur hodie 23 MA1: O proles Hispaniae 24 MA2: O Jesu perpetua 25 R: Si quaeris miracula 26 Motet: O proles – O sidus 27 Benedicamus Domino Vespers for St. Francis 28 A1: Franciscus vir catholicus 29 A2: Coepit Innocentio 30 A3: Hunc sancto praeelegerat 31 A4: Franciscus evangelicum 32 A5: Hic creaturis imperat 33 Hymn: Proles de caelo 34 MA1: O Stupor gaudium 35 MA2: Salve sancte pater 36 Benedicamus Domino

Source Tr 93, Tr 90 Tr 90 Tr 90 Tr 90 Tr 90 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 (Ps. missing) Tr 88 Tr 88 (cross-reference) Tr 88 cross-reference (missing in Tr 88) Tr 88 lost ModB lost lost lost ModB lost lost Tr 87 ModB, Tr 88 ModB lost lost lost lost lost ModB lost ModB Mod B

The Franciscan Masses

presented in an earlier study;302 here only a short summary is needed. The Ordinary survives ascribed to Du Fay in Tr 93 and Tr 90 and citations of parts of the Gloria as his work by Tinctoris.303 In the case of the propers we have mentions of the gradual of both Masses as in the Tractato di musica of Giovanni Spataro,304 and the introit Os iusti for St. Francis in one of Spataro’s letters, all called works by Du Fay.305 This, and the copying of the two cycles next to each other in Tr 88, indicates common authorship. The separate transmission of the propers and the Ordinary points to their origins in Du Fay’s book, which in one of the descriptions of the executors cited earlier is said to contain “the Masses” of St. Anthony. Because the single Ordinary was meant to be sung with the two sets of propers, neither one could be interleaved with the Ordinary, so they were probably copied next to each other and following the Ordinary. The expression “plusieurs aultres anthiennes” in one of the descriptions surely indicates that the Masses were followed by a set of Vespers. Crucial to this is the survival of Sapiente filio, the second antiphon for St. Anthony, the responsory Si quaeris miracula with a doxology, the hymns for St. Anthony and St. Francis, and the magnificat antiphon Salve sancte pater, for St. Francis. If only the hymns and the magnificat antiphons had survived one could postulate that these were isolated compositions, like the other magnificat antiphons that we have by Du Fay, but there is no reason for Du Fay to have set Sapiente filio unless he had set the entire set for Vespers of St. Anthony. Similarly, Si quaeris miracula is the second responsory in the third nocturn of Vespers,306 and as such it had no doxology. That it was set by Du Fay with a doxology indicates that it was intended not for Matins but for the Vespers procession.307 The hymns are late additions to ModB, Proles de caelo with an ascription and En gratulemur without one, most likely because the piece is copied below Du Fay’s properly ascribed Benedicamus Domino 2,308 which was surely written for these Vespers, and the scribe assumed that the ascription would serve both 302 303

304

305

306 307

308

Planchart, “Connecting the Dots.” Tinctoris, Proportionale, in Opera theoretica, ed. Seay, 2a:47 and 57; cf. Fallows, Dufay, 188–86, and Planchart, “The Books,” 182–83. Spataro, Tractato (1531), chs. XV (end), XVI (third opening), XXIV (second opening), XXXI (third opening); cf. Fallows, Dufay, 188, and Planchart, “The Books,” 183–84. Blackburn et al., eds., Correspondence, 588; cf. Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1972), 18. See Weiss, Die Choräle, xxxii–xxxiii. This was a use to which Si quaeris miracula was often put outside the Franciscan books; it was the most popular of the pieces by Julian, and it was included (with a doxology) in the Variae preces of the monks of Solesmes (p. 176), the only one of Julian’s pieces found in modern chant books. ModB, fols. 29v–30r (new 32v–33r).

221

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At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

works. Earlier scholarship left the hymn out of Du Fay’s canon not only because of the apparent anonymity of the copy, but because it sets the plainsong at pitch rather than an octave up, but this is a trait it shares with the Benedicamus Domino copied above it, and with the communions for both saints.309 Had only the Magnificat antiphon Salve sancte pater for St. Francis survived, one could have postulated that it was intended as a suffrage to him in the Vespers of St. Anthony, but the existence of the hymn indicates that, like the Mass, the Vespers were set for both saints.310 The motet for St. Anthony was clearly part of a Cambrai tradition, where solemn Vespers in the mid- and late fifteenth century always included “a motet.”311 Both Mass and Vespers remained important works for Du Fay, as evidenced in the fact that at his death he owned what was clearly a deluxe manuscript, in large format, copied on vellum, and in black notation.312 Du Fay clearly had a particular devotion to St. Anthony of Padua. From his will, the reports of the executors, the obit book of the grand vicars, and the accounts of the community of the grand vicars, we know that the earliest of Du Fay’s foundations was the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua, which he established most likely after his return from Savoy in 1458, and endowed it so that it continued to be sung at Cambrai after his death. Although the earlier accounts of the grand vicars are silent on this matter, it is suggestive that some of the sixteenth-century accounts of Du Fay’s foundation mention not only the Mass but the singing of both Vespers.313 During his lifetime Du 309

310

311

312 313

The issue of the transposition of the chant is raised anew by Gerber in Sacred Music, 66–67 and 70–71, in a misguided attempt to cast doubt on Du Fay’s authorship of a number of the propers, which is marred by a misunderstanding of their liturgical contexts and in some instances by a misreading of the clefs in the modern chant books. The case of Salve sancte pater is the one small anomaly in what is left of Du Fay’s Vespers. In Julian’s office the magnificat antiphon for first Vespers is O stupor et gaudium (Weiss, Die Choräle, iii), and that for second Vespers is O virum mirabilem (ibid., xix). Salve sancte pater is rubricated as the magnificat antiphon infra octavam, which would be precisely the chant used as a suffrage in a Vespers of St. Anthony. But in a good number of manuscripts it simply follows O stupor et gaudium without further rubric and could easily be regarded as the antiphon for second Vespers. Occasionally it appears as the first Vespers antiphon (cf. the sources inventoried thus far for Cantus). Cf. Planchart, “Choirboys in Cambrai,” 138. O proles Hispaniae – O sidus Hispaniae is copied in a section of ModB copied on paper found in Florentine documents dating from ca. 1438– 1441, indicating that the motet might well have been written at Cambrai in 1440. The same applies to the responsory Si quaeris miracula, copied in Tr 87 in a section of the manuscript that probably dates from 1436–1445 (cf. P. Wright, “On the Origins,” 258), but the paper on which Si quaeris miracula is copied comes from the end of that period (personal communication from Wright). On a possible origin for this manuscript, see pp. 133–34. LAN, 4G 6751 (1573–1574), fol. 9v: “Item, pro missa S Anthonii de Padua cum utriusque vesperis ex fundatione dicti Du Fay, sex pueribus et eorum magistro 10 s, residuum sociis

The Remnants of the Cambrai Commune sanctorum

Fay treated the singers of the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua to a dinner after the ceremony, a custom that was kept by his executors for the two years they oversaw his last will,314 and among his possessions there was a small round seal with an Antonine inscription.315 What is remarkable about the “plusieurs aultres anthiennes” mentioned by the executors and the traces of them that have survived, is that the book he left to the chapel of St. Stephen apparently also contained a complete liturgy for St. Francis, a saint who did not have a special liturgy in the Cambrai calendar and for whom Du Fay did not endow a liturgy. From what survives, however, it is clear that it followed not the use of Cambrai but the use of the Franciscan order. The presence of St. Francis in this collection and the fate of the book itself might be explained by events that took place in 1450 and will be discussed in the next chapter.

The Remnants of the Cambrai Commune sanctorum Among the propers that Feininger identified as works of Du Fay, three further cycles remain that may be remnants of the music that Du Fay wrote in the 1440s. One of them, for St. John Baptist (Tr 88, fols. 141v–147r), appears between the cycles for the Cross and the Angels, the only interruption in the otherwise continuous set of Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece. The other two pose problems as coherent sets of propers: the first, in Tr 88, fols. 154v–161v and 169r, has what is now a barely legible rubric, “Missa S Georgii,”316 the second, in Tr 88, fols. 210v–216v, has no rubric, but Feininger called it a Mass for St. Sebastian317 because the alleluia has the verse Sebastiani gratia, which is a contrafact of Du Fay’s alleluia for St. Francis.318 Neither of them is a coherent cycle, and the first

314

315

316

317 318

presentibus, 41 s 8 d”; (1574–1575), fol. 9r: “Item pro missa S Anthonii de Padua sub discantu cum utriusque vesperis ex fundatione dicti Dufay sex pueribus et eorum magistro 10s residuum sociis presentibus 41 s 8 d.” LAN, 4G 1313, p. 30: “Item pour les despens fais par les dessus dictes executeurs et aultres qu’ilz appelerent au digner le jour Saint Anthoine de Pade, apres le messe dicte et descantee en la capelle dessus dicte de Saint Estiene comme avoit acoustume de faire chacun an le dict deffunct, 4 lb 2 s 6 d.” LAN, 4G 1313, p. 5: “Item pour une burlette d’argent dore escripte ‘de cingulo sancti Anthonii,’ etc., 15 s.” The rubric is invisible in the facsimile and most films. It can barely be read with the manuscript at hand and, with some enhancement, in the color photographs found on the site Manoscritti Musicali Trentini del ’400 at http://www1.Trentinocultura.net. Its existence was confirmed for me by the late Adelyn Peck Leverett. Feininger, ed., Auctorum Anonymorum, iii and 166. This verse is unique to Tr 88; it did not turn up in any of the chant sources inventoried by Schlager for his catalogue of alleluias or the two volumes of alleluias in Monumenta monodica medii aevi.

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At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

of them, despite the rubric, cannot be a set of propers for St. George.319 They appear to be part of the commune sanctorum written for Cambrai. To these cycles we should add the isolated alleluia Ora pro nobis for the Virgin Mary in Tr 88, fols. 64v–65r, which is a contrafact of the alleluia Posuisti domine in the factitious cycle for St. George. The musical aspects of these cycles are discussed in Part II of this study. Here it may be useful to describe where they fit in the liturgy of the cathedral. As Feininger noted, each of these cycles utilizes some material from the Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece (or from the Mass for St. Maurice),320 which argues for Du Fay being the composer. Presumably, faced with writing music for most of the liturgical year, he followed procedures already present in the chant itself, using the same setting whenever there was a set of chant phrases in common between two pieces, and in the case of alleluias using the same melody, resorting to contrafact.321 This is a solution similar to that used about 150 years later by William Byrd when composing his cycles for the Gradualia.322 Still, of the three cycles listed earlier, the only one that is unproblematic in terms of its structure in that it is a coherent set of propers for a given feast, that for St. John the Baptist, poses a liturgical problem if one considers it a work by Du Fay.323 The cycle sets the propers for St. John Baptist found in the modern chant books, a formulary derived from the Franciscan tradition,324 including the alleluia Tu puer propheta.325 But this alleluia was never used at Cambrai. The 20th-century gradual CBM 60, all the fifteenth-century missals that survive, the Missale parvum of 1507, and the sixteenth-century gradual CBM 12 all use the alleluia Inter natos mulierum,326 which was also the alleluia for St. John the Baptist in Dijon.327 Among the institutions with which Du Fay was connected, only the Sainte-Chapelle of Chambéry, which followed the use of Grenoble, would have used Tu puer propheta and the main alleluia for

319 320 321 322

323

324 326 327

Cf. Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 157–58. Feininger, ed., Auctorum Anonymorum, viii. The alleluias for St. Sebastian and St. Francis share the same music. Jackman, “Liturgical Aspects,” 17–37; see also Fallows, “Dufay and the Mass Proper,” 52, and Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Second Style,” 326–37, with sections of some of the graduals presented side by side. Feininger and Gerber pass this over in silence, Gerber because she assumes the work is anonymous, and Feininger because he assumed this was the “normal” liturgy for St. John, since these are the propers found in the modern chant books. Cf. Van Dijk, Sources, 2:286. 325 LU 1501. Schlager, Thematischer Katalog, no. 165b. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique 3824, fol. 186v; cf. Hansen, H 159 Montpellier, 532, no. 337.

The Remnants of the Cambrai Commune sanctorum

St. John.328 If this cycle is by Du Fay, it probably dates from after 1450 and was written for Savoy. It is worth noting here that the other cycle with which it shares any music is the cycle for St. Maurice, another, albeit earlier, Savoyard work. The other two cycles were surely composed for Cambrai, but it is possible that most of the polyphonic sanctorale was entered as extended cycles, of several introits, graduals, alleluias, and so on, that could be used for a category of saints. The Cambrai missals of the fourteen or fifteenth century, whether from the liturgy in choro or one or another of the many chapels, show no liturgy in the cathedral where the propers assigned to St. George, St. Maurice, and St. Sebastian were used in the order they appear in Tr 88.329 The anomalies in the propers for St. George again point to Cambrai as the origin of the cycle: in Tr 88 the Missa Sancti Georgi contains two introits, an alleluia, a tract, two offertories, and two communions but no gradual, as follows: In In Al Tr Of Of Co Co

In virtute tua Protexisti me Alleluia Desiderium animae In virtute tua Confitebuntur caeli Posuisti domine Laetabitur iustus

Ps. Magna est Ps. Exaudi deus V. Posuisti domine

(with alleluias)

(with alleluias) (with alleluias)

The three propers with alleluias, plus the Alleluia V. Beatus vir, are recorded as the Mass for St. George in the twelfth-century gradual of the cathedral.330 The propers without alleluias, that is, the introit and offertory In virtute tua, the tract Desiderium, and the communion Laetabitur iustus, would form a cycle for a martyr before Easter (although it would need a gradual). Something similar to this appears in the Missale parvum printed in Paris in 1507:331

328 329

330 331

Cf. Paris, BnF lat. 876, fol. 300v. The stability of the liturgy in choro at the cathedral, however, is underscored by the almost total congruence between CBM 60, a 12th-century gradual from the cathedral and the Missale parvum secundum usum venerabilis ecclesie Cameracensis printed in Paris in 1507. Most of the variants occur precisely where one would expect them, in the alleluias of the sanctorale, since alleluia verses continued to be produced throughout the 14th and 15th centuries at a considerable rate. CBM 60, fol. 74v. Of the copies I have examined Paris, BnF, Velins 1600, and London, BL, C.52.e.5 are complete; Lille, Université Catholique, 1.M.21, is missing one leaf (first foliation 135, with the end of the prefaces and the start of the canon).

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At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

Before Easter In Gr Al Al Tr Of Co After Easter In Al Of Co

Iustus non conturbabitur Iustus ut palma Alleluia Alleluia Desiderium In virtute tua Posuisti domine Protexisti me Alleluia Confitebuntur Laetabitur iustus

V. Ad annuntiandum V. Corona aurea V. Surrexit pastor

Ps. Exaudi deus V. Beatus vir

But the feast of St. George, celebrated on 23 April, virtually never falls before Easter, and when it does it coincides with Good Friday or Easter Eve, which would take precedence.332 In any case the “before Easter” Mass in the Missale parvum is actually a complete proper for a martyr per circulum anni, such as one might expect to find in a commune sanctorum section.333 Its presence in the calendric section of the Missale parvum is something of a liturgical anomaly; it does not occur in the cathedral gradual and missals before the fifteenth century, nor does it occur in missals or graduals from outside Cambrai, but traces of such a collection of propers connected with St. George’s Day appear in a few of the fifteenth-century missals in Cambrai. What this points to is that the odd combination of propers in Tr 88 can be traced to uses instituted at Cambrai in the fifteenth century. A number of these uses did not survive into later chant books, but this one did find its way into the Missale parvum. As noted earlier, the propers for St. Sebastian are unlabeled in Tr 88, and their association with this saint is indicated by the text of the alleluia verse. They are: In Gr Al 332

333

Laetabitur iustus Posuisti domine Alleluia

Ps. Exaudi deus V. Desiderium animae V. Sebastiani gratia

In the Julian calendar Easter falls on 24 April eight times and on 25 April four times every 532 years. In the 15th century St. George’s Day fell before Easter only in 1451, when it coincided with Good Friday. The Missale parvum has, in fact, a commune sanctorum, but this section is arranged not in individual cycles but in the traditional manner, with introits, graduals, offertories, and communions grouped by categories.

The Remnants of the Cambrai Commune sanctorum

Of Co

Gloria et honore Magna est

Except for the alleluia, which is a unique contrafact of Du Fay’s alleluia for St. Francis,334 this collection of propers was very infrequent in the Cambrai liturgy of the central Middle Ages, but its use as a group increased considerably in the fifteenth century and the Missale parvum assigns it to a good number of feasts of a martyr, though not to St. Sebastian, whose propers are among the most stable in the Roman liturgy from the eighth century on; the traditional Mass for St. Fabian and St. Sebastian appears in all the Cambrai sources from the twelfth century on, the only variant being the choice of an alleluia.335 That the alleluia in Tr 88 is a contrafact and does not mention Sebastian’s liturgical companion, St. Fabian, suggests that this cycle might have been compiled from a commune martyrum for a special Mass, such as the double for St. Sebastian endowed by Du Fay’s colleague Gilles Flannel in connection with his gift to the cathedral of a statue (imago) of this saint. The earliest mention of this is in the accounts of the fabric for 1454–1455, roughly five years before the compilation of Tr 88.336 In this case the adaptation of an alleluia by Du Fay that actually had no place in the Cambrai liturgy (that for St. Francis) for the double newly endowed by Flannel, who was both a colleague of long standing and a personal friend, makes eminent sense. If the proper cycles for St. George and St. Sebastian can be traced back to Cambrai, that for St. Maurice and his companions is not so traceable. The cycle consists of the following: In In Gr Al Of Co

Venite benedicti Sapientiam sanctorum Gloriosus deus Alleluia Mirabilis deus Gaudete iusti

Ps. Exsultate iusti Ps. Exsultate iusti V. Dextera tua V. Iudicabunt sancti

This has virtually nothing to do with the Mass for St. Maurice at Cambrai and indeed throughout most of northern France, which was as follows:337 334

335

336 337

Schlager, Thematischer Katalog, and id., ed., Alleluia-Melodien II, report not a single plainsong source for this verse, which does not survive in any of the Cambrai books either. On the early history of this liturgy see Hesbert, ed., Antiphonale missarum sextuplex, lxxxvi, and no. 24. All Cambrai sources transmit the Mass found in the Sextuplex. LAN, 4G 4661, fol. 7v. Cf. Cambrai 60, the Missale parvum, and Lille 599, from St-Pierre.

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At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

In Gr Al Of Co

Intret in conspectu Gloriosus deus Alleluia Laetamini in domino Posuerunt mortalia

Ps. Deus venerunt gentes V. Dextera tua V. Reddet deus

In most late medieval chant books the introit Venite benedicti was used only on Wednesday in albis, so Feininger labeled it as an introit for Eastertide.338 But the feast of St. Maurice is on 22 September and there is no connection between the saint and the Easter season. Feininger, however, was unaware that from the tenth century on in southern France and apparently as far north as Bourges the liturgy for St. Maurice used the following chants:339 In Gr Al Of Co

Venite benedicti Timete dominum Alleluia O quam gloriosum Etsi coram domino

Ps. Esurivit enim V. Inquirientes V. Vindica domine

After the Cluniac takeover of St-Martial de Limoges in the eleventh century this liturgy was changed as follows:340 In Gr Al Of Co

Venite benedicti Timete dominum Alleluia Mirabilis deus Gaudete iusti

Ps. Esurivit enim V. Inquirientes V. Iusti epulentur

This is the form of the “southern” Mass for St. Maurice that appears to have survived. Now, as I have noted earlier, during the 1440s Du Fay apparently remained in touch with the court of Savoy, where Duke Amadeus VIII, later Pope Felix V, had founded an order of St. Maurice. I believe that the Tr 88 cycle for St. Maurice, which follows the southern form of the Mass for this saint, was written for Savoy, and that the double introit, as in the case of Du Fay’s Mass for St. Francis, was intended for the octave.341 All the 338 339

340 341

Feininger, ed., Auctorum Anonymorum, 108. Introit alone (with tropes), in Paris, BnF lat. 909, fols. 49v–50r; lat. 1084, fol. 82r–v; lat. 1119, fols. 69v–70r; lat. 1121, fol. 37v; n. acq. lat. 1871, fol. 31r; Vatican, BAV, Reg. lat. 222, fol. 98r. Complete Mass in Paris, BnF lat. 1118, fols. 88v–89r, and London, BL, Harley 4951, fol. 296r. Neither the St-Yrieix gradual nor the Gaillac gradual has a liturgy for St. Maurice, however. Paris, BnF lat. 1132, fol. 91v. Barbara Haggh, “The Archives,” 26–29, makes an interesting attempt to connect the propers for St. Maurice to the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon through Auclou, who was very active in

The Remnants of the Cambrai Commune sanctorum

elements of this cycle could also have been used as part of the Cambrai liturgy, particularly if many of the propers for the saints were copied, as the payment to Mellet suggests, in the form of a large commune sanctorum.342 The evidence of the Mass for St. Maurice, taken together with the composition of works such as Seigneur Leon, indicate that during his years at Cambrai Du Fay maintained a relatively active connection with a number of southern courts, including his former Savoyard patrons, something that he could do as a nominal familiaris of the duke of Burgundy without fearing papal sanctions.343 Writing something like the Mass for St. Maurice, however, would have been less fraught with the danger of sanctions in the latter part of Du Fay’s decade at Cambrai, because on 23 February 1447 Eugenius IV died in Rome, and on 6 March Tommaso Parentucelli was elected pope as Nicholas V. His election lessened the tensions between Basel and Rome, since much of the opposition in Basel was to Eugenius IV himself, and Nicholas, a far better diplomat than his predecessor, took a conciliatory approach that within two years of his election produced the Concordat of Vienna with King Frederic III in 1448, and the abdication of Felix V on 7 April 1449. Finally, what was left of the Council of Basel recognized Nicholas as their pope and dissolved itself, bringing an end to the schism. Throughout the decade, as Craig Wright has shown, Du Fay discharged all of the routine duties of a canon at the cathedral: serving as witness, overseeing work and the state of the church properties, going to Laon and to Reims in search of wines for the chapter to purchase, traveling to Mons and to the court of Burgundy on chapter business, serving as a proctor in exchanges and collations of benefices, and installing newly beneficed clerics in their appointed stalls in the choir.344 But his major contribution to the intellectual and artistic life of the cathedral at this time was his tenure as head of the small vicars from 1442 to 1449, making him the chief musical officer of the cathedral. In this capacity he spurred the enormous project of copying the new antiphoner for the cathedral and, no less important, what appears to have been an enormous expansion in the amount of polyphony

342 343 344

Burgundian circles, and his connections to the Dominican order (Auclou’s Paris church, StJacques de la Boucherie, was a Dominican foundation), but even by her own admission the evidence for this is weak. We have no evidence of Du Fay’s connection to the Dominicans, whereas there is considerable evidence for his interest in the Franciscans, and this at a time when the two orders were increasingly at odds over the dispute concerning the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. At Cambrai the introit Venite benedicti would have been part of the proprium de tempore. On this, see Planchart, “Connecting the Dots.” C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 182–85.

229

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At the Cathedral of Cambrai (1439–1450)

sung at Cambrai, not just in the chapels but in the choir, if we are to judge from books for which Symon Mellet was paid in 1449. Much of this music, particularly that for the propers of the Mass, must have been composed by Du Fay, since this was a repertory that virtually did not exist anywhere in the 1440s. Only a very small fraction of this repertory has survived in distant and imperfect copies in the Trent Codices, but what survives is sufficient to allow us to see that it involved Du Fay in new ways of organizing his melodic language in longer and more flexible phrases, and also in a number of mensural experiments, some of which he retained in his late music and others which he largely abandoned, but which suggest that these years are also most likely those in which he set down the theoretical tract which is referred to in the writings of some of the later theorists.345 From the little we know it does not appear that this decade was altogether a particularly happy time in Du Fay’s life, but in a sense the exile from the life of a courtier at a time when his own creative powers were at their peak appears to have given him the time, and, in the creation of music for the liturgy at Cambrai, the challenge that laid the foundations for the extraordinary music that we have from the last twenty-five years of his life. Once more, this is a reflection of Du Fay’s self-image as a creator of music, and it is also instructive to think that during this decade at Cambrai he was writing works for the cathedral, the Burgundian chapel, the court of Leonello d’Este in Ferrara, and even the Order of St. Maurice, not only in Savoy but across the divide created by the schism.

345

On the number of treatises that might have been written by Du Fay, see earlier in this chapter.

5

The Courtier (1450–1458)

Prelude to the First Journey South From the beginning of his reign Nicholas V engaged in a vigorous program of renewal and building of Rome designed to put the city on a par with the splendor of the seats of other European courts. Modern historians fault him for lacking an understanding of the beauty of the Roman remnants, much less the grandeur of some of the medieval monuments of the city, but at the time his work was viewed as an important raising of the city to a state of splendor compatible with the presence of the papal court in a church that had finally exorcised the Schism.1 The proclamation of a Jubilee year in 1450, even though it was something that was expected, was also seen as a time for thanksgiving and celebration because not only had the Western Church achieved unity but also there was a sense in the West that the long schism with Constantinople had also healed. At Cambrai the business of the cathedral and the city continued with its normal routine; an entry in the acts for 11 March 1450 tells of the reception by procuration of Nicolas Plonchet, archdeacon of Troyes and then a familiaris of the pope, to the prebend vacant on the death of Gérard Muguet, with two former papal familiares, Guillaume Du Fay, canon of Ste-Waudru, and Jehan de la Croix, canon of Chartres, as the witnesses.2 This is the last reference we have to Du Fay at Cambrai until December of that year. Almost eleven weeks later the accounts of the tesoreria generale in Savoy report a payment for the lodging of Du Fay and nine religiosi at the Hostelry of the Red Hat in Turin from 26 May through 1 June.3 The entry famously refers to Du Fay as “cantor illustrissimi domini ducis 1 2 3

Gregorovius, Geschichte (1963), 3:47–69; Pastor, History, 2:65–92. CBM 1058, fol. 226v; C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 185. TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv 16, Reg. 98, fol. 270r–v; Cordero, “Guglielmo Dufay,” 35; Van den Borren, Dufay, 361. The body of the entry, which is what has been reported, refers only to the innkeeper as “Sebastiano de Collete hospite Capelli,” but the heading gives the full name of the inn, “Sebastiano de Collete hospite Capelli Rubei.” That the inn’s sign was a red hat, that is, a cardinal’s hat, probably indicated some social pretension, and indeed several other entries in the accounts show that this was the place where the court lodged important guests who, for whatever reason, could not be lodged at court.

231

232

The Courtier (1450–1458)

Burgundiae,” and the nine religiosi as also being servants of the duke, and for a long time it was one of the two pieces of evidence for Du Fay’s connection with the court of Burgundy,4 later contested by Wright, but cautiously reaffirmed by Fallows.5 We now know that Du Fay’s connections with the court were more extensive than previously thought, although apparently informal, and that he stayed in touch with the court of Savoy throughout the years of the Schism but used his connection with the court of Burgundy not only as a shield against a possible papal sanction concerning his contact with Savoy but also as a convenient excuse not to leave his relatively safe base in the north while the Schism was open, despite entreaties from Louis. The nine religiosi with him pose a different problem; since they were with him it is no surprise that the writer of the account in Savoy regards them also as servants of the duke of Burgundy. The term religiosus usually refers to a monk or a friar, but Du Fay was a secular priest and despite his obvious sympathy for the Franciscans did not have much of an occasion to consort with monks or friars. The entry in the accounts indicates that at the least they were clerics, but neither the accounts of the Burgundian court nor those of the cathedral of Cambrai reveal the absence of nine men in the months leading to Du Fay’s arrival at Turin. Earlier scholarship had assumed that Du Fay was on his way to Rome for the Jubilee,6 but Fallows noticed that the number of Du Fay’s companions matched exactly the number of men he requested as singers for his Mass for St. Anthony of Padua in his will,7 and suggested that Du Fay was actually on his way to Padua, where two weeks after the time he left Turin there was the dedication of Donatello’s altar for the basilica of St. Anthony in Padua. As Fallows notes, Donatello was in Rome in 1433 at the time of Sigismund’s coronation, and in Florence, as Brunelleschi’s partner, in 1436, so there is reason to believe that Du Fay knew him and that the composer must have been aware of the significance of Donatello as an artist.8 Fallows’s argument that the Mass was intended for the dedication of Donatello’s altar, and his revising of its date to near 1450 instead of the 1430s, where earlier scholarship had placed it,9 is now generally accepted. But a problem remains in that, despite efforts to find any evidence of the performance 4

5 6 7

8

The other is the now lost act of his installation as canon of Ste-Waudru in Mons in 1446, summarized in Devillers, Chartes, 3, no. 1249. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 203–4; Fallows, Dufay, 65–66. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 188. Fallows, Dufay, 67, arrives at the number by dividing the total payment Du Fay endows, 30s, by the individual payment stipulated for each singer, 3s 4d. Fallows, Dufay, 66–68. 9 Cf. OO Besseler 2:iv–v.

Prelude to the First Journey South

of the Mass at the time of the dedication of the altar or even around that time in the basilica, no such evidence has turned up.10 The evidence that survives from Cambrai in terms of Du Fay’s career in the 1440s would suggest that the propers for St. Anthony of Padua, together with those for St. Francis of Assisi, the Ordinary known to Tinctoris and Gaffurius as Du Fay’s Mass for St. Anthony, and the fragments of what apparently was a set of Vespers for both saints, are a product of the late 1430s and 1440s, some of them perhaps even from the late part of that decade. All of this supports Fallows’s hypothesis of the eventual purpose of the Mass, even if it might have been composed earlier in the 1440s. The nine religiosi with the composer could indeed have been singers recruited by him, who could have been Franciscan friars or rather clerics who had obtained permission to don Franciscan habits for this occasion and were on their way to Padua for the dedication of the altar. Apparently one of two things happened: either the party never reached Padua or else the authorities of the basilica, despite Du Fay’s reputation, were not interested in having his Mass performed at the ceremony. This would not have been the first time that Du Fay encountered incomprehension and hostility on the part of what one could call the mid-level clerical bureaucracy of his times. The reason I propose this hypothesis is the existence of the book with the Mass for St. Anthony that the composer left to the chapel of St. Stephen at Cambrai at his death. That book is lost, but it is described as a parchment volume in large format, containing the Mass for St. Anthony and “numerous other antiphons” written in black notation. In the previous chapter and in an earlier study I offered a reconstruction of its contents; it was most likely a volume of the size of Cambrai 6, with all of the music necessary to celebrate the Masses for St. Anthony of Padua and for St. Francis of Assisi together with first and second Vespers and the Masses for the octave of each saint, and it followed punctiliously the liturgical order of Franciscan books rather than the use of Cambrai.11 Now, a book of this size, copied on parchment and in black notation, would be a rarity on the Continent after 1440. All of the polyphony copied at Cambrai after 1445 is on paper, and among Du Fay’s own books, the one containing his own Requiem, which obviously had enormous personal importance for him, was also on paper. In other words, the book with the Mass for St. Anthony, as described by the executors of the composer’s will, has all of the earmarks of having been intended as a presentation copy for someone or for some patron or 10 11

See Fallows, “Dufay, la sua messa.” A detailed reconstruction of this book appears in Planchart, “The Books,” 175–98.

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institution, but a presentation copy that in the end for some reason never left the hands of the composer. The presence of Du Fay and his companions in Turin and the fact that their lodging was paid by the court of Savoy also indicates that perhaps Du Fay had other business to transact in Savoy itself. There is now evidence that there was contact between Louis of Savoy and Du Fay, by letter or by courier, during the 1440s, but the journey of 1450 would allow the composer to ascertain in a more direct and sure manner what his reception at the court would be after a long absence since there could be people at the court who would have regarded Du Fay’s long sojourn at Cambrai at the time of the Schism with less than sympathy. It might be that the composer also planned to go to Rome to earn the indulgences associated with the Jubilee. Although there is no surviving evidence for this, there would have been time for at least a short visit to the city, but the influx of pilgrims had brought an outbreak of epidemics that decimated not only the pilgrims but a number of members of the papal chapel.12 Most likely, however, Du Fay never reached Rome and spent the summer at the court of Savoy, and when he was preparing to return north on 11 September 1450 it was from Savoy that he set out, with a gift of £10 from the duke for the expenses of his journey home.13 Du Fay is recorded back at Cambrai on 20 December 1450.14 Around this time an important event took place in the cathedral that scholarship in the past loosely associates with Du Fay, but which, curiously enough, has not left any perceptible traces in his work. The archdeacon of Valenciennes, Fursy du Bruille, a formidable curialist who had spent decades in Rome but had resided in Cambrai at least from 1438 on, had chosen for his burial the chapel of the Trinity,15 and at his death on 19 December 1450 he left to the chapel of the Trinity a Byzantine icon he had obtained in Rome, the famous image of Notre-Dame de Grace, which a

12

13 14

15

Fallows, Dufay, 66; Starr, “Music,” 7; Gregorovius, Geschichte (1963), 3:54; Pastor, History, 2:84–88. TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 98, fols. 609v–610r. CBM 1058, fol. 246v. Du Fay installs Jehan Grenet, procurator of Antoine Haneron, as a canon in place of the late Fursy de Bruille. Haneron was an immensely influential Burgundian official who had been the teacher of Charles, count of Charolais, and this installation once again underscores the connections between Du Fay and the Burgundian court upon his return north, since the chapter chose the members who performed these ceremonies with considerable care and political acumen. Haneron’s career is examined in MacCarthy, “Music and Learning,” 180– 95. CBM 1058, fol. 25v (21 Dec. 1445).

Prelude to the First Journey South

pious tradition regarded as having been painted by St. Luke.16 The image survived the destruction of the cathedral in the eighteenth century and remains to this day an object of enormous veneration. A number of copies were commissioned by the French and Burgundian nobility; on 24 April 1454, the acts note the request by the count of Éstampes to have Petrus Christus make three replicas of the image, and the chapter also covered the payment to the painter.17 Du Fay’s Marian devotion was a lifelong one, but the large Marian works of his last years are connected to the chapel of St. Stephen, where he was to be buried, or the Burgundian court. After his return to Cambrai Du Fay resumed his usual duties as a canon of the cathedral and of Ste-Waudru in Mons, including a visit to Mons in May 1451 that coincided with the celebration of the meeting of the chevaliers of the Order of the Golden Fleece,18 a time when he again had the occasion to visit with a number of the chaplains of the duke of Burgundy, including Binchois, who was also a canon of Ste-Waudru, and Nicaise du Puit, who had helped Du Fay with his resignation of the canonicate at St. Donatian in Bruges in 1447. It is possible that Du Fay sought Du Puit’s assistance again at this time, since it appears that he hoped eventually to become one of the dignitaries of the cathedral. Arnold Logier, who had been cantor of the cathedral since 1420,19 was in poor health, and already in September 1450 had made provisions for his obit.20 By 9 June 1451 Logier had been near death for fifteen days and received the last rites, but had recovered,21 but by June 21 he had died and the canons relatively quickly awarded his canonicate to Nicaise du Puit, who received it through his procurator, Guillaume Du Fay.22 The cantorship was also vacant and it would appear that Du Fay expected to become the next cantor. On 9 September 1451 the chapter decided that Du Fay should “serve as cantor 16

17

18

19 22

CBM 1058, fol. 246r, on the death of Fursy. His will has not survived and was already missing from the archives in the late 17th century. His executors were two relatives, Jehan du Bruille and Jehan de Noisilles, plus four of the most important canons of the cathedral, Gilles Carlier, Gilles D’Inchy, Robert Auclou, and Grégoire Nicole. His canonicate was disputed by two highpowered clerics, Antoine Haneron, a counselor of the duke of Burgundy, and Pierre de Ranchicourt, and eventually collated by Ranchicourt, although Haneron eventually also obtained a canonicate in the cathedral (CBM 1058, fol. 146r–v). See also Houdoy, Histoire, 69– 70 (Houdoy, who rarely makes chronological errors, misstates the death of Fursy, placing it in 1452). CBM 1059, fol. 87r–v (24 Apr. and 1 May 1454); also Houdoy, Histoire, 70 (giving 1453 as the year). MAE, MS 71, fols. 1v–3r; these are extracts copied from the registers of Ste-Waudru in the 19th century by Mme. Georges Heupgen. The originals were destroyed in the bombardment of 1944. I owe my knowledge of these documents to Barbara Haggh-Huglo. CBM 1046, fol. 94v. 20 CBM 1058, fol. 237v. 21 CMB 1058, fol. 264 bisr. CBM 1018, fols. 267v–268r.

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at the usual salary.”23 The language is curiously ambiguous, as if the canons were not entirely convinced that granting Du Fay the cantorship was possible. A glance at the list of cantors during the fifteenth century sheds some light on this. For the first three-quarters of the century virtually all the cantors had been appointed at the collation of the bishop. The one exception, Barthélemy de Wauquetin (received 9 February 1420), had obtained it through a complicated process similar to what followed Du Fay’s resignation at St. Donatian, in which a prominent curialist who was what I have earlier called “a benefice broker,”24 Anselm Smits van Breda (Anselmus Fabri), who had very strong connections with the Burgundian court, obtained it, and resigned it almost immediately in favor of Wauquetin.25 Du Fay, who had served the court of Burgundy at this point for more than a decade, probably thought he would have the support of the bishop, who was probably his supporter when he was awarded the canonicate at St. Donatian. But on 5 November canon Jehan Lambert presented to the chapter sealed letters from the secretary of Bishop Jehan de Bourgogne, collating the cantorship to Jan Rodolph called the Fleming,26 who had been a canon since 1446, also on an Episcopal collation.27 Rodolph, a protégé of the bishop, was not present, so Du Fay was his representative at the installation, which must not have been a pleasant experience for him if he did want the cantorship.28 Evidence from the last decade of Du Fay’s life indicates that apparently he resented Rodolph to the end of his days.29 During Du Fay’s short term as cantor pro tem Gobert le Mannier, who had replaced Pierre du Castel as magister puerorum in November 1447, resigned his post.30 From the many entries concerning him in the chapter acts from 1431 to his death in 1464, he was a talented musician and a composer but apparently a difficult man. At the time of his appointment the canons were seeking Paul le Josne from Tournai as magister puerorum, but Paul apparently could not take the post. On 20 October 1451 the chapter, surely on Du Fay’s advice, since he was then cantor pro tem (the other two canons who would have had an input in this matter would have been Jehan de la Croix called Monamy, Du Fay’s former colleague in the papal chapel, who was then the master of the small vicars, and Robert Auclou, who was the scholaster), asked canon Jehan Turpin, who was sent 23

24 27 30

CBM 1058, fol. 277r: “Magister Guillermus Du Fay deserviat cantorie et habeat salarium consuetum.” See earlier in this chapter. 25 CBM 1046, fol. 94v. 26 CBM 1059, fol. 2v. CBM 1046, fol. 151v. 28 CBM 1059, fol. 2v. 29 See later in this chapter. CBM 1059, fol. 1r, entry of 15 Oct. 1451.

Prelude to the First Journey South

to Tournai to deal with the rents from St-Brice, to again seek Paul le Josne, who was reputed a good musicus, for the post of magister puerorum, and stipulated that if Le Josne would not come to Cambrai, to seek Pierre de Domart, who was also reputed a good musicus.31 This entry in the acts is immensely important because it shows that Du Fay and the canons at Cambrai were already aware of the work of Domart, whose Missa Spiritus almus became one of the most influential works of the middle of the fifteenth century (much to the annoyance of Tinctoris),32 but also because it is symptomatic of a change in the meaning of the term musicus in the middle of the fifteenth century, when it began to be applied not to those who engaged in the study of musica speculativa but to the men who actually wrote music, that is, to composers precisely as composers.33 Eventually, Le Josne came to Cambrai; he was appointed magister puerorum on 25 October 1451 and served until the end of February 1456.34 The cathedral canons were not entirely happy with their absentee bishop, and on 31 March 1452 the dean, Gilles Carlier, set up a commission of canons to make a series of administrative requests from the bishop.35 The bishop’s answer, which was far from satisfactory to the chapter, was reported on 11 April,36 and it must have been clear to Du Fay that at this time Cambrai was perhaps not where he wanted to be. Already sometime late in 1451 he had received a letter from Duke Louis of Savoy, dated 22 October, without a year, but surely 1451, thanking him for some cloth he had sent the duke and urging him to return to Savoy as soon as possible.37 By 19 April 1452 he had petitioned the chapter to be granted a gift of 60 écus instead of the gross fruits of his prebend for the coming year, a sign that he intended to leave the city for an extended period of time.38 On 21 April the chapter granted his request and noted that it did so, in part, because of the “virtues and merits of Du Fay, canon, who had ornamented this church with musical compositions,”39 and on 12 June, the 31

32 33

34 36 38

39

Ibid., fol. 1v: “Vadat dominus Guillermus Turpin apud Tornacum / tam pro faciendo censitorum sci Brictii quod ad loquendum de uno magistro puerorum / et specialiter si possit faciat quod dominus Paulus Iuvenis acceptet officium quia famatur bonus musicus et honestus alioquin loquitur cum Petro de Domarto / qui etiam famatus est bonus musicus.” Cf. Wegman, “Petrus de Domarto’s Mass Spiritus almus.” I am grateful to Sean Gallagher for his observations on the history of this term in the 15th century. CBM 1059, fol. 2v, and LAN, 4G 7763 (1455–1456), fol. 12r. 35 CBM 1059, fol. 16v. Ibid., fols. 17v–18r. 37 TAS, Archivio di Corte, Protocolli Ducali, Reg. 76, fol. 303r. CBM 1059, fol. 20r. The entry indicates that the chapter had received Du Fay’s request and set the following Friday to deliberate on its response to it. Ibid., fol. 20v: “propter virtutes et merita magistri Guillermi Du Fay canonici qui presentem ecclesiam musicis cantibus decoravit.” C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 189 and 224. His

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day after St. Barnabas, which began the fiscal year for several of the offices of the cathedral, it was determined that Du Fay would not be liable for any assessments for the coming year.40 It is not clear whether Du Fay was at Cambrai on this date; the only mentions of him in the acts between June 1452 and November 1454 indicate that he was absent.41 He is mentioned again in the acts as being back in Cambrai on 6 November 1458, when he was appointed with other canons to oversee some business of the cellarer.42 But the account of the will of Henri Beye, who died on 12 October 1458, mentions that Du Fay sang in the funeral, “comme choriste,” in place of the cantor Jan Rodolph, who could not attend.43

Sojourn in Savoy, 1452–1458 The evidence we have about Du Fay’s whereabouts between 1452 and 1458 is much sparser than what we have from his years in the papal chapel or in Cambrai, and even though some of it is frustratingly ambiguous, it is extremely important and fascinating. It includes an entry in the execution of Du Fay’s will mentioning that Pierre de Wez, a learned and literate chaplain of the cathedral, who had for years been Du Fay’s neighbor and administered the last rites to the composer as well as being one of executors of his will, had kept track of Du Fay’s house and of his accounts for the seven years that Du Fay “was in Savoy.”44 The other pieces of evidence are the two surviving autographs we have from the composer,45 a letter of Pope Nicholas V to Du Fay and to Louis of Savoy,46 the account of executors of the last will of Du Fay’s colleague Michiel van Beringhen,47 and a very small number of entries in the accounts of the tesoreria generale Savoy.

40 41

42 44

45

46

reading that the decision was taken “by acclamation” is a misreading of the end of the document, which simply states that all the canons were called to discuss the matter. CBM 1059, fol. 26v. CBM 1059, fols. 169v–171r, a rota collationis indicating the order in which the canons can propose candidates for the smaller benefices in the cathedral, dated 15 Oct. 1455, indicating Du Fay as absent and thus not part of the normal rotation. CBM 1060, fol. 29v. 43 LAN, 4G 1212, fol. 4r. LAN, 4G 1313, p. 25. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 189, notes that the two southern sojourns in the 1450s add up very close to seven years. CAS, Inv. 124, SA 3605, piece 24, a quittance as executor of André Picard, dated 8 Nov. 1455, FAS, Mediceo avanti il Principato, MS VI 765, a letter to the Medici, dated 22 Feb. [1456]. These will be discussed later in some detail. The third one, a possible autograph, has been identified independently by Barbara Haggh-Huglo and myself on the basis of the text script; it is the fascicle with Du Fay’s Mass on Ecce ancilla – Beata es in Brussels 5557. ASV, RL 483, fol. 295r–v. 47 LAN, 4G 1203, fol. 15r.

Sojourn in Savoy, 1452–1458

Chronologically the earliest of these references is, interestingly enough, the letter of Nicholas V dated 18 January 1454. It is a bull addressed to Du Fay, canon of Cambrai and bachelor of laws, in response to a supplication that has not survived but certainly carried the same date as the bull, and came most likely not directly from Du Fay but from Louis of Savoy in the name of the composer, since it states that the duke asserts that Du Fay is “his beloved counselor and master and first chaplain of his chapel.”48 It allows Du Fay to receive and hold any nonconventual priory either granted outright or in commendam and gives him license to hold it with incompatible benefices and to exchange it at will. From this it is clear that the duke was attempting to get Du Fay a substantial benefice that could allow the composer to remain in Savoy perhaps indefinitely. At the same time, the absence of a specific benefice is reminiscent of the letter of Malatesta di Pandolfo to Martin V in 1423;49 it suggests that Louis had neither much influence in the Roman Curia (hardly a surprise in that he was the son of a man regarded in Rome as a former antipope) nor much sway over the clerical establishments in his own lands, most likely a situation related to the complicated political situation in Savoy in the 1450s. Politically the years from 1450 to 1455 were extremely tense between Savoy and France. Louis the Dauphin was completely estranged from his father, King Charles VII, and under military pressure had abandoned the Dauphiné and taken refuge in Savoy, where almost on the spur of the moment and against his father’s wishes he had married Duke Louis’s daughter Charlotte on 9 March 1451.50 The tension between Savoy and France over the conduct of the dauphin almost erupted into open war, a fate that was averted by a treaty hastily drawn up and signed by both rulers at Cleppé in 1452.51 On this occasion both courts met, probably including the chaplains of Savoy and those of the king of France, and this most likely is the first time that Du Fay met personally with Jehan de Ockeghem, first chaplain of the French king. Over the years, despite the antagonisms between their respective patrons, it appears that a genuine friendship developed between Du Fay and Ockeghem. The tensions between Savoy and France, however, continued after Cleppé, fueled by the intrigues and deviousness of the dauphin, and another threat of war, this time even more dangerous than the previous one, was finally defused by an elaborate treaty 48

49 50 51

ASV, RL 483, fol. 295r: “Ludovicus dux Sabaudie asserens te dilectum consiliarium suum et magistrum ac primum capellanum capelle sue fore.” See pp. 70–71. Guichenon, Histoire, 1:531; Kendall, Louis XI, 74–75; Vale, Charles VII, 164–65. Guichenon, Histoire, 1:513–15; Kendall, Louis XI, 76; Vale, Charles VII, 165–66.

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between the two rulers signed at St-Pourçain on December 1455.52 This, again, was an occasion for a meeting of the two courts and for an encounter between Du Fay and Ockeghem, since both the king and the duke took their chapels with them and Duke Louis spent an enormous sum in the livery of his chaplains for this occasion.53 From a letter of Du Fay to Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici that obviously refers to events in this meeting, it is clear that the animosity between the rulers did not filter down to those of their followers who were concerned with music and poetry.54 In the letter Du Fay mentions that he had recently written a number of songs at the request of gentlemen from the French royal court, which he is sending to the Medici. This allowed Fallows to identify a few of these songs because their texts are by poets from the circle of Charles d’Orléans, who was at StPourçain with his entourage.55 The letter also refers obliquely to what was probably the most traumatic political event of the entire century, when Du Fay states that he has written four lamentations on the fall of Constantinople on texts that were sent to him from Naples, and he offers to send these, together with the songs, to the Medici. The effect upon Europe of the fall of Constantinople, one of Christianity’s holiest cities, to the Ottoman Turks under the rule of Sultan Mehmet II on 29 May 1453,56 and the consequent demise of the Byzantine Empire was immensely complicated. Despite the shock, the papacy’s calls for a crusade, which continued for several decades, went largely unheeded.57 The reaction of Philip the Good, who was almost the only Western ruler to take some small action, was typical: on 17 February 1454, in order to proclaim the crusade, he held the Feast of the Pheasant in Lille, which Vaughan rightly calls the “most bizarre and extravagant of all fifteenth century banquets.”58 An official account of the banquet was drawn up and distributed to the guests, 52 53

54

55

56 57

Guichenon, Histoire, 1:517; Kendall, Louis XI, 78. CAS, Inv. 124, SA 3605, fol. 10v, reimbursing Barthélemy Chouet, receiver of the chapel, for 200 fl. spent on the expenses of the chapel when it traveled to meet the French king. Also Du Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire, 6:72–75; Bouquet, “La cappella,” 245. The letter is dated Geneva, 22 Feb.; the year is not given but almost certainly is 1456. FAS, Mediceo avanti il Principato, Filza 6, doc. 765; see Fortuna and Lunghetti, eds., Autografi, 38–39 and ill. 18 (facsimile); Kühner, “Eine unbekannte Brief,” 114–15 (edition); Grunzweig, “Notes,” 86 (edition); Becherini, “Relazioni,” 87–88 (edition); D’Accone, “The Singers,” 318–19 (translation). Fallows, Dufay, 70–71. The songs are Malheureux cueur (OO Besseler 6, no. 24), with a text by Le Rouselet; Les douleurs (OO Besseler 6, no. 84), with a text by Antoine de Cuise; and perhaps Mon bien m’amour (OO Besseler 6, no. 71), with an incipit that Fallows associated with a poem by Charles d’Albret. For the problems with the last identification see Fallows, The Songs, 189. Runciman, The Fall, 133–44; Nicol, The Last Centuries, 405–11. Runciman, The Fall, 160–91. 58 Vaughan, Philip the Good, 143.

Sojourn in Savoy, 1452–1458

and found its way into the writings of Olivier de la Marche and Mathieu d’Escouchy,59 with further details published by Vaughan.60 It was on this occasion when the song Je ne vis onques la pareille, variously attributed to Du Fay and Binchois,61 was performed, as well as a plaint by a figure representing the Holy Church, “who made piteous complaint on behalf of the Christians persecuted by the Turks, and begged for help.”62 This work has been identified with the only one of the lamentations by Du Fay that has survived, O tres piteulx – Omnes amici eius,63 because its title in one of the two sources reads “Lamentatio Sanctae Matris Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae,”64 and could easily be conflated with the lament of the mother church reported at the Feast of the Pheasant. But the chronicles give the complete text of the lamentation in Lille, which is entirely different and which the chronicles do not describe as being sung.65 Also part of the problem is that the title of Du Fay’s piece uses a rare double genitive and has been consistently mistranslated.66 Its correct rendering should be “Lament of the Holy Mother of the church of Constantinople,” so that the persona speaking in Du Fay’s text is the Virgin Mary, complaining to God himself about the fate of her son (and his followers) at the hands of the Turk. In this context Du Fay’s choice of a phrase from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and his deliberate inversion of the order of the two sentences used,67 are surely part of the composer’s own response to the fall of Constantinople, and a response that would not have provided comfort to any of the secular rulers of Europe, including his own patrons, for the cantus firmus implies a question to all of them, “where were you when the Mother of God needed you?”68 Du Fay’s letter to the Medici also thanks one of the Medici officials for having helped Du Fay in matters dealing with the court of Rome. This could well refer to his search for a substantial benefice somewhere in Italy 59

60 61

62 64 65

66 68

La Marche, Mémoires, 2:340–80; Escouchy, Chronique, 2:154–59. See also DeVries, “The Failure,” 161–65, and esp. n. 13, with extensive reference to further studies. Vaughan, Philip the Good, 144–45. OO Besseler 6, no. 91; OO Planchart, 12/7. See also Fallows, The Songs, 254–56, for a fuller discussion of the conflicting attribution. Cf. Vaughan, Philip the Good, 144–45. 63 OO Besseler 6, no. 10; OO Planchart 1/21. FR 2794, fols. 34v–36r. OO Besseler 6:xxviii surveys the previous literature, assigning the performance to the Feast of the Pheasant and absurdly concludes that La Marche, who was a witness to the event, cites the wrong text. See Fallows, Dufay, 71, and n. 38; id., Catalogue, 303. An exception to this is Cumming, The Motet, 261. 67 Noted by Fallows, The Songs, 55. Cf. Runciman, The Fall, 179: “Only the papacy and a few scholars and romanticists scattered about the West were genuinely shocked at the thought of the great historic Christian city passing into the hands of the infidel.”

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or in Savoy, already reflected in the letter of Nicholas V mentioned earlier. A less immediately plausible reading of the entire letter, although not an impossible one, would be that Du Fay, sensing that Louis was essentially ineffectual in securing a southern benefice for him, was searching for other patrons whose ability to influence papal preferment or to dispense such benefices outright was greater than that of Louis, and of course the Medici could well be such potential patrons. The other document in Du Fay’s hand is a quittance dated Geneva, 8 November 1455, as a testamentary executor for the salary of August and September of André Picard, a singer of the court chapel who had died on 29 September. There the composer refers to himself as “magister capelle illustrissimi domini nostri sabaudie ducis,” which confirms the title given to him in the letter Louis had written to Philip the Good in 144169 and in the letter of Nicholas V to Du Fay. What is interesting is that beginning in 1449 the chapel of Savoy had its own accounts, kept separately from those of the tesoreria generale, so that it is possible to keep close track of the personnel of the chapel. The first of the surviving accounts, CAS, Inv. 24, SA 3604, covers the years 1449–54 in one section, and then in a separate section 1454–1455. It would appear that the first section of SA 3604 is a bringing together of the accounts from the previous five years, probably sometime in 1454–1455, when the decision was made to keep the accounts of the chapel separately and to follow the format found at the end of the register for 1454–1455. Thereafter the accounts of each year were entered in a separate booklet, beginning with CAS, Inv. 24, SA 3605. In a few of these accounts the actual quittances signed by the chaplains were kept together with the account, which is why we find Du Fay’s receipt for Picard’s salary for 1455.70 Table 5.1 gives the names of the singers at the court of Savoy during Du Fay’s second and third sojourns there, roughly 1450–1458. A number of important things need to be noted in the list presented in Table 5.1. The first is the sheer size of the chapel of Savoy in terms of its musical members.71 In 1452, when Du Fay arrived in Savoy for his longest stay at the court, the chapel consisted of thirteen singers, an organist, and a trumpet player, a number that remained relatively constant throughout the decade, although the trumpet player disappears from the lists after 1455.72 69 70 71 72

See p. 201. So in CAS, Inv 124, AS 3605 (which includes the quittance by Du Fay) and AS 3613. The chapel clerks and custodians, also mentioned in the accounts, are not included in Table 5.1. Ferrier’s name is not in the list for 1455–1456 (CAS, Inv. 16, SA 3605); it is possible that he had retired and was never replaced within the chapel. At this time he would have had at least thirty years of service as a trumpet player for the court.

Sojourn in Savoy, 1452–1458

243

Table 5.1 Singers and musicians of the chapel of Savoy (1450–1460) Name

Dates

Function

Renaud Joly Guillaume Poree Barthélemy Chouet Jacques Villette Jehan Villette André Picard Pierre Lynardiere Estienne Ferrier (Fourrier) Jehan Fontayne Jehan Girard Jehan Clisse Vincent du Bruequet (Vincenet) Antoine Bernard Clement de Viniac Jehan Legier (Ligier) Louis Patin (Patier) Jacques Amouret Jehan Fontry Pierre Langheric André Segard Remy du Bois Eloy d’Amerval Jehan du Fresne Jehan Lescart Jehan Ranguis Berthélemy le Turcq Robert Gadiffre Martin Douvrin? Alexandre de l’Orteil Antoine Guinat Louis Gautier (Chariere) Jehan Songines (Faulcon)

1440–1455 1444–1459 1444–1462 1444–1466 1449–1453 1449–1455 1449–1455 1449–1455a 1449–1457 1449–1461 1449–1463 1450–1464 1451–1461 1453–1466 1454–1455 1454–1455 1454–1457 1455–1456 1455–1456 1455–1465 1455–1466? 1455–1457 1456–1463 1457 1457–1500 1457–1462 1457–1465 1457–1466 1457–1469 1457–1470 1457–1470 1457–1487

Singer Singer, tenorist Singer Singer Singer Singer Singer Trumpet Singer Singer Singer Singer, organist Singer Singer Singer Singer Singer Singer Singer Singer Singer Singer Singer Singer Singer Singer Singer, tenorist Singer Singer Singer Singer, organist Singer

Sources: CAS, Inv. 24, SA 3604–3609 for the years 1449–1460; Bouquet, “La cappella,” 283–85 for dates before 1449 and after 1460; Bradley, “Musical Life,” 252–58, also for dates prior to 1449. Bouquet, “La cappella,” 241 and 283, mentions Iohannes Chinalleri as magister cappellae in 1457 based upon an entry in TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 100 bis, fol. 50r, but she has misread the entire entry; Chinalleri is not the magister cappellae of the duke but of another lord, most likely the podestà of Novara. The duke is paying his traveling expenses to Rome, but he is not taking a letter of the duke to Rome; rather the letter mentioned in the entry is a letter of the duke to the treasurer ordering the payment. a This represents years he appears in the chapel. He is first mentioned in court accounts on 24 May 1424 (TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 70, fol. 320r).

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But it is worth noting that Du Fay’s name never appears in the chapel accounts even though he calls himself the magister cappellae of the duke in the quittance of 1455 and is referred to as such in the letter of Pope Nicholas V in 1454. The actual day-to-day administrator of the chapel, who signed the total receipt of funds and is always the first name one encounters in the lists, was Barthélemy Chouet, singer, chaplain, and later counselor to the duke. A learned man of considerable administrative abilities, he was born ca. 1418, ordained in 1443, received a bachelor of law degree, served the duke from 1449 to 1462, and amassed a considerable number of benefices. From 1462 to his death in 1501 he was bishop of Nice and is buried the cathedral, in the chapel of St. Bartholomew founded by him.73 But if Chouet’s name is always the first in the accounts of the chapel itself, in the only list of payments for livery for the entire court that survives complete for the entire decade, dated 18 January 1455, where the chapel officers are listed roughly in order of importance, Du Fay’s name appears at the start, two places above Chouet’s name.74 This appears to confirm that Du Fay was indeed the head of the chapel but was not a singer in that institution. His position at the court was that of a courtier and a counselor, and in terms of music it would appear that his main task was to provide works for the chapel and the court. In a number of ways this is a parallel to Du Fay’s relationship with the court of Burgundy during his years at Cambrai. It is also possible that something like this was part of his relationship with the Malatesta court in Rimini, which appears to have resulted in a considerable number of works between his arrival in the summer of 1420 and his departure in 1424 or 1425. Thus his only major appointments where he was viewed primarily as a singer appear to have been those at the court of Louis Allemand and at the papal chapel, and in the case of his work in the papal chapel the large number of works he wrote between 1429 and 1436, including a number of important ceremonial motets, the entire hymn cycle, and most likely the cycle of chant paraphrase settings of the Kyrie and the Gloria,75 bespeak an effort to go beyond being considered just a singer. His precipitate appointment to the chapel of Savoy in 1434 by Duke Amadeus VIII has rightly been viewed as an attempt to give the Savoyard chapel some of the prestige that the Burgundian chapel had,76 and the reflection of the meetings of both chapels in Martin le Franc’s Le 73 74

75 76

Bouquet, “La cappella,” 244–45, and n. 39 with an extensive bibliography on Chouet. TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv 16, Reg. 104, fol. 281v. Du Fay’s name is followed by Jehan Faure, Chouet, and the almoner, Antoine Bolomier, and then the other singers. On this cycle, see Planchart, “Music for the Papal Chapel,” 109–14. Cf. Fallows, Dufay, 37.

Sojourn in Savoy, 1452–1458

Champion des dames makes it more obvious by citing the names of Du Fay and Binchois more than once within a single poetic line as “parallel lives.” Even taking into consideration all the caveats expressed by Margaret Bent about the performative aspect of the language of the musical stanzas in that poem,77 it is more than pure coincidence that the two men were Europe’s most prolific composers at the time. During Du Fay’s years at Savoy, Duke Louis’s chapel included two other composers, the organist Vincent du Bruequet, who served the chapel from 1450 to 1464 and was a member of the Aragonese chapel in Naples from 1469 to his death in 1479, and left a number of works ascribed in the manuscripts to “Vincenet,”78 and Éloy d’Amerval, from whom we have only a single work, the Mass Dixerunt discipuli in CS 14,79 and an extended poem published in 1508, Le livre de la deablerie,80 where he mentions Du Fay’s name as part of a list of composers that clearly consisted of men whom he had known personally.81 All the music we have from either composer postdates by many years their sojourn in Savoy, but a number of traits in their works, not the least the transparent sonority of much of du Bruequet’s counterpoint, points to Du Fay’s influence on them. Amerval’s interest in mensural games – his Mass is both a compendium of mensural notations for the tenor and a real tour de force – may owe something to Du Fay’s own interest in mensural transformations, evidenced in his motets of the 1440s.82 As noted earlier, no surviving work by either of them can be even remotely connected with their years in Savoy. Thus of the repertory of this chapel, apart from music of the 1440s that survives in manuscripts that show some connection with the Council of Basel and would, presumably be known to the singers of the Savoy chapel,83 the only music that we have that could have been composed expressly for the court of Savoy during 77 78

79 80 81 82

83

Bent, “The Musical Stanzas.” Cf. Atlas, “Vincenet.” The identification of Vincenet as Vincent du Bruequet was made by Pamela Starr, “Strange Obituaries,” 179 and n. 7. Further confirmation comes from the Savoy archives, where Du Bruequet is referred a number of times as “Vincenet,” e.g., TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 103, fol. 243r; Reg. 104, fol. 281v; Reg. 105 (rotulus, unnumbered); Reg. 106, fol. 231r (these are all payments for livery for 1454, 1455, 1456, and 1458). Modern edition in Éloy d’Amerval, Missa Dixerunt discipuli, ed. Magro and Vendrix. Paris: Michel le Noir 1508; modern edition by Deschauz and Charrier. Cf. Higgins and Dean, “Eloy d’Amerval.” Du Fay’s mensural use is relatively tame compared with that of Amerval, but still, in the Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece, the Ordinary for St. Anthony of Padua and St. Francis of Assisi and his Mass on L’homme armé contain a number of unusual mensural usages, and possibly many similar passages occurred in the now lost propers for the entire year written for Cambrai. Primarily this means Tr 87 and Tr 92, except for the Battre fascicles of Tr 87, and perhaps some of the repertory of MuEm.

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these years are those works of Du Fay that can be dated, securely or tentatively, to the 1450s. These will be discussed briefly later. Unlike the years at Cambrai or even the period when Du Fay was first in Savoy, our knowledge of the musical and cultural life of the court of Savoy during the years Du Fay was there is very limited. Historians have concentrated rather on the political conflict with France and on the internal tensions within the court caused by Duchess Anne of Lusignan’s tendency to impose a series of Cypriot favorites who were neither competent nor scrupulous upon a court that clearly detested them.84 From Du Fay’s letter to the Medici and the songs identified by Fallows as those that were surely written “at the request of the gentlemen of the royal court,” we can posit that the meetings between the two courts at St-Pourçain and certainly at Cleppé, were productive for Du Fay. The Savoy court led a relatively peripatetic existence in the 1450s, but both Du Fay’s letter to the Medici and the quittance for the salary of André Picard were dated in Geneva, and probably it is there, in addition to Chambéry and possibly Turin, that Du Fay spent a good deal of the time during those years. Significantly, however, he does not seem to have made any effort to obtain a canonicate in Geneva or in Lausanne. In the case of Geneva it may well be that from his previous experience with the chapter he had no desire to expose himself to their hostility, even though now he could indeed claim to have a university degree, but in the case of Lausanne, where he had once been a canon and where there was probably some regard for him, it may be that the ability of Duke Louis to influence the chapter was considerably less than that of his father; indeed, it is interesting to note that the one benefice that Nicholas V allows the duke to confer upon Du Fay would have been something considerably less lucrative than what the composer had in the north or what he had in Lausanne before the schism.85

The Missa se la face ay pale and Other Sacred Music Written in Savoy One important religious event that, as Anne Walters Robertson has recently shown, is reflected in Du Fay’s music for Savoy was the acquisition in 1453 of the relic known today as the Holy Shroud (or the Shroud of 84 85

Thus Maria José, Amedée VIII, 2, passim (through most of the volume). It is important to note that the letter of Nicholas does not confer a benefice on Du Fay, but allows him to hold it, provided he manages to obtain it.

The Missa se la face ay pale and Other Sacred Music Written in Savoy

Turin, based on its present location) by Duke Louis in 1453.86 The Shroud was then an object of profound veneration, and the acquisition of such an important relic was clearly a major event both in terms of religious and political significance. Because of the way the Shroud was normally kept, folded and placed in a reliquary that showed only the face, it has also acquired a connection with one of the most popular and endlessly reproduced relics from the Passion, Veronica’s veil, which according to tradition had the face of Christ imprinted upon it after the woman used her veil to dry the sweat and blood on Jesus’ face while on his way to Calvary.87 The events connected with the acquisition of the Shroud, as Robertson shows, were probably the most likely cause for the composition of Du Fay’s Missa Se la face ay pale, since the paleness of Christ’s face was a major exegetical topos for writers on the Passion.88 This fits much better with the purpose of the work than either of the two dynastic weddings that happened in Savoy in 1450, that of Louis the Dauphin to Charlotte of Savoy on 14 February, or the consummation of the marriage of Yolanda of Valois, daughter of King Charles VII, and Duke Louis’s son Amadeus.89 The first of these events was hastily arranged and there would have been no time to write a Mass. The second event would have been a curious moment, even though it was the major dynastic wedding, tying the heir of Duke Louis to a French princess, because the children had been married by procuration on 16 August 1436, when Amadeus was one year old and Yolanda two, and the girl was sent to live in the court of Savoy.90 Their marriage was consummated in Feurs en Forez, after the meeting at nearby Cleppé in 1452, when the courts of France and Savoy met to defuse the antagonisms created by the hasty marriage of the Dauphin to Charlotte of Savoy, and in October of that year Louis granted by letters patent 10,000 écus of her dowry to his daughter-in-law.91 This, apart from the evidence that Robertson presents concerning how unusual a polyphonic nuptial Mass was,92 is not a promising set of circumstances for the composition of an elaborate ceremonial work, far grander than any of his previous ceremonial works are. But the reception of a major relic intimately associated with the major event in the narrative of Christian salvation could easily bring such an effort from the 86

87 89

90

91

Robertson, “The Man with the Pale Face,” 419; also Perret, “Essai sur l’histoire du Saint Suaire,” 82–87; Eschbach, Le Saint Suaire, 40. On the connection, see Robertson, “The Man with the Pale Face,” 413–15. 88 Ibid., 402–5. Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1976), 37–38, proposing the first wedding, later withdrawn in favor of the second, which was supported by Fallows, Dufay, 58 and 70. Guichenon, Histoire, 1:547; the marriage contract is dated 1 Aug. 1436, and see Histoire, 3:416– 20. Guichenon, Histoire, 1:557. 92 Robertson, “The Man with the Pale Face,” 380–88.

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composer. The Mass, then, was probably composed sometime between 1453 and 1455. The Shroud was received by Louis in Geneva in 1453 and apparently not brought to Chambéry until 1455,93 but the court resided much of the time during these years in Geneva, and surely the first major ceremonies concerning the reception of the Shroud took place in that city. One small caveat that should perhaps be added here is that we have no firm documentary evidence for the origins of the Mass. Robertson’s hypothesis is predicated upon a reading of the allegory of the Mass based on its cantus firmus, and an extensive reading of liturgical and devotional writings, which she marshals with considerable finesse. Of all of the hypotheses that have been advanced concerning the origins and purpose of this Mass hers is the one that best fits the scant factual evidence (i.e. the entirely southern transmission) and the stylistic evidence of the music itself. There is also a small archival entry that points in that direction; it came to Walters’s attention after the publication of her work, and she has kindly pointed it out to me. During the months of April and May 1453, when the shroud came into the possession of the duke of Savoy, the duke and his family were staying at the Franciscan convent in Rive, which had an enormous church and two cloisters,94 and at the convent there were numerous celebrations of the Mass, which the Savoy notaries describe as “missae novae.”95 This locution, as the records of Cambrai cathedral show, invariably meant new polyphonic music for the Mass,96 and at that time the only people capable of producing such works in the Savoy chapel were the chapel’s organist, Vincent du Bruequet, from whom no music survives until long after he left Savoy, and Du Fay, who was the head of the Savoyard musical establishment, so it surely fell to him to compose new music for these ceremonies. Late in Du Fay’s sojourn in Savoy his fellow canon at Cambrai, Michiel van Beringhen, died on 12 August 1457. During his life he had created an endowment raising the newest Marian feast, the Visitation, celebrated on 2 July, to the rank of a double,97 but in his will he made an endowment to create an entirely new feast in honor of the Virgin, the Recollectio omnium festorum Beatae Mariae Virginis, where all the feasts that commemorated 93 95

96 97

See p. 44, n. 149. 94 Deonna, “Les Arts a Genève,” 146–48. TAS, Inv. 16, Reg. 102, fols. 351v–325r and 483v–484r. See also Pibiri, “L’Acquisition du Saint Suaire,” 161. See p. 200. In late 14th- and early 15th-century documents it is sometimes called the “new feast” of the Virgin, e.g., Lille 599 (Cantatorium of St-Pierre), fol. 56v: “De nova sollemnitate Beatae Mariae Virginis ad missam.” Beringhen’s foundation is detailed in several of the obituaries of the cathedral, LAN, 4G 2009, fol. 60v (52v), CBM 39, fol. 54r.

The Missa se la face ay pale and Other Sacred Music Written in Savoy

the life of the Virgin, that is, the Conception, Nativity, Annunciation, Purification, Visitation, and Assumption, were to be recollected and celebrated.98 The will itself does not go beyond the establishment of the feast, which Beringhen wished to have assigned to a specific calendar date, 26 August, but which eventually came to be celebrated on the fourth Sunday in August.99 The accounts of the executors and other documents, however, reveal that, perhaps on instructions from Beringhen before his death, the dean, Gilles Carlier, who was one of the executors, was given the task of writing the texts for the Mass and Office of the new feast, and Du Fay was asked to provide the plainsong settings.100 Carlier used some of the well-known Marian texts for some of the pieces, for example the introit Gaudeamus omnes for the Mass, and the responsories Ad nutum domini and Senex puerum portabat for Matins, and for others he wrote, as was commonly done, a contrafact that could be used with a well-known chant, as is the case with the prose Mittit ad sterilem, based upon the immensely popular Mittit ad virginem. It is also possible that he wrote the readings for the Office and the collects for the Mass, but the transmission of the Recollectio liturgy in terms of the spoken texts is both fragile and ambiguous.101 Some time after Beringhen’s death and probably shortly after Carlier finished the texts, the chapter sent their main courier at the time, Guillaume Panet, to Savoy to carry the texts for Du Fay to set to music. For once we know approximately how long it took Du Fay to complete the task, amid whatever else he was doing for the court in Savoy, because Guillaume stayed in Savoy waiting for Du Fay to finish writing the music, and the accounts indicate that the entire journey took fifty days, and he was paid £20 16s 8d because “the expenses there were much higher.”102 Now, probably it took a man on a horse about fourteen days to go from Cambrai to Geneva (ca. 700 km) or Chambéry (ca. 750 km), so Du Fay probably wrote the plainsongs in about twenty days or so. Faced with four texts already connected with traditional melodies, he left the introit Gaudeamus omnes, and the immensely popular responsory 98 99

100

101 102

LAN, 4G 1203, fol. 33v. Cf. ibid.: “quod festo commemorationis celebrabitur die vicesima sexta Augusti,” and LAN, 4G 2009, fol. 60v (52v): “Duplum sollemnitatis festorum gloriosissime virginis Marie quod celebratur semper dominica quarta augusti.” LAN, 4G 1203, fols. 13v–15r, with various payments for the copying of the new feast in the cathedral’s chant books and missals, and for a messenger who was sent to Savoy with the text for Du Fay and came back with the settings. It should be noted, however, that the accounts of the executors do not identify Carlier as the author of the texts. Haggh, “The Aostan Sources,” 366–68. LAN, 4G 1203, fol. 15r: “a celux que les vinres (?) estoient moult chers par dela.”

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Ad nutum domini by Fulbert of Chartres, which was probably an important piece in the tradition of the cathedral,103 and the prose with their traditional melodies,104 but wrote a new melody for Senex puerum. Not surprisingly, the entire office is largely modally ordered, the exceptions being the hymns and the invitatory, as well as Ad nutum domini, which is in mode 5, but falls where a modally ordered office calls for mode 2. According to an entry in the execution of Beringhen’s will, the recollectio was celebrated for the first time at Cambrai in August 1458.105 The new feast soon spread relatively quickly to other churches in northern France and Flanders, and not surprisingly to churches in Savoy. By the early sixteenth century a number of its unique chants had been replaced in Cambrai and elsewhere by chants common to other Marian feasts, but the Recollectio gained widespread support and continued to be celebrated in Europe as well as in the Americas until the early twentieth century. In northern France and Flanders its origins were apparently known outside Cambrai itself, and it is from a charter of a convent in Scheut, near Brussels, dated 1492 and cited in 1960 by Placide Lefèvre, that modern scholars first realized that the texts were written by Carlier and the music by Du Fay, since no one had thought of looking into Beringhen’s will among the thousands of fifteenth-century wills in the Archives du Nord.106 Lefèvre clearly was not aware of the importance of what he had found. It was Barbara Haggh-Huglo who realized its significance and made a detailed study of Beringhen’s will and of the chant books from Cambrai, Aosta, and elsewhere in Europe, which allowed her to establish which of these chants were composed by Du Fay and how long they remained in the repertory at Cambrai and elsewhere.107 By the time he was writing the music for the Recollectio, however, it must have become clear to Du Fay that Duke Louis apparently had neither the ability nor the diplomatic and administrative skills to provide him with a 103

104

105 106 107

This is clearly the impression one derives from the spectacular six-voice setting by Jehan Leleu published posthumously in 1547 (see Johannes Lupi, Opera omnia, ed. Blackburn, 1, no. 2), where Lupi goes out of his way to create an impressive polyphonic tapestry that at several points appears to echo the pealing of the cathedral’s famous bells. The prose text, Mittit ad sterilem, is modeled on Mittit ad virginem and could be sung to the same melody. LAN, 4G 1203, fol. 12v; the expense, including the salary paid to the small vicars, was £36 10s. See Lefèvre, ed., Les Ordinaires, xv–xvi, and n. 1 on p. xvi. The basic work on the recollectio appears in Haggh, “The Celebration”; id., “De viering”; id., “The Aostan Sources”; id., “The Medium.” A promised edition of the chants has not yet appeared. An earlier work on the Aostan sources is Frutaz, “La Recollectio festorum”; a summary of the chants used in the late 15th century at Louvain is in Lefévre, ed., Les Ordinaires, 279–85.

The Final Return to Cambrai

substantial benefice in his own lands, and if he had any hopes that the Medici would become his patrons, this also showed little promise. In Ferrara the court chapel had been disbanded by Borso d’Este after the death of Leonello, who had obviously admired Du Fay’s music and to whom the composer could have looked for support and patronage.108 The composer was approaching his sixty-first year, a very advanced age for a man in the fifteenth century, and he probably decided that a safer and more stable old age awaited him in Cambrai and the cathedral milieu. By September Du Fay had left Savoy for the last time.

The Final Return to Cambrai On his way north Du Fay stopped in Besançon, where one of his colleagues from the papal chapel, Pierre Grosseteste, had become a canon in the cathedral of St-Étienne in 1440 despite some opposition from the canons on account of his bastardy.109 Pierre and Du Fay were both northerners, since Pierre came from Tournai and his father, Jehan Grosseteste, was a canon of Tournai and had contacts with some of Du Fay’s early patrons at Cambrai, notably Ailly’s nephew Raoul le Prestre,110 but from his childhood Pierre had been in the chapel of Thibaut de Rougemont,111 bishop of Besançon, and he followed the bishop there when he retired from the papal chapel in February 1450.112 It is likely that even though Pierre came into the papal chapel near the end of Du Fay’s tenure, in June 1436,113 the two men had developed a friendship. The one document we have showing that Du Fay was at Besançon is dated 14 September 1458. It is an entry in a martyrology of the cathedral, and describes an episode that took place that day in the choir: Anno domini millesimo ccccmo Lmo octavo, die iovis xiiiia Septembris, que die iovis fuit festum exaltatione sancte crucis, post offertorium maioris misse in choro ecclesia Bisuntium Sancti Stephani tunc decantatum, fuit per venerabilem virum magistrum Guillermum Du Fay, in arte musica peritum et scientificum factorem, declaratum

108 109

110 112 113

See Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 95–96. The pope granted the canonicate to Pierre in Oct. 1438 (ASV, RS 346, fols. 72v–73r; RS 362, fols. 115v–117r), but lawsuits by other claimants (ASV, RS 346, fol. 156v) and opposition by the chapter delayed the collation until 22 Aug. 1440 (Hours, Diocèse de Besançon, 200; Starr, “Music,” 182, n. 253. ASV, RS 226, fols. 108r–109r; RS 269, fol. 144r–v. 111 ASV, RS 333, fol. 31r–v. Starr, “Music,” 182; also RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 831, fol. 136v, last payment to him, Feb. 1450. RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 828, fol. 92v.

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antiphonam que incipit O quanta est exultatio angelicis turmis et etc. adesse de secundo tono et non de quarto tono prout nonnulli sustinere nitebantur, quodque si de huiusmodi quarto tono saeculorum aut finis in nota ipsius antiphona alicubi reperitur hoc procede ex vitio scriptoris et aliis rationibus per eundem magistrum declaratis et expressis. Tunc presentibus in huiusmodi declarationis hic venerabilibus et discretis viris dominis Petrus Grossicapitis, canonico, Iohanne Beloni, succentore et canonico.114

This is, in a number of ways, a curious document. Why would the canons, or more likely the singers, ask Du Fay about the mode of the antiphon in the middle of the service? In fact immediately after the offertory, when the Mass of the day is progressing toward its most important liturgical point, the preface and the canon? One does get from it the impression that the singers used the spoken parts of the Mass, in this case the secret and relatively long series of prayers that intervene between the offertory and the preface, to indulge in some form of chit chat, in this case a question to their distinguished visitor, who obviously was seated with the canons in choro. The antiphon probably was fresh in the minds of the singers because in Besançon it was used as the third antiphon for Vespers on the feast of the Finding of St. Stephen (2 September), who was the patron saint of the cathedral.115 The antiphon is a relatively modern chant with a small concordance. A version of the text was published in Analecta hymnica as the magnificat antiphon for the feast of SS. Victor and Ursus.116 But its more frequent use was for the feasts of St. Stephen; as such it appears in French and Italian sources.117 The music is given in Example 5.1 from the notated breviary from Châlons-sur-Marne. Du Fay’s answer is particularly interesting in that it is both “critical” and “historical,” that is, the answer of a true musicus. Of all the reasons he gave, 114

115

116 117

Besançon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 712, fol. 226r. Martyrologium of the cathedral of StÉtienne de Besançon. The entry concerning Du Fay’s visit is part of the continuation of an extraordinary series of annals added to the manuscript as marginalia on fol. 76r and then as main text on fols. 76v–89v. “The year of the Lord 1458, on Thursday the 14th of September, which Thursday is the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, after the singing of the offertory, it was postulated by the venerable master Guillaume Du Fay, expert in the art of music and learned composer, that the antiphon that begins O quanta est exultatio angelicis turmis etc., was of the second mode and not of the fourth as some assumed, he added that if in the notation of the antiphon the saeculorum or the final were of the fourth tone that was because of a scribal error and from other causes that were explained by the said master. Present at these declarations were the venerable and prudent men Pierre Grosseteste and Jehan Belon, succentor and canon.” Besançon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 64 (Breviary of Besançon), fol. 224r. None of the surviving office manuscripts from the cathedral has the music. AH 5, 243, from Paris, BnF, lat. 1318, fol. 15r without music. E.g., the Besançon breviary mentioned in n. 85; Paris, BnF, lat. 811, Breviary of Châlons sur Marne, fol. 13r (St. Stephen); Florence, Biblioteca del Arcivescovado, s. c., fol. 159r (Finding of St. Stephen), in both of these cases as antiphon to the magnificat.

Example 5.1 Antiphon O quanta est exsultatio (Paris, BnF lat. 811, fol. 13r)

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according to the report, the only one recorded is that the final of the antiphon (and consequently the differentia of the psalm, which is a G a c–a G–F E E in the Châlons breviary) was the product of a scribal error. One would assume that he noticed the large number of cadential patterns within the antiphon where the motion is E–F–E D or a variant thereof, and concluded that the last five notes of the antiphon were copied a step too high. The few surviving sources that transmit the antiphon with music indicate that he was in fact wrong: the ending of the piece is the same everywhere, but the piece does belong to a type of plagal tritus chants that behave through most of their length as plagal deuterus melodies. The best-known example of this is the Easter introit Resurrexi.118 Whoever composed the antiphon made a bit more of an effort to use G as a reciting tone, as we find in Resurrexi, but the opening phrase reads entirely like a classical plagal deuterus. By early October 1458 Du Fay was back at Cambrai; on 12 October Henri Beye, canon of the cathedral and nephew of Paul Beye (d. 13 February 1445), who had been one of the most influential men in the chapter early in the century, died, and Du Fay sang at his exequies.119 For the last sixteen years of his life Du Fay was to live in Cambrai, perhaps leaving the city only for short trips to Mons or to wherever the court of Burgundy was, although in fact no record of a single such journey survives in the cathedral accounts, but these only record official journeys; thus any journey the composer would have made to Mons simply to attend a chapter meeting at Ste-Waudru would not have been recorded. We should note however, that by 1459 Du Fay was sixty-two years old, and traveling was probably immeasurably more difficult for him than in the past.

Music from the Savoy Years There are a number of works that can be dated with certainty to the years that Du Fay was in Savoy. To begin with, we have the four lamentations for the fall of Constantinople mentioned in the letter to the Medici, of which only one has survived, but the surviving one represents in many ways a development in Du Fay’s compositional procedure that builds upon the four-part writing that he had developed in the motets composed in Cambrai in the 1440s. It probably reflects as well his knowledge of 118 119

Cf. Planchart, “The Opening Chant,” 80–87. LAN, 4G 1212 (will of Henri Beye), fol. 4r. Du Fay was paid 10s, which indicates that in this case he would have been responsible for a number of the intonations during the liturgy.

Music from the Savoy Years

English music of the mid-century not only in terms of the contrapuntal structure, a four-part texture where the two lower parts work in tandem to support the upper voices, but also in terms of the formal and mensural shape of the work, with a section in perfect time and a section in imperfect time where the basic contrapuntal motion shifts from semibreves and minims in perfect time to breves and semibreves in imperfect time. This structure is the most frequent large-scale structure of much of the English music of the mid-century, including the Caput Mass, but it was, by and large, absent from Du Fay’s music before 1450.120 Then we have those songs that, by his own report to the Medici, were composed most likely at St-Pourçain at the request of the French lords, some of which have been identified by Fallows because their texts are by members of the circle of Charles d’Orléans. Among these are Les douleurs dont me sont tel somme, Malheureux cuer, and possibly Mon bien m’amour,121 and a curious rondeau with an Italian text, Dona gentile.122 Fallows had noted that rondeaux with Italian texts are entirely absent from fifteenth-century textual sources, but a few of them appear in musical manuscripts early in the century, though none as late as Dona gentile.123 The Italian text is garbled in all the sources, which were copied by French scribes, and the odd rhymes have prompted critics to assume that the original used dialectal forms.124 By far the most convincing explanation, however, is Fallows’s hypothesis that the original text was a ballata that Du Fay refashioned as a rondeau text by suppressing two lines from the volta, since he appears to have subjected other Italian texts he set to similar editings.125 The most likely time when Du Fay would have had occasion to set an Italian text after his return to the north in 1439 (and both the transmission and the style of Dona gentile mark it as a later work) would have been during his years in Savoy, a partially bilingual court, in the 1450s. It might also not be overly fanciful to hear in Les douleurs dont me sont tel somme Du Fay’s reaction to

120

121

122 124

125

In both sources for the lamentation the mensuration signs are for perfect time and for imperfect time. Neither source is particularly close to the composer, who appears to have used instead with breve–semibreve movement (an English approach to the use of mensuration signs) for most of his late works. OO Besseler 6, nos. 24, 71, 84; OO Planchart 10/3/3 and 10/5/38, 43. See the discussion of these pieces in Fallows, The Songs, nos. 24, 71, and 84. OO Besseler 6, no. 6; OO Planchart 10/1/7. 123 Fallows, The Songs, 47. Cf. Pirrotta, “On Text Forms,” 678, and Perkins and Garey, eds., The Mellon Chansonnier, 1:326–30. Fallows, The Songs, 48. Fallows’s proposal also has the considerable advantage that it explains and allows us to retain some of the spellings as they appear in the sources.

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Ockeghem’s singing voice, which was celebrated for its low range.126 In all his other music Du Fay seldom goes below gamma ut,127 but in Les douleurs, within thirty-six perfections we encounter thirty-four notes sounding below gamma ut, including six times the low C below the bass clef, which is the lowest pitch found in Ockeghem’s music; moreover, the entire piece is a mensuration canon. The most important work of Du Fay that we can place with some certainty during his years at the court of Savoy, however, is the Mass on Se la face ay pale. The piece marks an important milestone in Du Fay’s production and indeed in Continental music of the fifteenth century. Even though Continental musicians had eagerly copied and presumably sung English cantus-firmus Masses of the first half of the fifteenth century, that approach to the writing of a Mass had not been taken up by composers south of the Channel. It is true that we have virtually no sources of liturgical polyphony north of the Alps for most of the fifteenth century, but it is still telling that the extensive anthologies copied in the 1440s and the first half of the 1450s, including not only Ao 15, but Tr 87, Tr 92, and MuEm, which transmit some of the early English cantus-firmus Masses, transmit no such work from a Continental composer. Even the enormous Mass collection in Tr 93 and the expansion of it in Tr 90, which begins three of its main divisions, those devoted to Glorias, Credos, and Sanctus, with a group of English cantus-firmus Masses, headed always by the clearly influential Caput Mass, contain no Continental counterparts. In our present state of knowledge the earliest repertory of Continental cantus-firmus Masses falls into two repertories, each with two subgroups. The first division is between Masses for three voices, which follow the older contrapuntal texture, with the tenor as the bottom voice, and Masses for four voices, where the use of a low contratenor, often treated as and called tenor secundus, creates a new texture. This texture is one of the new traits of the Caput Mass (as well as of a few English contemporary Masses). It was prefigured in some of the motets by Du Fay from the 1430s, such as Nuper rosarum flores and Salve flos Tuscae gentis, and imitated more closely in Du Fay’s motets of the 1440s, Moribus et genere and Fulgens iubar ecclesiae, which were surely composed after he had come across the Caput Mass, probably in the mid-1440s. This texture can also be called “four voices but three ranges,”128 because the high contratenor and the tenor usually share 126 127

128

Weinman, Johannes Tinctoris, 33. Some of the proper cycles written in Cambrai in the 1440s occasionally descend to E below gamma ut, e.g., Alleluia V. O patriarcha pauperum (OO Planchart 3/3, m. 185). I am indebted to conversations with Sean Gallagher for this formulation.

Music from the Savoy Years

the same range. The subdivision within each of these two groups consists of Masses with a strict cantus-firmus treatment, which are closest to the tradition of the tenor motet,129 and Masses with a free cantus firmus, where the rhythmic shape of the cantus firmus varies from movement to movement, and the cantus firmus is sometimes subjected to melodic paraphrase or ornamentation that also varies from movement to movement. The three-voice repertory has an earlier origin than the four-voice one, and the earliest examples of strict cantus firmus appear to predate those with free cantus firmus both in England and on the Continent. The chronology of the repertory is particularly difficult to establish because the earliest sources that survive for the Continental Masses are no earlier than the mid- to late 1450s. The earliest manuscripts that transmit Continental cantus-firmus Masses are Tr 88, copied between 1456 and 1460,130 and Lu 238, copied between 1461 and 1463,131 and from the structure of Tr 88 it is clear that except for Du Fay’s Mass on Se la face ay pale, none of the other early Continental cantus-firmus Masses in four voices reached Trent much before 1460.132 The Continental repertory of early four-voice cantus-firmus Masses is bewilderingly varied (see Table 5.2). To begin with, there are questions about the English or Continental provenance of three of them, Meditatio cordis, Se tu t’en marias, and O admirabile beati.133 All three consist of four movements and are lacking the Kyrie. Of the two anonymous Masses Meditatio cordis is part of a Mass–motet cycle found in Str 47,134 and almost certainly represents a decapitated English Mass, whose long prosula Kyrie was reworked as a motet.135 The second is an unicum in Tr 88, and the cantus firmus is a chanson rustique that appears as the tenor of Binchois’s Filles a marier, in a combinative chanson, Robinet se veult marier – Se tu te marie – Helas pour quoy se marie on, and in a slightly different form in a quodlibet, Or sus or sus par dessus.136 In the case of the 129 130 131

132 133

134

135 136

This would include, of course, mensural or canonic transformations of the tenor. Saunders, The Dating of the Trent Codices, 87–91. Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, 123, originally dated the main corpus 1467–1472, but in The Lucca Choirbook, 32–34, with new biographical information about the scribe, he has revised the dating of the main corpus to 1461–1463; see also id., Fifteenth-Century Liturgical Music: VI: Mass Settings, x. Saunders, The Dating, 87–91, with further refinements in Gerber, ed., Sacred Music, 3. The first one is not yet available in a modern edition; the last two appear in Gerber, ed., Sacred Music, nos. 25 and 101. Str 47, fols. 85v–92r; motet also in Tr 88, fols. 284v–286r, this last edited in Gerber, Sacred Music, no. 97, with an implausible attribution to Joan Ximeno de Cornago; see ibid., 18. Cf. Snow, “Mass-Motet Cycle,” and Strohm, The Rise, 428–9. Cf. Fallows, Catalogue, 162, 302, and 351, with references to further literature.

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Table 5.2 Continental or possibly Continental four-voice cantus-firmus Masses from before 1460 Composer

Title

Cantus firmus

Anonymous Anonymous Anonymous Anonymousb Guillaume Du Fay Jehan de Ockeghem Petrus de Domarto

Meditatio cordis Puisque m’amour Se tu t’en marias Rozel im gortenc Se la face ay pale Caput Quinti toni

Type Strict Free Strict Free Strict Strict Free

Location GCSAa GCSA GCSA GCSA All All All

Petrus de Domarto

Spiritus almus

Strict

All

Symon de Insula

O admirabile beati Le serviteure

Free Free

Vincent Fauguesd a b

c d

e

Origin

Earliest source Tr 88 (ca. 1460) Tr 88 (ca. 1460) Tr 88 (ca. 1460) Tr 88 (ca. 1460) Tr 88 (ca. 1460) Tr 88 (ca. 1460) SP B80 1474

GCSA

Perhaps English? Perhaps English? North French? Austria? Savoy ca. 1453 France 1450–55 Netherlands ca. 1458? Netherlands 1450–55? Lille?

Lu 238 (ca. 1463) Tr 88 (ca. 1460)

All

Bourges?

Tr 88 (ca. 1460)

With an associated motet that might have been a Kyrie with Latin verses. Attributed in Str 47: Adersch Franzosel, indicating that the scribe thought the composer was French. The attribution has been variously interpreted as referring to Jehan Touront [now Tourout] (Gülke, “Johannes Touront”; Strohm, Meßzyklen, 82–84), but denied by Kirnbauer, “Johannes Touront,” and apparently tacitly rescinded in Strohm, The Rise, 429, n. 166. The Mass is treated as anonymous in Gerber, ed., Sacred Music, 102; Planchart, “Johannes Touront.” Strohm, The Rise, 530, n. 474, suggests that the title might be a translation of O florens rosa. The MS ascribes it to Jehan de Ockeghem, but Tinctoris in his Liber de arte contrapuncti, in Opera theoretica, 2:143, credits it, surely correctly, to Vincent Faugues. Perhaps the Missa Le serviteur copied by Mellet at Cambrai in 1462–1463, LAN, 4G 4670, fol. 27v; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 247; Houdoy, Histoire, 194.

third, our knowledge of who Symon de Insula was remains quite uncertain. Attempts to make “de insula” mean “from the island” (i.e., England), fly in the face of the far more common late medieval usage where Insula was the common designation for Lille. The chant used as the source of the cantus firmus had a very small concordance; it is found in England and in northern France, particularly in sources from the vicinity of Lille, but apparently not in Lille itself.137 Reinhard Strohm has offered an identification of 137

The Cantus database gives only three sources: Worcester F 160 (Paléographie Musicale 12), fol. 211v; Rouen, BM, 248, fol. 12v, and Valenciennes, BM, 114, fol. 125r. The office cantatorium of St-Pierre, Lille, BM, 599, fol. 49r, assigns to Gregory the common of confessors without any specifically proper pieces.

Music from the Savoy Years

Symon as Symon de Vromont, magister puerorum at St-Pierre de Lille,138 while Rebecca Gerber suggests that he was an Englishman and that he might be the “Britoni” who was a member of St. Peter’s choir in Rome in 1452–1456.139 Strohm’s identification, which is connected with his proposal of a circle of what can be called English emulators in Lille, is far more plausible, although the absence of the antiphon from Lille 599 weakens the case slightly. In any event, while Symon’s Mass and Domarto’s Quinti toni are in four voices, their cantus-firmus treatment goes back to a tradition represented by the Dunstable or Power Mass on Rex saeculorum, while the other Masses clearly belong to a tradition of cantus-firmus treatment represented by the Caput Mass. Rob Wegman rightly points out the many similarities between Domarto’s Spiritus almus and Ockeghem’s Caput, both of which are clearly indebted to the English Caput for a number of features that go beyond the nature of their four-voice texture.140 Both composers sang in the choir at Our Lady in Antwerp, but the known dates of their membership are widely separated. It is possible that both got to know the English Caput Mass during their time in Antwerp, although if the work made its way to Cambrai by the middle of the 1440s, as the response to the Caput texture in Du Fay’s Fulgens iubar ecclesiae suggests, it was likely to be available in Tournai in 1451 when Domarto was there.141 If the Masses of Du Fay, Ockeghem, and Domarto represent a reaction to the Caput Mass, they are individual reactions by each composer. In the case of Du Fay he had left Cambrai most likely by the summer of 1452, and at that time I doubt that he knew either Domarto’s or Ockeghem’s Masses, and it may be that only Ockeghem’s Caput had been written by that time. He might well have come to know Ockeghem’s Mass when the two composers met at Cleppé (1452) or more likely St-Pourçain (1455), but Ockeghem’s Mass is so drastically different from anything that Du Fay was composing at the time that it is impossible to trace any influence it might have had on the

138

139

140 141

Documented in 1450–1451 and 1460–1461. See Strohm, “Insular Music”; Wegman, “Petrus de Domarto,” 301–2. Gerber, ed., Sacred Music, 21, citing Reynolds, Papal Patronage, Table 10 (n.p.): this is an implausible identification; the usual designation for English singers or composers was “Anglicus,” and Britoni, if it is a toponymic, points to Brittany in France. Wegman, “Petrus de Domarto,” 286–96. Cf. CBM 1059, fol. 2r, 21 Oct. 1451, sending Guillaume Turpin to Tournai to seek either Paul le Josne or Petrus de Domarto for the post of magister puerorum at the cathedral.

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Missa Se la face ay pale.142 What Du Fay has taken from the English Caput is the contrapuntal construction on a framework using a strict cantus firmus and a second tenor that lies most of the time below it. But this second tenor, unlike those of his motets of the 1430s, is rhythmically free. The cantus firmus of the Mass is treated as an isorhythmic tenor in the Gloria and the Credo, where it is also subjected to two levels of augmentation. The tenor in the other movements, treated always in double augmentation, is not really isorhythmic, since it presents a single color and the introductory rests (when they are present) and the rests between sections are not replicated from one movement to the other. The other aspect of the Caput Mass present in some of Du Fay’s motets and carried into the Mass to considerable lengths is the treatment of isomelic passages, particularly in the high contratenor, as formal markers.143 Charles Hamm, at a time when Caput was thought to be by Du Fay, referred to it as a notational twin of Se la face ay pale.144 Wegman has contested this idea, pointing out that Se la face ay pale is organized throughout in a perfect modus,145 which is unusual in Du Fay’s canon.146 Indeed, Caput does not seem to have a clear organization at the modus level for the sections in , and it is organized in a strict imperfect modus in the sections in , which do not even have the rare instances of the extra breve that one finds in Du Fay’s music in this mensuration. Still, Hamm had an intuitive point in that the rhythmic surfaces in Caput and Se la face ay pale are very similar not only in the sections in triple meter but also in those in duple meter. Nevertheless, there is a basic difference between them in the treatment of the music in ; in Caput the music in duple meter moves faster in the ratio of 4:3 at the semibreve level in comparison to the music in . In Se la face ay pale there is minim and semibreve equivalence between both mensurations throughout the Mass, so that the sections in give the

142

143

144 146

On the influence of Ockeghem’s Caput on Du Fay’s Missa L’homme armé, see Planchart, “The Origins,” 328–29. In Caput the corresponding passages, not entirely isomelic but quite distinctive, are Kyrie, mm. 204–12, and Credo, mm. 197–214. In Fulgens iubar the isomelic sections are small cadential formulas which call attention to themselves because of the absence of the triplum: mm. 35–37, corresponding with mm. 131–33 and 227–29, as well as mm. 83–85, corresponding with mm. 179–81 and 275–77. In Se la face ay pale the most notable instances are Gloria, mm. 71–82, and Credo, mm. 71–82 as well; allusions to these passages are present in the Sanctus, mm. 135–47 (all measure numbers from the editions in OO Planchart). Hamm, Chronology, 129. 145 Wegman, “Petrus de Domarto,” 285, n. 94. Du Fay’s other works organized in perfect modus are, for the most part, early works: Vasilissa, ergo gaude, O sancte Sebastiane, Balsamus et munda, and from the 1440s, Moribus et genere.

Music from the Savoy Years

impression of a slightly more relaxed tempo.147 In this respect the mensural use of Se la face ay pale, despite Du Fay’s adoption of the Caput texture, is old-fashioned and represents the last instance in his surviving works of the use of with minim and breve equivalence in relation to . This is one of the aspects that make the Mass a Janus-faced work; others are the motetlike treatment of the tenor, which Du Fay was to abandon in the later Masses. But the use of a cantus firmus to organize the entire structure of the Mass, the extended use of the high contratenor in the motivic unification of the work, the allusion to voices other than the tenor of the chanson, and above all the melodic style of the entire work are “progressive” traits, at least in terms of the evolution of Du Fay’s own musical language. And the use of an instrumental tenor is a unique instance in his canon and probably in the repertory of mid-fifteenth-century Mass music. In this respect Se la face ay pale stands as a symbol of Du Fay’s years in Savoy. The composer clearly had an attachment to the house of Savoy and to the life of the court, and after his “exile” at Cambrai he was clearly very glad to have returned to the south. I think some of this can be heard in the radiant serenity of the Mass. At the same time the years in Cambrai had been years of considerable experimentation with melodic writing, forced upon him by the necessity of creating contemporary-sounding lines out of the often intractable melodic style of the responsorial chants of the Mass propers, including the responds of the offertories, even if these chants had not been sung responsorially for centuries. They were also years of considerable experimentation with the mensural system, something that had been hidden from our view by the loss of nearly all of the music written for the cathedral liturgy in the 1440s and now visible only in the Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece, the Missae Sancti Antonii et Sancti Francisci, and the few fragments of the commune sanctorum that survive. They were probably also the years when Du Fay set down some of his thoughts on music in the treatise that survives only in the form of short citations and, I suspect, in the interest that men such as Tinctoris, Gaffurio, and Spataro show in some of his works, particularly those from the 1440s. In this respect Se la face ay pale represents a work of consolidation. Du Fay avoids some of the mensural and melodic extravagances of his music of the 1440s, but keeps the melodic flexibility that he achieved during that decade, which is quite different from the tissue of small rhythmic and melodic cells that 147

This aspect of the music, which is fundamental to its expressive character, is distorted by Besseler’s arbitrary shift in the rate of reduction between and , and this distortion can be heard in virtually every recording ever made of the work.

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mark so much of his earlier music (and make it so immediately attractive as well), and the expanded use of the high contratenor as a compositionally important part, albeit not a contrapuntally essential one. The tightly constructed numerical structure of the Mass, noted by a number of scholars,148 does not, in this case, appear to carry an obvious symbolism, but rather seems to be part and parcel of what the composer viewed as a requirement for a well-constructed work.149 The symbolism one finds in the later Masses is, as a rule, more connected with a theological reading of the cantus firmi in an almost narrative fashion.150 A number of scholars have noted the influence of Caput on Se la face ay pale, and I have suggested that Caput probably arrived in Cambrai in the company of the other cycles that accompany it in the copy in Tr 93. There is a moment in Se la face ay pale that indicates Du Fay’s probable familiarity with one of the companions of Caput, namely the Mass on Fuit homo missus, where virtually all the important cadences blossom, through the use of double notes, into fouror five-voice sonorities that feature prominently the third of the chord.151 Two of the cadences in Se la face ay pale, both in measure 238 of the Gloria and the Credo,152 recall the cadences of Fuit homo missus, and the one in the Credo is the more startling of the two because, even though it does not use a double note, as the one in the Gloria does, it places the third in the cantus and sounds like no other cadence in the entire Mass. The clear structure and perfect formal balance of the Mass, coupled with the sheer melodic elegance of the writing, have made it a favorite of modern scholars and critics, to the point that it has become something of an iconic representation of the cantus-firmus Mass. Its fate in the fifteenth century, as Richard Sherr has noted, appears to have been different.153 The two “complete” copies that survive are neither complete nor performable, and we have a text for the whole work simply because the major lacunae in the two sources do not coincide. The apparent lack of popularity of the

148

149

150

151 152 153

See Trowell, “Proportions,” 136–38; Sandresky, “The Continuing Concept,” 112 and 114; and particularly the exhaustive analysis in Nosow, “Le proporzioni,” 60–70. Some of the proportions in the Mass, particularly the triple cursus in the Gloria and Credo, might also reflect the Trinitarian symbolism that the visual arts at the time associated with the contemplation of Christ’s face; cf. Robertson, “The Man with the Pale Face,” 409–15. See Planchart, “The Origins,” 329–32, and Bloxam, “Du Fay as Musical Theologian.” In a number of studies Bloxam has shown that this almost narrative approach to the symbolic use of the cantus firmus was cultivated by composers of the generation after that of Du Fay; cf. Bloxam, “In Praise of Spurious Saints,” and id., “Annunciation Narrative.” Bent, ed., Fifteenth-Century Liturgical Music: II, 1–34. Measure numbers refer to the edition in OO Planchart 3/4. Sherr, “Thoughts on Some of the Masses,” 322–24.

Music from the Savoy Years

Mass in its own time may be a reflection of the stylistic shift that took place in the decades after it was composed, but it may also be an indication of the fact that it was in one respect an anomalous work, written for a vocal ensemble with an instrumental tenor.154 The songs of the 1450s not only show the new melodic style Du Fay developed in the 1440s, but a renewed interest in the virelai and the bergerette, which he shares with a number of other composers at this time, and a shift toward texts that hew more closely to the main literary tradition of courtly love rather than to the bourgeois conviviality or the occasional songs, May Day and New Year’s songs, that are so frequent in his earlier work. In the same vein, the surviving lamentation for the fall of Constantinople is the earliest example we have in his canon of what may be called the “English organization” of a piece of music, into essentially parallel sections, the first in triple meter and the second in duple meter notated in the English manner, an organization that was to become prevalent in his late sacred works. At the same time the lamentation is an early example of what music historians call the chanson-motet, which was to become a small but important subgenre in the music of a later generation. Given the astonishingly prolific production of Du Fay’s early years, the assumption has always been that we have lost a large amount of his later work on account of the disappearance of virtually all French sources from the second half of the fifteenth century. From what we have been able to recover from his music of the 1440s and what we can infer from his activity in Cambrai this appears to be true, in that he apparently composed a full cycle of propers for the entire liturgical year during the decade 1440–1450. I suspect that if we were to recover all the music he wrote during his years in Savoy the profile of this repertory would be different, consisting primarily of secular rather than sacred music, and resembling rather what we have from him in Ox 213 than what we have in Bo Q15 in terms of repertory. This would be the reverse of his Cambrai years in the 1440s, although I think that he continued writing songs during those years as well. 154

The problem of the tenor of this Mass is extremely complicated. Etienne Ferrier, the senior trumpet player of the court, was officially part of the chapel at this time. All the notes of the cantus firmus except for the B-flat are easily playable by a slide trumpet. The B-flat (5th position) is barely playable and we do not have firm evidence for the existence of a double slide instrument at Savoy in the mid-1450s (cf. Polk, “The Trombone, the Slide Trumpet,” 396). Ferrier was clearly a virtuoso who probably had access to the best instruments being made at the time. It is also possible that the cantus firmus was played by the organist rather than by the trumpet.

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Du Fay apparently preferred the life he found in Savoy over his life at Cambrai, and to some extent I think one can hear that in the music of the 1450s, but he had been unable to obtain a benefice in the south that would be even remotely as lucrative as his northern benefices, and as in 1439, a sense of prudence impelled him to return home. What is astonishing, however, is what he was to make of the sixteen years that were still left to him.

6

The Last Years (1458–1474)

Cambrai at Du Fay’s Return The Cambrai that Du Fay returned to in 1458 was a different place than the one he had left in 1452. Perhaps the most notable difference for him was the absence of a number of colleagues, some of them associates of long standing. Robert Auclou, who among the canons had the longest association with Du Fay and had been both his patron and his colleague from early in 1426, died on 16 August 1452; three of the former papal singers, two of whom had been colleagues of Du Fay at one point or another in Rome, and the other who almost surely knew him as a choirboy, had also died: Philippe de la Folie, called Foliot, on 1 March 1454, Nicole Grenon on 17 October 1456, and Mathieu Hanelle, the first papal singer to become a canon of Cambrai, on 2 January 1458.1 In addition Michiel van Beringhen, who commissioned Du Fay and Carlier to compose the liturgy for the Recollectio, had died on 12 August 1457.2 There were new canons and dignitaries to become acquainted with, and of course a host of new chaplains and vicars. In fact, given the turnover in the personnel of the community of small vicars, there was virtually not a single one among those in late 1458 who had been active before 1452. Upon his return Du Fay was certainly the most widely traveled and cosmopolitan member of the chapter; he had been in the service, at one point or another, of Italian princes, two popes, and two of the most powerful magnates of the time, the dukes of Burgundy and Savoy. It is not surprising, then, that among his close associates in the chapter, men who, from what we can tell at a distance of five hundred years, became his new circle of friends, were not so much the provincial worthies, such as Jan Rodolph, the cantor, or Nicolas Plonchet, Auclou’s successor as the scholaster, or some of the other canons, but rather Gilles Carlier, the dean, a formidable theologian and music theorist, with solid university training,3 1

2 3

CBM 1059, fol. 36r (Auclou’s death); LAN, 4G 1177, fol. 1v (Folie’s death); CBM 1059, fol. 239v (Grenon’s death); CBM 1060, fol. 9r (Hanelle’s death). LAN, 4G 1203 (Beringhen’s will), front cover. Cullington and Strohm, “That Liberal and Virtuous Art,” 7–8.

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and Grégoire Nicole, the official, a Burgundian diplomat, and lawyer trained in Bologna and Paris, who, like Du Fay, was the illegitimate son of a cleric.4 Nicole, however, was probably a childhood friend of the composer. Another canon who would become a close friend of Du Fay in the composer’s old age was Pierre de Ranchicourt, a nobleman from Arras born ca. 1428,5 who had already become chancellor of Arras when on 9 February 1447 he was received as canon of Cambrai.6 Ranchicourt came to Cambrai briefly in 1453 and then in 1458,7 but was in residence from 9 May 1459 until he was elected bishop of Arras in 1463.8 He had been given a canonical house, but spent a good deal of his time at Du Fay’s house, where the composer built at his own expense an extra room over the kitchen with its own staircase, which was still referred to in the execution of Du Fay’s will as “la cambre de monsieur d’Arras.”9 A man of considerable learning and influence as well as social status,10 he became a close friend of Du Fay to the end of the composer’s life. Among the lower clergy of the cathedral Du Fay had at the time three close associates. Pierre du Wez, who had come to the cathedral as a small vicar in October 1443 (the earliest mention of him in the records), remained a small vicar until 1457, joined the grand community of chaplains in 1449–1450, and remained a chaplain to his death in 1483.11 He had looked after Du Fay’s house during the composer’s seven-year stay in Savoy (which includes both journeys of the 1450s), administered him the last rites, and was one of the executors of his will.12 One possible explanation for their long association can be gleaned from the execution of Pierre’s will. Despite having been a man of very modest means,13 he apparently had a wide culture and was a learned man who left behind a large library.14 Another old associate was, of course, Symon Mellet, who continued his

4 5

6 8 9 10

11

12 13

14

A summary biography appears in Maillard-Luypaert, “Pour le salut,” 7–13. ASV, RV 376, fols. 57v–58r, a papal letter dated 17 Nov. 1443, referring to Ranchicourt as being fifteen years old. 7 CBM 1058, fol. 96v. CBM 1059, fol. 58v, 26 May 1453; 1060, fol. 27v, 16 Oct. 1458. r CBM 1060, fol. 44 , on Ranchicourt’s arrival. Eubel, Hierarchia, 2:98, on his elevation to Arras. A description appears in CBM 1060, fol. 44r; the mention in the will is in LAN, 4G 1313, p. 44. For a summary biography of Ranchicourt, including two very likely portraits, see Panofsky, “Two Roger Problems,” 36–38 and figures 2, 5, and 6. LAN, 4G 7442, fol. 8v; 7443, fol. 7r; 7444, fol. 5v; 7445, 6v; 7456, fol. 7r, for his dates as a small vicar; LAN, 4G 6916, fol. 23v; 6962, fol. 24r, for his dates as a chaplain. LAN 4G 1313, pp. 1, 19, 15. LAN, 4G 7767, fol. 14v: the aumosne grants him 100s in 1482 on account of his old age and poverty. LAN, 4G 1705, fol. 10r.

Cambrai at Du Fay’s Return

work as a music scribe, and was by now a member of the grand community of chaplains.15 Finally, there was a new associate, Alexandre Bouillart, a native of Beauvais, who must have arrived in Cambrai in 1454. He is mentioned in the list of chaplains receiving wine on the night of St. Martin in 1454 at St-Géry,16 and on 29 November 1454 he exchanged a chaplaincy he had in Lonsart17 with Laurent Canner, a former small vicar who was then a papal singer, for one of the chaplaincies of SS. Nicholas and Catherine in the cathedral.18 He held this as a foreign chaplaincy, just as he held the chaplaincy he had at St-Géry.19 In 1459 he was received into the communities of chaplains both at the cathedral and at St-Géry,20 and he obviously chose to be a chaplain only in the cathedral, since his name

15

16 17

18

19

20

Mellet was a chaplain from 1454–1455 to 1460–1461 (LAN, 4G 6921, fol. 11r; 6929, fol. 22v); that year he exchanged his chaplaincies for a grand vicariate with Robert le Canoine, who had been magister puerorum (CBM 1060, 113r). LAN, 7G 2412 (1454–1455, Bourse), fol. 11r. Nowadays a part of Esnes at 11 km from Cambrai, but then a separate village; cf. Le Glay, “Notice sur le village d’Esne,” 282. CBM 1059, fol. 112r. The case of the chaplaincies of SS. Nicholas and Catherine is an example of how carefully and comprehensively one has to read the surviving documentation. Apparently, some of the cathedral offices were not always entirely current with the assignments of chaplaincies, particularly the foreign chaplaincies, those held by someone who was not a fullfledged member of the grand community of chaplains. The accounts of the chaplains for 1439– 1440 and 1440–1441 are lost. That for 1441–1442 lists for the first time one Symon le Lièvre as a member of the community and, also for the first time, a chaplaincy at the altar of SS. Nicholas and Catherine, being held as a foreign chaplaincy by Martinet Courtois (LAN, 4G 6909, fols. 31v and 36v). Thus Symon joined the community sometime between 1439 and 1441, and the chaplaincy of SS. Nicholas and Catherine could have been granted to him during those years or indeed in 1441–1442. Symon appears in the lists of chaplains until 1454–1455, and all of these years Courtois also holds a chaplaincy at the altar of SS. Nicholas and Catherine (LAN, 4G 6921, fols. 22v, 31r, and 38r). The account of that year, however, records a second foreign chaplaincy at the altar of SS. Nicholas and Catherine as being formerly held by Symon le Lièvre (LAN, 4G 6921, 38r). Symon either left Cambrai or died and his chaplaincy then became foreign. It is surely this chaplaincy that was collated briefly by Laurent Canner, who was then in Rome, and quickly exchanged for a chaplaincy in Lonsart, as noted in the acts. But until 1457–1458 the chaplaincy is listed in the accounts of the chaplains simply as the chaplaincy that had belonged to Symon le Lièvre, and only in that year it is listed as having belonged to Symon le Lièvre and now belonging to Sandrin [Bouillart], even though Bouillart had been present personally at the permutation with Canner in 1454. The accounts of the bourse at St-Géry have him receiving wine on 11 Nov. 1454 (cf. n. 16), but do not ever list him in the solutiones cappellanorum. The accounts of the chaplains have a lacuna between 1443–1444 and 1456–1457; those from 1456 to 1459 have Sandrin Brillart among the holders of a foreign chapel, which surely goes back to at least 1454–1445 (LAN, 7G 2956 [1456–1457], fol. 6r; [1457–1458], fol. 5v; [1458–1459], fol. 5v). St-Géry: LAN, 7G 2956 (1459–1460), fol. 3v: “Alexandri Bruillart, pro novitate, 45s.” Cathedral: 4G 6927, fol. 13r: “Alexandre Bouillart, bienvenue, 7 lb 16s 4 d.”

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disappears at that point from the St-Géry accounts.21 It was probably at this time that he became Du Fay’s chaplain, something we know only from his epitaph and from Du Fay’s will, and remained a chaplain of the cathedral and of Du Fay until his death on 20 August 1474.22 In addition, Du Fay also had a connection with one family of what can be described as the lower bourgeoisie at Cambrai. Jacques de Beulancourt, called Hardi, and his wife, Marie Caminet, were apparently friends of Du Fay and his mother. Jacques became franc-sergeant of the cathedral in 1410,23 but both of them were dead by 14 November 1445, when Du Fay acted as an executor of Marie’s will.24 Their son, another of the executors, was also called Jacques Hardi, and obtained the same post as his father on the death of Jehan Milet in 1459.25 He was married to one Marie Lupard, and their son Antoine became Du Fay’s godson, so they were Du Fay’s compère and comère. Du Fay’s comère lived until January 1476;26 her husband lived until 1482, and on his death Antoine became franc-sergeant of the cathedral, the third generation of the family in that post.27 Du Fay’s legacy to his godson, a book with the legend of St. Barbara and a book “des bonnes moeurs,” proved not effective in the end: Antoine was a perennial deadbeat and the acts show dozens of entries dunning him for unpaid debts. Du Fay appears not to have been particularly close to his two remaining colleagues from the papal chapel, Gilles Flannel called L’Enfant, and Jehan de la Croix called Monamy, both of whom were members of the local bourgeoisie of Cambrai.28 Flannel and Du Fay were colleagues of long 21

22

23 26

27

28

He kept the St-Géry chaplaincy as a foreign chaplaincy, since he had it until 1466, when he resigned it in a complex quadruple permutation with Jacques Maynart, Antoine de Bouberch, and Symon de Freschies (CBM 1060, fol. 242r, 9 June 1466). The chapter acts, which would have noted Bouillart’s death and his will, if he left one, are lost; the date of his death and his epitaph are recorded in CBM 1049, p. 29. This is a collection of epitaphs transcribed by the Abbé Tranchant in 1764. Bouillart’s epitaph reads: “Chi gist le sire Alexandre Bouillart prêtre natif de Beauvais chapelain de l’église et de Me Guillaume Du Fay canonne de Cambray et trepassa l’an mil cccc lxxiiii le xx jour D’Aoust.” CBM 1055, fol. 249r (13 May 1410). 24 CBM 1058, fol. 23r. 25 CBM 1060, fol. 38r. CBM 1049, p. 50. This is Tranchant’s transcription of the epitaphs for a tomb that had the bodies of both Jacques and Marie, but as in a few of his other transcriptions he apparently misread the dates, and gives 1452 as the death of one or another of the Jacques, which, from the entries in the acts, is too late for Jacques 1 and too early for Jacques 2. CBM 1061, fol. 139r (29 Apr. 1482). The acts specify that Antoine is the son of Jacques. Edmond Dartus, possibly misled by the epitaph as transcribed by Tranchant, believed this was not the case. (Private communication from Dartus to Fallows, reported in Fallows, Dufay, 311.) On Flannel see Planchart, “Institutional Politics,” 136: Jehan de la Croix had obtained canonicates in Thérouanne, Laon, and St-Géry in Cambrai before becoming a cathedral canon (ASV, RS 304, fol. 1r–v; RS 320, fol. 229r–v), and his brother Charles de la Croix was a canon of St-Géry by 1440 (LAN, 7G 753, 176v) and was still a canon there in 1503–1504 (LAN, 7G 2417 [1503–1504], fol. 14v].

Cambrai at Du Fay’s Return

standing,29 and it was surely Du Fay who adapted his own alleluia for St. Francis to serve as an alleluia for St. Sebastian, to whom Flannel was particularly devoted. But Flannel, after a very long career as a papal singer, going from 1418 to 1441 with only a small hiatus, appears to have avoided any musical duties at Cambrai. De la Croix, instead, took an active part, at least as an administrator, in the musical life of the cathedral, serving as master of the small vicars as Du Fay was preparing to leave for Savoy and for a number of years during his absence, as can be seen in Table 6.1. Each master of the small vicars served for a good number of years in the early part of the century,30 and from 1400 to 1428, when Grenon returned to Cambrai as a canon, none of the masters was a musician, but from 1428 to the end of the century the master was a musician with only a small number of exceptions. Grenon was the master of the small vicars apparently continuously from 1428 to 1439. Then we have Carlier, Du Fay, and De la Croix, all musicians. The only year in the entire century where the acts and the aumosne report a conflicting assignation probably indicates that Du Fay and De la Croix shared duties during the transition from one master to the other. The non-musicians in Table 6.1 all appear to be interim masters: Piquet in 1452– 1453, Dinchy (the great-great-uncle of the nefarious Baron Dinchy, who terrorized Cambrai in the 1570s) in 1455–1456 and 1458–1459, and Rosut (eventually one of Du Fay’s executors) in 1457–1458. The table suggests that De la Croix had grown weary of the assignment and that much of the 1450s were a time of slight instability and trouble for the musical establishment of the cathedral. A similar succession of masters with a relatively short tenure and including a few non-musicians occurs in the final decade of the fifteenth century, when we also find in the chapter acts increasing complaints of poor training and lack of discipline among the small vicars.31 Thus it would appear that Du Fay’s return to the cathedral was in some quarters a welcome one. Du Fay served as the master of the small vicars continuously for five years, his last recorded tenure in that position.32 He was succeeded by his friend Symon le Breton, who came to live permanently at Cambrai in 1463. Du Fay resumed a number of the duties common to a canon upon his return. On 25 June 1459 he was elected master of the grand and

29

30

31

In his will Flannel originally did not include Du Fay among his executors, but added him in a codicil redacted two days after the date of the will (4 and 6 June 1466) (LAN, 4G 1337, fols. 1r and 3r). From 1399 to 1424 Henri de Rosut called Ponet was the master of the vicars, most likely with a single interruption in 1409–1410. Planchart, “Institutional Politics,” 151–52. 32 But see later in this chapter, p. 270.

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Table 6.1 Masters of the small vicars at Cambrai in the fifteenth century 1399–1400, Henri De Rosut, Ponet (vicars) 1400–1409, not traceable 1409–1410, Étienne Sinemur (vicars) 1410–1411, not traceable 1411–1412, Henri De Rosut, Ponet (vicars) 1412–1414, not traceable (probably Rosut) 1414–1415, Henri De Rosut, Ponet (aumosne) 1415–1416, not traceable (probably Rosut) 1416–1424, Henri De Rosut, Ponet (aumosne) 1424–1425, Henri de Arnhem (aumosne) 1425–1427, not traceable 1427–1428, Archdeacon of Hainaut (Raoul Le Prestre) (aumosne) 1428–1431, Nicole Grenon (aumosne) 1431–1433, not traceable 1433–1434, Wautier D’Opstal (aumosne) 1434–1436, not traceable 1436–1437, Nicole Grenon (aumosne) 1437–1438, not traceable (probably Grenon) 1438–1439, Nicole Grenon (aumosne) 1442–1443, Guillaume Du Fay (aumosne) 1443–1444, not traceable (probably Du Fay) 1444–1448, Guillaume Du Fayd 1448–1449, Jehan de la Croix, Monamy (Du Fay, aumosne)

1449–1452, Jehan de la Croix, Monamy 1452–1453, Jehan Piquet 1453–1455, Gilles Carlier 1455–1456, Gilles Dinchy 1456–1457, Jehan de la Croix, Monamy 1457–1458, Jehan de Rosut 1458–1459, Gilles Dinchy (vicars) 1459–1464, Guillaume Du Faya 1464–1470, Symon le Bretonb 1470–1474, not traceable, probably Du Fay 1474–1475, Martin Courtoys (vicars) 1475–1476, not traceable (probably Courtoys) 1476–1481, Martin Courtoys 1481–1483, Jehan de Rosut 1483–1489, Rogier van Eeckoutec 1489–1491, Jehan Jorland, Corbie 1491–1492, Rogier van Eeckoute 1492–1495, Jehan Jorland, Corbie 1495–1496, Rogier van Eeckoute 1496–1498, Pierre Godemare 1498–1499, not traceable (Rogier van Eeckoute?) 1499–1501, Rogier van Eeckoute

Source: From nominations in the chapter acts unless otherwise noted. The years in the table are fiscal years going from the Feast of St. John Baptist of one year to the eve of that feast the following year. a For 1463–1464 from the account of the small vicars. b For 1468–1470 from the account of the small vicars. c For 1483–1484 from a mention in the acts. d For 1446–1447 from the aumosne.

small vicars, and together with Quentin Gerard, keeper of the keys to the coffer of the small seals.33 He remained master of the vicars until June 1464, when his friend Symon le Breton, who had retired from the 33

CBM 1060, fol. 49v.

Cambrai at Du Fay’s Return

Burgundian chapel and came to reside at Cambrai, was elected master of the small vicars.34 As keeper of the keys to the small coffers he was in office until at least 1467 (the register of acts from 1468 to 1476, old register N, is lost); he was also master of the office of the bakery (furnus) for 1460–1462, the aumosne for 1463–1465, and the hospital of St. Julian for 1462–1463.35 In addition, the accounts for the wine and the bread indicate that he was the head of that office for 1460– 1463.36 As head of the wine and the bread he took part in 1461 in travels to supervise damage to a canal and tree-cuttings, each followed by dinner at his house,37 and as one of the keepers of the small coffers he took part in drafting an inventory of the cathedral property in 1461.38 These activities, very similar to those he undertook in the 1440s, appear to diminish after 1464. There is indirect evidence, however, that between 1471 and 1473 or 1474 he was again master of the small vicars. The chapter acts, which would tell who was elected to the office, are lost, as are the accounts of the small vicars.39 And the accounts of the aumosne record only the buying of cloth “by order of the chapter,” but not who went to buy it. By this time Du Fay was surely too old to be expected to journey to the fairs, as he had done during his early years as master of the small vicars, which might explain the silence in the accounts of the aumosne on this matter, but there is a change in the accounts of the fabric that points to Du Fay as the master of the small vicars during these years. In the early 1460s, all orders of payment for the copying of music, when they are noted in the accounts of the fabric, are signed by Du Fay; between 1464 and 1470, however, the orders are signed by Le Breton, and then after 1470 the orders are again signed by Du Fay.40 He also continued serving as a witness in many of the proceedings of the chapter, and he served as a procurator for a number of clerics who were seeking a

34

35 37 38 39

40

CBM 1060, fol. 197r. In the election of officers for the previous year the name of the master of the vicars is left blank (CBM 1060, fol. 172v), but it was most likely Du Fay, who was also master of the aumosne that year, an office that financed 50 percent of all the expenses of the small vicars. CBM 1060, fols. 172v, 197r, 217r. 36 LAN, 4G, 7459–61, all fol. 1r. LAN, 4G 7459, fols. 3r–v and 9v. See also C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 225. LAN, 4G 4554; cf. Houdoy, Histoire, 350–60. The account for 1474–1475 survives, and it shows Martin Courtois as the master (LAN, 4G 6971 [1474–1475], fol. 1r). This is easiest to see in Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 247–52.

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canonicate at Cambrai, particularly those who were or had been members of the papal chapel.41

Burgundy and the Missa L’homme armé The cathedral chapter was not the only institution that had new tasks for the returning Du Fay. The Order of the Golden Fleece, in the person of its head, Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, had an immediate task for the composer as well. On 6 August 1458 Pope Calixtus III died and Cardinal Enea Silvio Piccolomini was elected pope on 19 August, taking the name Pius II. The fall of Constantinople, regarded by humanists of Pius’s generation as the most important seat of classical and Christian learning, proved deeply traumatic to them, far more so than it was to the princes and magnates of Europe. In 1454, while still a cardinal, Pius had exerted himself to convince Philip the Good to undertake a crusade, and the duke had made extensive preparations for such an undertaking, which included, in typical Burgundian fashion, the extravagant Feast of the Pheasant held in Lille.42 As a pope, Pius lost no time in issuing an urgent and passionate call for a crusade. The first call went out at the Congress of Mantua on 26 September 1459 and the formal proclamation of a crusade on 14 January 1460. For the entire duration of his papacy Pius II was obsessed with that idea; he died in Ancona on 14 August 1464, when he himself was en route in a crusading endeavor after failing to stir the European princes to such an undertaking. Among the European princes almost the only one to respond to the pope’s call with even a modest amount of enthusiasm was Philip the Good, who once more responded to the crusading call. Given the duke’s personality and inclinations, a great deal more time and effort went into preparatory ceremonies and festivities than into the actual business of raising an army and conveying it to a port from where it could sail to the east. In fact, by the time the small Burgundian force had reached the Mediterranean coast in southern France in 1464, Pope Pius had died and the entire crusading enterprise had evaporated.43 But the preparatory ceremonies included a call to all the chevaliers of the Order of the Golden Fleece to join a crusade and to come to a general meeting of the Order, which took place in St-Omer in May 1461. The ceremonies in 1461 41 42

43

CBM 1060, fols. 105v, 110r, 124r, 129r, 132v, 178v, 226v, 227v, 229v, 234v, 258v. See DeVries, “The Failure,” 163–64, and Vaughan, Philip the Good, 143–45. See also earlier in this chapter. Vaughan, Philip the Good, 218 and 370–72.

Burgundy and the Missa L’homme armé

were considerably less extravagant than those attendant on the Feast of the Pheasant in 1454, but they included all of the panoply and the different liturgies called for in the statutes of the Order.44 For these ceremonies the duke needed some extraordinary music for the Ordinary of the Mass, and he apparently set out to find it by commissioning the two greatest composers active at the time, Du Fay and Jehan de Ockeghem, the first chaplain of the king of France. In an earlier study I surmised that the duke may have waited until the death of Charles VII before approaching Ockeghem, given the tension between the two rulers.45 But I think now that this surmise is surely incorrect. The duke, after all, had the explicit if grudging permission to recruit in the lands of France for the crusade, and requesting a crusading Mass from Ockeghem could hardly be regarded as a hostile act toward Charles VII.46 Further, already by 1460 it was clear to all, including the two composers involved, that Charles was dying, and that the future king of France was, in fact, under the protection of Philip the Good.47 In addition, the duke had the perfect person to transmit the request to Ockeghem, namely Du Fay, who already knew Ockeghem and had developed a friendship with him, as later events were to show. For a cantus firmus for the Mass Du Fay chose a tune that was surely connected with the Order of the Golden Fleece, L’homme armé. The tune, although written in the style of a chanson rustique, is clearly the product of a learned composer conversant with prolation notation, which was quite old-fashioned by 1460. The number symbolism in the tune, linked with its thirty-one breves, suggests that its origins cannot go back before 1433, when at the birth of Charles the Bold the number of chevaliers in the Order was changed from the original twenty-four and the master to thirty and the master.48 It would appear that by the time that Du Fay and Ockeghem came to write their Masses there was already a polyphonic setting of the song in the form of a jocular combinative chanson, Il sera par vous combatu – L’homme armé, teasing Du Fay’s close friend, Symon le Breton, about fighting “the feared Turk,” and making short work of the enemy while armed only with a celery stalk. The song survives in only two sources, in its apparently original form as an anonymous three-voice work 44

45 46 47 48

These are described in a letter of Prospero da Camogli to the duke of Milan (9 May 1461), in Kendall and Ilardi, eds., Dispatches, 2:343–54, and in the acts of the order cited in Haggh, “The Order of the Golden Fleece,” 8–9. Planchart, “The Origins,” 335–36. Vaughan, Philip the Good, 365; see also Planchart, “The Origins,” 324. See Vale, Charles VII, 187–91. See Prizer, “Brussels and the Ceremonies,” 70 and n. 5; Planchart, “The Origins,” 312–14.

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in the Mellon Chansonnier,49 and in a slightly clumsy arrangement for four voices without any text and an ascription to “Borton” in the Casanatense chansonnier.50 Scholars had assumed that the ascription was a mangled one to Robert Morton, who was a junior colleague of Symon in the Burgundian chapel,51 but elsewhere I have argued that “Borton” is probably the name of the arranger, quite possibly Pierre Bordon, as Rob Wegman has suggested,52 and that the author of the original combinative chanson is Du Fay, who had become a close friend of Symon in the 1440s.53 The text of the combinative chanson surely was inspired in part by the alarm the Burgundian chaplains must have felt when in 1457 the chambre de comptes prepared a memorandum that made it appear as though a departure on a crusade, including members of the chapel, was imminent,54 thought it was tempered at this time by the realization by both Du Fay and Symon that in 1459 or 1460 the duke of Burgundy probably would never go beyond organizing an elaborate meeting. The reason for mentioning the chanson in this context is that (and this further strengthens the case for Du Fay’s authorship) the commission to Ockeghem apparently went not only with the request that he use L’homme armé as the cantus firmus, but that Du Fay must have sent him a copy of the chanson as well, because, as Leeman Perkins has observed in a detailed analysis of the L’homme armé Masses of Du Fay and Ockeghem, the younger composer cites here and there in his Mass bits of the chanson, and in fact appears to have written his own chanson L’autre d’antan as a kind of good-humored musical rejoinder to Il sera par vous – L’homme armé.55 The two Masses were surely sung during the meeting at St-Omer.56 Ockeghem must have been aware at least of the peculiar tonal structure of the Du Fay Mass, which I have argued is a modal “inversion” of the unusual tonal structure of Ockeghem’s Missa Caput, since he begins his Mass using the tonal structure of the chanson and changes it gradually to end with that

49 50

51 52 54 55 56

Perkins and Garey, eds., The Mellon Chansonnier, 2, no. 34; OO Planchart 10/4/2. Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS 2856, fols. 156v–157r. Cf. Fallows, Catalogue, 187 with further references. The most recent discussion of Morton’s life is Planchart, “Robert Morton.” Wegman, “Pierre Bordon.” 53 Planchart, “The Origins,” 321–27. Cf. Vaughan, Philip the Good, 362, and Planchart, “The Origins,” 324. Perkins, “The L’homme armé Masses,” passim. Haggh, “The Archives of Order,” 5–9, argues that there was little or no polyphony in the liturgy at these meetings before 1468, but this view has been corrected in Prizer, “Brussels and the Ceremonies,” 83–86.

Burgundy and the Missa L’homme armé

of Du Fay’s Mass.57 He pays homage to Du Fay’s style in the early movements, but treats the cantus firmus as a source for notational and rhythmic conceits.58 Du Fay also pays homage to Ockeghem’s style in his own Mass, particularly in matters of rhythmic language and phrase structure,59 but also uses the cantus firmus in a way that equates L’homme armé with the figure of Christ and produces an elaborate program of Christological symbolism that runs throughout the Mass.60 There is also another element at work. Du Fay was writing a work that he knew would be juxtaposed with another by one of his contemporaries whom he probably regarded as his only equal, and what David Fallows occasionally refers to as his competitive feelings and insecurity61 show themselves in the enormous size and complexity of the work. It is his longest and in some ways most intricate Mass, full of sharp shifts in sonority and sudden thickets of rhythmic complexity.62 Du Fay seems intent on making sure that Ockeghem’s work would not outshine his. At around the time when the L’homme armé Masses were being written, Johannes Tinctoris came to Cambrai and spent four months there between March and June 1460; on 11 July the chapter ordered the office of the small vicars to grant him 3 Rhenish florins for having served for four months in habitu ecclesiae.63 Because the payment was made through the office of the small vicars scholars have always assumed that Tinctoris served as a small vicar during that time, but the detailed attendance lists of the small vicars for that year pass over him in silence.64 He might have sung with the small vicars, as other clergy in the cathedral sometimes did, but he was not one of them; what is unusual is how long Tinctoris stayed in Cambrai. The payment was made through that office because Du Fay was the head of the office, and it would appear that Tinctoris’s visit was more likely concerned with his wanting to visit Du Fay and perhaps even study with him. The misunderstanding concerning Tinctoris’s status at Cambrai hides something more interesting: the term in habitu ecclesiae is used very seldom in the Cambrai documents, and always in reference to men who were not officially members of the cathedral clergy (and hence, in Tinctoris’s case, not a small vicar), but whose presence in the life of the 57 58 59 61 62

63

Planchart, “The Origins,” 328–29 and 332–33. This aspect is carefully analyzed in Fitch, Johannes Ockeghem, 50–56. Crocker, A History of Musical Style, 156–60. 60 Planchart, “The Origins,” 329–32. Fallows, Dufay, 213–14. The edition in OO Besseler 3, no. 2, strenuously attempts to iron out these sonority shifts through an extensive and largely unmusical use of musica ficta. CBM 1060, fol. 86r. 64 LAN, 4G 7458, fols. 5v–6r.

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cathedral had been particularly valued during their time at Cambrai. Tinctoris was then about twenty-five years old and had none of his later renown; the designation, and the size of the gift, which was considerable, are probably a reflection of Du Fay’s opinion of him at the time. What Du Fay might have thought of him years later, after the dissemination of Tinctoris’s rather blunt comments in the Proportionale musices concerning some of Du Fay’s practices, is not recorded, but the reactions of some of his other contemporaries were reported by Tinctoris himself in his later writings.65

The Magistri puerorum and the Case of Johannes Regis, and Josquin at Cambrai In the same year the Cambrai maîtrise again had problems with the magister puerorum, the former chorister Robert le Canoine, who had been magister since September 1458.66 At the start of the fiscal year 1460–1461 the canons were dissatisfied with him and replaced him with one of the small vicars, Jehan Zemberch, but less than a week later, at his pleading, they reinstated him.67 In October of that year Charles the Bold, then count of Charolais, visited Cambrai, and after Mass the magister puerorum and the children sang a motet by the count.68 But by 7 November the canons noted that Robert had a woman of uncertain morals living with him in the house of the choirboys as his servant. They dismissed him and set a committee consisting of three musician canons, Jehan de la Croix, Helbin Hainbaut, and Du Fay, to seek a new magister puerorum.69 Three days later the chapter instructed Du Fay to write to Jehan Le Roy [Johannes Regis], the magister puerorum of St-Vincent of Soignies, asking him to come to Cambrai as magister puerorum.70 In the meantime they reinstated Zemberch as a temporary magister puerorum.71 This entry is the first documentary indication we have of any communication between Du Fay and Regis. The music of the younger composer appears to be so indebted to the late music of Du Fay, particularly in terms 65 67 68

69

Cf. Blackburn, “Did Ockeghem Listen to Tinctoris?,” 639–40. 66 LAN, 4G 7457, fol. 8r. CBM 1060, fols. 84v–85r: entries of 25 and 30 June 1460. CBM 28, fol. 72v. This is a note added to a 13th-century psalter from the cathedral: “Charle conte de Charoloys, fils de Phelippe duc de Bourgogne, etc., fist ung motet et tout le chant, lequel fut chanté en se presence après messe dicte en le venerable eglise de Cambray par le maistre et les enfans. En l’an 1460, le 23e jour d’octobre qui fu le jour de Saint Severin.” CBM 1060, fol. 97v. 70 CBM 1060, fol. 98r. 71 CBM 1060, fol. 98v.

The Magistri puerorum and the Case of Johannes Regis, and Josquin at Cambrai

of its sonority and rhythmic surfaces,72 that scholars originally thought that Regis must have been a student of Du Fay.73 But the Cambrai records, particularly the lists of the small vicars found in the bread and wine accounts, show no contact between Regis and Cambrai before this time. Nonetheless, by 1460 Du Fay may have been aware of Regis’s work for some time; after all, from around 1449 Regis had been magister puerorum at St-Vincent of Soignies,74 where Du Fay’s Burgundian colleague, Binchois, was a canon. Binchois died on 20 September 1460 and one of his executors was Du Fay’s former colleague in the papal chapel, Guillaume Le Métayer, called Malbecque, who had become dean at Soignies. As such he spent more than a month of travel to Bruges, Brussels, Cambrai, Cassel, and Mons settling financial matters concerning Binchois’s will. Malbeque and Du Fay were apparently friends of long standing; Du Fay had obtained at some point a personatus at Wattiebraine, which yielded £40 of Hainaut per year, and it was Malbecque who collected those rents.75 Malbecque’s travels probably took place shortly after Binchois’s death, and curiously the only city of those mentioned earlier where Binchois did not have a benefice was Cambrai, and yet the accounts of the executors indicate that Malbeque spent four days there.76 It is more than likely that he stayed with Du Fay at Cambrai, but there is no record of his visit in the Cambrai documents. Perhaps it coincided with the visit by Charles the Bold and his retinue, and this coincidence resulted in Malbecque not receiving a gift of wine or bread as many other visitors did. But it is suggestive that after this visit there was a flurry of interest by the cathedral chapter in having Regis as the magister puerorum. This interest set off an elaborate set of negotiations that went on for some time. Zemberch, who had been installed as a provisional magister puerorum, turned out to be a difficult and quarrelsome fellow, who finally 72

73 74

75

76

These similarities are obscured in the edition of Cornelis Lindeburg (Regis) and Besseler (Du Fay) by editorial idiosyncrasies in the reduction of values and barring, but become apparent when the music of both composers is transcribed in a consistent manner. In performance, particularly “from the inside,” i.e., from the perspective of the performers themselves, the similarities are indeed quite noticeable. This is the case in Fallows, “The Life of Johannes Regis.” Regis does not appear in the documents at Soignies until 1451, but there are lacunae. Gallagher shows that the changes in the institution that led to the creation of the school took place in 1449; see Gallagher, Johannes Regis, 13–16. There is no real English term for personatus. A personatus was a benefice higher than a simple canonicate but not quite a dignity. Du Fay’s personatus was at the church of Notre-Dame in the town called today Wauthier-Braine, some 20 km south of Brussels; cf. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 195. Gallagher, Johannes Regis, 21.

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had to be arrested and imprisoned until Symon Mellet posted bail.77 He was dismissed, and Jehan du Sart was appointed again as a temporary magister puerorum.78 But the house of the choristers was apparently also in serious disrepair, and a large committee of canons, which included the archdeacon of Valenciennes (Pierre de Ranchicourt), the dean (Gilles Carlier), the scholaster (Nicolas Plonchet), the official (Grégoire Nicole), Jehan Lambert, Reignault des Lyons, and Du Fay, was formed to decide how to repair the house so that Regis, “who is supposed to come,” can live in it properly.79 On Regis’s part we have evidence that around this time he sent to Cambrai a truly extraordinary work, a Mass combining the cantus firmus of L’homme armé, recently used by Du Fay and Ockeghem, with a panoply of chants derived from the office of St. Michael, which Sean Gallagher has associated quite convincingly with a specific liturgy at Cambrai, the foundation for St. Michael set up by Michiel van Beringhen sometime before 1457.80 The Mass was copied into the choirbooks of the cathedral by Symon Mellet in 1462.81 In every way, this looks like the ultimate “audition piece” for a post in Cambrai in 1462; even so, in the spring of 1463 the chapter had to send one of its messengers, Gilles Faloen, to Antwerp, where Regis was at that point, to seek an answer from him.82 In the end, however, Regis never took up the post, and Jehan du Sart remained as magister puerorum.83 The situation with the maîtrise remained unsettled: Du Sart was replaced in January 1466 by a small vicar, Rasse

77

78 79

80

81

82

83

CBM 1060, fol. 126v (fight, 30 Nov. 1461), fol. 127r–v (disruption of services, imprisonment, expulsion from service to the cathedral, not simply as magister puerorum, 2–9 Dec. 1461). CBM 1060, fol. 127v. CBM 1060, fol. 145r. In terms of the personnel of the cathedral this was an extraordinarily powerful committee and probably a good sign of the chapter’s interest in Regis. Gallagher, Johannes Regis, 87–90; Haggh, “Guillaume du Fay and the Evolution of the Liturgy,” 559. The foundation is detailed in CBM 39, fol. 20v, and LAN, 4G 2009, fol. 28v, but it is curiously absent from all the accounts of the fabric that normally would list monies received for such endowments. The terminus ante quem is established by its mention in the execution of Beringhen’s will, LAN, 4G 1203, fol. 12v (marginal addition). LAN, 4G 4670, fol. 27v. The account is for 1462–1463 and the entry undated, but among the earliest ones of the officio ornamentorum, and these entries are always in chronological order. LAN, 4G 6789 (1462–1463), fol. 4v. The entry is undated but is preceded by the entry granting the small vicars a payment to buy herring for Lent, which was always given on Ash Wednesday. A curious detail is that the entry specifies that Faloen went on foot (pedester); this would have taken him between eight and ten days. The distance between Cambrai and Antwerp is about 200 km, and Rob Wegman, who has walked the Road to Santiago more than once, informs me that even with determination, training, and about ten to twelve hours of walking one can cover about 30 km; 20–25 km a day is a far more likely average. Regis’s point of view in these negotiations is presented in detail in Gallagher, Johannes Regis, 21–31.

The Magistri puerorum and the Case of Johannes Regis, and Josquin at Cambrai

de la Venne, who was enjoined to expel his female servant and a young lodger as conditions for his employment.84 Rasse, however, was replaced in June 1467 by Robert le Canoine, who returned from Lille to take the post.85 In the course of the fiscal year 1468–1469 Robert was dismissed. The volume of the chapter acts from February 1467 to June 1476 (old register N) is lost, but the account of the aumosne for 1468–1469 has two entries that bear on this matter. The first, dated 4 March 1469, has Jehan Hemart, who had been a choirboy at the cathedral and then a vicar and magister puerorum at St-Géry, as the new magister puerorum, being given £4 for a robe. The second is a series of payments for the upkeep of various choirboys to Robert and Hemart, “successively magistri puerorum this year.”86 Hemart brought stability to the office and remained as magister puerorum until 1483. Among his charges at St-Géry in the 1460s was a choirboy who was identified upon his leaving between 25 May and 23 June 1466 as Gossequin de Condet, and who is almost certainly the young Josquin des Prez.87 Given that choirboys usually attended the maîtrises between the ages of nine and seventeen, Josquin must have arrived in Cambrai roughly around the time that Du Fay returned from Savoy. It is impossible, of course, to tell what music by Du Fay the young Josquin might have heard; after all, he was a choirboy at St-Géry and not at the cathedral. Nevertheless, the liturgical books of the cathedral indicate a number of ceremonies, such as the procession on the feast of St. Mary Magdalene, where the entire clergy of the city participated, and specifically that antiphons or responsories were sung by the singers of the cathedral and those of St-Géry, as well as those of St-Aubert and Ste-Croix.88 These are the years when Du Fay wrote, among other works, the four-voice antiphon Ave regina caelorum and the Missa Ecce ancilla Domini – Beata es Maria, and I think it is telling that David Fallows, writing at a time when Josquin’s presence in Cambrai was unknown, and commenting on the latter work, draws a connection between the style of the two composers in the canonic duos that they favored.89

84 86

87 88

89

CBM 1060, fol. 233v. 85 Ibid., fol. 264r. LAN, 4G 7765 (1468–1469), fols. 17v and 18r. For further documentation of Hemart’s career see Appendix 2. LAN, 7G 2414 (1465–1466), fol. 20v. CBM 71, fols. 103r, 116r, 132v. The other Cambrai processionals, MSS 68 and 72, show similar provisions. Fallows, Dufay, 209. Of course, Josquin could have come across these traits of Du Fay’s music later in his life; still they appear very early in his own work, so it is likely that he came across them during his years at Cambrai.

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Du Fay’s Activities in His Last Decade From the mid-1460s to the end of his life the geographical horizon of Du Fay, probably the most widely traveled of his fellow canons, came to be restricted to the city of Cambrai. But the city, because of its importance as an administrative center and the musical fame of its cathedral, largely as a result of Du Fay’s presence there, was as cosmopolitan a city as one that was neither a political capital nor a major commercial center could be, and important visitors came through with some frequency. On 22 June 1462 the accounts of the wine and bread note a visit by Johannes Ockeghem on 2 June 1462, although we do not know how long he stayed.90 Charles the Bold, Count of Charolais, visited Cambrai in the fall of 1462, and again in December of that year with a large retinue.91 That same fall his half-brother Antoine, the “grand bastard of Burgundy,” the count of Estampes, and the duchess of Bourbon, the last one also with a large retinue, visited Cambrai.92 Although not recorded, we can be sure that each of these visits was accompanied by musical performances, most likely by the choirboys and their master, and by special efforts on the part of the small vicars to sing the liturgy with particular solemnity,93 and that the performances surely included songs, either by Du Fay or by the musicians of the visiting dignitaries. In 1463 two events took place that clearly affected Du Fay’s inner circle of friends. Pierre de Ranchicourt was elected bishop of Arras and left Cambrai. He traveled to Rome, where he was consecrated by Paul II on 17 April 1463,94 and then took up residence in Arras. Even though Ranchicourt visited Cambrai thereafter with some frequency, staying at Du Fay’s house whenever he was in the city,95 Du Fay must have felt the loss of his friend quite sharply. In an earlier study I speculated that this may be one of the events that triggered the sense of mortality reflected in Du Fay’s last setting of the antiphon Ave regina caelorum, where he interpolated a series of personal tropes, but in retrospect I think this was probably 90 91

92 93

94 95

LAN, 4G 7460, fol. 4v. Charles is recorded at Cambrai on 21 Oct. and 26 Nov., and both times the gifts of wine and bread are enormous, each adding £13 8s (LAN, 4G 5097, fol. 12v); the December visit is recorded in the acts (CBM 1060, fol. 156v). LAN, 4G 5097, fol. 12v. We must remember that the note concerning the visit of Charles in 1458 (cf. n. 57) is recorded not in the acts or a similar document, but as an entry in one of the psalters of the cathedral, almost like a grafitto. Foppens, Biblioteca Belgica, 2:1003. The visits are listed in C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 212.

Du Fay’s Activities in his Last Decade

not the case; the immediate causes that produced such a work remain unknown.96 That same year, however, Symon le Breton retired from the Burgundian chapel and returned to Cambrai, where he spent the last decade of his life. By this time Symon and Du Fay were clearly old friends. Du Fay had served as the caretaker of Symon’s house at Cambrai in the 1440s,97 and, as noted earlier, Symon was the dedicatee of Du Fay’s song Il sera par vous – L’homme armé. Breton followed Du Fay as master of the small vicars98 and became his near neighbor.99 As Du Fay’s will shows, at the end of his life Breton left Du Fay two particularly personal legacies, a music manuscript and a diptych with his own portrait and an image of the Virgin, which Du Fay instructed should be placed on the altar of the chapel of St. Stephen whenever the commemorative Masses for Du Fay and for Symon were to be said, as well as a golden Agnus Dei.100 In February 1464 Ockeghem came again to Cambrai, and this time we know he stayed for a fortnight at Du Fay’s house.101 As Wright notes, Ockeghem probably came north in the retinue of Louis XI, who sought to persuade Philip the Good in Lille to delay setting off on the crusade called by Paul II.102 This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the account of the grand métier reports that the small vicars were given an extra 40 s each for singing in the procession and the Mass on the day of “the proclamation of the crusade,” 15 March of that year.103 This was a “general procession,” and thus involved all the clergy of the city. If the weather allowed, it was to go by the Rue du Marché from the cathedral to St-Martin, returning to the cathedral by the Rue des Chanoines, followed by a Mass for the Holy Ghost with the choirboys singing the gradual and the tract.104 The term used in the payment by the grand métier, “decantatione,” indicates that the Mass was probably sung in polyphony, but we are given no information as to which music was sung. It 96 97

98 100

101 102 103 104

Planchart, “Notes on Guillaume Du Fay’s Last Works,” 63. CBM, MS 1058, fol. 119v. This is the house that C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 210, reports he had in 1460. See also ibid., 212, fig. 5, for a map indicating the houses of Symon and Du Fay. 99 See Chapter 4. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 210, 212, and fig. 5. LAN, 3G 1313, pp. 7, 21, 44, 66, and 71; see also Planchart, “The Origins,” 322–23. My experience with the wills of musicians in the 15th century indicates that the music book was most likely all the music that Symon owned; from the description by the executors, “ung livre de viesses chanteries,” it was probably a chansonnier. The golden Agnus Dei was either a small figurine with the lamb and the cross, or a medal with such an image, this last in imitation of the wax Agnus Dei that the popes distributed on the Sunday in albis. LAN, 4G 5098, fols. 12v–13r; also C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 208. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 208; see also Vaughn, Philip the Good, 369–70. LAN, 4G 5098, fol. 15r. CBM 1060, fol. 190v. The normal Mass for the day was to be said early in the morning, and the usual obits were not to be suspended. The payment reported in LAN, 4G 5098, fol. 15r, was ordered on 23 Mar. CBM 1060, fol. 191r.

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is probably no coincidence that a few months later Symon Mellet copied in the books of the cathedral Du Fay’s Missa Ecce ancilla – Beata es Maria, a work that not only uses an opening motto reminiscent of that found in Ockeghem’s Missa Ecce ancilla (even though the Masses use different cantus firmi), but more tellingly, is pitched a fourth lower than any of Du Fay’s other Masses and inhabits a range favored by Ockeghem. Together with the Du Fay Mass Mellet copied as well the Kyrie of the English Missa Caput, which Du Fay might have obtained through Ockeghem.105 It would be fascinating to know what Ockeghem and Du Fay talked about during the extended visit. By this time Binchois was dead and it must have been clear to both composers that they had no living equals. Both of them most likely knew some of the music of Regis, Caron, and others of their contemporaries whom they probably esteemed. It is possible that this meeting marks the beginning of Du Fay’s awareness of the music of Busnoys, who was then serving the count of Charolais and who was obviously known to Ockeghem. I hear such an awareness in some of Du Fay’s very late songs, such as Dieu gard la bone,106 and particularly in Vostre bruit.107 By this time Du Fay had relinquished most of his offices at the cathedral, but the acts show him still quite active, serving as a proctor or as a witness and installing chaplains. These are the routine duties of any canon, requiring little effort, unlike trips outside the city to observe the cutting of trees or the repairs of the canals that Du Fay had undertaken earlier, but read in toto and together with similar entries concerning the other canons, they yield a surprising hint of continuing bad blood between Du Fay and the cantor Jan Rodolph, who, as noted earlier, had essentially scooped the one cathedral dignity that had been held briefly by Du Fay.108 Whenever in these activities Du Fay had to interact with Rodolph, for example installing him in a benefice as the proctor of an absent cleric, the acts specify that he did so “by order of the chapter.” This phrase never appears in any other of the hundreds of similar entries concerning Du Fay or the other canons. Apparently, left to his own devices, Du Fay wanted as little to do with Rodolph as possible. In 1465 and 1466 the last two small chapters of Du Fay’s beneficial career played themselves out. By this time, in addition to the canonicates in Cambrai and Ste-Waudru, Du Fay had managed to collate the canonicate at Notre-Dame de Condé mentioned in Chapter 4,109 and he had a small

105 107

LAN, 4G 4671, fol. 24r. 106 OO Besseler 6, no. 79; OO Planchart 10/5/16. OO Besseler 6, no. 83; OO Planchart 10/5/59. 108 See p. 222. 109 See p. 193.

Du Fay’s Activities in his Last Decade

benefice in the parish church of Watiebraine near Soignies.110 As a collector for the monies from this office he had used his colleague from the papal chapel, Guillaume Le Metayer, called de Malbecque, who was a canon of StVincent de Soignies. But Malbecque died on 29 August 1465.111 Among the executors of his will was one Jehan le Roy, who in this case was probably not his colleague Johannes Regis,112 but on Malbecque’s death it was Regis, by this time well known to Du Fay, who took over the task of serving as Du Fay’s collector.113 Then on 16 June 1466 Du Fay resigned his canonicate at Condé in exchange for a chaplaincy at the altar of St. Mary in the parish church of Ohain, about 80 km east of Cambrai, with Jehan Walpois, who might be the same man who by 1496 had become a canon of Cambrai.114 Du Fay was present for the exchange and Walpois was represented by Du Fay’s own chaplain Alexandre Bouillart.115 Du Fay’s former patrons and admirers still thought about him. On 13 February 1467 Tomasso Portinari, the agent of the Medici in Bruges, wrote to Florence that he had directed the singer Simone, who was traveling in France with the purpose of recruiting singers for the chapel of San Giovanni in Florence, to Cambrai and to Douai, where there were many singers and where the Florentines had friends who could help.116 That one of the friends was Du Fay is made clear in a letter of 1 May 1467 from Antonio Squarcialupi, the renowned organist of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, to Du Fay. The letter is full of the carefully calibrated flattery that the Medici were famous for, thanking him for the quality of singers that had come from the north117 and requesting that Du Fay set to music a 110

111

112

113

114

115 117

There is no record of when Du Fay acquired this benefice, which he must have acquired in partibus, possibly because it may have happened early after he returned to Cambrai in 1439, and the chapter acts from 1439 to 1442 are lost. Mons, Archives de l’État, Chapitre St-Vincent de Soignies, Paroisses, no. 44 (will and execution of Guillaume de Malbecque), cover. The Le Roy in the will is described as “clerc d’icelle église,” while Regis was already the scholaster; Mons, Archives de l’État, Chapitre St-Vincent de Soignies, Paroisses, no. 44 (will and execution of Guillaume de Malbecque), fol. 1r; cf. also Fallows, “The Life of Johannes Regis,” 153. Cf. the execution of Du Fay’s will, LAN, 4G 1313, p. 35. The description of Regis there as “clerc au dict deffunct,” led to the misunderstanding that Regis had been a student or secretary of Du Fay. CMB 1049, fol. 99v, lists Jehan Walpois only as the successor to the canonicate of Jehan Daussut in 1513, but his name begins appearing in the lists of canons profiting from the vineyards at Wasne-au-Bac beginning in 1496 (LAN, 4G 7472 [1496–1497], fol. 3r). CBM 1060, fol. 243r. 116 See D’Accone, “The Singers,” 322. The only northern singer whose name we know is Jehan Cordier, from Tournai, who was not a singer at Cambrai (for a short summary of his career see D’Accone, “The Singers,” 322–23 and n. 45). It is worth noting that the accounts of wine and bread for 1466–1467 and 1467–1468 show no departures that could conceivably be connected with Cambrai singers leaving for

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canzon by the young Lorenzo de’ Medici.118 The survival of the letter in the Florentine archives indicates that Du Fay received it and returned it as well. Almost surely he did not set the poem to music, but apparently he suggested someone who could do so, in this case John Hothby, as James Haar and John Nádas surmise.119 They also postulate a possible visit by Hothby to Du Fay, probably in 1464, which might be the occasion when the Kyrie of the English Missa Caput reached Cambrai.120 This is not impossible, but I find it less plausible than assuming that the Kyrie was transmitted to Du Fay by Ockeghem during his visit of 1463. There are other indications that Du Fay’s music was being sought elsewhere or that the composer was intent on disseminating it. On 7 May 1465 Gilles Crepin, who had been a singer in the court of Savoy from 1 September 1461 to 31 December 1464,121 and perhaps earlier at Saint Peter’s in Rome,122 was admitted as a small vicar in the cathedral.123 Gilles left the cathedral service on 9 July 1468,124 and a mandate of 19 January 1469 from the Tesoreria Generale of Savoy, copied into the registers on 21 January, reports the following: A messire Gile Crepin jadys des chantres de la chapelle de feu mon tres redoubte le duc pere de mondit seigneur qui venoit de Picardie et alloit a Rome et appourta de la part de messire Guillaume Du Fays aucunes messes faictes en lar de musique nouvellement quil lassa es chantres de mondit seigneur en Avillane dernierement quand mondit seigneur y estoit les queulx quatre ducas du comandement que dessus pour passer son chemin qui valent 9 ff 2 gr.125

118

119

120

121 123 125

Florence. So we must conclude that Du Fay recommended singers who were not at that point active in the service of the cathedral. FAS, Mediceo avanti il principato, filza XXII, 118, 1, available online at www.archiviodistato .firenze.it/rMap/index.html (and then clicking “ricerca su filza”); facsimile also in Fortuna and Lunghetti, eds., Autografi, 104–5; edited in Kade, “Biographisches,” 113–14; partial translation in D’Accone, “The Singers,” 322; Fallows, Dufay, 76. Haar and Nádas, “Johannes de Anglia,” 291–96, including a transcription of the setting by Hothby from Mantua, Biblioteca Comunale Teresiana, MS 518, discovered by Pedro Memelsdorff; cf. Memelsdorff, “John Hothby.” A keyboard version of the song had been known from the Faenza Codex. Haar and Nádas, “Johannes de Anglia,” 346. The copying of the Kyrie by Mellet is reported in LAN, 4G 4671, fol. 24r. The entry in the account of 1463–1464 is undated but is copied near the end of the series of payments, which means that the copying took place in 1464. Bouquet, “La cappella,” 283. 122 Reynolds, Papal Patronage, 44. LAN, 4G 7463, fol. 6r. 124 LAN, 4G 7567, fol. 5v. TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 114, fol. 161r–v: “To sire Gilles Crepin, formerly of the singers of the late most feared duke, father of my said lord, who was coming from Picardy and was going to Rome, and brought on the part of sire Guillaume Du Fay some masses newly made in the art of music, which he left to the singers of my said lord in Avigliana lately, when my said lord was there, which are 4 ducats as commanded above, to allow him to go on his way, worth 9 florins 2 gross.”

Du Fay’s Activities in his Last Decade

By this time Du Fay’s former patrons in Savoy had died – Anne of Lusignan on 11 November 1462 and Louis on 29 January 1465 – but either the new rulers, Amadeus IX and Yolanda of Valois, were eager to have new works by him or the composer was eager to send them some of his music. It would stand to reason that Crepin also carried some of Du Fay’s music all the way to Rome, where he sang in the choir of St. Peter’s from at least 1471 to 1481.126 The major source of polyphony copied at St. Peter’s in the 1470s, SP B80, has a great deal of Du Fay’s music, including the Missa Ave regina caelorum, which must date from ca. 1471–1473, but nothing that would fit the description of the music that Crepin left with or perhaps lent to the Savoy singers, unless he took the Ave regina copied in 1464 with him in addition to the Masses mentioned in the Savoyard accounts, since SP B80 is the only surviving source for that work. A few months after Crepin’s departure, on 16 and 17 October 1468, a particularly important visit took place in Cambrai: the king of France and some of his court, together with Charles the Bold, the new duke of Burgundy, came to pray before the image of Notre Dame de Grace, which was kept in the chapel of the Trinity. For some time, scholars thought that this might have been the occasion for the composition of Loyset Compère’s motet Omnium bonorum plena, the text of which incorporates a long list of musicians, beginning with Du Fay and ending with the composer himself, many of which were thought to be associated with Cambrai.127 In any event, this occasion could hardly have been less auspicious for a celebratory motet of any kind. The king and the duke had met for a number of days at Péronne before their arrival at Cambrai for tense and very delicate negotiations. At that time the citizens of Liège rose in bloody revolt against Burgundy, and it became clear that some of Louis XI’s agents were implicated in fanning the discontent of the Liégeois. When Charles found out he flew into a towering rage; Louis was his guest and essentially at his mercy. The French king, to diffuse the situation, agreed to accompany Charles and help him put down the revolt, which was eventually accomplished with considerable damage to Liège and its people. The stop at Cambrai was precisely on the way between Péronne and Liège.128 Subsequent scholarship has suggested that the occasion for the 126 127

128

Reynolds, Papal Patronage, 94–95. The musicians named, in order, are Du Fay, Jehan Dussart, Busnoys, Caron, Georget de Brelles, Tinctoris, Ockeghem, Des Pres, Corbet, Hemart, Faugues, Molinet, and Compère. The literature on Omnium bonorum plena is enormous; cf. Fallows, Dufay, 77–78; id., “The Life of Johannes Regis,” 147; id., “Josquin and Trent 91,” 206–7; Finscher, “Loyset Compère”; id., Loyset Compère, 15; Rifkin et al., “Loyset Compère”; Wegman, “From Maker to Composer,” 473–75. See Kendall, Louis XI, 215–24.

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motet was perhaps the dedication of the cathedral of Cambrai in 1472,129 but the most recent studies present other possible occasions for pieces such as this motet, and also weaken considerably the connection with Cambrai itself.130 In the end Joshua Rifkin’s conclusion that we simply do not know the place and occasion of Compère’s motet is surely correct. The routine activities of Du Fay as a canon in the years after 1467 are hidden from us by the loss of register N of the chapter acts (1468–1476), but they were surely the same: serving as a witness or a procurator, installing chaplains and canons in their stall in the choir, and serving as an executor for those of his friends who had named him to oversee the executions of their wills. Jacques Carité, a canon of Cambrai since 1428 (although by 1420 he had claims to that canonicate),131 who had been a close associate of Du Fay in matters of the capitular administration in the 1440s and died on 12 July 1461, made Du Fay one of his executors.132 Gilles Flannel, Du Fay’s oldest colleague from the papal chapel, died on 7 June 1466, and the acts indicate that Du Fay was one of the executors.133 But the will itself reveals that Flannel originally did not include Du Fay among his executors, but added his name in a codicil two days after drafting his will.134 The cathedral’s official, Grégoire Nicole, died on 25 December 1469, and his will survives.135 Nicole was from Cambrai and, like Du Fay, illegitimate (his father was a subdeacon). He still had a large number of relatives in the city, and his father, Jehan Nicole, a canon of St-Géry, was 129 130

131

132

133 134

135

Montagna, “Caron, Hayne, Compère,” 110–12. Wegman, “Ockeghem, Brumel, Josquin,” 211–13; Rifkin, “Compère, ‘Des Pres,’ and the Choirmasters of Cambrai.” This was the canonicate of Arnold de Halle, the medical doctor who had an immense collection of musical instruments (d. 1417); it was granted to Thomas de Ramillies, a grand vicar, on 1 Oct. 1417 (CBM 1056, fol. 50v), but by 11 Feb. 1418 six other claimants had appeared (ibid., fol. 52v), by 15 Feb. Carité added his claim (ibid., fol. 52v), and the prebend was declared litigious on 18 May 1418 (ibid., fol. 55r). The process lasted until 6 Dec. 1428, when Carité finally collated it (CBM 1046, fol. 131v). CBM 1046, fol. 131v (death date); CBM 1060, fol. 177r (oath of the executors, 28 July). This is one of the very few instances when the executors do not present the will of the deceased to the chapter on the day of the death or on the following day, and the act adds the words “nuper defuncti,” to the account, which are usually not used in these reports. CBM 1060, fol. 241v. LAN, 4G 1337; the will is dated 4 June 1466; the list of executors is on fol. 3r, the codicil, on fol. 4v, dated 6 June 1466, adds Du Fay (using the old spelling, Du Fayt). Among Flannel’s possessions was a breviary that he had borrowed from Du Fay, and a book “to teach a priest how to say Mass” (Flannel had become a priest very late in his life), and among the legacies a gift of 40 s to Jehan Du Sart for having taught for two years in the choir school the son of Jehan Davon, a friend of Flannel. A detailed study of the will has been published in Maillard-Luypaert, “Pour le salut de mon âme,” which includes a brief but detailed biography.

Du Fay’s Activities in his Last Decade

Du Fay’s proctor, presenting his litterae de fructibus to the chapter between 1427 and 1431.136 Grégoire must have been older than Du Fay, because by 1419 he was already a magister artium.137 He studied law in Bologna and Paris, had a long and distinguished career as a Burgundian lawyer and diplomat, and was a friend of both Carlier and Du Fay. At least one of his legal works was published together with a treatise of Carlier in 1479.138 His executors included Carlier, Du Fay, and Buissart Baudoin, canons of the cathedral, Jehan le Fevre, canon of St-Géry, Symon le Lievre, canon of SteCroix, Jehan Caron, and Thomas de Liere, chaplains, and Antonin des Prez and Quintiner Fillard, clerks. The notaries were Guillaume Bouchel and Jehan de Luwere.139 He left behind an enormous library; the inventory is six folios long.140 At the end is an entry for a “liber missalis de aliquibus specialibus misis,” valued at £7, followed by an entry in French: “Item ont este trouvez xiii choyers de velin contenant plussieurs messes pour mettre avec celles dessusdites de pareil volume escripts de le main messire Simon Melle prisiez c s.”141 Du Fay modeled some of the provisions of his own will on those of Nicole. Two other friends of Du Fay died in the early 1470s, Gilles Carlier in Paris on 24 October 1472,142 and Symon le Breton on 11 or 12 November 1473.143 No will survives from either of them, but most likely Du Fay was an executor of both, all the more so in that his own will also derives some of its features from the will of Carlier, or rather from the foundations Carlier made. As his age was advancing Du Fay’s thoughts were clearly turning to his own mortality. What is surprising is how late in his life he began to make provisions to ensure that his confreres in the cathedral would offer the constant prayers that were regarded as crucial to shortening the period his soul would spend in the pains of Purgatory. It is true that he wrote the 136 137 138 140

141

142 143

LAN, 7G 573, fols. 107v, 108v, 109r, 277r. ASV, RS 133, fol. 104r (15 Oct. 1419), dispensation from the defectum natalium. See Nicole, “Scriptum domini Gregorii Nicolai.” 139 LAN, 4G 1039, fol. 1r. A good number of the volumes he left to the cathedral itself have survived. They are identified in Maillard-Luypaert, “Pour le salut de mon âme,” 20–23, with their current shelf numbers in the Mediathèque municipale at Cambrai. LAN, 4G 1039, fol. 38v. The first entry looks suspiciously similar to the contents of CBM 158, the votive missal mentioned earlier in this chapter that had rubrics accounting for the performance of polyphonic votive Masses. Could the thirteen fascicles of Masses in the hand of Mellet have been yet another polyphonic collection? CBM 1046, fol. 92r. CBM 1046, fol. 70bisr, gives 12 Nov., but in CBM 1049, p. 29, Tranchant reports an epitaph, two lines of which he could not read because they were worn out: “Hic iacet venerandus vir Symon / [two lines illegible] / anno domini millesimo quadrigentesimo / septuagesimo tertio undecima mensis / novembris,” which is surely le Breton’s epitaph.

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motet Ave regina caelorum with the tropes praying for his salvation in 1464,144 but it was not until 1470 that Du Fay began setting up the mechanism to ensure the official intercession of the community for the salvation and the rest of his soul. This is in sharp contrast to what a number of his fellow canons did, particularly his friends Grégoire Nicole and Gilles Carlier, on whose foundations Du Fay modeled his own. Both of them, as will be shown later, established their foundations decades before their death.

The Foundation of His Obit, the Missa Ave regina caelorum The form Du Fay chose for his foundation had not been common in Cambrai. It consisted of endowing a Mass for the Blessed Virgin to be said on a given date, which would then become an obit after the death of the founder. This kind of foundation was popular elsewhere, and it is likely that it is owing to such a foundation that we have Guillaume de Machaut’s La messe de Nostre-Dame.145 But in Cambrai the practice, amply attested by the records of the fabric, was the endowment of a simple obit that began after the death of the founder, the foundation of “doubles,” that is the augmentation of the solemnity of a given feast, the foundation of a “Salve service,” a short Marian office including the singing of the Salve regina in front of a specific altar or image, often in polyphony, the endowment of polyphonic singing at a specific office, or less frequently the endowment of a solemn Mass, which was independent of the obit and continued as a Mass after the death of the founder.146 Three examples of this last type of foundation were celebrated in the fifteenth century at Cambrai: the Masses endowed by Mathieu de Herleville, Ernoul Logier, and Pierre d’Ailly. Herleville must have founded his Mass shortly before his death in 1433, and Logier before his in 1451. The Mass of Ailly must have been founded when he left Cambrai after his elevation to the cardinalate in 1411, but the earliest mention of these Masses in the Cambrai documents date from 1451–1452, when the accounts of the fabric began to report the expenses for endowed Masses in detail.147 The kind of endowment established by Du Fay was established for the first time in Cambrai in 1450 by 144 146 147

See earlier in this chapter. 145 Robertson, “The Mass of Guillaume de Machaut.” For a number of these foundations see Strohm, The Rise, 285. LAN, 4G 4657, fol. 21v, for the Masses of Herleville and Logier. The Mass of Ailly was recorded in the accounts of the small vicars, which have a huge lacuna from 1411 to 1453; we find the first record of it in LAN, 4G 6789 (1453–1454), fol. 1v.

The Foundation of his Obit, the Missa Ave regina caelorum

Fursy du Bruille, the archdeacon of Valenciennes and the man who left to the cathedral the image of Notre-Dame de Grace. That same year his example was followed by Gilles Carlier, the dean, and Grégoire Nicole, the official.148 Du Bruille died in December 1450,149 and for the next fifteen years these were the only such foundations at Cambrai. In 1465–1466 Reignault des Lyons, who eventually was one of Du Fay’s executors, established such a Mass/obit, as did Nicole Plonchet, the scholaster,150 followed in 1469–1470 by Klaus van Valkenisse, the archdeacon of Antwerp,151 and in 1471–1472 by Du Fay.152 All of these men except for Du Fay were dignitaries of the cathedral and several of them were also close associates or friends of Du Fay. In a certain sense, Du Fay’s foundation was both the new fashion and the way the elite among the canons were doing things. The most common manner to establish a foundation was to purchase some land that already had a productive use, be it agriculture or buildings that could be leased, and then donate it to the cathedral chapter, which would administer it and use the revenue to pay for the Masses and other foundations that had been established. The office that usually administered most of the real estate of the cathedral chapter was the assize, which until 1454 was a single office. That year the administration of the properties in Cambrésis, Tournaisis, Artois, and the lordships of Bouchain and Le Cateau was separated from that of the properties in Brabant, Flanders, and Hainaut. The new administration was called the Assise du Cambrésis and later Petite Assise (after 1490); the other accounts remained as the accounts of the Assise until 1500, when they began to be called Grande Assise.153 The accounts of the assise have a lacuna from 1465–1466 to 1474–1475, but in the account of the latter year we encounter the following notation among the accounts from Brabant: Item in dicto anno lxx. empti fuerunt de pecuniis magistri Guillermi du fay et magistri Iohannis de busco / pro fundatione obituum ipsorum in ecclesia cameracencis / etiam a prefato domino Iohanne taye milite / manente in bruxella / terras arabiles / prata nemora et vinaria situata in parochia de verselle / quequidem hereditagia a domino abbate de dielenghem / ac etiam octo capones perpetui redditus super unam domum et hereditagium in dicta parochia et ante ecclesiam

148

149 150 153

The first record of the three endowments, entered in immediate succession, is the account of the fabric for 1450–1451, LAN, 4G 4657, fol. 7v. CBM 1058, fol. 246r (19 Dec. 1450); the executors present his will. LAN, 4G 4673, fol. 7v. 151 LAN, 4G 4677, fol. 7v. 152 LAN, 4G 4679, fol. 7v. Bruchet and Piétresson de Saint-Aubin, Repertoire numérique, ser. G, II, 683 and 702.

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dicte ville de verselle / Quorum quid hereditagiorum declaratio / ac etiam quibus censitoribus / quantum / et spatium quo censita sunt / ad longum sequitur.154

This is followed by a detailed description of the lands and their tenants, covering two and a half pages closely written. The entry and the description (reporting whatever changes in tenancy there were) is repeated in every surviving account of the assise for more than a century, until the invasion of Cambrai by the French in 1579. The nature of Du Fay’s foundation is also detailed in two entries in the necrology of the cathedral. The second of these reads: Die quinta Augusti in quaquidem solemnitas agitur sancte Marie ad Nives fiet de eadem beata maria missa celebris pro magistro Guillermo du fay Canonico sacerdote quamdiu vivet et post decessum eius obitus de 12 lb turon. Distribuendis prout in missa domini decani continetur.155

The payments to all those involved are detailed in the same necrology in an accounting that is virtually identical to the provisions in Du Fay’s will.156 Du Fay, then, had bought some lands in 1470 in Bersele near Brussels together with Jehan Du Bois, another of the canons, in order to fund their respective obits. It is not surprising, then, to find in the accounts of the fabric on 5 July 1470 a payment to Symon Mellet for copying in the new choirbooks a Magnificat of the fifth tone and a Requiem Mass “newly put together” (de novo compilata) by Du Fay.157 Neither work survives,158 but Du Fay willed a manuscript containing the Requiem to the chapel of St. Stephen,159 and a later account of the singing of what was surely Du Fay’s 154

155

156

157 158

159

LAN, 4G 5431, fol. 4v: “Likewise in the said year 70 there were bought with the money of Master Guillaume Du Fay and Master Jean Dubois for the foundation of their obits in the church of Cambrai, also by the aforesaid Jehan Taye, knight, resident in Brussels, arable lands, fields, woods, and vineyards situated in the parish of Bersele, which heritable lands are held from the Lord Abbot of Dieleghem and also eight capons of perpetual rent for one house and hereditament in the said parish and before the church of the said town of Bersele. The declaration of which hereditaments and also by what assessors and how large the area for which they were assessed [for rent] follows at length.” CBM 39, fol. 56r: “On the fifth day of August when the solemnity of St Mary of the Snows takes place, let it be celebrated with a solemn Mass of the same St Mary for Master Guillaume Du Fay, canon, priest, for as long as he lives, and after his death his obit to 12 lb. of Tours, distributed as indicated in the Mass of the lord dean.” CBM 39, fol. 31v; the same entry appears in LAN, 4G 2009, fol. 38v. This is the second of two fragmentary necrological calendars of the grand vicars; cf. Haggh, “Nonconformity,” 373 and n. 5. LAN, 4G 4678, fol. 22v; Houdoy, Histoire, 198; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 251. It is not entirely clear from the wording of the entry that the magnificat is by Du Fay, but if it is (which is the most probable reading), it is surely not the surviving Magnificat quinti toni, which would have been between thirty and forty years old by then. LAN, 4G 1313, p. 71; Planchart, “The Books,” 175–76.

The Foundation of his Obit, the Missa Ave regina caelorum

Requiem at a meeting of the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1507 indicates that apparently Du Fay also wrote a polyphonic setting of the Office of the Dead.160 In a recent study I have attempted to show how the manuscript that Du Fay left to the chapel of St. Stephen most likely included that Office as well.161 The Requiem would be the work intended to be sung, together with the Office of the Dead, not only at Du Fay’s funeral but also at his obit after his death. Du Fay’s foundation, however, was for a Mass of the Virgin to be sung on the day he had chosen for his obit until his death, after which it turned into a Requiem Mass. He apparently set out to write a setting, probably around the time he established his obit. It stands to reason that this work is the Missa Ave regina caelorum, as Strohm suggested.162 It is a clearly a very late work that goes beyond being a cantus-firmus Mass and incorporates elements of a new genre that Peter Burkholder has called “imitation Mass”163 in that it cites passages from Du Fay’s earlier motet, Ave regina caelorum, where the composer added tropes asking the Virgin to intercede for his soul at the time of his death, a motet that he specifically requested be sung on his deathbed.164 The Mass is an extraordinarily complex work and appears to have had a complicated and slow gestation. The evidence for this is tenuous and difficult to evaluate; it includes aspects of the work itself, and the records we have concerning the celebration of Du Fay’s obit and the copying of what is surely this Mass into the choirbooks of Cambrai. The Mass survives in four copies, two of them fragmentary,165 and as Wegman has shown, all show traces of both compositional revisions and editorial changes.166 Even the copy closest to Du Fay’s original, that in Br 5557,167 has what is surely an editorial attempt to make sense of the irregular shape of the Kyrie,168 and an erasure that indicates that originally 160 162 164 165

166 167

168

Prizer, “Music and Ceremonial,” 133. 161 Planchart, “The Books,” 199–204. Strohm, The Rise, 283–87. 163 Burkholder, “Johannes Martini and the Imitation Mass.” LAN, 4G 1313, pp. 19 and 70. Br 5557, fols. 110v–120v (complete); ModD, no. 14 (complete); Poz, gathering 1: fols. 1v–2v and 5r–8v (isolated fragments); SP B80, fols. 9v–20v (incomplete). Modern editions: OO Besseler 3, no 4; OO Planchart 3/7; Du Fay, Missa Ave regina caelorum, ed. Feininger. Wegman, “Miserere supplicanti.” The Mass is in a separate fascicle, copied some time after 1474, which forms part of a series of appendices to the original manuscript; cf. Wegman, Choirbook, 5–8. Du Fay left a manuscript of the Mass to the duke of Burgundy in his will (LAN, 4G 1313, p. 7), but apparently the Burgundian chapel already had a copy of the work and the copy in Br 5557 reflects a conflation of both copies. The original structure of the movement, according to Wegman, “Miserere supplicanti,” 43, was Kyrie, Kyrie, Christe, Christe, Kyrie, Kyrie, Kyrie, and at one point indications to repeat Kyrie 1 after Kyrie 2, and Christe 1 after Christe 2, were added. Wegman is surely correct; the added repetitions disrupt the structure of the movement and the expanded Kyrie disrupts the proportional balance of the entire Mass. There are occasionally such irregular structures in

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in the version of the Mass in this manuscript measures 120–29 of the Agnus Dei were missing.169 In addition, in Kyrie 2 parts labeled elsewhere as contra and bassis [sic], are labeled concordans, suggesting that Kyrie 2 was at one point a duet.170 Christe 2 appears in two forms, as a two-voice canon with a concordans part or as a simple duet between the cantus and a slightly different concordans part, and the next-to-last Kyrie is a duet between cantus and contra with a concordans si placet. These variants are more extensive and substantial than what we find in any other major work of Du Fay, and suggest that he subjected the work to some extensive revisions at one point or another.171 What we can glean about the history of its performances at the cathedral suggests that this is the case and hints at a possible explanation. Du Fay did not buy lands for the establishment of his Mass until 1470, and the records of the fabric and the grand métier record the first celebration of Du Fay’s Mass in 1471, but they give different dates. The accounts of the fabric, which seldom give the dates of these foundations and probably simply followed the established plan, gives in this case 5 August for the Mass founded by the archdeacon of Antwerp, Klaus van Valkenisse, and 8 August for the Mass founded by Du Fay, even though Du Fay had requested the same day as Valkenisse.172 This would have been the normal manner of resolving such a conflict. Valkenisse’s foundation was older than Du Fay’s and he was a dignitary of the cathedral. To deal with these possible conflicts many of the foundations, for example that of Gilles Carlier, which served as the model for Du Fay’s, gave the preferred date followed by the terms vel circiter (or near).173 But the record of the grand métier, indicating the distribution of the thirty loaves of bread to the poor during such Masses, and probably recording more accurately the immediate circumstances of their celebration, reports Du Fay’s Mass on 5 August and van Valkenisse’s on 31 August.174 Apparently Du Fay made an issue of the matter and his Mass displaced that of Valkenisse, because all of the

169 170 171

172

173

174

Renaissance Masses, for example in the Kyrie of Orlando di Lasso’s Missa In te domine speravi, which has two separate Christe eleison movements. All measure numbers refer to the edition in OO Planchart 3/7. See Bent, “Trompetta and Concordans,” 65–67. Wegman, “Miserere supplicanti,” makes a detailed case for what can be considered revisions and what may be the result of editorial changes by different scribes. LAN, 4G 4679, fol. 7r. On Du Fay’s request, see p. 271; Valkenisse’s foundation is described earlier as well. CBM 39, fol. 56r: “Octava die vel circiter Februarii fiet missa solemnis de beata virgine Maria pro magistro Egidio Carlerii . . .” LAN, 4G 5104, fol. 18v. In “Notes on Guillaume Du Fay’s Last Works,” 67, I misread the shelf number in my notes and assumed the entry was for 1472–1473.

The Foundation of his Obit, the Missa Ave regina caelorum

accounts of the grand métier, and later those of the aumosne, that report the date of these ceremonies place Du Fay’s on 5 August and Valkenisse’s one to three days later, depending on the year. This is procedurally very unusual in the records of the cathedral, and I have argued that the date was important to Du Fay because it was his birthday.175 Strohm has made an interesting argument that Du Fay chose that day because it is the feast of Our Lady of Snows, commemorating the miracle (a snowfall in August in Rome) whereby the Virgin indicated the place where Santa Maria Maggiore was to be built. Du Fay’s early patron, Martin V, was buried there, and Santa Maria del Fiore, for whose dedication Du Fay wrote Nuper rosarum flores, is a daughter foundation.176 But it is worth noting that the feast of Our Lady of Snows, although popular throughout northern Europe at the time, was all but unknown at Cambrai. The earliest mention of it is Du Fay’s foundation in the Cambrai necrological calendar, and after that all the Cambrai calendars still mention only St. Sixtus on 5 August until the early sixteenth century. And the entire career of Du Fay suggests that he was considerably more of a conciliarist than a romanist in his religious sympathies. His years in Rome, even though productive, were probably not particularly settled or happy. Echoes of the conflict between Du Fay and Valkenisse can be traced in the archdeacon’s later career (as echoes of Du Fay’s conflict with the cantor can be traced in his own later career). Valkenisse had become a canon in 1441, and had been in residence since then.177 He became archdeacon of Antwerp in September 1454,178 had established his obit, and clearly was planning to die in Cambrai. But in November 1477 he moved to Brabant, most likely to Antwerp,179 and apparently neglected his duties, so the chapter appointed Jehan du Caurel as coadjutor in January 1478.180 Valkenisse fought this and apparently managed to have Du Caurel removed in February 1480.181 He died away from Cambrai on 4 January 1481.182 Although Du Fay succeeded in establishing his Mass loco obitus in 1471, it does not appear that the Missa Ave regina was ready to be sung at this time, and the funds coming from the lands in Bersele were apparently insufficient. In 1471 the aumosne records the alms distributed at the Masses

175 176 177

178 181

Planchart, “Notes on Guillaume Du Fay’s Last Works,” 64–65. Strohm, The Rise, 285–87. CBM 1064, fol. 138v. The chapter acts attest to his continuous presence in Cambrai from 1442 on (there is a lacuna in the acts from 1439 to 1442). CBM 1059, fol. 105v (30 Sept. 1454). 179 CBM 1061, fol. 33v. 180 Ibid., fol. 36r. Ibid., fol. 88v. 182 Ibid., fol. 133v.

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established by Carlier, Nicolai, and other canons, but none for Du Fay’s Mass.183 The account for 1472–1473 has the following entry among the receipts: Item a bursario chori pro elemosina fundata per venerabilem virum magistrum Guillermum du Fay huius ecclesie canonicum de xxxa albis panibus canonicalibus distribuendis xxxta pauperibus fiende in die sue misse sollempnis loco sui obitus futuri qui celebrabitur quinta augusti et quia hoc anno idem dominus solvit dictam elemosinam ex suis propriis denariis ideo hic – nichil.184

Apparently the funds generated by 1471 were not sufficient to cover the cost of this traditional gift to the poor at his Mass, so Du Fay covered it out of his own pocket. In addition, the accounts of the aumosne do not list the payments to the priest or the chaplain at the service when it was sung in polyphony for 1471 or 1472. Only in the accounts of 1473–1474 do we find such payment: Item pro similis distributionis elemosine fundate per magistrum Guillermum Du Fay canonicum in die sue misse sollemnis loco obitus sui futuri qui fit communiter vta augusti vel circiter dno celebranti et cappellano cuilibet eorum 6 d sunt 12 d185

And it is therefore probably no coincidence that the accounts of the fabric pay Symon Mellet in 1473–1474, most likely in the spring of 1474, for copying a Missa Ave regina caelorum, together with a prose Ave Maria and a tract Desiderium, by order of Du Fay.186 It appears that the Mass was not finished until 1472, and was not sung in Du Fay’s foundation until 1473. Given these financial problems it is not surprising that in 1472 Du Fay teamed up with the cathedral’s wealthiest canon, Raoul Mortier, who was to be one of his executors,187 in order to buy more lands, this time in 183 184

185

186

187

LAN, 4G 7765 (1471–1472), fol. 17r–v. LAN, 4G 7765 (1472–1473), fol. 4r. “Item, from the bursar of the choir for the alms founded by the venerable man Master Guillaume Du Fay, canon of this church, of 30 white canonical loaves of bread to be distributed to 30 poor men, to be done in the day of his solemn Mass in place of his future obit that is to be celebrated on the fifth day of August, and because this year that same lord paid said alms from his own monies, therefore here – nothing.” LAN, 4G 7765 (1473–1474), fol. 20r: “Item for a similar distribution of alms founded by Master Guillaume Du Fay, canon, in the day of his solemn Mass in place of his future obit, which is done usually the 5th of August or thereabouts, to the lord celebrant and the chaplain, each 6 d, are 12 d.” 4G 4681, fol. 21v: “Item domino Simoni Mellet magno vicario pro scribendo et notulando in novis libris unam missam super Ave regina caelorum / ac pro prosa Ave Maria necnon novum factum / et tractus desiderium / soluti fuerunt pro dictis partibus in quadam cedula declaratis signata G du Fay 53 s 4 d.” The will of Mortier, who died on 12 Aug. 1480, LAN, 4G 1467, shows he had lent money to the chapter and to several people. He had immense landholdings that yielded £2,883 17s 1d

The Dedication of the Cathedral of Cambrai

Wodeque, to augment his obit and to pay for the foundation he had made of four crowns, large iron candelabras with numerous candles, that were to be lit during Easter.188 The accounts of the assize for 1474–1475, which are the earliest that survive after Du Fay’s purchases, record this transaction: Item in anno lxii acquisti fuerunt per dominos magistrum guillermum dufay et R mortier in territorio de Wodecque a Remigio Ioffrin de Lessines hereditagia sequentes . . .189

The Dedication of the Cathedral of Cambrai The situation in 1472, then, was probably as follows. The Missa Ave regina caelorum was nearing completion or had just been finished, and Du Fay had finally secured enough funds to pay for all of his foundations, when the chapter decided to conduct the long-delayed dedication of the cathedral.190 The chapter acts for 1468–1476 (old register N), which would have detailed the preparations, are lost, but the accounts of the fabric for 1471–1472, which normally go from the feast of St. John Baptist (24 June) in one year to the day before the same feast the next, have an appendix concerning the expenses for the dedication of the church going from 18 June to 7 July 1472.191 The expenses are for the immediate preparations but give the impression of being a last flurry of activity after some longer planning. The first payment is to Paul Auclou, Robert’s nephew and now the chapter’s solicitor, who received £23 12s 4d for having gone to Rome to get the supplications by the chapter concerning the dedication and the indulgences connected with it submitted to the chancery.192 The payment is

188 189

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191 192

(fol. 19r). The total value of his estate was £8,961 2s 2d (fol. 19v), and the residual estate after all debts and legacies was still £6,540 5s 6d (fol. 28r). This foundation is mentioned in the execution of his will, LAN, 4G 1313, p. 26. LAN, 4G 5431, fol. 23v: “Item in the year 72 were acquired by the lords Master Guillaume Du Fay and R. Mortier, in the territory of Wodeque, from Rémy Joffrin from Lessines, the following lands . . .” There follows a detailed description of the lands and their measurements. From this Du Fay derived £46 11s, for the Easter crowns and for the augmentation of his obit. The chapter had already established a committee to see about the dedication in 1453; CBM 1059, fol. 51r (7 Mar. 1453): “Ad videndum de presenti ecclesie dedicatione / ac de indulgentiis obtenendis pro visitantibus et benefactoribus ecclesie / commituntur domini dignitates / Lamberti, de Leonibus, Q Gerardi, Beringhen, Valkenisse, G Nicolai, et Greneti.” LAN, 4G 4679, fols. 31r–32v. LAN, 4G 4679, fol. 31r. These supplications, to my knowledge, have not yet turned up in the registers. If they have survived they will surely be published eventually when the immense database compiled by Adalbert Roth over the last three decades sees the light.

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undated, but even if it was made between the dates indicated at the head of the entry it is for something that must have taken several months to do, first traveling to Rome, then negotiating the complex and not very prompt workings of the apostolic chancery,193 and then returning to Cambrai. A second undated payment is to the senior cathedral messenger, Gilles Faloen, who had been to Brussels to present letters to bishop Jehan de Bourgongne concerning the dedication.194 Since most of the other entries are dated, these two are nominally from 18 June 1472, but clearly are for events that took place some time before that date. The canons, of course, had to ask their bishop to officiate at the dedication, but they could not have had any illusions about what he would do: Jehan de Bourgogne had not set foot in Cambrai since 1442. So the chapter probably had an alternative plan from the beginning. Pierre de Ranchicourt, the bishop of nearby Arras, was himself a nobleman, had been a canon of Cambrai, and through his friendship with Du Fay had visited the city numerous times since his elevation, always staying at Du Fay’s house, where he had his private rooms. He had been in Cambrai on 14 January 1472, when he received wine at Du Fay’s house,195 and one can be sure that the dedication of the cathedral was discussed then. On 19 June 1472, Jehan de Rosut, a canon (and eventually an executor of Du Fay’s will), and Guillaume Bouchel, chaplain of the cathedral, canon of Ste-Croix and the secretary of the chapter, traveled to Arras to ask Ranchicourt to come and dedicate the cathedral.196 They were successful; the very next day Ranchicourt sent two of his secretaries, Mathieu du Hamel and Hughes (no last name given), canons of Arras, to Cambrai to make the necessary preparations, and the chapter sent one of the compagnons, possibly a chaplain, to Rome with further letters concerning the indulgences.197 The account continues with detailed payments for ornaments and other decorations for the church. Then follow an astonishing set of accounts for lunch and dinner at Du Fay’s house, on 3 July, the day after the dedication, followed by dinners every day until the seventh of that month. The expenses were immense: £6 6s 2d on the first day, £11 3s 6d on the second, £4 15s on the third, £4 4d on the fourth, 40s 6d on the fifth, and a total wine bill for all five days of £10 10s.198 This amounts what Du Fay would have paid in rent for his house for eight months of the year.

193 194 195

On this, see Starr, “Rome as the Centre of the Universe.” LAN, 4G 4679, fol. 31r. Faloen was gone five days and received 30s. LAN, 4G 5104, fol. 9r. 196 LAN, 4G 4679, fol. 31r. 197 Ibid. 198 Ibid., fols. 31v–32r.

The Dedication of the Cathedral of Cambrai

Under these circumstances it appears that Du Fay held his Marian Mass from his obit in 1472 and had it sung for the first time at the dedication. It was, after all, a Mass for the Queen of Heaven, which is precisely the image of the Virgin to which the cathedral was dedicated. For centuries the major Marian feast at Cambrai was the Assumption, and a long hagiographic tradition viewed the arrival of Mary in heaven as the occasion of her coronation as the regina caelorum. There are a number of indications that this was the case. The first is the revisions of the Mass as shown in Brussels 5557, the additions of concordans and si placet voices, and the clever canon in Christe 2, which make the piece even more splendid, and, as Wegman notes, the suppression (later changed in the manuscript) of measures 120–29 of Agnus 2,199 eliminating the citation of the passage in the motet with Du Fay’s name in it. This indicates, as Wegman notes, that there was apparently a “public” and a “private” version of the work,200 which would be consistent with the scenario postulated here. Reinhard Strohm, who first raised objections to the view I had proposed in 1972, that the Mass was written for the dedication,201 was indeed correct in this point: the Mass was not written for the dedication, but it was most likely completed shortly before and then used for this ceremony. Strohm’s thesis, that since Jehan de Rosut’s endowment for the dedication was the customary set of a motet and a hymn at Vespers and should be read as an exclusion of the Mass and as a symptom that the Du Fay Mass was therefore not sung at the dedication,202 is actually untenable. What Rosut was funding was adding a polyphonic motet and a polyphonic hymn to the Vespers of a feast, something that, as Strohm points out, was customary at Cambrai in terms of amplifying the solemnity of the feast. There was no need to add a polyphonic Mass to it because at Cambrai it had been customary since the late 1440s to have the Mass sung in polyphony at all the major feasts. This was surely a result of Du Fay’s own activity in the 1440s and is reflected in the copying of four clearly systematic volumes of polyphony for the Ordinary and the Proper in 1449 by Symon Mellet,203 and in the greatly increased copying of polyphonic Mass music one finds in

199 200 202

203

The measure numbers are those in OO Planchart 3/7. Wegman, “Miserere Supplicanti,” 48–49. 201 Strohm, The Rise, 284–86. The endowment appears in Cambrai 39, fol. 57r, and in LAN, 4G 2009, fols. 61v–62r; Strohm’s argument in The Rise, 286. See earlier in this chapter. What should be stressed here is that such a collection bespoke a systematic approach to the singing of polyphony in the cathedral. In this, as I note in “Institutional Politics,” 140, Cambrai was several decades ahead of other northern institutions. But this, in terms of its implications, was not known when Strohm was writing.

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the accounts of the fabric between 1450 and 1475.204 The singing of a polyphonic Ordinary at such an occasion at Cambrai would have been routine by 1472, and the choice of which polyphonic setting to sing would surely have devolved upon the master of the small vicars. All direct evidence of who the master was is missing, but as noted earlier, the master of the small vicars from June 1472 to June 1474 was almost certainly Du Fay,205 and it would stand to reason that for an occasion of such importance for the chapter and clearly for him personally as well, officiated by one of his closest friends, he would have felt the need to add his own contribution to the liturgical splendor. The dedication of the cathedral is the last major event we know in Du Fay’s life; it was an extraordinary and solemn occasion attended by clergy from all over the region. Even the bare bones of the account in the records of the fabric indicate that Du Fay probably played an important role in the ceremonies, their preparation, and their aftermath.

The Funeral Monument By June 1474 Du Fay was by all standards a very old man. Probably during that year he commissioned a funeral monument that was to be mounted on the wall of the chapel of St. Stephen, near the place where he would be buried. His epitaph was not noted in the epitaph collections made in the sixteenth century by Julien de Ligne, and in the eighteenth by Henri-Denis Mutte or François-Dominique Tranchant,206 most likely because the stone was covered either by a tapestry or by a piece of furniture. Miraculously, because it was sculpted on the very brittle and fragile slate of Tournai,207 it survived the demolition of the cathedral and was discovered, fractured and face down, serving as a stepping stone to a well of the house of canon PierreJoseph Thénard in 1859. It was reassembled and in 1866 Thénard gave it to the collection of Victor Delattre, who published a description of it.208 At his death in 1889 the monument was bought by the Musée des Beaux Arts in Lille.209 The monument was so fragile that it was not exhibited. In 1981, when I sought to see it, it was in storage in the basement of what remains of

204 205 206 207 209

Most readily available in Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 237–55. See earlier in this chapter. De Ligne and Mutte’s collections in CBM 699 and 701, Tranchant in CBM 1049. Cf. Nys, La Pierre de Tournai. 208 Delattre, “Recueil d’épigraphie cambrésienne.” Nys, “Un relief tournaisien,” 7.

The Funeral Monument

the Palais Rihour, the former chapel of the dukes of Burgundy in Lille, and the museum kindly allowed me to take a number of photographs, which remain the only visual modern record of the monument between the early twentieth century and the recent restorations.210 In the late 1980s the monument was exhibited in the foyer of the museum. It had been partially restored largely by the removal of additions made in an earlier restoration in the late nineteenth century, namely the face of Christ and Du Fay’s hands. I also took some photographs of it then, but when I returned in 1991 in the hope of taking more photographs and close-ups, the museum had been closed for restoration and it remained closed until 1997. At that time the monument was sent to the atelier at Versailles for a careful restoration, and did not return to Lille until 2001. The restoration was extremely careful, and the stone is now exhibited in a wooden frame and on a pedestal that is slightly inclined backward in order to minimize gravity’s pull on the fissures, but this, and the particular lighting in the gallery, mostly sharply focused spotlights that hit the monument at a sharp angle, make it impossible to obtain a good image of it. The museum has taken a good photograph of the entire stone post restoration; its only flaw is that the lighting needed to counteract the sharp spotlights “bleaches out” the stone color, making it appear almost white rather than dark gray.211 Figures 6.1 to 6.5 show the monument in 1981, 1990, and 2001, as well as close-ups of Du Fay’s face in 1981 and 1990. The stone shows Du Fay in his aumusse, kneeling on the left; behind him stands St. Waudru, preceded by her two daughters, St. Aldétrude and St. Madelberte; at the center an angel presides over the rising Christ, who steps out of his tomb with two stunned soldiers in front; the one on the left virtually in a position of worship and the one on the right absolutely terrified by the event; on the extreme right is a third soldier astonished by what he is seeing. The setting is that of a gothic chapel with a ribbed ceiling. The iconography of the three soldiers is part of the normal iconography of the resurrection,212 and the presence of St. Waudru and her daughters is clearly explained by the fact that Du Fay had been a canon of Ste-Waudru since 1447, and this canonicate was extremely important to his self-image.

210

211

212

The museum retained copies of my photographs, but I am no longer sure of whether these copies still exist. The restoration is described in Brejon de Lavergnée, Une année de restaurations au Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille. An even more detailed technical account of the restoration appears in Balcar, “La restauration,” 39–43. Tondreau, “Iconographie de Sainte Waudru,” 209.

299

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Figure 6.1 Du Fay’s funeral monument in 1972. Photo author.

Ludovic Nys notes that the imagery of the entire stone is an unusual one. Among the surviving ex-votos in Tournai stone or in the wills that Nys has examined, the scene of the resurrection is entirely absent.213 He also observes that the floral decoration in the frame of the scene is very unusual,214 and notes the similarities between the mise en scène of the monument and Italian designs, such as the Florentine engraving of the resurrection (ca. 1461?) in the Albertina Museum in Vienna.215 Many of the tombiers from Tournai made such monuments for the clergy of the region in the late fifteenth century.216 Du Fay most likely gave the tombier an engraving or a drawing that he might have acquired in Italy decades before as a possible model. In addition, the choice of scene was also surely Du Fay’s. It is impossible not to sense the importance of the resurrection story in his own music, from the extraordinary tropes in the early Gloria–Credo pair,217 213 217

Nys, “Un relief tournaisien,” 15. 214 Ibid. OO Besseler 4, no. 4; OO Planchart 5/4.

215

Ibid., 14–15.

216

Ibid., 16–17.

The Funeral Monument

Figure 6.2 Du Fay’s funeral monument in 1990. Photo author.

to the climax of the Agnus Dei (and thus of the entire Mass) in the Missa L’homme armé,218 to the burst of sesquialtera at “et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum” in the Missa Ave regina caelorum,219 and the final visio beatifica in the final Agnus Dei of the same work,220 and in his endowment of five crowns to be lit during Easter Mass,221 the endowment of tapers to be lit in front of his funeral monument during the same Mass (among other feasts), and the endowment of a Mass (surely a low Mass) to be said in the chapel of St. Stephen, at the same time as the Easter Mass was being celebrated in the choir, with a memorial for himself and his benefactors.222 Du Fay had his seal and his carefully worded epitaph sculpted in relief, with the space for the date of his death left to be sculpted at the appropriate time.

218 220

OO Besseler 3, no. 2; OO Planchart 3/5. 219 OO Planchart 3/7, Credo, mm. 152 ff. LAN, 4G 1313, p. 25. 221 See earlier in this chapter. 222 See Appendix 4.

301

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Figure 6.3 Du Fay’s monument at the present time (by permission of the Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille).

Du Fay’s Will Du Fay probably had his funeral monument made before the summer of 1474. In June of that year, on St. Barnabas Day, as we know from the account of the small vicars, he was replaced as master of the small vicars by Martin Courtois, a native of Cambrai who had been a choirboy and a small vicar at the cathedral, had served in the chapel of Louis XI for twenty-one years, and had become a canon of Cambrai in 1463.223 At around that time he must have called upon the chapter’s notary, Guillaume Bouchel, and drawn up his will, which was witnessed on 8 July by canons Jehan Du Bois, then the head of the grand métier224 and the man with whom Du Fay had 223 224

See Appendix 1. Du Fay’s will is, in fact, our only source of this knowledge, since the acts for these years are lost and the accounts of the grand métier do not give the master’s name for these years but rather the name of the chaplain who actually wrote them down, Paul Auclou.

Du Fay’s Will

Figure 6.4 Du Fay’s face in 1982. Photo author.

Figure 6.5 Detail of Du Fay’s face in 1993. Photo author.

acquired the lands in Bersele, and Jacques Michel,225 and the chaplain Nicaise de l’Espine.226 The will and its execution are both fascinating documents – the first, in many ways, for what it does not tell, and the second for the picture it draws of the clearly comfortable and wellappointed household of Du Fay in his later years. Already Houdoy and Dartus noted the strangely impersonal tone of the will, with little or no mention of Du Fay’s relatives.227 This is in sharp contrast to the will of his friend Grégoire Nicole, a local man and also illegitimate, who had a distinguished legal and ecclesiastical career. In his will Nicole leaves dozens of legacies to his relatives, many of them mentioned with real affection, and makes legacies to fulfill the desires of his own father concerning the family’s property.228 The impersonal tone of Du Fay’s will, which requests prayers “pro animabus mea, parentum et benefactorum meorum,”229 with no further elaboration, together with a complaint from Jennin du Chemin, a cousin in Bruges, who had been left out of the will even though he had sent Du Fay delicacies from Bruges for 225

226 228

By a strange coincidence Michel died the same day as Du Fay; his will survives in LAN, 4G 1427; cf. also C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 119, citing the entry for the general chapter on the day after Epiphany in 1475. LAN, 4G 1313, p. 75. 227 Houdoy, Histoire, 89–90; Dartus, A Propos, 284–85. LAN, 4G 1039. 229 LAN, 4G 1313, p. 70.

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seventeen to twenty years,230 and the decision of the executors to increase the legacy to Pierre du Wez by £30 to compensate for keeping Du Fay’s house during the seven years he was in Savoy, plus other unspecified services for which he had not been paid,231 have led Fallows to assume that Du Fay, at the end of his life, was “a difficult and mean man.”232 This is not impossible, but what Dartus sensed, which is that Du Fay early on had some difficulties, is also germane.233 Du Fay appears to have been the child of a rape, whose very existence reminded many of his relatives of the shame of the family. He was apparently quite ashamed of this and sought to hide his illegitimacy more thoroughly and more successfully than any of his contemporaries at Cambrai or in the papal chapel. By the time Jennin began to send delicacies, Du Fay was a famous man who had worked for two popes, the dukes of Savoy and Burgundy, and the Malatesta, and was courted by the Este and the Medici. Du Fay might well have felt that it was only now that his relatives were ready to acknowledge him. There may also be another aspect of his character late in life that is revealed by the inventory of his possessions. The first few entries are a description of the coins found in his house in a number of leather pouches.234 I sent the list to a number of monetary historians and numismatists in the USA, England, and France, largely in an attempt to trace a kind of coin called by the executors a biscremon.235 Several of the monetary historians wrote back; none had ever come across the biscremon but several noted that Du Fay’s coin hoard was unusually large and suggested that he might have become something of a miser, even though other aspects of the account indicate that he would spend relatively large sums of money providing meals for the small vicars after the performances of the liturgy for St. Anthony of Padua, which he had founded in the chapel of St. Stephen probably in the 1460s, and on Easter Monday as well.236 Thus it is also possible that he viewed the seven years that Pierre du Wez was able to live in his house, which was considerably more luxurious than anything a chaplain or even a grand vicar could afford, as part of his recompense. 230

231 234 236

LAN, 4G 1313, p. 25: “Item a Jennin du Chemin, cousin au dict deffunct, demourant a Bruges, lequel par l’espace de xviii a xx ans a envoye au dict deffunct plusieurs biaux presens de confistures, raisins, fighes, et aultres viandes de quaresme dont n’avoit riens recue.” Ibid. 232 Fallows, Dufay, 81. 233 Dartus, “A Propos,” 285. LAN, 4G 1313, pp. 1–2. 235 Ibid., pp. 1 and 39. Ibid., p. 30 (St. Anthony), p. 24 (Easter Monday, referred as “le maoust,” because the Gospel of the day told of the apparition of Jesus to the disciples on the road to Emmaus). Interestingly, the payment is for the purchase of meat for the singers, since this is the first day after Lent when they could eat meat.

Du Fay’s Will

At his death Du Fay had a number of unpaid debts to people who had served him, which again bespeaks his being something of a miser, although from some of the payments it appears that they would be made yearly or at irregular intervals. In any case two of his servants had not been paid for a while, including Jacques de Werchin, who had lived in Du Fay’s house for five years and helped him to say the hours during his last illness. Apparently Du Fay had promised to get him a small parsonage, but he had not managed to obtain possession of it; he was granted £40.237 Colle de Lourimel, a female servant who helped Du Fay during his illness, received £16.238 Hotin Cohier, who served as assistant in Du Fay’s kitchen for two years and was kept while he learned to remake horseshoes but was not mentioned in the will, received 33s 4d.239 Guillaume Bouchel had not yet been paid for his services as a notary and received £14.240 Du Fay did not forget all his relatives or his associates and friends. The most curious of these legacies, which again speaks to familiar tensions, is to Jacques des Priers, a relative from Tournai, who had been taken care of by Du Fay for eighteen months; Jacques was left £20, on the condition that he and his parents would not hold Du Fay in debt for a set of curtains, cushions, and a stool, described in the will as “a room” (cambre) decorated with a pelican and the motto “sur le rose me repose.” In any event, the executors actually gave Jacques £40.241 There were also legacies to Antoine Hardi, his godson, and the wife of Jacques Hardi (Marie Lupard), his comère. To Martin Courtois, his successor as master of the small vicars, he left a portrait of the king given to him by Jehan de Fontenay, another royal chaplain, plus a painting that Fontenay had brought from Tours (probably with memories of Ockeghem). Pierre de Ranchicourt received a knife that King René had given Du Fay; Gobert le Mannier, a talented singer and composer from what we can tell from the references to him, even though not a note of his music has survived,242 received an imago mortis. Du Fay left £100 and a book that he had as a gift from Guillaume Poree, the tenorist of the Savoy chapel, to his chaplain Alexandre Bouillart. He left Pierre du Wez £20 plus two paintings,243 and to Gerard Watreleet, medical doctor and canon of Arras, £20 for having taken care of him.244 Three other men were also paid by the executors for having barbered and 237 241 242 243

244

LAN, 4G 1313, p. 24. 238 Ibid. 239 Ibid., p. 27. 240 Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., pp. 22, 47–50, and 75. There are numerous references to him in the acts; cf. Appendix 1. One should note that the legacy to Pierre exceeds what Du Fay left to Ste-Waudru, the Grand Chartreuse, or the Franciscan friars of Cambrai. All these legacies are given in LAN, 4G 1313, p. 71.

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given medical attention to Du Fay in his last illness, the son of Pierre du Puch, barber, Jehan le Duc, barber-surgeon, and Baude Mansel, médecin.245 Most likely it is around this time that he made another gift to Bouillart: he resigned his benefice in Wattiebraine, which paid £40 a year, in favor of his chaplain.246 Du Fay’s other main legacies were to all those who would participate in his obsequies and funeral for their services, and to a number of religious institutions. To his own church he left a diptych with Symon le Breton and the Virgin, to be placed on the altar of the chapel of St. Stephen whenever the obits of Symon or Du Fay were celebrated; an Agnus Dei of gold to the chapel of the Trinity (where Notre-Dame de Grace was kept); and to the fabric £40. Legacies to other institutions included the church of the monastery of St-Aubert (a painting); the fabric at Ste-Waudru, 100s; the fabric at Condé, 100s; the Grand Chartreuse in Savoy, £20; the Franciscans in Cambrai, 100s; the Dominicans of Valenciennes, 100s; the table of the abbot of St-Aubert, “where he often dined very well,” £10 lb for dinners where the abbot would invite some of his friends; the hospital of St. Julian, 20s, that of St. John, 10s, and that of St. George, 10s; the prisoners in the castle of Sollis, 15s; the lazar-house, 10s; each of the old men in the asylum of St-Pierre de Bevres, 2s 6d; the béguinages of St. Vaast, St. George, and Lille, each 10s, and the cloistered nuns of St. Vaast, 20s. These legacies are very much the same kinds of legacies, both in terms of the institutions and of the amounts, that other canons of the cathedral made in their wills. Du Fay’s foundations were also of the same kind that most of his fellow canons made; in addition, some of them were modeled on the foundations of Gilles Carlier and Grégoire Nicole. His Mass and obit to be celebrated in the chapel of St. Stephen by the community of the grand vicars were, as noted earlier, deliberately modeled after the foundation of Carlier. He also ordered three tapers in front of “the images” and one in front of the funeral monument in the chapel of St. Stephen to be lit at Easter, and on the feast days of St. Anthony of Padua, St. Waudru, and all the Hours and Masses of 245

246

LAN, 4G 1313, pp. 25 (Le Duc), 27 (Puch, Mansel). The account of the executors (ibid., p. 27) indicates that it was Mansel who treated Du Fay most frequently during the last two years of his life, and consulted with Watreleet, who did not live in Cambrai; but from the will itself (ibid., p. 71), where only Watreleet receives a legacy, it is clear that Du Fay regarded him as “his doctor.” The two had known each other for a long time. Watreleet, Guillaume Bouchel, and Du Fay are listed as dinner guests of the Abbot of St-Sepulchre in a payment of 14 Dec. 1458 (LAN, 3H 1309 [1458], fol. 72r). This resignation would have been recorded in the lost book N of the acts; we know it only from the execution of the testament, which mentions that Du Fay, “shortly before his death,” had resigned it and given it to Bouillart (LAN, 4G 1313, p. 13).

Du Fay’s Will

St. William, as well as every Saturday during the singing of the Salve regina. He also ordered that on Easter Day, when the main Mass was being celebrated, another such Mass of the day was to be said in the chapel of St. Stephen with an added memorial for him and for all the faithful departed, similar to the Mass founded by Gilles du Bois during the Sundays in Advent.247 He had already established in the chapel of St. Stephen a Mass for St. Anthony of Padua on his feast day, but the provisions of the will indicate that the Mass included also a set of polyphonic Vespers with a motet and a processional responsory, and the will here includes some tantalizing information about the performance forces. The Mass was to be sung by “some of the better singers” as determined by the grand vicars, but also the choirboys and their master. The choirboys were to sing in the responsory Si quaeris miracula and the motet O sidus Hispaniae (presumably Du Fay’s) at Vespers and the Gloria of the Mass during the day.248 After the Mass a short ceremony was to follow, also modeled on one already in use at the cathedral, with the antiphon O lumen Hispaniae in plainsong and the motet O lumen ecclesiae or another one, sung by the choirboys.249 He also instituted a polyphonic Mass to be said on the feast days of Ste. Waudru and St. William, and made provisions for the translation of these ceremonies whenever a liturgical conflict arose.250 The Mass for St. Anthony, however, was by far the most solemn of them, 247

248 249 250

Cambrai had two canons called Gilles du Bois in the 15th century, Gilles du Bois, Sr. (canon 1398–1435), whose successor was Symon le Breton, and Gilles du Bois, Jr. (canon 1412–1438), who contracted leprosy in 1420, but was allowed to keep his prebend, even though he had to live outside the city (CBM 1056, fol. 84v). The foundation Du Fay is following is surely that of Gilles du Bois, Sr., although no other record of it appears to have survived. Bonnie Blackburn, in a private communication, notes that such a side Mass would detract from the main Mass on Easter. This, however, may be another sign of Du Fay’s “obsession” with the resurrectio mortuorum one notices in the Missa L’homme armé, the Missa Ave regina caelorum, and the very unusual iconography of his funeral monument. The side Mass was a way for Du Fay and Symon to participate, even after their death, in the Resurrection liturgy. LAN, 4G 1313, p. 72. Ibid.; if the motet O lumen ecclesiae was by Du Fay it has not survived. Ibid. The obituary of the Grand Vicars, LAN, 4G 2009, fol. 2r, mentions the Masses of Ste. Waudru and St. William, with the usual opening: “habemus missam de ea [or eo] in cappella nostra fundatam per M G du Fay sub discantu . . .” Nosow, Ritual Meanings, 195, misinterprets this to mean that the chapel of St. Stephen had “polyphonic manuscripts for those masses,” that is, specific manuscripts such as the one with the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua. In this case “habemus missam” is being used as it is still used in the modern French and Spanish, indicating not the possession of an object but the “possession” of a rite. For these two celebrations the polyphony would have been from any of the Ordinary cycles available, and the propers, if they were done in polyphony, from the commune sanctorum available since 1449. Both of these Masses were celebrated until the French invasion in the 16th century; they are last recorded in 1578–1579, LAN, 4G 6751, fol. 9r (together with the St. Anthony Mass).

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requiring a celebrant, the priest, and two sacred ministers, a deacon and subdeacon. Finally, following the foundation of Grégoire Nicole, who had established a low Requiem Mass to be said on the first day of each month,251 Du Fay established a similar cycle of twelve Requiem Masses on the second day of each month. The last group of legacies that will concern us here is the music books. Apart from these Du Fay’s library contained four items that reflect on what we know of his biography. One was an old copy of the Decretals without a gloss.252 This could mean that Du Fay might have attended law lectures, perhaps in Bologna in the 1420s, but it certainly does not come close to the library holdings of those of his fellow canons who were true lawyers, like Grégoire Nicole.253 There is a copy of Guido’s Micrologus, which probably reflects Du Fay’s work on music theory in the 1440s.254 There is a collection of poetry by Martin le Franc, which apparently has not survived, but might be reflected in some of Du Fay’s late songs, particularly Departés vous, which mentions some of the allegorical characters one finds first in Le Champion des dames,255 and a copy of Vergil’s writings, which might bear upon the Vergilian imagery that forms one of the strands of the L’homme armé tradition.256 Beyond these the inventory drawn up by the executors includes nine or ten music collections as follows: 1. A parchment book in large format with the Mass of St. Anthony of Padua and “many other antiphons.” 2. A book of “old songs” (viesses chanteries) that had belonged to Symon le Breton. 3. A book with the Mass of St. Anthony Abbot and the Requiem. 4. A small book with red cover and copper clasps. 5. Four books of a certain size with different pieces of music (d’une grandeur de diverse chanterie).

251 252

253

254 255 256

LAN, 4G 1039, fol. 7v. LAN, 4G 1313, p. 7: “unes decretales viesses sans glosse.” Interestingly, the will of his relative, Jehan Hubert, who left behind a surprisingly small library, lists also a single decretal; LAN, 4G 1372, p. 11. Cf. the list of titles in Maillard-Luypaert, “Pour le salut de son âme,” 20–22. The inventory in LAN, 4G 1309, fols. 36r–38v, lists fifty-two volumes of law books. The will of Du Fay’s colleague Jehan du Bois, LAN 4G 1307, fols. 12v–14r, has fourteen books of canon law and three of civil law. LAN, 4G 1313, p. 7: “i viez livre intitule micrologus.” Ibid.: “i petit livret en paper contenant eglogas magistri Martini le Franc.” Ibid., p. 6: “i Vergile en papier.” Cf. also Long, “Arma virumque cano,” and Planchart, “The Origins,” 317–18.

Du Fay’s Will

6. A little booklet of chansons. 7. A book of louanges and the Mass Ave regina caelorum.257 Items 4–6 in this list are described three times by the executors as “six books of music” that Du Fay had given to the duke of Burgundy during his life, but had retained for his own use,258 and yet the music books add up to seven, unless one is to assume that the small red book was not a music book, even though it was part of the gift. In any event, sometime after Du Fay’s death the executors had a small sack made of buckram to hold the books, and in July 1475 Jennin Tamerel, one of the chapter’s messengers, rode to Arras and then to Dourlens to give the books to the duke.259 This collection is nine or ten times larger than that of any of the other musician canons at the cathedral for whom we have an inventory of their possessions. We do not have the will or inventory of Le Breton, but from Du Fay’s will we know he owned at least one book of polyphony. Nicole Boidin, the tenor at the court of Burgundy, who died as a canon of Cambrai in 1469, also owned one book of polyphony.260 We do not have the wills or inventories of Grenon or Hanelle, but neither Flannel nor De la Croix had any music among their possessions, and the thirteen “booklets of masses written by the hand of Symon Mellet” mentioned in the inventory of Grégoire Nicole and cited by Houdoy turn out to be, when the entire inventory is read, fascicles that were intended for a missal listed immediately earlier and might or might not have had any music at all.261 Du Fay left two of his music books to the chapel of St. Stephen because they contained the music needed for two of his most important foundations, the obit and the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua.262 The others he gave to the duke of Burgundy, whom he expected to value and preserve his music, and indeed the duke and his followers appear to have done so and even managed to obtain a copy of Du Fay’s Requiem and his Office of the Dead as well, which were still being used in ceremonies of the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1507.263 If Du Fay’s music books were still in the

257 260

261

262 263

LAN, 4G 1313, pp. 65–66. 258 Ibid., pp. 7, 30, and 66. 259 Ibid., p. 30. Described twice in LAN 4G 1217, fol. 3v: “1 livre en papier daucunes viesses canteries de musique, 15 s,” and fol. 25r: “1 livre de messes notees [no price].” The position of the entries in both lists clearly indicates that they refer to the same book. Houdoy, Histoire, 265; LAN, 4G 1039, fol. 38v. The missal, however, does sound suspiciously like CBM 158, the votive missal that clearly was intended as a missal for the saying of polyphonic missae communes (cf.), so that perhaps these booklets had some polyphonic music in them. The contents of these books are examined in detail in Planchart, “The Books.” Prizer, “Music and Ceremonial,” 133.

309

310

The Last Years (1458–1474)

Burgundian library in the seventeenth century and had not been discarded as outmoded (and they were surely not illuminated, so they would not have been valued as art objects), they probably perished in the disastrous fire of 1731 that destroyed most of the library.264 The survival of the choirbook Brussels 5557 (not connected with Du Fay’s legacy except that it has copies of two of his Masses, but the only surviving choirbook of the court that can be dated before 1490) probably is due to the possibility that it was not in the library at the time of the fire.

The Last Days Almost two weeks after Du Fay recorded his testament, on 20 July, his chaplain Alexandre Bouillart died. The chapter acts, which surely recorded his death, are missing and no will survives, but the date of his death was recorded in the collection of epitaphs transcribed by Tranchant in 1764.265 This must have been a blow to the old man; Du Fay had promoted Bouillart’s ecclesiastical career, even though he was not a musician,266 and assumed that it would be Bouillart who would give him the last rites.267 From some of the payments to the barbers, surgeons, and doctors who attended Du Fay, the composer was in delicate health for about two years before his death, to the point that he was visited monthly or sometimes more often by Baude Mansel, who wrote for assistance to Gérard Wastreleet, also a doctor and a canon of Arras, for help with the care of Du Fay.268 The presumption, given the treatments at the time, is that Du Fay was bled regularly during that time. This is suggested by the fact that a barber, the son of the widow of Pierre du Puch, was paid for having barbered Du Fay “for some time before his great illness,”269 but this could mean simply that Du Fay now needed assistance to shave. The same applies to a payment to one of his servants, Jacques de Werchin, who had lived in Du Fay’s house for five years, and “had had great labor and travail in watching over the deceased night and day during his illness and helping him to say his hours”;270 the wording cannot be understood in any way to mean that the illness had lasted five years. In any event, at the 264 266

267

268

Lemaire, “Histoire de la Bibliothèque,” 15. 265 See n. 17. CBM 1060, fol. 211r, 1 May 1465. Du Fay, whose turn it was to collate a benefice, presented Bouillart for the chaplaincy of St. Mary in Noyelles. Nonetheless, the wording in the will suggests that Du Fay already doubted that Bouillart would outlive him. LAN, 4G 1313, pp. 26–27. 269 Ibid., p. 26. 270 Ibid., p. 24.

The Last Days

beginning of October 1474 Du Fay’s condition apparently worsened considerably, and this is what his executors call “the great illness that he developed in his legs and elsewhere,” and in this case another barbersurgeon was called, Jehan le Duc, who visited him twice daily, most likely to try to alleviate what was probably the symptoms of dropsy.271 The morning of 17 November his friend Jacques Michel, one of the witnesses of his will, died,272 and that same evening Du Fay also passed away.273 The end must have come quickly; Pierre du Wez was able to administer the last rites, but his request that at his deathbed, if time permitted, the hymn Magno salutis gaudio as well as his Ave regina caelorum be sung softly by eight of the small vicars274 could not be done, according to the executors, “on account of the shortness of the time.”275 Wright suggests that the arrangements for Michel’s funeral probably interfered,276 while Fallows takes the remark in the execution to mean that Du Fay’s agony was relatively short.277 I think that Fallows is probably correct; in addition the evening, when Vespers are in progress and the singing men and the choirboys are probably performing the service, is a difficult time to round up eight singing men and six choirboys for a private ceremony, no matter how eminent the personage. Du Fay’s request was performed as a separate addition to his funeral the next day.278 At his death Du Fay was one of the most famous personages in the city of Cambrai, and his funeral was in many ways a solemn reminder of his importance to the cathedral and the city. As soon as he was dead four chaplains began the recitation of the Psalter, and the ladies of the Hospital of St-Julien came and shrouded the body and placed it in a casket of oak. In the meantime, and probably working through the night, the bell-ringer and the church’s mason dug the grave and lined it with brick. The next day, to the tolling of the bells, six of the chaplains, together with four others 271 273

274

276 278

On this cf. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 219 and n. 216. 272 LAN, 4G 1427, fol. 1r. LAN, 4G 5106 (grand métier), fol. 15r, payment of 30s to purchase bread for the poor to be distributed at the funerals. The entry for Michel states, “obiit xxvii novembris de mane,” and the following one for Du Fay: “qui eodem die de vespere etiam obiit.” See also C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 219, n. 218, and 229 (both giving fol. 12v). The will says “submissa voce” (LAN, 4G 1313, p. 70), translated by the executors into French as “en fausset” (LAN, 4G 1313, p. 19). Virtually every commentator on this passage has drawn the wrong conclusion from the French translation. At this time submissa voce had a centuries-old tradition in missals, ordinals, and in endowment documents, and meant “softly.” Middle French had no real “technical” equivalent, so the executors used the closest technical term that they associated with soft singing, what in Italy would be called sotto voce. What this points out is that the loud hoot of the modern falsettist was unknown (or undesirable) in late 15thcentury France. On the Italian usage in the 15th century see Blackburn, “Anna Inglese,” 249. LAN, 4G 1313, p. 19. 276 C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 219. 277 Fallows, Dufay, 79. LAN, 4G 1313, p. 19.

311

312

The Last Years (1458–1474)

carrying torches, carried the casket to the cathedral,279 where thirteen craftsmen had built a bier that was decorated with five large shields with Du Fay’s arms and eighteen small shields placed on the torches and the tapers. The office consisted of a vigil, the Psalter, read this time by all the canons, the Office of the Dead, with Du Fay’s music, his Requiem Mass, and at the end the hymn Magno salutis gaudio and the Ave regina caelorum that could not be sung at his deathbed. This must have taken from 28 to 29 November, and while these ceremonies were taking place Masses were being said for Du Fay in virtually every altar of the cathedral, since the executors specifically state that “all who came celebrated Mass” and they were in total 126 priests.280 Indeed, the accounts indicate that a number of extra altar boys had to be recruited for these purposes.281 Some 118 members of the cathedral personnel took part in the ceremonies, including 26 canons, all the 9 grand vicars, 43 chaplains, 13 small vicars, 8 choirboys, 4 habitués, that is, people who, like Tinctoris in 1460, had been temporarily given the habitu ecclesiae, 4 clerks of the chapels, 3 sergeants of the church and 2 of the baillie, the thurifer, the messenger of the chapter, and the proctor (probably Paul Auclou), as well as two people specifically named, Jehan le Roux, an old associate of Jehan du Sart,282 and Jacques Vallain, about whom nothing else is known. A good number of these were either not priests or, like some of the chaplains or the small vicars, were occupied in other duties during the ceremonies, so the 126 priests who celebrated Masses during the obsequies were members of the other churches in Cambrai. Still, one can sense some of the old rivalry between the cathedral and St-Géry: there is no mention of any representatives of St-Géry in the accounts, and even though some of its canons and chaplains were surely at the ceremonies, the fabric of St-Géry contributed only 3s 9d to the obsequies,283 and Du Fay is not remembered in any of the necrologies from St-Géry. At Ste-Croix, a collegiate church that was essentially a dependence of the cathedral, where men like Guillaume Bouchel were canons, the only mention is a payment in the fabric for the tolling of the bells for clergy who had died during the year, including Du Fay, Michel, Jehan le Fevre, a canon of St-Géry, and Jehan Maubegois, a monk of St-Aubert.284 This stands in contrast to the two colleagues on whose foundations he modeled his own, Carlier and Nicolai. Both of them were 279

280 283 284

C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 219, assumes that it was carried to the chapel of St. Stephen, where he was to be buried, but more likely is that the ceremonies took place in the choir. LAN, 4G 1313, p. 16. 281 Ibid., p. 17. 282 Cf. CBM 1060, fol. 255v. LAN, 7G 2225 (1474–1475), fol. 11r: “Item ad exequias magistri guillermi du fay 3s 9d.” LAN, 6G 705 (1474–1475), fol. 23r.

The Last Days

natives of Cambrai285 and had been canons at St-Géry, Ste-Croix, or both, and left obits and foundations in both churches. Du Fay’s relationship with St-Géry was early and largely that of an absentee chaplain, and during his years at Cambrai, both in the 1440s and from 1458 on, he seems to have had little to do with St-Géry or Ste-Croix. The execution of Du Fay’s will took two years to complete, which is what most such executions took. Mortier took over the maintenance of Du Fay’s house while a detailed inventory and appraisal of all its contents was drawn up. Those items that were not part of a legacy were eventually sold, although, unlike a few other executions, there is no record of who bought anything. The executors collected the monies still due to the estate and paid the debts. They presented one account to the chapter in November 1475, and a second in November 1476, finally closing the execution. When all the rents had been collected, all the legacies and foundations allotted, and all the debts paid, a residual estate of £975 5s 10d remained in 1475. Revenues in 1475–1476 amounted to £108 17s 8d, and after other expenses and foundations in November 1476 a surplus still remained of £749 14s 9d, which was distributed to charity. Du Fay died a fairly wealthy man after a very long life, much of it spent in comfortable circumstances. At his death he was canon of Cambrai and of Ste-Waudru in Mons, had a pension from the curate in Goy, and a chaplaincy in Peruwez, east of Soignies; he had resigned the personatus of Wattiebraine in favor of his chaplain, Alexandre Bouillart, probably around the time he made his will, but Bouillart’s death two weeks later left this benefice in an administrative limbo. Half of the year’s income from it was still due to Du Fay, so his administrator for this benefice, Jehan Le Roy (Regis), gave the executors £20 of Hainaut.286 The executors returned this to him together with a silver belt worth £13, provided he would establish an obit for Du Fay at Soignies, which he did.287 The date of the funeral monument was added by Alart Genois, a tombier from Tournai who had worked on a number of funeral monuments at the cathedral, including that of Michiel van Beringhen.288 He was paid to engrave the date and a painter was paid to gild the text of the epitaph.289 Du Fay had the place for the date raised so that the date could be sculpted, but the executors, for whatever reason, chose the cheaper method of 285

286 288

Nicole’s origins are mentioned in his will, LAN, 4G 1309, fol. 1v; Carlier, in a petition to Pope Martin V in 1424, refers to himself as “Egidius Carlerii de Cameraco,” ASV, RS 177, fol. 146r–v, and his obit in Ste-Croix states that he had been a choirboy at Ste-Croix; CBM 197, p. 63: “qui dum erat iuvenculus fuit puer altaris huius ecclesie sancte crucis.” LAN, 4G 1313, p. 34. 287 Ibid., p. 35. On Alart and his career see Nys, “Un relief tournaisien,” 9–11. 289 LAN, 4G 1313, p. 30.

313

314

The Last Years (1458–1474)

engraving. Fallows may be correct in seeing this as a sign that in his last days Du Fay “failed to attract the devotion that one might expect from those around him.”290 But others, who did not have to deal daily with an old man probably grown difficult, did feel a measure of devotion to him. The accounts of the fabric for 1475–1476 record a payment to Symon Mellet for entering into choirbooks of the church a new Mass and a Magnificat by Busnoys, and “le lamentacions de Obghuen de Bunoys et Hemart,”291 surely lamentations on the death of Du Fay, and the triad of composers could not be more appropriate. Of all of Du Fay’s colleagues at the end Hemart, an active composer and the man most directly concerned with the practicalities of actual music-making at the cathedral, probably had the clearest idea among his colleagues of Du Fay’s stature. The other two are regarded today as the two most important figures of the generation that followed that of Du Fay, and I suspect that the judgment of their contemporaries, if we are to judge, for example, by the writings of Tinctoris, was essentially the same. The luna totius musicae, as the author of the text of Omnium bonorum plena called him, had set. 290

Fallows, Dufay, 82.

291

LAN, 4G 4683, fol. 23r; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 254.

7

Epilogue: Historical Aftermath

Music at Cambrai after Du Fay A careful examination of the chapter acts of the cathedral, together with the accounts of the fabric, the bread and wine, and the aumosne for the quarter century after Du Fay’s death makes for slightly melancholy reading: the copying of new music tapered off a little and then fell abruptly after Symon Mellet’s death on 17 September 1481,1 and very little music was copied into the cathedral choirbooks until after 1500. The payments for the copying of polyphony between 1480 and 1512 are given in Table 7.1. These payments all come from the accounts of the fabric, which are missing for 1480–1481, 1489–1494, 1495–1498, 1501–1505, and 1510– 1511, so that there might have been more polyphony copied at Cambrai during this period. Nonetheless, it is significant that for the eight-year period of 1481–1489, for which we have full accounts, there is no polyphony being copied. The copying that begins around 1507, particularly with the work of Louys Terasse, is, as Craig Wright has shown, the beginning of a new burst of copying that resulted in the series of sixteenth-century choirbooks that survive today from the cathedral.2 And it may be symptomatic of the situation that the renewed copying of polyphony around 1506 begins with payments to a vicar from St-Géry rather than to a cleric from the cathedral. Most of the entries in Table 7.1 are also reported by Wright together with other entries concerning binding and repairs to music books in the early sixteenth century.3 One entry published by both Houdoy and Wright for 1506–1507, reporting a payment of £6 to “Symon Miellet,” for having copied many new Kyrie, Glorias, Credos, Sanctus, and Agnus, is a ghost.4 Wright cited Houdoy, but could not find a documentary source. The wording of the entry, listing the movements in order, should warn us that it probably comes from a time when Ordinaries were not copied as cycles at Cambrai. The entry in Houdoy is one of the very few errors in his work, probably the result 1 3 4

CBM 1061, fol. 132v. 2 C. Wright, “Musiciens,” 222. C. Wright, “Performance Practices,” 298–99. Houdoy, Histoire, 206; C. Wright, “Performance Practices,” 298.

315

316

Epilogue: Historical Aftermath

Table 7.1 Copying of polyphony at Cambrai (1480–1512) Date

Payment

1498–1499 1499–1500 1505–1506

To Henri de Mont Henri, small vicar, notating Masses, 35s (LAN, 4G 4697, fol. 26r) To Henri, small vicar, for notating a few Masses, 42s 1d (LAN, 4G 4698, fol. 34v) To a vicar of St-Géry for having notated and written two new Masses in duplicate for both sides of the choir, 30s (LAN, 4G 4700, fol. 34v) To a young vicar of St-Géry for having notated a new Mass in duplicate, 30s (LAN, 4G 4701, fol. 35v) To Loys Terasse, small vicar, for having notated and put into the books of the church many new Masses and Magnificats, 52s (LAN, 4G 4702, fol. 32v) To Etienne Brulle, vicar, for writing in duplicate two Masses on Lombard paper, 40s (LAN, 4G 4704, fol. 37v) To Robinet Presiau, called Binet, for writing in duplicate nine Masses in discant, £16 13s 4d (LAN, 4G 4704, fol. 37v) To Loys Terasse, chaplain, for having notated ten Masses in duplicate, £8 6s 8d (LAN, 4G 4705, fol. 36r) To Noel Jesus, for having made four books of music from two and added five Masses, 100s (LAN, 4G 4705, fol. 36r).

1506–1507 1507–1508 1509–1510

1511–1512

of a misreading of his own notes. The text as he prints it is a slightly garbled version of an entry from 1456–1457,5 about one year before the first entry in the accounts of the fabric referring to the copying of “a Mass.”6 The chapter made up for some lack of copying by buying what amounted to personal music books from some of its clergy, as was the case with Jacob Obrecht, who sold a book with some of his music to the chapter before departing.7 But the acts and the aumosne with increasing frequency mention the poor musicianship and lack of preparation of many of the small vicars, and the fact that many were admitted virtually on probation suggests that as the singing of polyphony became more widespread in the churches of northern France and Flanders competition for skilled singers became sharper.8 At the same time the accounts of the wine and bread show increasingly that small vicars came and went with more frequency and their stays could be short. For example, Alexander Ackerman [Agricola] was a small vicar from 8 February to 14 May 1476,9 and Jehan Holinghe [Mouton] was a small vicar from 16 February to

5 6 8 9

LAN, 4G 4664, fols. 27v–28r; correctly cited in Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 241. 7 See p. 214. CBM 1061, fol. 237r. Cf. Pirro, “Jehan Cornuel,” passim, and C. Wright, “Performance Practices,” 312–14. LAN, 4G 7472 (1475–1476), fol. 7v.

The Transmission of Du Fay’s Music after His Death

30 May 1498.10 The masters of the small vicars were still canons with a distinguished musical career behind them – Martin Courtoys, Rogier van Eeckhoute [de Ligno Quercu], and Jehan Jorland called Corbie11 – but they were no longer composers like Grenon, Du Fay, or Le Breton. After Hemart was dismissed as magister puerorum in 1484 when caught in a liaison with a nun,12 his successor, Jacob Obrecht, proved an inept administrator and his tenure was short, from 28 July 1484 to 25 October 1485.13 Having dismissed Obrecht the canons, as they had done with Hemart, lured away the magister puerorum of St-Géry, in this case Denis de Hollain, who had been a choirboy and a small vicar at the cathedral. Hollain turned out to be an excellent teacher and a devoted servant of the church, and was magister puerorum until shortly before his death on 8 November 1503. The grateful chapter had made him a canon on 15 February of that year.14 Hollain’s tenure is the main feature of stability in the establishment at Cambrai in the decades after Du Fay’s death. The period of comparative decline was not reversed until the second and third decades of the sixteenth century.15

The Transmission of Du Fay’s Music after His Death This decline is paralleled by the apparent eclipse of Du Fay’s music in the decades following his death. Some of his late Masses were still copied outside Cambrai after 1480,16 and Giovanni Spataro in the 1530s had access to parts of the Missa Sancti Antonii et Sancti Francisci.17 But with the exception of the hymns (in heavily reworked versions), one or two of the magnificats, and a few songs, little of his music appears to have been 10 13

14 15

16

17

Ibid. (1497–1498), fol. 9r–v. 11 See p. 270. 12 CBM 1061, fols. 170v and 187r. Ibid., fols. 187r and 237r. It is interesting to note that when Obrecht was auditioning as magister puerorum in late July 1484, the master of the small vicars, and therefore one of Obrecht’s auditioners, Rogier van Eeckhoute, was hosting a visit by Jehan de Ockeghem (LAN, 4G 5510, 13v), so it is most likely that Obrecht and Ockeghem met then. On Obrecht’s time at Cambrai see Wegman, Born for the Muses, 82–85. CBM 1064, fols. 437r and 448r. The date of his death appears in his will, LAN, 4G 1371, fol. 1r. The best study of the rise of the cathedral music establishment in the early 16th century remains Blackburn, “The Lupus Problem.” Se la face ay pale in Venice, Ferrara, or Rome (BAV, CS 14), and Siena (Sie 1.2), both in the 1480s; L’homme armé in Venice, Ferrara, or Rome in the 1480s (BAV, CS 14), in Rome in the 1490s (BAV, CS 49), and in Edinburgh in the first two decades of the 16th century (Ed); Ecce ancilla – Beata es Maria in Venice, Ferrara, or Rome in the 1480s (BAV, CS 14), and Ave regina caelorum in Rome in the 1470s (BAV, SP B80), Ferrara in the 1480s (ModE), and perhaps in Lwów in the 1490s (Poz). Blackburn et al., eds., Correspondence, 588–89.

317

318

Epilogue: Historical Aftermath

copied in the 1490s, and none of it ever made it into the early printed collections. Similarly, with the exception of a single middle-period song, Le serviteur, we have no works of his that served as the basis for works by the composers of the following two generations.18 There may be a number of different reasons for this. Fallows’s claim that “the mature years of Ockeghem, Busnoys and Hayne van Ghizeghem brought about a move toward a more aggressively Franco-Flemish style that eschewed some of Dufay’s Italianate characteristics”19 is surely one of the causes. Du Fay’s last years already saw the increase in a different approach to the relationship between melody and counterpoint than what he practiced. But Fallows also makes the astute remark that the seeds of Josquin’s mature works may be seen in a work such as Du Fay’s Missa Ecce ancilla – Beata es.20 We now know that Josquin was at Cambrai when that work and the troped Ave regina were composed, and he surely also knew the Missa Ave regina caelorum, which he could have encountered in Rome or in Ferrara, and a good deal of his canonic writing is prefigured in Du Fay’s last two Masses. I have also suggested that there are some echoes of the Missa Ave regina caelorum in some of Josquin’s Masses.21 But most of the music of the generation of Busnoys and Ockeghem, or that of Josquin and Obrecht that is based on earlier models, is based upon songs or segments from a song, and many of Du Fay’s late middle-period songs were written in Savoy. Even though they were copied elsewhere, they were not part of an immediate repertory for the later generations, and the few very late songs, works such as Dieu gard la bone, might have struck younger composers as too hermetic.22 Yet Du Fay’s music continued to be performed at Cambrai probably well into the sixteenth century. The chapter acts of 8 January 1515 ordain that the motet sung at Vespers of the Epiphany is to be replaced in the future by a motet from the works of Du Fay.23 As Fallows notes, the only Epiphany piece we have from Du Fay is Magi videntes stellam, a very modest setting of the Magnificat antiphon for Vespers of the Epiphany, which is clearly a product of the 1440s. This is the decade when Du Fay was systematically providing the cathedral with polyphonic music for the liturgy. Most of it was surely propers for the Mass, but he clearly wrote at least a set of

18 19 22

23

On the authenticity and success of Le serviteur see Fallows, The Songs, 160–61. Fallows, Dufay, 83. 20 Ibid. 21 Planchart, “Masses on Plainsong Cantus Firmi,” 103. Fallows, Dufay, 161–63, provides a sensitive analysis of another very late song, Par le regart, and points out the hermetic aspects of the late songs. CBM 1066, fol. 295r; C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 220, 229; Fallows, Dufay, 85.

Historiography of Du Fay

complete Vespers for St. Anthony of Padua and St. Francis,24 so the survival of Magi videntes stellam indicates that he also wrote either a set of polyphonic Vespers for the Epiphany or at least a core of polyphonic music for such Vespers. From the many foundations and endowments detailed in the obituaries of the cathedral, we know that such a core usually included a Magnificat antiphon, a hymn to be sung by the choirboys, and “a motet.”25 Thus it is virtually certain that at the time a motet for the Vespers of the Epiphany by Du Fay must have existed. In 1517 Jehan de la Pierre instituted a performance of Du Fay’s Requiem by the choirboys, the master, and four or five vicars, in memory of his benefactors, a foundation that continued until 1521.26 Further, as William Prizer has shown, the Order of the Golden Fleece adopted Du Fay’s Requiem and his Office of the Dead, and used them at the yearly meetings for a number of years.27 There is also evidence from the accounts of the community of the grand vicars, which were the de facto recipients of the two music books he left to the chapel of St. Stephen and were charged with performing all the liturgies endowed by Du Fay, that they continued to do so each year at least until 1579, when the French troops invaded Cambrai, the chapter fled to Mons, and the liturgical life of the cathedral came to a standstill.28

Historiography of Du Fay Early on, however, Du Fay’s name was included by musical and literary writers in the roll call of important composers, often in connection with Dunstaple and Binchois, beginning with Martin le Franc among the poets and Tinctoris among the music theorists, and this tradition was continued by both types of writers well into the sixteenth century. Adam von Fulda, writing in 1490, credited Du Fay with expanding the musical range by three 24 26

27

28

Cf. Planchart, “The Books,” 185–89. 25 See p. 222; also Planchart, “Four Motets,” 27–28. LAN, 4G 7008, fol. 23r; C. Wright, “Performance Practices,” 303. De la Pierre became a member of the grand community of chaplains in 1498 (LAN, 4G 6980, fol. 13r), and appears in the lists until 1521–1522 (LAN, 4G 7013, 29v). He must have died that year, and his foundation apparently died with him. Prizer, “Music and Ceremonial,” 133–35, 142, and 150–51, citing a letter from Niccolò Friggio to Francesco II Gonzaga, Brussels, 24 Jan. 1501, describing the meeting of the Order. LAN, 4G 6749 (1501–1558), 4G 6750 (1563–1564), 4G 6751 (1573–1589), all entries concerning Du Fay’s foundation on fols. 7r–9r of each yearly fascicle. A change in wording after 1553 in the case of the St. Anthony entries makes me think that by that time no one at Cambrai could read Du Fay’s complex black notation, but the Mass and Vespers continued to be sung sub discantu until 1579. On the French invasion, see Lancelin, Histoire du diocèse de Cambrai, 188–89, and Pierrard, Les diocèses de Cambrai et de Lille, 110–11.

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steps below the bottom of Guido’s gamut,29 a notion picked up by later writers and encyclopedists and regarded as unjustified by modern scholarship,30 but comprehensible if he had seen such an early work as Ave virgo quae de caelis (with its surely spurious ascription to Du Fay), or more plausibly the Alleluia V. O patriarcha pauperum, from the Missa Sancti Antonii de Padua et Sancti Francisci, which was a work that remained in circulation among the theorists up to the second quarter of the sixteenth century, both of which descend to E below gamma ut, coinciding with the extension mentioned by Adam. Following Tinctoris a number of theorists, including Gaffori, Spataro, Aron, and Giovanni del Lago, discussed sometimes quite extensively some of Du Fay’s mensural usages, and it is clear from their remarks that they had access to the Missa Sancti Antonii de Padua et Sancti Francisci and other pieces from the 1440s, including parts of the cycle of propers for the Order of the Golden Fleece.31 The mentions and discussion by the theorists, more than the mentions by the poets, earned Du Fay a kind of posthumous immortality. They were picked up by writers on music between 1550 and 1825, so Du Fay’s name found its way into a number of musical histories, dictionaries, or small treatises, including those of Pierre Grégoire (1576), Nucius (1613), Walther (1732), Forkel (1801), Choron and Fayolle (1810–1811), and Gerbert (1812– 1814). As Fallows notes, probably none of these writers knew a note of Du Fay’s music.32 Ironically, the one writer who surely saw a good deal of Du Fay’s music, including virtually all of the important early works, since he owned Bo Q15, Giovanni Battista Martini, never got to write on Du Fay because his planned general history of music did not reach past antiquity,33 and neither Charles Burney nor Sir John Hawkins mentioned Du Fay in their histories of music. There is another category of works where Du Fay’s name is encountered, ecclesiastical histories dealing either with the diocese of Cambrai or with the cathedral itself, as well as a few dealing with churches where Du Fay had held a benefice. These include Jean le Carpentier (1664), François-Jean

29 30 31

32

Adam von Fulda, De Musica, in Gerbert, Scriptores, 3:342 and 350. Cf. Fallows, Dufay, 83. Blackburn et al., eds., Correspondence, 588–90; Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1972), 14–17; Fallows, Dufay, 182–85. Fallows, Dufay, 84. 33 Martini, Storia della musica.

Historiography of Du Fay

Foppens (1731), and André Le Glay (1825).34 Of these only Le Glay had any inkling that Du Fay had been an important musician.35 The beginnings of modern scholarship concerning Du Fay are marked by Giuseppe Baini’s publication of his study of Palestrina in 1829.36 Baini encountered a number of major works by Du Fay in the choirbooks of the Sistine Chapel and recognized his importance, but his main concern was showing Palestrina as the culmination of the entire progress of Renaissance music,37 and thus he paid little attention to Du Fay. The prize-winning essays by Raphael Georg Kiesewetter and François-Joseph Fétis, submitted to a competition sponsored by the Royal Dutch Academy and published in 1829,38 also point to Du Fay’s importance, but still do not go beyond what Baini had said. In 1834, however, Kiesewetter published his history of music, where he included for the first time examples of Du Fay’s music.39 Clearly he had access to such works as were available to Baini in the Sistine Chapel manuscripts, and probably obtained access to them through Baini. Two years later Fétis published the first relatively extended biography of Du Fay in volume 3 of his Biographie universelle,40 in, as Fallows comments, “nearly five columns of chaotic but stimulating detail.”41 Fétis mentions the existence of Du Fay works not only in the Sistine Chapel manuscripts seen by Baini, but also in Ca 6, seen by Coussemaker, in Br 5557, and the Pixérécourt chansonnier, thus expanding considerably the number of works known at the time. Nonetheless, Fétis, like Kiesewetter, accepted Baini’s contention that he had found the name of Du Fay as a singer in the papal chapel in 1380, leading him to postulate a life span for the composer of ca. 1350 to 1432. In his monumental history of music, Kiesewetter’s nephew, August Wilhelm Ambros, gave even more attention to Du Fay’s music and published further examples,42 but retained Baini’s chronology of his life,43 which led to considerable confusion as further references to Du Fay were found. This led a number of scholars, including Coussemaker, Victor Delattre, Vander Straeten, and Auguste Castan, among others, to the supposition that there were two men by the

34 35

36 37 38 39 40 42

Carpentier, Histoire, 2:475; Foppens, Compendium, 176; Le Glay, Recherches, 199–200. Fallows, Dufay, 257–59, includes a list of all references to Du Fay in historical and music writings from 1440 to 1836. Baini, Memorie storico-critiche. Cf. Kirkman, “From Humanism to Enlightenment,” 450–52. Fétis, “Mémoire”; Kiesewetter, “Die Verdienste der Niederländer.” Kiesewetter, Geschichte, 46–49, and ex. 5; id., History, trans, Müller, 113–22, and ex. 5. Fétis, Biographie universelle, 3:349–51; 2nd edn., 3:70–2. 41 Fallows, Dufay, 84. Ambros, Geschichte der Musik, 3:398–499 and 515–23. 43 Ibid., 453–54.

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same name, both of them musicians.44 The confusion was cleared up by the publication of two major studies, Houdoy’s history of the cathedral of Cambrai in 1880,45 and Haberl’s study of Du Fay in 1885,46 followed two years later by his history of the papal chapel.47 These studies represent late nineteenth-century historiography at its absolute best. Houdoy was a local historian with extraordinarily good training, and had an unparalleled knowledge of the archival materials in Lille and Cambrai, which were then still rather chaotically catalogued.48 Haberl was both a practical musician and a thorough scholar, in close contact with most of the major music historians of his time and the personal connections to obtain admission to the Vatican library and the archives, although most of the archival material he used was then in the Archivio di Stato in Rome.49 Between them they clarified Du Fay’s biography and provided a firm documentary foundation for his activity in Rome and in Cambrai, which remains the basis of all work on his life to this day. In a detailed and fastidious manner Haberl collected all the references to Du Fay and his music known at the time, from Martin le Franc’s mention in Le Champion des dames to the work of Haberl’s own contemporaries.50 In addition Haberl published his important catalogues of the music manuscripts in the Vatican in 188551 and announced his spectacular discovery of Trent Codices 87–92,52 thus increasing by several thousand works the amount of fifteenth-century music available to scholars at the time. Naturally it would take several decades before this repertory would begin to be published and analyzed. Ironically, one of the major sources for Du Fay’s music before 1435, Bo Q15, was already known to scholars and had been seen, for example, by Coussemaker, who actually had the manuscript sent to him in Lille,53 but little of its contents had become available. Thus, in terms of making Du Fay’s music available to a wider public the turning point was the publication in 1898 of fifty songs by Du Fay and other composers from Ox 213.54 This was followed in 1900 by the first 44 45 47 48

49 51 52 54

This was, for example, the opinion of Coussemaker in 1868; cf. Bent, Bologna Q15, 10. Houdoy, Histoire. 46 F. X. Haberl, Wilhelm Du Fay. F. X. Haberl, Die römische ‘Schola Cantorum’. The material from the cathedral and other secular churches in Cambrai occupies more than sixteen km of shelf space, and it was not properly inventoried until the monumental work of Anne-Marie and Pierre Pietresson de Saint-Aubin, Répertorie numérique, published between 1960 and 1971. D. Haberl, “Franz Xaver Haberl.” 50 F. X. Haberl, Wilhelm du Fay, 6–52. F. X. Haberl, Bibliographischer und thematischer Musikkatalog des päpstlichem Kapellarchives. F. X. Haberl, Wilhelm Du Fay, 87–96. 53 Cf. Bent, Bologna Q15, 10. Stainer et al., eds., Early Bodleian Music: Dufay and His Contemporaries.

Historiography of Du Fay

volume of a monumental anthology of music from the Trent Codices edited by Guido Adler,55 which included a thematic catalogue of the six manuscripts discovered by Haberl and the publication of a good deal of sacred music by Du Fay, including for the first time a major work, the Missa Se la face ay pale. With this a solid foundation was set for the study and appreciation of his music and its place in the development of fifteenthcentury musical style. At about the same time a number of Belgian ecclesiastical historians, who included the diocese of Cambrai in their purview, had begun a series of systematic studies of the Vatican archives, which added a good number of new references to Du Fay and other Franco-Flemish musicians of the early fifteenth century.56 In the 1920s two important articles by Gino Borghezio and Stanislao Cordero di Pamparato brought to light the material from Savoy,57 and a third one by François Baix summarized what was then known about Du Fay’s beneficial career.58 In 1925 Charles van den Borren published the first extended study of Du Fay’s life and an appreciation of his music based largely upon what had been published by Stainer and in the Austrian Denkmäler,59 followed in 1932 by a musical anthology that was a supplement to Stainer’s edition in that it consisted of sacred music from Ox 213.60 That same year Besseler published a small anthology of Du Fay’s works in an influential practical series,61 followed five years later by Rudolf Gerber’s edition of all the hymns and their transformations in the late fifteenth century in the same series.62 Research continued into the early years of World War II; in 1940 André Pirro published his history of music, which added substantially to what was known about Du Fay’s years at Cambrai,63 and in 1942 Baix published his summaries of the Libri annatarum under Martin V, with an immense introduction to the workings and personnel of the camera apostolica at the time.64 Besseler had planned a complete edition of Du Fay’s works during the 1930s, but the first such undertaking began with the publication of four fascicles by Guillaume de Van between 1947 and 1949.65 Any earlier attempts at publishing the complete works before this time were most

55 56

57 58 60 62 64

Adler et al., eds., Sechs Trienter Codices, Erste Auswahl. Berlière, Libri obligationum (1904); ibid., Diversa cameralia (1906); Dubrulle, Les Bénéficiers . . . Martin V (1905); id., Les Bénéficiers . . . Eugène IV (1908); id., “Les Membres de la curie.” Borghezio, “La fondazione”; Cordero di Pamparato, “Guglielmo Dufay alla corte di Savoia.” Baix, “La Carrière.” 59 Van den Borren, Guillaume Dufay. Van den Borren, ed., Polyphonia Sacra. 61 Du Fay, Zwolf geistliche und weltliche Werke. Du Fay, Sämtliche Hymnen. 63 Pirro, Histoire, 74–87. Baix and Uytterbrouck, eds., La Chambre apostolique. 65 OO De Van 1–4.

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likely hampered by the fact that the major source for Du Fay’s early works, Bo Q15, was by and large inaccessible to virtually all scholars through most of the first half of the twentieth century.66 Following De Van’s death in 1949 Besseler undertook the edition, which included volumes that superseded those published by De Van.67 Besseler’s edition took from 1951 to 1966 to complete. Right before this undertaking he published his important book Bourdon und Fauxbourdon (1950),68 a brilliant study of the evolution of counterpoint, rhythmic texture, and above all of what Besseler thought was the beginnings of modern tonality in the music of Du Fay. The work is full of brilliant observations of details in the works of Du Fay and his contemporaries, and a great deal of Besseler’s observations on rhythmic texture, and the ranges of certain contratenors, remain immensely valuable. But the main thesis is, to put it bluntly, a colossal error, and given Besseler’s systematic approach to his material, it affected virtually everything in the work, so that it must be read with extreme caution throughout. This view of Du Fay as the forefather of modern harmonic tonality also blinded him to crucial aspects of Du Fay’s contrapuntal language, and led in the Opera Omnia to an approach to musica ficta that attempts to erase or mitigate Du Fay’s use of inflected notes and his taste for cross-relations, particularly in the pieces with a G or a C final, despite Besseler’s own aperçu of what he called Terzfreiheit in such works.69 In the same manner it led him to date a work such as Inclita stella maris at least a decade too early, since its tonal-contrapuntal world did not conform with Besseler’s tonal teleology.70 Besseler’s tonal interpretation is not the only problem that plagues the Opera Omnia. His notions on the evolution of rhythmic textures, although generally correct, led him to an arbitrary decision to transcribe works either at 1:2 reduction or 1:4 reduction, depending on their date or in some cases the mensuration, and the rate of reduction sometimes changes within a single piece or movement, without any warning or without the change being mentioned in the notes. But at the time Du Fay’s mensural usage was still very imperfectly understood, all the more so in that around 1440 or slightly before Du Fay began using what I have called “English ” and Charles Hamm called “ with breve-semibreve movement,”71 for music notated 66 67

68 69 71

Cf. Bent, Bologna Q15, 20–21 and 28–30. The history of these undertakings is an unhappy one; see Thomas Schipperges, Die Akte Heinrich Besseler, 289–96. A second edition, ed. Peter Gülke, appeared in 1974. Besseler, Bourdon und Fauxbourdon, 43; 2nd edn., 42–44. 70 OO Besseler 1: ix. Hamm, A Chronology, 96.

Historiography of Du Fay

in the Continent with , and Besseler indiscriminately treated all the duplemeter music after 1440 as tempus diminutum, to the point that in the Missa Se la face ay pale, which never shifts away from integer valor, the triple-meter sections are reduced 1:2 and the duple-meter sections are reduced 1:4, which has misled performers ever since and can be heard in virtually every recording of the piece.72 Withal, however, the first volume of Besseler’s Opera omnia to be published, volume 3 with the four last Masses (1951), was a generally accurate and useful edition. The second volume to appear, nine years later, volume 2, with the early Masses (1960), was an editorial disaster. It is riddled with typographical errors, and even major mistranscriptions,73 and a careful reading of the preface, the critical apparatus, and the transcription give the impression that they were done by different persons who did not consult with each other or collate the results. Similar problems and errors appear, although to a lesser extent, in all subsequent volumes, and though many are easily detectable and correctable, a few works, for example Si quaeris miracula,74 are unperformable from the edition. In Besseler’s defense one must admit that the beginning of the edition took place under extraordinarily difficult and painful circumstances for him,75 and the continuation coincided with the time when his health was deteriorating and he was not able to travel freely to do some of the necessary research. Further, he was ill served by his editors in terms of proofreading, which might have been the result of the fact that the American Institute of Musicology, heroic though its undertakings were, was always severely underfunded and understaffed. Two important studies appeared the same year as volume 2 of the Opera Omnia, Rudolf Bockholdt’s study of Du Fay’s early Mass music,76 which has an accurate transcription of the Missa Sancti Antonii, and Charles Hamm’s study of the chronology of Du Fay’s work based on mensural practices.77 The basic premise of Hamm’s study remains, I believe, fundamentally 72

73

74 75 76

OO Besseler 3, no. 1, passim. In the commercial edition of the work, published in the Capella series (1951), Besseler attempted to mitigate the shift by indicating whole note = half note or the reverse, at every shift, but the greater availability of the Opera Omnia volume trumped this attempt. A single example must suffice: mm. 189–203 of the Gloria in the Missa Sancti Antonii (p. 54), a duo between cantus and contratenor. The cantus is variably from one to seven semibreves off from the tenor notes to which it should correspond, and from m. 197 to m. 202 the rhythms of the cantus bear absolutely no relation to the notated rhythms, and simultaneities include a number of seconds, unsupported fourths, sevenths, and ninths. OO Besseler 5, no. 45, mislabeled as an antiphon. See Shipperges, Die Akte Heinrich Besseler, 289–96. Bockholdt, Die frühen Messenkompositionen. 77 Hamm, A Chronology.

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sound. Much of its detail has been questioned by later scholarship, because in many ways the study was done too early, when both the manuscript transmission was incompletely understood and the music of what I have called Du Fay’s second period78 was either unknown or thought not to be by Du Fay.79 But Hamm’s work opened an important dialogue on Du Fay’s notational practices which has continued to the present day, and his contributions to the study of manuscript structure have been invaluable.80 Wolfgang Nitschke’s systematic study of Du Fay’s cantus-firmus Masses added considerably to our knowledge of the structure of these works and of Du Fay’s handling of large-scale form.81 Besseler’s painful experience with Guillaume de Van might have prejudiced him against French musicology, so that when he came to write the influential article on Du Fay for the first edition of MGG published in 1954, he entirely ignored the information presented by Pirro in 1940,82 and as a result the account of the central period of Du Fay’s biography remained incorrect until Craig Wright’s overhauling of Du Fay’s biography during his years at Cambrai in 1975.83 David Fallows’s brilliant study of Du Fay, first published in 1982, summarized, clarified, and presented in a synthetic manner all the biographical material known to that date together with a wealth of cultural details. More important, however, it contained an extensive and fairly detailed appreciation of Du Fay’s complete oeuvre as known then, which was illuminated by his extensive knowledge of the entire repertory of fifteenth-century music and the deep musicality of someone who had experienced much of this music as an active performer. Two major studies concerned with Du Fay have been published since, Laurenz Lütteken’s study of the isorhythmic motets in 1993,84 which, as with most of Lütteken’s work, combines detailed analysis of the works and their historical circumstances with a careful probing of the philosophical and aesthetic underpinning of the repertory, both in terms of the time in which it was created and of its reception history, and Peter Gülke’s study of Du Fay, which uses the biography, including material that came to light after Fallows’s study, as a framework for philosophically insightful and deeply musical evaluation of Du Fay’s music. 78 79 80

81 84

Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Second Style.” The one exception at the time was Feininger; cf. Auctorum Anonymorum, iv–viii. Hamm, “Manuscript Structure”; id., “Dating a Group”; id., “A Group of Anonymous English Pieces.” Nitschke, Studien. 82 Besseler, “Guillaume Dufay.” 83 C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai.” Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay.

Historiography of Du Fay

In the last three decades an increasing number of studies dealing not only with Du Fay but with many of his contemporaries and with almost every aspect of fifteenth-century music have contributed immensely to our understanding of Du Fay’s music and his position in the development of fifteenth-century music. The publication of numerous facsimiles has facilitated access to the primary sources of the music, and the number of recordings has multiplied to the point that a determined collector can probably obtain recordings of virtually the whole of Du Fay’s oeuvre, and a good deal of his music has become as close to being “standard repertory” as that of any fifteenth-century composer outside Josquin des Pres is likely to become. This is a particularly good sign because a number of ensembles have begun to move away from the orthodoxies of the last half century, which coupled a careful (and sometimes overly dogmatic) historicist approach to an unexamined tradition of vocal performance and an approach to tempo and phrasing that had its roots in an odd mixture of neo-Caecilianism and Anglican choral practices that made Du Fay’s music, particularly the large-scale works, Masses and motets, sound as the product of the late Victorian tradition. Fallows’s opinion at the end of his first preface, that in the world of 1982 among the few things likely to improve were the performance and understanding of medieval music,85 proved at first overly optimistic in terms of the performances and recordings of Du Fay’s music, which for about a decade afterward seemed to evaporate as the early music movement turned to the Baroque and classical periods with a vengeance. But as in the centuries after his death, neither Du Fay nor his music were entirely forgotten, and a renewed interest in the performance not only of his music, but of a good amount of the music of his contemporaries, seems to have risen with the new century. 85

Fallows, Dufay, vii.

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volume ii

The Works

8

Guillermus Du Fay, Musicus

As a prolegomenon to the discussion of Du Fay’s music it may be useful to present here, in a relatively condensed manner, the evidence we have for his own self-image as what we today call “a composer.”1 This will involve taking something of a bird’s-eye view of his biography (and consequently some duplication with Volume I), but it is important because I think this is one aspect where Du Fay was different from many of his contemporaries, and indeed, this might be one of the elements of his self-image that led to a number of his troubles with what I call the mid-level clerical bureaucracy of his time. At the end of his life, when writing his own epitaph, the first thing Du Fay said of himself was that he was a musicus. This term had a long tradition, going back at least to Aurelian of Réôme and to the little poem found at the beginning of Guido d’Arezzo’s Regulae rhythmicae,2 contrasting the musicus, “who understood the philosophical nature of music, with the ignorant singer (‘cantor’) who could only sound the notes.”3 The musicus was what we call today a “music theorist,” as opposed to the singer, who was at the time the epitome of the “practical musician.” Nonetheless, already in Guido’s time a long process of resolution of this dichotomy was in progress, and Guido himself was an example of musicus and cantor.4 This evolution, as Erich Reimer has shown, led, among other things, to the use of the term musicus for what today we call “a composer.” Reimer places this stage in the sixteenth century because this is when the term is most clearly used in that sense in the contemporary treatises, which are, after all, his main sources.5 But in what might be called common parlance, this use of the term was already in play in the middle of the fifteenth century. A specific example, all the more germane because its wording is almost certainly traceable to the circle around Du Fay, is an entry dated 20 October 1451 in the chapter acts of the cathedral of Cambrai. On 15 October of that year Gobert le Mannier, who had been magister 1 2

3 4 5

Cf. for example C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 194; Wegman, “From Maker to Composer.” See Guido d’Arezzo, Regule rithmice, ed. Pesce, 330–31. On the tradition to Aurelian see Gushee, “Questions of Genre,” 393. Christensen, “Introduction,” 3. Bower, “The Transmission,” 158–64; also Christensen, “Introduction,” 4. Reimer, “Musicus und Cantor,” 29–32, and more schematically in id., “Musicus – Cantor.”

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puerorum of the cathedral since November 1447, had resigned his post, and the canons were casting about for a new magister. Three men were surely involved in this search, Robert Auclou, who was the scholaster; Jehan de la Croix, Du Fay’s colleague from the papal chapel, who was the master of the great and small vicars; and Du Fay, who was serving as the cathedral’s cantor, that is, its chief liturgical officer. The entry reads as follows: Vadat dominus Guillermus Turpin apud Tornacum / tam pro faciendo censitorum sci Brictii quam ad loquendum de uno magistro puerorum / et specialiter si possit faciat quod dominus Paulus Iuvenis acceptet officium quia famatur bonus musicus et honestus alioquin loquitur cum Petro de Domarto / qui etiam famatus est bonus musicus.6

Neither of the two candidates for magister puerorum, Paul le Josne and Pierre de Domart, was known for his involvement with musica speculativa; rather they were composers, and in the case of Pierre an extremely influential one (much to the chagrin of Tinctoris, a true musicus in the oldfashioned sense, who would surely have objected strenuously to that designation being applied to Pierre).7 The emergence of the notion of the composer in the fifteenth century has been the subject of a study by Rob Wegman, who argues that for most of the fifteenth century “counterpoint” was primarily a performative activity that musicians learned from their earliest years,8 and that the notion of “composer” as someone who wrote down his counterpoint does not begin to appear until the end of the century. There was a true continuum that went from “singer” (or player) to “maker,” the person who produced res factae,9 and that only at the very end of the fifteenth century or the beginning of the sixteenth does the activity of the “maker” begin to be termed “composition,” particularly in connection with the actual writing down of the music, and the final emergence of the idea of the “composer” as one who produces written music is a product of the early sixteenth century.10 Wegman’s argument is substantially correct. He cites, however, passages where Ockeghem and Obrecht are designated as musicus as marks of deference to their learning, what Tinctoris called “Latinity.”11 They may be learned, but they also, in the

6 8 9

10 11

7 CBM 1059, fol. 1v. Tinctoris, Proportionale musices, in Opera theoretica, 2a: 46, 55. Wegman, “From Maker to Composer.” Note particularly p. 423 and n. 35. While it is not absolutely necessary that a res facta be written down, virtually all of the written-down compositions of the 15th century are indeed res factae or, at the very least, aspired to be. But see Strohm, The Rise, 518, for the designation of Hendrik Isaac as “componist” in 1484. Wegman, “From Maker to Composer,” 437.

Guillermus Du Fay, Musicus

context of the passage cited above from the acts, represent the first step toward recognizing that they were what we today call composers.12 Within this context Du Fay was something of an exception, and his selfdesignation as musicus at the end of his life shares some of what Wegman has noted in the designation as applied to Ockeghem and Obrecht, but also to the use of the word in a context related to that of the entry in the chapter acts. Du Fay had no word for composer, but with the term musicus he referred to himself as a learned maker of res factae. At the end of his life he owned what by fifteenth-century standards was an immense collection of written polyphony, some ten volumes of it, and it is worth noting here that unlike Hanns Wiser, Du Fay was neither a magister puerorum nor a schoolmaster of any kind.13 There is also some evidence that he conceived a good deal of the music he produced until ca. 1450 in large-scale cycles, something that required it to be written down. It is also worth noting that among the earliest uses of the verb componere to indicate the production and writing down of a res facta are the ascriptions in Ox 213, where the name of the author is followed by the word composuit in twenty-one cases. The proportions in the use of the term are interesting: nine composers have one ascription with composuit each,14 Grenon has two, and Du Fay has eleven. The disparity is not entirely a function of Du Fay having more works than the others in the manuscript; the addition of composuit to ascriptions to Du Fay are found throughout the manuscript, but the additions to the other ascriptions are for the most part restricted to a section between fols. 114v and 139v, where a number of the most complex works in the manuscript are clustered. It would appear that the use of composuit became, early on, associated with Du Fay’s activity as a maker of res factae. The scribe of Ox 213 had an unusually complete and close accessibility to music by Du Fay and other composers active in the Veneto in the 1420s and 1430s, and it appears to me that his use of the term composuit was associated in his mind largely with Du Fay’s works. There is another aspect of the music-making of Du Fay and his contemporaries that needs some clarification. In the absence of anything but 12 13

14

Cf. also ibid., 475–77. As noted earlier, Cambrai had both what the French call petites and grands écoles, and also something of a proto studium, and the visits of Jehan de Fontenay and of Tinctoris to Cambrai, apparently to work with Du Fay, suggest that he was viewed by some as a musicus in the older sense of the term. Anonymous (name cut off), Billart, Cesaris, Ciconia, Johannes de Leodio, Arnold and Hugo de Lantins, Lebertoul, and Tapissier.

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small fragments of slate tablets and a few scraps of paper, how did the composer proceed from his initial conception to the work as it is reflected in the manuscripts? The surviving evidence, with extensive references to previous research, has been assembled and presented in an exemplary manner by Jessie Ann Owens,15 who shows that it is most likely that composers in the fifteenth century used slate tablets or single sheets of paper and composed in parts or, at most, in pseudo-score. Modern critics have trouble thinking that a composer writing the parts successively could keep in their mind extended contrapuntal structures such as we encounter in the large-scale works of Du Fay or Ockeghem, despite the present day evidence that composers such as Hindemith or Boulez could keep in their minds immensely complex and detailed sound structures with relative ease, and that the same seems to have been the case with Bach or Mozart. Margaret Bent, who is particularly sensitive to both compositional procedure and its theoretical background, admits that even moderately competent composers could control three-part polyphony in their heads, and eventually adjust what we today call the counterpoint as they wrote the parts, even when writing them separately, and even provides a plausible hypothesis on how the less talented or less experienced composer would go about it.16 Nonetheless, a great deal of our present view of compositional procedure has been colored by the fascination the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had for the compositional process of Beethoven, whose approach to composing included extensive written sketching and revision on the way to the final form of the music. Given how people apparently learned to compose in the fifteenth century, which, as Wegman shows, involved largely a performing experience,17 and the kinds of musical memory needed by singers who had to memorize a great deal of the plainsong repertory and probably a fair amount of polyphony as well,18 one should assume that Du Fay probably could keep in his mind long stretches of three- or four-part polyphony in considerable detail, just as Ockeghem must have been able to hear the effect of the mensuration canons in a work such as the Missa Prolationum. A subtle change in the ways composers apparently conceived the music they were about to write took place in the early part of the fifteenth century, but our witnesses for this are the writings of theorists from the late 15 17 18

Owens, Composers at Work. 16 Bent, “Some Factors in the Control of Consonance,” 626. Wegman, “From Maker to Composer,” 428–52. The fundamental work on this is now Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory. For a detailed study of compositional process, albeit in a repertory ca. 1500, see Cumming, “Composing Imitative Counterpoint,” with extensive references to earlier studies.

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fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, which can easily be misread. This change was adumbrated by Richard Crocker in an important article in 1962, which passed largely unnoticed at the time,19 and would have been more widely considered if David Hughes’s magisterial exposition of some of the same ideas in 1956 had been widely available.20 Edward Lowinsky and Margaret Bent made crucial contributions to its understanding, albeit from very different perspectives,21 but the most thorough explication of it is that of Bonnie Blackburn, who finally defines res facta as a method she calls “harmonic composition,” which could be quasi-simultaneous or successive, where “each voice must be related to every other voice so that no improper dissonances appear between them.”22 Blackburn, following Lowinsky and her own reading of Tinctoris’s remarks about the emergence of a “new art,”23 places the beginning of this procedure in 1437, shortly after the composition of Du Fay’s Nuper rosarum flores,24 which both she and Lowinsky view as a particularly clear example of this new procedure. This, particularly in terms of Tinctoris’s perception, is certainly correct, but I hear evidence of these “harmonic procedures” in Du Fay’s music that goes back to about a decade before. By the same token we should assume that Du Fay could hear the different effect of what we call a major or a minor triad, even though there was no name for it as a verticality and he most likely thought of it as the byproduct of a contrapuntal combination, but there can be no doubt that the signed e fa in the first miserere of his last setting of the Ave regina was clearly placed there precisely for its effect. Graeme Boone has published a particularly thorough and convincing study of what he calls Du Fay’s sense of “tonal color,”25 and Thomas Brothers has shown that Du Fay, not just in his early works but throughout his career, made extensive use of what he calls “discursive accidentals.”26 Du Fay’s use of what we might call the pitch field varies slightly depending upon the final of the piece and its key signature, if any.27 In pieces with a D, E, or F final the pitch collection is 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 27

Crocker, “Discant, Counterpoint, Harmony.” Hughes, “A View of the Passing of Gothic Music.” Bent, “Resfacta,” and Lowinsky, “Canon Technique and Simultaneous Conception.” Blackburn, “On Compositional Process,” 283. Tinctoris, Liber de arte contrapuncti, in Opera theoretica, 1:12. Blackburn, “On Compositional Process,” 269; cf. Lowinsky, “Canon Technique,” 189–94. Boone, “Tonal Color in Dufay.” 26 Brothers, Chromatic Beauty, 185. It is risky, I believe, to speak of modes in much of Du Fay’s polyphony. All of it predates Tinctoris’s treatment of mode in polyphony in Liber de natura et proprietate tonorum (1476), and except for those pieces based upon a plainsong what we encounter in his music is much closer to what Harold Powers called a “tonal type.” Cf. Powers, “Tonal Types,” 439.

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generally that of the diatonic scale, sometimes with signed B fa, either as a key or in individual notes for pieces with D or F finals, and the use of musica ficta for the half step below the final and sometimes the fifth in pieces with D or F finals, and the fourth in pieces with E final.28 But in pieces with G or C finals the pitch field that we encounter as signed notes is very close to the total chromatic scale. To be sure, not every work with a G or C final makes use of that entire pitch field, although it is found as signed notes in the Missa Ave regina caelorum (ca. 1471–1472), and in a combination of signed notes and implied musica ficta in Craindre vous vueil (ca. 1436). The studies that exist concerning the tonal organization of Du Fay’s music apart from the insightful but misguided efforts in Besseler’s Bourdon und Fauxbourdon, are few and concentrate for the most part on the secular music.29 Treitler’s magisterial study shows in a schematic but very clear manner the basic architecture of the tonal types used in Du Fay’s chansons, a basic architecture that can, in fact, be extended to all of his music. But Du Fay’s use of “discursive accidentals,” either signed or implied, as musica ficta is also an important part of the affective grammar of his music, particularly in works with G or C finals, and in the 1430s a specific idiom begins to appear in his music that will last to the end of his career, marked by a predilection for rapid shifts between sonorities using a B fa and a B mi, and occasionally between E fa and E mi in different voices. It is significant, I believe, that the earliest piece where these cross-relations (to give them the modern name for the sake of brevity) become an important and pervasive feature of the tonal surface of the music is Nuper rosarum flores. But they remain a particular trait of much of his music with G or C finals to the end of his life. I should note here that one of the most extreme examples of an early Du Fay work with an extended pitch field, the Gloria–Credo pair No. 3,30 which atypically for such pieces has an F final, makes almost no use of the cross-relations per se. In any case, these cross-relations, which are pervasive in Nuper rosarum flores and particularly in the much later Missa L’homme armé, clearly distressed Besseler because they run entirely counter to his thesis of Du Fay as a precursor of modern tonality, and in his edition he uses musica ficta in a strenuous effort to hide them. The foregoing is basically a prolegomenon to the main topic here, which is the career of Du Fay as a composer and what I believe was his self-perception 28

29 30

There are a few exceptions to this: the Gloria–Credo pair No. 3, OO Besseler 4, no. 5, OO Planchart 5/5, with an F final, uses the pitch field one usually encounters in pieces with a C final, including signed B fa, E fa, and A fa, and even a D fa. Cf. Treitler, “Tone System”; Bashour, “A Model”; and Mahrt, “Guillaume Dufay’s Chansons.” OO Besseler 4, no. 5; OO Planchart 5/5.

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as such, a self-perception supported in part by what we can glimpse of the perception of those who were his patrons and colleagues. These glimpses can be teased out of the historical record, and though each is relatively small and fleeting, together they do add up to something like a coherent picture that, when set side by side with some of the evidence we have from Du Fay’s own music, presents a picture at considerable variance with Craig Wright’s view that Du Fay was first and foremost a late medieval cleric and his musical activity was essentially secondary,31 or Wegman’s view of “the maker.”32 The first of these details comes rather early in Du Fay’s life. Even though the account books of the small vicars of the cathedral in the fifteenth century have enormous lacunae, the far more complete records of the aumosne, as well as the chapter acts, not to speak of the chapter acts from St-Géry and Ste-Croix, as well as the accounts of the bourse of StGéry and information in other kinds of registers, give us the names of hundreds of men who were choristers in the churches of Cambrai, among them a good number of men who achieved some renown as musicians. Some left written compositions, others achieved important positions in the chapels of the king of France, the dukes of Burgundy or Milan, and the papal chapel, or as magistri puerorum at the cathedral, at St-Géry, or at SteGudule in Brussels. To cite only a few besides Du Fay, we have Barthélemy Poignare, Denis de Hollain, Gilles Carlier, Gilles Cosse, Gilles Flannel, Jacques le Mannier, Jacques Robaille, Jehan Caron 1, Jehan Fresneau, Jehan Hemart, Jehan le Leu, Jehan Mauclerc, Jehan Zemberch, Josquin des Près, Laurent Canner, Louis van Pullaer, Martin Courtois, Philippe Caron, Pierre le Canoine, and Robert le Canoine. The records of the aumosne at the cathedral and those of the bourse at St-Géry document hundreds of gifts to them when they were choristers, usually livery, and payments to help them undertake a pilgrimage, buy some necessities, or attend the schools. Only once in all of the records I have seen is any of these boys given a book, and that is when in 1411 the aumosne at the cathedral records granting Du Fay 20s to obtain a doctrinale, that is, what was often called the Doctrinale puerorum of the thirteenth-century Franciscan Alexandre de Villedieu.33 Although this was at the time (and would remain well into the next two centuries) the basic textbook used in the schools to teach grammar, including an important component of prosody and versification (it consists of 2,645 hexameters), it was still a formidable work to let loose in 31 33

C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 194. 32 Wegman, “From Maker to Composer.” The work had as many titles as there were manuscripts or impressions; cf. Zawart, “History of Classical Education,” 96.

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the hands of a thirteen-year-old boy.34 This was the kind of book that the magister scholarum owned, not one of the boys, and books were still precious enough objects that the cathedral authorities would probably not part with them. Indeed, the gift to Du Fay is of money so he can buy a copy of the book, perhaps from the estate of a deceased cleric. Still, this indicates that some members of the cathedral clergy regarded Du Fay as an exceptionally gifted student. As Du Fay became a clericus altaris, probably in 1412 or 1413, he might have considered becoming a small vicar at the cathedral. Instead, however, he obtained a chaplaincy at St-Géry, sometime in 1413–1414. Over the course of the fifteenth century a good number of clerics were, at one point or another, chaplains at St-Géry and small vicars at the cathedral, but there is no instance of anyone serving in both capacities at the same time. The chaplains of St-Géry took part in the offices of the church, but were not, like the small vicars, the singing men. Thus Du Fay, relatively fresh from the maîtrise, took a position that was not per se that of a singer. The accounts of the chaplains at St-Géry, however, reveal that by 11 November 1414 Du Fay was apparently no longer in Cambrai. The assumption of most scholars has always been that he went to the Council of Constance. Most likely he was a member of the retinue of Pierre le Prestre, one of two Cambrai canons who were at the council and were nephews of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly.35 The evidence for his presence at Constance, apart from events of his later career, comes from some of his own music, as noted in Volume I, Chapter 2,36 and this is the beginning of another remarkable trait that, though not unique to Du Fay’s biography, is more pervasive for him than for most of his contemporaries, and it is that the musical works themselves carry a fair amount of information as “biographical” documents. In this case the composition of a Sanctus–Agnus pair based on a cantus firmus that at Cambrai was part of the Missa ad tollendum schismam is evidence that he wrote the work at Cambrai in preparation for going to Constance,37 and was presenting himself to the singers in Constance as “a composer.” Du Fay was back at Cambrai by 6 October 1417,38 and remained there as a socius chori of St-Géry until at least Ash Wednesday of 1420.39 He was in 34

35 38 39

The best modern edition remains that by Reichling: Villedieu, Das Doctrinale. A 13th-century copy that belonged to the cathedral survives with interlinear glosses in prose, CBM 250; it consists of 76 fols. See p. 24. 36 See p. 61. 37 Ibid. See also Planchart, “The Early Career,” 357–60. LAN, 7G 2411 (1417–1418), fol. 12r. LAN, 7G 2926, fol. 7r, mentioning Du Fay receiving 12d. for obits “on the day after Ash Wednesday.”

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Rimini before 20 August 1420, when Cleofe di Malatesta set sail for her wedding with Theodoros II Palaiologos. As we now know, he was recruited most likely not by Carlo di Galeotto, lord of Rimini, but by Bishop Pandolfo di Malatesta, Cleofe’s brother.40 Still, if Pandolfo wanted “a singer,” there were a number of very good singers in the Veneto; recruiting a young musician half a continent away was not yet a usual procedure, so perhaps Pandolfo was interested in another aspect of Du Fay’s skills. This seems to be the case if we judge by the relatively large number of compositions, some of them quite unusual for the time that we have from him between 1420 and 1424. These include five motets, Vasilissa ergo gaude, O gemma lux, O sancte Sebastiane, Apostolo glorioso, and Vergene bella, two of them exceptional works for their Italian texts, and Apostolo glorioso, also exceptional for its five-voice texture; at least two and possibly three Mass pairs, Gloria–Credo 1–3, the first written in conjunction with Hughes de Lantins, a work that literally marks the first true flowering of a new genre, the Missa sine nomine; and a number of songs, notably the ballades Resvelliés vous for the wedding of Carlo di Malatesta with Vittoria di Lorenzo Colonna, J’ay mis mon cuer for Elizabetta di Galeazzo Malatesta, who was Bishop Pandolfo’s favorite niece and eventually his heir,41 and He compaignons for an unspecified occasion sometime in 1423 or 1424.42 Du Fay’s return to Cambrai and Laon, either at the end of 1424 or early in 1425, brought him back to the role of a cantor and a clericus. He continued to compose, and some of the most extraordinary early songs, including Je me complains, Ma belle dame souveraine, and Adieu ces bons vins, belong to that period, but he left the north as soon as it was feasible, most likely by February 1426,43 and the implied complaint in Adieu ces bon vins indicates that he was dissatisfied with his lot then.44 The two years in Bologna were perhaps not much of an improvement on his situation in Laon: Allemand, unlike his predecessor Carrillo, does not appear to have been interested in music, and might have recruited musicians such as Du Fay and Gilles Laury out of a sense of trying to duplicate Carrillo’s administration after the intervening disaster of Condulmaro’s governorship.45 Still, what we have from those years are some of the most openly “experimental” works of Du Fay. The motet Rite maiorem moves away 40 42

43 45

Bent, “Petrarch, Padua, Malatesta.” 41 See OO Planchart 10/2/4. See Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 124–25. The possibility of a later date is now mooted by what we know of the career of Pandolfo di Malatesta; cf. Planchart, “The Liègeoise Diaspora.” See p. 75. 44 See Planchart, “Du Fay and the Style of Molinet,” 64–65 and n. 28. See pp. 82–83.

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from the surface showiness of the Malatesta motets, but uses the solus tenor in a manner that is absolutely unique in the entire repertory.46 The case of the Missa Sancti Jacobi is more extreme. I believe that it began as a selfcontained three-movement Mass, ending with the Credo, and using plainsong paraphrase in the Kyrie in a manner entirely different from that used by Du Fay elsewhere or that of any of his contemporaries, where the plainsong paraphrase forms a climactic ending to each group of invocations. To this he began adding, probably also in Bologna, motetlike proper settings (Introit and Offertory). The Sanctus and Agnus, written perhaps in Rome, marry traits of the Ordinary movements to those of the propers, and finally the alleluia, introit repetitio, and the communion, surely written in Rome, revert in one case to the style of the earlier propers (the alleluia), or are written in an entirely new style (repetitio and communion). Similarly, the Sanctus papale comes as close as any work of the early fifteenth century to being essentially a polychoral work.47 Furthermore, the Sanctus is, as I have shown, surely a work written sub spem for the papal chapel, inspired by Du Fay’s knowledge that at the time he was in Bologna the papal chapel included a group of choristers led by Nicole Grenon, an ensemble recruited largely from his own maîtrise at Cambrai.48 Still, his position at Bologna was largely that of a cantor, and after the revolt of August 1428 and his removal to Rome that was also by and large his position in Rome. Nonetheless, Du Fay’s years in Rome represent the beginnings of an immensely productive streak in his career: first of all we have the completion of the Missa Sancti Iacobi, which in the repetitio of the introit, and particularly in the communion, present the harbingers of a new approach to plainsong setting, albeit adumbrated in the Kyrie of the Mass. Then there are three motets. Balsamus et munda cera is a departure from the kinds of motets he wrote for the Malatesta in its lack of an introitus (in this the motet harks back to those of Machaut) and a songlike quality to the upper voices.49 Ecclesiae militantis, in contrast, is a summa of all of the procedures he used in earlier motets (with the exception of Balsamus), while at the same time it begins to establish a new relationship between the upper voices and the tenors, which will see its flowering in the motets of the late 1430s and 1440s. Finally, Supremum est mortalibus represents a drastic departure in terms of textures, the use of the contratenor, and the incorporation of fauxbourdon in an isorhythmic motet. 46 48 49

See OO Planchart 2/4; Bent, “Trompetta and Concordans,” 62. See pp. 93–94; also Planchart, “Institutional Politics,” 136–38. Cf. Fallows, Dufay, 114 and n. 20.

47

Fallows, Dufay, 179–81.

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The rise of fauxbourdon in his works gave Du Fay an effective manner of composing a kind of liturgical Gebrauchsmusik that was at once euphonious and elegant and probably easily constructed. Concomitant with this is the beginning of two large-scale projects, the composition of the cycle of hymns for the whole year and that of the cycle of Kyries and Glorias for all the different classes of feasts that called for polyphony in the papal chapel. All these pieces built upon plainsong paraphrase, using the liturgically appropriate plainsong for each class of feast in the case of the Kyries and the Glorias. For the most solemn feasts, when the Gloria and the Credo were both sung in polyphony, he employed two pairs that he had already written for the Malatesta,50 reworking the second one from three voices to four,51 and perhaps adding an alternate Amen with Easter tropes to the second. No one in the previous 150 years had attempted anything comparable. Amadeus VIII’s call to Du Fay to come to Savoy probably appeared to him as a validation of his own conception of himself as a musicus, and also came at a time when his own beneficial career, his career as a clericus, was essentially stalled: nothing had come of the requested benefices in the famous coronation rotulus of Eugenius IV. The first stay at Savoy was very brief, and his journey to Cambrai, ostensibly to visit his mother, was also surely a visit to make sure that if a benefice in Cambrai would open up he would not meet with the opposition he had encountered in Bruges and in Tournai.52 Significantly, he brought to Cambrai the two most spectacular liturgical works he had that were appropriate to the state of the liturgy in the cathedral at the time, the two four-voice Gloria–Credo pairs, written perhaps during the Malatesta years, but now destined for the most solemn feasts within his Kyrie and Gloria cycle.53 He might have brought some of the hymns, since a few of them were added here and there in CBM 29. In addition, the other trace of his visit that we have is the contratenor that he added to a Gloria that is surely a work of Nicole Grenon.54 In other words, whatever other conversations he had with members of the chapter, he clearly made an effort to present himself as a musicus. This was something that could be misunderstood at this time, as it was in Du Fay’s case at St. Donatian in the 1440s. That apparently it was understood at Cambrai is probably the result of the presence of Grenon and Hanelle in the chapter,

50 53 54

See OO Planchart 5/4–5. 51 See Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:187–88. 52 See pp. 131–132. The presence of these works in Cambrai 6, copied shortly after 1435, points to this. OO Planchart 5/29.

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and perhaps also Carlier, who was something of a traditional musicus (i.e., theorist).55 Du Fay’s return to Savoy in April 1435, and the shortness of his stay there, since he was back in the papal chapel by 10 June,56 give the impression that he sensed that to obtain a canonicate at Cambrai he had to be in the Curia, rather than in Savoy. As during his first sojourn, his stay at the court was very short, and to some extent one suspects that the duke at first simply wanted his presence as a counterweight to the splendor of the Burgundian chapel. Du Fay’s last year in the papal chapel was marked once more by a number of spectacular compositions clustered around the time of the dedication of Santa Maria del Fiore in March 1436: Nuper rosarum flores, Salve flos Tuscae, Mirandas parit, and the extraordinary recomposition of Quel fronte signorile as Craindre vous vueil. In addition he obviously came into contact with another musician who clearly admired his music, the scribe of ModB, who in all likelihood was Benoit Sirede,57 a singer at Orsanmichele and later at Ferrara and the baptistery and the cathedral in Florence.58 Sirede entered in ModB an enormous amount of music by Du Fay, all the way to the 1436 motets, all of it in careful and very good readings. Furthermore, it is clear that Du Fay remained in touch with him and sent him new works, because his collection is our only source for all of the late isorhythmic motets by Du Fay with the exception of Nuper rosarum flores, which survives also in Tr 92. This means Sirede had access to works that Du Fay wrote in Savoy in the late 1430s and in Cambrai in the 1440s, access that probably came directly through the composer – yet more evidence of his self-representation as a musicus. About six months after his reception as a canon of Cambrai in November 1436 Du Fay left the papal chapel for the last time and returned to Savoy. We do not have the accounts of the chapel of Savoy as a separate institution before 1449, and those of the Tesoreria generale are generally opaque in terms of the structure of the institution, but if the pattern that emerges after 1449 holds for the 1430s, Du Fay was the magister cappellae

55

56 57 58

Two other papal musicians, Gilles Flannel called L’Enfant, and Jehan Marsille, met with problems in collating their canonicates at Cambrai – Flannel in 1433 and again in 1434 (CBM 1046, fols. 117r, 123v), before collating a canonicate in 1438 (CBM 1046, fol. 154v), and Marsille in 1436 before collating in 1437 (CBM 1046, fols. 154v and 174v) – but in these cases rival claimants were experienced curialists. In Flannel’s case his rival was Anselm Smit van Breda, a formidable figure in Rome at the time; cf. Schwarz, “Anselmus Fabri (Smit).” RAS, Camerale I, Reg. 828, fol. 41v. See Haar and Nádas, “The Medici,” 36–40; Phelps, “A Repertory,” 136–38. Starr, “The ‘Ferrara Connection’”; id., “Benoit.”

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but not an active member of the chapel as a performer; his career as a cantor came to an end in June 1437. Du Fay’s works that can be traced securely to this period are, like the last Florentine works, occasional pieces: Magnanimae gentis and O gloriose tiro, both of which have clear connections with Savoy. One large-scale project, surely begun in Rome, survives mostly in sources connected with the Council of Basel, the cycle of proses for the major feasts of the year. It covers all the important feasts of the Lord, Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, and Corpus Christi, so it is possible that it was continued and concluded in Savoy. The only prose not in that cycle, that for SS Peter and Paul, Isti sunt duae olivae, is certainly a Savoyard work, since that plainsong was not used in Rome or northern Italy and was restricted to a narrow area that included the dioceses of Lausanne and Geneva. Apart from a few ceremonial works, the music that Du Fay wrote for Savoy probably consisted largely of songs; that is the impression one gathers from the surviving repertory of his last sojourn in Savoy, from 1452 to 1458. But we might be facing here a problem caused by the transmission of his music. Despite the loss of sources, we have, for the years before 1436, two enormous collections by scribes who clearly had a keen interest in Du Fay’s music, Bo Q15 and Ox 213. The third such collection is Sirede’s manuscript, ModB, which takes us up to the mid-1440s, but Sirede was interested in music for the Office and motets. The source situation for Du Fay’s music after 1437 becomes very fragile. No Savoyard collections of polyphony survive between the later section of Str 222, finished ca. 1435,59 and Pav 362 and Cord, copied in the 1460s and 1470s respectively,60 although there is now good evidence that parts of Tr 92 were copied by Nicole Merques during the years he was in Basel.61 Of the several dozens of manuscripts of polyphony copied at Cambrai between 1442, the most plausible date for Cambrai 11, and the end of the century, noted in the registers of the fabric, not a single one survives, and the same applies to any manuscripts copied for the court of Burgundy between 1440 and 1490 with the exception of Brussels 5557, so that for Du Fay’s compositional career after ca. 1437 we are left largely with sources that are quite distant from the composer. Under these circumstances it is even more surprising how much of his late work survives, which might be a function, as I hope to show below, of his active promotion and dissemination of his music, but a small 59 61

Fallows, Catalogue, 45. 60 Ibid., 13 and 36. P. Wright, unpublished paper presented at the International Conference on Early Music in Novacella in 2009. I am deeply grateful to Professor Wright for allowing me to see his work.

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glimpse of the songs that probably date from his last years in Florence and the years in Savoy appears in the chapter on the songs, Table 16.4 (nos. 30–38). Du Fay probably could see the approaching storm between the council and the pope with uncommon clarity. All the principal actors in the conflict, Eugenius IV, Louis Allemand, and Amadeus VIII, had been his patrons at one point or another. As noted earlier,62 his retreat to Cambrai in 1439 was also a politically savvy move in that he put himself under the protection of the duke of Burgundy, a protection that allowed him to keep a low-key and discreet contact with the court of Savoy. Significantly, his first direct contact with Philip the Good produced a relationship whereby Du Fay was a musicus of the Court of Burgundy but not a cantor. The duke’s first project for Du Fay was the composition of six polyphonic proper cycles for the weekly missae communes that he had founded at the SainteChapelle in Dijon as part of the liturgical devotions of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Five of these cycles survive, albeit largely anonymous, in Tr 88.63 These works mark a return by Du Fay to the kind of large-scale musical projects he had undertaken in Rome, but then also take him into entirely new territory in terms of how to deal with setting the long and often melodically diffuse (from a fifteenth-century perspective) plainsong melodies of the graduals and alleluias. Some movements of the Masses have ascriptions in the sources, and others were known by Gaffori and Spataro to be by Du Fay,64 but his authorship of the entire cycle, apart from the interrelatedness of the Masses already noted by Feininger,65 show up in an extremely unusual trait. All missae communes were meant to be sung throughout the year and thus needed a tract as well as a second alleluia. The Masses in Tr 88 have two alleluias (the only such polyphonic cycles in the entire fifteenth century to do so), but no tract. Given their transmission, we have no rubrics for them, but an entirely unique and sui generis rubric in a Cambrai missal copied in the 1440s provides rubrics on how to generate the tract of a missa communis from an alleluia.66 This is not only a liturgical but a musical innovation that can only be traced to Du Fay’s creation of the missae communes for the Order. When we apply the 62 63

64 65

66

See p. 156. See p. 506, and also Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 148–59; id., “Connecting the Dots,” 16–20. Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Masses” (1972), 13–17. Feininger, ed., Auctorum Anonymorum, iv–vii; also Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Second Style,” 326–40. CBM, 158, fols. 1r–2v; cf. Planchart, “Connecting the Dots,” 17–19.

Guillermus Du Fay, Musicus

rubric of the Cambrai missal to the Order’s Masses, it also becomes clear that the verse of the alleluia that will produce a tract is set as a duet, so that the tradition of polyphonic tracts as duos has its roots in Du Fay’s cycles of 1439. The decade of the 1440s represents in many ways the apogee of Du Fay’s career as a musicus. This is ironic in a number of ways: first of all, musicians (largely cantores) of his time went to live in the place where they held a benefice as a form of retirement. This was the case of virtually all of those of Du Fay’s colleagues in the papal chapel who wrote music.67 Josquin, to be sure, retired to Condé in 1504, probably in his fifties, and continued writing music well past that point.68 Du Fay was forty-two in 1439, and his retreat to Cambrai was simply a matter of political expedience. By contrast, the complete loss of virtually all the music manuscripts from Cambrai from 1440 to the end of the century prevented us for a long time from having a clear idea of Du Fay’s activities during the 1440s. What we can see are small reflections of this repertory that made their way to Florence or Ferrara, Munich, and Trent. Two motets, Moribus et genere for Dijon in 1441 and Fulgens iubar ecclesiae for Cambrai in 1445 or 1447, probably reached Benoit Sirede most likely from Du Fay himself. But Sirede was compiling a book of music for the Office, so no Mass music appears in ModB. Further, if Sirede had also compiled a book of music for the Mass, which has not survived, most of what Du Fay was writing in the 1440s would not have been appropriate, because Du Fay had embarked on setting in polyphony a repertory largely ignored by earlier composers, the propers of the Mass, which were not normally sung in polyphony elsewhere at the time. The historical circumstances that led to this have been described earlier.69 I have noted that much of the music for the Ordinary, even if it included new works by Du Fay, could have been compiled from works imported from England and the Low Countries, but the music for the propers 67 68

69

Planchart, “Institutional Politics,” 130. Fallows, Josquin, 274–347. Apart from style and transmission, there is liturgical evidence for a number of pieces coming from the years in Condé. Benedicta es caelorum regina was a prose that was used only in northern France, the Low Countries, and England (cf. AH 54, no. 252). The ending of the five-voice De profundis was clearly for a funeral; this was the normal ending used for the fifth gradual psalm, which was not the normal place of De profundis but is something allowed by the rubrics (cf. LU, 1764). The possible funerals are given in Fallows, Josquin, 142–43, and all date from after 1504. Fallows, however, errs in cautioning that the use of the plural “eis” in “dona eis Domine” makes it “unwise to associate the motet with any single event or personage” (p. 242); in fact the plural “eis” is part of an invariable liturgical formula. See Volume I pp. 214–16.

345

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Guillermus Du Fay, Musicus

probably had to be composed at Cambrai. The impetus for this was surely the commission by the duke of Burgundy. In the 1420s Du Fay and a few other composers had written plenary Masses, which included the propers and the Ordinary, and Jehan Brassart had written a number of polyphonic introits, probably in the 1430s, but a systematic setting of proper cycles was an innovation in 1439. Du Fay had already undertaken a number of extended musico-liturgical projects – the hymns, the Kyrie and Gloria cycles, and the proses. The six Masses for the Order were another such project and the precursor of the proper cycles for the cathedral. There was also another such large-scale project: in the 1430s or early 1440s Du Fay had begun a series of polyphonic Vespers for St. Francis and for St. Anthony of Padua, fragments of which survive in Tr 87, Tr 88, and ModB.70 In the 1440s this was apparently enlarged by an elaborate work that has come to be known as the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua, but was in effect an elaborate Ordinary cycle that served two proper cycles, one for St. Anthony of Padua and another for St. Francis of Assisi, including the octave of St. Francis.71 Just as the Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece follow not the liturgy of Cambrai but that of the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon, the Franciscan Masses follow the liturgy of the Franciscan Order rather than that of the cathedral. To be sure, the propers for most of these Masses, with only a few exceptions (e.g., the communion for the Mass of the Holy Cross), could be used in the Cambrai liturgy as well, and were probably included in the two large volumes of propers copied by Symon Mellet in 1449. In addition, the rubrics of Cambrai 158 for the derivation of tracts in the missae communes indicate that the cathedral adopted some of the procedures that Du Fay devised while composing the missae communes for Dijon. In the case of the propers for St. Anthony of Padua, Du Fay established a celebration of his feast with his own music for it in the chapel of St. Stephen sometime during his life, either around 1450 before leaving for Italy or upon one of his two returns, in 1451 or 1458, a celebration that continued after his death at least until 1579,72 and in the case of the alleluia for St. Francis, which was never used in the cathedral liturgy, either Du Fay or someone else made it a contrafact for St. Sebastian, most likely in connection with the rise of the saint’s feast to double rank founded by Gilles Flannel.73 Having started to compose polyphonic propers, Du Fay apparently wrote some for institutions other than the cathedral. A cycle for 70 72

Planchart, “The Books,” 185–88. 71 Ibid., 175–78. Planchart, “Notes on Guillaume Du Fay’s Last Works,” 71.

73

See p. 540.

Guillermus Du Fay, Musicus

St. Maurice follows the liturgy of Savoy, and, as I have noted elsewhere, probably was commissioned by the duke of Savoy, who must have sent Du Fay the texts of the liturgy,74 and there is evidence that the Alleluia V. Tu puer propheta was also composed for Savoy.75 Some of the small pieces for Vespers composed during this period follow not the use of Cambrai but rather the use of Paris, which was the use followed by the Burgundian chapel.76 In short, we have Du Fay at Cambrai in the 1440s writing music for a number of different patrons: his own cathedral, the court of Burgundy, both for its services wherever the ducal chapel happened to be and for the liturgy of the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon, and even the court of Savoy, which at the time was on the other side of the Schism. But there is more, as Fallows and Gallagher have noted. Seigneur Leon, also written during that decade, is for Leonello d’Este, and most likely written not as a commission but sub spem,77 which is probably also the way in which he wrote the final version of the Franciscan Masses and Vespers, in this case for Padua. Mention of this last work brings up another aspect of Du Fay’s activity during these years, and it is its innovative and “experimental” aspects. Seigneur Leon is a hybrid of rondeau and motet that points to the combinative chanson as well as to the chanson-motet of a later generation. To write not just entire cycles of polyphonic cycles, but a collection of them per circulum anni, which is surely what was contained in the two large volumes of propers copied by Symon Mellet in 1449 (and in double copies, meaning that it was intended for the liturgy in choro), represents not only musical innovation but even more liturgical innovation, which, given the weight of tradition, was considerably more adventurous. In addition, the music of the 1440s that has survived contains a number of mensural uses that are entirely new not only for Du Fay but for his contemporaries,78 including some of the earliest uses of modus cum tempore signs,79 and in the Credo of the St. Anthony Mass a passage of fiendishly difficult multiple mensurations that led Wiser to add a simpler

74 76 77 78

79

Planchart, “Connecting the Dots,” 22–28. 75 See later in this chapter. See later in this chapter. Fallows, Dufay, 63; but cf. Gallagher, “Seigneur Leon’s Papal Sword.” This was one of the traits that made Charles Hamm, at a time when Du Fay’s authorship of a number of these pieces was less securely established, very suspicious of their authenticity; cf. Hamm, Chronology, 103–12. These indicate modus and tempus with a combination of two or three figures; Busse Berger, Mensuration and Proportion Signs, 155–63.

347

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Guillermus Du Fay, Musicus

rendering of the cantus.80 All of this suggests that perhaps this is the decade when Du Fay undertook the writing of his lost treatise on proportions, seen by Fétis in 1824,81 an activity that brings him closer to the old-fashioned definition of musicus. Of all of the music Du Fay wrote in the 1440s we have only a few fragments. In the case of the proper cycles for Dijon, Cambrai, and Savoy, parts of them reached Wiser in Munich in the early 1450s, and others reached him in the later 1450s in Trent, probably, as Strohm surmises, from the imperial chapel at Wiener Neustadt,82 although it is not impossible that some of the music reached Trent through itinerant singers from Cambrai on the way to Rome.83 When Du Fay left Cambrai for his last extended stay in Savoy in 1452, his position as magister cappellae, but not as cantor, is made explicit in a series of documents.84 Again, it appears that, as in the earlier Savoyard years, Du Fay’s production was largely songs for the court rather than liturgical music, although there is a “ceremonial” liturgical work, the Missa Se la face ay pale, that typically re-envisions a number of traditions. The older one is the isorhythmic motet, as practiced by Du Fay, including an extended use of isomelic passages, but this time not connected with the tenor, as well as intimations of the entire texture of the chanson in the polyphony of the Mass.85 The younger one builds on Du Fay’s own response to the English Missa Caput, a work he had surely come to know in the 1440s,86 but changed now through his use of a secular cantus firmus, one of the earliest instances of such use in the fifteenth century.87 A number of the songs composed during Du Fay’s last sojourn in Savoy can be identified through a combination of historical circumstances and the texts that he used. First of all there are the meetings of the court of Savoy and the court of France at Cleppé in 1452 and particularly at StPourçain, when we are certain that the chapels of both courts were

80

81 82 83

84 85 86 87

OO Planchart 3/3, Credo, mm. 238–50. All modern editions ignore Du Fay’s original version and publish instead Wiser’s simplification. Fétis, “Mémoire,” 13; Borren, Dufay, 22–24; Gallo, “Citazioni,” 149. Strohm, “The Medieval Mass Proper,” 50–54. The case of Gilles Crepin in 1467, who stopped in Savoy, is mentioned earlier. In addition there is the case of Jacques Boni, Hendrik Ziller, and Laurent Canner, who traveled to Rome in 1454 (cf. Appendix 1). See the discussion in Chapter 5. OO Planchart 3/4, Missa se la face ay pale, Gloria and Credo, mm. 271–82 in each movement. Cf. Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Second Style,” 310. Cf. Strohm, The Rise, 423 and 430. The earliest Masses on secular songs all appear in Tr 90 (La belle se siet) or Tr 88, sources copied between 1456 and 1460.

Guillermus Du Fay, Musicus

present.88 Then there is the letter of Du Fay to Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici, on 22 February [1456], specifically stating that recently he had written a number of songs “at the request of the lords of the king’s household,” and offering to send them to the Medici together with four “lamentations of Constantinople,”89 and a number of songs that set texts of the poets from the circle of Charles d’Orléans, that is, of poets who were probably in St-Pourçain with the French court, some of whom also suggest that he heard Ockeghem sing.90 In these works Du Fay shows that he is alert to new trends in song composition, mostly coming from Ockeghem. At the same time in some of the songs, such as Dona gentile,91 he combines an experimental approach to the text, transforming what was most likely a ballata into an Italian rondeau,92 with a style-conscious recall of the music of Ciconia in the repetitions of “datime soccorso.”93 He continued to write music for different patrons. The texts of the lamentations for Constantinople were sent to him from Naples, surely with the request that he set them to music. By the same token, the texts of the new liturgy for the Recollectio Festorum Beatae Virginis Mariae were sent to him from Cambrai so that he could produce the plainsongs for the new feast. The short episode at Besançon during Du Fay’s final return to Cambrai, where he was asked to settle a controversy on the mode of the antiphon O quanta est exsultatio,94 is also evidence of the extent to which he was regarded as a musicus not only in the sense of one who wrote music, but in the traditional sense of a music theorist. Similar evidence is presented by the visits to Cambrai of two musicians, Jehan de Fontenay (in 1447–1448), who was a member of the French Royal Chapel from 1459 to 1486, and Tinctoris in 1460,95 both of whom have incorrectly been reckoned as “small vicars” at Cambrai at the time, but who were apparently just seeking Du Fay at Cambrai, most likely to discuss musical matters with him. This pattern continued after Du Fay’s final return to Cambrai in 1458. The accounts of the fabric note the copying of a number of his works by Symon Mellet. Some, like the troped Ave regina caelorum, were “personal” works perhaps intended for a foundation of his own, but others like a Magnificat septimi toni, the hymn O quam glorifica, a prose for St. Mary Magdalen (surely Mane prima sabbati), all unfortunately lost, were surely

88 90 91 93 95

See p. 240. 89 Grunzweig, “Notes sur la musique,” 86. Fallows, Dufay, 70–71, 156–58; Planchart, “Du Fay and the Style of Molinet,” 67–68. OO Planchart 10/1/7. 92 Cf. Fallows, The Songs, 48–49. Planchart, “Du Fay and the Style of Molinet,” 67–68. 94 Castan, “Une consultation.” See p. 275.

349

350

Guillermus Du Fay, Musicus

intended for the cathedral liturgy.96 But the Missa L’homme armé was surely written for Philip the Good and the Order of the Golden Fleece,97 and to judge from the specific form of the cantus firmus used so was the Missa Ecce ancilla.98 But this last work was entered in a double copy into the cathedral books, which means it was intended for the liturgy In choro.99 The Missa L’homme armé was apparently not copied for the cathedral,100 although Regis’s Mass was copied in 1462–1463,101 and the Missa Ave regina caelorum was not copied until 1472–1473.102 The pattern of earlier years persisted. In 1468, when Gilles Crépin left Cambrai for Rome, he carried with him “a number of masses” by Du Fay, which he left (or allowed to be copied?) by the musicians of the Savoy chapel.103 The wording makes it clear that Du Fay was sending these Masses to Savoy and to Rome. By the same token Antonio Squarcialupi sends Du Fay a poem by Lorenzo de’ Medici with a request that he compose music to it.104 The notion of a work composed “to be sent away,” as if it were a painting or a sculpture, is more common in Du Fay’s career than in those of most of his contemporaries. This might be just a case of our historical astigmatism or the loss of documentation. But it is interesting to note that out of four pieces of correspondence that we have concerning the composer, namely Louis of Savoy’s letters, one to Philip the Good asking him to allow Du Fay to return to Savoy, a second in answer to a gift sent by Du Fay, as well as Du Fay’s letter to the Medici, and finally Squarcialupi’s letter to Du Fay, two of them deal with works to be sent away, and another is a request for a work by Du Fay. This is not quite yet the kind of treatment of the piece of music as a commodity that Wegman points to in his study of Hendrik Isaac’s dealings with patrons,105 but it is a precursor to it, just as Du Fay’s largely lost collection of propers for Cambrai, a sort of Choralis Cameracensis, is the precursor of Isaac’s Choralis Constantinus, and the self-described musicus is indeed a “componist.” 96

97 99 100 101 102 103 104

LAN, 4G, 4670, fol. 27v; 4G 4671, fol. 24v; 4G 6472, fol. 24r; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 248, 249, 251. 98 Planchart, “The Origins,” 334–35, but cf. also earlier. See later in this chapter. LAN, 4G 3671, fol. 24r; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 248; Houdoy, Histoire, 194. The accounts of the fabric have no lacunae between 1458 and 1474. LAN, 4G 4670, fol. 27v; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 247; Houdoy, Histoire, 194. LAN, 4G 4681, fol. 21v; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 252; Houdoy, Histoire, 200. AST, Camerale Savoia, Tesoreria Generale, Reg. 114, fol. 261r. FAS, Mediceo avanti il Principato, MS XXII 118. 105 Wegman, “Isaac’s Signature.”

9

The Isorhythmic and Mensuration Motets

The Motet in Du Fay’s Time As a repertory, Du Fay’s motets present the scholar and the performer with the widest variation within his canon, beginning with a problem of definition. The most important recent work on the fifteenth-century motet, Julie Cumming’s excellent survey of the genre during the first three-quarters of the fifteenth century, which coincide with the life of Du Fay, provides a detailed examination of the many subgenres of motet and their evolution during Du Fay’s lifetime.1 It also makes it very clear at the outset how fluid the borders between the subgenres of the motet were throughout the fifteenth century2 and provides a study of the uses of the term by fifteenthcentury theorists and in music manuscripts that again underscores how labile the boundaries of the genre were.3 In his edition of the collected works Besseler established a distinction between “isorhythmic motets” and “cantilena motets” in the first volume,4 and published most of Du Fay’s other settings of sacred music in a separate volume with the title Compositiones liturgicae minores.5 Du Fay himself used the term “motet” in connection with three works, two of them his own, O sydus hispaniae and Ave regina caelorum, and one possibly anonymous, O lumen ecclesiae;6 Besseler published the first but not the second among the motets. The third apparently does not survive,7 but since its text is clearly that of an antiphon for St. Dominic8 it would also 1 4

5 6

7 8

Cumming, The Motet. 2 Ibid., 24–40. 3 Ibid., 41–62. OO Besseler 1. In this he was following the same distinction made by Guillaume de Van in fascicles of his own edition. OO Besseler 5. LAN, 4G 1313, pp. 70, 73, 74; Houdoy, Histoire artistique, 410, 412–13; Haberl, Wilhelm Du Fay, 120–22, also below, see Appendix 3. It is absent from Cumming’s very comprehensive list of motets in The Motet, 384–99. The antiphon is found in all Dominican antiphoners up to the present time; cf. Antiphonarium sacri Ordinis Praedicatorum, 134–35, where it is assigned, together with the Salve regina, to the procession after Compline. The Cantus database, however, lists only one source for it, Ljubljana, Nadškofijski arhiv 19 (olim 18), fol. 127r (cf. Antiphonarium. . . Kranj, 2, fol. 127r), where it is used as a Magnificat antiphon. It is a very late chant and shares its melody with O decus ecclesiae gloriosa, a Magnificat antiphon for the feast of the Crown of Thorns. Again, the Cantus database reports only one source for it, the immense antiphoner in seventeen volumes from Augsburg

351

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The Isorhythmic and Mensuration Motets

have been left out of a “motet” edition by Besseler, if it had survived with an ascription to Du Fay. This lost motet presents a small conundrum. Of all the polyphonic works mentioned in the will only the Ave regina caelorum is referred as “my motet” (motetum meum),9 but all except O lumen ecclesiae are works known to be by Du Fay. But from the evidence we have, Du Fay’s sympathy was with the Franciscans, who at the time stood in opposition to the Dominicans. It is true that he left in his will 100s each to the Franciscan and Dominican establishments in Cambrai,10 but this was part of a pattern where he left a legacy to every religious establishment in the city. The cathedral liturgy did not include the feasts of St. Dominic or St. Francis.11 Thus his authorship of the lost motet remains slightly in question. In my own edition of Du Fay’s works I have basically followed Cumming’s more inclusive approach, although there I still group the motets into two general categories, cantilena and paraphrase motets, and then isorhythmic and mensuration motets.12 Within the cantilena and paraphrase motets I include a number of works that would probably form a separate category if most of Du Fay’s music from the 1440s had survived, namely the small-scale antiphon settings that were surely part of complete Vespers settings, particularly those for St. Francis and for St. Anthony of Padua, as well as a small number of surviving office antiphons that Du Fay wrote for the cathedral of Cambrai and for the chapel of the duke of Burgundy. Had all of the works that Du Fay composed for the cathedral and the Burgundian chapel in the 1440s survived we could, as in the case of the Mass propers, have devoted a section to Du Fay’s Opera Omnia to music for the Office.13 Compositionally, these small antiphon settings follow the same procedures that Du Fay developed in the early 1430s in the hymn cycle, the Kyrie cycle, and the plainsong-based Glorias, a procedure that was refined and expanded in the sequence cycle and in the settings of the proper of the Mass of the 1440s, so here again there is no musical boundary between these pieces and some of the music for the

9 11

12 13

cathedral copied ca. 1580, Copenhagen, Det kongelige Bibliotek Slotsholmen, Gl. Kgl. Samling, 3449 8o, I–XVII, Vol. VI, fol. 166r. See Appendix 4. 10 Ibid. This is the case for all the surviving missals and antiphoners from the cathedral as well as the printed missal and antiphoner from the early 16th century. We should remember that Du Fay instituted the celebration of St. Anthony of Padua, who was also not part of the liturgy of the cathedral in the chapel of St. Stephen and not in choro. OO Planchart 1 and 2. In the discussion in this book this is the approach I take; see later in this chapter.

The Motet in Du Fay’s Time

Mass. In this study, however, I deal with the small antiphon settings in the chapter on the music for the Office. Probably the best repertory with which to begin a discussion of the music is the isorhythmic and mensuration motets, which was the one subgenre in the music that he cultivated that had the longest tradition, going back to the thirteenth century, and which had reached, when Du Fay began cultivating it, what turned out to be the final stage in its evolution. The most comprehensive studies of the isorhythmic and mensuration motets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are those of J. Michael Allsen and Laurenz Lütteken.14 Allsen’s essay is a particularly useful study of motet techniques and the ways in which composers emulated each other in this repertory, which allowed him to provide particularly useful insights into what can be called related families of motets. Lütteken’s study, although centered on Du Fay’s motets, really examines virtually the entire repertory of early fifteenth-century motets, including matters of genredefinition, the institutions and circumstances that gave rise to the works, the ensembles for which they were written, and their manuscript transmission. It is in every way a true “social history” of the motet in the first half of the fifteenth century. Much of what I will say below is heavily indebted to the work of Allsen and Lütteken. We have no idea how far back Du Fay’s knowledge of the motet repertory went. Surely the collections of the cathedral of Cambrai and of St-Géry had books containing motets from the fourteenth century and perhaps earlier. An extensive fourteenth-century collection of motets, Mass movements, and secular music, which survives today as a set of leaves detached from bindings, was in the library of the Abbey of St-Sépulchre in Cambrai until it was dismantled in the late fifteenth century.15 Philippe de Vitry was most likely a canon of St-Géry, and there is evidence that he was present for at least one of the chapter meetings in 1354–1355,16 although no music by Vitry appears in any Cambrai source. In 1361–1362, one magister Nicholas, described as subcantor and succentor of St-Géry, was paid 3s 2d for making a motet for the patron saint of the church and copying it into the books,17 and in 1417–1418 Jehan l’Escrivain was paid by the cathedral for correcting, regluing, cleansing, and recovering “the book of motets” of the choirboys.18 Further, among composers whose music the young Du Fay might have come across, both Nicolas Grenon and Gillet 14 15 17 18

Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality”; Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay. Cf. Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai. 16 LAN, 7G 2223 (1354–1355), fol. 9r. LAN, 7G 2223 (1361–1362), fol. 14r. LAN, 4G 4622, fol. 31v; see also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 219.

353

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The Isorhythmic and Mensuration Motets

Velut, who worked at the cathedral in 1407–1408 in one case and in 1409– 1411 in the other, produced a number of isorhythmic motets.19 There is also some evidence that fifteenth-century composers occasionally had access to motet collections of the thirteenth century. This is shown by a cantilena motet by Nicole Merques with three texts: Castrum pudicitiae, Virgo viget melius, and Benedicamus domino. The first two texts are nonscriptural, but are part of one of the traditions derived from an early thirteenth-century motet on the melisma Flos filius eius from the responsory Stirps Iesse, which was also widely used as a Benedicamus Domino melody.20 During the years that Du Fay was surely in Constance, that is between late in 1414 or early 1415 and the fall of 1417, he very likely had occasion to hear the former chapel of John XXIII and now the chapel of the Council singing music by Antonio Zacara and by Johannes Ciconia, who had been together in Rome in the 1390s and, in the case of Ciconia, had later close contact with some of the most important figures of the council. Indeed, as I have suggested above, Du Fay was probably for a time a singer in the council’s chapel.

The Malatesta and Bologna Motets If Du Fay’s earliest experience of the tenor motet was surely that of the tradition of northern France in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, his earliest compositions in the genre belong firmly in another, slightly younger tradition, that of the Italian motet of the early fifteenth century exemplified primarily by the works of Ciconia. Some of this may be simply because he began his work as a motet composer in the Veneto while in the service of Pandolfo di Malatesta. The chronology of his isorhythmic and mensuration motets is probably the most precise of the chronologies for his works apart from the Ordinary of the Mass cycles, largely because all of them are indeed occasional pieces, and the specific occasions for most of them are known, and for some of the others there are some very likely conjectures. Some of these dates have been changed or made more secure by recent research, so it might be useful here to list the motets in the chronological order that reflects our latest knowledge of them (see Table 9.1). 19

20

See pp. 45–46 for Grenon’s and Velut’s sojourn in Cambrai. Whether any of their motets were known in Cambrai in the first two decades of the 15th century, however, cannot be determined. See Planchart, “The Flower’s Children,” 338–41.

The Malatesta and Bologna Motets

355

Table 9.1 Du Fay’s isorhythmic and mensuration motets No.

Title

Date

Occasion

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Vasilissa ergo gaude O gemma lux et speculum Apostolo glorioso O Sancte Sebastiane Rite maiorem Balsamus et munda cera Ecclesiae militantis

August 1420 Fall 1424 Fall 1424 Before 1425 1426–1428 April 1431 March 1432?

8

Supremum est mortalibus

May 1433

9 10 11 12 13

Nuper rosarum flores Salve flos Tuscae Magnanimae gentis O gloriose Tiro Moribus et genere

14

Fulgens iubar ecclesiae

March 1436 March 1436 May 1438 1438–1439? December 1441 1445 or 1447

Departure of Cleofe Malatesta for Greece Stop in Bari by Pandolfo di Malatesta Arrival of Pandolfo di Malatesta in Patras Plague of 1424?a For Robert Auclou; c.f. unique in Bologna Distribution of Agnus Dei First anniversary of the coronation of Eugenius IV? Meeting of Eugenius IV and King Sigismund Dedication of Santa Maria del Fiore Ceremonies around the Dedication Peace between Berne and Fribourg Savoy or Council of Basel? Visit of the court of Burgundy to Dijon

a

Cambrai, Candlemas

The plague affected Bologna and Pavia, and caused immense alarm in the Veneto, where Du Fay was working.

The earliest group of motets consists of nos. 1–4 in Table 9.1. For the first, Vasilissa ergo gaude,21 we have a definite occasion and a firm terminus, the festivities in Rimini that preceded the sailing of Cleofe di Malatesta on her way to her wedding in Constantinople on 20 August 1420. It is also the only one of Du Fay’s isorhythmic motets copied in the first stage of Bo Q15, which, as Bent shows, was completed by 1425.22 Two others, O gemma23 and Apostolo glorioso,24 must have been composed by the time Pandolfo di Malatesta set sail for Patras in the fall of 1424,25 and the performance, if not the composition, of O gemma surely preceded that of Apostolo glorioso. We have no sure information on the occasion for O sancte Sebastiane,26 but stylistically it belongs with this group, and together with Vasilissa ergo gaude and O gemma, it appears only in Bo Q15 and Ox 213. Haberl and Pirro had assumed that it was for a plague in Milan, though Du Fay never was in that city.27 Besseler at first associated it with 21 23 25 27

OO Besseler 1, no. 7; OO Planchart 2/1. 22 Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:20. OO Besseler 1, no. 9; OO Planchart 2/2. 24 OO Besseler 1, no. 10; OO Planchart 2/4. See p. 77. 26 OO Besseler 1, no. 9; OO Planchart 2/3. Haberl, Bausteine, 1:83; Pirro, Histoire, 72.

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The Isorhythmic and Mensuration Motets

a plague in Rome in 1429,28 but made no further reference to that in his edition. Fallows and Allsen simply place it “before 1427.”29 Lütteken makes an extended argument, where he mentions some of the outbreaks of the plague in Bologna in 1423 and an epidemic in Rimini in 1425, and concludes that the motet apparently is connected with the Roman outbreak of 1428–1429.30 The style of the motet, which is very close to that of O gemma, and a careful reading of the text (which was a preexistent prayer) suggest that it is not a work connected with a local outbreak of the plague or an epidemic, but rather a plea to St. Sebastian to keep the plague from spreading to the region. The reaction of most courts to actual local outbreaks of the plague was usually flight to what was regarded as a healthier region, but fear of the spread of the contagion to the local region was the occasion for elaborate rites to the appropriate saints seeking their protection. This would have made sense in 1423 or 1424, when the outbreak of the plague in Bologna and the surrounding countryside caused enormous alarm along the entire Adriatic coast.31 Among these works Vasilissa ergo gaude, O gemma, and O sancte Sebastiane are also interconnected by a series of traits that connect them with Hughes de Lantins’s Celsa sublimatur, also in honor of St. Nicholas. Allsen deals extensively with these connections, and makes a convincing case that this group of works is not only interrelated but was composed at approximately the same time.32 He offers an intriguing possibility of the occasion for Celsa sublimatur, the entry of Ludovico Colonna in Bari as viceroy of Apulia in the fall of 1424.33 Allsen’s chronology for the Du Fay motets is now out of date, since he assumed that Apostolo glorioso, and by extension O sancte Sebastiane, dated from Du Fay’s years in Bologna,34 but indeed his view of their relationship and their intertextuality with Hughes’s motet is made even stronger by the new chronology, which places O gemma and O sancte Sebastiane in late 1424. This also supports Hans Schoop’s view that perhaps Du Fay and Hughes might have been together in Bari, and given what we now know about Pandolfo’s travel to Patras, it is most likely that they were both in the retinue of the archbishop.35 Similarly Lütteken also noted the careful placement of references to Bari saints at 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Besseler, “Dufay in Rom,” 4–5. Fallows, Dufay, 28; Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 473. Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 278–83. Corradi, Annali, 1:260–65, esp. 262, and 5:132–33; Sticker, Abhandlungen, 1:82. Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 268–84. Ibid., 271; see also Partner, The Papal State, 78–79. Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 273 and 282. See Planchart, “The Liégoise Diaspora,” 93–94.

The Malatesta and Bologna Motets

similar points in the motets of Du Fay and Lantins.36 In any event, given the close relationship between the Pesaro Malatesta and the Colonna in the summer and fall of 1424, Du Fay’s and Hughes’s motets for St. Nicholas were written in late 1424 for Pandolfo’s stop in Bari. It stands to reason that Du Fay’s motet would have been used to propitiate St. Nicholas before the party sailed to Greece, and Hughes’s motet would have honored the recently appointed viceroy in his new capital. Further, there are also musical connections with other works from 1424 and 1425. O gemma and the ballade Resvelliés vous of 1423 are connected notationally in that they are the only works where Du Fay uses the figure 2 to produce duple diminution for a florid passage.37 Besseler also commented on a musical relationship between O sancte Sebastiane and Resvelliés vous and between O gemma and the ballade Je me complains piteusement of 1425,38 but these do not appear to me to go beyond the general stylistic similarities of works composed during a relatively short period of time. The four Malatesta motets share some traits: they all begin with a canonic introitus, which in Apostolo glorioso is expanded into two successive canons. In all of them the upper voices are isorhythmic within each color, and the opening of each isorhythmic period is relatively slow-moving music, while the end shows an increase in the rhythmic activity, so that the structural points of articulation are clearly perceptible. This last trait is found in a good number of the motets of Ciconia and other composers working in Italy in the early Quattrocento, but in addition Du Fay finds in each motet a different approach to the sounding surface of the music, creating what amounts to a formal counterpoint between the motet’s tenor-derived structure and a progression of events in the surface of the music. In Vasilissa ergo gaude, as Fallows noted, there is a suggestion of an ABA form in terms of the amount of imitation used in the work, where the introit is entirely imitative, the first talea has a much looser imitative structure, and the second has a good deal of imitation.39 The shape of the motet, as Fallows notes, owes a great deal to Ciconia’s Ut per te omnes,40 but its melodic surface is rather reminiscent of the almost improvisatory virtuosity of Ciconia’s O felix templum, albeit without the obvious echo effects between the two upper voices, and Vasilissa ergo gaude, like O felix templum, uses only one text in the upper voices. The relatively high number of parallel fifths in Vasilissa ergo gaude has been considered as 36 37

38

Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 276–77. Cf. Resvelliés vous, mm. 5–6, 35–36, 58–59, and O gemma, mm. 51–57, 84–90; also Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 276. OO Besseler 1:xiv. 39 Fallows, Dufay, 107. 40 Ibid., 108.

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evidence of Du Fay’s inexperience with four-part counterpoint, but such parallel fifths as are found in the motet continued to be used well into the fifteenth century, although in later works Du Fay does make an effort to avoid them. Here, however, they might also be heard as part of a largely successful attempt to duplicate in a four-voice work the particularly bright sound of Ciconia’s motet textures.41 In each of the other three motets Du Fay provides completely different solutions to the foreground of the music. In O sancte Sebastiane he plays up the rhythmic complexity in the second color, devoting it entirely to the final Amen, and writing probably the most dissonant counterpoint among his early works, while, in an apparently counterintuitive move, the final half-color of O gemma provides a slightly relaxed section after the rhythmic intensity of the end of the second color. In Apostolo glorioso the rhythmic and textural contrasts between the two sections of the motet are much less pronounced than in O sancte Sebastiane or O gemma; rather, the point here appears to be the sumptuous sonority of Du Fay’s only truly five-voice work.42 The same variety is found in the tonal goal of the motets. In Vasilissa ergo gaude the main “harmonic” goals are D and A, in Apostolo glorioso they are G and C, but in O gemma D remains a constant goal, and in O sancte Sebastiane an older relationship a second apart obtains (but oddly enough between D and C rather than the more traditional D and E found in much fourteenth-century music). Rite maiorem,43 for St. James the Greater, and with an acrostic referring to Du Fay’s colleague Robert Auclou (who was titular rector of the church of StJacques de la Boucherie in Paris, but who was Louis Allemand’s secretary in Bologna from February 1426 to August 1428), represents a number of new approaches. It is built on the end of the respond of a rhymed responsory for St. James that was apparently unique to the liturgy of San Giacomo il Maggiore in Bologna.44 The work is a mensural transformation motet, where the cantus firmus is read twice under two different mensurations, and , and since the tenor has a number of semibreves, the final section of 41

42

43 44

Virtually all of Ciconia’s motets are three-voice works. As Bent has shown, the fourth voices in many of them have all the traits of being added by someone else (The Works of Johannes Ciconia, ed. Bent and Hallmark, 205–9), and my own experience in performance is that usually they dull the sound of the pieces. Du Fay’s Ecclesiae militantis, technically a five-voice motet that in many ways looks back to the Malatesta works with a canonic introit and an amen section reminiscent of that in O sancte Sebastiane, is for most of its length only in four parts, since the two tenors overlap only in two sonorities. OO Besseler 1, no. 11; OO Planchart 2/5. On the history of the motet and the recovery of the manuscript where the responsory was copied see p. 68; see also Planchart, “Four Motets,” 17–25. See also OO Planchart 2/5.

The Malatesta and Bologna Motets

each talea is compressed in the second color. Still, there is in this piece no real sense of acceleration in the second color, as there is, for example, in Apostolo glorioso, which follows the same mensural pattern. Instead we have here an expanded version of the relatively relaxed ending found in O gemma.45 Two traits appear in Rite maiorem for the first time in Du Fay’s motets. The first is that the talea pattern in the tenor and contratenor includes the introductory rests, which produces not only an opening duo of the upper voices that sounds at first like an introitus except that it is replicated at the start of each talea, producing a very clear set of structural markers; the second is that we encounter a hint of isomelic procedures, where the melodic outlines of the first section are recalled in the second. But while in later isomelic works the melodic outlines remain in the same voice, in Rite maiorem the cantus 1 and 2 exchange patterns.46 Rite maiorem also has a solus tenor, that is, a voice put together mostly from the lowest-sounding notes of the tenor and the contratenor (called second tenor in later motets), which could be used as a substitute for the two lower parts. Solus tenor parts are found in a number of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century motets, and the reason for their existence is still not entirely clear. They might be given, as suggested above, as an alternative for performance, or they might represent a compositional stage.47 Only two works by Du Fay are transmitted with a solus tenor, and they clearly followed each other in his motet output, Apostolo glorioso and Rite maiorem. The solus tenor of Rite maiorem is unique in the entire repertory in that it contains new material, rather than the introductory rests at the start of each talea, which provides an attractive and rhythmically active counterpoint to the upper voices. The style of the addition is entirely unlike that of either of the lower parts but rather close to that of the cantus parts. Margaret Bent refers to it as similar to the kind of parts that were often labeled trompetta in the manuscripts, and wonders if perhaps it was an addition by the scribe of Bo Q15.48 I believe that it is an original part by Du Fay and that it is related in its structure to the solus tenor of Apostolo glorioso, which in turn is related to the structure of the introitus of that motet, which consists of a canon for cantus 1 and 2 followed by a canon by contratenors 1 and 2 (at which point cantus 1 and 2 become free parts). The introitus of Apostolo glorioso represents a halfway point between the entirely canonic introitus of the other three 45

46

47

48

The rhythmic surface of the sections in in Rite maiorem resembles, albeit in four voices, that of the sections in in the Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo of the Missa Sancti Jacobi. This was first pointed out in Fallows, Dufay, 109. Note that I am deliberately avoiding the terms “triplum” and “motetus” in the discussion of Du Fay’s motets. These views are presented in Davis, “The Solus Tenor,” and Bent, “Some Factors in the Control of Consonance.” Bent, “Trompetta and Concordans,” 62.

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Malatesta motets and the noncanonic duet opening of Rite maiorem. Moreover, the trompetta additions in Rite maiorem were composed in such a manner that they could be grafted to the contratenor of the four-voice version in an entirely seamless way (although there is no written source that transmits them in that manner).49 All this points toward a difference that is not always carefully made between the grammar of counterpoint and discant and the compositional design of the entire texture, which in Du Fay never violates the fundamental grammar but includes an equally careful and imaginative design of all the parts, none of which is compositionally inessential. Apostolo glorioso and Rite maiorem represent Du Fay’s involvement with the practice of the solus tenor, and as is usual with most of what he did, he adds unique traits. The first impression that Du Fay’s earliest motets give as a group is how varied they are in their approach to writing what was by then a genre with a very old and settled tradition. To be sure all are “pan-isorhythmic,” that is, all voices are isorhythmic within each color, all but Rite maiorem begin with a canonic introduction outside the isorhythmic structure, all but Apostolo glorioso are for four voices with a clear textural division between the cantus 1 and 2 on the one hand and the tenor and contratenor on the other, and all but Vasilissa ergo gaude are polytextual, although in the case of Apostolo glorioso and Rite maiorem the two texts are derived from a single poem, an Italian sonnet in the case of Apostolo glorioso and a sequencelike poem in Sapphic eleven-syllable lines in the case of Rite maiorem. But the musical surface of the five pieces could not be more varied, and the approaches to the structure also show the same kind of reluctance to try the same thing twice. At the same time, one can see certain kinds of continuities, for example between Apostolo glorioso, which is surely the last of the Malatesta works, and Rite maiorem in terms of the experimentation with trompetta textures (in the solus tenor of Rite maiorem and the contratenors of Apostolo) and in the use of a solus tenor in both pieces.

The Papal Motets The next group consists of five motets written for the papal chapel. For three of them we know the specific occasion for which they were written, 49

The edition in OO Planchart 2/5 provides for such a possibility even though it is purely speculative. Against Bent’s hypothesis that the trompetta interludes might be an addition by the scribe of Bo Q15 is both their quality and the integration into the texture. All of the additions in Bo Q15 that can be proven to be the work of the compiler are surprisingly incompetent at almost every level.

The Papal Motets

and only one of them can be dated only conjecturally. Of the two motets for which we do not have a specific occasion, Salve flos Tuscae50 is so close in every respect to Nuper rosarum flores51 that it must date from the same time. Its cantus firmus is taken from the responsory Circumdederunt me viri mendaces, sung in the modern liturgy on Palm Sunday, but which was sung in fifteenth-century Florence on Passion Sunday, which in 1436 was the very same day when the cathedral was consecrated, so that both Salve flos Tuscae and Nuper rosarum flores were most likely performed on the same day.52 The other is Ecclesiae militantis,53 for which a number of dates, ranging from the coronation of Eugenius IV in March 1431 to as late as 1439, have been proposed.54 The most convincing hypothesis by far is that of Julie Cumming, who suggested that it was intended for an event during the first year of Eugenius IV’s reign, most likely the first anniversary of his coronation, on 11 March 1432.55 This chronology also illuminates one aspect of what now turns out to be Du Fay’s first papal motet, Balsamus et munda cera.56 The work was composed for the distribution of the Agnus Dei, wax figurines of a lamb, by Eugenius IV on the Saturday after Easter in 1431 (7 April).57 At this time Du Fay had been in the papal chapel, at the time essentially a French and Flemish ensemble, for two and a half years, and in terms of its construction Balsamus et munda cera is the most French and therefore the most oldfashioned of his early motets. There is no introit, and he presents the tenor and contratenor moving forward and then in retrograde in each color, a scheme that appears also in the only surviving motet by his teacher, Richard de Loqueville, O flos in divo.58 The motet has a complex scaffolding of mensurations between the different voices that overlap across the beginning of the second color in order to ensure the correct interpretation of the mensurations as the tenor begins moving twice as fast. The melodic flow of the upper voices still recalls his more Italianate motets, and he achieves here a melodic style that, as Fallows remarks, “has all the surge of the most 50 52

53 54

55 57 58

OO Besseler 1, no. 15; OO Planchart 2/10. 51 OO Besseler 1, no. 16; OO Planchart 2/9. That is its assignment in Florence, Archivio Arcivescovile, s.c., fol. 96r, and in Florence, Archivio dell’Opera del Duomo, MS F. n. 30, fol. 128r–v. The second manuscript, from 1523, presents the responsory in a shortened version. The first transmits it exactly as it appears in the Du Fay tenor. See also Vol. I, p. 138. OO Besseler 1, no. 12; OO Planchart 2/7. Cf. Besseler, Bourdon und Fauxbourdon, 11; OO De Van 1 (2):xxx; Hamm, Chronology, 67; Crawford, “Guillaume Dufay,” 83–90. Cumming, “Concord,” 342; see also earlier. 56 OO Besseler 1, no. 13; OO Planchart 2/6. See C. Wright, “Dufay’s Motet Balsamus et munda cera.” Bo Q15, M 280; edition in Reaney, ed., Early Fifteenth-Century Music, 3:21.

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passionate of his chansons,”59 with an almost improvisatory sweep that is all the more remarkable in that the upper voices are indeed isorhythmic within each color. Du Fay achieves this partly by keeping the two lower voices moving slowly and relatively evenly, and alternating rests among them, which allows him to write essentially three-voice counterpoint most of the time. My experience performing this work is that Fallows is indeed correct, and audiences always react particularly warmly to Balsamus et munda cera. At the same time the combination of almost improvisatory upper voices and the slow and rhythmically ambiguous lower voices make it one of the hardest of Du Fay’s motets to begin. In most of his other works the pulse and the phrasing are always a bit simpler and clearer at the start; here the performers are thrown in medias res at the outset, a sign that Du Fay clearly regarded his colleagues in the chapel as true virtuosos. Ecclesiae militantis is in many ways the showiest and most outwardly extravagant of Du Fay’s motets. It has three texts (or five, if one sings the words to the tenors, which in this case might have been intended), and the texture of two cantus parts and two lower voices (in this case two tenors) of the earlier motets is augmented by the presence of a contratenor with its own text that functions in many ways as a third tenor part. The tenors in this case are tiny fragments of two antiphons picked for the emblematic meaning of their texts, “Gabriel” (the baptismal name of the Pope), and “Ecce nomen domini” (that is the name of the Lord). Because they are broken up by rests, most of the time they are reduced to a single line (see Ex. 9.1).60 They are preceded by rests corresponding to the introit, then copied once with six mensuration signs, , , , , , and , and followed by the final cadence of the Amen. The contratenor is sung three times under three mensurations, , 3, , and one statement of the contratenor equals two tenor statements. The relationship between the two cantus parts and the tenors is wholly artificial, where a minim of the tenor equals two minims of the cantus parts, a relationship that Bobby Wayne Cox labeled “pseudo augmentation.”61 This has caused some discomfort to scholars, who have tried to analyze how “the beat” works in this piece,62 but in fact the measuring of the piece is relatively simple. The tempo of the semibreve 59 60

61

Fallows, Dufay, 114. Gabriel angelus locutus est Mariae, LU 1417, CAO 2916; Ecce nomen domini, LU 317, CAO 2527. In the modern liturgy the first is assigned to the Annunciation, the second to the Saturday before the first Sunday in Advent. In the 15th century, however, both were sung during the first Sunday in Advent, and thus in close proximity. The first antiphon was unknown in France. Cox, “‘Pseudo-Augmentation’.” 62 Hamm, Chronology, 67–70.

The Papal Motets Example 9.1 Tenors of Ecclesiae militantis (up to the Amen)

in is set at the outset in the introitus for cantus 1 and 2 (and later for the contratenor) and it never changes throughout the motet.63 It becomes the tempo of the minim in the tenor statements in integer valor and that of the semibreve in the tenor statements in tempus diminutum. It is a “beat” in the same sense that the “beat” moves in some virtuosic jazz pieces, for the semibreve of the upper voices moves at a speed of about MM 180, since the actual pulse at the outset is the perfect breve moving at about MM 60 (the so-called walking rate). The length of the taleae-colores in the motet produces the proportion 6:3:4:2:6:3, which is also reflected in the proportions of the contratenor, 3:2:3. The major articulations of the piece occur at the end of each pair of tenor statements (coinciding with each statement of the contratenor). Du Fay uses a very loose isomelic pattern, where cantus 1 and 2 exchange melodic outlines in the three major sections, producing the following pattern: Cantus 1: a b a Cantus 2: b a b

As Fallows points out, the introitus (which has the same length as one taleacolor statement) and the first section contain some imitation, the second 63

Neither cantus has a mensuration sign at the outset, but the rhythmic notation is one of the clearest examples of cut circle in terms of its rhythmic patterning, and when the contratenor enters with a sign in m. 47, there is absolute equivalence at every level between the contratenor and the two cantus.

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section avoids it, and the third section has enough of it to be heard as a return to imitative textures.64 The introit and the first four taleae-colores of the piece (mm. 1–191) move in modules of six breves in the three upper voices, enforced by the notation of the tenors. In the seventh talea-color where the two cantus are moving in against the of the contratenor and the of the tenors (mm. 192–255), the contratenor remains in modules of six breves, but the two cantus move in modules of nine breves, although in this section the nearly rhapsodic writing of the upper voices tends to obscure this structure. The final talea-color beginning with the Amen, with all voices moving in , returns to six-breve modules. The motet ends with a coda of three breves and one long (again the six-breve module) outside the “isorhythmic” scheme. This piece is the first of three motets by Du Fay where the talea and the color coincide, in other words, there are no true taleae in it, but the two tenors (and the contratenor) are simply repeated in different mensurations, so the motet is not isorhythmic but rather based on mensural transformation. Since there are no multiple taleae within a color, the two cantus parts are not isorhythmic. This is also the first of five motets of Du Fay built upon a double tenor,65 although for all intents and purposes this texture is present in all but name as early as Rite maiorem, but here the rests in each tenor largely alternate, so that the two tenors add up to a solus tenor with an added note at a few points, making the piece for the most part a four-voice work except at a few crucial moments, most importantly at the end of the work. Whatever the occasion of its composition,66 Ecclesiae militantis is a summation of Du Fay’s motet techniques up to that time. It has the ABA structure in terms of imitative procedures found in Vasilissa ergo gaude, and the isomelic structure, including the exchange of outline between the two cantus parts, of Rite maiorem; it returns to the canonic or quasi-canonic introit that opens the Malatesta motets, and like Apostolo glorioso it relies for a great deal of its effect on the sheer splendor of its sound. It carries the mensural scaffolding of Balsamus et munda cera to a new level, and particularly in the Amen it recalls the melodic immediacy of that motet. But in 64 65

66

Fallows, Dufay, 113–14. In Ecclesiae militantis as in Nuper rosarum flores both tenors are chant-derived. In the other three motets, Salve flos, Moribus genere, and Fulgens iubar, the second tenor is a freely composed voice. In many of Du Fay’s early motets the texts give us something of a clue as to the occasion. In the case of Ecclesiae militantis, despite a reference to war in the contratenor, the texts are so turgid and so corrupt in the source that they remain virtually opaque (cf. Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 131–36).

The Papal Motets

addition in this piece, as in no other of his works, Du Fay appears to be intent on bringing to the fore the sheer rhythmic multiplicity of the texture, beginning with the second color (m. 121),67 but with a number of instances of added rhythmic complexity (e.g., the triplet figurations in Cantus 1, mm. 244–61). Under these circumstances the final Amen, even though it has the faster figuration found in the middle Malatesta motets, sounds like a clarification of the rhythmic textures. Fallows comments on a certain severity and absence of lyricism in Ecclesiae militantis;68 this indeed may be so and probably both Balsamus et munda cera and the later Nuper rosarum flores are more warmly received by audiences. But my own experience is that Ecclesiae militantis remains something of a favorite of performers themselves, and in this it rivals even Nuper rosarum flores among singers. The revised chronology of the motets, which places Balsamus et munda cera before Ecclesiae militantis, also makes even clearer the nature of the shift that takes place in Du Fay’s motets with the next work, Supremum est mortalibus bonum.69 It was written for the meeting of Pope Eugenius IV with King Sigismund on 21 May 1433. The motet was connected to the Peace of Viterbo (April 1433) through a long chain of misreadings by Rudolf von Ficker, De Van, and Besseler, detailed by Fallows.70 As usual, André Pirro has the correct date, but his account was ignored by scholars who wrote later.71 Laurenz Lütteken also provides an extended discussion of the dating.72 The ceremonial meeting between Eugenius and Sigismund is described in a letter of Poggio Bracciolini to Niccolò Nicoli.73 A full historical account of the meeting appears in Joseph Aschbach, Geschichte Kaiser Sigismund’s.74 The meeting was also commemorated in Filarete’s bronze relief on the doors of St. Peter’s.75 The coronation of Sigismund as emperor by Eugenius took place ten days later, on 31 May 1433. The occasion was of immense political importance and Du Fay wrote for it the longest of his isorhythmic motets and an entirely sui generis work. It is also his most widely distributed motet: it appears in six manuscripts, more than any other fifteenth-century isorhythmic motet; some of the sources were copied half a century after its composition.

67 69 71 73 74

75

All measure numbers refer to OO Planchart 2/7. 68 Fallows, Dufay, 114. OO Besseler 1, no. 14; OO Planchart 2/8. 70 Fallows, Dufay, 280, n. 23. Pirro, Histoire, 70. 72 Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 289–91. Bracciolini, Lettere, 1, no. 44. Aschbach, Geschichte, 4:107–14. See also Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter, 7:38–39. See Spencer, “Filarete’s Bronze Doors,” 35–36.

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The organization of this piece is markedly different from that of all other motets of the first half of the fifteenth century. It makes use of two different cantus firmi, one for the isorhythmic section and another for a second section outside the isorhythm. The first cantus firmus is a freely composed melody divided rhythmically into three taleae of thirty breves, of which the last six are rests. There are two statements of this cantus firmus (and therefore six taleae). This is preceded by an introitus of twenty breves and followed by a non-isorhythmic ending lasting fifty-five breves, divided as follows: twelve breves over a second cantus firmus, the first phrase of the antiphon Isti sunt duae olivae,76 twenty-one breves of three-voice cantus coronatus setting the name of the pope and the emperor, and an Amen lasting twenty-two breves. The cantus and the contratenor are nonisorhythmic throughout. In the introitus, during the tenor’s six-breve rests of taleae 2 and 4, and in the first eight breves of the Amen, the polyphony consists of fauxbourdon with the contratenor serving as the foundation voice. All the other passages when the tenor is silent consist of duets between the cantus and the contratenor. The appearances of passages in fauxbourdon do not seem to follow any pattern. This is also the first motet where Du Fay abandons the two-cantus texture of the upper voices, and the contratenor lies below the cantus and sometimes crosses below the tenor. The motet has only one text and is set to the cantus and contratenor when the tenor is present and to all three voices in the fauxbourdon passages. Unlike the earlier motets, the text-setting is extremely clear and it is obvious that Du Fay took particular care in this case to make sure that every word was easily heard by the audience. The first cantus firmus is a freely composed part without text. In this respect the motet refers back to the Italian tradition. The text of the second cantus firmus, Isti sunt duae olivae, was surely intended to be sung, since it sets off the phrase in cantus coronatus with the names of the king and the pope.77 Next to Nuper rosarum flores, Supremum est mortalibus is one of the most analyzed works of Du Fay. Willem Elders published an extended rhetorical reading of it, arguing that the fauxbourdon was intended as symbolic of peace.78 I find this improbable, given that the work was written

76

77

78

In the modern liturgy the Magnificat antiphon for St. John and St. Paul, LU 1510; in the 15th century it was used this way, but also for Vespers of St. Peter and of St. Paul, CAO 3438. The scribe of Bo Q15 left it out, but this is most likely on account of his confusion when he realized he had left out the last three taleae of the first tenor. Elders, “Dufay as Musical Orator,” 9–14, and id., “Guillaume Dufay’s Concept of Fauxbourdon.”

The Papal Motets

before Du Fay had much contact with humanist circles.79 Other analyses have been contributed by Cox, Finscher and Laubenthal, Fallows, Allsen, and Lütteken.80 A particularly insightful analysis is offered by Julie Cumming, who describes how an educated listener at the time might have heard the motet.81 She points out that Supremum est mortalibus contains references to all kinds of subgenres within the larger motet tradition and to genres outside of it, including the cantilena motets organized in pairs of breves that she calls “cut-circle motets,” the English threevoice motet tradition, and the new sound of fauxbourdon, which was associated at the outset with liturgical Gebrauchsmusik. At the end there is also what Lütteken calls a “clamor,”82 in the passage with the names of the pope and the king, which connect it both with the courtly ballades such as Resvelliés vous and with the passages in Gloria settings where the nomina sacra are set to fermata chords. In every respect the motet is a work full of unexpected turns and innovation, some of which were carried on in the later motets and some of which remained unique to it. Its wide transmission, which included alteration of the names mentioned at the end of the work, either through simple erasure and the replacement with N (for nomen) in Trent 92, or the substitution of names of local rulers in MuEm, place it, as Lütteken observes, near the beginning of a tradition that will include such works as Josquin’s Mass for Duke Ercole of Ferrara.83 With its transparent texture, its clear declamation, and its euphonious sound, as well as the references to textures associated with liturgical music and cantilena motets, Supremum est mortalibus broke with all kinds of stylistic precedents in the motet tradition. In this respect, it is something of an avant-garde work, and its wide dissemination and relatively long-lived transmission attest to its popularity at the time. In modern times it has retained that, and has become the most frequently performed of Du Fay’s isorhythmic motets. Between the time when Du Fay wrote Supremum est mortalibus and the time he wrote his next two motets for the papal chapel his own world and that of the pope suffered a number of drastic changes. In July 1433 Du Fay took a leave of absence from the papal chapel, and by February 1434 he had 79

80

81 83

Both Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 216, and Blackburn, “On Compositional Process,” 228, n. 29 argue that Elders’s case is overstated. Cox, “The Motets,” 34–39; Finscher and Laubenthal, “Cantiones,” 302–3; Fallows, Dufay, 115–17; Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 212–28 and 477–79, Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 407–12. Cumming, The Motet, 158–63. 82 Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 366–67. Ibid., 116–17 and 432–33.

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become maestro di cappella of Amadeus VIII of Savoy, where he was responsible for the music at the wedding of Louis and Anne of Lusignan, and where he met the chapel of the duke of Burgundy and, apparently for the first time, Gilles Binchois. He had also traveled to Cambrai, where he was hoping to obtain a canonicate. In 1436 he returned to the papal chapel, which had moved to Florence after the people of Rome had risen in revolt against Eugenius and forced him to flee. Du Fay’s next two motets were connected with an event that was regarded then as now as a momentous occasion in terms of ecclesiastical history, of the artistic life of the time, and of the public image of the Florentine republic: the dedication by Eugenius IV of the Florentine cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore, following the completion of the immense dome built over the crossing by Filippo Brunelleschi. Just as the new chronology of the motets allows us to see his motets up to Ecclesiae militantis as a group of works summarized in this last motet, followed by what amounts to a new departure in Supremum est mortalibus, a detail of Florentine liturgical life in the fifteenth century allows us to posit the extraordinary suggestion that both Nuper rosarum flores and Salve flos Tuscae84 were composed to be performed on the same day, since, as it turns out, the cantus firmus of Salve flos Tuscae was sung in Florence on Passion Sunday, not on Palm Sunday.85 Both motets are similarly constructed, being built on a double tenor, although in Nuper rosarum both tenors are derived from the opening of the introit Terribilis est for the feast of the Dedication of the Church, while in Salve flos Tuscae the second tenor is a newly composed voice. Further, both use the kind of mensural scaffolding that Du Fay had used in Balsamus and in Ecclesiae militantis, albeit in a simpler manner, and both use the same four mensurations for their sections in the lower voices:86 , , , and in Nuper rosarum, and , , , and in Salve flos Tuscae. The color in both motets lasts five to six breves. In Nuper rosarum, which is a mensural transformation rather than an isorhythmic motet, the first half of the tenor color consists of rests for both tenors, while Salve flos, a true isorhythmic motet, has two taleae of twenty-eight breves in each color. Given the mensural structure of the pieces, this leads to the proportions 6:4:2:3 in Nuper rosarum and 6:3:4:2 in Salve flos, and in terms of what one may call their numerical structure both motets are identical in length. The only difference 84

85 86

OO Besseler 1, nos. 15 (Salve flos) and 16 (Nuper rosarum); OO Planchart 2/9 (Nuper rosarum), 2/10 (Salve flos). See p. 138. In Nuper rosarum Du Fay uses in the upper voices in both sections in duple meter, a remnant of the mensural scaffolding found in Balsamus and in Ecclesiae militantis.

The Papal Motets

is that Nuper rosarum has a coda of three breves after the close of its numerical structure. The proportional structure of Nuper rosarum has been widely viewed as having a symbolic meaning. This was pointed out as early as 1964,87 but it was after Charles Warren’s detailed attempt to present the proportional structure of the motet as a representation of the architectural structure of the cathedral that the connection between the music and the architecture were widely assumed.88 Warren’s hypothesis has been shown to be incorrect in that the dimensions of the cathedral itself cannot be expressed in simple integers and do not correspond to the proportions of the motet.89 Still, as Craig Wright has shown in a careful and thorough study, the motet is symbolically tied to the cathedral through its numeric structures, which tie it, in a tradition of biblical exegesis and number symbolism well known in the Middle Ages, not to the Florentine cathedral itself but to the biblical prototype for all cathedrals and indeed, for all churches, the Temple of Solomon. Moreover, the symbolism is expanded to encompass the equally well-known conceit of the Virgin, to whom the Florentine cathedral was dedicated, as herself a living tabernacle, for she had carried the Lord in her womb.90 A number of other features of the motet, including the division of the sections within each color into groups of 2 × 7 or 4 × 7 breves, the number of notes in the cantus firmus (fourteen), and the unusual stanzaic form of the text, four stanzas of seven lines (six lines of seven syllables with a final line of eight syllables), are also connected with the biblical narrative of the construction and dedication of the Temple, which took seven years to complete and was dedicated on the seventh month of the year; the dedication ceremonies took twice seven days.91 Still other possible symbolic connections between the motet and the Temple have been extensively explored by Hans Ryschawy and Rolf Stoll.92 It might be appropriate here to discuss the kinds of proportional structures found not only in the motets of Du Fay but in his Masses and some of the chansons as well. A considerable number of studies have shown the extent to which Du Fay’s works are built on proportional structures that make use of golden sections, Pythagorean proportions, and Fibonacci 87 88 89 90 91 92

Dammann, “Die Florentiner Domweihmotette Dufays.” Warren, “Brunelleschi’s Dome and Dufay’s Motet.” Brewer, “Defrosted Architecture”; C. Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism, 94. C. Wright, “Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores.” Ibid., 398–400 and 406–7, citing 1 Kings 6:1–20, 8:65, and modern studies of the Temple. Ryschawy and Stoll, “Die Bedeutung der Zahl”; also Trachtenberg, “Architecture and Music Reunited.”

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numbers.93 He shares this propensity with many of his predecessors and contemporaries. In addition, he was well aware, as the case of Nuper rosarum flores indicates, of the medieval traditions of number symbolism that were particularly pervasive in the motet repertory. A possible model for the expansion, or rather the coordination, of the number symbolism of the music with that of the words, would have been the English motet Sub Arcturo plebs vallata,94 one of a group of closely related “musician motets.” It was known to the scribe of Bo Q15, who copied it twice in his manuscript, and thus most likely was known to Du Fay as well. The motet has been extensively discussed by Brian Trowell, Roger Bowers, and Margaret Bent,95 and here only a few of its traits need to be mentioned. The number of beats in the music and the number of syllables in the texts equal 144, which stands for the number of the chosen ministers of God (144,000) in the Book of Revelation.96 The text of the motetus tells about the major figures of music through the ages – Tubal, Pythagoras, Boethius, Gregory, Guido, Franco – and the text of the triplum enumerates English musicians of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The structure of the poem for the triplum consists of stanzas of nine lines. Nine is of course 3 × 3, which is the structure of the angelic orders, so the implication is that the English singers “sing like the angels.” Such an implication would, in medieval disputations, require a reference to an auctoritas, and the golden mean structure of the motet provides it, for one of its Golden Section nodes falls at the place where the text of the motetus mentions Gregory the Great’s name, and it was Gregory’s reaction to the captive English children, comparing them to angels, that spurred him to send Augustine to convert England. This story, told by Paul the Deacon and recounted by Bede, was part of the central national narrative of England, and was known by every educated Englishman throughout the Middle Ages.97 Du Fay, like most highly trained musicians and clerics of his age, was familiar with these traditions of number symbolism as well as gematria, in which the numerical value of the words is calculated, which apparently he

93

94

95

96 97

Sandresky, “The Continuing Concept”; id., “The Golden Section”; Powell, “Fibonacci”; Trowell, “Proportions”; Nosow, “Le proporzioni”; Brothers, “Vestiges.” Edited in Ficker, DTÖ 76:9–11; Günther, The Motets, no. 12; Cox, “The Motets,” 2:255–69; Harrison, Motets, no. 31; Bent, Two 14th-Century Motets. Trowell, “A Fourteenth-Century Ceremonial Motet”; Bowers, “Fixed Points”; Bent, Two 14thCentury Motets. Revelation 7:4. Paulus Diaconus, Vita Sancti Gregorii, 27 (Caput XV); Bede, Opera Historica, 1:200–203. The traditional formulation of Gregory’s words, “Non sunt angli, sed angeli,” is spurious.

The Papal Motets

used in the ballade Resvelliés vous.98 Virtually all of his isorhythmic and mensuration motets, as well as a number of the large cantilena and paraphrase motets and the Mass cycles, show a numerical or rather proportional organization of their structure. Some of it, as in the case of Nuper rosarum flores, may be tied to what can be described as a symbolic program, but in Du Fay’s case a great deal of it appears to derive from the notion that this was the way a “well-constructed work” was put together: for him the numerical proportions functioned in a manner similar to the geometric calculations that painters used to create perspective or architects used in the design of buildings. They were part of the common rhetoric of his music. Nuper rosarum flores is not an isorhythmic motet, but a mensural transformation motet in its purest form. The upper parts are not isorhythmic at all, but are among the most strictly isomelic in any of his works in the four-voice sections. Since the duo sections over the rests in the tenors are not isomelic, the melodic-contrapuntal structure can be summarized as A–X1–B–X2–C–X3–D–X4–Coda. Extensive use of divisi at similar points in the four-voice sections, and the fact that Du Fay retains the melodic outlines in each voice instead of exchanging them as in Rite maiorem and Ecclesiae militantis, make the isomelism and the return of “X” as a texture quite noticeable, particularly in X1 and X2. There are moments of deliberate word-painting, such as the obvious and forceful imitation on the word “successor,” followed by homorhythmic declamation of the pope’s name, and large-scale planning that makes the third section the simplest and quietest (with the least amount of divisi and a flowing, quasi-canonic introductory duet that prefigures the kinds of duet writing one finds in Du Fay’s last two Masses nearly four decades later. This leads to the extravagant “duet” that opens the final section, which opens like a duet but then goes into an almost dancelike “cadenza” for the cantus supported by divisi notes in the contratenor. The final four-voice section again has fewer divisi notes, since Du Fay seems intent on keeping the forward momentum of the work. The ending of the mensural structure arrives so abruptly that the coda becomes absolutely essential to provide a proper ending for the work. And even though none of the manuscripts indicates a change there, the coda works best musically if the singers return to integer valor in it, creating the effect of a ritenuto. In many ways Nuper rosarum builds upon and extends procedures that Du Fay had used in Balsamus, Ecclesiae militantis, and Supremum est, but 98

See Atlas, “Gematria.”

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its sound surface is something entirely new in the extraordinary balance it achieves between sheer sonority and melodic-contrapuntal momentum. It is also the first major work of Du Fay where what will become a particular tonal idiom in a number of his pieces, a G final tonal type that involves a constant tension between B mi and B fa, is presented in full force. This has been misunderstood by most editors and performers, who attempt to force the work into an unconflicted tonal world by extensive use of entirely uncalled for musica ficta.99 Salve flos Tuscae, which must have been written at nearly the same time as Nuper rosarum and was surely sung on the same day, most likely for one of the civic ceremonies connected with that day,100 is at the same time a clear sibling of Nuper rosarum in terms of its mensural structure, but also a true isorhythmic motet despite the very unusual trait that the upper voices are isorhythmic for the first three sections but not the fourth. It also inhabits a tonal world that at once harks back to Balsamus and prefigures some of what was to come in Du Fay’s last isorhythmic motets.101 There are divisi, but they do not call attention to themselves as they do in Nuper rosarum. The entire piece lies slightly lower than Nuper rosarum, not only on account of the D final but also because of the way Du Fay has written the cantus and contratenor, and it eschews the sonorous coda of Nuper rosarum, ending, exceptionally among Du Fay’s motets, with just three sounding voices, as the talea of the second tenor ends with rests and Du Fay does not provide, as he did in earlier motets, even a set of concluding chords. The mensural structure gives the motet another trait that Du Fay’s contemporaries possibly found disorienting, which is the relaxation of the tempo and the contrapuntal rhythm as the piece moves from the second color in to the third in . In the final talea Du Fay speeds up the tempo of the cantus by shifting from its opening into sesquialtera (using the figure 3) and then to dupla (using the figure 4). This happens in a section where the upper voices have abandoned isorhythm, and in the sesquialtera section Du Fay manages to evoke what I earlier called the “cadenza-like” passage of the final duet of Nuper rosarum, without, however, citing any of its melodic 99

100

101

This is the case of the edition in OO Besseler 1, no. 16. An exception is the excellent edition by Bonnie Blackburn in the Fazer Editions of Early Music series. This was already surmised by Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 294, even though he, as all scholars at the time, placed the cantus firmus on Palm Sunday, a week after the dedication. He sees quite clearly, however, what he refers to as the staatspolitischen aspect of the work. But see Volume I, pp. 137–38 for a view tying the motet more closely to the dedication itself. This might be what caused Fallows, whose sensitivity to tonal shape is quite acute, to want to place Salve flos some ten or twenty years later than what the historical indicia for it warrant (cf. Fallows, Dufay, 46 and 291).

The Later Motets

substance. It is a startling moment, as if the composer were teasing his audience’s ear about the fact that both motets are indeed siblings, no matter how different their musical surfaces. The low-key sound surface of Salve flos Tuscae, despite its many beauties and the subtlety of its entire conception, have rendered it almost invisible to performers, who gravitate to the splendor of Nuper rosarum or the brilliance of Ecclesiae militantis, and that is a pity, for it is one of Du Fay’s subtlest and most expressive motets.

The Later Motets Du Fay’s next two motets reflect a different performance tradition from that of the papal chapel. They were written for the chapel of Savoy in the late 1430s, which although a solid institution, was not as full of virtuoso singers as the papal chapel at that time. Chronologically, I believe that Magnanimae gentis,102 composed for the peace treaty between Bern and Fribourg on 3 May 1438,103 is the earlier of the two, followed by O gloriose tiro.104 The first of these two is Du Fay’s simplest motet in terms of its contrapuntal structure. It is for three voices and does not have a single divisi in any of its parts, nor does it use fauxbourdon as does Supremum est, Du Fay’s only other isorhythmic or mensuration motet for three voices. This might be, as Fallows surmises, a reflection of the state of the Savoy chapel at the time,105 or a function of the fact that the motet was probably sung on more than one occasion by a traveling group from the chapel.106 Like Nuper rosarum flores, Magnanimae gentis is not isorhythmic but a mensural-transformation motet where the tenor is sung under four signs, , , , , precisely the same sequence as that of Nuper rosarum flores, but a canonic inscription directs the singer to sing the first time in duple augmentation, turning the 6:4:2:3 proportion implied by the notation into 12:4:2:3.107 Further, the opening duo, marked by rests in the tenor, 102

103 105 107

OO Besseler 1, no. 17; OO Planchart 2/11. The tenor, Haec est vera fraternitas, is the beginning of a responsory no longer in use in the modern liturgy, cf. OO Planchart 2/11:7–8. Besseler, “Neue Dokumente,” 167–70. 104 OO Besseler 1, no. 22; OO Planchart 2/12. Fallows, Dufay, 49. 106 Cf. Besseler, “Neue Dokumente,” 167–70. The canon that governs the performance of the tenor has an error. It reads “Quater dicitur: Primo crescat in duplo, Aliis tribus vicibus ut signa notant, primas pausas tamen obtinendo.” This calls for each of the successive repeats to include the opening rests. Most likely the original read omittendo, perhaps changed in some copies into the common medieval spelling obmitendo and not written very clearly. At one point in the transmission a scribe might have simply reached for a word beginning with “ob” that appeared to make sense (I am grateful to Leofranc Holford-Strevens for this hypothesis).

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is not part of the repeating structure but serves as an old-fashioned introitus. Here and there the melodic writing recalls Nuper rosarum, particularly at the beginning, and some of the shifts between sonorities with B fa and B mi return, but in the end the melodic and contrapuntal surface of the motet are very different from those of the Florentine pieces, and almost diffident sounding despite the relatively grandiloquent text, which echoes some of the techniques in Salve flos Tuscae and the cantilena Mirandas parit.108 The tenor is extremely simple and in the faster mensurations produces a certain even flow not often found in Du Fay’s motets. The actual phrase structure of the upper voices is clear-cut and often articulated simultaneously in both voices. This is, in many ways, Du Fay’s simplest motet outside the cantilena pieces. O gloriose tiro has been the subject of controversy. The authenticity of this motet was first questioned by De Van on stylistic grounds,109 at a time when neither a solid chronology of Du Fay’s works nor much of the English music of the 1430s and 1440s was well known. Besseler first accepted the work as authentic,110 but eventually rejected it.111 Ernst Apfel suggested an English composer, which is an astute though incorrect assessment.112 Fallows accepted De Van’s and Besseler’s views, one of a few cases where respect for Besseler seems to have trumped his usually extraordinary musical acumen.113 Allsen favors Du Fay as the composer; he has marshaled the evidence for Du Fay’s authorship in a concise manner, pointing out that the texted contratenor is a red herring as an argument against Du Fay’s authorship.114 Lütteken presents the most extended discussion. He notes that the proportional scheme and the final are unusual in Du Fay’s motets, and the melodic style, particularly when the tenor is not sounding, is unspezifisch, by which I understand he misses the highly defined melodic gestures that one finds in the Florentine motets, but he does include it among the authentic motets.115 John Reid, using a computer-aided analytical process, accepts it as an authentic work.116 The principal argument against Du Fay’s authorship is posed by a good number of parallel fifths between the two upper voices. Allsen, summarizing the opinions of De Van, Besseler, and Fallows, mentions “other contrapuntal crudities,” although these authors really dwell mostly on the parallel fifths. In this case I think the parallel fifths, like the texted contratenor, are 108 110 112 114 116

Cf. Holford-Strevens’s comments in “Du Fay the Poet?,” 114–16. 109 OO De Van, 2:xxxii. Besseler, Bourdon und Fauxbourdon, 174–75, but see also 152–55. 111 OO Besseler 1:v. Apfel, “Über den vierstimmigen Satz,” 39–40. 113 Fallows, Dufay, 291. Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 482. 115 Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 271–72. Reid, “Testing,” 171, 177.

The Later Motets

also a red herring. It is true that in most of his music after the 1420s Du Fay goes to some lengths to avoid the parallel fifths that one finds in some of the early works. This was already remarked upon by Fallows,117 but there might be another reason for the fifths in this work. With or without the fifths, this motet is a particularly euphonious piece. Its texture is a bit denser than that of the Florentine motets (all the more so because the extended divisi in Nuper rosarum are virtually never used in contrapuntal passages), and the “unspecific” melodic style that Lütteken noted returns in the motet Moribus et genere, composed in 1441 or 1442.118 Thus most likely O gloriose tiro dates from after Magnanimae gentis but before Moribus et genere, that is, from Du Fay’s last months in Savoy before he returned to Cambrai in the late spring of 1439. The “tiro,” Theodore, was one of the patron saints of Savoy,119 though the specific occasion the piece was written for is not known. If this chronology is correct, the work was composed at the time when Du Fay was a representative to the Council of Basel, where he surely came into contact with a new repertory of English music – not just the works of the generation of Dunstaple and Power, but works of a younger generation of composers, largely anonymous today, but exemplified at its best by the master of the Missa Caput.120 A number of these English works make an almost ostentatious use of parallel fifths; the best example of this is the beautiful ending of the Gloria of the Caput Mass (see Ex. 9.2). The use of fifths may indeed be Du Fay’s experiment with some of these sonorities, which might have struck him as English. Also Englishinfluenced is the bipartite structure of the motet using the mensurations and in the tenor (with and in the other voices), and the use of the contratenor almost as a second tenor when all four voices are sounding, but becoming more active when the tenor is silent. In this respect, the motet sounds like Du Fay’s first attempt at coming to terms with the English music of the generation after Dunstaple, which does not yet have the subtlety that he was to achieve in Fulgens iubar or in the Missa Se la face ay pale. The motet makes use of isorhythm in all voices and of isorhythm and mensural transformation in the tenor. In addition, it retains in the 117 118 119 120

Fallows, Dufay, 107–8. For the dating see earlier in this chapter and also the discussion that follows here. Besseler, Bourdon, 152. I find recent suggestions that the Missa Caput may be a late work of Dunstaple (cf. Robertson, “The Savior,” 607–11) entirely unconvincing. There is nothing in all of Dunstaple’s other works that remotely resembles the melodic and in particular the rhythmic style and drive of this Mass.

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second color the kinds of mensural scaffolding found in earlier motets, but the long upper-voice duet that opens each color could allow the singers of the upper voices to establish a 3:4 proportion at the semibreve level in the free voices between the first section, which is in and the second, which is in . This would distort the “notional” proportion of the motet but would accord with English practice. This is something that Du Fay first broached in Ecclesiae militantis, where the tempo of the motet is established by the upper voices in the introitus. In the earlier piece, the semibreve remains constant throughout the motet, whereas here it shifts tempo, but in both pieces it is the upper voices rather than the tenor relationship that establishes the tempo of the music. In the end, the ascription in ModB should also carry a great deal of weight. The work of Michael Phelps and of James Haar and John Nádas on the genesis of the manuscript shows that the scribe, surely Benoit Sirede, was not only very interested in Du Fay’s music but probably knew the composer.121 I think that he obtained all of the Du Fay motets composed after Du Fay left Florence directly from the composer, because his copies of these works are virtually free of error, and as this includes O gloriose tiro, his ascription must carry considerable authority. Du Fay’s last two isorhythmic motets are the only ones composed in Cambrai. They are the product of his years in the cathedral at the time of the Schism caused by the Council of Basel. The earliest of these is Moribus et genere, in honor of St. John the Evangelist.122 The date and location of the motet have been the subject of some confusion. De Van and Besseler assumed that it was written for Dijon in 1446,123 when Du Fay was sent by the chapter to the Burgundian court.124 But the court at the time was in Brussels, not in Dijon,125 and Du Fay’s mission at this time was a particularly unpleasant one: to obtain ducal letters concerning a long and extremely 121

122 124

Phelps, “A Repertory,” 136–137; Haar and Nádas, “The Medici, the Signoria and the Pope,” 72–77. OO Besseler 1, no. 19; OO Planchart 2/13. 123 OO De Van 2:xiii; OO Besseler 1:xxiii. CBM 1058, fol. 80r. 125 Clarke, “Musicians,” 79.

The Later Motets

acrimonious lawsuit between Quintin Gerard and Klaus Vriend [Nicole l’Ami] over a prebend at Cambrai. Fallows dated the motet in 1442, and suggested the occasion was the first and only visit of Bishop John of Burgundy to his cathedral in 1442.126 His suggestion for the date makes sense, particularly in terms of the style of the work, but as Lütteken has noted, the text of the motet does not mention the bishop or Cambrai, which would be almost inconceivable in a motet welcoming the prelate to his see, but it does mention Dijon. On the other hand, he notes that St. John Evangelist was one of the two patrons of the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon, and the motet is simply a panegyric to the saint.127 It is also self-consciously about the singers singing it. The court of Burgundy spent the Christmas season in 1441 and in 1442 in Dijon, but was never in the city for the feast of St. John Baptist throughout the 1440s, so it would be logical that the motet was composed in honor of St. John Evangelist, the patron saint whose feast fell when the court was present. If Du Fay was present at the performance, a reasonable assumption in the case of a long and elaborate new work, we must rule out 1442, when he was at Cambrai during the Christmas season.128 This also places the motet very close to the time when Du Fay wrote the albeit very different proper cycles for the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon, in other words, in the first flush of his composing for the duke of Burgundy. The Christmas season of 1441 was also a significant moment in the history of the SainteChapelle in Dijon, as it was the first time that the court had visited in nearly a decade.129 We should also consider what the function of “a motet” had become for Du Fay since his arrival at Cambrai in 1439. The obituaries of the cathedral, which survive in three collections,130 contain numerous foundations for the performance of “a motet” and these are invariably works sung at Vespers by the children, the master, and one or two vicars.131 This is the ensemble mentioned in connection with the performance of motets in Du Fay’s will, and also the ensemble implied by the acrostic in the contratenor of Fulgens iubar ecclesiae. Thus it is very likely that the Cambrai motets are no longer pieces for a unique event, but have moved closer to the kind of paraliturgical work that could be sung annually at the appropriate feast, 126 128

129 130

131

Fallows, Dufay, 61–62. 127 Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 297–99. LAN, 4G 1090, fols. 27r and 28v, showing Du Fay present on 5 and 21 Dec. (cf. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 182). Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 297. CBM 39, for the choir, and LAN, 4G 2009, fragments of two obituaries of the grand vicars, one for the choir and the other for the chapel of St. Stephen (cf. Haggh, “Nonconformity,” 373–74). Planchart, “Choirboys in Cambrai,” 138–39; Nosow, Ritual Meanings, 169.

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particularly as substitutes for the Benedicamus Domino at the end of Vespers.132 Moribus et genere presents a clarification of the procedures Du Fay used in O gloriose tiro. The texture and the function of the voices is both closer to that of Du Fay’s Florentine motets and of the music (particularly the Mass music) coming out of England in the late 1430s and early 1440s, music that Du Fay was surely collecting for his project to create a repertory of polyphonic ordinaries for the cathedral of Cambrai. The function of the fourth voice is that of a second tenor, but at the same time, when the first tenor is silent it becomes considerably more active, something that occurs in O gloriose tiro but not in the Florentine motets and is probably the result of his contact with the four-voice texture of English music. The text of the cantus and contratenor is a single poem in stanzas of four hexameters. Lütteken refers to it as having the greatest literary pretensions among the texts of Du Fay’s motets,133 but as Leofranc Holford-Strevens notes, the pretensions are not matched by the accomplishments and the poem is confused and downright incompetent at many levels, to the point that it strains even Holford-Strevens’s legendary abilities to make sense of these texts.134 The piece is both a pan-isorhythmic and a mensural-transformation motet, and the rests in the lower voices, as in the case of Salve flos Tuscae, are part of the isorhythmic scheme, where the first color of the lower voices is sung once in and the second is sung twice, in and in , leading to a proportional structure of 3:2:1. The tenors are copied only twice, the second time with the double mensuration and a repeat sign. A curious canon is copied in each opening of the manuscript below the rests that open the second talea of each color. It reads: Ut signant signa pauseque bases bene

Holford-Strevens translates it as follows: “as the signs sign, and sign well the bases of the rest/pause” (assuming the first signa to be a noun and the second to be an imperative).135 Charles Turner provides a paraphrase: “As the signs indicate, [heed] well the note and rest [?].”136 The canon is cryptic and apparently superfluous, since the notation of the tenors is absolutely clear. They are both in perfect modus (indicated by long pauses across three spaces). They are entirely unproblematic. Turner regards the inscription as 132 134 135

Cf. Nosow, Ritual Meanings, 174–75. 133 Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 298. Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 122–3. Holford-Strevens, private communication. 136 Turner, “Proportion and Form,” 119.

The Later Motets

“an aid to performance,”137 but does not go beyond that. There may be something else behind the canon, which could be corrupt, although it is copied identically in both openings of the unique source.138 Its placement below the rests that open the second talea might not be crucial, but merely a product of the length of the tenor incipit in the exemplar that was then frozen in the transmission, and its appearance in the first color may be entirely cautionary. In the second color it may be a warning to the tenoristae (including the singer of tenor 2) that their tempo is probably not what a simple reading of the signs would yield. At the point where the tenors shift to the cantus and high contratenor shift to , with the breve of the upper voices moving at the speed of the semibreve of the lower voices. If the relationship between cut and uncut time is held to be a rigid 1:2, virtually any tempo that would allow the proper phrasing of the first section, when all voices are in , to flow and permit the phrases to be sung in one breath will yield a desperately fast tempo in the second and third sections, particularly when the upper voices have triplet figuration. It is not that singers cannot sing it that fast; any singer capable of performing Resvelliés vous can sing the upper voices of Moribus et genere at the tempo that would be required by a strict proportional reading if the first section is taken at even a moderately flowing tempo. I have on occasion performed it with strict proportions and my singers could do it, but neither they nor the audience felt that the music made any sense; unlike the case of Resvelliés vous, the contrapuntal density of the music, when the parts are moving that fast, becomes a scramble. This motet carries one step further a process begun by Du Fay in Ecclesiae militantis, where the tempo is set by the upper voices and the tenors are in this respect subsidiary voices. In Ecclesiae militantis the speed of the semibreve is established in the introitus and never changes throughout the motet. In O gloriose tiro this process is carried one ambiguous step forward in that the motet does make sense in a strict proportional reading, but in terms of the way Du Fay’s other works of the late 1430s function, it sounds more natural if the upper voices shift tempo between the triple meter and the duple meter, following the tradition that obtains in English music as the parts shift from to (or , as this tempo was notated in France). Du Fay composes the music so that the lower voices have a reasonable number of rests at the shift, and thus the tenoristae can clearly hear the tempo of the upper voices.139 In Moribus et genere it is only this 137 139

Ibid. 138 ModB, fols. 74v–76r (new 76v–78r). This approach is already one of the possibilities in Nuper rosarum flores.

379

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last possibility that yields a sensible set of tempi, and since the motet retains the kind of mensural scaffolding found in all of Du Fay’s motets from Ecclesiae militantis on, he must have felt that he had to warn the performers. In Fulgens iubar, which carries this process to its logical conclusion, there is no mensural scaffolding, and the canon deals only with how to read the tenors. The melodic and motivic surface of Moribus et genere has some of the same “unspecificity” that Lütteken finds in O gloriose tiro. It is, in some ways, the blandest of Du Fay’s motets, but also an uncommonly euphonious and sonorous work. The music, particularly in the cantus, carries reminiscences here and there of the melodic writing in Nuper rosarum flores, but unlike that work the motet is not isomelic. For that very reason the return of two fairly distinctive passages is startling: measures 47–48 of the cantus and contratenor return transposed up a fourth in measures 95–96, and measures 298–300 return, also transposed up a fourth, in measures 346–48; a slightly looser correspondence obtains between measures 291–93 and 340–42 (in this case a fifth apart), which become more noticeable because of the absence of melodic correspondence throughout most of the motet. In the first section, at measures 32–33 and 81–82, where the cantus is silent, Du Fay composed gestures that look forward to the formal markers one finds in Fulgens iubar, but these gestures do not return in the second and third sections. The passages where tenor 1 is silent and tenor 2 speeds up owe something to the writing in O gloriose tiro, but also, particularly in the triplet sections, to textures that Du Fay had tried in the proper cycles for the Order of the Golden Fleece, which must have preceded Moribus et genere by only about a year or so. The conflict between B mi and B fa is not as pronounced here as it is in Nuper rosarum flores or in Fulgens iubar, and the rhythmic setting of the tenor is closer to what we find in Nuper rosarum flores and Magnanimae gentis than to its slightly more prominent profile in Fulgens iubar. All in all, the traits of Moribus et genere make most sense if one regards it a work that falls between O gloriose tiro and Fulgens iubar. Fulgens iubar is surely Du Fay’s last surviving isorhythmic motet.140 The text of the contratenor has an acrostic, “Petrus de Castello canta,” surely referring to Pierre du Castel, who was magister puerorum at the cathedral from 1434 to 1447.141 By the end of 1447 Pierre had trouble recruiting boys, and in November or early December of that year he was dismissed as magister puerorum.142 This led Fallows to surmise that the motet must 140 142

OO Besseler 1, no. 18; OO Planchart 2/14. CBM 1058, fol. 140v.

141

See Appendix 2.

The Later Motets

have been composed early in Pierre’s tenure, placing it around 1442.143 But a reading of the history of the magistri puerorum of the cathedral indicates that the canons knew this was an extremely difficult job, and dismissal did not mean disgrace. He had been a grand vicar from 1437 to 1446, and remained a chaplain of the cathedral until 1455. Shortly after leaving the post of magister puerorum he became a canon of St-Géry, and by 1454 he was in Paris, at the Sainte-Chapelle. At his death, probably in 1466, he was canon of Noyon.144 The writing of Fulgens iubar reflects Du Fay’s familiarity with the texture of the English Missa Caput, and it is likely that he came across this work in the mid-1440s as part of his efforts to collect polyphonic Ordinaries for the cathedral, which culminated in the copying of two volumes of Ordinaries by Symon Mellet in 1449.145 Lütteken proposed 1445, when pallets for a silver reliquary in the cathedral were repainted; they showed an image of Mary worshiping her own son, a scene that echoes the incipit of the cantus firmus, “Virgo post partum quem genuit adoravit.”146 I have proposed the Vespers of the Purification in 1447, at the time when Pierre de Ranchicourt first came to Cambrai to claim his canonicate. Pierre, a nobleman, was already a renowned clergyman, and was to become a close friend of Du Fay. At his swearing in all the witnesses were musicians.147 Nosow also proposes the procession at the Purification, but ties the motet itself with the gift of two silver reliquaries to the cathedral by the canon Jehan Martin. Like Lütteken, he connects the final words of the motet’s cantus firmus, quem genuit adoravit, to a legend on one of the reliquaries, and the opening of the contratenor, “Puerpera pura parens / Enixa regem saeculi,” to a scene painted in one of the reliquaries described in the cathedral inventory of 1460–1461.148 Martin established a procession after Nones or after the sermon (in Lent) on each of the five Marian feasts of the year, including the Purification, and there is a lengthy description of the procession in the obituary of the grand vicars.149 Nosow proposes the procession of the Purification, as established by Martin, in which the reliquaries were carried, as the ceremony for which Fulgens iubar was written, and claims that this 143 145 146

147 148

149

Fallows, Dufay, 60–61. 144 See Appendix 2. LAN, 4G 4656, fol. 30r (cf. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 225–26). Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 300–301; a banderole in the reliquary did cite the end of that phrase. Cf. Also Houdoy, Histoire, 188 and 351. Planchart, “Notes,” 61. Nosow, Ritual Meanings, 183, citing Houdoy, Histoire, 350–51. The inventory is LAN, 4G 4554, and Du Fay was one of the canons supervising the inventory. The scenes depicted in both reliquaries are described in detail in the inventory, including the presence of the legend “Quem genuit adoravit” in the second reliquary (Houdoy, Histoire, 350–51). LAN, 4G 2009, fol. 12r.

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must have begun to take place “between August 25, 1445, and the date of Martini’s death in 1446.”150 Nosow’s hypothesis is attractive but it has serious problems. To begin with, Martin died on 12 July 1443.151 His will does not survive, but the accounts of the executors do, and these took two years, 1443–1444, to complete.152 The chapter acts, which usually note the presentation of the will to the chapter a day or two after the death, are silent, perhaps because on 12 July the chapter was engaged in a complicated legal action concerning the chapter’s bakery.153 Still, if the execution took two years it is possible that Martin’s foundation took effect for the first time in 1445. Nosow, however, gives no source for his date, and I have not been able to trace it. By contrast, the procession on the Purification is one of the oldest such ceremonies,154 so in this case the novelty of Martin’s endowment was the carrying of the reliquaries with their inscriptions and painting, which is the argument advanced by Lütteken. Fulgens iubar, by almost any standard, is an exceptional work, and there is evidence from the music that Du Fay regarded it as such. It is the kind of work that he had written for specific occasions, and for that reason I return to Purification of 1447, when Ranchicourt first was at Cambrai. He was already a man of extraordinary distinction, and there is a detail that connects this occasion with those proposed by Lütteken and Nosow. By this time, carrying the reliquaries would have been an important part of the procession, as described in Martin’s foundation, and they had recently been repainted and restored. In addition, Ranchicourt was coming to take possession of the Cambrai canonicate that had been held by the same Jehan Martin, and which had remained in a litigious limbo since Martin’s death.155 150 151

152 155

Nosow, Ritual Meanings, 183. LAN, 4G 1177, 18th-century chronological lists of the wills and executions in the cathedral archive; also CBM 1046, fol. 188v. LAN, 4G 1457. 153 LAN, 4G 1090, fol. 90r. 154 Hiley, Western Plainchant, 30–32. LAN, CBM 1046. On 2 Aug. 1443 Jehan Conseil (Synodi) was received on a nomination of the duchess of Burgundy, but this was contested by Nicaise Wallet, and the prebend was declared litigious on 15 Feb. 1445 (LAN, 4G 1090, fol. 201r). Wallet describes himself as a canon of StGéry in 1447 (ASV, RS 417, fol. 230r) but his name is absent from the St-Géry records; a Jehan Wallet is documented as a cathedral chaplain from 1438 (LAN, 4G 6908, fol. 29v) to 1457 (LAN, 4G 6923, fol. 31r) and then as canon of St-Géry from 1459 (LAN, 7G 2413 [1459–1460], fol. 17v) to 1469 (LAN, 7G 2414 [1468–1469], fol. 17v) and was probably a relative of Nicaise, since he represented Nicaise when the latter sent letters of expectative for the provostship of the cathedral in July 1456, which was contested by Adrien de Poitiers (CBM 1059, fols. 220v, 222v). Nicaise spent most of his career in Rome, and in 1451 the chapter, seeking the help of people from Cambrai in Rome concerning a long lawsuit, named him as one of their allies (CBM 1058, fol. 276r). Wallet apparently did collate the provostship and its associated canonicate in 1456 (CBM 1046, fol. 157r) but by 19 Nov. 1458 he had died in Rome (CBM 1060, fol. 32r).

The Later Motets

In the end none of the three dates proposed for the motet can be definitely proven, but in terms of Du Fay’s style either 1445 or 1447 is more plausible than 1442, particularly since Pierre du Castel’s standing with the chapter appears to be irrelevant, and even if ultimately the chapter was displeased with him, he was not dismissed until shortly before 9 December 1447, and the motet is liturgically connected with the Purification, which falls on 2 February, at which time he was still magister puerorum. The motet is formally Du Fay’s most sophisticated work in the genre. It is both a pan-isorhythmic and a mensural-transformation motet. The tenors are unsigned, but written in perfect modus and tempus (the long rests cover three spaces, indicating the modus). A canon states: “These tenors are sung three times, first in perfect modus and tempus [with] minor [prolation]. Second [cut] by a third. Third cut by half of the first.”156 Each color has two taleae, and the upper voices are not only isorhythmic within each section but isomelic across the entire motet in the passages for four voices. The duets that open each talea are not isomelic, but the even- and odd-numbered four-voice sections correspond with each other, yielding a structure that is an elaborate variation of that of Nuper rosarum flores:157 Upper voices Duo 4 vv. Duo 4vv. Duo 4vv. Duo 4vv. Duo 4vv. Duo 4vv. Coda

a x1 b y1 c x2 d y2 e x3 f y3 g

Tenors A1 B1 A2 B2 A3 B3 C

The isomelism is heard most clearly at the start of each four-voice section, but in addition in measures 35–36 of each talea the cantus is silent for two breves and the contratenor sings a cadential formula. The formulas are common under-third cadences, the first to G and the second to D, but they 156

157

ModB, fol. 122r (new 125r): “Tenores isti ter dicuntur, primo de modo et tempore perfectis minoris. Secundo per tertium. Tertio cise per semi de primo.” Fallows, Dufay, 119–21 presents a sensitive analysis of this motet.

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are prominently audible and serve to reinforce the sense of isomelism at important points in the middle of the four-voice section, where the effect of the isomelic return at the start of the four-voice section might have worn off. Significantly, it is the contratenor that serves this function. This is something that Du Fay will expand in a dramatic manner in the Gloria and Credo of the Missa Se la face ay pale. The coda provides another surprise: it cites, virtually note by note in all parts (with some exchanges in the three lower voices) the coda of Nuper rosarum flores. Fulgens iubar is Du Fay’s last isorhythmic motet and it would appear that he knew that, and thus he ends his final contribution to the genre with a look back at what he surely realized had been a crucial work in his own history. It may also be a symptom of the fact that Fulgens iubar, even though it builds on features of a number of earlier motets, owes most of its structural characteristics to Nuper rosarum flores. The texts, as Holford-Strevens notes, are Latin written as syllabic accentual verse, in stanzas composed as those of a French ballade, including a refrain. The text of the cantus is a modest and old-fashioned but competent poem that probably had been written at Cambrai some decades earlier. That of the contratenor is a more ambitious and modern effort, written with far less skill, and with a remarkably contorted imagery and rhetoric.158 Given the acrostic and a dependence upon ideas exposed in the text of the cantus (something that Holford-Strevens points out), it was clearly written ad hoc for the composition of the motet, perhaps by Pierre du Castel, but certainly by someone whose skill was below that of men like Gilles Carlier, Robert Auclou, or Du Fay. The metric and mensural structure of the motet are virtually identical with those of Dunstaple’s Salve scema sanctitatis,159 which precedes Fulgens iubar in ModB, the only source for both pieces,160 but Dunstaple’s motet is not isomelic and its melodic style is very different from that of Du Fay’s motet. The music of Fulgens iubar, in terms of melodic ductus, rhythmic layering between the voices, and the use of the contratenor, owes a great deal to the style of the English Missa Caput, the last four movements of which were surely part of the repertory of Ordinaries collected in the 1440s and

158 159

160

Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 148–49. Dunstaple, Collected Works, no. 31. This is Dunstaple’s one motet with a double tenor design, and Allsen suggests that it may have been the model for many of the motets with a double tenor design of the 1430s, including those of Du Fay (cf. Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 497). Cf. Fallows, Dufay, 119–20.

The Later Motets

copied into two massive volumes by Symon Mellet in 1449.161 In the fourvoice sections the texture is entirely dominated by the cantus, which makes the places where the cantus falls silent stand out starkly, something that Du Fay obviously planned in order to allow the formal markers produced by the contratenor to be heard as such, and the tenors are slightly more active than those of Moribus et genere or the tenor of Magnanimae gentis. The motet, however, presents a particular difficulty to the performers: it is virtually impossible to make sense of the music if one follows the proportions of the piece exactly as written. The three sections of the motet are signed in the upper voices as follows: , , and , which correspond to the three manners of singing the tenors in the canon cited above. In the upper voices a literal reading of the mensurations would call for the semibreve to move at the same speed in sections 1 and 2 and then twice as fast in section 3, which corresponds with the proportion that the canon proposes for the tenor. At any comfortable tempo for section 1 the music will sound slightly sluggish in section 2 and then desperately fast in section 3 since at the start of each talea, in addition to the acceleration in tempo indicated by the tenor canon and the mensuration sign, Du Fay uses the largest number of short rhythmic values, particularly in the duets.162 It bears repeating again that any singer capable of singing Resvelliés vous can sing the last two taleae of Fulgens iubar at a tempo twice as fast as that of the first two taleae, but the contrapuntal density of the texture at such tempo would render the music a scramble. There is also the matter of what Du Fay might have meant by the of the second section. Fulgens iubar was written at a time when Du Fay had largely abandoned the use of cut signatures and had adopted the “English style” of mensuration signs, where the fast duple or triple meter are indicated not by the use of a slash through the sign but by the actual notational density. In works where Du Fay does use with its traditional meaning of minim equivalence with (including the later Missa Se la face ay pale) the rhythmic density of the duple meter sections is considerably greater than what we find in Fulgens iubar, where the writing in recalls rather Du Fay’s use of this mensuration in works where he is writing what I have called “English ,”163 where four semibreves in this mensuration equal three in . This is something that, as Anna Maria Busse Berger has shown, is also connected to the relationship between and proposed by Italian theorists,164 who were 161 162

163 164

See earlier in this chapter. This had already been remarked upon by Hamm, Chronology, 37–40 and 57–65, and Fallows, Dufay, 119–20. Planchart, “The Origins,” 58; OO, Planchart, 2/11, 8. Busse Berger, “The Relationship,” 24–28.

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surely known to Du Fay after his many years in Italy, but it is also worth noting that Du Fay begins to use where his Continental colleagues would use only in the late 1430s or early 1440s, when his contact with English music was apparently most extensive. His practice remains unclear to us because Italian and German scribes tended to re-edit his late works, replacing the signs with , but it is telling that every source we have that is relatively close to the composer uses , and that the edited copies often show lapses where copyists forgot to alter one or more signs.165 If the singers were to sing the upper voices following Du Fay’s use of the shift from to in most of his late work, and simply retain the speed of the semibreve between the second and third sections of the motet, the music suddenly works as most of Du Fay’s other music of the 1440s and 1450s works. Such an interpretation has its roots in the procedures Du Fay used in Ecclesiae militantis and, closer at hand, in Moribus et genere. If there is no cautionary canon in Fulgens iubar as there is in Moribus et genere, it is because by 1447 this practice was probably well known in Cambrai. This is also the decade where I have proposed that Du Fay wrote his treatise on mensural music and proportions,166 which would most likely have shed light on the mensural practices of his motets of the 1440s. Fulgens iubar is a work of considerable melodic elegance. In the fourvoice sections the music is clearly dominated by the cantus, and the duets create a distinct progression from moderately active in the first section to a simpler and more relaxed counterpoint in the second to virtuosic flourishes in the third, where the complexity is underlined by melodic and rhythmic imitation between the cantus and the contratenor. At the same time, the combination of an elaborate formal scheme and tonal lucidity appear to be an open invitation to analysts, and the piece has been subjected to a number of analyses. The most perceptive of these are those of Samuel Brown167 and of Fallows, who offers an insight, based upon the writings of Petrus Frater, dictus Palma Ociosa (fl. 1336), on how such a motet could be sketched and composed.168 I believe that Fallows is essentially correct in this, although the contrapuntal skeleton of the motet that he presents, useful as it is for the modern analyst, is something that Du Fay probably could hear without having to sketch it out. Modern scholarship, beginning with Charles Hamm, has ascribed to Du Fay one further isorhythmic motet, Elizabeth Zachariae,169 found as an 165 166 169

Cf. Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1976), 44–47; id., “The Books,” 190–97. See pp. 207–08. 167 S. E. Brown, “New Evidence,” 8–9. 168 Fallows, Dufay, 120–23. Hamm, Chronology, 70–73.

The Later Motets

unicum in Tr 87 and first published in DTÖ,170 and then by Allsen.171 Hamm’s arguments for Du Fay’s authorship rest on the transmission of the motet within a fascicle manuscript in Tr 87 and more importantly on a constellation of formal traits, including a pervasive major modus, a canonic introitus, and an elaborate mensural scheme where the mensurations are used as Du Fay does.172 Allsen also notes several intertextualities between Elizabeth Zachariae and a number of motets by Du Fay from the 1420s and 1430s,173 including the use of rhythmic sequences found in Vasilissa ergo gaude and other motets. Fallows avoids discussing the motet;174 Lütteken mentions it, but remains entirely noncommittal.175 Reid, by contrast, disputes the ascription.176 In the end Allsen concludes that the work is either “by Dufay, or a work by a composer who was familiar enough with Dufay’s works to produce a masterful imitation.”177 I would opt firmly for the second possibility; with the caveat that “masterful” is not something I would apply to the musical surface of Elizabeth Zachariae. The composer of the piece is clearly familiar with the formal procedures Du Fay uses in his motets between Vasilissa ergo gaude and Ecclesiae militantis, and imitates them with some care. In the process, he has written an attractive and wellmade work that merits repeated hearing and study. What he does not or cannot imitate is Du Fay’s melodic style. The melodic writing is rife with neighbor-tone figurations and anticipations found nowhere else in Du Fay’s music in the profusion found here, all the more so in the case where many of the anticipations are dissonant. The general dissonance level of the entire motet surpasses even that of the final Amen of O sancte Sebastiane. Some of the dissonances are clearly scribal errors and easily emended, but many are beyond emendation and part of the basic contrapuntal fabric of the work. The kind of counterpoint one finds in measures 55–56, for example, is something well below Du Fay’s standards even in the 1420s (see Ex. 9.3). Melodically and contrapuntally a number of passages, for example, measures 43–45, 46–50, and 61–67, border on gibberish, and the use of B and B poses serious problems caused by conflicts with E and F in close succession. Most of the problems appear in the first section of the motet, where we meet with a large number of dissonances over the longheld tones of the tenor and the contratenor. In the 1420s and 1430s Du Fay 170 172 173 174 176

Ed. Ficker, DTÖ 76:16–18. 171 Allsen, ed., Four Late Isorhythmic Motets. Hamm, Chronology, 72. Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 280–83; id., “Two ‘New’ Motets,” 13–14. Fallows, Dufay, 291. 175 Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 340. Reid, “Testing,” 176 and 178. 177 Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 359.

387

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The Isorhythmic and Mensuration Motets Example 9.3 Anonymous (Benoit Sirede?), Elizabeth Zachariae (mm. 55–57)

sometimes used a surprising number of struck dissonant notes, even at the start of a tempus. Supremum est mortalibus bonum provides a good number of them, but not with the frequency found in this motet. In addition, I know of no authentic work of his where the progression of sonorities seems to be as meandering as in Elizabeth Zachariae, particularly in the first section. All these problems are most acute in the passages when the upper voices are in , creating a cross-rhythm between the perfect semibreves of the tenor and contratenor and the imperfect semibreves of the cantus and contratenor. The counterpoint is considerably better in the second color, which suggests that the composer was a bit over his head in trying to deal with the extremely long notes in the first color. Rhythmic patterning, particularly in the opening canon, sounds mechanical, with its insistence on two minims at the end of three of the first four perfections. All of this suggests that the composer is an overambitious imitator of Du Fay, who did manage to get a good number of aspects of Du Fay’s motet style right, but could not match his melodic gifts or his skill as a contrapuntist. One composer whose knowledge of Du Fay’s music appears to match what we find in Elizabeth Zachariae is Benoit Sirede. James Haar and John Nádas have presented an extensive case for Sirede being the scribe of ModB,178 which is the major source for Du Fay’s later isorhythmic motets. At the time he was copying the manuscript he was choirmaster of the Baptistery in Florence, which was under the patronage of St. John Baptist,179 something that would make his authorship of this work all the more plausible. With all of its problems, the motet remains an interesting and even exciting work to sing and to hear. Du Fay’s fourteen isorhythmic and mensuration motets, partly because most of them can be dated with some confidence, present a particularly

178

Haar and Nádas, “The Medici, the Signoria, and the Pope.”

179

Ibid., 36–40.

The Later Motets

telling view of the first half of his career as a composer, albeit from a very specific perspective. They are all big works intended for special occasions, and, as Fallows puts it, they represent the “public voice” of Du Fay at its most self-conscious.180 But precisely because they are display works they also constitute a compendium of what Du Fay viewed as the most effective procedures to put his ideas across, in terms not just of the planning or the symbolic structure, but also of the surface of the music. They show him building upon those techniques that had proved successful from one piece to the next. Interestingly enough, for a musician trained in the north of France, which had a very specific motet tradition anchored in the works of Vitry, Machaut, and their immediate successors, down to Grenon and Loqueville, he wrote only one motet in that tradition, Balsamus et munda cera. It is clear that Du Fay, beginning his career as a motet composer in the north of Italy, was at pains at first to adopt a fundamentally Italian tradition, albeit with echoes of his northern contrapuntal schooling. The Malatesta motets are all well within the Italian tradition; all begin with a canonic introitus outside the isorhythmic scheme. In the first four the introitus is notated as a divided cantus 1, although the canonic voice could be sung by the singer of the cantus 2 because both upper voices are in the same range. The four motets have a D final, and the introit begins with an outline of the descending octave a′–a, but they also define the total range that the two upper voices will have. As the introitus falls outside the isorhythmic scheme, it also serves as an uncomplicated way of setting the tempo of the music before any mensural complexities intervene, and this is something that Du Fay will continue to do, to the point that apparently in some of the late motets the upper voices set the tempo of the pieces and are to be sung “as if the tenors did not exist.” In the last Malatesta motet, Apostolo glorioso, the introitus is expanded into a partial double canon, involving all four upper voices, with cantus 1–2 defining the plagal octave of the G mode, and contratenors 1–2 defining the authentic octave. With O sancte Sebastiane and O gemma Du Fay begins to construct an elaborate mensural scaffolding among the voices, which he abandons temporarily in Apostolo glorioso, probably because of the expanded texture of the piece. In Rite maiorem he incorporates the introductory duet into the isorhythmic structure by beginning the tenors with a series of rests, and expands the isomelism already hinted at in Vasilissa ergo gaude into a complex pattern of isomelic voice exchange. Balsamus et munda cera is something of a change in that Du Fay, in the new environment of a Franco-Flemish papal 180

Fallows, Dufay, 103.

389

390

The Isorhythmic and Mensuration Motets

chapel, writes his most northern French motet, a piece that in some ways looks back to Vitry and Machaut, but at the same time becomes melodically his freest motet. He retains, however, the mensural scaffolding present in some of the Malatesta motets. Ecclesiae militantis is a brilliant summation of all of his motet procedures to that time, including a return to the canonic introitus of the Malatesta pieces, again outlining the octave a′–a, an elaborate mensural scaffolding, and a duplication in a D mode work of the radiant sonorities of Apostolo glorioso. In this context Supremum est represents a real break, all the more so because it is an entirely sui generis work; there is no other motet quite like it before or after. In its isorhythmic structure it harks back to the Italian motets, including a tenor not derived from a plainsong (the use of Isti sunt duae olivae near the end is essentially ornamental and symbolic), but its vocal scoring has been changed, with a contratenor below the cantus, and its sonority has been expanded by sections in fauxbourdon, used almost in a symbolic manner to reference the sound of purely liturgical music. The motets that follow Supremum est belong in a different world. We could continue to speak of cantus 1 and 2, but the way the parts work together and sound in the ensemble are now cantus and contratenor, with one or mostly two tenors below. Nuper rosarum and Salve flos return to the structural procedures used in Rite maiorem, Balsamus, and Ecclesiae militantis, but in new variations. In Nuper rosarum the proportions of the motet are laden with symbolic meaning that does not appear to exist in the other motets, isomelism becomes the primary organizing force of the upper voices, and the rich sonority of Supremum est is incorporated into the texture not through the use of fauxbourdon but through extensive divisi passages. In addition, the complex G tonal type with its conflict between B mi and B fa, which will become a hallmark of much of Du Fay’s later music, makes its first fully-fledged appearance. Magnanimae gentis appears to be a distillation of Nuper rosarum and Salve flos into an almost songlike work, and in O gloriose tiro we encounter what is apparently Du Fay’s first reaction to a new repertory of English music, which includes passages where the second tenor behaves like a low contratenor. With Moribus et genere and Fulgens iubar it is clear that the old motet genre has become something of a shell. Moribus et genere is an essay in the control of the total sonority that Du Fay had encountered in the new English music, and Fulgens iubar not only asserts that control in a masterful manner, incorporating the texture of works such as the Caput Mass, including what amounts to a combination of cantus firmus and trebledominated styles, but refines the use of the contratenor as a

The Later Motets

compositionally important voice and expands the isomelic formal structure that he had produced in Nuper rosarum flores. The proportional and mensural structures of the motets are extraordinarily varied. Du Fay simply never repeated himself, but at the same time one can see and hear a thread of ideas being expanded and varied from one work to the next.

391

10

Cantilena, Chant Paraphrase, and New-Style Motets

This chapter deals with a heterogeneous group of pieces, all of which are settings of liturgical or devotional texts. The entire repertory includes works that Du Fay and his contemporaries would have called motet, some that were never considered motets in the fifteenth century, and others whose designation changed in the course of the century. In many cases the sectional structure of the pieces was underlined by mensuration changes, as was the case of the tenor motets discussed in Chapter 9, as well as changes in texture. This entire repertory, including a number of pieces that are better discussed in Chapter 11, are given in Table 10.1. In his will Du Fay referred to two of these pieces, nos. 6 and 10, as motets.1 Besseler included only nos. 10, 18, 20, 22, and 25, as well as the three spurious pieces, in his edition of the motets;2 no. 19 was edited as a prose,3 nos. 21, 23, and 24 were edited as songs,4 and the remainder were edited as antiphons or as Marian antiphons, in the volume of small liturgical works.5 Still, calling all of these works “motet” tout court is an unhappy compromise. I suspect that Du Fay and his colleagues would have called nos. 7– 9, 11–13, and 15–16 “antiphon,” and no. 17 “responsory,” and that nos. 1–5 would have been called “antiphon” at the beginning of the fifteenth century and “motet” toward the end of Du Fay’s life, by analogy with works such as nos. 6 and 14.6 Accordingly I will discuss nos. 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, and 17 not in this chapter but rather in the chapter on music for the Office, together with the hymns, the magnificats and the Benedicamus Domino. At the time of their composition nos. 22 and 24 were sui generis works for which their contemporaries had no generic name. Later scholarship has called the small repertory of later fifteenth-century works that are composed along the same lines as no. 22 “motet chansons,”7 and I will discuss them in this chapter.

1 4

5 6

392

7

LAN, 4G 1313, pp. 70, 73–74. 2 OO Besseler 1, nos. 1–6, 20–21. 3 OO Besseler 5, no. 1. OO Besseler 6, nos. 5, 9, 10. Earlier, however, Besseler had edited Vergene bella as a motet; cf. Zwölf geistliche und weltliche Werke, no. 2. OO Besseler 5. Significantly Cumming, in The Motet, does not mention nos. 7–9, 11–13, 15–17, and 24. Cf. Stephan, Die burgundisch-niederländische Motette, 51–59; Finscher, “Motetten-Chanson.”

Cantilena, Chant Paraphrase, and New-Style Motets

393

Table 10.1 Du Fay’s cantilena, chant paraphrase, and new-style motets No.

Composition

Antiphon texts 1 Alma redemptoris mater 1 2 Alma redemptoris mater 2 3 Anima mea liquefacta est 4 Ave regina caelorum 1 5 Ave regina caelorum 2 6 Ave regina caelorum 3 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Hic vir despiciens mundum Magi videntes stellam O gemma martyrum O proles Hispaniae Petrus apostolus Propter nimiam caritatem Salva nos, Domine Salve regina

15 16

Salve sancte pater Sapiente filio Responsory texts Si quaeris miracula Devotional texts Flos florum Gaude virgo mater Christi Inclita stella maris Lamentatio sanctae matris

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

O beate Sebastiane Vergene bella Secular texts Iuvenis qui puellam

25

Mirandas parit

8 9

10

Mensuration pattern

Genre

Earliest source

Cantilena and tenor Chant paraphrase Chant paraphrase Cantilena (declamation) Chant paraphrase New style: paraphrase and cantus firmus Chant paraphrase Chant paraphrase Chant paraphrase Cantilena Chant paraphrase Chant paraphrase Chant paraphrase New style: paraphrase and cantus firmus Chant paraphrase Chant paraphrase

Bo Q15 (I) Tr 92, ModB Bo Q15 (I) Bo Q15 (I) ModB SP B80 ModB ModB ModB Tr 87, ModB ModB ModB Tr 90 Tr 89, MuB 3154 ModB ModB

Chant paraphrase

Tr 87

[ ]

Cantilena Cantilena Cantilena New style: cantilena and cantus firmus Cantilena Cantilena

Bo Q15 (I) Bo Q15 (III) Bo Q15 (II) Ricc 2794, MC 871 Bo Q15 (III/II) Bo Q15 (I)

[ ] [ ]3 and

Cantilena and fauxbourdon Cantilena

MuL

[ ]

[ ]

8

3

9

10

[ ]

ModB

The only source has inconsistent signs: and for the duple meter. The last sign is surely the correct one. The signs in this manuscript might be corrupt; the succession of signs was probably all integer valor or else all cut signs. The is surely an editorial change for .

394

Cantilena, Chant Paraphrase, and New-Style Motets

Table 10.1 (cont.) No.

Composition

Excluded as spurious A1 Ave virgo quae de caelis A2 Qui latuit in virgine 11 A3 Veni dilecte mi

Genre

Earliest source

Mensuration pattern

Cantilena Cantilena Cantilena

Tr 92 Tr 87 Bo Q15 (III/II)

[ ] [ ] and [ ]

In terms of the music the chant paraphrase motets use the same procedures Du Fay used in the hymns, the Kyries, the plainsong-based Glorias, and most of his settings of the propers of the Mass (but not the first three propers of the Missa Sancti Iacobi, which resemble tenor motets), whereas the cantilena motets share most of their musical procedures with the songs and with the freely composed Mass Ordinary settings. The traditions for sacred or devotional works written in either manner do not go back much before 1400. Manuscript 16bis of the Basilique de Sainte-Anne in Apt, which reflects the repertory of the papal court in Avignon in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, has a number of polyphonic hymns that represent the earliest chant paraphrase settings we have,12 and free cantilena settings, mostly of Marian texts, are found in the works of Dunstaple and Power, but as is the case with the isorhythmic motets, the clearest antecedents for Du Fay’s cantilena motets are works composed in northern Italy between 1400 and 1420, many of them by northerners: Johannes Ciconia, Bertrand Feragut, and Johannes de Lymburgia. The works that I classify in Table 10.1 as “newstyle” motets are elaborate hybrids of the cantilena, the chant paraphrase, and the tenor motet, which became the main repertory of motets being written in Europe after ca. 1450.13 One of them, however, is a very early example of a small genre that was cultivated by composers of the second half of the fifteenth century, a combination of chanson and motet, in this case a French lament about the fall of Constantinople with a Latin cantus firmus, the texture of the English Caput Mass, and a typical English bipartite structure going from to . Readers might also notice that I do not always follow the detailed typology for the motet proposed by Cumming in her excellent study of this genre. In this case this is not a disagreement with

11 12 13

By Johannes de Lymburgia. Cf. Ward, The Polyphonic Office Hymn, 41; Haydon, “Ave maris stella.” See Cumming, The Motet, 254–87. Significantly, each of these three pieces is unique in Du Fay’s canon (as it survives); Cumming places each in a separate category (pp. 258, 267, and 271).

The Early Cantilenas

her classifications of the repertory, but rather a consequence of dealing with a far more restricted group of pieces and of the fact, which she notes time and again in her comments on Du Fay’s pieces, that he was, as she puts it, “a master of generic mixture,”14 so that many of his motets make references to more than one of her categories. Still, her work underpins most of what I have to say in this chapter.

The Early Cantilenas We might begin with the cantilenas, which represent the majority of Du Fay’s earliest repertory of sacred and devotional music outside the Mass. With Margaret Bent’s work on Bo Q15 providing us with a clearer look at the chronology of Du Fay’s early work,15 we can posit that the earliest surviving cantilenas are those copied in stage I of that manuscript, specifically Alma redemptoris 1, Ave regina 1, Anima mea, Flos florum, and Vergene bella. The first thing that is striking about this group of works is how varied it is, although it is also true that the texture of most of them is related to the texture that Du Fay uses in his songs. It is useful, however, to remember how varied Du Fay’s early song repertory itself is. The musical texture of Alma redemptoris mater 116 is that of a song, but the piece is based upon a plainsong cantus firmus in the tenor. Du Fay barely ornaments the cantus firmus in the first two sections of the piece, but adds more ornamentation at the start of the third, so that the song texture is reinforced as the work progresses. Still, since the cantus firmus together with its text determines the phrase structure of the piece, it pushed Du Fay to cadencing once or twice on notes he would not usually choose in a song (e.g., the cadence on A at m. 10). At the end of the first part there is an extended passage where the cantus shifts to Ͻ and the contratenor engages in a series of displacements: a bit of late Ars subtilior that leads to a much simpler section with all voices in , where each phrase is set separately, and the usual connecting gestures that Du Fay uses almost everywhere else are largely absent (Ex. 10.1). The very end of the motet consists of an extended passage in cantus coronatus, something he used in a number of other early motets but also at important moments in ballades (e.g., the setting of Carlo Malatesta’s name in Resvelliés vous) as well as in the settings of the

14

Ibid., 286.

15

Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:20–22.

16

OO Besseler 5, no. 47; OO Planchart 1/1.

395

Example 10.1 Alma redemptoris mater 1 (mm. 19–37)

The Early Cantilenas

nomina sacra in the Gloria settings.17 Unlike the ballades and the Glorias, here (and in every one of the motets that end with such passages) each word is set as a unit, separated from the others by a rest. As a rhetorical device, these endings are the musical counterpart of certain inscriptions, where every word is separated by a dot or another sign.18 The cross-referencing of the ballades found in Alma redemptoris 1 becomes even more prominent in Flos florum, with a highly ornamented cantus that recalls the writing in a number of Du Fay’s early ballades.19 Flos florum, as Nosow and Cumming have noted, was apparently an immensely influential work at the time, spawning a number of emulations by other composers as well as some works by Du Fay that are obviously influenced by it.20 The writing of the cantus is far more fluid than that in Alma redemptoris 1, and paradoxically, although it is far more ornamental, it feels much less fussy. It is interesting to note that the initial progression in both motets has identical points of departure and arrival: F and A, but while the arrival in Alma redemptoris 1 sounds slightly haphazard, that in Flos florum is both very simple and extremely smooth, being prepared by the lower two voices from the beginning of the piece, to the point that I suspect that tenor and contratenor were composed simultaneously in this piece, which is something one finds in a number of other Du Fay motets, particularly the isorhythmic and mensuration pieces (see Ex. 10.2). The final section in cantus coronatus contains a relatively large number of inflected notes whereby the end contrasts sharply with the sonority prevalent in most of the motet. The voice-leading in this section is for the most part extremely careful, although Du Fay writes a direct melodic tritone in the contratenor (mm. 135–36), something that he would continue doing from time to time to the end of his career. In the case of Vergene bella21 Margaret Bent not only shows that it was originally copied in stage I of Bo Q15, but she also proposes a compelling hypothesis that it was written for a Paduan celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Petrarch in July 1424, probably on commission from the Malatesta family of Pesaro, for whom he is known to have written

17

18 19 20

21

A complete list of passages in cantus coronatus in Du Fay’s music appears in Blackburn, “The Dispute,” 26, n. 44. The best known of these inscriptions is that of the Pantheon in Rome. OO Besseler 1, no. 2; OO Planchart 1/18. Cf. Nosow, “The Florid and Equal-Discantus Motet,” 152–62, 216–58; Cumming, The Motet, 108–15. OO Besseler 6, no. 5; OO Planchart 1/23.

397

Example 10.2 Flos florum (mm. 1–15)

The Early Cantilenas

a number of other works.22 Like Flos florum, Vergene bella is composed along the lines of a song texture, but at the same time it is a large-scale work, and if Bent is correct in her hypothesis it shares some aspects of the ceremonial motet. In this respect, it prefigures the function of a later cantilena, Mirandas parit. The organization of the motet has been distorted in most editions thus far by treating it as a piece in three sections, and placing a double bar before the final shift in mensuration.23 The work is actually in two sections, a setting of the fronte, and a setting of the sirima.24 The first part, unsigned, is organized in pairs of perfect breves and contains a great deal of “remote imperfection,” that is, when a long is imperfected not by a breve but by a semibreve. In Du Fay’s music this kind of rhythmic organization, when it is signed at all, is invariably signed with , and judging by the rhythmic density of the music it appears to call for beat on the breve and fast semibreve motion. The second section, the setting of the sirima, begins with a mensuration. It is organized in single breves, and the subdivisions of the semibreve at measures 98–102 call for a slower tempo. Then, right before the last line of the poem, the music comes to a close on A, but without a bar line, something like a rhetorical pause, and then the last line is set with a sign and the rhythmic organization of the beginning, and surely at the same tempo as the beginning. The function of the setting of the last line is very similar to that of the Amen passages in some of the isorhythmic motets. But the texture of the music organizes the piece in a slightly different manner. The vocative opening of the poem is set in imitation, and in the second section the phrases that plead directly with the Virgin, as well as the prefatory “Chi la chiamò con fede,” are also set in imitation, which the scribes underscored by adding the text to the lower part in those places. Otherwise the piece is set as a relatively florid cantus with two supporting parts. The melodic and contrapuntal structures are indebted to the music of the Italian Trecento, although not in a manner as direct as Vasilissa ergo gaude is indebted to Ciconia. Instead it appears as though Du Fay had internalized a number of trecento stylistic traits and made them his own. He uses a number of inflected notes and particularly shifts in range, such as placing the cantus at the bottom of its range at “miseria estrema” (mm. 93–95) for affective purposes. In contrast to Alma redemptoris 1, where the ornamented cantus passage in Ͻ sounds slightly

22

23

Bent, “Petrarch, Padua, Malatesta.” Bent notes that a number of important text variants align the text as transmitted in all copies of Du Fay’s setting with readings in the manuscript of Petrarch’s poetry in the possession of Malatesta di Pandolfo, lord of Pesaro. Cf. OO Besseler 6, no. 5, m. 74. 24 OO Planchart 1/23, mm. 1–77 and 78–138.

399

400

Cantilena, Chant Paraphrase, and New-Style Motets

forced, the ornamental melisma after the “miseria estrema” passage in Vergene bella (mm. 98–101) fits easily in the normal rhetoric of the song. The return of the organization in pairs of breves, with its faster tempo, and also the densest and most active counterpoint in the piece, provides it with something of a parallel to the elaborate Amen sections in the tenor motets. The unforced elegance of the writing in the entire motet has made Vergene bella one of Du Fay’s most popular works during the revival of his music in the twentieth century. Another cantilena that, like Vergene bella, consists of three freely composed voices is Ave regina 1,25 but it could not be more different: it has a simple, near homophonic texture that appears to relate it to the tradition of the lauda. The setting is unlike Du Fay’s other motets in that virtually every phrase of the text is set to a short musical gesture and separated from the next by a rest, giving it a very clear structure and something of a start and stop quality. In terms of breves the phrase structure of the motet is 7, 5, 4, 4, 4, 4, 7, 7, so that the last two phrases sound as the climax of the piece, particularly since the next-to-last phrase has the most elaborate counterpoint, and the final alleluia is the only extended melisma of the piece. The writing is extremely careful, with a number of inflected notes and also the kind of cadential combination that calls for a good number of B fa in some instances, balanced by equally prominent G mi in others, giving the motet a harmonic coloration that is almost unique in Du Fay’s canon. It also remains an isolated instance in his production in that it is an extremely simple and compact piece of devotional or even liturgical music that is freely composed with no reference to plainsong. By around 1429 Du Fay had found an even more efficient manner of producing such works using chant paraphrase in the cantus and often the new texture of fauxbourdon for the other voices. The most unusual work among the early cantilenas is Anima mea liquefacta est,26 where Du Fay employs the texture of two equal cantus voices and a tenor, as in his early isorhythmic motets, but placed in a low range, with a cleffing of c3, c3, and F4. In addition, all three voices paraphrase the plainsong, which makes the piece something of a virtuoso tour de force in how to derive fifteenth-century contrapuntal lines from plainsong. At the outset the two cantus voices are technically in canon, which recalls the canonic introits to a number of his early tenor motets, but given the problems presented by trying to derive all voices from the plainsong, the cantus 2 enters after eight breves, by which point the counterpoint in cantus 1 is entirely free. The tenor 25

OO Besseler 5, no. 49; OO Planchart 1/4.

26

OO Besseler 5, no. 46; OO Planchart 1/3.

The Early Cantilenas

starts in slower values, another reference to tenor motets, and is also derived from the plainsong. Once all three voices are sounding Du Fay largely eschews imitation and constructs his lines out of a judicious use of notes from the plainsong, a few ornamental additions, and a rhymicization that allows him to create correct counterpoint between the voices. The piece has no mensuration sign, but is rigidly organized in pairs of perfect breves, the kind of organization that, when signed at all, he signed with , which implies a beat on the breve and a relatively fast tempo, which is also suggested by the relatively large number of semibreve dissonances. Given all the constraints Du Fay has imposed upon himself, there is no room in the piece for the kinds of luxuriant melodic gestures one finds in pieces like Flos florum, or the other pieces that Cumming calls “cut circle motets,” and the music moves most of the time in even semibreves. The work is euphonious and quite elegant, but Du Fay must have found the process of writing it incredibly laborious, for he never again attempted anything like it, and to my knowledge no other fifteenth-century composer did either. In his old age, in the Ave regina caelorum 3, he achieves something slightly similar, the permeation of the texture by motives from the plainsong through the use of imitation, but in this case the references to plainsong outside the tenor are treated like short motives. Despite the differences in the surface of the music, with Ave regina 1 totally declamatory, Anima mea and Alma redemptoris 1 relatively unornamented, Vergene bella fairly florid, and Flos florum extremely florid, three of the five pieces share the rhythmic language and some of the melodic traits of what Cumming has called “a hybrid sub-genre: the cut circle motet,” consisting of a relatively small group of pieces written in the first three decades of the fifteenth century by northern composers working in Italy.27 The pieces share a metric structure of imperfect tempus or modus, depending on the mensuration sign, with perfect prolation or tempus. The three “cut circle motets” in this group present a microcosm of the mensural conundrum posed by this subgenre. Flos florum is notated with a mensuration, Anima mea has no mensuration signs, but is in a tempus perfectum clearly organized in a series of imperfect longs, and Vergene bella is in three sections all in tempus perfectum, the first and last organized metrically in imperfect longs, and the middle one in a series of breves (that is, without a modus organization). There is no sign at the beginning but the signs for the second and third sections are and , respectively. This last sign, which is what lends its name to Cumming’s subgenre, has been the subject of a great deal of controversy. The literature on it is 27

Cumming, The Motet, 99–124.

401

402

Cantilena, Chant Paraphrase, and New-Style Motets

enormous and contentious.28 Cumming provides a balanced overview of the controversy in modern scholarship,29 and notes that the rhythmic structure of “cut circle,” which has “duple grouping at the lowest and highest level, and triple division in the middle,” can be found in music notated with no sign, with , with , or with ,30 so the presence or absence of the stroke cannot be taken as a sign of a proportional change of tempo or of “diminution.” The fact that the sign , when used simultaneously with or , is always accompanied by semibreve-to-minim equivalence between the cut and the uncut signs probably misled scholars, particularly Besseler, into regarding it as a prescriptive sign of diminution or of proportion.31 Bent, in the works cited in note 24, makes a vigorous case that the sign , except in cases when it is used simultaneously with another mensuration, has no prescriptive value concerning tempo, nor can it be taken as a proportional sign. It is, according to her, a sign with a number of possible meanings, none of them prescriptive.32 In Du Fay’s music, it almost always indicates a tempus perfectum rigidly organized in a series of imperfect longs, and with a more frequent use of remote imperfection, that is a long imperfected by a semibreve, than music signed with . Not all works of Du Fay with such a metric organization are signed with ; a good number of them are unsigned and very few are signed with . Given the evidence of scribal intervention in the use of signs throughout the fifteenth century,33 and even the wholesale renotation of pieces,34 it is impossible to be sure which signs were in Du Fay’s original notation. From ambiguous evidence posed by multiple copies for some late works it appears that during the 1440s Du Fay largely abandoned the use of cut signs of any kind,35 so that the tempo of the music

28

29 31 33

34

35

Bent, “On the Interpretation of ”; id., “The Early Use of the Sign”; id., “The Use of Cut Signatures in Sacred Music by Binchois”; id., “The Use of Cut Signatures in Sacred Music by Ockeghem”; id., “The Myth”; Busse Berger, “The Myth”; id., “The Origin and Early History of Proportion Signs”; id., “The Relationship of Perfect and Imperfect Time”; id., Mensuration and Proportion Signs; DeFord, “On Diminution and Proportion”; id., “The Mensura of in the Works of Du Fay”; Günther, “Der Gebrauch des tempus perfectum diminutum in der Handschrift Chantilly 1047”; id., “Die Anwendung der Diminution in der Handschrift Chantilly 1047”; Planchart, “Tempo and Proportions”; id., “The Relative Speed of Tempora”; Schroeder, “The Stroke Comes Full Circle”; Wegman, “Different Strokes for Different Folks?”; id., “What Is ‘acceleratio mensurae’?”. Cumming, The Motet, 99–105. 30 Ibid., 105. Besseler, Bourdon und Fauxbourdon, 131. 32 Bent, “The Myth,” 205. In the case of Du Fay’s music some of the evidence has been presented in Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1976), 44–47; id., “The Books,” 190–98. On renotation in the 15th century, see Cox, “‘Pseudo-Augmentation,’” 439–40; Ciconia, The Works of Johannes Ciconia, ed. Bent and Hallmark, 198–226 (passim); Hamm, Chronology, 53– 55 and 94–95. Cf. Planchart, “The Books,” 190–98.

The Cantilenas of the Late 1430s and 1440s

had to be inferred from the notation itself. This may well have been the case for him from the beginning, with initial signs having no tempo connotations. The notational density of his music in tempus perfectum with a minor modus organization, however, points to a faster speed for the semibreve in this metric context than in music in tempus perfectum without a modus organization or, as in the case of some of the motets and the Missa Se la face ay pale, a tempus perfectum organized in major modus. How much faster this was, or whether it was proportional, we do not know. Du Fay might have subscribed to the misunderstanding of Prosdocimus de Beldomandis that led to what Busse Berger calls “the myth of diminution per tertiam partem.”36 Absent a rediscovery of Du Fay’s treatise on proportions, which had survived into the middle of the nineteenth century, we cannot know,37 but in Du Fay’s music we never encounter the situation found in some of the works of Binchois, where a piece is copied once with three signs, , , and , for the same music,38 and we never encounter the sign except in music where the tempus perfectum is organized in imperfect longs.39

The Cantilenas of the Late 1430s and 1440s The high-water mark for Du Fay’s production of cantilenas was the years between 1424 and 1436. Only two of the surviving cantilenas can be dated from after these years, the curious Iuvenis qui puellam, which is incomplete in its only source, and O proles Hispaniae – O sidus Hispaniae, which formed part of the now incomplete Vespers for St. Anthony of Padua and is surely a product of the late 1430s or early 1440s. A number of the cantilenas blur the stylistic boundaries between this genre and those of the song and the motet, vague as such boundaries might have been in the 1420s and 1430s. While in the early Vergene bella the musical texture is almost indistinguishable from that of the songs, to the point that Besseler included it among the songs and 36 38

39

Busse Berger, “The Myth,” 419–21. 37 Fétis, Mémoire, 13; Gallo, “Citazioni,” 149. Bent, “The Use of Cut Signatures in Sacred Music by Binchois,” deals systematically with all such cases in Binchois’s music. The very few exceptions in the imperfect modus organization of what we can call Du Fay’s cut-circle pieces is directly related to his practice in music in , or later in what I call “English ,” that is that moves predominantly in breves and semibreves, and is usually organized in imperfect longs as well. At certain points, usually at the approach to a major cadence or for an important articulation, he introduces an extra breve in the modus organization of the music. In the earlier works this appears to be both more frequent and less controlled; in the late works the extra breves are placed with considerable care. The instances of this in the “cut circle” pieces are extremely rare but at the same time enormously effective.

403

404

Cantilena, Chant Paraphrase, and New-Style Motets

not among the cantilenas in his edition, in Mirandas parit,40 a luminous work in three sections, the imitation between cantus 1 and 2 at the beginning, the delayed entrance of the tenor, and the fact that throughout much of the work the tenor moves in slower values (particularly at important points: its first entrance, the start of the second section, and the beginning and the end of the long duet for cantus 1 and 2 in the second section) assimilate the texture of this piece to those of the tenor motets, including the suggestion of a canonic introitus at the beginning of the work (Ex. 10.3). In this Mirandas parit aligns itself with the ceremonial sound of the two big Florentine tenor motets that are surely contemporary with it, Nuper rosarum flores and Salve flos Tuscae, the last of which, like Mirandas parit, is a song in praise of Florentine women. Even more motetlike is Inclita stella maris,41 a sumptuous and euphonious work that according to its rubrics can be performed in four different ways: (1) as a two-voice mensuration canon; (2) as a two-voice cantilena with the one notated cantus and the first contratenor; (3) in three voices with canon and the first contratenor; and (4) in four voices with the addition of a second contratenor.42 In this case the motetlike quality lies more in the visual aspect of the piece (both in the original notation and in a modern edition) rather than in its sound, which is unusual in that it is a gently flowing stream of music with little apparent change and devoid of any of the brilliant contrapuntal or rhythmic effects one finds the motets or even in the other cantilenas. This is in keeping with the pleading in the text, but there might be more to the work with all its different instructions. One of the salient aspects of the four-voice version is that the figures being repeated a few beats apart by the canonic voices are reinterpreted contrapuntally, and the expansion of the sixth that goes to an octave in many of the cadences is sabotaged by one or another of the contratenors. Note, in Example 10.4, the contrapuntal reconfiguration of the cadence in measures 62–63 between cantus 1 and 2 when it recurs in measures 68–69. Each of the different combinations of voices makes different demands on the singers in terms of musica ficta, and in some ways the four-voice version 40 41

42

OO Besseler 1, no. 5; OO Planchart 1/25. OO Besseler 1, no. 1; OO Planchart 1/20. Besseler, who disliked the work because it did not conform to his teleological view of the evolution of tonality in Du Fay’s music, considered it a very early work (cf. OO Besseler 1:ii and ix). Its transmission and style, however, point to the early Roman years (1428–1431). The rubric to the second contratenor, “Non potest cantare nisi pueri dicant fugam” [It cannot be sung unless the children say the canon], leads Fallows to speculate that dicere might mean to sing with text and cantare to vocalize (Fallows, Dufay, 132). He probably overinterprets this difference, although at the time he was writing it was still necessary to make arguments for vocalizing untexted parts in this music. But the language of medieval chant, particularly the proses, is rife with references to dicere and cantare treated essentially as synonyms when dealing with musical settings.

Example 10.3 Mirandas parit haec urbs (mm. 1–19)

Example 10.4 Inclita stella maris (mm. 55–72)

The Late Cantilenas

is the most counterintuitive of them all in terms of what the melodic instinct of the singers would lead them to do. Thus the work might also have been intended as a graduated test of the ears and the skill of the singers in hearing the counterpoint that surrounds their part. It is perhaps in this context that the mention of pueri in the canon can be interpreted. The upper parts lie in a range that could easily have been sung by adult singers as well, but if the piece had a pedagogical component to it, the specific mention of pueri, who would need their aural skills sharpened, would make sense. A different problem is posed by O beate Sebastiane,43 a cantilena that survives essentially in two closely related but different versions. The piece was copied in Bo Q15 around 1434;44 another version in ModB, probably copied in the mid-1440s,45 contains a considerably revised set of manuscript accidentals, where two fa steps in Bo Q15 were cancelled, and six mi steps were added.46 Karol Berger has made an interesting and largely convincing argument that the revision had something of a symbolic intent, given the linguistic association of the mi sign, diesis (sharp), with arrows, and the manner in which the first attempt to kill St. Sebastian was carried out.47 Berger dismissed, though not entirely, the possibility that the revision in ModB could be seen as an invitation to the singers to employ the rules of musica ficta to produce what would ultimately be a conflation of the versions of Bo Q15 and ModB, which he accurately refers to as a “very colorful reading.”48 This remains a possibility, however, all the more so in that in the late 1430s, particularly in the songs, but also in the Mass music, Du Fay apparently experimented with a considerable expansion of the tonal palette of his music, particularly in works with a C or a G final,49 which eventually led to the kinds of tonal textures that he uses in works like Nuper rosarum flores, the Missa L’homme armé, and the Missa Ave regina caelorum.

The Late Cantilenas The two cantilenas composed after Du Fay left Rome have been briefly mentioned above. Iuvenis qui puellam,50 which is unfortunately incomplete 43 45 46 49 50

OO Besseler 1, no. 4; OO Planchart 1/22. 44 Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:143 and 233. Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 51–63. See Berger, “The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian,” 353. 47 Ibid., 354–55. 48 Ibid., 353. See later in the discussions of songs and Mass music. OO Besseler 6, no. 9; OO Planchart 1/24. New fragments of the source were discovered in Vienna in 2011. Among them, alas, the folio with the contratenor (or cantus 2?) of the Primum argumentum was cut vertically and used as reinforcing strip, so only the margin and the rubric survive; cf. Bent and Klugseder, A Veneto Liber Cantus, 33.

407

408

Cantilena, Chant Paraphrase, and New-Style Motets

in its only source, has an ascription reading “decretalis Guillermus Du Fay,” that is, “Guillaume Du Fay, canonist.” The text of the introduction is taken from a letter of Pope Eugenius III, “Ad Aesculapium presbyterum,” found in the proceedings of the Third Lateran Council (1179).51 Du Fay’s knowledge of this passage surely came from the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX (1294), of which he owned a copy at his death.52 The arguments that follow it are not real glosses but an ad hoc satire. There was a long-standing tradition of celebrating one’s graduation by posing humorous quaestiones quodlibetales, and as Leofranc Holford-Strevens shows, the question raised by Eugenius III was still discussed by canonists in Du Fay’s time, and could be the gist of a “postgraduation” celebration by the composer.53 Symbolic connections with the Council of Basel, or a display of Du Fay’s forensic oratory, as discussed by Ernest Trumble, Willem Elders, and David Fallows, are not impossible,54 but the whimsical ascription suggests that the immediate cause of the piece was probably a celebration of Du Fay’s becoming a bachelor of laws, which must have taken place sometime in 1436 or 1437. The loss of about a third to a half of the piece is a tragedy because despite its tongue-in-cheek text the work is a virtual summary of Du Fay’s cantilena composition in the previous decade, including passages in fauxbourdon and in reduced scoring. It is a long and complex work with an unusual scheme of mensurations and tempo changes. The variety of textures recalls the variety Du Fay exploits in Supremum est mortalibus bonum, but the actual sound of the cantilena is quite different: some of the sections in duple meter recall the sound of Mirandas parit, which probably was written not long before. The first section in fauxbourdon contains some of the highest consistent tessitura of any work by Du Fay, recalling the much earlier Sanctus Ave verum corpus, while the second fauxbourdon, for which only the cantus remains, but which can easily be reconstructed (unlike the other incomplete sections of the work), sounds as though Du Fay is referencing the sound world of the English carol. The last of Du Fay’s surviving cantilenas, O proles Hispaniae – O sidus Hispaniae,55 is a large-scale four-voice work with two texts that make it resemble the isorhythmic and mensuration motets. The first text is the 51

52

53 54

55

Mansi et al., eds., Sacrorum conciliorum, 22:326. The source was first noted in Elders, “Guillaume Dufay as Musical Orator,” 14, n. 27. Richter and Friedberg, eds., Corpus iuris canonici, 2: Decretalium collectiones, cols. 661–62. For Du Fay’s copy cf. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 228. Holford-Strevens, “Dufay the Poet?,” 150–57. Cf. Fallows, Dufay, 49, with references to Trumble and Elders, and Elders, “Guillaume Dufay’s Concept of Faux-bourdon.” OO Besseler 1, no. 6; OO Planchart 1/16.

The Late Cantilenas

magnificat antiphon for first Vespers in the rhymed office for St. Anthony of Padua written by Julian von Speyer.56 It is found in numerous Franciscan chant sources of the late Middle Ages. The second text is an imitation of Julian’s work, but it is extremely rare. According to Hilaire de Paris, it is the work of Simon de Montfort.57 In Tr 88 Du Fay’s motet is preceded by a five-voice setting of O sidus Hispaniae that Rudolph von Ficker attributed to Du Fay, an attribution rejected by all subsequent scholarship.58 This piece is part of a project that occupied Du Fay in the late 1430s and 1440s, which consisted in the composition of polyphonic settings of all of the music for the Mass and Vespers for St. Anthony of Padua and for St. Francis of Assisi. A number of these compositions survive scattered in ModB, Tr 87, Tr 88, and Tr 90, and were apparently collected in a parchment book written in black notation that Du Fay left to the chapel of St. Stephen at Cambrai.59 Even though one of the texts is a magnificat antiphon, this piece was not intended to serve that purpose. Instead, following a tradition of the cathedral of Cambrai, where solemn Vespers virtually always included “a motet,” this piece was the motet for the Vespers of St. Anthony. Du Fay himself refers to it as “a motet” in his will.60 Tonally, O proles Hispaniae is one of Du Fay’s most colorful works, using a modal combination that he was to repeat later in his Missa L’homme armé, a piece with a G final and no signature in the cantus and one flat in the lower voices, although it does not have the sudden tonal shifts of that Mass, which were inspired most likely by his knowledge of Ockeghem’s Missa Caput. This is also one of the very few works of Du Fay to open with an explicit mensuration sign. The first and last sections are organized in terms of imperfect longs, the middle section, signed , is not. The different signs might mean only a toggle, as suggested by Margaret Bent,61 but in fact the rhythmic density of the middle section indicates a slower tempo. The double text, as noted above, assimilates the piece to the tradition of the isorhythmic motets, although the lower voices are considerably more active rhythmically than what one finds in Du Fay’s isorhythmic motets. He references the motet tradition also in devoting the 56 57

58 59 61

Cf. Weiss, Die Choräle, xxiv. Paris, Saint Antoine de Padoue, 326; see also Chevalier, Repertorium Hymnologicum, no. 31035 (with added note to Hilaire in vol. 5). Ficker, ed., Sieben Trienter Codices, sechste Auswahl (DTÖ 79), 105. Cf. Planchart, “The Books.” See also Chapter 6. 60 LAN, 4G 1313, p. 72. Bent, “On the Interpretation of in the Fifteenth Century,” with references to her earlier discussions.

409

410

Cantilena, Chant Paraphrase, and New-Style Motets

entire last section to an extended Amen, something he had not done since the early Malatesta motets and Ecclesiae militantis. In addition, while the first two sections of O proles Hispaniae are entirely nonimitative (and have some of the densest counterpoint in Du Fay’s music), the Amen opens with a leisurely point of imitation, and for eighteen breves the thinnest and most transparent contrapuntal texture of the work. Du Fay is treating the texture itself as a formal element, and trying something that is the absolute opposite of the endings of most of his motets.

The New-Style Motets The last three works to be discussed here are also quite different from each other in approach if not entirely in sound. The earliest of these is O tres piteulx – Omnes amici eius,62 the only survivor of a set of four lamentations on the fall of Constantinople that Du Fay mentions in a letter to Piero de’ Medici, most likely written in 1456.63 At this time Du Fay had completed his immense cycle of music for the cathedral of Cambrai, and surely had come to know a great deal of English music, most importantly the last four movements of the Missa Caput, and had composed what a number of scholars regard as his own response to it, the Missa Se la face ay pale. The rhythmic and contrapuntal texture of the lamentation owes a great deal to the texture of the Missa Caput, and the large-scale organization of the work, with a section in triple meter and a section in duple meter, is that found in countless English motets of the period. Again, we should remember that the piece survives only in two late Italian copies, where it was almost certainly subjected to the most common revision of Du Fay’s notation, changing what was surely the original sign for the duple meter, English , into . In terms of its texts the piece is a curious hybrid of chanson and tenor motet, a genre of which we have a few examples by other composers from the last quarter of the fifteenth century, but where Du Fay again appears as something of pioneer. He had already experimented with something similar in the late 1440s, the rondeau Seigneur Leon – Benedictus qui venit, surely written for Leonello d’Este,64 which barely remains within the song genre because of the rondeau text, even though only the refrain has survived, although in terms of its sound surface it approaches that of the tenor motets. The lamentation, however, is 62 64

OO Besseler 6, no. 10; OO Planchart 1/21. 63 See earlier in this chapter. Fallows, Dufay, 63, but also Gallagher, “Seigneur Leon’s Papal Sword.”

The New-Style Motets

a full-fledged motet in the manner of the English motets of the late 1440s and early 1450s. The piece’s title in FR 2794 is “Lamentatio sanctae matris ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae,” and critics and commentators have been misled as to who the person speaking the French text is because of a failure to understand the rather clumsy double genitive of the title,65 which should read “Lamentation of the holy mother of the church of Constantinople”: the speaker is not mère église, but rather the Virgin Mary.66 Du Fay uses as a cantus firmus verses 2 and 3 of the Beth section of the first Lamentation of Jeremiah, sung at Matins on Maundy Thursday, but this is an exceptional case in his use of a cantus firmus in that he does not follow the form of the plainsong in any chant book. The liturgical text reads as follows: Beth. Plorans ploravit in nocte, et lacrimae eius in maxillis eius: non est qui consoletur eam ex omnibus caris eius: omnes amici eius spreverunt eam, et facti sunt inimici. Du Fay uses the following sections in this order: Omnes amici eius spreverunt eam: non est qui consoletur eam ex omnibus caris eius. Before the Council of Trent the Lamentations were sung to a number of different tones in different parts of Europe,67 but from Du Fay’s cantus firmus it is possible to determine that the plainsong behind it is the “Roman” version that underlies the version of the modern chantbooks.68 He begins each segment with the f–g–a intonation of the lesson, and uses the b–a–g–a flex (albeit slightly ornamented) at spreverunt eam, but then provides no intonation for non est qui and writes a half flex at consoletur eam, plus an extended cadence for omnibus caris eius that incorporates elements of the flex and the actual cadence of the plainsong. The second run through the cantus firmus retains the music for the first line, but then expands the half flex at consoletur eam into an arc that goes up to c, and the final cadence into a long melisma that goes down to C, so that the second run through the cantus firmus explores the entire modal octave of the putative plagal F tone, but can also be heard as a variation of the final melisma of the refrain in the plainsong: Ierusalem, convertere ad dominum Deum tuum,69 even though Du Fay does not set those words to music. This 65 67 69

Cf. Fallows, The Songs, 55. 66 Cumming, The Motet, 261–62, gets the title right. Cf. Stäblein, “Lamentatio, I–II.” 68 See LU 626; also Wagner, Einführung, 3:236–38. Cf. Wagner, Einführung, 3:237.

411

412

Cantilena, Chant Paraphrase, and New-Style Motets

is in keeping with his practice dealing with the modal implications of the melodies he uses in his paraphrase chant settings, where near the end of the piece he usually has the melody cover the entire ambitus of the mode in a final gesture. Something like this, however, simply cannot be found in any chant book. Du Fay has constructed his cantus firmus ad hoc, using and expanding the formulas of the lesson tone; he also excerpted and rearranged the text of the lesson to create a “libretto.” The end of the cantus firmus not only expands on a passage of the tone that he does not set but, as mentioned above, he also deals with the tonal space in a manner very similar to his practice at the end of the cantus parts in many of his chant paraphrase settings of the 1440s.70 This is important because it shows to what extent his chant paraphrase setting in the 1440s eventually molded his ideas about melodic construction, and because it prefigures the expansions of cantus-firmus melodies that one finds in the Missa L’homme armé and other late works. I believe that Du Fay took what for him was an unusual step, of creating an artificial cantus firmus, albeit one that references its chant origins, with a specific “libretto” text for rhetorical and possibly political reasons. Like most of Europe, particularly the clerical class, he was probably horrified by the fall of Constantinople, even more so because he had been part of one of the councils that labored, however misguidedly, for the union of the Latin and Greek churches. He probably also had a reasonable idea of how the European princes had reacted to the events that led to the fall, and like a large number of churchmen at the time he was probably bitterly disappointed in that reaction. The cantus firmus can easily be heard as a not too veiled reproach to the European rulers, something like “where were you when she needed you?,” albeit a reproach cast in a manner that could not be heard as so openly subversive that it would have had repercussions on his own career. The melodic contours of the cantus firmus are echoed in the cantus that sings the French plainte at the outset, in measures 1–13, in the kind of anticipatory imitation that he would use again in Ave regina caelorum 3, and again in measures 43–65, where the anticipation reflects the expanded flex of the second cursus of the cantus firmus. In measures 96–98, when this expanded flex occurs in the tenor, Du Fay drops the cantus, so that the tenor is at that point the highest-sounding voice, and the large-scale sweep through the descending octave c″–c′ in the cantus firmus that takes place in measures 93–118 is recapitulated quickly at the end of the cantus, 70

See Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Second Style,” 337.

The New-Style Motets

beginning with the prominent leap from f′ to c″ in measures 113–14.71 The piece shows, apart from Du Fay’s astonishing control of the smallest melodic and contrapuntal detail, the complete mastery that he had achieved of the new four-voice texture found in English works of the 1440s, particularly the Missa Caput. The Salve regina72 is a late work. Its odd transmission and a few traits of the style caused Karl Dèzes to question its authenticity and consider it an anonymous German work.73 Besseler accepted that judgment74 and simply omitted it from the Opera Omnia without further mention, which must be considered an act of scholarly irresponsibility. The problem is that when Dèzes was writing almost nothing of Du Fay’s sacred music of the 1440s, 1450s, and 1460s was known except for the late festal Masses and the Ave regina caelorum 3, and the German repertory of the mid-fifteenth century was also largely terra incognita. Subsequently both Fallows and Strohm have questioned Dèzes’s assessment of work, Fallows on the basis of the new works that were established as being by Du Fay in the 1980s, and Strohm on the basis of his own extensive work on German music of the 1440s and 1450s, as well as on the work of Tom Ward and other scholars.75 It is also worth noting that this motet shares its transmission in Tr 89 and MilD 1 with Du Fay’s Magnificat tertii toni, with which it has a number of other stylistic traits in common. Given its transmission and style, the piece must date from the later part of Du Fay’s second stay in Savoy (1452–1458) or from shortly after his return to Cambrai. Unlike the later Ave regina caelorum 3, this piece is, like Du Fay’s works of the 1440s, a chant paraphrase setting with the plainsong in the cantus. But if the small antiphons discussed above represent the composer’s stylus humilis in this genre, and Si quaeris miracula (and a good many of the propers of the Mass settings of the 1440s) represents the stylus mediocris, this work represents the stylus gravis, just as such a style is represented by the earlier Ave regina 2.76 The plainsong is elaborated throughout in the cantus and subjected to the kind of expansive but carefully controlled ornamentation that one finds in the Ave regina 2 and the later Ave regina 3. In all, the melodic elaboration appears to be an expansion of some of the procedures used in the chant propers of the 1440s, as one can see in Ex. 10.5. Not surprisingly, the one 71 72 73 74 75 76

See also the very detailed and sensitive analysis in Gülke, Guillaume Du Fay, 273–74. Not in Besseler’s edition of the OO; OO Planchart 1/7. Dèzes, “Das Dufay zugeschriebene ‘Salve regina’.” Besseler, “Von Dufay bis Josquin,” 1–22. Fallows, Dufay, 299; Strohm, The Rise, 438 and n. 198. See Planchart, “Du Fay’s Plainsong Paraphrase Settings.”

413

Example 10.5 Salve regina misericordiae (mm. 1–12)

The New-Style Motets

work that presents the closest parallel to the ornamentation used in this motet is the Magnificat tertii toni, even though in the magnificat the underlying plainsong is not a medieval melody, as is the case of the Salve regina, but a simple recitation tone. In a number of places where Du Fay articulates the phrase structure of the work by leaving out the cantus (e.g., mm. 12–13), the lower voices produce an elaborate cadential pattern that echoes the cadence of the four parts that immediately precedes it. This is a procedure that Du Fay would use to considerable effect in the Ave regina 3 and in the Missa Ave regina caelorum. The very sectional nature of the plainsong, which is unique in this respect among the large Marian antiphons, led him to write a work in six sections, but he uses only two mensurations, and English (notated as in the manuscripts), and creates a certain continuity by a mensural pattern that goes as follows: , , , , , . The contrapuntal textures and the text declamation are particularly clear in this piece, reflecting quite directly the declamation of the plainsong itself. Like many of the plainsong settings of the 1440s, the motet essentially avoids the use of imitation throughout. If the Salve regina represents the most elaborate form of the kinds of plainsong paraphrase, Du Fay’s last surviving motet, Ave regina 3,77 moves in several new directions at once. The piece is an extraordinary hybrid; it includes traits of the old tenor motet, the chant paraphrase settings, and the approach to cantus-firmus composition that Du Fay first adumbrated in the Lamentatio, and then expanded in the Missa L’homme armé. Then there is his decision to add a prayer for himself interpolated in four segments as a trope of the liturgical text. The work was copied into the Cambrai choirbooks by Symon Mellet in the fall of 1464,78 and must have originated shortly before. We do not know what prompted Du Fay to write the work; my own earlier speculation on the causes strikes me today as far less plausible,79 and Du Fay in 1464 was at least six years away from the time when he began to establish the endowment for his own obit,80 but the work has a number of extraordinary traits that strike modern ears as particularly expressive and deliberately affective, and were probably heard as such at the time, so that there must have been an important personal impulse behind the composition. Given the hybrid nature of the piece, it may be useful to examine the strands that may have gone into its shape. We might begin with the 77 78 79

OO Besseler 5, no. 51; OO Planchart 1/6. LAN, 4G 4672, fol. 23v; Houdoy, Histoire, 195; see also Planchart, “Notes,” 56. Planchart, “Notes,” 60–63. 80 Ibid., 64.

415

416

Cantilena, Chant Paraphrase, and New-Style Motets

addition of a set of tropes. Troped Marian antiphons were relatively common in England at this time, both in plainsong and in polyphony, and Du Fay must have known enough English music to be aware of them. In the plainsong repertory they were also known in northern France and the Netherlands, and significantly the double cantatorium of Saint-Pierre de Lille, which is the only plainsong source known thus far that transmits the antiphon Ecce ancilla domini with the opening leap of a fourth found in the cantus firmus of Du Fay’s Mass, transmits a number of them.81 The antiphon most often provided with tropes was the Salve regina, which would also be a more hospitable textual context for Du Fay’s interpolated supplications. The choice of the Ave regina must have been prompted by musical considerations. Most of Du Fay’s most intense and complex works have G or C finals, and unlike the Alma redemptoris, another chant with a C final, the Ave regina has a simple and starkly direct melody, with a number of internal repetitions near the beginning, which were particularly useful to Du Fay in the formal design of the piece. The version of the plainsong he used was surely that found in the now lost antiphoner copied under his supervision at Cambrai in the 1440s and 1450s,82 which might have differed slightly from the versions found in the surviving Cambrai manuscripts or the printed antiphoner of the early sixteenth century.83 The evidence is difficult to evaluate because we do not have that antiphoner, and there is evidence that some of the mid-fifteenth-century changes in the liturgy at Cambrai were not retained in the sixteenth-century printed sources;84 also, as Haggh-Huglo has shown, there were differences of liturgical practice in the cathedral itself between the communal liturgy in choro and the liturgies in the side chapels, differences fueled by the wishes of those who endowed many of the new offices.85 Du Fay uses the plainsong as a cantus firmus in a slightly ornamented form. This is something that he had begun doing in the Lamentatio and expanded considerably in the Missa L’homme armé, but in the Ave regina caelorum 3 the cantus firmus, particularly at the beginning of phrases, is largely unornamented and in relatively long notes. This, combined with what Du Fay does with the text setting, where the tenor sings only the antiphon text, while the other voices sing both the antiphon text and the tropes (and most of the time the delayed entrance of the tenor causes 81 82 83

84

LBM 599, fols. 124r–126r, Ave regina, Salve regina, and Alma redemptoris, all with tropes. Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 157–63. CBM 77, fol. 120v; CBM 131, fol. 95r; Antiphonale. . . Cameracensis, fol. 264v. See also Haggh, “Nonconformity,” 386–91. Cf. Planchart, “The Books,” 205–6. 85 Haggh, “Nonconformity.”

The New-Style Motets

the tropes to be sung simultaneously with the tenor text), recalls the polytextuality of his earlier tenor motets. The motet also has a greater use of imitation, mostly at the unison or the octave, than most of Du Fay’s earlier motets or cantilenas. This might be, oddly enough, a result of his familiarity with Jehan de Ockeghem’s Missa Ecce ancilla, which he clearly got to know before writing this motet, since his own Missa Ecce ancilla – Beata es Maria, copied at Cambrai about six months before this motet, shows Ockeghem’s influence, and Ockeghem’s own Missa Ecce ancilla is probably the one of his Masses that uses the greatest amount of imitation, largely because it paraphrases much of the chant in all the voices.86 In a number of places, particularly the opening duo and the imitation between pairs of voices as Salve, radix sancta,87 the music prefigures procedures that composers of Josquin’s generation would favor. Beyond what imitation would do to move motives from the cantus firmus into the other voices, the motet has moments of straightforward chant paraphrase in voices other than the tenor. This is particularly prominent at the beginning, where an opening duo shifts between cantus and contratenor and then contratenor and bassus, with the cantus and then the contratenor paraphrasing the first two phrases of the plainsong, which happen to be melodically identical. At the same time, the structure of this opening duet, followed by the astonishing change in range, texture, and sonority as the cantus firmus enters and the sound changes from what we call today a C major sonority to a dramatic “C minor chord” with the high E fa in the cantus, is something that most likely Du Fay found in the slightly less dramatic opening duet of the Kyrie of the English Missa Caput, which also was copied into the Cambrai choirbooks about six months before this piece.88 The form of the work is strictly that of English motets of the mid-century (and the form of the movements of the Missa Caput), a section in followed by a section in English with the cantus firmus running only once throughout the motet (the second section begins at Gaude, gloriosa). The section in English is organized, as in virtually all of Du Fay’s late music, in pairs of breves, with an occasional extra breve, almost as a composed ritenuto or a metric “punctuation mark,” at a number of places. Another point is how much of the texture of the piece is for three voices, and not just for three voices but remarkably transparent as well. The relatively dense sonority of the Salve regina, which this motet shares with some of the late plainsong settings among the propers of the Mass of the 86 88

Cf. Fitch, Johannes Ockeghem, 78–90. Planchart, “Notes,” 56–58.

87

OO Planchart 1/6, mm. 45–49.

417

418

Cantilena, Chant Paraphrase, and New-Style Motets

1440s, and with the earlier Si quaeris miracula, is entirely absent here. In this the motet resembles the even more transparent texture of the slightly earlier Missa Ecce ancilla – Beata es. Some passages, like the extraordinary three-voice “cadenza” at the words et iuva ut in mortis hora,89 appear to be a reformulation of the virtuosic endings of some of his earlier motets, and in the passages where the composer inserts his name, particularly the second one at miserere supplicanti Du Fay, which he was to quote in its entirety in the second Agnus Dei of his Missa Ave regina nearly a decade later, there is a much larger concentration of inflected notes, and the second trope that mentions his name is set largely in even breves, something that borders on the fermata settings used for the names of dedicatees in earlier works such as Supremum est mortalibus bonum. Apart from its division into two main sections, the motet consists of a series of clearly delineated “episodes” governed largely by the rhetorical and grammatical structure of the text. Du Fay clearly planned the piece with enormous care. For example, the sharp tonal and textural shift between the initial duet and the entrance of the cantus firmus and the first trope at Miserere tui labentis in the first half of the piece is echoed tonally in the second half with the Miserere supplicanti trope, both sections being the only time we hear the high E fa in the cantus, but the textural change is echoed also in the massive four-voice section that begins at In aeternum ne damnemur / Valde decora, the section that precedes what I have called a “cadenza” at et iuva. Both major sections of the motet end with almost Ockeghem-like drives to the cadence, the first with a burst of dense polyphony at portae caeli, followed by a rising figure at debili that appears to be inspired by the end of the Gloria of Ockeghem’s Missa ecce ancilla, and the second by a long burst of very active four-part polyphony that borders on the ecstatic. In both passages, it is the contratenor in its highest range that provides most of the rhythmic and motivic energy, and the music it has in measures 72–76 is recapitulated, so to speak, in the last melodic gesture of the entire motet. The only source for the piece, a manuscript copied at St. Peter’s in Rome around 1474,90 is problematic. The scribe (or the scribe of his exemplar) did a half-hearted editing of the mensuration signs, making them inconsistent,91 and the tenor, which surely had a B♭ signature throughout, is provided with an intermittent one. Further, the text of Du Fay’s tropes 89 91

OO Planchart 1/6, mm. 192–223. 90 Cf. Reynolds, “The Origins,” 272–81. See Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1976), 44–47.

The New-Style Motets

has been hopelessly garbled, to the point that the text of the ending is today entirely conjectural. Besseler offered some sensible emendations of the text in his edition, but tried to force the music into his view of a “modern” C major with musica ficta that borders on the absurd.92 I offered some further text emendations, and refined them with the help of Leofranc HolfordStrevens.93 In the end this is symptomatic of what we have of Du Fay’s music: it is an imperfect reflection of what he actually wrote, but it remains nonetheless one of the most compelling and powerful works of fifteenthcentury music. 92 93

OO Besseler 5, no. 51, mm. 21–23. Planchart, “Notes”; further refinements in OO Planchart 1/16:12–13.

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11

Music for the Office

All the works discussed in this chapter are chant paraphrase settings, by and large pieces where the cantus, or sometimes the contratenor, is derived from the plainsong with a rhythmic setting and melodic ornamentation that assimilate it to the style of fifteenth-century melodic writing. This was a technique that by 1430 was barely over a half century old. It had been cultivated by the anonymous compilers of a small collection of hymns found in Apt 16b,1 copied at the end of the fourteenth century in the circle of the Avignon popes, but it had been used more extensively by English composers at the turn of the century.2 In turning plainsong into effective fifteenth-century melodic lines, some repertories, such as the hymns, the Kyrie melodies, and the Marian antiphons, which had a clear and, to fifteenth-century ears, more modern-sounding melodic direction than the graduals or the alleluias, for example, presented fewer immediate problems, and it is in these repertories that the technique began to be used extensively in the second and third decades of the fifteenth century.3 Virtually all of Du Fay’s surviving music for the Office uses this procedure, but he also used it extensively in all the music he wrote for the Mass, both Ordinary and Proper, up to the middle of the century. Of his music for the Office the hymns have received the most attention because from early on scholars were aware that the surviving hymns look very much like a systematic cycle for the entire church year. Only more recently have we become aware that this aspect of the hymns is shared by the Kyries, the plainsong-based Glorias (together with the Gloria–Credo pairs), the proses, and what remains of Du Fay’s music for the Proper of the Mass. In fact, it appears that throughout his career Du Fay undertook a series of extended liturgical projects.

The Hymn Cycle The nature of the hymn cycle became apparent earlier because of the circumstances of its transmission; the three main sources each have a 1 2 3

420

See Haydon, “Ave maris stella.” See Bockholdt, “Englische und franko-flämische Kirchenmusik.” The best technical and stylistic discussion of the procedures remains Sparks, Cantus Firmus, 42–82.

The Hymn Cycle

section of hymns where the compilers were producing something approaching a complete polyphonic hymnal, Bo Q15 in the early 1430s, ModB in the late 1430s and the 1440s, and CS 15 in the late 1490s.4 Table 11.1 gives the surviving Du Fay hymns and their sources. The sections of the table are self-explanatory, and the columns largely so. In a number of cases Du Fay composed two alternative versions of a hymn, one in three voices with a texture largely of cantus, contratenor, and tenor, and another notated with cantus and tenor, where the third voice is derived in fauxbourdon. In these cases they are given the same number, but one is provided with the addition of the letter a. In the incipit column all the fauxbourdon settings are indicated by the marking “fb,” and in the cases of dual settings the other setting is indicated by the marking “ct.” The single instance of a hymn for two cantus voices and tenor is indicated by “2 c.” The three columns for the main sources give the folio where the hymn in question begins.5 The column for the other sources registers the hymn’s presence in them, and the melody column gives the melody number in Bruno Stäblein’s edition.6 The hymns in section B of the table require some comment. No. 3a, A solis ortu, for Christmas Lauds, found only in ModB and Ao, is a contrafact of Hostis Herodes impie, and though surely authentic, is not part of the cycle, which was entirely for Vespers. No. 4a, Audi benigne conditor, was added in the 1430s or 1440s into Ca 29, a thirteenth-century liturgical miscellany, on fol. 157v. The setting largely coincides with that in ModB for the first sixteen measures, but is then followed by six measures of an extended Amen.7 No. 23, Proles de caelo for St. Francis, is a later work. It formed part of the extended cycle of Franciscan pieces that made up the content of the book in black notation that Du Fay left to the chapel of St. Stephen at his death, which contained the interrelated Masses for St. Anthony of Padua and St. Francis, as well as a complete set of Vespers for each saint that followed the liturgy of the Franciscan Order rather than 4

5

6 7

On the dating of the hymns in Bo Q15 see Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:19–22; on ModB see Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 51–63, and Haar and Nádas, “The Medici, the Signoria, the Pope”; and on CS 15 see Sherr, Papal Music Manuscripts, 58–131. Since the publication of the facsimile of Bo Q15, Bent, Bologna Q15, the foliations of the manuscript have become easily available. I use the modern Arabic foliation that is the only complete one. MMMA 1. The polyphonic Amen, and the fact that the hymn here was intended to be sung in polyphony throughout, are in accordance with the traditions of the cathedral at Cambrai, if we can judge from the other hymns entered in Ca 29 and those copied in CBM 6 and 11. The Amen probably was added by Du Fay during his sojourn at Cambrai in 1434.

421

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Table 11.1 Du Fay’s hymns A. Authentic settings by Du Fay that belong to the hymn cycle No.

Incipit

Feast

Bo Q15

ModB

CS 15

Other sources

Mel.

Advent

A 314v

1r

4v

MuEm, Tr 92

23.2

Christmas

A 316v

1v

5v

MC, Tr 92

71

Christmas

–

1v

–

–

71

Epiphany

A 317r

3v

9v

Tr 92

53

Lent

–

8v

15v

–

55

5

Conditor alme siderum, fb Christe redemptor omnium, fb Christe redemptor omnium, ct Hostis Herodis impie Audi benigne conditor Aures ad nostras

–

9r

18v

SP B80

714

6

Vexilla regis

Lent Sundays Passion

–

9v

20v

Tr 92, Ca 29, GSB

32

Ad caenam agni, ct Ad caenam agni, fb Jesu nostra redemptio Veni creator spiritus

Easter Easter Ascension

– – A 318r

10 11r 8v

23 – –

Tr 89 – –

3 3 513

Pentecost

A 318v

15v

29v

17

10

O lux beata trinitas

Trinity

A 319r

11v

32v

11

Corpus Christi Dedication

A 320r

10v

34v

A 321r

17v

69v

–

140

BVM BVM All Saints

A 321v A 321v A 322r

– 7v –

– 42v –

MuEm, BU – SP B80

67 67 71

All Saints

A 322v

18v

50v

71

Angels

A 323r

–

–

MC, Tr 92 (2×), Tr 90, Ver 759 –

16

Pange lingua gloriosi Urbs beata Jerusalem Ave maris stella fb Ave maris stella Christe redemptor omnium, fb Christe redemptor omnium, 2 c Tibi Christe splendor, fb Ut queant laxis

Fl 112b, MC, MuEm, SP B80, Tr 92, Tr 93 MC, SP B80, Tr 92 Tr 92

A 323v

12v

37v

Tr 92

151

17

Aurea luce et decore

St. John Baptist SS Peter & Paul

A 324r

16v

39v

SP B80

152

1 2 2a 3 4

7 7a 8 9

12 13 13a 14 14a 15

v

v

22 56

112

The Hymn Cycle

423

Table 11.1 (cont.) No.

Incipit

Feast

Bo Q15

ModB

CS 15

Other sources

Mel.

18

Exsultet caelum laudibus, ct Exsultet caelum laudibus, fb Deus tuorum militum, fb Sanctorum meritis Iste confessor, fb Iesu corona virginum, fb

Apostles

A 324v

20v

53v

Fl 112b, MuEm

114

Apostles

A 324v

20v

55v

114

Martyrs

A 325r

19v

56v

MuEm (2×), SP B 80 Tr 88

Martyrs Confessor Virgins

A 325v A 326r A 327r

19v 20r 20v

58v 62v –

Tr 92 Tr 92 –

70* 146* 115*

18a 19 20 21 22

115

B. Authentic settings by Du Fay that are not part of the hymn cycle No.

Incipit

Feast

Bo Q15

ModB

CS15

Other sources

Mel.

3a

A solis ortu

–

2v

–

Ao

53

4a

Audi benigne conditor Proles de caelo En gratulemur hodie

Christmas Lauds Lent

–

–

–

Ca 29

55

St. Francis St. Anthony

– –

20v 32v

– –

– –

715 752

23 24

C. Arrangements of Du Fay’s hymns most likely by others No.

Incipit

Feast

Bo Q15

ModB

CS15

Other sources

Mel.

6a 7b

Vexilla regis Ad caenam agni, fb

Passion Easter

– –

– –

20v –

32 3

9a

Veni creator spiritus, fb Urbs beata Ierusalem, fb Urbs beata Ierusalem, 4vv Ave maris stella Deus tuorum militum, ct Deus tuorum militum, ct Iste confessor, ct Iesu corona virginum, ct Iesu corona virginum, 4vv

Pentecost

–

–

29v

– Mer 13b, Civ 101, Tr 89 –

Dedication

–

–

68v

–

140

Dedication

–

–

69v

–

140

BVM Martyr

– –

– –

– 56v

Tr 92 –

67 115

Martyr

–

–

–

SP B80

115

Martyr Virgins

– –

– –

62v 66v

– –

146* 115*

Virgins

–

–

67v

–

115*

12a 12b 13a 19a 19b 21a 22a 22b

17

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Music for the Office

Table 11.1 (cont.) D. Hymns with ascriptions to Du Fay that are most likely not authentic No.

Incipit

Feast

Bo Q15

ModB

CS15

Other sources

Mel.

5a

Aures ad nostras

–

–

–

MC

714

25

Festum nunc celebre

Lent Sundays Ascension

–

–

–

Tr 87, MuEm

512

E. Hymn perhaps missing from the cycle Lucis creator optime, Sundays per annum, Melody 501.a a

Du Fay’s version, if it existed, might be behind the version of this hymn in CS 15, fol. 13v, in the fauxbourdon setting.

that of Cambrai or that of the papal chapel. The Vespers for both saints used the Office texts and plainsongs written by the thirteenth-century theologian Julian von Speyer (ca. 1200–1250).8 The last piece in section B, no. 24, En gratulemur hodie, for St. Anthony of Padua, is unique to ModB and has no attribution,9 but it was the standard hymn for St. Anthony in the Franciscan liturgy and the monophonic version is most likely the work of Julian von Speyer as well. In my first study of this most complex of works I did not include it among Du Fay’s works because in it the chant is set at pitch rather than transposed up an octave, which was Du Fay’s usual procedure.10 In the years since then it has become increasingly clear not only that Du Fay set the entire Vespers for both saints using the texts and plainsongs by Julian and that ModB transmits virtually all that survives of those Vespers settings. Further, with the exception of a motet by Quadris, all the fifteenth-century settings of Julian’s texts are by Du Fay,11 and as it turns out we have now a number of other pieces where Du Fay sets the plainsong at pitch, and all of them form part of the Mass for St. Anthony and St. Francis and are concentrated in the pieces connected to St. Anthony; thus this hymn is almost certainly by Du Fay.12 The hymns in section C of the table are pieces that use one or more voices by Du Fay with voices added by other composers. In the case of the Ave maris stella, for example, the rubric in the manuscript implies as much. 8 9

10 11

12

See Planchart, “The Books.” I now think that the scribe of ModB considered the ascription at the top of the folio where the hymn is preceded by Du Fay’s Benedicamus domino 2, which was surely the Benedicamus domino of the Franciscan Vespers, to apply to the Benedicamus domino and to the hymn. Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1976), 34–37. Quadris’s motet is Gaudeat ecclesia, copied anonymously in Tr 88, fols. 15v–17r. Quadris is identified as the composer in Gaffori, Tractatus practicabilium proportionum; see Miller, “Early Gaffuriana,” 376. Further details in OO Planchart 7/24.

The Hymn Cycle

Du Fay wrote a fauxbourdon setting and provided an alternate contratenor, both of which are in Bo Q15. The scribes of ModB and CS 15 used only the second of these versions, and in Tr 90 (the version in section C of the table) we meet a contratenor and a tenor labeled “tenor super ave maris stella // dufay sine faulx bourdon,” but the cantus itself is nowhere in the manuscript. Most of the versions in section C, though, are the arrangements using materials from Du Fay’s hymns used in the extended hybrid hymnal of CS 15, where every stanza set in polyphony often receives a different setting.13 All these arrangements betray their late fifteenth-century origins in details of the rhythm or the ornamentation. The ones in strict fauxbourdon sound curiously wooden and mechanical; clearly pure fauxbourdon was no longer something that composers found particularly interesting in the 1490s. By contrast, the two four-voice arrangements, particularly that of Urbs beata Jerusalem, are marvelous works, with the arranger underpinning Du Fay’s melody with a dense web of very modern counterpoint. The hymns in section D of the table are clearly misattributions; the pieces not only show no traces of Du Fay’s style, they are clearly the work of composers who did not have anything close to his skill as a contrapuntist. One piece included by Besseler in his edition of the Opera Omnia, albeit as an opus dubium, a setting of Pange lingua,14 is a ghost. The attribution to Du Fay is a typographical error in the catalogue of Tr 92 in DTÖ 14,15 which was compounded by the publication of the work in DTÖ 53.16 Both Gerber and Besseler apparently accepted the ascription and neither appears to have looked at the manuscript itself;17 the anonymous hymn, an unicum, appears on fol. 236v; Du Fay’s setting, correctly ascribed, appears on fols. 238v–239r. Two points need to be stressed before we continue the discussion of the hymns. The first is that we have something that looks very much like a hymn cycle, covering all of the important feasts of the year. The other is that Du Fay continued writing hymns throughout his life. There is evidence from the accounts of the fabric at Cambrai that he set the hymn O quam glorifica in 1463, when it was copied by Symon Mellet.18 This was a particularly important hymn in the Cambrai liturgical year, since it was the 13

14 17 18

None of the Du Fay settings used in CS have an ascription, and most of the hymns are entirely anonymous. The few ascriptions are to Marbriano de Orto and Josquin, who most likely were the compilers and editors. In the case of Du Fay’s Ave maris stella in CS 15, the first polyphonic setting (stanza 2) is that of Du Fay; the second setting (stanza 4) is ascribed to Josquin. OO Besseler 5, no. 56. 15 DTÖ 14–15:80. 16 DTÖ 59:29. Sämtliche Hymnen, ed. Gerber, Anhang. No. 2; OO Besseler 5, no. 56. LAN 4G 1461, fol. 24v: “Item escript et notte une hymne O quam glorifica nouvellement fait par maistre G du Fay contenant 2 foeilles.”

425

426

Music for the Office

hymn for the feast of the Assumption, which was essentially the cathedral’s patronal feast. Two earlier anonymous settings of this hymn appear in CBM 6 (fols. 30v–31r). Rudolf Bockholdt suggested that one of these settings may be by Du Fay, together with the hymn Iam ter quaternis, used at Cambrai on Passion Sunday, found in CBM 6 and CBM 28.19 This is not entirely impossible; both works are handsome pieces, and CBM 6 has at least one item that Du Fay composed during his visit to that city in 1435, but it is hard to think what would have prompted him to compose a Lenten hymn, Iam ter quaternis, in October, when he was in Cambrai, and the same applies to the writing of O quam glorifica. The other point concerns the nature of the cycle and its eventual destination. It is more than likely that Du Fay regarded it as a liturgical cycle, that is, he set out to write hymns per circulum anni. To be sure, he provided some duplications, pieces that survive in three-voice settings and in fauxbourdon settings, and for hymn texts that shared the same melody he practiced the kind of economy that one finds in collections such as Byrd’s Gradualia,20 and within his own work in the cycle of propers for the Order of the Golden Fleece.21 James Haar and John Nádas, noting some of these duplications, remark that Du Fay’s hymn cycle “was not a tightly sealed package as it came from the pen of the composer.”22 This is indeed true, but liturgical cycles virtually never are: the same can be said of Leonin’s Magnus liber organi, Isaac’s Choralis Constantinus, Byrd’s Gradualia, or Bach’s cantata cycles for Leipzig, which does not mean that these collections were not regarded as cycles by their creators and their users. The destination of the cycle has been a matter of some contention. Given that much of the cycle survives in Bo Q15, a manuscript that was finished in its present-day form by ca. 1435, scholars assumed that the hymns were written in Rome and were for the papal chapel.23 Tom Ward, who has made the most detailed study of the traditions of the polyphonic hymn in the fifteenth century, observed that most of the melodies used by Du Fay were part of those belonging to what he calls “the Italian tradition,” which were employed by Roman curia, and are entered into a plainsong hymnal copied in Rome ca. 1458, but the last three pieces in Table 11.1 use melodies that were not part of the plainsong tradition of the papal chapel 19 21

22 23

Bockholdt, “Die Hymnen.” 20 Cf. Jackman, “Liturgical Aspects.” Cf. Feininger, Auctorum Anonymorum, vi–vii; Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Second Style,” 327–37. Haar and Nádas, “The Medici, the Signoria, the Pope,” 85. Besseler, “Dufay in Rom,” 9–11; Sämtliche Hymnen, ed. Gerber, 2–3.

The Hymn Cycle

and other Italian churches, and are absent from the earliest surviving plainsong hymnal copied Roman manuscript.24 Accordingly, he suggested that the cycle was composed for the court of Savoy.25 Scholars, including myself, interpreted the absence of a number of hymns from Bo Q15 by assuming that Du Fay had not finished the hymn cycle by the time he left Rome in August 1434.26 The situation, however, is more complicated. Ward’s position is both liturgically and historically sound, and yet I think that in this instance he draws the wrong conclusion; three of the hymns do indeed use melodies not part of the papal tradition, which means Du Fay might have written them after he left Rome in 1433, but indeed not in Savoy, because the melodies for those hymns in the Savoyard sources are different as well: for Sanctorum meritis the Roman tradition uses Stäblein’s melody 159, Du Fay uses melody 70, and the Savoy hymnals use melody 108; for Iste confessor the Roman tradition uses Stäblein’s melody 160, which is the same melody used in Savoy, but Du Fay uses melody 146, and for Iesu corona virginum the Roman tradition uses melody 750, Du Fay uses melody 115, and the Savoy hymnals use melody 525.27 Thus the plainsongs used in those hymns do not point to any given place where Du Fay worked. Then there is the matter that the only record of any chant books produced for the papal chapel during the first half of the fifteenth century is for a hymnal: on 7 September 1428, Jehan Pigouche, the custos iocalium of the chapel, was paid 12 florins for cleaning the vestments of the chapel and pro factura unius libri ymnorum ad usum dicte capelle.28 We cannot tell if the three odd melodies were in that hymnal. But the three hymns with the odd melodies are all in the redaction in Bo Q15, so they belong to what was thought to be the “early layer” of the cycle. In other words, it is not impossible that Du Fay wrote those pieces before leaving Rome in 1433, although it is possible that he wrote them on his way to Savoy, but not yet at Savoy (where he would have access to the melodies used there). 24

25 26 27

28

CS 6, fols. 197r–230v. Ward, “The Polyphonic Office Hymn and the Liturgy,” 181–86. It should be noted here, however, that CS 6 was not copied for the papal chapel but for cardinal Pietro Barbo (later Pope Paul II), for his own church in Rome, and probably did not enter the Cappella Sistina collection until after the sack of Rome in 1527 (my thanks to Jeffrey Dean for this information). Ward, “The Polyphonic Office Hymn and the Liturgy,” 181–86. Thus Planchart, “Music for the Papal Chapel,” 116–17. Sources for the Savoy tradition are the Lausanne hymnal included in Stäblein, ed., Hymnen, and all the sources inventoried in Lagnier, ed., Corpus musicae hymnorum Augustanum that transmit the three hymns in question. ASV, I&E 387, fol. 75v.

427

428

Music for the Office

The first step in dealing with this conundrum is to realize that none of the three major sources for the Du Fay hymns is a copy of “Du Fay’s hymn cycle”; rather they are hymn collections that answered to the tastes and needs of the scribes who copied them. Margaret Bent has made a very compelling case for the scribe of Bo Q15 being an active and intrusive editor,29 and Michael Anderson has suggested that the scribe of Bo Q15 shows an apparent prejudice against the temporale in his hymn collection, which explains better than any of the earlier hypotheses the gap in the hymns in that manuscript.30 Similarly, James Haar and John Nádas have presented evidence that the scribe of ModB, who they believe was Benoit Sirede, copied the hymn collection in ModB to serve his own ends, perhaps the polyphonic Vespers at Santa Maria del Fiore in the late 1430s,31 although Michael Phelps makes an equally strong case for the possibility that Sirede copied ModB if not for the papal chapel in Florence, at the very least as a reflection of that repertory.32 Given the further history of the manuscript, it would appear that Sirede actually copied ModB for himself. Something similar, but with a significant difference, is the case of the hymn collection in CS 15. This is once again not a collection intended to transmit Du Fay’s hymn cycle, but very much a collection destined for the use of the papal chapel and designed also as a repository of the traditions of that chapel. In CS 15 the hymns are transmitted in complex hybrid settings, largely in an alternation of plainsong and polyphony, but the stanzas set in polyphony, rather than consisting of a repetition of the same music, are each a fresh setting. Most of the time, but not always, the first polyphonic stanza is set to Du Fay’s music (although never with an ascription), followed in the other polyphonic stanzas either by fresh new settings or by arrangement where one or more of the voices of Du Fay’s setting are provided with new counterpoints. The few attributions in the entire collection name either Marbriano de Orto or Josquin des Prez, who were most likely the compilers and editors of the collection. The collection includes Du Fay’s hymn settings that use melodies from outside the Italian tradition together with settings of the same hymns that use the melodies of the Italian tradition, but it is surely wrong to argue that the inclusion of the Du Fay settings was due to a desire to collect all of Du Fay’s settings of the hymns, since they are copied anonymously; rather this is a reflection of the fact that the editors and compilers of CS 15 regarded these pieces as part of 29 31

32

Bent, “A Contemporary Perception.” 30 Anderson, “The Organization,” 346–47. Haar and Nádas, “The Medici, the Signoria, the Pope,” 36–40 and 66–70; on Sirede see also Starr, “The ‘Ferrara Connection’.” Phelps, “A Repertory in Exile,” 50–89.

The Hymn Cycle

the traditions and repertory of the papal chapel. The setting of Iesu corona virginum, one of the hymns with a melody outside the Italian tradition, is a case in point. As with other hymns with five stanzas, rather than having stanzas 1, 3, 5 in plainsong and stanzas 2 and 4 in polyphony, the compilers use polyphony for the last stanza as well. The setting of stanza 2 uses Du Fay’s cantus, but a freshly composed tenor and contratenor in a modern style. Stanza 4 is Du Fay’s fauxbourdon setting (although the rubric for fauxbourdon is missing, so the setting looks like a duet), and stanza 5 uses Du Fay’s cantus and tenor, with a new contratenor and a bassus, in very active polyphony that produces a texture of extraordinary richness. One can hardly imagine the editors of CS 15 going to all that trouble if the hymn was never to be used or was not considered part of the repertory of the papal chapel.33 They clearly regarded these pieces as an integral part of the papal chapel’s hymn book. Similarly, attempts to tease the significance of the inclusion or exclusion of a piece or a version in CS 15 by a comparison with the far less systematic collection in SP B80 are ultimately misguided. As Christopher Reynolds has shown, SP B80 was copied for the basilica of San Pietro in Vaticano,34 and the liturgy, the traditions, and the personnel of the basilica’s musical establishment were different from those of the papal chapel, even though there was some overlap. Indeed, even using the Roman plainsong hymnal from ca. 1458, CS 6, as an absolute guide poses problems. The last hymn in that manuscript, Urbs beata Ierusalem, agrees textually with the Du Fay hymn as it is copied in Bo Q15, ModB, and in the arrangement (similar to that of Iesu corona virginum) of CS 15,35 but it does not use Stäblein’s melody no. 140, used by Du Fay and listed by Ward as part of the Italian tradition,36 but rather melody no. 56, for which the only surviving polyphonic setting appears in SP B80.37 In this respect, then, CS 6 reflects a Roman tradition that is different from that of the papal chapel itself. The evidence, as it survives, both in terms of the transmission of the hymns and their structure as a cycle, is that Du Fay regarded the basic corpus as a cycle for the entire year, and that it was written for the papal chapel, although it was probably partly written in Rome and partly 33 34 35

36 37

Cf. OO Planchart 10/22, versions 2–3. Reynolds, Papal Patronage, 343; Ward, The Polyphonic Office Hymn, no. 590. The Scribe of ModB added a “penultimate” stanza to the text, although he did not set it under the music, but wrote it as text at the end of the cantus part. Cf. OO Planchart 7/11. Ward, The Polyphonic Office Hymn, 16. See Reynolds, Papal Patronage, 84, who notes that this was the melody found in the basilica’s chant books.

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elsewhere, and that Du Fay did not regard it, however, as a closed cycle, providing a number of the hymns with alternative versions, particularly in terms of the use of fauxbourdon and a contratenor. At the same time, because the copies of Du Fay’s hymns in Bo Q15 and in ModB were compiled by the scribes of those sources for their own ends, even though both scribes apparently sought eagerly all the Du Fay music available to them, we cannot safely treat the two compilations as representing chronological stages in the composition of the cycle. Du Fay’s hymns, when one considers the versions prior to the hybrid copy in CS 15, present a fairly consistent picture. They share primarily two textures, cantus, contratenor, tenor, and cantus, fauxbourdon, tenor, which Du Fay clearly viewed as very closely related. With the redating of the genesis of the communion of the Missa Sancti Iacobi to sometime after 1429,38 it would appear that the beginnings of fauxbourdon in Du Fay’s canon are intimately connected with the explosion of chant paraphrase settings exemplified by the hymns and the Kyrie cycle, which must be roughly contemporary with the hymns and bears some of the same traits in terms of the melodies it uses. The one exception to the two textures mentioned earlier is No. 14a in Table 11.1, Christe redemptor omnium – Conserva tuos famulos for All Saints, which is set to two cantus voices and tenor.39 This has a parallel in the Kyrie cycle, where two of the Kyries survive in parallel settings, one of which is for two cantus voices and tenor.40 In pieces such as the hymns, where a relatively short stanza will be repeated between two and four times, Du Fay seems to have aimed for both the utmost clarity in the tonal direction and at the same time a careful use of various approaches to the tonal goals. In Conditor alme siderum,41 a fauxbourdon that is probably the simplest setting of the cycle, and one where the plainsong had a long tradition of performance in an alternation of longs and shorts (which is reflected in the notation in all sources), Du Fay set the melody with a minimum of ornamentation and in a pattern of pairs of breves that, in his music, always calls for a relatively fast tempo (Ex. 11.1). Within the very simple style that he is using the cadences at the end of lines 1 and 3 38 39 40

41

See p. 92 and also the discussion of the Mass that follows here. Its counterpart, No. 14, is in fauxbourdon. Kyrie Vat. II (Mel. 48), OO Besseler 4, no. 17; OO Planchart 5/11, and Kyrie Vat 11 (Mel. 16), OO Besseler 4, no. 12; OO Planchart 5/16. Kovarik, “The Performance,” 231–32, proposes that they might be earlier settings that preceded Du Fay’s decision to organize his Kyries as a cycle. This is possible, although the presence of a similar texture in Christe redemptor omnium – Conserva tuos famulos and in some of the proses weakens that argument. OO Besseler 5, no. 11; OO Planchart, 7/1.

The Hymn Cycle Example 11.1 Conditor alme siderum (stanzas 1–2)

are slightly more elaborate and carry a good deal of forward rhythmic energy, and the tenor holds the cadential pitch for two beats. The cadence at the end of line 2 is simple to the point of abruptness and all voices break on the second beat. The result is that the stanza is clearly heard as two halves. The tonal goals are those of the plainsong, G, E, C, E, making for a very clear tonal structure, and in the last phrase Du Fay introduces a B fa in the tenor that provides a sudden flash of color and also has the effect of making the tenor of the last phrase forcefully outline a tritone, something that harks back to his writing in pieces far removed from the simplicity of this hymn, such as Resvelliés vous. Du Fay’s main concern in the hymns appears to be structural clarity; he sets the poetry line by line, with strong cadences at the end of each line, but

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he often makes sure that the approaches to each cadence will show a good deal of variety. The main interest in the music is not so much the hymn melody as the total contrapuntal texture that drives the music forward. This is the case even in the fauxbourdon settings, which are essentially twopart counterpoint. In the settings with a contratenor it is the contratenor that often sparks the drive to each cadence and also often pushes the music forward past the cadence, frequently with a pattern of a dotted semibreve, a minim, and a semibreve. The formal strategies Du Fay uses for the hymns are as varied as the hymns themselves: in O lux beata trinitas the first and third phrases are set to very simple counterpoint with some ornamentation near the end of the phrase (more pronounced in the third phrase), but the second and the fourth phrases are set in a considerably more elaborate manner, with the contratenor and tenor alternating between semibreves and minims and offset from each other by a minim (a favorite device that Du Fay employs extensively in his songs), ending in what amounts to a small cadenza for all three voices. In Pange lingua, one of the most extended hymns with a stanza of six lines, he sets the first two quite simply, the third with considerably more activity, the fourth and fifth with a decreasing amount of rhythmic activity, reserving for the last the most elaborate counterpoint in the piece. By contrast, in Urbs beata Ierusalem he is content to set all lines with a minimum of ornamentation in the cantus and approximately in the same contrapuntal density, letting the extraordinary elegance of the plainsong itself come through. Half of the hymns in the cycle show small differences from what could be called the norm, that is, pieces for cantus, contratenor or fauxbordon, and tenor, and where the odd-numbered stanzas and the Amen (if present) are in plainsong and the even-numbered stanzas are in polyphony. Some of these differences might be a matter of adaptation to other uses; others might be editorial changes by the scribes or be original with Du Fay, although the line dividing these last two can be very blurred, given that the sources closest to the composer are also the work of particularly idiosyncratic editors. Two of the hymns were eventually copied into a liturgical miscellany in Cambrai, Ca 29, that included a monophonic hymnal: Audi benigne conditor and Vexilla regis prodeunt.42 The first was transposed down a fourth and provided with an extended polyphonic Amen; the second also has a polyphonic Amen, signed with , and in this case the Amen appears also in ModB and CS 15, and not just in Ca 29. In fact, since ModB has also a 42

Ca 29, fols. 157v and 258v.

The Hymn Cycle

plainsong Amen, one of the two becomes redundant in that copy. This is probably a reflection of how the pieces were sung at Cambrai. The polyphonic hymns, whether by Du Fay or others, copied in Ca 6, 28, and 2943 are copied in the same manner, with stanza 1 under the music and the remaining stanzas as text, usually below the last of the voices copied. This is how plainsong hymns were copied, except that the polyphonic settings at Cambrai do not include the chant. Thus it appears that the hymns were sung in polyphony throughout at Cambrai, and for this reason a polyphonic Amen was needed. The added Amens in the Cambrai copies are almost certainly by Du Fay, and the notation (not just the mensuration sign) of the one for Vexilla regis prodeunt calls for a faster tempo in comparison to that of the hymn. This Amen found its way into the copies in ModB and CS 15, which makes me think that that version probably postdates Du Fay’s visit to Cambrai in 1435, which is the most likely time when a few of his hymns were incorporated into the cathedral books. Two other hymns, O lux beata trinitas and Ave maris stella, set the oddnumbered verses, at least in the copy in Bo Q15. The case of O lux beata trinitas appears to be relatively simple: the piece has only three stanzas, so perhaps Du Fay thought that having polyphony only for a single stanza would be a waste of effort. In the case of Ave maris stella both ModB and what we can infer from CS 15 provide a version with the even verses set to polyphony, as was Du Fay’s usual procedure.44 Given how interventionist the scribe of Bo Q15 could be, it is impossible to judge if the version in this manuscript represents Du Fay’s choice of text setting. The Easter hymn, Ad caenam agni providi, is one of those left out of Bo Q15, and its copy in ModB is in an unusual format: it has no plainsong, and a version with contratenor on fol. 7v sets verses 1, 3, 5, 7, while a version in fauxbourdon sets verses 2, 4, 6 on fol. 8r. In CS 15 the hymn has eight stanzas in strict alternation of plainsong and polyphony, with the even stanzas in polyphony and with Du Fay’s setting as stanza 2. This accords with Du Fay’s usual practice, which appears to be that which survived in the papal chapel in the late fifteenth century. It might be that since this is the hymn for the most important day of the liturgical year, a complete polyphonic setting was regarded as fitting.45 It is doubtful that this 43 44

45

See Ward, The Polyphonic Office Hymn, 42. In CS 15 verses 1, 3, and 5 are in plainsong, and verses 2, 4, 6, and 7 are in polyphony. Suspending the strict alternation to have a polyphonic doxology was the rule for the editor of CS 15. Stanza 4 of Ave maris stella is one of the few hymn settings in the manuscript with an attribution, in this case to Josquin des Prez. Haar and Nádas, “The Medici, the Signoria, the Pope,” 66–67.

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arrangement went back to Du Fay, although this could be, like the polyphonic Amen of Vexilla regis prodeunt, another symptom that the scribe of ModB was familiar with the traditions of the cathedral of Cambrai, even though Du Fay’s hymns were not written for that institution. The hymn for all saints, Christe redemptor omnium – Conserva tuos famulos, survives in a version in fauxbourdon and another with two cantus voices and tenor. Both versions appear in Bo Q15, but ModB has only the second. This texture was used by Du Fay very early on for a number of the isorhythmic and cantilena motets, and two of the Kyries exist in versions for two cantus voices and tenor. Still, the texture appears to have caused Du Fay some trouble in this piece. Cantus 1 is uncharacteristic, with occasional dissonances that hark back to the music of the 1420s (m. 7) and a sharp shift in range that sounds like nothing else in the hymns (m. 9). Du Fay did not try this texture again in any of the hymns.46 In contrast the fauxbourdon setting is a simple but elegant setting. Aures ad nostras deitatis preces, for the Sundays in Lent, is the only hymn of the cycle in duple meter. It is absent from Bo Q15, like most of the temporale hymns,47 but all its sources give consistently as its mensuration, and the rhythmic density of the piece is consistent with Du Fay’s fast duple meter (which by the 1440s he would start notating with English instead). Perhaps on account of the penitential nature of the hymn Du Fay uses very little ornamentation, and this in turn led him to the duple-meter setting. This might sound fanciful, but it is worth noting that the most penitential of his extended chant paraphrase settings, the Missa de Sancta Cruce from the Proper cycles for the Order of the Golden Fleece, is almost entirely in duple meter and in this it contrasts sharply with the other Masses of that cycle. It is also unusual in its lack of melodic ornamentation.48 Four other hymns have odd traits that might be a matter of their transmission and the interest of the scribes or might stem from Du Fay’s original setting. Pange lingua is missing stanza 4 (the cantus has verses 2 and 6) in the copy in Bo Q15, and the scribe entered a verte folium rubric at the end of the tenor and contratenor; on the following page is an anonymous setting with verses 4 and 6 in the cantus. This could be a correction of an oversight or, as Michael Anderson suggests, an attempt by the scribe

46

47

This version of the hymn, nonetheless, was extremely popular; it survives in eight sources, and in one of them (Tr 90, fol. 1r) it has instead the Christmas text for the melody, Christe redemptor omnium – Ex patre patri nato. Cf. Anderson, “The Organization,” 346–47. 48 Cf. OO Planchart 4/4.

The Hymn Cycle

to create a linkage between the two hymns,49 but probably is something not connected with Du Fay’s conception of the piece. The transmission of Urbs beata Jerusalem presents some peculiarities. In Bo Q15 it has five stanzas, without the stanza In hoc templo trinitatis found in ModB. Du Fay, following his usual practice, set stanzas 2 and 4, and left the others in plainsong. This might be how the hymn was available to the scribe of ModB, but apparently he also had access to In hoc templo. He thus set it under the plainsong, but did not underlay Gloria et honor, now stanza 6, under the polyphony, but copied it as text after the cantus. As it appears, the five-stanza form without In hoc templo was surely the way the hymn was sung in the papal chapel. That stanza is not in the hymn as copied in the Roman plainsong hymnal, CS 6 (fols. 229v–230r),50 and is not in the hybrid setting of CS 15. In fact, the shape of the setting in CS 15 is typical of what the editors of the collection do with five-stanza hymns, which is to leave stanzas 1 and 3 in plainsong, but set the doxology in polyphony with an increase in the number of voices, and this is what happens with Urbs beata Ierusalem. The setting of stanza 2, Nova veniens, uses Du Fay’s cantus for a simple fauxbourdon with a new tenor; the setting of stanza 4, Tunsionibus pressuris, is Du Fay’s setting, and that of Gloria et honor has the tenor and cantus of Du Fay’s setting with two new voices that contribute the kinds of dense rhythmic and motivic figuration one finds in the music of Josquin or De Orto, who most likely were the editors of CS 15. This is an extraordinary setting and one of the jewels of the hymn cycle in CS 15. Aurea luce et decore roseo for St. Peter presents a different case. This setting is unusual in a number of ways. First of all is the mensuration, in all the parts and in all the sources, and with a rhythmic organization that Du Fay uses only in music where the beat is on the perfect breve, so that the tempo for the semibreve is quite fast. Then there is the text setting: the oldest form of the hymn has six stanzas: 1. Aurea luce, 2. Ianitor caeli, 3. Iam bone pastor, 4. Doctor egregie, 5. Olivae binae, and 6. Sit trinitatis;51 none of the sources for Du Fay’s hymn includes stanza 5. The setting in the three main sources for Du Fay’s hymn is as follows:

49 50

51

Anderson, “The Organization,” 341–42. This remains the form of the hymn in the modern liturgy; cf. Antiphonale monasticum, 694–95, which retains the medieval text rather than using the revised (recte: vandalized) version of the 1632 edition of the breviary. AH 51:126–27.

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Music for the Office

1. Aurea luce 2. Ianitor caeli 3. Jam bone pastor 4. Sit trinitati

Bo Q15

ModB

CS 15

polyphony chant polyphony polyphony

polyphony chant – 3. Sit trinitati: polyphony

polyphony chant – 3. Sit trinitati: polyphony a 4 4. Doctor egregie: polyphony

This is one of two of Du Fay’s hymns where the sources unanimously agree that it is the odd rather than the even verses that are set in polyphony. But even given this fact, the setting in Bo Q15 is anomalous in that it has three stanzas in polyphony and only one in chant, which make an alternatim performance impossible. This is not a problem in ModB, which omits Iam bone pastor. The structure of ModB is replicated in CS 15, which the adds Doctor egregie in polyphony and seemingly out of place. The context of Du Fay’s other hymns and the rubrics of the Roman Breviary, as well as what we now know about the habits of the scribe of Bo Q15, provide an explanation for this situation. First of all, the only other hymn where all the early sources indicate that Du Fay set the odd verses is O lux beata trinitas, which is a hymn with only three stanzas. Second, Aurea lux et decore roseo, as copied in ModB and, for all intents and purposes in CS 15, is also a three-stanza hymn, and this three-stanza form was the way the hymn was sung for St. Peter in Rome, as shown in the plainsong hymnal, CS 6 (fols. 218v–219r). Considering the way that the piece is copied in CS 15, no one would think of singing Doctor egregie after Sit trinitati: one does not add postscripts to a doxology. But when this hymn is sung on 30 June, the Commemoration of St. Paul, as well as on 25 January, the Conversion of St. Paul, the rubrics of the breviary assign Doctor egregie and Sit trinitati to 25 January, and Iam pastor bone, Doctor egregie, and Sit trinitati to 30 June in churches dedicated to St. Paul.52

52

The most convenient access to the rubrics today is in the Antiphonale monasticum, 790: Vespers of the Conversion of St. Paul, with hymn Doctor egregie – Sit trinitatis; 932: Vespers of St. Peter, with hymn Aurea luce et decore roseo, as in CS 15 but with an extra stanza, O roma nobilis, from a different hymn; 940: Vespers of St. Paul, “ubi veri fit officium S. Pauli,” referring to the hymn Doctor egregie, Sit trinitati, on p. “936,” this last number a typo for 932. On p. 936 what we find is the hymn for Lauds of St. Peter, consisting of Iam bone pastor, Doctor egregie, and Sit trinitatis.

The Hymn Cycle

The version in ModB and in CS 15, up to Sit trinitati, is in fact the form of the hymn as it was sung in the papal chapel in the fifteenth century. The papal chapel, except when singing in a church such as the basilica of St. Paul outside the Walls on 30 June (an unlikely occurrence), would simply have replaced Doctor egregie (which was copied with Du Fay’s setting) for Aurea luce when singing Vespers on 25 January. Thus, it would appear that, if Du Fay wrote the hymns for the papal chapel and for St. Peter, he originally used only three stanzas. The extra stanzas in Bo Q15 and in CS 15, though forming part of the original hymn, were no longer sung for Vespers of St. Peter in the fifteenth century, but they were used for Lauds of St. Peter and for the Conversion of St. Paul, the last of which would have been a feast when the papal chapel would have sung polyphony in the late fifteenth century. Thus, the scribe of Bo Q15 most likely added Iam bone pastor to Du Fay’s setting for reasons of his own, the most likely reason being that the stanza mentioned Peter’s name and his own bishop and patron was Pietro Emiliani, while the editors of CS 15 added Doctor egregie (with Du Fay’s music) as a replacement for Aurea luce to allow the hymn to be sung for the Conversion of St. Paul. The last of the hymns with exceptional features is Iesu corona virginum, one of the three hymns with a melody from outside the Italian tradition. The oldest versions of the hymn have no doxology;53 the version of the hymn in Bo Q15 has Deo patri sit gloria, while ModB and CS 15 have Laus honor virtus gloria for the doxology. Both of these are essentially “wandering stanzas” that were associated with a number of hymns in the Middle Ages, although the second survived with this hymn into the modern liturgy.54 As is the case with other hymns with five stanzas, the compilers of CS 15 were loath to have a doxology in plainsong, and thus they broke the strict alternatim pattern with this piece, just as they did with Urbs beata Ierusalem. For stanza 2 they used Du Fay’s cantus with a new tenor and contratenor, and for stanza 4 Du Fay’s fauxbourdon setting, although there is no rubric for fauxbourdon in the manuscript. This could be an oversight or an editorial decision to provide as much contrast as possible between the fourth and fifth stanza. For the fifth stanza they took Du Fay’s cantus and tenor and wrote two contratenors to produce a four-part texture in the most modern manner. The setting is not as motivically dense as the fourvoice version of Urbs beata Jerusalem: rather than direct imitation we have here a much looser “directional” imitation, for example between the two 53

Cf. AH 50:20–21.

54

Cf. Antiphonale monasticum, 677.

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Music for the Office Example 11.2 Jesu Corona virginum (mm. 32–50 of CS 15 version)

added voices at measure 4155 and an interesting contrapuntal jeu d’esprit, as when the added voices accompany the start of the second line of the stanza as a strong cadence on A after essentially eliding the end of the first line (mm. 37–38), as seen in Example 11.2. Finally there is a surprising signed B fa in the second contratenor that results essentially in a full B-flat triad in root position, three measures before the end of a hymn with an E final. It is hard not to hear this, in the very last hymn of the cycle, as a sly 55

All references are to the edition in OO Planchart 7/22.

The Magnificats

reference to the B in the tenor of Conditor alme siderum, another hymn with an E final and the first hymn in Du Fay’s cycle, even though this is the work of the editors of CS 15. The final question that the doxology of Iesu corona virginum in CS 15 raises is why, if this hymn was not part of the hymn tradition of the papal chapel, did the editors of CS 15 go to the effort of composing the doxology? It cannot be an act of piety to the memory of Du Fay, whose name is absent from the entire manuscript, but rather the desire to refurbish and modernize the hymn collection that the singers of the papal chapel considered their own at the end of the fifteenth century.

The Magnificats If the hymns, despite their relatively complicated transmission, can be seen as forming something of a coherent cycle, the same cannot be said for Du Fay’s Magnificat settings. As with the hymns, he apparently continued to set the Magnificat throughout his career; the earliest magnificat acknowledged to be his work was entered into Bo Q15 in the early 1430s,56 and the accounts of the fabric at Cambrai record the copying of a Magnificat septimi toni by Du Fay in 1462–1463,57 but the four undoubtedly authentic Magnificats show a very scattered transmission and some drastic revisions by the scribes who copied them. Apart from the piece in Bo Q15, the other Magnificats appear largely in manuscripts from the 1440s and the 1460s, so that it is probable that the bulk of them were composed after Du Fay left the papal chapel. Still, three of the four magnificats set all twelve verses of the canticle in polyphony, which was the practice in the papal chapel.58 Given Du Fay’s systematic approach to such repertories as the hymns, the Kyries, the plainsong-based Glorias, the proses, and as has become clear in recent years, the Propers of the Mass, it is hard not to assume that we are probably missing a good number of settings by him, and that by the mid-1440s he had probably provided settings for all eight tones, most likely in seven separate settings since very often the third and fourth tones were 56

57

58

Magnificat sexti toni, Bo Q15, fols. A 199v–201r. A possibly earlier Magnificat primi toni has a double ascription to him and Binchois in ModB, but is ascribed to Binchois in its earliest source, BU 2216, and is surely his. LAN, 4G 4670, fol. 27v: “Item payet a Sire Simon Mellet pour avoir escript et noste ung magnificat du 7 ton qui a fait maistre Guille du Fay contenant 4 foeilles.” Planchart, “Problems of Authenticity,” 133–36.

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Table 11.2 Du Fay’s Magnificats Title

Earliest source

Primi toni Sexti toni

BU (Binchois) Bo Q15 (Du Fay) Octavi toni ModB (Du Fay) Quinti toni ModB (Du Fay) Tertii et quarti toni Tr 89

Other sources

Remarks

ModB (Du Fay, Binchois); Fl 112b; SP B80 ModB (Du Fay); Tr 92 (Binchois, erased); MuEm (Dunstaple); Fl 112b; SP B80 Tr 92; Bux; Fl 112b; SP B80 SP B80 MC 871 (Du Fay); MilD 1; CS 15; SP B80

Surely Binchois Surely Du Fay Early 1430s Late 1430–1440s Late 1430s–1440s Late; after 1458?

served by a single setting.59 The Magnificats with ascriptions to Du Fay in any of their sources are listed in Table 11.2. As one can see from the table, both the transmission and the ascriptions of the works present an almost incoherent pattern. Still, the pieces show a few common traits that may serve as the beginning of an investigation of Du Fay’s approach to the canticle. Three of the four authentic settings set all twelve verses to polyphony, and they do so in a rigidly formulaic manner: Verse

Octavi toni

Sexti toni

Tertii toni

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

A 3 fb B2 C 3 ct D 3 fb B2 C 3 ct D 3 fb B2 C 3 ct D 3 fb B2 C 3 ct

A3 B 3 cc C3 D 3 cc E3 B 3 cc C3 D 3 cc E3 B 3 cc C3 D3

A3 B2 C4 D2 E3 B2 C4 D2 E3 B2 C4 D2

All three make use of what can be called strophic alternation. The setting of Anima mea dominum (v. 1) is always unique, and then we encounter three or four strains that succeed each other through several cycles in the setting of the remaining verses. Du Fay retains this procedure even when, in the Magnificat tertii toni, it leads to what to modern ears is a curiously 59

This is the case with the rubrics for his Magnificat tertii toni in Tr 89, fols. 165r–166r, and SP B80, fols. 200v–203r.

The Magnificats

anticlimactic ending, a four-voice Gloria patri followed by a two-voice Sicut erat. In the Magnificat sexti toni there are several layers of textural counterpoint in the sound of the ensemble. The musical pattern is A – BCDE – BCDE – BCD, but the A, C, and E sections are scored for cantus, tenor, and contratenor, with the tenor and contratenor lying below the cantus, while sections B and D are scored for a divided cantus and a tenor. The second of these textures is something that Du Fay had used in a number of his motets, and it also appears in a repertory closer to the Magnificats, the hymns, and the Kyries. In this Magnificat the use of this texture for sections B and D overlays a simple alternation between cantus, tenor, and contratenor and two cantus and tenor over the cyclic pattern created by the musical segments.60 But there are two further formal processes in counterpoint with what I have just described. Sections D and E shift from the tempus perfectum of the opening to tempus imperfectum diminutum, with the attendant increase in the speed of the semibreve and simpler, more transparent, melodic and contrapuntal writing, so that we hear another kind of progression, three verses in followed by the much faster ; this process is repeated twice except that the second and third sections in last only two verses, and the last section in is only one verse, creating the kind of formal acceleration Du Fay used in his motets. Finally, there is the melodic substance of the piece and its relation to the Magnificat tone. The intonation and A present the tone almost without ornamentation, except that the cadence of A (mm. 5–7) is not derived from the Magnificat tone, but the sixth-tone cadence of the solemn tone for the Lamentations of Jeremiah. This surely had no programmatic connection for Du Fay, but it was an extraordinarily elegant manner of ending a sixthtone recitation that every choir singer probably knew intimately and provided an excellent ending. B begins with a strict citation of the plainsong, but then expands the phrase after the flex (mm. 15–21) into a line that rises to the f″ and has a cadence on c′–c″. Section C cites the start of the tone in the tenor, but the cantus explores an enormous range, from a′ to c″, with a clear division in which each phrase explores a specific segment of the range, either the fourth below the final or the fifth above it. Still, the central section (mm. 32–39) makes it clear that the recitation tone is a′. D, with its shift into a fast duple meter, appears to abandon the tone, although it is there in the second cantus, but the attention is drawn to the very expressive cantus 1 in the highest part of the range. Further, the entire first half of D is 60

This is something similar, but not identical, to what Du Fay did in the first three movements of the Missa Sancti Jacobi, which go back to the mid-1420s.

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an extended duet that cadences firmly on an octave c′–c″ and is followed by a pause. The music of cantus 1 here is a variation upon the music it had in B, but in many ways it sounds entirely new, as if the piece had embarked on a long and brilliant digression. The end of the section is an elaborate threevoice closing, with cantus 1 covering the entire octave from c″ to c′, and cantus 2 the octave from a′ to a, with no hint of recitation tone or even the closing formula of the tone. This is, in many ways, the musical high point of the piece thus far and the furthest removed from the plainsong. Then section E presents the entire tone in cantus 1, virtually without ornament and in stark homophony that is barely one step beyond the simplest fauxbourdon. This is, in context, a shockingly sharp contrast, and it would have struck even more forcefully listeners who were steeped in the sound of the psalmody, as were his patrons and colleagues. This entire process, starting from section B, is repeated once more, and the third time it ends with the exhilaration of section C for the Sicut erat. This is a work of enormous formal sophistication clothed in relatively simple and accessible melodic charm. It is not a surprise that it has become one of the most frequently performed works of Du Fay in modern times. In the Magnificat octavi toni the texture changes, including duos, the use of fauxbourdon, and the use of a fully composed three-voice texture, are coordinated with the musical sections, so that everything changes simultaneously section by section. Still, the structure is similar to that of the Magnificat sexti toni in the way Du Fay approaches the plainsong. Section A outlines the intonation and cadence of the tone in the cantus in a simple fauxbourdon setting with little ornamentation. Section B, a duo, begins with the intonation in imitation, the cantus following the tenor. In the second phrase (mm. 9–12) the tenor has the reciting tone, but the cantus has a long ornamented descent from c″ to c′. A third phrase (mm. 13–16) has something like the flex in the tenor as the cantus circles the two important notes of the tone, g′ and c″. For the closing the plainsong paraphrase returns to the cantus, which outlines the descent from c″ to g′. The setting marries a reference to the tone with a display in the cantus of the entire ambitus of the eighth mode (in this case not just a tone). Some of this is repeated in section C, for example the tenor–cantus imitation at the outset, but here it is used to establish the final, beginning with a descent to the d below it and a rise to the c″ above. Only then, at measure 23, does Du Fay cite the intonation in the cantus, and for the next eight measures we hear what sounds like a lightly ornamented version of a recitation on c″ leading to a descent and a cadence on g′, but the cadence is reached on the third beat of a perfection, and is then overshot, as the cantus reaches

The Magnificats

an even stronger cadence on d′ (m. 33), but also on the third beat. At this point the tenor–cantus imitation returns, and its purpose, as at the opening, is the rise from the d′ to the g′ and the establishment of the final. Section D, the end of the composed music, does the same thing as section E of the Magnificat sexti toni does: it presents the plainsong tone in the cantus with the least amount of ornamentation and in simple fauxbourdon. The cycle is repeated again, and the final repetition ends, as does the Magnificat sexti toni, not with the stark presentation of the tone, but with the most elaborate of the four sections that Du Fay has used. These two settings are very close siblings in terms of the formal and rhetorical structure that Du Fay uses. In contrast to these, the Magnificat quinti toni is built on a modified strophic repetition of a single strain after the initial setting of the first verse. The piece survives in two versions, one in ModB and the other in the much later SP B80. The transmission and the state of the piece are problematic. It is possible that this work was not originally an alternatim Magnificat. Version 1, in ModB, sets verse 1 plus the even verses in polyphony, while version 2, in SP B80, sets the odd verses in polyphony. The text underlay for verse 3 in version 2 is so clumsy that it is hard to imagine this text was ever intended to go with that section of the music. In all of his other Magnificats Du Fay uses three or four strains of music for the verses, and orders them sequentially. The polyphony consists of two segments, the second of which is subjected to small variations of detail upon repetition. The two versions arrange the segments as follows: Version 1 (ModB): A, B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, B6 Version 2 (SP B80): A, B2, B3, B1, B2, B3

The variations in version 1 are: B2 has an inserted measure after the first two (m. 24), but lacks measure 16 of B1, so both sections are the same length. B5 lacks the two semibreve rests at the start and compresses the first three measures of B1 into two, so it is one measure shorter, and B6 has the inserted measure found in B2 (m. 89) and also measure 16 of B1. B3–4 are in duple meter, but B3 is essentially a reworking and a slight compression of B1; the most obvious element of the compression is the elimination of the contratenor passages in measures 9 and 13–14. B4 is virtually a literal repeat of B3 except for the omission of a measure (m. 47). Example 11.3 shows the kinds of change that Du Fay makes in B1 to produce B3. At the outset he eliminates the two semibreve rests, and then suppresses the music for the second and third beats of measure 9, so that measures 10 and 40 fall at the start of a metric unit. The third note of measure 42 in all parts has no

443

Example 11.3 Magnificat quinti toni (mm. 6–13 and 36–44)

The Magnificats

corresponding value in measure 11; still, measures 10–12 have nine semibreves, and the corresponding passage in measures 40–43 has been made to last into eight semibreves by the addition of an extra note in measure 42 compensated by the shortening of the values for the cadential figure of the cantus (the last four notes of m. 43). Also, the contrapuntal relationship between the cantus and the lower voice has been shifted back a minim (see the notes marked with * in the example). Such changes continue throughout the section. The reworking, despite the simple and unassuming aspects of the music, is the product of considerable contrapuntal ingenuity. The Magnificat tertii toni is clearly a product of the late 1450s or more likely the early 1460s, after Du Fay returned to Cambrai. The sources, Tr 89, MC 871, MilD 1, CS 15, and the different version SP B80, are all late and distant from Du Fay’s sphere. Besseler assumed that the piece was incomplete and set only the first five verses, because three of the sources, Tr 89, CS 15, and Mil D1, escaped his attention, and these are the manuscripts that give the complete version of the piece.61 The piece follows what seems to be Du Fay’s normal procedure of cycling through a series of sections, but it is unusual in that instead of ending with the most elaborate segment, it ends with the simplest of the segments, a duet for the cantus and the tenor. Presumably this was then followed by a polyphonic antiphon in more than two voices. The musical and rhetorical structure of the piece is quite interesting: the third- and fourth-tone magnificats recite on C, and end on A (both) or E (one of the two fourth-tone endings).62 The A segment, after the intonation, simply has the cantus traverse the entire octave c″–c′, coursing a second time through the lower pentachord, and then making the descent from c″ to a′. Thus the setting presents not so much a paraphrase of the tone as a designation of the tonal space of both the third and fourth tones. Segment B, a duo with a considerable amount of imitation, does the same thing, but going up from the e. The section has three main phrases. The first defines the tonal space with a huge arc from e′ to c″ and down to b′ in the cantus (e to e′ and down to g in the tenor). The second essentially repeats these gestures, but brings the phrase to a firm close on the octave a–a′, the main ending of the third tone, and the third phrase repeats the same gestures, beginning with what sounds almost like quotation of the 61

62

OO Besseler 5:xxxvi and no. 36. A complete edition, based largely on MC 871, appears in Pope and Kanazawa, eds., The Musical Manuscript, no. 74. Cf. LU 209–10 and 215–16. This is consistent with what can be gleaned from the differentiae for the third- and fourth-mode antiphons in Ca 38, the printed Antiphoner from Cambrai, and LBN 599 (Lille, St-Pierre).

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opening of the second phrase, and brings the entire section to an end on the octave e–e′, the main cadence point for the fourth tone. There is not even a hint of the reciting tone. The third section, in duple meter and in four voices, has no imitation; it begins forcefully with the tone’s intonation and presents the reciting tone quite bluntly, underpinned by sonorous near homophony, and a brilliant cadence on the flex. Then it repeats the intonation, brings the cantus for a short time down to the e′, but resumes the recitation on c″, and closes with a firm cadence on the a′. In a sense this section functions like the final sections of the cycle of the Magnificats in the sixth and eighth modes, that is, the starkest presentation of the recitation pattern, but underpinned here by writing of extraordinary sonic brilliance. The duet that follows returns to the sonic austerity of the previous duet, and is again an exploration of the space of the third and fourth tones, with only the barest hint at the recitation. The cantus explores the fourth a′–d″ and back to a′ in the first phrase, the fourth a′–e′ in the second, and the entire ambitus of both tones in the third, ending on the D, a tone below the final. The last two phrases consist of arcs moving up and down from this D, ending on the E. In this section the tenor often moves in parallel with the cantus. Thus sections A and C do represent the third tone, but sections B and D represent the fourth. Since A is never repeated after the opening, Du Fay probably sensed he needed the brilliance of the C section to balance the “fourth-tone pull” of B and D, and indeed the Magnificat is a piece in both tones. Section E keeps this balance by exploring forcefully the authentic range in the first half and the plagal range (with short rises to the c″ in the second. The writing in many places prefigures the kind of writing one finds in the Missa Ave regina caelorum and its model motet. The arrangement in SP B80 is an alternatim version, sections of polyphony setting the odd-numbered verses as assigned in Tr 89, MilD 1, and CS 15, except that verse 7 is set to the second duet. The sections in triple meter have been rewritten so the entire polyphony is in duple meter. Its final segment is the four-voice one for the Gloria patri. This is clearly a later arrangement with none of the stylistic subtleties or the intellectual elegance of Du Fay’s original, but it is nonetheless a euphonious and eminently “practical” adaptation.63 The alternate setting of verse 7 for the three lower voices found in Tr 89 and CS 15 replaces the second of the three statements of the four-voice section with a three-voice version without the cantus. It is a lovely setting by someone who did know a good deal about Du Fay’s style, but it works at cross-purposes with the careful tonal structure of the entire 63

Cf. OO Planchart 8/4:11–15.

The Benedicamus Domino

magnificat, including two cadences on F and one on D that Du Fay would hardly allow himself in a piece in the third and fourth tones.64 The Magnificat has suffered a good deal in the transmission. Tr 89 and MC 871 present each section only once with multiple texts set to each. CS 15 presents all twelve sections separately, but it was clearly copied from an exemplar set down as Tr 89, where the repeated notes of the four-voice section had already been subjected to different divisions. In fact, in that section every one of the manuscripts presents the music with what appears to be superfluous repetitions of pitches that do not fit any of the three texts set under the music well. Singers need either to use repeated attacks on a single vowel, something that was not uncommon in plainsong, but absolutely never happened in the recitation of the psalms of the canticles except in a cadence formula, or else tie notes together to accommodate the declamation of the text. Withal, however, the Magnificat remains a beautiful example of Du Fay’s late style.

The Benedicamus Domino Du Fay’s two settings of the Benedicamus Domino,65 the short versicle that closes each of the major Offices, but in this case were surely intended for Vespers, for which he wrote hymns, Magnificats, and a number of antiphons, are most likely contemporary with the later parts of the hymn cycle or perhaps slightly later. They were added to Bo Q15 near the end of the compilation as page fillers,66 but form part of the main body of ModB, where they were copied successively.67 In the modern liturgy the plainsongs survive as the Benedicamus Domino for Lauds as well as the Ite missa est for solemn feasts in the case of no. 1,68 and as the Benedicamus Domino for second Vespers in solemn feasts in the case of no. 2.69 In Du Fay’s setting the two melodies appear a fourth above the pitch of the modern chant books for no. 1, and a fifth above in the case of no. 2, but in fact the pitches used by Du Fay agree with those found in medieval sources.70 In the first Du Fay uses the plainsong, with a minimum of ornamentation, as the 64 66

67 68 70

Cf. OO Planchart 8/4:10, mm. 32, 38, and 39. 65 OO Besseler 5:9–10; OO Planchart 9/1–2. Bent, Bologna Q15, 1, nos. 183, 194; the two pieces are entered on fols. A 113v–114r and A 169v–170r. ModB, fol. 32r–v. No. 1 appears also in Tr 87, fol. 57r, and Tr 90, fols. 459v–460r. LU 22 and 124. 69 LU 125. Cf. the response in ModB, Barclay, “The Medieval Repertory,” no. 69; Huglo, “Les Débuts,” no. 301; Eifrig and Pfisterer, eds., Melodien zum Ite Missa est, no. 340, for no. 1; and the response in ModB, Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 394, fol. 110r, and Cambridge, St. John’s

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tenor. In the second he places the plainsong in the cantus and subjects it to ornamentation that goes well beyond what we find in the hymns, but resembles the kind of ornamentation found in the Magnificat sexti toni or the Magnificat octavi toni. In the first Benedicamus Domino, with the plainsong in the tenor, he shapes the cantus in the manner he does in some of the cantilena motets, particularly the Florentine pieces such as Mirandas parit. This includes ornamenting the a–b–c′ rise of the tenor in measures 6–8 to produce motivic imitation in all voices, a short duet of cantus and contratenor separating the first two sections of the tenor (mm. 12–14), and a highly ornamental end to the cantus melody. The second Benedicamus Domino, unassuming though it might be, represents an approach to chant paraphrase that goes well beyond what we encounter in the hymns, and the kind of flexibility it shows appears to grow from some of the procedures that Du Fay had used in the early Magnificat settings. In these pieces, particularly in the sections that move away from a simple statement of the reciting tone, he sought to signify the tone, by cross-referencing it to the corresponding mode (the two are not the same). He expresses the mode in two ways: either by carefully outlining its structural intervals and their pitch collections, the tetrachord and the pentachord that defined whether the mode was authentic or plagal (depending on the position of the two intervals with respect to each other), or else by traversing the entire modal octave in a single phrase. The plainsong is a sixth-mode chant, transposed up a fifth with a C final. The version in ModB is given in Example 11.4. Du Fay’s first two phrases paraphrase the first six neumes of the plainsong, albeit going up to g′ rather than f′, but making much of the descent from f′ to c′ found in the chant. On the third phrase the cantus plunges down to g, making the most of the largest leap in the chant, and though he does lift the melody to the e′ of the chant, most of that phrase is spent on the third below c′. The final segment is an immensely long arc (see Ex. 11.5). The chant phrase set in Example 11.4 to “gratias” is paraphrased in measures 14–18, so Du Fay ends the paraphrase of the chant as it exists on the downbeat of measure 18. He then adds a huge arc, going down to g and up to a′ and settling down to f′, the traditional sixth-mode final. Measures 14–16 mark a shift in the sonority of the piece, ending with the firm cadence on f–c′–f′ at measure 16. The music that follows that cadence is College, MS D24, fol. 14r, for no. 2. I am profoundly grateful to Professor Anne Walters Robertson, who provided me with photos of both sources.

The Benedicamus Domino Example 11.4 Plainsong response to Du Fay’s Benedicamus Domino 2

Example 11.5 Benedicamus Domino 2 (mm. 14–23)

a long coda where this shift is composed out with the cantus exploring the octave f–f′,71 and the tenor and contratenor the octave c–c′, with the tenor emphasizing the notes of the pentachord f–c′. The coda explodes the modal ranges of what came before, but firmly establishes the traditional sixthmode final and at the same time drastically changes the sonority of the work. It is probably no accident that the lowest sound of the entire piece occurs in the contratenor right before the F cadence that launches the final phrase. In paraphrasing the chant at pitch, and in its unusual cleffing: c3, F3, F3, the Benedicamus Domino prefigures some of the procedures that Du Fay was to employ in the Mass and Vespers for St. Anthony of Padua, and indeed a good deal of what remains of the Vespers for St. Anthony survives only in ModB. For this reason I believe that this setting of the Benedicamus Domino was part of the Vespers for St. Anthony and St. Francis. ModB is also virtually the only source of the remaining chant paraphrase settings for the Office by Du Fay, a small handful of antiphons, which are the only survivors of what probably was a fairly large group of works. This does not include the Marian antiphons, which were discussed in the last chapter, not so much because they were not part of the Office but because, in the fifteenth century the polyphonic settings of these pieces were liturgically polyvalent in a way that hymns or Magnificats were not. They could be sung in the Office in the course of the liturgical year, but were often also sung at specially endowed services, and as such were closer in function to the motets and were written in a manner closer 71

Even though the music itself descends only to g, in terms of the mode this range is the octave f–f′.

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Table 11.3 Du Fay’s antiphons and responsory for Vespers No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a

antiphons Hic vir despiciens mundum Magi videntes stellam O gemma martyrum Petrus apostolus Propter nimiam caritatem Salva nos, Domine Salve sancte pater Sapiente filio responsory Si quaeris miracula

Type

Source

Chant paraphrase Chant paraphrase Chant paraphrase Chant paraphrase Chant paraphrase Chant paraphrase Chant paraphrase Chant paraphrase

ModB ModB ModB ModB ModB Tr 90 ModB ModB

Chant paraphrase

Tr 87

Mensuration

[ ]

a

The signs in this manuscript might be corrupt; the succession of signs was probably all integer valor or else all cut signs.

to that of the motets, and by the end of Du Fay’s life they were indeed being called “motet.” The only Office work by Du Fay not in ModB is the responsory Si quaeris miracula, found only in Tr 87, but connected liturgically with a number of the pieces that survive in ModB. This repertory is listed in Table 11.3. The last three items in the table point to a cycle of works, most of which are now lost to us. In his will Du Fay left to the Chapel of St. Stephen a large book in black notation containing the Mass (or Masses, as one of the reports of the executors states) of St. Anthony of Padua, “together with many other antiphons.”72 In another study I proposed a reconstruction of the contents of this manuscript, suggesting that it contained a Mass Ordinary, two sets of propers, one for St. Anthony of Padua and one for St. Francis, and probably two sets of polyphonic Vespers, one for each saint.73 Table 11.4 indicates what has survived of the Vespers part of that collection. This is a conservative estimate of the number of pieces. The Vespers may also have included the magnificat antiphon O Iesu perpetua for the octave of St. Anthony and the magnificat antiphon O stupor et gaudium for St. Francis’s day, since the antiphon that survives by Du Fay is for the week within the octave. There is no evidence that Du Fay set a processional responsory for St. Francis or wrote a motet for his Vespers comparable to his motet for St. Anthony, although he might well have done so. But the existence of Sapiente filio, the

72

LAN, 4G 1313, p. 6. See also Volume I, Chapter 6.

73

Planchart, “The Books,” 184–90.

The Benedicamus Domino

451

Table 11.4 Du Fay’s Vespers for St. Anthony and St. Francis No.

Genre

Text

Sources

I. St. Anthony of Padua 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Antiphon 1 Antiphon 2 Antiphon 3 Antiphon 4 Antiphon 5 Hymn Magnificat Antiphon Motet

lost ModB lost lost lost ModB lost Mod B, Tr 88

Procession

Gaudeat ecclesia Sapiente filio Qui dum sapientiam Augustini primitus Quorum vita moribus En gratulemur hodie O proles Hispaniae O proles Hispaniae – O sidus Hispaniae Si quaeris miracula

Antiphon 1 Antiphon 2 Antiphon 3 Antiphon 4 Antiphon 5 Hymn Magnificat Antiphon Benedicamus

Franciscus vir catholicus Coepit sub Innocentio Huc sanctus praeelegerat Franciscus evangelicum Hic creaturis imperat Proles de caelo Salve sancte pater Benedicamus domino

lost lost lost lost lost ModB ModB ModB

9 II. St. Francis of Assisi 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

second antiphon of the series for St. Anthony, would be inconceivable if he had not composed the entire set. The style of these pieces, simple as they are, points to the late 1430s and the 1440s as the time they were composed. The mensuration of Magi videntes stellam, 3, is something that begins to appear in his music in the proper settings for the Order of the Golden Fleece composed late in 1439 and early in 1440, and the cut signatures in many of the pieces in Table 11.3 look like the kinds of editorial alterations that his use of English was subjected to at the hands of scribes. This is particularly the case with Si quaeris miracula, where, as is often the case, the scribe lost concentration and allowed the English to appear near the end of the piece.74 Most of these pieces are the product of what I have called Du Fay’s second period,75 and were intended, unlike the motets or the festal Masses, to be liturgical service music in the strictest sense. This is something that 74

75

This is what happens in a good number of copies of Du Fay’s late works, including Ave regina caelorum 3 and the Missa Ave regina caelorum; cf. Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1976),” 44–47. Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Second Style.”

Tr 87

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Music for the Office

Fallows noted with some puzzlement at a time when much of Du Fay’s music of the 1440s was not well known, when he called them “perplexing examples of the simplest possible music being composed for the most glamorous cathedral foundation in the Low Countries.”76 What we should bear in mind is that in the 1440s neither Cambrai nor any other northern cathedral was a glamorous musical foundation; the decision made in those years at the cathedral to initiate the systematic use of polyphony in choro was one of the elements that contributed to Cambrai becoming a famous musical establishment, but in terms of the traditions not only of the cathedral itself, but of the entire region, it was a radical decision, and it was probably important that the service polyphony in the cathedral be as unpretentious and as close to plainsong as possible. Furthermore, most of these pieces were intended to be sung before and after a psalm or a Magnificat sung in plainsong, and it would have been indecorous to have the antiphon call undue attention to itself in a context when it was the message of the psalm that was liturgically significant.

The Small Vespers Antiphons The antiphon settings present the chant in the cantus in a rhythmic setting with minimal ornamentation. Two of them, Magi videntes stellam and Propter nimiam caritatem,77 are almost entirely in a form of note-against-note counterpoint (Propter nimiam caritatem is also in fauxbourdon) with a relatively fast rate of declamation; this is about as austere a text setting as one could imagine. The cadences are approached with an absolute minimum of ornamentation, even at the end of the piece, where Du Fay usually tends to write a more expansive melismatic passage that sums up the modal ambitus of the cantus. Apart from Sapiente filio the surviving antiphon settings in Table 11.3 are Magnificat antiphons. We need not posit that they were composed as part of a complete set of polyphonic Vespers, but given the nature of Du Fay’s activity in Cambrai in the 1440s, it is likely that they formed part of some sort of systematic cycle of pieces for the liturgical year. And yet the liturgical aspects of these pieces occasionally point away from Cambrai. The nature of the evidence in this case is problematic because we do not have the fifteenth-century antiphoner from the cathedral, an enormous project in several volumes that took more than a decade to complete and 76

Fallows, Dufay, 150.

77

OO Besseler 5, nos. 38 and 37; OO Planchart 1/9 and 1/12.

The Small Vespers Antiphons

which was copied during Du Fay’s years as a canon,78 but we have a complete antiphoner from the cathedral from ca. 1230–1250 and a printed diocesan antiphoner published between 1508 and 1517,79 so that chants found in one or both sources were likely to be part of the cathedral liturgy and have the function they have in these sources. Still, there are small traces here and there of liturgical changes in the cathedral in the 1440s and 1450s that were not retained in the later chant books.80 Magi videntes stellam and Salva nos were certainly used at Cambrai. Hic vir despiciens mundum and Propter nimiam caritatem are not in any of the surviving Cambrai sources, but are found in chant books of the Parisian use, which was followed by the court of Burgundy, and thus could have been written for the Burgundian chapel.81 Petrus apostolus, although used in Cambrai, was always used as a memorial, hardly the kind of piece that would require even the most modest polyphony; in the Parisian books it appears only as a Matins antiphon at St-Maur des Fosses,82 so that it is also unlikely that it was for the Burgundian chapel, which followed the use of Paris. The antiphon was added to ModB in the mid-1440s, probably by Jehan Fedé,83 but it probably originated in the late 1430s, perhaps for the cathedral of Lausanne, for which Du Fay wrote a prose for SS Peter and Paul. It may have come to Ferrara with Fedé, who at one point had been accused of being a schismatic, and was probably in Basel sometime before his arrival at Ferrara.84 A different case is presented by Salve sancte pater and Sapiente filio,85 which were not used either at Cambrai or in the Paris use, but were found almost exclusively in chant books of the Franciscan order and are part of the complete liturgy for Mass and Vespers that Du Fay wrote in the late 1430s and the 1440s, and which was collected in the book in black notation that he owned at his death.86 The most curious case is that of O gemma martyrum for St. George.87 Neither of the Cambrai antiphoners includes the feast of St. George, 78 79 80 81

82 83 84

85 86 87

Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 155–66; also see pp. 192–94. Ca 38 and Impr. XVI C 4; cf. Barbara Haggh et al., eds., Two Cambrai Antiphoners, vii–xxx. Planchart, “The Books,” 205, but see also Haggh, “Nonconformity,” 173–76. Hic vir despiciens mundum, in BnF lat. 12044 and 15181, and Propter nimiam caritatem, in BnF lat. 12044. Paris, BnF lat. 12044, fol. 155v. Haar and Nádas, “The Medici, the Signoria, the Pope,” 86–87. ASV, RS 373, fols. 196v–197r, petition by Jehan de Champmort (Johannes de Mortuocampo), clerk of Thérouanne, dated 19 May 1441, claiming that Fedé is in Basel among the adherents of Felix V, and requesting that he be deprived of his chaplaincy “retro chorum de furno,” in St-Amé of Douai. OO Besseler 5, nos. 43–44; OO Planchart 1/14–15. E.g., Fribourg (Switzerland), Bibliothèque des Cordeliers, MS 2. OO Besseler 5, no. 42; OO Planchart 1/10.

453

454

Music for the Office

although the missals always do, but always with a liturgy from the common of the Saints. The Office liturgy for the saint, even in places where he was venerated, always came up against the problem that his feast day, 23 April, falls most of the time much too close to Easter, which fluctuates from 22 March to 25 April, so it coincides with Good Friday at one end and with Thursday of the fourth week after Easter at the other, and most of the time his Vespers were preempted by those of the temporale. As a consequence also for the Office his liturgy was usually celebrated, when it was celebrated, with the items from the commune martyrum, and pieces specific to him are extremely rare. O gemma martyrum mentions him by name, but in fact the text is a contrafact; the melody is the common melody used for the “O” antiphons of Advent, which means that the contrafact was written deliberately to one of the best-known and most solemn antiphon melodies in the entire repertory. The text betrays its late facture in that it reads not so much like a traditional antiphon text but as a collect. It is absent from all the chantbooks inventoried by the Cantus project, and until very recently no plainsong source for it could be traced. But it is hardly a surprise that the only source that transmits it is in fact the late fifteenth-century antiphoner from Ferrara cathedral, as St. George was the patron saint of Ferrara. Here it is the Magnificat antiphon for second Vespers and thus the last musical item of the entire Office for the saint. Though the volume with O gemma martyrum was not copied until the 1490s, the antiphon is mentioned in the two surviving Ferrarese ordinals from the early fifteenth century,88 so it was part of the Ferrarese liturgy throughout the fifteenth century, but it is also clear that it was neither known nor used anywhere else. Du Fay’s setting is a unicum in ModB, added by whoever copied the small collection of antiphons on fols. 48v–50v (new 51v–53r), which Haar and Nádas suggest might have been Jehan Sohier called Fedé, who was a singer in the Ferrarese chapel from July 1445 to March 1446.89 But Sohier must have found the piece in a Ferrarese source,90 and Du Fay almost 88

89

90

Ferrara, Museo de la Cattedrale, Antifonario X, fols. 19v–20r; Cornell University Library, MS Rare BX C 36 0635 (olim MS B 31), fol. 2v (incipit); LBL Add. 28025, fol. 263r (incipit). I am deeply thankful to Dr. Giovanni Sassu, curator of manuscripts at the Museo de la Cattedrale, who tracked down the office of St. George in the antiphoners and provided me with excellent photographs of the entire office. Haar and Nádas, “The Medici, the Signoria, the Pope,” 86–87; also Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 66–68. The small verse that Sohier copied at the end of the antiphon, Ora pro nobis beate Georgi, was entered in the Ferrara ordinals between the hymn and the Benedictus antiphon at Lauds (Cornell, University Library, BX C 36 0635, fol. 2r), and the rubric for second Vespers indicates

The Responsory Setting

certainly wrote it in Ferrara, since the text was not available anywhere else, or perhaps in nearby Bologna, where a messenger could have brought him a leaf with the text and its plainsong on it.91 The style of the piece is that of Du Fay’s music in the late 1430s and 1440s. If he wrote it in Ferrara, it might indicate that he stopped in the city on his way from Florence to Chambéry in 1437 after he left the papal chapel. If he wrote it in Bologna on a chant received from Ferrara, this might be a possible explanation for the payment of 20 ducats that he received from the duke of Ferrara in May 1437.92 This also means that the copy in ModB is probably very close to Du Fay’s original. The work itself is absolutely straightforward and surprisingly austere. It is in duple meter and signed with , but moves mostly in breves and semibreves, so that this might be the earliest example we have of Du Fay’s abandonment of in favor of English . It also has one or two curious traits: the entrance of the cantus at miles caelestis (m. 23) in the middle of syncopations by the lower voices, which is not common in Du Fay’s music, and in measure 32 we encounter a suspension resolved upward in the cantus that barely masks parallel fifths between the cantus and the tenor. This last trait, like the parallel fifths in the much later O gloriose tiro, which have caused problems with the attribution of that work, might be another case of Du Fay doing something that, to his ears, “sounded English.”93

The Responsory Setting The last of the pieces in Table 11.4, the responsory Si quaeris miracula,94 inhabits a world almost equidistant from the simple antiphons we have just examined and the songlike writing of the Florentine cantilena motets and the Marian antiphons. It was an important work for Du Fay, and one of the few that he mentions in his will,95 where he indicates that the cantus was to be sung by six choirboys.96 The piece is an extended and rather formidable

91

92 94 95 96

that it should be done as in first Vespers but “cum reliquis de laudibus,” which implies the use of the versicle immediately before O gemma martyrum. The text is unique to the Ferrara chant books, and the association of the text with the melody of the O antiphons, which is reflected in Du Fay’s setting, is not something that the composer could have guessed at. That means that he must have seen an actual plainsong setting of the text. See Volume I, Chapter 3. 93 See the discussion of O gloriose tiro, pp. 374–76. OO Besseler 5, no. 45; OO Planchart 1/17. LAN, 4G 1313, p. 72; see also later in this chapter. It is interesting to note that in this piece a good part of the cantus is notated with a g2 clef, which is very rare in Du Fay’s music.

455

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Music for the Office

setting of a responsory for St. Anthony of Padua, based, like all of Du Fay’s Franciscan works, on the Office for the saint by Julian von Speyer.97 In Besseler’s edition of the Du Fay Opera omnia it is inexplicably classified as an antiphon, and was published with so many errors of transcription and misprints that it has been largely ignored by performers and most critics. In Julian’s office for St. Anthony it is the eighth responsory for Matins;98 that Du Fay set it with a doxology indicates clearly that it was not intended for Matins but rather as the responsory for the procession at the end of Vespers,99 that is, it belonged in the full set of polyphonic Vespers for St. Anthony that together with the Vespers for St. Francis and the Masses for both saints were included in the book in black notation that Du Fay left to the chapel of St. Stephen in his will.100 In his setting Du Fay follows the textural changes of the plainsong performance scrupulously. The sections sung by the schola, that is the respond and the two reprises after the verse and the doxology, are set for three voices, and the sections sung by the cantors, the verse and the doxology, are set for two voices. The structure of the piece is quite elaborate and it defeated the efforts of the scribe of Tr 87. Besseler did not understand the structure of the piece either, and as a result both the manuscript and the edition are missing twelve measures.101 Du Fay set the respond in two sections, with a full close before Cedunt mare, the section of the respond that should be sung after the verse and the doxology. His first setting of the last section of the respond is in itself divided into three parts: a trio starting at “Cedunt mare” leading to a full close but without a barline, a duo for the cantus and the contratenor, starting at “Membra resque perditas,” which leads seamlessly to final part, a three-voice closing for the respond. After the verse, a cantus and tenor duet, a rubric in the manuscript reads “Cedunt mare ut supra,” directing the singers to repeat the entire end of the respond. After the doxology, however, the only thing that follows is a new setting of the text beginning “Membra resque perditas” for three voices throughout and in duple meter. But in singing a responsory no medieval choir would ever return to two different places in the respond after the verse and the doxology. What is missing in Tr 87 is a second rubric directing the singers

97 98 99

100

The basic work on von Speyer and his rhymed offices remains Weiss, Die Choräle. Weiss, Die Choräle, xxii–xxiii; also AH 5:126–29. This is the place that Du Fay assigns it in his will; the term he uses there, “post completorium,” does not, in this case, mean “at the end of Compline,” but simply “after the conclusion [of Vespers].” Cf. Planchart, “The Books.” 101 OO Planchart 1/17, mm. 214–25.

The Responsory Setting Example 11.6 Si quaeris miracula (mm. 154–61 and 222–29)

to repeat “Cedunt mare” until “Membra resque perditas,” and then to sing the new setting of the final words. The connection between the two sections is virtually identical in both cases (see Ex. 11.6). The plainsong is paraphrased in the cantus throughout, and the ornamentation, even though it does not have the songlike quality we find in some of the Marian antiphons such as Ave regina caelorum 2, is considerably more elaborate than that in the smaller antiphons. There is no imitation, and the structure of the piece is entirely dependent on the scoring and on phrases delineated by very clear cadences. The three-part writing is considerably denser than that of the small antiphons or even the Marian motets from that time. As with a great deal of Du Fay’s music in the Trent codices, the mensuration signs in Tr 88 are largely wrong. The entire respond is unsigned, the verse is signed , the doxology is signed , and the newly composed end to the respond is signed . The entire piece is rigidly organized in imperfect longs, which in much of Du Fay’s music indicates a faster tempo for the semibreve and, when it is signed, it is signed with in the triple meter. But in this piece the rhythmic density, particularly in the respond, is the kind of density that Du Fay uses only in music signed with . I suspect that, as with a number of his others works in the Trent codices, somewhere in the transmission a reworking of the signs was incompletely carried out, leaving Du Fay’s last sign intact.102 The original signs were almost certainly uncut throughout, and Du Fay expected the 102

This is probably the most common oversight in such revisions; it is documented, for example, in the Missa Sancti Antonii de Padua et Sancti Francisci, Ave regina caelorum 3, and the Missa Ave regina caelorum.

457

458

Music for the Office

singers to sense, from the rhythmic density, that the verse moved faster than the respond, and possibly the doxology also moved slightly faster than the respond. This expectation was based on English notational practices that became normal for Du Fay from the early 1440s on, although, as we have seen, aspects of this practice are already present in O gemma martyrum. The style of Si quaeris miracula is most closely related to the large-scale chant settings that Du Fay wrote for the propers of the Mass for the Order of the Golden Fleece, beginning in 1439, and which he continued writing throughout the 1440s. It is a severe-sounding but immensely impressive work and one of the most extended essays in the kind of conflict of sonorities produced by a cantus with no signature and lower parts with a B, a kind of writing that Du Fay cultivated in pieces with a C or G final. It is already present in Nuper rosarum flores and reaches its apogee in Du Fay’s canon in the Missa L’homme armé. Since Si quaeris miracula was copied in a section of Tr 87 that Hanns Volp probably finished in the early 1440s,103 it is likely that the piece, like the antiphons added to ModB, is a product of the late 1430s or the very early 1440s, that is, around the time when Du Fay wrote the enormous cycle of propers for the Order of the Golden Fleece, which are stylistically the closest to the music of Si quaeris miracula. This brings us again to the question posed by Fallows about the extreme simplicity of the surviving Office antiphons, which use the same compositional procedures but are almost devoid of ornamentation. What this might reflect is a decision by Du Fay to write at three different musicorhetorical registers, something like a parallel of the three styles of Latin composition that would have been familiar to any educated man at the time. The equivalent of the stylus gravis is what we meet in the festal Masses and the big motets, particularly the occasional pieces, what Fallows called Du Fay’s “public voice”;104 the stylus mediocris is represented by pieces like Si quaeris miracula and the proper settings of the 1440s, and the stylus humilis by the hymns and all the rest of the Office music. Among the Mass music to be discussed in the next chapter, the early Gloria–Credo pairs belong to the higher register, and the plainsong-based Glorias and Kyries to the middle register; the Mass music has no pieces quite as simple, even in plainsong, as the small Office antiphons.105 Now, it will not do to apply these categories too rigidly or to apply them to all of Du Fay’s output. The 103 105

P. Wright, “The Compilation,” 245. 104 Fallows, Du Fay, 103. See Planchart, “Du Fay’s Plainsong Paraphrase Settings.”

The Plainsong Settings

songs, with the exception of some of the early ballades and a piece like Seigneur Leon, are not per se “public music,” as is the case of the motets and of most of the liturgical music. It seems that this rhetorical construct, if Du Fay was at all conscious of it, crystallized in the 1430s, as he set out to produce extended cycles of liturgical works – the hymns, the proses, the Magnificats, and the proper cycles.

The Plainsong Settings There remains a small repertory of music for the Office composed in 1457 when Michiel van Beringhen established the Recollectio festorum Beatae Mariae Virginis in his will, and Gilles Carlier was given the task to compile and write the texts for the liturgy and Du Fay to compose the plainsongs.106 Carlier’s task was by far the most extensive one: he had to compile or write anew the entire text for all the Hours and the Mass for the day. For much of it he could simply choose the appropriate scriptural readings, and for the prayers, such as the collects of the Mass, he could easily adapt some of the existing texts of collects of one or another of the Marian Masses. His efforts in terms of the Mass are preserved in a number of fifteenth-century missals that transmit the liturgy, either as part of the main text or as additions in a separate fascicle, as well as in the Missale parvum published in 1507.107 None of these sources transmits the music produced by Du Fay, and no Graduals from the cathedral survive from the fifteenth century. When Cambrai 12 was copied in 1540, most of the sung parts of the Mass had been replaced by chants common to other Marian feasts, so that layer of texts set by Du Fay survives only in Savoyard sources, mostly from churches in the Val d’Aosta.108 The liturgy of the Office fared better in Cambrai itself. Even though no manuscript antiphoners or breviaries from the second half of the fifteenth century survive from Cambrai, a comparison of the chants in the Aostan sources with those of the printed diocesan Antiphoner of Cambrai, published between 1508 and 1518 by Symon Vostre,109 shows that the changes 106

107

108 109

On the circumstances and documentation, see pp. 248–49; the edition will be in OO 11. A detailed study and edition by Barbara Haggh-Huglo is forthcoming. This is described in considerable detail in Haggh-Huglo, “The Celebration”; id., “The Medium.” See Haggh, “The Aostan Sources.” Antiphonale secundum usum Cameracensis ecclesiae. Only a single exemplar appears to have survived. See also Haggh-Huglo et al., eds., Two Cambrai Antiphoners.

459

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Music for the Office

in the Mass did not affect the Office. The chants for the Office of the Recollectio are listed in Table 11.5. Carlier’s procedure in producing the texts ranged from writing them entirely anew, as is the case of most of the items in Table 11.5, to producing a specific cento of biblical material, as is the case with the Vespers responsory Surge propera, to simply using already existing texts that were part of the Cambrai liturgy for other feasts of the Virgin, as is the case of Cum iocunditate as the canticle antiphon for Compline, and the responsories Ad nutum Domini and Senex puerum portabat for Matins. Du Fay wrote the music following a pattern that he must have been very familiar with, that of a modally ordered office. That was the case with the office for St. James the Elder he had encountered in Bologna in 1426, with the offices for St. Anthony of Padua and St. Francis of Assisi that he had set to polyphony in the 1430s and 1440s, as well as a number of other offices that he must have encountered in Cambrai and elsewhere.110 As Table 11.5 shows, the antiphons for first Vespers (repeated for second Vespers) and for Lauds are modally ordered, beginning with mode 1. The canticle antiphons in these cases follow a slightly different pattern; that for first Vespers is in mode 6, that for Lauds returns to mode 1, and that for second Vespers remains in mode 5, and the Vespers responsory is in mode 6, just as the magnificat antiphon. The night Office follows a common pattern, where the antiphons progress from mode 1 to 8, with the ninth antiphon also in mode 8, while the responsories progress from mode 1 to 8, with one exception, and the ninth responsory returns to mode 1. Thus the two cycles, night and day, use instances of two procedures, one that retains the final mode reached (second Vespers and in a slightly different way first Vespers) and one that returns to the first mode (Lauds). The first procedure obtains in the Matins antiphons and the second in the Matins responsories. The Cantus project does not assign a mode to the hymns,111 but singers in the late Middle Ages did, and I have assigned a mode to the hymns in Table 11.5. It is clear, however, that neither of the hymns was thought to be in the modal order of the Office. The antiphon to the Nunc dimittis for Compline fits the order, but in this case it might be a coincidence, for this is one of three texts that Carlier simply took from another Marian feast and Du Fay wrote no new music for it (it is indicated by an incipit in the Antiphoner). On the other hand, the invitatory for Matins was apparently 110

111

At Cambrai the office for St. Elizabeth of Hungary was a modally arranged office; see Haggh, ed., Two Offices. Cf. ibid., passim.

The Plainsong Settings

461

Table 11.5 The Office of the Recollectio festorum No.

Genre

First Vespers 1 Antiphon 1 2 Antiphon 2 3 Antiphon 3 4 Antiphon 4 5 Antiphon 5 6 Hymn 7 Responsory 8 Magnificat antiphon Compline 9 Nunc Dimittis antiphon Matins 10 Invitatory First Nocturn 11 Antiphon 1 12 Antiphon 2 13 Antiphon 3 14 Responsory 1 15 Responsory 2 16 Responsory 3 Second Nocturn 17 Antiphon 4 18 Antiphon 5 19 Antiphon 6 20 Responsory 4 21 Responsory 5 22 Responsory 6 Third Nocturn 23 Antiphon 7 24 Antiphon 8 25 Antiphon 9 26 Responsory 7 27 Responsory 8 28 Responsory 9 Lauds 29 Antiphon 1 30 Antiphon 2 31 Antiphon 3 32 Antiphon 4 33 Antiphon 5 34 Hymn 35 Benedictus antiphon Second Vespers 36 Magnificat antiphon

Text

Mode

Tenebrae diffugiunt Solem iustitiae Gabriel archangelus Non concava vallium Virgo puerum Gaude redempta Surge propera V. Pulchra es Vidi speciosam

1 2 3 4 5 1 6 6

Cum iocunditate

7

Festa genitricis Dei

4

Virga florem paritura Anna parit Ioachim Angelus mittitur Omnipotens Dominus Ad nutum Domini Suscipe verbum

1 2 3 1 4 3

Festinat ad cognatam Femina vetus Virgo mater Ibo ad montem V. Viam mandatorum Ut audivit V. Cum facta est vox Senex puerum V. Accipiens Simeon

4 5 6 4 5 6

Salve vellus Tota pulchra es Gloriam virginis Scandit ad aethera V. Exaltata est O felix virgo V. Peccavimus Plaude superna Sion V. Ecce tabernaculum

7 8 8 7 8 1

Antiquum consilium Anna stellam matutinam Mittitur ad Mariam Vetulam visitat Aeternum puerumque Nuntiat angelus virginis Beata es Dei genitrix

1 2 3 4 5 2T 1

Ave virgo speciosa

5

462

Music for the Office

thought to fall outside the modal order, even though the text is by Carlier and the music by Du Fay. The other two texts that Carlier simply took wholesale from other Marian feasts were treated very differently by Du Fay: Fulbert of Chartres’s immensely popular Ad nutum Domini was simply left alone, and it created the only modal bump in the responsory series, which has no second-mode responsory.112 For the other, Senex puerum portabat, which clearly did not carry the auctoritas of Ad nutum Domini, Du Fay simply discarded the traditional Gregorian melody and wrote his own sixth-mode tune, thus keeping the modal order at that point. The surface of the music in all of these pieces can best be described as profoundly “well mannered.” The antiphons and hymns are composed with the same exquisite precision that one finds in the cantus parts of the songs, with the same attention to the text declamation and the melodic syntax in terms of the modes as Du Fay understood them, that is, as octave species consisting of a pentachord and a tetrachord for the authentic modes and a tetrachord and a pentachord for the plagal modes, where the final is always the lowest note of the pentachord. This approach obtained in Du Fay’s melodic writing whether the voice was “in a mode” or in what Harold Powers calls a “tonal type.”113 This can be seen in the discussion of the melodic writing of Craindre vous vueil,114 but the kinds of shifts in color (and in the intervallic nature of the pentachord or tetrachord) that are so characteristic of Du Fay’s writing, particularly in the songs of the 1430s and in pieces such as the Missa L’homme armé, are definitely not what he proposed to do in the plainsongs for the Recollectio. Typical of his procedure is the first antiphon for Vespers, Tenebrae diffugiunt (see Ex. 11.7). The music articulates the text line by line, as in the songs. The first line presents the pentachord of mode 1, with the b′ fa that is often present in the intonations of the mode and with a clear articulation after reaching the a′.115 Lines 2 and 3 compose out the recitation tone on a′. Lines 1 and 3 present the pentachord and the tetrachord of the mode, in both cases going up and down in each interval species, and line 4 represents the descent to the final and once more outlines the pentachord. Line 2, however, contains the kind of music that makes clear that the composer is not a ninth-century monk but a fifteenth-century musician, for even though it contains a nod toward the establishment of a recitation tone, its main purpose appears to be to provide 112

113 115

It remains a mystery why, under the circumstances, Du Fay did not place it at the start of the second nocturn. Cf. Powers, “Tonal Types and Modal Categories,” 439–43. 114 See pp. 174–78. The “bar lines” in the example are those found in the Antiphonarium.

The Plainsong Settings Example 11.7 Antiphon Tenebrae diffugiunt

Example 11.8 Responsory Omnipotens Dominus

“tonal contrast” between lines 1 and 3. Its close on E is unusual for pieces in mode 1, which often have internal cadences on C; part of its purpose is to neutralize the b′ fa of line 1 in order to prepare the ascent of line 3, but it also finds an echo in the first word of line 4, preparing the final descent to D. The opening of the work is slightly extravagant for a Vespers antiphon; by contrast, however, the responsories are relatively modest in terms of the melismatic writing. There is nothing that comes close to the extravagance of the responsory Turbam compescit that Du Fay saw in the books of San Giacomo il Maggiore in Bologna, or even the combination of melismatic writing and flexibility that one finds in Fulbert’s Ad nutum. As with the antiphons, the sense one has is of considerable care in both the declamation of the text and the “expression” of the mode. The first Matins responsory can serve as an example, particularly since it is in the same mode as the antiphon given in Ex. 11.7 (see Ex. 11.8). Carlier’s text here is not a poem but Kunstprosa in three statements with soft internal articulations: Omnipotens Dominus / hominis lapsum miseratus. || Dat sterili vires / ex cano concipiendi. || Illam quae mentes nostras / sustollet ad astra. Du Fay uses the first statement to expose the modal pentachord, but sets the first segment of the phrase to an exploration of the third d–f, and the second to the rise from f to a, with a short jump to the c′.

463

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Music for the Office

The second statement begins with an exploration of the tetrachord, including a rise beyond d′ to e′, but the final melisma on “concipiendi” explores the entire modal octave in two segments, one tracing the tetrachord and another the pentachord. The two phrases are separated by the largest leap in the melisma and contrary motion, one phrase descending to the break and the other ascending from it. For the verse Du Fay eschews anything like the standard formula for responsory verses in mode 1 (albeit with a distant reference to the opening at “Illam”) and uses most of the verse before the melisma at “ad” to set up a descending exploration of the pentachord. The final melisma of the verse explores almost the entire modal octave, but ends on the a′ as a nod to the reciting tone. Du Fay’s melismas are considerably more directed melodically than what one often finds in the oldest layer of Gregorian chant; they are nothing like the oscillations between a′ and c′′ in the gradual Viderunt omnes,116 although he had encountered such melismas not just as a singer throughout his career, but as a composer, when he set out to write settings of the propers of the Mass for the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon and for the cathedral of Cambrai. The melodies are beautifully constructed, but they are cantus planus, and singing through them one becomes aware of how much of Du Fay’s melodic gift was tied to his sense of rhythmic interplay between the voices. In some ways these pieces are the musical equivalent, mutatis mutandis, of the lovely Gothic revival architecture that was so common in American campuses in the 1930s, such as the Yale colleges. It is lovely and often graceful, but it does not have the sometimes wild abandon (within a disciplined structure) of the cathedral of Rouen or Mont SaintMichel, or the daring presence of its contemporary architecture, the Chrysler building. 116

LU 409.

12

Ordinary of the Mass Movements

Du Fay’s earliest datable work is a pair of Ordinary of the Mass movements that he wrote most likely in Cambrai in 1414 before leaving for Constance; his last datable work is the Missa Ave regina caelorum, which probably was not finished until 1472 and is surely the Mass by that name copied into the Cambrai choirbooks in 1473.1 Music for the Mass, like the songs, comes from all periods of his life, but can be divided into three large groups, two of which have relatively clear chronological limits, at least in terms of the surviving pieces; the third covers Du Fay’s entire career. The boundaries between the three groups are more a matter of convenience for today’s student and observer. They are not entirely consistent internally and there is some overlap between them, but they present a convenient partition of an enormous and varied repertory. The three groups are as follows: 1. Settings of single movements, pairs, and trios, of the Ordinary of the Mass. These pieces were edited in Besseler’s Opera Omnia with the unfortunate general term fragmenta missarum, possibly an echo of Ottaviano Petrucci’s title for his famous collection of 1505.2 But as Margaret Bent has noted, the title is misleading,3 and in fact all of these works, with perhaps a single exception, are not “fragments” but complete compositions intended to be what they were from the beginning; further, a number of them were intended as part of liturgically ordered cycles that apparently survive in their entirety, however scattered their transmission might be. All of the works in this group had probably been composed by the early 1440s at the latest. 2. Settings of music for the Proper of the Mass, usually in complete cycles. This group includes Du Fay’s prose settings, which were separate pieces, but which amount to a cycle per circulum anni. Most of Du Fay’s proper settings, except for the proses, were essentially unknown as his work until the 1940s, when Laurence Feininger postulated his authorship of a number of them.4 Feininger’s surmise was treated with profound skepticism by most scholars until the 1980s, when a fair amount of direct 1

2 4

LAN, 4G 4681, fol. 21v; Houdoy, Histoire, 200; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 252; C. Wright, “Dufay,” doc. 19. OO Besseler 4. 3 Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:154. Feininger, ed., Auctorum Anonymorum, ii–viii.

465

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Ordinary of the Mass Movements

and circumstantial evidence was found that confirmed his initial judgment.5 Chronologically the earliest works in this group are some of the prose settings, which go back to the 1430s, but the bulk of this repertory was written by Du Fay between his arrival in the north in the summer of 1439 and his departure for Savoy in 1450.6 Probably twothirds to three-quarters of his works in this group have disappeared without a trace, and one can only surmise their existence from the payment records of the cathedral.7 Three late works, also lost, would also belong here: a prose for St. Mary Magdalene (surely Mane prima sabbati), copied in Cambrai in 1464–1465,8 a prose Ave Maria [. . . virgo serena], copied in 1473 and perhaps intended to be part of the endowed Mass for himself, as well as a new setting of the tract Desiderium animae.9 3. Festal settings of the Ordinary of the Mass, including four plenary Masses. These cover his entire career, from the Missa sine nomine written sometime before 142210 to the Missa Ave regina caelorum, finished half a century later. We know of nine such works, two of which have disappeared: the Missa Sancti Antonii Abbatis and the Missa pro defunctis. The plenary Masses included the two lost works, the Missa Sancti Iacobi, and the Missa Sancti Antonii de Padua et Sancti Francisci. The surviving seven Masses show something of a stylistic shift between the first three and the last four, which are cantus-firmus cycles, and at first blush it might appear that the shift has a chronological component. The first three are works from the 1420s in the case of Sine nomine and Sancti Iacobi, and most likely the late 1430s or the 1440s in the case of Sancti Antonii de Padua, while the last four can be dated fairly securely to 1453, 1460, 1463, and 1471–1472, respectively. A reflection of Du Fay’s Missa Sancti Antonii Abbatis may be heard in an anonymous plenary cycle that uses in its introit a version of the plainsong for the introit Scitote quoniam that was used in Cambrai between 1450 and 1500. This Mass is surely the work of one of Du Fay’s 5

6 7 8 9

10

Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1972), 14–19; id., “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 143–66; Fallows, Dufay, 182–91. Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 135, 168–69. These records are most accessible in Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 213–56. LAN, 4G 4672, fol. 24r; Houdoy, Histoire, 195; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 248. LAN, 4G 4682, fol. 21v; Houdoy, Histoire, 200; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 252; C. Wright, “Dufay,” doc. 19. The identity of both prose texts can be determined from the Cambrai missals in use at the time. It is very unlikely that the setting of Desiderium animae in Tr 88, fols. 157v– 158r, although a work of Du Fay, is the setting copied at Cambrai in 1473. Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:153.

Ordinary of the Mass Movements

followers.11 Du Fay’s own Mass was probably a late work, but if the surviving anonymous work reflects its texture (as it does reflect, for example, the extended use of a head motif typical of late Du Fay), it was a work written in a manner similar to the surviving St. Anthony Mass, that is, with a freely composed Ordinary in three voices. Similarly, a reference to Du Fay’s Missa pro defunctis, sung in 1507 at a ceremony of the Order of the Golden Fleece, describes it as a three-voice work,12 and it is likely that it was, like most of the early settings of the Requiem, a chant paraphrase setting throughout, that is, a work that was close in approach if not in style to the proper settings of the 1440s. It may well be that in Ockeghem’s Missa pro defunctis, particularly in terms of the introit and especially the Kyrie, which has no parallel anywhere else in the fifteenth century except in the Kyrie of Du Fay’s Missa Sancti Iacobi, we also have a reflection of what Du Fay’s own Requiem was like.13 There is a tenth cycle that was ascribed to Du Fay in some of the manuscripts copied by Hanns Wiser in the 1460s, the Missa Caput. It was considered for much of the twentieth century not only his work, but a crucial work in his development, even though the manuscripts showed that Wiser had changed his mind, probably upon receiving further information, and erased the ascription in his only complete copy of the work.14 This work is one of the most influential pieces of the mid-fifteenth century and was indeed crucial to the development of the style not only of Du Fay but of Jehan de Ockeghem and a number of other composers, but it is the work of an anonymous English master. Some recent scholarship has suggested Dunstaple as the author, but this would call for a stylistic shift in Dunstaple’s old age that would make Verdi’s shift in Falstaff pale by comparison.15 We should probably refer to its composer as the Caput master, unless an ascribed copy surfaces, which is unlikely, since apparently the tradition in England was to omit composer’s names. Virtually all the recovered fragments in the last quarter century that include the beginning of a work have no composer ascriptions.16

11

12 13

14 16

Planchart, “The Books,” 206–9. There is no modern edition of the work, although both I and David Fallows have prepared editions. Fallows’s edition was sung by the Hilliard Ensemble in a private recording; mine has been recorded by The Binchois Consort, dir. Andrew Kirkman, on Hyperion CDA67474 (2005). Prizer, “Music and Ceremonial,” 133. Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (Oct. 1984); Bent, “Ockeghem’s Requiem?” (April 2009). Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1972), 3. 15 Robertson, “The Savior,” 604–12. Bent, “The Earliest Fifteenth-Century Transmission,” 95–96.

467

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This chapter will deal only with the works in the first of the three groups given above. These are listed in Table 12.1. The pieces are presented in the order in with they appear in the new Opera Omnia of Du Fay.17 Chronologically, nos. 1–5 and 24–28 are probably the oldest layer, going from 1414–1415 (no. 1) to the end of Du Fay’s years in the service of the Malatesta (late 1424 or early 1425). No. 7/1 surely dates from Du Fay’s early years in Bologna, 1426–1427. Nos. 10–23 were most likely composed for the papal chapel and must date from the years 1429–1437, perhaps with the Kyries having been written before the Glorias. Nos. 8 and 9 also probably date from Du Fay’s years in the papal chapel, although no. 9 is probably later than no. 8. No. 6 comes most likely from Du Fay’s first stay in Savoy in 1434. The Kyrie has a late and surely spurious ascription to Du Fay in the index of Tr 92, the only source that pairs it with the Gloria; this is discussed later in this chapter.

Early Cycles of Three and Two Movements and the Early Isolated Movements A roughly chronological discussion of these pieces also allows us to treat the two obvious cycles in this repertory, namely, the Kyrie and Gloria cycles, as units. But at first it might be useful to deal with the concept of these pieces as fragmenta missarum. They are nothing of the sort; beginning with the late fourteenth century the composition of settings of individual movements of the Ordinary of the Mass was a common practice, and by the early fifteenth century in England as well as on the Continent two kinds of pairings had become relatively common, the movements with long texts, Gloria and Credo, and the Sanctus and Agnus. Such pairings are found in the repertory of the Old Hall manuscript, even though the movements were copied in blocks, all the Kyries (now lost in Old Hall) together, then all the Glorias, and so on. But many of these pairs have been pointed out by scholars, who have noted the use of similar cleffing, rhythmic texture, and even motivic similarities. The same obtains in the north Italian repertory of the early fifteenth century. It is true that most of these pairings are made most explicit in Bo Q15, and as Margaret Bent has noted, the scribe of that manuscript had a penchant for conflating possibly unrelated works into factitious pairs and cycles.18 But there is sufficient internal evidence,

17

OO Planchart 5.

18

Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:153–57.

Table 12.1 Du Fay’s Ordinary movements, pairs, and trios No.

Title

Earliest source

Other sources

1

Kyrie–Gloria–Credo

Bo Q15

2 3

Kyrie–Sanctus–Agnus Gloria (Lantins)–Credo (Du Fay) 1 Gloria–Credo 2 Gloria–Credo 3

Bo Q15 Bo Q15

Kyrie (Binchois?) – Gloria (Du Fay) Sanctus (Du Fay)– Agnus (Sirede?) 1

Tr 92 Bo Q15 (Sanctus) Tr 92 (Agnus)

8 9 10 11 12 13

Sanctus–Agnus 2 Sanctus–Agnus 3 Kyrie 1 (Vat 1, Mel 39) Kyrie 2a (Vat 2, Mel 48) Kyrie 2b (Vat 2, Mel 48) Kyrie 3 (Vat 4, Mel 18)

Bo Q15 Tr 92 Ao 15 Bo Q15 Tr 87 Bo Q15

14 15 16 17 18

Kyrie 4 (Vat 6, Mel 47) Kyrie 5 (Vat 14, Mel 68) Kyrie 6a (Vat 11, Mel 16) Kyrie 6b (Vat 11, Mel 16) Kyrie 7 (Vat 12, Mel 58)

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Kyrie 8 (Vat 9, Mel 171) Gloria 1 (Vat 11, Bose 51) Gloria 2 (Vat 14, Bose 11) Gloria 3 (Vat 15, Bose 43) Gloria 4 (Vat 9, Bose 23) Gloria 5 (de quaremiaux) Gloria 6 Gloria 7 Gloria 8 (cursiva) Lantins/Du Fay Gloria 9 (ad modum tubae) Parts Contratenor to a Gloria by Grenon Spurious ascriptions19 Gloria S 1

Bo Q15 Tr 87 (2×) Ao 15 Bo Q15 Ao 15 (version 1) Tr92 (versions 1–2) Bo Q15 Tr 92 Bo Q15 Tr 92 Bo Q15 Bo Q15 Tr 92 Bo Q15 Ox 213

Ao 15 (all); Ca 6, Ca 11, MuEm, Ven 145 (Kyrie) Ao 15 (Kyrie) Ao 15 (pair); Ox 213, Tr 90, Tr 93 (Gloria) MuEm, Tr 87, Tr 90, Tr 93 (Credo) Ao 15, Ca 6, Ca 11 (both); BU 2216 (Credo) Ao 15, Ca 6, Ca 11, Tr 87, Tr 92 (both); Tr 90, Tr 93 (Credo) Ca 6, Ca 11, Tr 90, Tr 93 (all Kyrie only, Gloria unique to Tr 92) Tr 90, Tr 92, Tr 93 (all three Sanctus only, Agnus unique to Tr 92) – Tr 92 (Sanctus 2×) – MuEm, Tr 90, Tr 92, Tr 93 MuEm, Tr 90, Tr 93 – Ao 15, BU, 2216, MuEm, Tr 92/Tr 93 (variant) – – MuEm, Tr 87, Tr 90, Tr 92, Tr 93 – Tr 93 (versions 2–3)

4 5 6 7

28

29

12/2 19

Bo Q15 Bo Q15

MuEm, Tr 90, Tr 92, Tr 93 – Tr 92 – MuEm, Tr 90, Tr 92, Tr 93 – – Ca 6, Ca 11, Tr 87, Tr 88 –

Bo Q15

Ao 15, Tr 90, Tr 93

Ca 6

Ca 11

MuEm

–

The Kyrie of no. 6 in this table also carries a spurious ascription to Du Fay in the index of Tr 92.

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Ordinary of the Mass Movements

particularly in the works of Ciconia and Zacara, that a number of such pairs were intended as such by the composers.20 What is also worthy of note is that virtually none of these early pairings includes the Kyrie, even though the Kyrie and the Gloria are the two movements of the Ordinary that were sung contiguously in the liturgy. It is precisely this that raises the possibility of nos. 1 and 2 in Table 12.1 being true fragments. In the case of no. 2, which is probably the earliest work we have from Du Fay, the evidence is against it having ever been part of a five-movement cycle. This surmise was more plausible when we were unaware of the liturgical connection of the cantus firmus used in the Sanctus and the Agnus, and scholars thought it might be a product of the 1420s or 1430s.21 But it is clear now that at Cambrai the cantus firmus was part of the missa ad tollendum schismam,22 and that Du Fay probably wrote it under Loqueville’s supervision (since the copy of the cycle in Bo Q15 includes a second setting of the Sanctus by Loqueville) in the expectation of taking it to Constance at the end of 1414. The transmission in Bo Q15 joins it with a Gloria–Credo pair by Zacara, which, from its titles, is connected with Rome and the papal chapel.23 I have already suggested that the conflation in Bo Q15, in this case, probably reflects information the scribe had about the performance of these pieces by the chapel of the Council. In this case Du Fay’s Kyrie, which is built from motives so simple that it could have been written by any competent composer at the time with little notice, was surely added ad hoc to complete the cycle for performance by the Council’s chapel. The case of no. 1 is not so simple. Margaret Bent raises the possibility that it could have been part of a five-movement cycle where the scribe of Bo Q15 simply suppressed the last two movements.24 Indeed, it remains to this day the only instance of such a three-movement cycle in the first half of the fifteenth century. The Kyrie survives in several other manuscripts, and the Gloria and the Credo survive, not contiguously, in Ao 15; but no Sanctus or Agnus, ascribed or anonymous, that could plausibly be posited 20

21 23

24

Gallo and Von Fischer, eds., Italian Sacred and Ceremonial Music, 263–65; Ciconia, The Works of Johannes Ciconia, ed. Bent and Hallmark, 198–200. Fallows, Dufay, 42. 22 Planchart, “The Early Career,” 359. Gloria Micinella and Credo Cursor, published in Gallo and Von Fischer, eds., Italian Sacred and Ceremonial Music, nos. 3–4. Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:167, states that the pair does not meet the criteria established in Hamm, “The Reson Mass,” and Gossett, “Techniques of Unification.” I have to disagree with her on this point: the Micinelli were a powerful Roman family associated with the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, and the cursores were the curial messengers; in other words, the titles of both pieces point to a common use in Rome, and the ranges and cleffings of the pieces agree. Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:156–57.

Early Cycles of Three and Two Movements and the Early Isolated Movements

as part of this cycle has survived anywhere. It is not entirely safe to assume that Ao 15 was dependent on Bo Q15 for this repertory. On the other hand, there is some evidence that the earliest form of what we now call the Missa Sancti Iacobi was such a three-part cycle, which would not be incompatible with the spirit of experimentation one finds in a good deal of Du Fay’s earliest works. Still, in the case of this cycle it is probably best to leave the question open. The earliest group of Mass pieces by Du Fay, apart from these two cycles, are probably the three Gloria–Credo pairs (nos. 3–5 in Table 12.1) and the Glorias 5, 6, 8, and 9 (nos. 24–28 in Table 12.1). Two of these pieces have conflicting attributions: the Gloria of Gloria–Credo 1 is ascribed to Du Fay in Ox 213 and to Hughes de Lantins in Bo Q15 and Ao 15, and Gloria 8, an unicum in Ox 213, has an ascription to Hughes de Lantins beside an erased ascription to Du Fay. These two conflicting attributions are related. The ascription of the Gloria of the first Gloria–Credo pair to Du Fay in Ox 213, over the music and in the index, is clearly a scribal error that the scribe actually noticed but then compounded in his attempt at correction. As Hans Schoop has shown, the scribe realized that he had misattributed a Gloria of Lantins to Du Fay, but when he changed the attributions, he changed them for the wrong piece, and instead of changing the attribution for the Gloria paired with Du Fay’s Credo, he changed it for the Gloria copied on the previous opening (fols. 59v–60r), a very early work by Du Fay, written using the text-setting procedure we encounter in the Gloria and Credo of no. 1 in Table 12.1.25 Because the piece is an unicum it was left out of the Besseler edition of the Opera Omnia, but was published by Charles van den Borren as a work of Lantins.26 Schoop’s changed ascription has now been generally accepted, and David Fallows has noted how close the style of this Gloria is to that of Du Fay’s other early pieces.27 Another element most of these pieces have in common is that all except for Glorias 5, 6, and 8 were copied in the first stage of Bo Q15, which means that they all predate the presumed ending of the first version of that manuscript ca. 1425.28 Gloria 8, with the conflicting attribution to Lantins and Du Fay, is also a piece that existed by the early 1420s, and Gloria 6, unique to Tr 92, shares virtually all its stylistic traits with Gloria 8 and the Gloria and Credo of the three-part cycle, and is probably contemporary with them.

25 27

Schoop, Entstehung und Verwendung, 48–49. 26 In Polyphonia Sacra, no. 16. Fallows, Dufay, 175–77. 28 Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:20–21.

471

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Ordinary of the Mass Movements

The Kyrie–Sanctus–Agnus has elicited very little critical commentary, but it is a work that poses a few problems. The Sanctus and Agnus, probably composed at Cambrai in 1414, are based on a cantus fractus that serves as the tenor, and the Agnus is a compressed contrafact of the Sanctus. In terms of the polyphony they relate as follows: Sanctus measures 1–15 = Agnus 1–15, but while at measure 7 the Sanctus has all voices stop on a fermata, in the Agnus the contratenor provides a figure that moves the music forward. Sanctus 16–29 = Agnus 16–29 (with some small variants of detail), but the section in the Sanctus continues for ten measures, while the Agnus has a two-measure cadence. Sanctus 61–64 = Agnus 32–35; Agnus measures 36–38 have no direct correspondence in the Sanctus, but are a simplification and compression of the melodic drive of measures 66–69 of the Sanctus. The correspondence resumes with Sanctus 80–93 = Agnus 39– 52.29 In terms of the plainsong intonation, the intonation of Agnus 1 equals that of the Sanctus, that of Agnus 3 equals that of the Benedictus, while that of Agnus 2 is derived from the tenor of the last eight bars of the preceding intonation (Sanctus and Agnus 8–15). This is something similar to what happens in a later anonymous Sanctus–Agnus pair based on this plainsong discovered by Craig Wright,30 so it is possible that there was a tradition of such settings. Given that in the plainsong sources only a Sanctus exists with this melody, the transformations in the Agnus, including the intonation of Agnus 2, were surely made ad hoc by Du Fay. Echoes of this procedure will reappear in a few of his later works.31 The Kyrie is melodically and contrapuntally much simpler than the other two movements, but a good deal of its music appears indebted to melodic and contrapuntal gestures found in the Sanctus and Agnus. The tenor is clearly not a plainsong but is rather written in the manner Du Fay uses in some of his simplest songs. It survives not only in Bo Q15 but also as an isolated Kyrie in Ao 15, although surely it belongs with the movements in Bo Q15. Its structure presents a contrast with the Sanctus and Agnus not so much on paper as in performance. It consists of four sections: 1. Kyrie, 2. Christe, 3. Kyrie, and 4. Kyrie. The last section repeats all the music for the third section (13 mm.) and adds an extended close (14 mm.). In Bo Q15 first Kyrie and the Christe have a triple repeat sign and the next-to-last Kyrie a double repeat sign with a single invocation per section. In Ao 15 there are no repeat signs and the nine invocations are spread in the cantus 29 30 31

All measure numbers refer to OO Planchart 5/2. C. Wright, “A Fragmentary Manuscript.” See the discussion of the Missa sine nomine in Chapter 14.

Early Cycles of Three and Two Movements and the Early Isolated Movements Example 12.1 Sanctus, OO Planchart 5/2 (mm. 47–52)

and tenor 3, 3, 2, 1, with single invocations in the contratenor. But the text distribution is clumsy; musically the first Kyrie and the Christe are divided into two phrase groups each, not three. The version of Ao 15 probably is not original. To be sure, the Kyrie, if performed as in Ao 15, adds up to seventy-four breves, and balances the Sanctus well (93 breves), and the Agnus (52 breves), when performed as in Bo Q15, totals 155 breves. The scribe of Bo Q15 drastically altered all the isolated Kyries of Du Fay that he copied into his collection, removing plainsong and adding repetition marks, but this piece is clearly not a plainsong-based Kyrie. The manner in which this Kyrie is copied in Bo Q15 agrees with the way polyphonic Kyries were sung at Cambrai, if one is to judge from the repertories of Ca 6 and Ca 11, and this might be the way Du Fay thought at the time a polyphonic Kyrie should go. It also may be that if he added the Kyrie in Constance as I have proposed, he wanted it to balance the Zacara movements, particularly the Gloria that would follow it, which runs to 125 breves. Perhaps because it was written quickly the Kyrie is the least adventurous movement of the cycle. Its rhythmic and contrapuntal texture hark back to the kinds of writing of the generation of Grenon and Loqueville, although Du Fay’s melodic style is considerably more graceful. In the Sanctus (and the corresponding passage in the Agnus) we encounter, perhaps for the first time, a rhythmic and contrapuntal pattern that was to become almost a mannerism with Du Fay, an iambic figure in two voices displaced by a minim (see Ex. 12.1). For most of its length the cycle is as graceful and accomplished a piece as any talented and well-trained Northern composer could have written, but in a few passages, such as that in Example 12.1, we catch a glimpse of the fluidity and elegance that would quickly become a hallmark of Du Fay’s music. Still, the distance from this cycle to the brilliance of Vasilissa ergo gaude, written some five years later, where Du Fay has clearly absorbed the melodic and contrapuntal style of Ciconia and made it his own, is astonishing.

473

474

Ordinary of the Mass Movements

There are a number of works, however, that show that path. They survive mostly in north Italian or German sources, but may well be a product of Du Fay’s years in Cambrai between 1417 and 1420. These include the Kyrie–Gloria–Credo cycle (no. 1 in Table 12.1) and Glorias 6 and 8. Perhaps the earliest of these is Gloria 6. Despite its relatively late transmission, this Gloria appears to be a very early work. In very few other works of Du Fay do we encounter the profusion of short phrases with the kind of stop-and-go feeling found in this Gloria. The rhythmic and melodic language appear to be those of a Northerner who has just come into contact with Ciconia’s music but does not yet know how it really works. There is also a relatively obvious repetition of melodic and rhythmic formulas that calls attention to the repetition and to a certain rhythmic regularity produced by the many internal cadences where the rhythmic flow stops almost entirely, as well as an unusual number of dissonances that appear to be the product of a relatively casual approach to the relationship between the cantus and the contratenor. Gloria 8 and the Gloria and Credo of the three-movement cycle have an approach to text-setting where the text shifts from one voice to another while both are singing. This is not an uncommon feature in the early fifteenth century and it is found in the works of French and English composers. The index of Ox 213 indicates one such piece, a Gloria by Du Fay’s teacher, Loqueville, with the label cursiva,32 and following Hans Schoop, scholars have adopted this designation for this kind of textsetting.33 In these pieces the writing is considerably smoother than in Gloria 6. It is possible that the three-movement cycle is the latest work in this transitional group. The Gloria and the Credo are both in duple meter and have an extremely efficient manner of cursiva text-setting. Like Gloria 6, most of the phrases are short and compact, but the text shifts and the almost constant minim declamation throughout keep the momentum of both pieces going. The two movements share a good deal of motivic material, and I think that they were written first as a pair and the Kyrie is a later addition, though clearly meant as part of the cycle. If this thesis is correct, the Gloria, as the first movement of a pair, has an ending that for sheer musical wit is comparable only to something Haydn would do. As the movement reaches the final phrase of the text the nearly relentless declamation in minims changes to declamation in semibreves and for the first 32

33

Ox 213, fol. iir; the Gloria appears on fol. 69v, with concordances in Ao 15, fol. 93v, and Bo Q15, fol. 76v; edited in van den Borren, Polyphonia, 134, and Reaney, ed., Early Fifteenth-Century Music, 3:11. Schoop, Entstehung und Verwendung, 50–51.

Early Cycles of Three and Two Movements and the Early Isolated Movements Example 12.2 Gloria, OO Planchart 5/1 (mm. 53–62)

time both of the upper voices sing the text (see Ex. 12.2). At Dei patris there is no real cadence; the music stops briefly, followed by a two-note Amen that manages to sound absolutely final while blissfully ignoring every rule of what a discant cadence should be. The effect is all the more unexpected because even though the Gloria has a G final, the second half of the piece has been cadencing consistently on D, and the shift in all three voices between measures 60 and 61 is also unpredictable, with the possible exception of the contratenor. This cadence must have sounded as exotic to early fifteenth-century ears as the cadence that closes the theme of the second movement of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, Op. 49, sounded to early twentieth-century ears. The addition of the Kyrie, a smoothly written work in triple meter that in many ways recalls the Kyrie of Du Fay’s earlier Kyrie–Sanctus– Agnus, would probably blunt the surprise of the Gloria’s ending. But Du Fay uses the same two-note progression, approached slightly more conventionally, in both the Kyrie and the Credo. This trait of using a characteristic ending or final section to unify his Ordinary cycles is something that will continue to appear in Du Fay’s music to the end of his life. The remainder of the works mentioned above as being copied in Bo Q15 before 1425 most likely belong to the years Du Fay spent in the service of the Malatesta. At the very beginning of this period we have the brilliant motet Vasilissa ergo gaude of 1420, and the music of Du Fay in the three Gloria–Credo pairs already reflects both the fluidity and imagination we find in the motet, though not its very Italianate sound, which in Vasilissa ergo gaude was surely a deliberate attempt by Du Fay to emulate Ciconia’s sound. The Lantins–Du Fay pair appears to have been a joint project and not simply the result of the editorial initiative of the scribe of Bo Q15; they share a good number of traits, including cleffing, mensuration, and some motivic material. Fallows has made a perceptive comparison of the two works, which

475

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Ordinary of the Mass Movements

need not be rehearsed here,34 but a few small observations can be added. Lantins’s treatment of the text in the Gloria is more discursive than what we usually find in Du Fay, and the settings of “Laudamus te. Benedicimus te” and “Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis” tend to sound like run-on sentences, but echoes of the extraordinary opening of the Gloria can be heard in Du Fay’s presumably later Missa sine nomine. The passage in imitation at the fifth in Du Fay’s Credo mentioned by Fallows35 (mm. 35–40) is the first of a number of passages where Du Fay uses the same motive or a close variant that shifts from voice to voice (mm. 103–10, 126–35). Michael Allsen calls this procedure “rhythmic sequence,” and has traced it in a number of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century motets, including Royllart’s Rex Karole, Ciconia’s incomplete Padu . . . serenans, Du Fay’s Vassilisa ergo gaude, and the anonymous Elizabeth Zachariae, which is clearly a conscious imitation of Du Fay’s motets.36 In terms of music for the Mass, the passages in Du Fay’s Gloria, particularly that in measures 126–35, point the way to the extended use of this procedure as a means of unification in several movements of his Missa sine nomine.37 The two Gloria–Credo pair nos. 2–3 probably come from the later part of Du Fay’s Malatesta years. Both begin in , progressing to (with no. 3 returning to at the end), a mensural progression characteristic of the Missa sine nomine and of Apostolo glorioso, with which both pairs have much in common, not least the enormous rhythmic energy. Gloria–Credo 2 survives in a copy from stage I in Bo Q15, but the version of Gloria– Credo 3 in that manuscript is from stage III, copied after 1430.38 This might have misled Fallows into placing it in the 1430s,39 which is only partially correct. Bent has found traces of both movements on the back of some of the initials cut out from the discarded pages of the earliest version of Bo Q15 and pasted onto music copied into the revised manuscript in the 1430s; this shows that the two movements were in the earliest version of the manuscript but were not copied adjacently (even though they are an authorial pair) and were surely for three voices,40 so the recopying in the 1430s was not only to bring them together but to include a contratenor, which was surely added by Du Fay and is included in all other copies of the work. This addition might also have prompted some revision of the other

34 37

38

Fallows, Dufay, 176–77. 35 Ibid., 177. 36 Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 113–15. Cf. Missa Sine nomine, Kyrie, mm. 69–73; Gloria, mm. 40–50, 129–35, 176–80; Sanctus, mm. 51–55, 96–100. The rhythmic imitation in the Kyrie is particularly close to that in Du Fay’s Credo in this pair. Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:187–88. 39 Fallows, Dufay, 178. 40 Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:187–88.

Early Cycles of Three and Two Movements and the Early Isolated Movements

voices as well, resulting in the piece sounding later than Gloria–Credo 2, as Fallows notes, but no copy of the original three-voice version exists. In both pairs Du Fay creates the pairing by procedures that were common in the early fifteenth century: opening both movements with virtually the same melodic and contrapuntal gesture and writing music with such a restricted harmonic range that the Gloria and the Credo, even when the melodic gestures are not alike, sound like variations of each other. In Gloria– Credo 2 Du Fay adds a trait that he will continue to use in his Masses to the end of his life, namely, creating an extended final section in both movements related either by melodic or contrapuntal similarities. In this case both movements have two Amen sections. One consists of four “chords” in cantus coronatus (the same “progression” in both movements), and the second an extended section where the mensuration shifts to , and each of the four voices sings an Easter trope, in the Gloria a phrase from the Peregrinus plays, and in the Credo lines from one of the verses of the prose Surgit Christus cum tropaeo.41 But the melodies used for the tropes are either folk songs or some form of chanson rustique,42 and the scribe of Bo Q15 provided their original text above the trope text. For the Gloria a garbled French couplet: “Tu m’as monte sur la pance et riens n’a fait, Otre te reface Dieu que ce m’a fait,” clearly a woman’s spiteful comment to a lover who did not perform as expected, and for the Credo “La villanella non è bella se non la domenica,” simply commenting that rustic girls look better on Sundays. Later copies either leave out the trope text or, as in Cambrai, replace the Credo trope with an all-purpose Marian trope. From the later transmission of the works, both pairs were among Du Fay’s most successful early works, and there is little wonder; they marry the pellucid textures of the Missa sine nomine to the rhythmic energy one finds in Apostolo glorioso. In addition, Gloria–Credo 3 is contrapuntally and tonally an immensely adventuresome work, where passages of “white-note counterpoint” alternate with highly colored passages where signed notes go from F♯ on one side all the way to D♭ on the other. This is all the more interesting because the pieces have an F final, and the kinds of tonal shifts Du Fay uses here appear in his later works mostly in pieces with a G or a C final. Particularly striking is the sudden change of color caused by the appearance of an E♭. Du Fay uses this quite often, creating near cross-relations between different parts. This will remain very much a trait of his music, particularly in pieces with a G final, where the “changing notes” are B and B♭ (e.g., in Nuper rosarum flores and above all in the Missa L’homme armé). Much of the writing in this Gloria and 41

AH 54:366.

42

See Gülke, “Das Volkslied.”

477

478

Ordinary of the Mass Movements Example 12.3 Credo, OO Planchart 5/5 (mm. 113–17)

Credo resembles his writing in pieces with a C final, which is the main secondary goal throughout both. The strangest sounding passage in the pair occurs in the Credo, measures 113–14, but it is contrapuntally quite correct, given the frequent use of accented passing notes at this time; to be sure, Du Fay’s choice of a verticality consisting of e♭, g, a, and d′ on the second beat of measure 114 is startling, but the dissonance sets up even more spectacularly the arrival of the C sonority in measure 115 (see Ex. 12.3). There may also be a deliberate attempt at some sort of word-painting, for the texted voices are singing “iudicare,” referring to the Last Judgment. There are enough instances of word-painting in Du Fay’s music that this does not seem improbable. The remaining Mass movements composed before 1425 are Glorias 5 and 9. The latter is a breathless canon for two cantus voices supported by two parts singing “ad modum tubae,”43 a simple ostinato c′, c′, g, c′, g, in alternation for more than half of the length of the piece, which evolves into a short fanfare, c′, e′, c′, g. This then alternates for a few measures with the previous figure, and finally dissolves in fragments of the first figure and a final repetition of the c′ before a final flourish. Virtually the entire piece is essentially for three voices as the lower parts do not sound together until near the end. The piece appears to have been popular in Du Fay’s time, being copied well into the 1450s, and it became wildly popular with twentiethcentury performers when Du Fay’s music began to be revived in the 1930s and 1940s. Margaret Bent has provided a stylistic context for it: such voices appear at the time in a number of pieces, and in Du Fay’s canon they seem to be connected with the isorhythmic motets with two cantus parts, such as Apostolo glorioso (1424) and Rite maiorem (1426), both of which are provided with a solus tenor (which is what the two tuba parts in the Gloria amount to).

43

The rubric itself implies singing rather that the use of an actual instrument with the term ad modum, “in the manner of.”

Early Cycles of Three and Two Movements and the Early Isolated Movements

In addition, a good number of Du Fay’s tenor motets up to Apostolo glorioso open an introitus in unison canon, so the Gloria takes the conceit of the unison canon, the solus tenor, and the addition of a tuba part and extends it to the entire piece. The Gloria thus stands partway between being a jeu d’esprit and a “novelty piece,” which does explain its popularity with listeners then and now, as well as occasional opprobrium from some of its critics.44 I have left the discussion of Gloria 5 for the end of this group because the piece presents special problems not only per se but in the manner it has been discussed in the literature. The work is a short, highly sectional setting of the text copied in a single Stage II opening in Bo Q15 and nowhere else. This means that the version we have was copied after 1430, but as Margaret Bent has shown, about a third of the contents of Stage I was discarded by the scribe when he conflated the manuscript with an incipient second book. Many of the discarded pieces were recopied in Stage II, and their presence in Stage I has been determined by Bent because she has managed to identify a number of minuscule fragments of music on the obverse of capitals that the scribe of Bo Q15 cut off from the discarded leaves and then pasted into a good number of the pieces copied in Stage II.45 At the same time we cannot assume that the surviving bits represent more than a fraction of the pieces discarded in their Stage I copies and recopied in Stage II, and in terms of its style this Gloria is one that probably had been copied in Stage I. The motivic surface of the Gloria is reminiscent of the music we find in the Kyrie–Sanctus–Agnus cycle, but also in the Kyrie–Gloria–Credo cycle. This prompted Fallows to propose that the Gloria belonged with the first of these two cycles, which at the time he dated ca. 1426, based upon the similarities he heard between these pieces and the song Adieu ces bon vins de Lanoys.46 This is clearly untenable, although Fallows’s intuition that, if anything, the Gloria preceded the song, is correct, and indeed the song might have been influenced as he suggests by the Gloria, but the two are certainly not contemporary, and neither is the vineux cycle contemporary with them.47 At a time when the chronology of Bo Q15 was all but unknown, André Pirro proposed that the Gloria might have been written for the wedding of Louis of Savoy and Anne of 44

45 47

Fallows, Dufay, 179: “a tiresome work.” This was in fact the first piece of Du Fay I ever sang as a preteen chorister, in a composite Mass where the Kyrie came from Ockeghem’s L’homme armé, and for a few years I retained the impression that Du Fay was not as serious or as interesting a composer as Ockeghem. Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:243–92. 46 Fallows, Dufay, 42, 175. The name given here to the cycle is based on a name associated with the cantus fractus that serves as its tenor in the ascription of a Sanctus by Loqueville based upon the same tenor in Bo Q15, fol. 20v; see also C. Wright, “A Fragmentary Manuscript,” 313–14.

479

480

Ordinary of the Mass Movements

Lusignan in 1434, which took place on Shrove Tuesday (le jour des quaremiaux).48 This date is too late, since the Gloria had been copied by 1433. Besseler assigned the Gloria to quadragesima, the first Sunday in Lent,49 and Elders, on the basis of number symbolism, proposed Holy Saturday.50 All these assignments are liturgically absurd. The Gloria was not sung from Septuagesima to Good Friday,51 and upon its first singing on Easter Eve it was done with the highest solemnity, something that the slender Gloria 5 cannot make a claim to. Pirro’s instinct, associating the Gloria with Shrove Tuesday, which was Mardi Gras, is probably correct. Quaremiaux was used to refer not just to Mardi Gras but to the three days of carnival that preceded Ash Wednesday, and the tenor of the Gloria resembles nothing so much as the tenor of Portugaler or Or me veut, a piece probably associated with the performance by the blind fiddlers of Isabel de Portugal during the wedding festivities of 1434 and almost surely a dance tune. This is not to say that the Gloria was written or even performed at that time, but that its tenor was surely a secular melody, possibly associated with the dances during carnival season. While the upper voices do resemble motivically some of the earlier pieces, particularly the Kyries of the two three-movement cycles, the mensural transformations that the tenor (and the other voices) are subjected to resemble the motets of the Malatesta years. The Gloria is indeed written like a smallscale tenor motet, and this conceit is made even more apparent by the extravagant Amen in triplets, very much a motetlike gesture. It is, like a number of early works of Du Fay, sacred and secular, a whimsical piece. Motivically and in terms of its phrase structure it looks back to some of his earlier settings, but mensurally and texturally its context is the music Du Fay wrote for the Malatesta. If Du Fay wrote any Mass music in his year in Laon in 1425, it has not survived. From the years in Bologna, 1426–1428, we have the Missa Sancti Iacobi, a problematic work with a long gestation that will be discussed in Chapter 7, and Sanctus 7 in Table 12.1. The origins of this work have been noted above in Volume I, Chapter 2. It is a flowing, large-scale piece that Fallows has rightly argued has all the earmarks of a work written for two ensembles answering each other, one of choirboys and their master, and the other an adult choir.52 It has a highly sectional structure because Du Fay used 48

49 51 52

The term was used for Shrove Tuesday but also for the three days of carnival that preceded Lent; cf. La Curne de Saint Palaye, Dictionaire, s.v. “Caresmeaux”; also Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “Caresmeaux.” OO Besseler 4, no. 23. 50 Elders, “Zur Aufführungpraxis,” 91–95. It was spoken, but not sung, on Maundy Thursday. Fallows, Dufay, 181; id., “Specific Information,” 124.

Early Cycles of Three and Two Movements and the Early Isolated Movements

as a trope to the Sanctus an early fourteenth-century Eucharistic hymn, Ave verum corpus natum, variously (and incorrectly) ascribed to Thomas Aquinas and to Pope Innocent IV,53 which survives also as a trope to the Osanna in a few manuscripts.54 The trope ends with two lines that, although part of the hymn from the beginning, do not rhyme and are virtually a reference to the end of the Salve regina. Du Fay set most of the trope in separate sections for the ensemble of choirboys and their master, and the main liturgical text for the adult choir. Interestingly, he set the nonrhyming final two lines for the adult choir, which suggests that he did not consider them an integral part of the hymn itself. The choice of the Eucharistic hymn as a trope makes sense in that the Sanctus was sung surrounding the consecration and the elevation. Thus Du Fay’s original version consisted of a piece for three voices, each of which was divided at one point or another during the performance. The cantus was divided in two for all the settings of the hymn.55 The tenor sang throughout the piece; its only extended rest, twenty breves in the Qui venit, is carefully notated in all sources. It was “divided” in that the tenor singer who sang with the choirboys was probably not the same singer who sang with the adult ensemble except when both ensembles joined, if they did so. The contratenor was divided at two points, Sanctus 3 and Osanna 1, which show a first and second contratenor. The plainsong intonations, by virtue of their clef and key signature, belong to the tenor. This Sanctus is Du Fay’s most extended essay of the kind of work that, at its simplest, can be described as “three-voice music for at least four singers,” a technique found in a good number of early fifteenth-century works that has been studied in considerable detail by Margaret Bent, who was probably the first scholar to notice its existence as a definite technique.56 Pieces of this type posed a problem for music scribes, and this Sanctus is the most extreme case. Even the literate scribe of Bo Q15, who clearly knew most of Du Fay’s music up to the mid-1430s very well, was unable to produce a clear copy of it. This work is one of the earliest examples of Du Fay writing music with the smooth melodic and rhythmic ductus that Besseler called Strohmrythmus.57 It is a spacious and remarkably ambitious work, full of what in the mid-1420s 53 54 55

56

AH 54:257, no. 167; see also Szovérffy, Die Annalen, 2:298–99. See Thannabaur, 165–66, no. 116. An aspect of the divided cantus that has not been remarked upon is the further subdivision of cantus 1 in the first section of the piece, which has a set of double notes (mm. 15–16). If the cantus was sung by the choirboys, it is almost certain that Du Fay, following the Cambrai tradition, expected all six to sing the part; then when the cantus was divided, two groups of three would sing the two lines, which allowed the further division of cantus 1. Bent, “Divisi and a versi,” 111–14. 57 Besseler, Bourdon und Fauxbourdon, 129–38.

481

482

Ordinary of the Mass Movements

would have been considered a new sound, including the impressive full triads in six parts at the start of the first Osanna. This was probably a work written sub spem from Bologna but for the papal chapel and what he surely viewed as an ensemble from Cambrai – Grenon and his choristers – showing how advanced his music was at the time. Nonetheless, here he eschews the rhythmic and textural complexities of the motets, since he had to trust that the work would be prepared and sung without his presence. Bockholdt has offered a fairly detailed analysis of the work that remains extremely useful.58 His only misconception, shared by Besseler, is that the tenor is derived from an actual plainsong. In fact, neither the intonations nor the tenor correspond to any known Sanctus melody, and, as with the Missa sine nomine and the Sanctus and Agnus 2, it is most likely that Du Fay simply wrote the intonations ad hoc. One aspect of the work remains puzzling, its marked textural asymmetry; the play back and forth of two different ensembles culminates in the extraordinary Osanna 1 with its six-part opening (where presumably both ensembles sang). From the Benedictus on (which surely was to be sung after the elevation and thus separated by some time from the first part of the Sanctus) the texture remains strictly three voices, without even a double note anywhere, and the cantus, which in the first section goes up to f ″, never goes above c″. So it is possible that the second half of the piece was done only by the adult choir. We must remember that the use of choirboys was a new thing in the papal chapel, and the experiment lasted about two years. There are no ordinals or customaries from this time for the chapel, so we do not know how the choirboys were used. On the other hand, there is evidence from Cambrai, albeit much later, that shows that choirboys could be required to sing only in parts of a work. Du Fay’s will mentions payments to the choirboys who will sing in the Gloria of his Mass for St. Anthony of Padua, and the wording implies that they sing in the Gloria but not in the rest of the Mass.59 A rubric in Tr 92 connects this Sanctus to a long and elaborate Agnus Dei written in the manner of a tenor motet. The rubric, entered at the end of the contratenor on fol. 214v, reads: “agnus huius ab ante in v°folio” (the Agnus of this [Sanctus] is in the fifth folio back). The Agnus was accepted as Du Fay’s work by Besseler,60 very tentatively by Fallows,61 and entirely rejected by Bockholdt, who provides a detailed analysis of the contrapuntal 58 59 61

Bockholdt, Die frühen Messenkompositionen, 1:95–98. LAN, 4G 1313, p. 73; Houdoy, Histoire artistique, 412–13. Fallows, Dufay, 181.

60

OO Besseler 4, no. 7.

Early Cycles of Three and Two Movements and the Early Isolated Movements

procedures and concludes that the composer of that piece “belongs to a tradition different from that of Du Fay.”62 Bockholdt is surely correct: the Agnus has a large number of traits, including the segmentation of the tenor, that are entirely foreign to Du Fay’s style, and a number of melodic turns that are not only unlike Du Fay’s music, but could also be so easily changed to something one finds in Du Fay that one must conclude that the composer of the Agnus simply has a very different melodic style. Near the end of the work, however, one hears moments that indicate that the composer had heard Du Fay’s Nuper rosarum flores, and the last section of that motet had made an impression.63 This in turn may explain both the style of the work and its connection to the Du Fay Sanctus. The piece is clearly a product of the late 1430s. In this context it is well to remember that beginning in late 1436 the papal chapel recruited a number of choirboys, who sang in the chapel until ca. 1441.64 This probably led to a revival of the Du Fay Sanctus and the composition by someone of an Agnus “to go with it,” as the rubric of Tr 92 indicates. This someone might be a composer active in Florence in the mid-1430s who probably knew Du Fay and his music and admired it, but whose style is entirely different from that of Du Fay. The most likely candidate is Benoit Sirede, a singer of the chapel of the Baptistery and later of the Duomo in Florence all through the 1430s, who had been a singer and music teacher in Orsanmichele, and who is almost certainly the principal scribe of ModB, a manuscript dominated by the music of Du Fay.65 All the remaining works treated in this chapter come from the years between 1429 and 1437, that is, Du Fay’s years in the papal chapel and his first years in the chapel of the duke of Savoy. The transmission of these pieces is quite scattered, so that an accurate chronology remains impossible. In some ways the most problematic of this group of pieces is the Kyrie–Gloria pair listed as no. 6 in Table 12.1, which most likely dated from Du Fay’s first short stay in Savoy in 1434. The problems presented by this pair of movements and the different reactions of music historians to each piece are treated later in this chapter. Two groups of pieces, the isolated Kyries and the plainsong-based Glorias, appear to coalesce into two coherent cycles, and I will treat them as such. It is probably best to begin with them since, as in the case of the 62 63 64

65

Bockholdt, Die frühen Messenkompositionen, 98–102. Cf. Agnus in OO Planchart 5/6, mm. 269 to the end. The first notice of them is Dec. 1436; their first payment is Oct. 1437, and these continue until Oct. 1441; see Planchart, “Institutional Politics,” 138–39. See Haar and Nádas, “The Medici, the Signoria, the Pope,” 27 and 36–42.

483

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Ordinary of the Mass Movements

hymns, it seems Du Fay wrote them for the papal chapel, even though, as with the hymns, he may have written some of them during his leave of absence in 1433–1435.

The Kyrie Cycle As shown in Table 12.1, we have ten Kyries by Du Fay setting eight plainsong melodies. This number excludes the Kyries of the Missa sine nomine, the Missa Sancti Iacobi, the Missa Sancti Antonii de Padua et Sancti Francisci, and those of the two three-movement cycles, all of which were occasionally copied as separate movements, as well as a Kyrie copied anonymously in Ca 6 and 11, but ascribed to Du Fay in Tr 92. Craig Monson made a convincing argument that this last work cannot be by Du Fay, and a less convincing one that the work might be English.66 It might be by a Continental composer strongly influenced by English music, but surely not Du Fay.67 The Du Fay Kyries present the scholar with a curious and counterintuitive pattern. In what is surely the best source for his early works, which is Bo Q15, and even in Ao 15, their actual structure has been seriously distorted by the intervention of the scribe, even though their liturgical designations, particularly those in Bo Q15, are the more accurate ones. Two slightly younger sources, Tr 87 and 92, transmit the Kyries in versions that are surely closer to what Du Fay wrote in terms of the structure of the pieces, even though in their liturgical rubrics they represent a tradition foreign to Du Fay’s milieu at the time. The result of this situation, which was not known to Besseler when he edited the pieces for his Opera Omnia,68 is that some of the pieces, largely those that were not copied in Bo Q15 or Ao 15, were published in a form closer to Du Fay’s putative originals than those edited from Bo Q15 or Ao 15. This also requires that the modern editor of these works do something that usually runs counter to the instincts of most modern editors, which is to actively reconstruct the original structure of the Kyries found only in Bo Q15 or Ao 15. 66 67

68

Monson, “Stylistic Inconsistencies.” The ascription to Du Fay in Tr 922 is in the second index of the manuscript compiled by Hanns Volp, but not above the Kyrie itself (see Bent, “The Trent 92 and Aosta Indexes in Context,” 71); P. Wright is unconvinced the work is actually English, and suggested Binchois as its author (P. Wright, “Englishness in a Kyrie”). OO Besseler 4, nos. 9–19.

The Kyrie Cycle

The first scholar to note this was Edward Kovarik. His study of the Kyries, presented with extraordinary modesty as a performance matter although it covered a number of other topics, did not at first receive the attention it really merited.69 Even in 1998 I still tried to make sense of the Kyries as transmitted in the sources,70 but in preparing the pieces for the new Opera Omnia it became clearer to me that Kovarik’s approach is the only sound one. At the root of this is a simple proposition: all of Du Fay’s Kyries that are not part of “a Mass” cycle, even a short one of three movements, are chant paraphrase settings, and all were intended for alternatim performance with the first invocation always sung in plainsong. The only exception to the strict alternation is Kyrie 5, where Du Fay sets not only the eighth invocation but also the ninth one to polyphony. The scribe of Bo Q15 simply suppressed all the plainsong from his copy of the Kyries and provided triple repeat signs. Other early copies have neither plainsong nor repeat signs, and the layout of the manuscripts that include the plainsong, mostly Tr 87 and Tr 92, was often misinterpreted by Besseler. Kovarik provides particularly persuasive evidence for the first of the propositions in the previous paragraph. He was the first to notice that the Trent codices provide what he calls a “seven section short form” of an alternatim Kyrie that saves space and provides all the music necessary for a full performance.71 This scheme is as follows: 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Kyrie chant

Kyrie polyphony

Christe polyphony

Christe chant

Kyrie chant

Kyrie polyphony

Kyrie chant

The most common form of the plainsong Kyries in use in Du Fay’s time is Kyrie 1–3: a–a–a, Christe 4–6: b–b–b, Kyrie 7–9: c–c–c′. The scheme above allows Kyrie 3 to be sung from the chant in section 1, and Christe 6 to be sung from the polyphony of section 3. The more elaborate chant of Kyrie 9 (virtually a constant trait in most plainsong Kyries) requires the writing in full of sections 5 and 7. In the case of Kyrie 5 in Table 12.1, the scribe of Tr 87 used the same scheme, but copied the polyphony for sections 6 and 7 of the scheme. Further confirmation of Kovarik’s thesis 69

70

Kovarik, “The Performance”; by and large there are no references to it in most of the literature except for Fallows, Dufay. Planchart, “Music for the Papal Chapel,” 109–14. 71 Kovarik, “The Performance,” 239.

485

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Ordinary of the Mass Movements

is provided by those settings where the plainsong is more elaborate, with the following pattern: Kyrie 1–3: a–b–a, Christe 4–6: c–d–c, Kyrie 7–9: e–f– e′, and the polyphony sets strains b, c, and f. This is true, as he shows, even of Kyrie 8 in Table 12.1, where the first Kyrie in Du Fay’s polyphony sets a melody that resembles that of Christe 5 (d) in the modern Vatican edition. It turns out, however, that in Italian manuscripts at the time, the melody for Kyrie 2 is that used for Christe 5 in the French and English sources that form the basis for the modern edition of the plainsong.72 Kovarik cautions that some of the melodies that Du Fay uses in his Kyries appear in Italian sources, others in French sources, and a few have variants that have not been traced in any surviving plainsong, and thus he concludes that Du Fay probably did not write the Kyrie cycle in Rome, but perhaps in Savoy.73 This is surely correct as far as it goes, and reflects what was known about Du Fay’s life at the time. He probably began writing the Kyries in Rome, and continued writing them into the late 1430s, using plainsongs from chantbooks available to him wherever he was. But he remained a member of the papal chapel from 1428 to 1437, and during his first sojourn in Savoy and the journey to Cambrai in 1434–1435 he was on an authorized leave of absence.74 Further, the chant melodies he uses for the Kyries are not, as in the case of the three hymn melodies, different from those used in Rome, but rather variants of those melodies.75 That said, the Kyries set by Du Fay cover the hierarchy of feasts used by the papal chapel in a uniquely efficient manner (see Table 12.2). Two things need to be noted concerning this table. The first is the status of Kyrie Vat 1, Mel 39. This melody is almost never included in the Kyrie section of the Graduals where it appears, but is copied as part of the temporale, in the formulary for the Vigil of Easter.76 By the mid-fifteenth century its association with Easter itself had become commonplace, particularly in polyphonic sources, as shown by the rubrics entered in Tr 93 for all the settings of this melody, including Du Fay’s, all of which are labeled “pascale.”77 The second is that before the third quarter of the fifteenth century there would have been no polyphonic setting of the Kyrie in agenda mortuorum, since the Mass for the Dead was regarded as inappropriate for the use of polyphony.78 72 75 77 78

Ibid., 241–42. 73 Ibid., 242. 74 ASV, RS, 303, fols. 90r–91r. See Kovarik, “The Performance,” 242, n. 32 for details. 76 See Pothier, “Le Kyrie pascal.” Tr 93, fols. 105r–107r: four settings, one by Binchois, one by Du Fay, and two anonymous. This is reflected in the ordinance for the votive Masses founded by the duke of Burgundy at the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon in 1431, which were to be “a haulte voix a chant et deschant fors quand le service sera de Requiem”; cf. Prizer, “Music and Ceremonial,” 116.

The Kyrie Cycle

Table 12.2 The Kyrie melodies and their liturgical assignations in the papal tradition Assignment

Melodya

Du Fay’s setting

[Easter Vigil/Easter] In maioribus duplicibus In minoribus duplicibus In maioribus semiduplicibus In minoribus semiduplicibus In dominicis diebus In maioribus simplicibus In minoribus simplicibus In ferialibus diebus et trium lectionibus In agenda mortuorum In festis BMV et commemorationibus

Vat 1, Mel 39 Vat 2, Mel 48 Vat 4, Mel 18 Vat 6, Mel 47 Vat 14, Mel 68 Vat 11, Mel 16 Vat 12, Mel 58 Vat 16, Mel 217 Vat –, Mel 7 Vat 18b, Mel 101 Vat 9, Mel 171

Kyrie 1 Kyrie 2a and b Kyrie 3 Kyrie 4 Kyrie 5 Kyrie 6a and b Kyrie 7 – – – Kyrie 8

a

See Kovarik, “The Performance,” 235, and id., “Mid Fifteenth-Century Polyphonic Elaborations,” 1:672–77, for the plainsong sources consulted, and Eifrig and Pfisterer, eds., Melodien zum Ite Missa est, xii–xiii, with a list of sources as well.

It is probably unlikely that polyphony was used at this time for the ferial Kyrie; furthermore, the plainsong for it is both so simple and so short that it very likely did not invite any polyphonic elaboration beyond perhaps one improvised supra librum. We are most likely missing Du Fay’s setting of the Kyrie for the minor simple feasts. Its plainsong melody is very simple and repetitive,79 but, as appears below, he did set the Gloria for feasts of this rank. In any case, a search of fifteenth-century polyphonic sources has turned up thus far not a single setting of this plainsong Kyrie. Thus it is possible that despite the scattered transmission of these pieces we might actually have Du Fay’s entire Kyrie cycle. The textures used in the setting are similar to those used in the hymns. Two of the Kyries survive in two versions, one for two cantus voices and tenor, with the plainsong paraphrased in cantus 2, and the other for cantus, contratenor (or fauxbourdon) and tenor, with the plainsong paraphrased in the cantus. The first texture occurs once in the hymn cycle, in Christe redemptor omnium – Conserva, and there again in a hymn provided with two settings, one with two cantus voices and the other a fauxbourdon setting; but while both versions of the hymn appear in later copies as well as in Bo Q15, the versions with two cantus voices of Kyries 2 and 6 are unique to Bo Q15 in one instance and Tr 87 79

Kovarik, “The Performance,” 235, notes that the melody in the Roman books is a variant rather than an exact match of Vat 16 (Mel 217); it is given in ibid., “Mid Fifteenth-Century Polyphonic Elaborations,” 1:134–35.

487

488

Ordinary of the Mass Movements Example 12.4 Chant paraphrase in Kyrie 1

in the other, and Kovarik regards them as an early attempt that Du Fay decided not to pursue further.80 Du Fay’s setting of Kyrie 1 may serve as an example of his approach to these pieces. Example 12.4 gives the plainsong for the first Kyrie and Du Fay’s elaboration in the cantus. The plainsong moves entirely by step except for three thirds: a–c′, b–g, and g–e. These are the intervals that Du Fay chose to ornament. Of course, adding a passing tone, the simplest possible ornament, would simply close the only leaps in the melody; his solution is a figure that places the passing tone in the metric position one would expect and at the same time underlines the leap itself by repeating it. This must have been deliberate because the ornament in measure 4 is an exact inversion of that in measure 2. In measures 5–7 he uses the g–a– g–f–g of the chant to emphasize the final of the entire Kyrie, G, putting the three gs on initia and writing a rhythmic pattern that emphasizes those arrivals. The added e′ in measure 6 produces a traditional cadential figure leading to the g′. He gives that g′ enough time to sound before adding the single passing tone to the e′ and prolonging it with a cadential figure. The addition of the tenor is simplicity itself (see Ex. 12.5). The octaves indicate the goals of the setting, the stable points of the structure. At the start Du Fay opens up the contrapuntal structure by a small bit of contrary motion that underlines the rise in the cantus. In measure 2 the tenor leaps to the c′ that is the goal of the first phrase and then climbs one more step to set up the cantus cadential progression a′–b′–c″, as 5, 6, 8. A possible rhythmic dead spot in measure 3 is prevented by the active pickup of the tenor that leads to the second phrase. The second phrase begins with contrary motion, leading to the smallest interval between the voices at measure 5; from then on the tenor proceeds like a fauxbourdon tenor to the cadence in measure 7. This is a slightly dangerous moment: the cadence on G has been elaborately set (at least in terms of the context of this piece), and G is the final, so there is a danger that the arrival would be heard as a 80

Kovarik, “The Performance,” 232.

The Kyrie Cycle Example 12.5 Contrapuntal structure of Kyrie 1

Example 12.6 Kyrie 1, first invocation

premature cadence. At this point the tenor leaps a fourth on the second semibreve and uses a gesture similar to that Du Fay uses to prevent a rhythmic dead spot in measure 3. It also acts as a “direction sign,” pulling the music down from the octave g–g′ toward the end on E. Well-trained singers in the fifteenth century would probably have sung F in the tenor in measure 1 and in the cantus in measure 6. Du Fay’s contratenor is deliberately written to prevent the F♯ in the tenor, but in addition he uses it to shade the contrapuntal structure in a number of ways (see Ex. 12.6). The contratenor adds texture and rhythmic activity in the first three measures, but beginning with measure 4 it alters the sonority of the piece in a number of ways. Rather than the bare octaves at the start of measures 3 and 4, the second phrase now begins with the considerably richer and less stable 3–10 sonority, and the 5–10 under the minims in measure 4 becomes a bit more stable and recalls the 3–5 under the minims at measure 3. The nearly pure fauxbourdon progression in measures 5–7 is now disturbed by the 3–8 in the second beat of measure 5. The arrival at the G sonority in measure 7 is still supported by a solid 5–8, but the contratenor in that measure works with the tenor to create the downward pull to the final cadence. Further, apart from the opening sonority, all the 5–8 combinations are now reserved for a point of arrival. This is a relatively simple contratenor. It is not the kind of part that Besseler called Harmonieträger,81 which is a concept I find entirely 81

Besseler, Bourdon und Fauxbourdon, 235.

489

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Ordinary of the Mass Movements

misleading. The basic structure of the Kyrie remains a cantus–tenor duet that is self-contained, but the sound and the musical rhetoric of the piece with and without the contratenor are entirely different; the contratenor makes the piece a vastly more interesting work. This is something that can be said of most of Du Fay’s contratenors. They are not contrapuntally (i.e., grammatically) essential, but they are compositionally (i.e. rhetorically) crucially important in virtually all of his music.

The Gloria Cycle That Du Fay probably thought of the Kyries as something of a cycle is also suggested by what appears to be a cycle of Glorias based upon plainsong. The transmission of these pieces is slightly less scattered than that of the Kyries; most of them appear in Bo Q15, and all are found in Tr 92. The papal chapel’s liturgical ranking of the Gloria melodies, like its ranking of the Kyries, was based upon the Franciscan tradition. It is shown in Table 12.3. This table presents an interesting contrast with the previous table. The “gap” in Du Fay’s production appears to be at the top, that is, for the most solemn feasts, which surely were the most likely to be sung in polyphony. This “gap,” however, has a possible explanation that not only reinforces the idea that he thought of the Kyries and the Glorias as a cycle but also that he conceived of them as connected in some sense with the papal ceremonies. The first thing we need to notice is that the Roman tradition in the case of the Glorias provided for one plainsong that could be sung for the minor semidoubles and for the Sundays infra annum, and another that could be sung in the Sundays infra annum and for the major simple feasts. This is something that has its roots in the origins of the plainsong Gloria repertory; there were always fewer Gloria melodies than Kyrie melodies at any given locale, which prompted the editors of the Vatican edition in the late nineteenth century to mine the manuscripts of the Beneventan tradition for Glorias, which is something they avoided doing for all the other Ordinary chants.82 In any case, Du Fay set each melody only once, and his settings are modest enough that they would not seem out of place in feasts of either rank. That he did set the Gloria for the minor simple feasts, which had a separate melody, makes me think that we are indeed missing his setting of the Kyrie for feasts of that rank.

82

See Boe, ed., Beneventanum Troporum Corpus, 2/2, Gloria in Excelsis, xv–xvi.

The Gloria Cycle

Table 12.3 Liturgical assignment of the Gloria melodies in the papal tradition Assignment

Melody

Du Fay’s setting

In maioribus duplicibus In minoribus duplicibus In maioribus semiduplicibus In minoribus semiduplicibus In dominicis diebus (1) In dominicis diebus (2) In maioribus simplicibus In minoribus simplicibus In ferialibus diebus et trium lectionibus In agenda mortuorum In festis BMV et commemorationibus

Vat ad lib 1, Bosse 24 Vat 4, Bosse 56 Vat 2, Bosse 19 Vat 11, Bosse 51 Vat 11, Bosse 51 Vat 14, Bosse 11 Vat 14, Bosse 11 Vat 15, Bosse 43 Gloria not sung no Gloria Vat 9, Bosse 23

– – – Gloria 1 Gloria 1 Gloria 2 Gloria 2 Gloria 3 – – Gloria 4

The gap for the feasts of the higher rank, however, may be explained by the traditions of the papal chapel and of northern Italy. It is clear that the north Italian sacred repertory of the early fifteenth century includes a number of Gloria–Credo pairs, and it is more than likely that in the papal chapel in the feasts of the highest rank not only the Gloria but the Credo was sung in polyphony. The pieces that belonged to that tradition, particularly those of Zacara, were not chant derived, and though the use of plainsong in settings of the Credo begins at around this time in the socalled Patrem de Village settings,83 by and large a coupling of a polyphonic Gloria and a polyphonic Credo led to neither piece being based on a plainsong. By the time Du Fay joined the papal chapel he had two largescale Gloria–Credo pairs in his canon, and the presence of these two works in Ca 6 and Ca 11 indicates that Du Fay had them in his possession during his years in the papal chapel. Now a glance at Table 12.3 will show that in terms of the Gloria some of the melodies served for more than one rank. At the same time, there is no Easter Gloria per se, but one of Du Fay’s pairs, Gloria–Credo 2, has two alternative Amen settings, one with a set of tropes specific to Easter, and the other a simple two-chord Amen. This pair, then, could do double duty as the Gloria–Credo for Easter and, by implication, for the major doubles. The second pair could then serve as the Gloria– Credo for the minor doubles and the major semidoubles, thus replicating the situation that we encounter for his Gloria 1 and Gloria 2. I think that not only was this the case, but that surely it is one of the reasons that 83

Van den Borren, “L’Enigme”; Sherr, “Mass Sections,” 214–15, esp. n. 7.

491

492

Ordinary of the Mass Movements

impelled Du Fay to revise Gloria–Credo 3 and add a contratenor to it, thus making the two pairs at the top of this cycle into four-voice works. The contrast between the Glorias of these two pairs and the plainsong Glorias of the cycle, on the other hand, could not be more stark. The plainsong-based Glorias are severely functional pieces; three of them, Glorias 1, 2, and 4, are alternatim settings where the plainsong (usually labeled “chorus”) alternates with extremely simple polyphony. In the case of Gloria 4, which includes the late Marian trope Spiritus et alme, once the setting reaches the first trope verse the polyphony is restricted entirely to the trope text except for the final Amen. In these terms most of the plainsongbased Glorias share the same technique as the Kyries. The exception is Gloria 3, a setting of Vatican Gloria 15 (Melnicki 43), one of the oldest and possibly the simplest Gregorian Glorias sung at the time, which is set almost unornamented. The almost obsessive recitation on a in this piece and the way Du Fay sets the text as a set of separate phrases with strong pauses at the end of each phrase mark the piece as a deliberate counterpart of the alternatim Glorias with their sharp distinction between plainsong and polyphony. Here Du Fay seems bent on creating the same sharp delineations without resorting to alternation. He apparently was struck by the psalmlike tone of the plainsong itself, and sought to emphasize it in his setting, which recalls nothing so much as the most austere sections of his magnificat settings. A curious rubric for Gloria 2 in Tr 92, “in galli cantu” (at the cock’s crow), has elicited no comment. This term was used only for the midnight Mass on Christmas, a feast of the highest rank, but of the three Masses of that day the midnight Mass was the one celebrated with the least amount of elaboration, so perhaps a Gloria other than Vat ad lib 1 was used. The rubric, which appears only in Tr 92, might be, like the rubrics for the Kyries in the Trent Codices, a reflection of a German rather than an Italian tradition, and thus unconnected with Du Fay. The contrast between the two pairs and the rest of the Glorias surely did not bother Du Fay or his colleagues. Although written in Rimini and probably only revised for Rome, the pairs belong to a tradition of very showy and outgoing works that had some of its roots, particularly in terms of the Glorias and Credos of Zacara, in the music for the papal chapel in the early fifteenth century. The rest of the Glorias, like the Kyrie cycle, were essentially an innovation by Du Fay. It is interesting to note that the one work that surely was written for the papal chapel at around this time by a composer other than Du Fay, the charming Gloria by Barthélemy Poignare copied in Tr 87, stands, in terms of its musical surface, halfway between the showiness of the pairs and the severe style of the plainsong Glorias, with the

Other Ordinary Settings

songlike writing of the cantus and its clear and euphonious counterpoint. In some ways, however, it is considerably more adventurous in its early adoption of a cantus firmus in the English manner, and with a separate text at that – Ave regina caelorum – something that Du Fay himself would not do for several decades.84

Other Ordinary Settings The context of the two Sanctus–Agnus pairs is more difficult to establish. Sanctus–Agnus 2 was copied into Bo Q15 around 1433 (Stage III); Sanctus–Agnus 3 survives as a unicum in Tr 92. Texturally and motivically they appear to be related to the troped Sanctus of 1426–1427, with the alternation of duos and trios found in that piece and in the Ordinary movements of the Missa Sancti Iacobi, although neither of the two pairs is “music for three voices and at least four singers,” which is one of the main traits of the first three Ordinary movements of the Missa Sancti Iacobi and also of the troped Sanctus. Sanctus–Agnus 2 may be a work of the late 1420s or early 1430s; its melodic style is related to that of the troped Sanctus, but it does not have the suavity of that work. For example, the Sanctus and the corresponding Agnus have a curious contrapuntal hole in measure 4, as the contratenor falls silent and the F mi of the cantus sounds alone against a held tenor, and in measures 121–22 of the Sanctus Du Fay bluntly calls for a melodic diminished fifth, entirely exposed in the cantus. A stylistic backward glance can be heard in the motivic structure of the last twelve measures of the Osanna, which hark back to procedures used in the Missa sine nomine. Sanctus–Agnus 2, at the beginning of both the Sanctus and the Agnus, as well as in the Osanna, has the upper voices signed and the tenor signed . This appears to be a whimsical jeu d’esprit, particularly in the Osanna, where the notation and the phrase structure of the tenor appear to have been conceived in triple meter despite the mensuration sign (Ex. 12.7). Sanctus–Agnus 3 is probably a work of the late 1430s, but again apparently unrelated to the Ordinary cycles. The melodic writing shows traits in common with works such as Mirandas parit, which surely dates from 1436, and it has a section of fauxbourdon reminiscent of what we encounter in Iuvenis qui puellam and Supremum est. Its cantus-firmus treatment (described below) has no correspondence in any other work of Du Fay, 84

See Planchart, “Music for the Papal Chapel,” 97–103, with a modern edition of the Gloria.

493

Example 12.7 Sanctus, OO Planchart 5/7 (mm. 1–4 and 120–24)

Other Ordinary Settings

and its mensural scheme, even if we make allowances for some renotation by the scribe of Tr 92, is one of the least coherent in Du Fay’s music and one of the very few of his works where and are used for music with the same rhythmic density.85 It is also the only work of Du Fay where we encounter a fraction, 6/4, to indicate a proportional shift that elsewhere he indicates with a single 3 or with black notation.86 In terms of their form both pairs hark back to the two vineux pieces of 1414, inasmuch as in both cases the Agnus is a compressed contrafact of the Sanctus. In the case of Sanctus–Agnus 2 the music for the Agnus Dei is a literal repetition of the first fifty-eight measures of the Sanctus except for the perhaps inauthentic addition of two measures at the end in Tr 92. The identity extends to the first two intonations of the Agnus Dei. No plainsong version of the tenor has been found and probably none existed; the intonations were surely written by Du Fay for this piece. They follow the exact pattern he used for the intonations of the Sanctus and Agnus Dei of the Missa sine nomine. In the case of Sanctus–Agnus 3 the relationship is as follows: Agnus 1 = Sanctus, measures 119–34 (end of Osanna 2), with the original measure 133 replaced with a new approach to the final sonority (the replacement is exactly one measure as well); Agnus 2 = Sanctus, measures 17–67 (Pleni sunt); Agnus 3 = Sanctus, measures 92–109/1 (Qui venit), with the final sonority found in the Sanctus as the first beat of three further perfections that lead the music to the final sonority on F. This structure is all the more curious because the Sanctus of this pair is based upon a plainsong, Vatican 8 (Than 116), an enormously widespread melody that was used most often as part of the Ordinary for Marian feasts.87 The cantus of Du Fay’s setting is a loose paraphrase of the plainsong melody, even though the intonations are assigned to the tenor. Since the polyphony of the Agnus is derived from that of the Sanctus in the manner described earlier, there is no question of a true cantus firmus for this movement. For the intonations of the Agnus Du Fay used the intonation of the Sanctus for Agnus 1, an intonation written ad hoc for Agnus 2, and the intonation of the Benedictus for Agnus 3. As it turns out, this last intonation is almost identical with the intonation for Agnus 2 of Agnus melody 138 (also Vatican 8),88 but there is no relationship between this 85

86 87

88

Within Du Fay’s canon this work comes closest to supporting Margaret Bent’s contention that is sometimes used simply as a toggle sign devoid of tempo significance. Sanctus, cantus, m. 25. Thannabaur, 155–56. Curiously enough, this is the plainsong melody that was occasionally troped with the hymn Ave verum corpus natum, used by Du Fay in the troped Sanctus. Schildbach, 92.

495

496

Ordinary of the Mass Movements

melody and the music of Du Fay’s Agnus Dei. This approach to the intonations of the Agnus is a variation of what he had done in the Missa sine nomine. A problem similar to that posed by the Lantins – Du Fay Gloria – Credo pair is posed by a Kyrie and a Gloria copied together in Tr 922, listed as no. 6 in Table 12.1 above. The Kyrie was copied without an ascription, and the Gloria with an ascription to Du Fay. Then the scribe, Hanns Volp, when compiling the second index to Tr 92 long after the copying of the music, indicated Du Fay as the composer of the Kyrie.89 Besseler in his edition of the Opera Omnia did not regard the two movements as a pair and published them as separate movements,90 and this has affected the subsequent historiography of the movements. The authorship of the Kyrie has been questioned by Craig Monson, who thinks it is an English work, and by Peter Wright, who suggests more plausibly that it might be by Binchois.91 The Kyrie survives also in Ca 6, Ca 11, Tr 93, and Tr 90,92 none of which have the Gloria. David Fallows, writing after Monson’s article, but before Wright’s, suggested that the coupling of the Kyrie and the Gloria in Tr 92 meant that the two movements share the same author, and if the Kyrie is spurious so should be the Gloria.93 This actually flies in the face of the transmission of the pieces in Tr 92. When Volp copied these pieces he clearly had no idea of who wrote the Kyrie, but knew (or thought) the Gloria was by Du Fay. Only when copying the index, he decided to extend the ascription to the Kyrie.94 In fact, given some of the evidence Wright presents, it might well be that Volp might have reasoned as Fallows did but in the opposite direction, knowing that the Gloria was by Du Fay he then presumed that the Kyrie was also his. Wright presents an intriguing hypothesis, that the Kyrie and the Gloria might have been a collaborative project by Binchois and Du Fay from the time they met in Chambéry in 1434.95 This would be similar to the collaboration between Hughes de Lantins and Du Fay in the Gloria–Credo 1. There is a small caveat to consider in this case. When Du Fay left Savoy for Cambrai in 1434 he clearly took some of his works with him, including Gloria–Credo 2 and 3, which were duly entered in Ca 6 (and later in Ca 11). Why would he

89 91 92 94

95

See Du Fay, OO, ed. Planchart, 05/06. 90 Du Fay, OO, ed. Besseler, IV, nos. 19 and 28. Monson, “Stylistic Inconsistencies”; P. Wright, “Englishness in a Kyrie.” P. Wright, “Englishness in a Kyrie,” 193. 93 Fallows, Dufay, rev. edn., 179. This is made clear in Margaret Bent, “The Trent 92 and Aosta Indexes in Context,” 63–81; see also P. Wright, “Englishness in a Kyrie,” 192–95. P. Wright, “Englishness in a Kyrie,” 209–13.

Other Ordinary Settings

not have taken this Gloria as well, which would have been his most recent work and a very impressive one at that? The presence of the Kyrie in Ca 6 and 11 suggests that perhaps he did take the pair with him, but that the compiler of Ca 6 included the Kyrie but not the Gloria. One possibility is that the compiler viewed the Gloria as out of proportion to the other pieces in the manuscript. For example, the Glorias of Gloria–Credo 2 and 3 are 152 and 132 measures respectively. This one is 299 measures, longer by far than any other work, including the Credos in Ca 6, so the compiler might have found it too big. The length of the Gloria adds weight to Wright’s hypothesis that the Kyrie might be by Binchois if we recall that Du Fay’s reaction to composing his Missa L’homme armé in “competition” with Ockeghem led him to write a piece that is by far the longest and most elaborate of his cantus-firmus Masses. We should also remember that one of the reasons Amadeus VIII had for asking Du Fay to come to Savoy in 1434 was precisely to avoid his own chapel being overshadowed by the chapel of the duke of Burgundy. At first blush the sound of this Gloria would suggest the late 1430s, with echoes of pieces such as Nuper rosarum flores and adumbrations of the music for the Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece. But the copying dates of Tr 92 (the section with this Gloria) and Ca 6 argue for a date of ca. 1434.96 In this case the Gloria joins a number of other Du Fay pieces that scholars originally placed much later on account of their style, notably He compaignons, Vergene bella, and the Sanctus “papale.” At first blush the sound of the Gloria suggests a work of the late 1430s, after the big Florentine motets, particularly Nuper rosarum flores, and its rhythmic and contrapuntal language is close to that of the Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece. It might be that if the chronology of Du Fay’s music had been as well understood and documented as that of, say, Beethoven, these pieces, including the Gloria, would have elicited less puzzlement, and rather the kind of admiring aesthetic appreciation that one finds in countless program and liner notes for the remarkably “late sounding” Lento e mesto of Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 10 no. 3. This Gloria is one of the very rare pieces in Du Fay’s canon signed with at the start of the piece. The mensural scheme of the piece is so careful and elaborate that one has to assume that the signs are not editorial additions by the scribe. Here one also has to assume that the semibreves in were intended to move at a faster tempo than those in and that the mensura was on the perfect breve in and on the semibreve in . The passages in , which move largely in breves and semibreves, should be taken also at a fast tempo with the 96

P. Wright, “Englishness in a Kyrie,” 192–93, note 17 and Table 1.

497

498

Ordinary of the Mass Movements Example 12.8 Gloria 10, beginning

mensura in the breve. Ruth DeFord, in an important study of the mensura of in Du Fay’s music, notes that in this piece Du Fay shifts from to for four breves at the words Iesu Christe (measures 246–47).97 She considers the shift to indicate a slight slowing to give emphasis to the nomina sacra, but not an actual doubling. But an actual doubling works just as well and probably brings the tempo of these four breves closer to what Du Fay often used in earlier works, a series of longae with fermatas upon them. The notational density of the amen (notated in ) makes it clear that in this piece the two perfect mensurations are moving at very different tempos. Du Fay probably intended both cut mensurations in this piece to have minim equivalence (as happens in all his early work between and ). Although the piece is highly sectional, Du Fay achieves an extraordinary unity not just by the repetitions of certain motives but by a careful control of the range and direction of the phrases, particularly in the cantus, with D, G, and A as the primary goals, but with two surprising but effective digressions, an internal cadence on E followed by a phrase starting on C early in the piece (mm. 53–55), and an extended cadence on F near the end (mm. 237–39). The piece, like most of Du Fay’s works with a D final, is largely diatonic, but in the cantus he makes something of a point of presenting phrases that peak on the fa super la of the natural hexachord, followed almost immediately by a phrase where the b′ has to be a b mi going to c″, a gambit he uses right at the start (see Ex. 12.8). In this piece, with its long-limbed musical phrases and songlike cantus, we can hear the direction his music was to take during the long decade at Cambrai, a decade that not only affected his own style but during which he created a tradition of polyphonic music in choro as a matter of course in one of the major cathedrals of northern France and what would become the musical lingua franca of the second half of the fifteenth century.

97

DeFord, “The Mensura of

in the Works of Du Fay,” 123.

Other Ordinary Settings

Two settings of the Ordinary with ascriptions to Du Fay are most likely spurious. The first is the Kyrie discussed above that precedes Gloria 10 in Tr 92, and which as noted is most likely a work of Binchois. The work is freely composed and for much of the twentieth century it was one of the most popular pieces by “Du Fay” among early music ensembles. This is not surprising because it is an exquisitely refined work. With the publication of Monson’s study in 1975 much of the interest in the piece appears to have evaporated overnight. Partly this is a consequence of Monson’s study, which, as is the case when one is trying to run against established opinion and all the more so in the case of a fairly popular piece, engages in a bit of rhetorical overkill – not so much in describing Du Fay’s melodic procedures, which he does quite eloquently, or the melodic surface of the Kyrie, but in the substratum of value judgment that accompanies the description of the Kyrie itself. With the knowledge of English musical style derived from the studies of numerous scholars in the last thirty years, as well as wider knowledge of the range of Du Fay’s compositional procedures, the gap between his style and the style evinced in the Kyrie has narrowed. Still, apart from all of the details adduced by Monson,98 the immediate sound of the work, and even its structure, with balladelike first and second endings in Kyrie 3, recalls not so much the sound of English sacred works as the songs and the so-called song-motets of English composers roughly contemporary with Du Fay, particularly Frye and Bedyngham. There is no reason to restore the Kyrie to Du Fay’s canon, but there are numerous reasons to encourage its study and performance. Wright’s sensible proposal that the Kyrie might be by Binchois, whose style is indeed much closer to that of the English composers ca. 1430 than is the case with Du Fay, makes the best sense and perhaps will rekindle interest in the performance of this lovely work.99 The other work is a Gloria ascribed to Du Fay in its only source, MuEm. It was published, as was the Kyrie just discussed, as an authentic work by Besseler.100 The piece consists of a series of short-breathed phrases with sharply delimited cadences. It is to be sung twice through to accommodate the Gloria text, which is set as a double underlay below the cantus, followed by a short cadence at the end. This is entirely unlike anything Du Fay ever did in any of his sacred music, and the first two phrases, both cadencing on G in a manner that makes the second sound like an afterthought, is something not found anywhere in his work. Thus there is virtually no chance 98 100

99 Cf. ibid., 252–66. P. Wright, “Englishness in a Kyrie.” OO Besseler 4, nos. 19 (Kyrie) and 29 (Gloria).

499

500

Ordinary of the Mass Movements

that the ascription of this piece to Du Fay is correct. Although this is an inoffensively attractive piece, Du Fay never wrote anything as rhythmically and harmonically simple as this; even what is probably the earliest work we have from him, the Kyrie of the Kyrie–Sanctus–Agnus cycle, which is surely a product of his teens, has more sophistication than this Gloria. The Kyrie of Du Fay’s Kyrie–Gloria–Credo, which is in many ways as sectional as this Gloria, shows Du Fay in his late teens or early twenties with a control of the flow of the phrases, the large-scale tonal design, and a sense of rhythmic figuration that are well beyond what this Gloria demonstrates. These are traits that appear in his earliest music almost fully formed, and which he developed and refined to the end of his career; by comparison with even his earliest work this Gloria is simply incompetent. The last work we need to consider is the contratenor with an ascription to Du Fay (the only ascription in the sources) in Ca 6 and Ca 11, added to a Gloria. The circumstances for this addition are described in Volume I, Chapter 3. The Gloria, as I said there, is almost surely by Grenon and the contratenor was deliberately intended to be as conventional as possible, a polite piece of flattery to an older colleague.101 This is Du Fay at his least characteristic, writing a bit of truly “political music” in the hopes, which turned out to be correct, of ingratiating himself with the chapter of Cambrai, at a time when he was hoping for an appointment as canon of the cathedral with a minimum of fuss or delay. 101

See also Planchart, “Du Fay and the Style of Molinet,” 67.

13

The Mass Propers

This chapter deals with the most problematic repertory in Du Fay’s canon, problematic because what we have is but a fragment of what was surely an enormous systematic undertaking by the composer that apparently occupied most of his efforts in the long decade he was at Cambrai and the North during the schism prompted by the Council of Basel’s deposition of Eugenius IV and the election of Amadeus VIII of Savoy as Pope Felix V in 1439. For reasons that have already been explained,1 Du Fay left Savoy in the spring of 1439, and by early July he was already in the North, though not at Cambrai, where he arrived between All Souls Day and the Feast of the Conception of the Virgin that same year. Except for a relatively long sojourn in Savoy and probably in northern Italy in 1450–1451, as soon as the Schism ended, he was to remain in Cambrai until 1452. The circumstances of his stay at Cambrai and the documentary evidence of his activities as a canon of the cathedral have been explained in Volume I, Chapter 4. Musically and artistically his main activity during these years was the refurbishing of the liturgical practices at the cathedral, particularly concerning the music, in terms of both plainsong and polyphony. Under his guidance and that of Grenon the immense project of recopying the plainsong antiphoner of the cathedral took place, a task that took more than a decade to be completed.2 Now that we know that Symon Mellet spent all of the decade between 1430 and 1440 in the Roman curia in the service of one of the cardinals,3 it is more than plausible that his decision in 1441, when he returned to the North, to go to Cambrai rather than to Laon, where his early benefices were, may have been prompted by Du Fay’s presence at Cambrai. Particularly during the decade of 1440–1450, but also beyond, the two men were essentially collaborators in an immense musical project to provide polyphonic music for the Mass (and perhaps for Vespers as well) for all the major feasts of the year that were celebrated in choro and not just in one or another of the chapels. This is what one can gather from the language of two entries, one in the accounts of the fabric and the other in the chapter acts, which have already been cited and have been discussed by a number of scholars. The first is the payment to Symon Mellet in 1449–1450 for copying four books of polyphony, two with music 1

See p.156.

2

See pp. 191–93 and Curtis, “Musical Manuscripts,” 155–66.

3

See p. 191.

501

502

The Mass Propers

for the Ordinary of the Mass and two with music for the Proper.4 The other is a decision by the chapter on 21 April 1452 to advance Du Fay 60 écus in lieu of the full fruits of his prebend, partly because he was departing for Savoy, but also “because of the merits and virtues of master Guillaume Du Fay, canon, who has decorated the present church with his songs in music.”5 Craig Wright, discussing this, emphasizes that the entry is simply an advance payment because Du Fay was leaving, but this is not what the act says. Advancing anyone the fruits of their prebend was not customary; quite the contrary: cathedral chapters, Cambrai among them, viewed any absence as offering them the opportunity not to pay absent canons, as countless entries about such problems in Cambrai and elsewhere attest.6 In a way, the canons are making an exception here precisely because of Du Fay’s contribution to the music of the church. These two entries are surely related, and because the payment to Mellet indicates the number of folios for each collection we also know their sizes. The books with music for the Ordinary of the Mass consisted of nineteen sexternions7 and one quaternion, 236 folios, that is manuscripts about the present size of Tr 92 (240 fols.) or SP B80 (247 fols.). At the time of the payment thirteen sexternions or 156 folios had been written and notated. The books with music for the Proper each consisted of 14 sexternions, 168 folios, that is, manuscripts a bit larger than Br 5557 (136 fols.), where ten sexternions or 120 folios had been notated.8 The manuscripts were almost certainly copied as the description indicates; in the case of the Ordinary, Kyries, then Glorias, and so on, that is in the same manner that Ca 6 and Ca 11, this last one surely written by Mellet,9 were written. There is no mention in the accounts of Cambrai of “a Mass” in the sense of an entire Ordinary being copied as such until 1457, when Jacques le Mannier, who had been a small vicar in the 1430s and remained in the service of the cathedral to his death in 1464, and was among those who had assisted with the recopying of the great antiphoner for the cathedral, and was paid for 4

5

6

7

8

LAN, 4G 4656, fol. 30r; see also C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 225–26; Curtis, “Musical Manuscripts,” 232–33. CBM 1059, fol. 21v; see also C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 189 and 224. Wright misreads the admittedly very faint last word of the entry as “vocali” rather than “vocatis,” which leads him to conclude that the act was approved “by acclamation,” rather than that the canons were called to witness the act. The entry might in fact be incomplete. This was the point behind the rules for residence that were spelled out and reiterated periodically in chapter meetings in virtually every cathedral and collegiate church at the time. Sexternions were apparently the standard gatherings for books of music at Cambrai; both Ca 6 and Ca 11 consist of sexternions. 9 LAN, 4G 4656, fol. 30r. See Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 92–106.

The Mass Propers

copying “a Mass he had recently composed and quickly copied into two books.”10 But if for the sake of simplicity we assume that the same number of each of the movements was copied in each section, 156 folios could easily accommodate some twenty Ordinaries.11 The cathedral already had a respectable if slightly old-fashioned repertory of such pieces in Ca 6 and Ca 11, which show traces of having remained in use until the sixteenth century.12 Some of the Ordinaries collected in the 1440s may have been written by local composers during these years13 and others could have been obtained in Bruges and Antwerp. Among these were probably a number of English Ordinaries, including most likely the block of four Masses that opens the Gloria, Credo, and Sanctus sections of Tr 93, a manuscript whose repertory shows traces of having come partially from Cambrai.14 This block included the Masses on Caput, Salve sancta parens, Quem malignus spiritus, and Fuit homo missus.15 Indeed, Caput was incorrectly ascribed to Du Fay in some of the exemplars that reached Hanns Wiser in Trento in the late 1450s. The English Masses, if they were copied in the Cambrai books by Mellet, probably came without their long Kyries, but Du Fay’s music of the 1440s, as I noted already in the discussion of Fulgens iubar ecclesiae,16 shows he had become aware of what scholars today call “the Caput texture,” with the tenor as the second voice from the bottom with a rhythmically similar second tenor pitched about a fifth below the tenor, a contratenor in the same range as the tenor, and a cantus pitched about a fourth above the tenor, where a structural duo between cantus and tenor was provided with added contrapuntal flexibility by the presence of the second tenor, and the contratenor provided further rhythmic, melodic, and motivic energy to the texture, including extended duos with the cantus. 10

11

12

13

14

15

16

LAN, 4G 4665, fol. 24r: “pro missa noviter composita per eundem festinanter scripta cum notulis in duobus libris.” See also Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 242. Most Ordinaries of this time, when copied as units, take as a rule eight openings, but in a section of Kyries or Agnus Dei, as the copies in Tr 93 show, the copyist could often put two Kyries and sometimes two Agnus Dei in a single opening. In the inside of the back cover of Ca 6 there is a charming graffito: “Iohannes Lupi enfant de ♡”; Lupi was a choirboy at the cathedral from 1514 to 1521. This is a tenuous supposition: Grenon was apparently no longer composing, and Du Fay, as this chapter shows, was most likely composing an immense amount of music for the Proper of the Mass rather than for the Ordinary. Strohm, “Quellenkritische Untersuchungen,” 165, 175–76; id., ed., Fifteenth-Century Liturgical Music, VI: Mass Settings, 34–37. The last three are edited in Bent, Fifteenth-Century Liturgical Masses II. For the first see OO Planchart 12/11, with a full account of all earlier editions. See pp. 383–85.

503

504

The Mass Propers

Du Fay’s Proper Settings: An Overview In the case of the two volumes with music for the Proper, it is perhaps more likely that many of the propers were copied as liturgical cycles, if for no other reason than that was apparently the way in which Du Fay’s earlier venture into this repertory, the votive Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece, were organized. Further, the two ways of organizing these types of collections were already present in the Graduals and Missals used at Cambrai. Again, 120 folios of music probably could accommodate some twenty proper cycles; indeed, the collection of sixteen proper cycles in Tr 88 takes about ninety folios, and the copying there is neither systematic nor economic.17 What feasts would have been provided with polyphonic propers at Cambrai? A conservative list, and it needs to be conservative because the singing of polyphony in choro was in fact something of an innovation, would be as follows: Proprium de tempore

Proprium sanctorum

Commune sanctorum

Christmas Epiphany Easter Ascension Pentecost Trinity Corpus Christi Feasts of the BVM (probably a “pool” of Propers) Stephen John the Evangelist John the Baptist Peter and Paul Mary Magdalene Holy Cross (most likely the Exaltation) Michael Andrew Apostles Martyrs Confessors Virgins

This adds up to about twenty or twenty-one cycles because the pool for the feasts of the Virgin would probably add to two or three cycles, but many of those propers would also be used in the common Mass for Virgins, and 17

Tr 88, fols. 113v–200r.

Du Fay’s Proper Settings: An Overview

the cycle for St. Andrew would draw most of its propers from the common Mass for Apostles and the Mass for SS. Peter and Paul. Furthermore, three of the cycles listed earlier were also used at Cambrai (and elsewhere) as missae communes, that is, Masses that were celebrated throughout the year on specific days of the week: a Mass for the Trinity on Sundays, a Mass for the Holy Ghost on Thursdays, and a Mass for the Cross on Fridays, and there is unequivocal evidence from Cambrai that these Masses were celebrated with polyphony in the mid-fifteenth century.18 The feast of Mary Magdalene is included because the accounts of the small vicars and those of the aumosne show, year after year, that there was a special payment to the small vicars for celebrating that Mass, and a delegation of clerics from Notre-Dame in Arras always came to Cambrai for that occasion, so it was a particularly solemn feast at Cambrai.19 All the propers listed earlier would fit comfortably in the 120 folios that had been copied by 1449, all the more so since most of the polyphonic books copied in the 1440s are said to be “en grant volume,” which in this context is the large format of Ca 6 and Ca 11.20 For this repertory, however, there was virtually no music that could be obtained elsewhere, and thus most likely that all of these polyphonic propers were the work of Du Fay. The amount of music involved is enormous, and it was most likely this project that occupied him for much of the decade. He had composed some propers for the Missa Sancti Iacobi, but the procedure he used in most of them, except for the communion and the repetitio of the introit – treating the plainsong as a tenor in motet style – would have made it impossible to write a gradual or an alleluia, and this is probably what caused the gradual of that Mass never to be written and the alleluia to be composed on an artificial tenor written by Du Fay rather than on an alleluia plainsong. But the work on the hymns, the Kyries, and closer to this time the proses, provided Du Fay with the compositional approach to the proper cycles. The first impulse for this was surely the commission from Philip the Good for the Masses for the SainteChapelle in Dijon, and indeed a great deal of that music could be reworked for Cambrai. With the loss of all the polyphonic music manuscripts from the cathedral from the early 1440s (the likely date for Ca 11) to the second 18

19

20

The rubrics of the votive missal CBM 158 for the derivation of tracts from alleluia verses (see later in this chapter) are inconceivable and unnecessary except in the context of polyphonic propers. The earliest mention of the extra payment is in 1412–1413, in the account of the fabric (LAN, 4G 4617, fol. 20v), the last I recorded is for 1505–1506 (LAN, 4G 4700, fol. 31r), and there is a similar entry for each of the intervening years for which the fabric accounts survive. LAN, 4G 4654, fol. 28r; 4G 4655, fol. 27r; cf. Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 230–31.

505

506

The Mass Propers

quarter of the sixteenth century, almost all of the music by Du Fay for the Proper of the Mass has disappeared, and what survives does so mostly anonymously, and only the musical intuition of Laurence Feininger, and a series of later discoveries, including references in the writings of Tinctoris, Gaffori, and Spataro, as well as a constellation of circumstantial evidence, has allowed us to recover what might be a bit less than a quarter of Du Fay’s production in this field. The settings of the Proper that either have secure attributions to Du Fay or can be ascribed to him by a combination of style, liturgical evidence, and other circumstances is given in Table 13.1. The table contains two redundant entries that were indicated in the lost exemplars by cross-references (one of the cross-references survives in the copy we have, the other was omitted). The table also includes, for the sake of completeness, two cycles that will be discussed in the next chapter, those for St. Anthony of Padua and for St. Francis of Assisi, because most of their contents could easily have been used also at Cambrai for the common of confessors. The indications in parentheses point to other liturgical uses most of these Propers would have in the course of the year. The table lists all the surviving settings of music for the Proper of the Mass except for the five early settings (counting the introit and its repetition as two settings) connected with the Missa Sancti Iacobi. The earliest layer in the table is the seven prose settings, all of which must date from before 1439, when Du Fay returned to Cambrai. For the others surely the terminus ante quem non is July 1439, the time when Du Fay, by his own account and that of Philip the Good, entered the service of the duke.21 This involved among other things the composition of a cycle of six weekly Masses in polyphony for the votive services of the Order of the Golden Fleece in Dijon. Five of them have survived in Tr 88 (the Lady Mass is lost) without an ascription, but some ascriptions appear in concordant sources and in the correspondence between Giovanni Spataro, who clearly knew a number of Du Fay’s propers, and Giovanni del Lago. The case for Du Fay’s authorship of these cycles was presented above in the biographical chapters and need not be repeated here. Further detail on this, and the case for Du Fay’s authorship of the Officium de Sancto Mauritio, have been presented in my study of that office.22 Here it might be useful to review the status of the proper settings, the few ascriptions and references, and the interconnections between them. 21

22

BAB, Reeks 51, fol. 38r–v, reporting letters from Du Fay and the duke to St. Donatian, stating that Du Fay had been in the service of the duke from the Octave of the Apostles to the Purification just past (6 July 1439 to 2 Feb. 1440). Planchart, “Connecting the Dots.”

Du Fay’s Proper Settings: An Overview

Table 13.1 Polyphonic settings of the proprium missae by Du Fay No.

Text

I. Proses 1 Laetabundus exsultet 2 Epiphaniam domini 3 Victimae paschali 4 Rex omnipotens 5 Veni Sancte Spiritus 6 Lauda Sion salvatorem 7 Isti sunt duae olivae II. Order of the Golden Fleece Officium de Angelis 8 I: Benedicite dominum 9 G: Benedicite dominum 10 A: In conspectu angelorum 11 A: Laudate deum 12 O: Stetit angelus 13 C: Benedicite omnes Officium de Sancto Andrea 14 I: Mihi autem 15 G: Constitues eos 16 A: Dilexit Andream 17 A: Ego vos elegi 18 O: Mihi autem 19 C: Venite post me Officium de Sancto Spiritu 20 I: Spiritus domini 21 G: Beata gens 22 A: Emitte spiritum 23 A: Veni Sancte Spiritus 24 O: Confirma hoc 25 C: Factus est repente 26 I (Lent): Dum sanctificatus Officium de Sancta Cruce 27 I: Nos autem 28 G: Christus factus est 29 A: Dicite in gentibus 30 A: Dulce lignum 31 O: Protege domine 32 C: Per signum crucis Officium de Trinitate 33 I: Benedicta sit 34 G: Benedictus es

Feast

Main source

Christmas Epiphany Easter Ascension Pentecost Corpus Christi SS. Peter & Paul

Bo Q15 Tr 87 Tr 92 Tr 87 Tr 92 Tr 92 Tr 87

Angels (St. Michael) Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Andrew (Apostles) Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Holy Ghost (Pentecost) Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 90/Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr88 Cross Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Trinity Tr 88 Tr 88

507

508

The Mass Propers

Table 13.1 (cont.) No.

Text

35 A: Benedictus es 36 A: Verbo domini 37 O: Benedictus sit 38 C: Benedicite deum III. Order of St. Maurice Officium de Sancto Mauritio 39 I: Venite benedicti 40 I (Octave): Sapientiam sanctorum 41 G: Gloriosus deus 42 A: Iudicabunt sancti 43 O: Mirabilis deus 44 C: Gaudete iusti IV. Cambrai cathedral (and Savoy?) Officium de Sancto Iohanne Baptista 45 I: De ventre matris meae 46 G: Priusquam te formarem 47 A: Tu puer propheta 48 O: Iustus ut palma 49 C: Tu puer propheta 50 I: In virtute tua 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

I (TP): Protexisti me deus A: Posuisti domine T: Desiderium animae O: In virtute tua O (TP): Confitebuntur caeli C: Laetabitur iustus I: Laetabitur iustus

58 G: Posuisti domine 59 A: Sebastiani gratia 60 O: Gloria et honore 61 C: Magna est gloria V. Franciscan Order Officium de Sancto Antonio 62 63 64 65

I: In medio ecclesiae G: Os iusti meditabitur A: Antoni compar inclite O: Veritas mea

Feast

Main source Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88

St. Maurice (Confessors) Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 St. John the Baptist

Common of martyrs 1 (St. George?)

Common of martyrs 2 (St. Sebastian?)

Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88

St. Anthony of Padua (Confessors) Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88

Questions of Ascription

Table 13.1 (cont.) No.

Text

66

C: Quinque talenta Officium de Sancto Francisco

67 68 69 70 71 72

I: Gaudeamus omnes I (Octave): Os iusti meditabitur G: [Os iusti meditabitur] (cross-reference) A: O patriarcha pauperum O: [Veritas mea] (crossreference) C: Fidelis servus

Feast

Main source Tr88

St. Francis of Assisi (Confessors) Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88 Tr 88

Questions of Ascription The seven proses all have a firm ascription to Du Fay in at least one source. One piece considered a prose by Heinrich Besseler and published as such, Gaude virgo mater Christi,23 is not a prose but a cantilena motet and has been excluded from Table 13.1; it was discussed earlier among the motets. Beyond these Guillaume de Van, Charles Hamm, and following them David Fallows and I entertained the possibility that a few proses transmitted anonymously in Bo Q15, Ao 15, and Tr 92 could be by Du Fay,24 but in the end it was decided that all of these anonymous pieces cannot be by him: many of them fall well below his contrapuntal competence, and even the very beautiful setting of Mittit ad virginem in Bo Q15 and Tr 92, the work of a really excellent composer, shows stylistic traits at variance with Du Fay’s practice.25 The case for the authenticity of the Golden Fleece Masses was made above in the biographical section. Further evidence for it is also presented in two studies.26 Here it may be useful to summarize the evidence we have for Du Fay’s authorship of these cycles. The first thing that should be noted about most of these cycles is that they are cycles and not an assemblage of 23 24

25 26

OO Besseler 5, no. 1; OO Planchart 1/19. De Van, “A Recently Discovered Source,” 5–74; Hamm, Chronology, 76–78; Fallows, Dufay, 232; Planchart, “Music for the Papal Chapel,” 106–9. Planchart, “The Polyphonic Proses,” 2–8; edition of Mittit ad virginem, 11–13. Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Second Style,” and id., “Connecting the Dots.”

509

510

The Mass Propers

pieces produced by a scribe, as is the case with some of the pairs of Ordinary movements one finds in Bo Q15.27 The pieces for the Order of the Golden Fleece follow an entirely sui generis approach to how to construct a Proper cycle for a missa communis that can be traced liturgically to Cambrai in the 1440s and 1450s;28 those for St. Francis and St. Anthony of Padua follow quite rigidly the liturgy of the Franciscan missals for those saints, which was different from their liturgy at Cambrai, and that for St. Maurice and his companions follows a liturgy that is not only sui generis but shows traits of being a south French or Savoyard liturgy, for which the polyphony was composed somewhere north of the Loire.29 The point of this is that the composer of any movement of these cycles is surely the composer of the entire cycle. The pieces were transmitted anonymously to Tr 88, which has a considerable number of works by Du Fay and dating from the period of Cambrai. One possible reason for this is that the ultimate source of these works was probably liturgical books from the cathedral, where, if the example of Ca 6 and Ca 11 can be used as a guide, the works were copied without ascription, just as it appears that ascriptions were absent in in English collections of liturgical polyphony, which were probably used as models at Cambrai.30 Still, the copy of no. 23, Alleluia V. Veni Sancte Spiritus, in Tr 90 has an ascription to Du Fay, one of the very rare ascriptions in that manuscript.31 In the same cycle a passage in the tenor of no. 24, the offertory Confirma hoc (mm. 39–43),32 is cited by Giovanni Spataro in a letter to Giovanni del Lago, who refers to it as Du Fay’s offertory for the Holy Ghost.33 Similarly, Spataro cites in the same letter a passage from an “introito de confessoribus” by Du Fay, which turns out to be measures 30–34 of no. 68, the introit Os iusti for the propers of St. Francis of Assisi.34 Further, in his Tractato di musica, Spataro mentions a mensuration change from to 3 in “the verse” of Du Fay’s Mass for St. Anthony of Padua.35 The use of the term “verse” of course implies a 27 28 29 30

31 33

34

35

Cf. Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:153–57. See later in this chapter; see also Planchart, “Connecting the Dots,” 17–19. The evidence of this is detailed in ibid., 24–27. In virtually all cases in which the recovery of fragments from English choirbooks include the verso with the start of a Mass, for example, composer ascriptions are missing. Tr 90, fols. 419v–420r. 32 OO Planchart 4/3:14. Blackburn et al., eds., Correspondence, 590; Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1972), 15–16. Blackburn et al., eds., Correspondence, 588; Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1972), 15–16. Spataro, Tractato, ch. 24. The treatise is not paginated, but the passage is easily found because there is a reference to “G. dufai” on the left margin.

Questions of Ascription

proper, either a gradual or an alleluia, and indeed in no. 64, the gradual Os iusti for St. Anthony of Padua, in the verse section, at measure 162, the change described by Spataro takes place. Spataro is conducting a long polemic against Tinctoris and Gaffori, both of whom cite passages of Du Fay’s Mass for St. Anthony of Padua (in their cases from the Ordinary: Gloria and Credo), which means that the proper cycle for St. Anthony belonged with that Ordinary as a plenary Mass. But in addition, the cycle for St. Francis, for which we have an ascription from Spataro, shares two movements with the cycle for St. Anthony of Padua, the gradual and the offertory. The two cycles are copied side by side in Tr 88, and Wiser entered the cross-reference for the gradual in the St. Francis cycle, “graduale os iusti queras antea in missa sancti anthonii de padua,”36 but he forgot to enter a similar rubric for the offertory. That the two propers were copied contiguously in Tr 88 but separated from the Ordinary (which survives in Tr 90 and 93 (Kyrie) and Tr 90 (Gloria–Agnus) surely means that originally neither proper cycle was intermixed with the Ordinary because both were meant to be sung with it.37 The use of common movements between the propers for St. Anthony of Padua and St. Francis of Assisi is not the only instance of interrelationship between the cycles. As noted earlier in Volume I, Chapter 2, the formal structure of the five surviving Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece is unique to them and different from the structure of every other surviving proper cycle for the entire long fifteenth century, including those of Hendrik Isaac’s Choralis Constantinus, in the inclusion of two alleluias and a gradual and the provision of one of the two alleluias with a two-voice verse that could be sung by itself as a tract during Lent. This structure is exactly the one found in the missae communes in Cambrai 158, a missal from the cathedral copied in the 1440s or 1450s, with a rubric for the performance of these Masses that would be entirely irrelevant for Masses using plainsong propers, where a repertory of tracts is part of the plainsong corpus, but it would be crucial for Masses using polyphonic propers at a time when polyphonic tracts had not been composed, as was the case with the Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece and was surely the case at Cambrai in the early 1440s.38 But in addition, the Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece share a number of passages among themselves and with some of the other Masses in Table 13.1.

36 38

Tr 88, fol. 192r. 37 For a detailed account of this, see Planchart, “The Books,” 184–85. Planchart, “Connecting the Dots,” 17–19.

511

512

The Mass Propers

The simplest of these consists of the sharing of the formulaic settings of the introit psalm and the doxology, which remained constant for all the introits in a given mode. Thus, a single four-voice doxology is used for three mode 8 introits: Spiritus domini (no. 20), Benedicta sit (no. 33), and Laetabitur iustus (no. 57). Two mode 3 introits, Benedicite dominum (no. 8) and Dum sanctificatus fuero (no. 26), share the same doxology. There are two other pairs of introits that share the same doxology, but differently notated and with slight variants: the doxology for De ventre matris meae (no. 45) recurs in Sapientiam sanctorum (no. 39) in doubled values and with a small variant at the flex, and that for Venite benedicti (no. 39) appears in doubled values and again with slight variants for Protexisti me deus (no. 51). This last pair also shares the psalm setting as well, also in doubled values in the second introit. One could argue that such highly formulaic passages could be easily appended to any two introits that shared the mode. It is worth noting that these doxologies appear only in the copies in Tr 88; when these introits were copied as part of the introit anthology in Tr 93, Tr 90, and Strahov, they were notated without the doxologies, and often without the psalm verses. Thus the settings of the verses and the doxologies go back to a context where these settings were part of a liturgically ordered collection, which could be Dijon, Cambrai, or a German chapel that might have served as an intermediary link in the transmission of the versions of Tr 88 to Wiser.39 The case for Dijon and Cambrai is strengthened by connections between a number of these pieces that go beyond separable formulaic additions. In the plainsong itself, the mode 5 graduals Constitues eos (no. 9) and Benedictus es (no. 33) share most of their melodic material, and Du Fay used the same setting in both cases. Thus except for small details of a tied note here or there instead of repeated notes, measures 1–38 of the respond are identical in both settings.40 They differ in measures 39–44 of Constitues eos and measures 39–41 of Benedictus es, and the correspondence resumes at measure 45 of Constitues eos and measure 45 of Benedictus es and extends to the end of the respond. The correspondence continues in the verse, with measures 52–105 of Constitues eos and measures 49–102 of Benedictus es. After that the settings differ, but at measure 180 of Constitues eos and measure 165 of Benedictus es the correspondence returns to the end of the verse. There are also correspondences with the gradual Christus 39 40

Strohm, “The Medieval Mass Proper,” 45, suggests the imperial chapel at Wiener-Neustadt. Measure numbers are those in Planchart, OO.

Questions of Ascription

factus est (no. 28), though these are smaller: measures 162–73 of Christus factus est correspond to measures 151–61 of Benedictus es (a passage with no counterpart in Constitues eos), and measures 174–203 of Christus factus est correspond to measures 166–94 of Benedictus es and measures 181–209 of Constitues eos. These correspondences had been noted by Feininger and further commented upon by Bukofzer in his review of Feininger’s editions.41 As Feininger noted, the disjunctions in the correspondence reflect differences in the plainsong itself.42 We do not know the exact plainsong sources that Du Fay used, but the variants reflected in his settings, particularly in the case of the gradual Benedictus es, are those found exclusively in the surviving chant sources from Dijon,43 which strengthens the case that these settings were intended for the liturgy of the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon. There are also correspondences between two pairs of alleluias. The settings of Alleluia V. Laudate deum (no. 11) and Alleluia V. Emitte spiritum (no. 22), which share the same plainsong, are essentially the same, although Du Fay apparently shortened the respond in Emitte spiritum and added a third voice to the verse, which is a duo in Laudate deum. Finally, the music for the Alleluia V. O patriarcha pauperum (no. 70) is used for Alleluia V. Sebastiani gratia (no. 59). When Feininger published the proper cycles of Trent 88 with his ascriptions of some of them to Du Fay in 1947 his opinion was essentially passed over in silence by most scholars, including Besseler in his edition of the Opera omnia.44 Feininger never published a detailed explanation of his reasons for the ascriptions, and to my knowledge no such explanation was found among his papers after his death. A number of factors may have contributed to this. He had, in his editions and transcriptions of fifteenthcentury liturgical music, made a number of ascriptions, particularly of Ordinary cycles, to Dunstaple, Leonel, Du Fay, Busnoys, and others, that looked increasingly improbable as research on those composers progressed 41 42

43

44

Feininger, ed., Auctorum Anonymorum, iv–viii. Ibid., vi. Fallows, “Introit Antiphon Paraphrase,” published Feininger’s “confronto” of the plainsongs with the polyphony from Feininger’s Nachlass. His study is quite useful in terms of showing Feininger’s careful method, but of very limited relevance to the matter at hand because the introit antiphons are among the most stable chants in this repertory. Virtually all the important variants occur in the graduals, the alleluias, and some of the offertories. In addition, the study of local chant traditions in the 14th and 15th centuries had not really started when Feininger was doing his work. It is barely in its infancy even now. On this, see Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 161–62. The chant used by Du Fay agrees by and large with the readings of Montpellier H 159 and Brussels 3824, rather than with those of Cambrai 60. Surely Bukofzer’s largely negative review in Musical Quarterly had a great deal to do with this.

513

514

The Mass Propers

in the second half of the twentieth century. In the case of Du Fay these attributions included the following (with the sources known to him at the time): 1

Missa Caput

2 3 4 5 6

Missa Veterem hominem Missa La mort de Saint Gothard Missa Christus surrexit Missa Puisque je vis Missa Sine nomine

Tr 88 (K: “Dufay”), A Tr 89 (complete: “Dufay,” erased) Tr 88 (complete) ModE (ascription withdrawn) Tr 89, G, C, S CS 14 (lacks Agnus III) CS 14 (ascription unpublished)

Besseler accepted Feininger’s ascription of the Missa La mort de Saint Gothard in 1951,45 and published it in 1960 in the Opera Omnia,46 but by 1963, when Feininger published his own edition of it, he himself had withdrawn the ascription and tentatively proposed Jehan Martin as the composer,47 a suggestion supported by Nitschke in his study of Du Fay’s Masses.48 Similarly, when Feininger published the Missa sine nomine of CS 14 in 1952 he attributed it instead to Dunstaple,49 although his original ascription was taken over without comment by Llorens in his catalogue of the Cappella Sistina manuscripts.50 A fragment of the Mass survives in Lu 238, and two new editions are now available.51 The work is probably by a composer of the generation of the master of Caput rather than by Dunstaple. To these changes of heart one might add the discovery in 1954 that a passage of the Missa Veterem hominem was cited, as an English work, in Thomas Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, from a now lost manuscript in full black notation,52 and the removal of the Missa Caput from Du Fay’s canon.53 All of these developments undermined the confidence of other scholars in Feininger’s intuition, and may have undermined his own as well, for he never published any further studies of this repertory. Still, at the center of these intuitions was clearly an acute sense of musical style, which was thrown off only because the Missa Caput was, since its first modern publication in 1912, viewed not only as a genuine work of Du Fay but 45 47 49 51

52 53

OO Besseler 3:ii and n. 4. 46 OO Besseler 2, no. 6. Feininger, ed., MPLSER, Ser. 1, II/3, preface (n.p.). 48 Nitschke, Studien, 359–74. Feininger, ed., MPLSER, Ser. 1, II/2, v. 50 Llorens, Capellae Sixtinae Codices, 19. Strohm, ed., Fifteenth-Century Liturgical Music, VI: Mass Settings, no. 5, and Sherr, ed., Masses for the Sistine Chapel, no. 10. Morley, A Plain and Easy Introduction, 124; see also Dart, “A Footnote,” 183. Walker, “A Severed Head,” 14–15; Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1972), 1–13.

Questions of Ascription

as a work central to his development as a composer,54 so it stands to reason that he heard an “air of familiarity” in the other English Masses listed above. The preceding discussion, which at first blush would appear to belong in the next chapter, is necessary here not only to explain why scholars tended to ignore Feininger’s ascription of the propers, but also to point out to what extent, in the context of what was known at the time, his sense of musical style was acute. Moreover, he was not afraid of retracting some of his earlier opinions, though he was by all accounts an extraordinarily stubborn man.55 Now, if in the context of the Ordinaries, Feininger’s intuitions were thrown off by the fact that he considered the Missa Caput a central work of Du Fay, and this colored his judgment of the other Ordinaries, in the context of the propers, the opposite has been the case. All kinds of information that Feininger was not aware of – the congruence between the missae communes and the series of Masses founded by Philip the Good for the Order of the Golden Fleece in Dijon; the use of variants found only in Dijon in the cantus firmus of those Masses, the mention of some of the Golden Fleece Masses as well as some of the Franciscan Masses in the writings of Gaffori and Spataro as works of Du Fay, and the connection between the chants used in the cycle for St. Maurice and the use of those chants in Savoy, including a variant of the offertory that is found only in southern France, as well as the startling discovery of a Cambrai missal with rubrics for the performance of missae communes that make absolutely no sense in terms of the plainsong repertory, but perfect sense in terms of a polyphonic repertory, and which are also entirely congruent with the unique structure of Du Fay’s missae communes for the Order of the Golden Fleece – all these elements have tended to reinforce Feininger’s intuition about the proper cycles. This might also be the place to deal with some of the specific objections to the authenticity of these proper cycles. Manfred Bukofzer was skeptical of Feininger’s ascriptions,56 which at the time were presented with little documentation, and so was Robert Gerken in his dissertation.57 Both were distrustful of the sweeping assertions presented by Feininger with nothing 54

55 56 57

The Mass appeared in DTÖ 28, and Bukofzer’s “Caput,” in Studies, represents at once the culmination of the study of the work as part of Du Fay’s canon and the one that first planted the seeds of the revision of that view. A particularly acute appreciation of his career is Lowinsky, “Laurence Feininger.” Bukofzer, “Review,” 334–40. Gerken, “Polyphonic Cycles,” 1:43 and 102. Gerken assiduously avoids confronting Feininger’s ascriptions; in the first instance he simply cites Besseler, OO 2, I; and in the second he cites Bukofzer’s review of Feininger’s edition.

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more than the promise of a future study. More specific objections were raised by Charles Hamm in his study of the chronology of Du Fay’s music, and it concerned not only the propers but the Ordinary of the Missa Sancti Antonii de Padua et Sancti Francisci, because these works used mensurations that were found nowhere else or very infrequently in what was then known of Du Fay’s works. He took pains to point to the number of unique and possibly corrupt mensuration signs in this Mass, and in his discussion of the propers he again dwelled upon the fact that most of the mensural usage in these pieces was found nowhere else in Du Fay’s work.58 But from the evidence of Tinctoris and Gaffurius the Ordinary is indeed a work by Du Fay, and Spataro and Gaffurius refer to some of these propers as works by Du Fay, and further specifically mention his use of some of the mensuration signs questioned by Hamm. Ironically, Hamm had less trouble accepting Feininger’s ascription of some of the works listed above to Du Fay precisely because their mensural usage was largely concordant with that of the Missa Caput, which was then regarded as central to Du Fay’s canon, although he voiced skepticism concerning the Missa La mort de Saint Gothard.59 Similarly, Rebecca Gerber, in a study of some of these propers, has sought to show that the communions of the cycles, even when some of the other movements are securely ascribed to Du Fay, cannot be his work,60 and in her recent edition of Trent 88 she summarily rejects his authorship of most of these cycles.61 The first of these essays is built on two fundamental misunderstandings. First, she has misunderstood Barbara HagghHuglo’s study of the acta of the Order of the Golden Fleece in the National Archives in Vienna;62 these acts refer only to the yearly meetings of the Order and do not mention the votive Masses in the Sainte-Chapelle; therefore, the descriptions of the liturgy in these acts have no relevance to the Du Fay propers. She was misled by a typographical error in my article on Du Fay’s benefices, where Du Fay’s name appears in the author column for the propers of St. Stephen.63 Gerber sets up a series of stylistic guidelines of what she views as Du Fay’s normal practice in terms of the transposition of the chant, the textual density of the phrases, the melodic elaboration of the chant, the contrapuntal structure, cadences, rhythmic usage, the length of phrases, and the use of mensurations; these guidelines are unexceptionable and can be 58 60 63

Hamm, Cronology, 104–13 (Ordinary), 131–36 (Propers). 59 Ibid., 146–47. Gerber, “Dufay’s Style.” 61 Gerber, ed., Sacred Music, 62–68. 62 Haggh, “The Archives.” I did send her a correction of that misprint before the publication of her article, but it appears not to have reached her.

Questions of Ascription

viewed as the center of the composer’s practice, but hardly as the totality of it, and seeks to exclude all movements that do not conform entirely to this central practice without taking into account the totality of Du Fay’s repertory with secure ascriptions. In her edition of Trent 88, the criteria Gerber uses to question Du Fay’s authorship of some of the cycles (or of movements within a cycle) are based on a confusion between the liturgical traditions of Cambrai and those of Dijon or Savoy, as well as those of the Franciscan order, all of which were quite distinct, and upon occasional misreadings of the clefs in the plainsong sources in terms of the transpositions used by Du Fay in some movements. She ignores the evidence from the votive missal copied at Cambrai during the 1440s and its congruence with the unique structure of the Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece. In discussing this music, we might proceed chronologically, since the proses form a distinct group that precedes the proper cycles and they appear to have been, together with the earlier magnificat settings, the laboratory in which Du Fay transformed the style he had used for the hymns and the Kyries into the language that he was to develop in the proper cycles during the 1440s. The proses are surely a product of the 1430s. Only one of them was copied in Bo Q15, according to Margaret Bent in an early Stage III script, thus it was probably entered sometime in 1433.64 For all the others the earliest sources are Tr 871 and Tr 921, both of which were copied in the long decade between 1433 and 1445.65 Six of them constitute a de facto proser for all the major feasts of the temporale – Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, and Corpus Christi – and Du Fay probably regarded them as such, perhaps not at the outset but as the cycle progressed. Some of them, and surely Laetabundus exsultet, were composed when Du Fay was present in the papal chapel. Since he returned to it after his first sojourn at Savoy, and remained in the chapel from June 1435 to May 1437, it is also possible that the entire series for the temporale was written for the papal chapel. But their presence in Tr 921, a manuscript copied in the area of Basel, which probably transmits a good deal of the Basel–Savoy repertory at the time, and of two of them in Tr 871, copied by Hanns Volp almost certainly at the court of King Friedrich IV of Germany (Emperor Friedrich III after 1452) in Graz/Wiener Neustadt at a time when communications between Basel 64 65

Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:22 and 240; the qualification “early” was edited out in the final version. P. Wright, “On the Origins,” 258; id., “New Light” (I am most grateful to Professor Wright for providing me a copy of this paper before publication); see also Ward, “The Structure,” 141–44.

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and the court were particularly frequent,66 places the entire cycle in the repertory of the conciliar chapel and that of the duke of Savoy. For the last of the proses, which is clearly not part of the cycle, there can be no doubt: the chant used by Du Fay had a very small circulation, and all of the surviving sources for it come from southern Germany and the dioceses of Geneva and Lausanne;67 thus it was surely written for the cathedral at Lausanne, where Du Fay was a canon at the time. All the proses are for three voices and all are chant-paraphrase works where the polyphony alternates with plainsong. Those in the temporale cycle, with the exception of Veni sancte spiritus, are scored for cantus, tenor, and contratenor, with the plainsong paraphrase mostly in the cantus. Veni sancte spiritus, like two of the Kyries and one of the hymns, is scored for two cantus voices and tenor, and as in the other similarly scored work, the plainsong paraphrase is in cantus 2. Veni sancte spiritus is also unique in that it begins with polyphony; all the others, including Isti sunt duae olivae, begin with plainsong, but in the case of Victimae paschali laudes and Rex omnipotens, because the prose starts with a single verse rather than a verse pair, the polyphony, rather than echoing the plainsong, anticipates it. The setting of most of the proses, even a late chant such as Lauda Sion, is largely syllabic, and Du Fay uses remarkably little ornamentation in his paraphrase. Only in the refrain endings of Laetabundus exsultet does he use a bit more melodic ornamentation. In many ways the treatment of the chant is closer to that of the hymns than to that of the Kyries. The placement of the chant in the polyphony, where it is always transposed up an octave from the written pitch of the plainsong, gives us what may be a rare glimpse of how Du Fay composed these pieces (and possibly a great deal of his other music). It would appear that he set up a discant framework between the cantus that would carry the plainsong paraphrase and the tenor, both probably with little or no ornamentation, and then proceeded to elaborate melodically each of the voices. This would not be very different from the manner which the fourteenthcentury theorist Petrus Frater dictus de Palma Ociosa recommended for the composition of ornamented discant.68 Some of these elaborations 66 67

68

P. Wright, “On the Origins,” 259. AH 40, no. 321, gives two 14th-century manuscript sources, a gradual from Sankt-Blasien, now Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, St. Blasien 102, and a Franciscan Missal, Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguibertine, MS 107, three printed missals of Geneva (1491, 1498, 1522), and two of Lausanne (1505, 1522). Professor Calvin Bower, who for several decades has compiled an immense database of proses, tells me that his own database for Isti sunt duae olivae includes only the sources reported by Blume. Wolf, “Ein Beitrag,” 518–34.

Questions of Ascription

would surely be on his mind, even as he produced the unornamented framework, since as Anna Maria Busse Berger has shown, a good deal of the education of a musician at the time involved what can be described as building up a memory archive of figures and melodic strategies.69 But not every detail was yet fixed. Throughout his entire canon Du Fay has an absolute top limit for his cantus parts of f ″, and when the transposed plainsong would rise above it, as it does in a number of prose melodies with a G final, he would then present the chant paraphrase at pitch and in the tenor. This is what he does in Laetabundus exsultet, at verse 5b, Si non suis vatibus. In Lauda Sion, verses 5a and 8a rise to g′ in the plainsong, so Du Fay set the chant in the tenor in 5b and 8b; verses 3a and 4a do not, but from Du Fay’s elaboration it is clear that from the beginning he wanted the opening phrase of each to move from g to g′ and the last phrase to descend from g′ to g, so again he placed the plainsong in the tenor for verses 3b and 4b. A similar process seems to be at work in verse 9b. In addition, he set verses 5–6 and 8–9 as duos, so in the case of 6b, where neither the chant nor his ornamentation rises above f ″, he kept the chant in the tenor apparently for reasons of structural symmetry. In Rex omnipotens, verse 10, the chant does not go above f ″, but starts and ends in d″, although its ornamentation, if transposed up an octave, would reach g″ (m. 63). Du Fay placed the plainsong in the contratenor, and in an earlier study I surmised that he might have realized this only after writing the tenor, so he could not place the chant now in the tenor.70 But there might be a better explanation. Like many ninth-century sequentiae the melody of Rex omnipotens shifts range and the final of the verses about three-quarters of the way, so that stanzas 9 and 10 end on D, after which stanzas 11–13 return to a G final. Du Fay apparently wanted to keep the final as constant as possible. In the case of stanza 9, which starts on C and ends on D, placing the plainsong in the tenor or in the cantus would have had the same tonal outcome, a verse starting with a C sonority and ending with a D sonority, and placing the plainsong in the contratenor would constrain him to start either with a strangely spaced C sonority or with an F sonority that he surely thought had no place in a piece so firmly rooted in G, so he kept the plainsong in the cantus. But in verse 10 placing the plainsong in the contratenor allowed him to begin and end the verse with a G sonority.

69

70

Busse Berger, Medieval Music, 4–5. The process of memorization here would be closer to what Busse Berger described for chant rather than for counterpoint, since at this point I am describing melodic elaboration. Planchart, “The Polyphonic Proses.”

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The Mass Propers Example 13.1 Veni Sancte Spiritus, beginning

Occasionally Du Fay will alter the chant he paraphrases, apparently for tonal reasons. The most noticeable example of it is the opening of Veni Sancte Spiritus, where he clearly wanted to start and end verse 1 with a G sonority, so he simply eliminated the very first note of the plainsong and compressed the c–f rise of the line by using a repeated f (cf. mm. 1–2 of cantus 2 with the plainsong in Ex. 13.1). This may be the reason why he chose to begin this prose with the polyphony, since the plainsong verse does not sound as odd after the polyphonic one as does the polyphony beginning on a “wrong note” when heard immediately after the plainsong. Most of the settings are quite regular, and Du Fay builds variety in the small ornaments he uses, particularly as he approaches the cadence in each verse. A good deal of the music is a very careful reflection of the plainsong itself. Thus, Epiphaniam domini is a very modest, albeit elegant piece, while the long and melodically complicated Lauda Sion salvatorem elicits an extended setting where sections 1–4 are trios, 5–6 duos, 7 a trio, 8–9 duos, and 10–12 trios. In Tr 92, which is the source closest to Du Fay, the duos are signed with even though the rhythmic density of the music is exactly the same as that in the trios. In this case the mensuration may not point to a faster tempo but to the fact that these sections are organized in minor modus and the modus here provides an important cue to the way these sections should be phrased, particularly in terms of the text. This is very different from the use of in the last verse of Rex omnipotens, where there is a considerable shift in the rhythmic density so that either an acceleration by one third or by one half is called for. With all the small variations in approach and texture, the six proses of the temporale have what can best be described as an air of familiarity, even

Questions of Ascription Example 13.2 Isti sunt duae olivae, start of verses 4 and 5 (plainsong and cantus)

though they were written most likely over a period of several years. This is not the case with Isti sunt duae olivae for SS Peter and Paul. The plainsong in this piece is both a relatively late chant (the earliest sources are fourteenth century)71 and very much in a Germanic tradition. Tr 92, the only source for Du Fay’s piece, has a corrupt version of verse 1a (missing one word and two notes), but otherwise agrees in the plainsong with the other notated sources. The plainsong apparently puzzled Du Fay to some extent. In verses 4 and 5 the high note of the chant, f ′, is simply ignored in the paraphrase, which never goes above e″ (see Ex. 13.2). But in verses 7–9, when the chant rises to g′, he places the paraphrase in the contratenor (verse 7) and in an unlabeled lower voice (presumably the tenor of verse 8, a duo, and of verse 9, where the middle voice is labeled concordans) and includes the G in his paraphrase. In verses 8–9 his procedure is the one he normally follows when there is a g′ in the plainsong, and the procedure in verse 7, which begins and ends on D, is similar to what he does in Rex omnipotens, but apparently he really did not want to have f ′ as the Spitzton of a verse with a G final. Apart from this the paraphrase technique in this piece is as simple as it is in the other proses. All in all, the starkly syllabic nature of these plainsongs as well as their clear melodic direction led Du Fay to use the simplest paraphrase technique possible, all the more so because in the proses, unlike the hymns or even the Kyries, each polyphonic segment was to be heard only once. Isti sunt duae olivae makes use of more varied mensurations than any of the other proses. It starts and is largely in , but has bursts of triplets 71

See AH 40, no. 321.

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(signed 3) in all voices in verse 2, shifts to in the cantus against in the lower voices in verse 4, to in verses 6 and 10 (one of the last “traditional” uses of this sign in his canon), and to in both voices for verse 8. Beyond this verse 2 is scored in fauxbourdon, and there are double notes in the contratenor in verses 5 (mm. 62–63, 65) and 6 (m. 76). In verse 10, at the very end of the piece, where both lower voices have a B fa signature, the contratenor in the last note has a third, B mi/D, which sounds quite startling. The textural and mensural variety and the use of double notes recalls the incomplete cantilena Iuvenis qui puellam, which probably dates from after 1436, since it is ascribed to “decretalis Du Fay,”72 and at the same time prefigures some of the mensural experiments that Du Fay was to use in his propers. This piece is surely the last of his surviving proses, probably written at the very end of his stay in Savoy in the late 1430s. We know of two other polyphonic proses by him, written late in his career for the cathedral of Cambrai, a “prose for the Magdalene,” and a “prose Ave Maria,” copied in 1464–1465 and in 1473–1474, respectively.73 Given the liturgy of the cathedral, these were certainly settings of Mane prima sabbati and Ave Maria. . . virgo serena, this last surely for the Lady Mass he endowed in 1471–1473, and for which he wrote his Missa Ave regina caelorum.

The Proper Cycles The remainder of his surviving music for the Proper of the Mass consists of the five preserved Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece, the propers for St. Maurice, the two sets of Franciscan propers, a cycle for St. John the Baptist, and the pool of pieces for the Common of Martyrs preserved in Tr 88. In them one can hear both the evolution of Du Fay’s melodic language between the tightly controlled style of the 1420s and 1430s, so dependent on small motivic cells and rhythmic repetition, and the very flexible melodic writing one finds in the late works. The use of some new mensuration signs in some of the propers probably makes it likely that it is during these years that Du Fay wrote his lost treatise, De musica mensurata et de proportionibus.74 After 1450 he does not appear to have returned to these practices except for an extraordinary passage in the Credo of the Missa

72 74

See pp. 407–08. 73 LAN, 4G 4672, fol. 24r; 4G 4682, fol. 21v. Cf. Gallo, “Citazioni,” 151–52.

The Proper Cycles

L’homme armé,75 and a milder one in the Credo of the Missa Ave regina caelorum.76 By contrast, in these propers the approach to plainsong paraphrase found in the proses and the Magnificats is expanded in a number of ways. The first thing that is worth noting is that the nature of the chants themselves and the text-setting in the plainsong appears to have influenced Du Fay’s approach. Among the antiphonal chants, including in this case the offertories, which were no longer viewed as responsorial chants in the fifteenth century since the verses were no longer sung, it is the offertories that receive the most elaborate settings, including in those for St. Anthony, St. Francis, and St. Maurice, set in four-part polyphony that recalls in many ways the cantilena motet O decus Hispaniae – O sidus Hispaniae for the Vespers of St. Anthony. The setting of the introits is always more modest, with the psalm and doxologies either in stark homophony or, in the case of the four-voice setting for the G mode doxology, an animated homophony that recalls the plainest segments of his magnificat settings.77 The communions, which are among the simplest plainsongs he set, recall the very simple settings he used for some of the office antiphons. This might be one of the traits that misled Gerber into doubting that they belonged with their cycles.78 The settings of the responsorial chants, alleluias and graduals, are by far the most expansive and, one might say, experimental in terms of their mensural and textural use. The responsorial chants are the one repertory where the performance of the plainsong itself makes a distinction between a choral section and a soloistic one. Du Fay’s response to this may be traced in the surviving settings. His earliest pieces in this group are surely the five surviving Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece. In these pieces the gradual verses are consistently for three voices, and for each Mass one of the two alleluias has a verse for three voices and the other a verse for two voices. From the congruence in terms of the alleluias between the surviving propers in Tr 88 and the three votive Masses in CBM 158, with its unusual rubrics on how to derive a tract from an alleluia, we can see that in all cases the tract was to be derived from verses of the alleluias with a verse set for two voices. The antecedents for this interpretation of the solo parts of the chant is clearly the “Duo–Chorus” alternation found in many early fifteenth-century works, although in those cases, usually settings of antiphons or Ordinary of the Mass texts, the plainsong tradition did not call for an alternation of soloist and schola. One further consequence of this decision on Du Fay’s part is that it effectively 75 77

OO Planchart 3/5:17 (mm. 81–92). 76 OO Planchart 3/7:22 (mm. 217–36). See pp. 439–48. 78 See pp. 516–17.

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started the tradition that led to most fifteenth-century settings of the tracts being composed as extended duos with extra voices added only at the point where in the plainsong the schola joins the cantors. In the later cycles Du Fay, with one exception among the surviving pieces, extended this policy to all the responsorial chants. Thus the verses of all the graduals for St. Anthony of Padua, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Maurice, and the two pools for the Common of Martyrs are set for two voices, as is the one surviving tract, Desiderium animae, which significantly adds a third voice precisely at the point where since the thirteenth century the schola joined the cantors to finish the tract.79 Similarly, all the alleluias in these later cycles, with the single exception of Alleluia V. Antoni compar inclite, have verses set for two voices. The propers present problems on account of their transmission. The copies that reached Hanns Wiser do not have the same kind of authority that the pieces of Du Fay that reach us in Bo Q15, ModB, or Br 5557 do. Some of Du Fay’s mensuration signs have been changed, although in the case of the propers the kind of wholesale change of all the instances of English into found in Tr 93 and Tr 90 is generally absent. In the case of the Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece we do not have the chant books that Du Fay used for the plainsongs. The Sainte-Chapelle followed the use of Dijon, and the cantus firmi of Du Fay’s Masses follow that use; for example, the gradual of the Trinity Mass shows a melodic and textual variant found only in manuscripts from Dijon,80 and the communion of the Mass for the Cross in Cambrai is not the communion that was used in Dijon (which is also the communion used in the modern chant books), but the Dijon communion was not used in Cambrai or in most of northern France.81 Still, Du Fay surely composed these pieces in northern France, so he was using chant books for the Sainte-Chapelle but probably copied and held in the Burgundian court, and there are small variants that can no longer be traced. The Dijon chant books, for example, read “confitemini ei,” in the introit for the Trinity, but the introit in Tr 88 has the otherwise universal reading “confitebimur ei,” with no musical variant.82 This, however, may well be a case of a change in the transmission: in the plainsong tradition the reading “confitemini ei” is limited to the sources around Dijon, while “confitebimur ei” was nearly universal, so outside Dijon, 79

80 81

82

OO Planchart 4/7:16 (m. 193). In the modern chant books this point is indicated with an asterisk. Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Second Style,” 326. Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 151–52 and 161; id., “Connecting the Dots,” 17, n. 36. Cf. Hansen, H 159 Montpellier, no. 608; Brussels 3824, fol. 137r.

The Proper Cycles

clerical scribes, who surely knew their liturgy, would have automatically written “confitebimur” without noticing, or else regarded “confitemini” as a certain scribal error in their exemplar and emended it. There is also the matter of the chant incipits, which a musician like Wiser would surely know by heart. Whatever incipits the propers originally had, when there is a difference between the West Frankish and the East Frankish (i.e., “German”) tradition, Wiser automatically writes the German incipit, even in instances such as the gradual Os iusti for martyrs, where the paraphrase of the rest of the introit melody makes it clear that Du Fay was using a Franciscan source with the West Frankish melodic tradition for the introit.83 These variants aside, it is also clear that even though Du Fay’s paraphrase reflects the melodic substance of the chant quite closely for the most part, there are a number of instances in virtually all of his settings where he departs from the plainsong, often as he approaches a cadence, and not always just to add an ornament. His setting of Benedicta sit for the Trinity will serve as an example (see Ex. 13.3). The paraphrase of “sancta” is absolutely straightforward. At measure 5, however, Du Fay introduces a G sonority that he needs to create a tonal balance in the setting of “trinitas,” and with it a structural B in the melody that is not in the chant. The reason for this is that the plainsong ends the word “trinitas” with a melisma on the last syllable, while Du Fay’s setting postpones the last syllable to the end of the phrase. Thus the G sonority at measure 5 in his polyphony has the same function as the G in the last syllable of “trinitas” in the plainsong. Measure 7 is a very simple extension of the precadential B of the plainsong. The setting of “atque” slights the second clivis of the plainsong to produce a very typical gesture in Du Fay’s music: an under-third prolongation of the C that leads to a descent to G. The setting of “indivisa” is again something quite typical of Du Fay’s melodic writing, which in this case is mostly congruent with the plainsong’s gesture, a composing out of the fourth G– C, with an ascent from and a descent back to the G. This causes Du Fay to ignore the final note of the plainsong in this phrase, which would simply not fit with the tonal plan of the polyphony. The setting of “unitas” and “confitebimur ei” is quite straightforward, and the prolongation of the plainsong C in measures 25–26 is clearly intended to accommodate the displacement to the final syllable of “confitebimur,” which, in terms of 83

OO Planchart 4/8:4, m. 2, where in the Germanic tradition the chant echoes the third a–c′ of the intonation (cf. Munich, UB 156, ed. Hiley, Moosburger, fol. 22v), and Du Fay uses the B (flat) of the Western tradition (cf. Hansen, H 159 Montpellier, no. 754).

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the plainsong, is now placed on the preceding neume. In “quia fecit nobiscum” Du Fay barely follows the general outline of the plainsong, and here it cannot be a case of a variant reading in his plainsong sources, since this passage is extremely stable in the Gregorian recension all over Europe. The correspondence with the plainsong is restored for “misericordiam,” with the G sonority on the downbeat of measure 41 serving a purpose very similar to that on the downbeat of measure 5. Finally, with “suam,” even though I have placed the A of the final clivis of the plainsong over the a′ in measure 50, Du Fay’s response to this A is his composing out of the entire pentachord a′–d′–a′ as a preparation for the final cadence. What one finds in settings such as this is the kind of melodic writing that refers to the plainsong but has achieved a good deal of the freedom and flexibility that Du Fay displays in his songs and cantilenas, and in a few instances, as in measures 16–19, the contrapuntal-melodic structure appears to take precedence over the reference to the plainsong. His approach is quite different in the settings of the psalm verses, which are extremely simple and almost rigid in their reference to the plainsong, often in simple fauxbourdon although written out in full (see Ex. 13.4). The alleluias, graduals, and offertories of these Masses are all large-scale works, some of them over two hundred breves long. The approach to the chant paraphrase has fewer liberties like the one we find in Benedicta sit, but the melodic ornamentation can be extraordinary, as is the case at the end of the verse of the gradual Benedictus es (see Ex. 13.5). Here Du Fay’s cantus corresponds with the plainsong quite closely, but the two clives that end the melisma on “saecula” in the plainsong are treated very differently. The first is replicated in the cantus at measure 191, but the G of the clivis becomes an F in Du Fay’s cantus because he needs to create a point of tonal closure. The next gesture of the melody dips from f ′ to c′ and back to f ′ and the sonority at the end of measure 194 is exactly the same as that he will use to end the piece. Measures 195–203 can be heard as an immensely expanded composing out of the final two notes of the plainsong, and the slight pause in measure 192 suggests this, but actually, on the larger scale, the last gesture of the gradual begins in measure 193 (plus a pick-up), and allows the cantus to transverse the entire octave c′–c″ up and down, with a second partial rise to the final f ′, that is, a complete statement of the entire ambitus of the plagal tritus. In this case it is interesting to note that although the modern chant books classify this gradual as authentic tritus,84 the modal tradition at Dijon classifies it as a plagal tritus.85 This process of 84

LU 910.

85

Hansen, H 159 Montpellier, no. 800.

The Proper Cycles Example 13.3 Introit antiphon, Benedicta sit

summing up the entire modal ambitus of the cantus in the last phrase of the work is already present in some of Du Fay’s magnificats of the 1430s and in the responsory Si quaeris miracula, which may be among the earliest of his large-scale plainsong paraphrase works. These settings are also organized in a number of subsections by means of duos that are not necessarily separated into an entire section, as is the case with the gradual and alleluia verses, but as changes of scoring in the threevoice sections delimited by a cadence and even a pause of a breve or a long. Similarly, Du Fay uses shifts in mensuration, often in a single voice, sometimes indicated by a new sign, and in other cases by the use of color, to create neatly self-contained subsections.

527

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Example 13.3 (cont.)

In contrast to the graduals, alleluias, or even the offertories and the introits, the communions, even in the plainsong itself, are often short and very simple chants, and Du Fay responds to this using a much simpler paraphrasing that approaches the almost unornamented manner he uses for his settings of the Office antiphons discussed in the previous chapter. Typical of this manner is what we encounter in the communion for the Cross. In this case Du Fay used an exceptional transposition, putting the chant up a fourth rather than up an octave or leaving it at the written pitch. Per signum crucis is a relatively late chant; it is absent from the manuscripts of the Sextuplex although it appears as an incipit in Montpellier H 159. It is built on the melodic pattern of the communion Dilexisti iustitiam, which appears in the Sextuplex,86 and also as an incipit in Montpellier H 159;87 86 87

Hesbert, Antiphonale missarum sextuplex, nos. 33b, 140. Hansen, H 159 Montpellier, nos. 499 (Dilexisti), 501 (Per signum).

The Proper Cycles Example 13.3 (cont.)

there they are classified as mode 2, but the modern chant books classify them as mode 4.88 In any event, if they were to be notated with an E final (to assume the modern modal classification, which appears to be the most plausible), the pieces would require a B♭, which was a note absent from the gamut; hence they were written a fifth up when notated on a staff,89 which brings them to end on B, a note that represented an absolute impossibility as the final of a polyphonic setting. By transposing the chant up a fourth Du Fay allows it to end on the normal mode 4 final and presents it thus up an octave from its putative original pitch. One aspect of these propers that is absent from much of Du Fay’s earlier as well as his later music is the apparent variety of mensuration signs he uses and the effect to which he uses them. If my understanding of the sources for his music – with all the corruptions and changes they have – is 88

LU 1457.

89

On this problem see Maloy, “Scolica enchiriadis,” 61–62.

529

Example 13.4 Introit, Nos autem gloriari, Psalm tone

The Proper Cycles Example 13.5 Gradual Benedictus es (end)

correct, the 1440s is the time when Du Fay largely abandoned the use of and in favor of uncut signs, where the density of the rhythmic notation is his cue to the proper tempo for the music. Even among the last pieces that use cut signatures, such as the motet Fulgens iubar ecclesiae, they are being used in anomalous ways derived from what Charles Hamm called the

531

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The Mass Propers

“artificial relationship” between the mensurations in Ecclesiae militantis,90 which is something of a watershed work in this respect.91 In this his usage from ca. 1440 on resembles that of English composers, particularly in duple meter, so I usually refer to the with breve–semibreve motion so prevalent in his late music as “English .” This mensuration in particular was most often altered by scribes in Italy and Germany, and rendered as , although Hans Wiser, by the time he was copying Tr 88, had become aware that the uncut signatures were genuine.92 The mensurations found in the propers (including in this case the propers for St. Anthony and St. Francis) are given in Table 13.2. Mensurations labeled “internal” in virtually all cases are found at the start of a major section of the piece: the psalm and doxology of the introit, the verse of the gradual and alleluia, or a separate section, often set off with a rest, in the offertory. In addition, the sign 3 is used to indicate a triple division of the semibreve in (Offertory, Benedictus sit), and far more commonly of the breve in or , as well as in and . These uses of 3 are not noted in Table 13.2.93 The mensural usage in these propers, as well as in the Ordinary for St. Anthony and St. Francis, presents a number of problems that contributed a great deal to Charles Hamm’s skepticism about Feininger’s attributions.94 The first thing we should note is that despite the greater accuracy of the copies in Tr 88 in comparison with Tr 93 and Tr 90 concerning mensuration signs, we are still probably dealing with the wholesale renotation of Du Fay’s duple meter. Table 6.2 makes clear the enormous prevalence of the use of instead of in these pieces. Without exception all the sections in move in breves and semibreves, that is in the faster tempo associated on the Continent with . In this respect, Du Fay’s notation reflects English usage. Of the nine pieces using , four, Benedictus es, Priusquam te formarem, Emitte spiritum, and Laetabitur iustus, have 90 92

93

94

Hamm, Chronology, 69–70. 91 See pp. 362–64, and the notes in OO Planchart 2/3. This becomes quite noticeable when one compares the Ordinary of the Mass for St. Anthony and St. Francis, copied into Tr 90 in the mid-1450s, with the propers copied into Tr 88 ca. 1460. See also Planchart, “The Books,” 191–93. The use of 3 in modus cum tempore mensurations is exceptional, and its use with is at the start, The verse is unsigned, so ambiguous. The gradual Benedicite domino is signed . At one point the cantus shifts to 3, but the that one could assume a continuation of the cancellation of the 3 is a , so that perhaps we are missing a sign at the start of the verse. On the other hand the offertory Stetit angelus of that same Mass begins unsigned, but clearly in , and whenever any of the parts shifts to 3 the cancellation is signed . The verse of the gradual ; both voices shift to 3 at Os iusti of the Mass for St. Anthony and St Francis is signed . different points in the piece, but the cancellation in both cases is Hamm, Chronology, 131–36. Hamm’s discussion of the mensural usage in these pieces nonetheless remains quite useful.

The Proper Cycles

533

Table 13.2 Mensurations in the proper cycles Sign

Location Introits (initial): Benedicta sit; De ventre matris (unsigned); In medio ecclesiae; In virtute tua (unsigned); Laetabitur iustus; Spiritus domini; Venite benedicti Graduals (initial): Beata gens; Benedictus es; Constitues eos (unsigned); Os iusti; Posuisti domine Alleluias (initial): Antoni compar; Iudicabunt sancti; O patriarcha pauperum; Posuisti domine (unsigned); Sebastiani gratia; Tu puer propheta (unsigned) Tract (initial): Desiderium animae Offertories (initial): Benedictus sit; Confitebuntur caeli; In virtute tua; Iustus ut palma (unsigned); Mirabilis deus; Veritas mea Introits (initial): Benedicite dominum; Dum sanctificatus fuero; Gaudeamus omnes; Mihi autem (conflicting); Nos autem gloriari; Os iusti; Protexisti me deus; Sapientiam sanctorum Graduals (initial): Christus factus est; Priusquam te formarem (also internal, conflicting) Graduals (internal) Benedicite dominum; Benedictus es (conflicting); Constitues eos; Gloriosus deus; Posuisti domine; Beata gens Alleluias (initial): Benedictus es (unsigned); Dicite in gentibus; Dulce lignum; Ego vos elegi; Emitte spiritum (conflicting); Laudate deum (unsigned) Alleluias (internal): Antoni compar inclite; In conspectu angelorum; Iudicabunt sancti; O patriarcha; Posuisti domine; Sebastiani gratia; Tu puer propheta Tract (internal): Desiderium animae Offertory (initial): Protege domine Offertories (internal): Benedictus sit; Confitebuntur caeli; Gloria et honore; In virtute tua; Iustus ut palma; Mirabilis deus; Veritas mea Communions (initial): Benedicite deum; Factus est repente; Fidelis servus; Gaudete iusti; Laetabitur iustus (conflicting); Magna est; Per signum crucis; Posuisti domine; Quinque talenta; Tu puer propheta; Venite post me Communions (internal): Benedicite omnes angeli Introits (internal): Protexisti me Graduals (internal): Benedictus es (conflicting); Priusquam te formarem (conflicting) Alleluias (initial): Dilexit Andream; Emitte spiritum (conflicting); Verbo domini (Pentecost) Offertory (initial): Confirma hoc; Mihi autem Communion (initial): Laetabitur iustus (conflicting) Introit: In medio ecclesiae (internal, surely incorrect) Introit (internal): Mihi autem (in Tr 90 and Tr 93, correct; cf. the next sign) Introit (internal): Nos autem Gradual (initial): Gloriosus deus Gradual (internal): Os iusti Alleluia (initial): In conspectu angelorum (surely incorrect) Alleluia (internal): Dulce lignum (surely incorrect); Verbo domini (Trinity) Offertory: Stetit angelus (unsigned/internal signed) Introit (initial): Mihi autem (conflicting) Introit (internal): Mihi autem (in Tr 88, incorrect) Gradual (initial): Benedicite dominum Alleluia (initial): Verbo domini (Trinity, surely incorrect) Communion (initial): Benedicite omnes angeli

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conflicting signatures, with in one voice against in the others, and in all instances the context makes it clear that was the original sign. Thus, it is more than likely that the remaining five pieces were originally notated with as well, all the more so because in these pieces there is absolutely no difference in terms of metric organization of notational density between the music under the two signs. Of the small group of pieces with , Mihi autem has it simultaneously with and is identical with it. In the Trinity alleluia Verbo domini is clearly a scribal error, since the music is organized as , and after a passage in 3, the cancellation of that signature uses . The gradual Benedicite dominum shows no conflict, but the music is organized exactly as , and after two voices have a passage in 3 the cancellation of the triple division uses , so it may very well be that again is a ghost. One piece is surely in and the other two are organized exactly as . But the situation might not be quite that simple; it is also possible that represents a transitional step in Du Fay’s abandonment of the use of in favor of English , which took place most likely during the 1440s, the time where I surmise he wrote his treatise on proportions. We do not have the treatise, and these pieces have clearly suffered a good deal in transmission, so we are left with scattered and not entirely consistent glimpses of what was probably a change in Du Fay’s notational practice. In contrast, the one piece signed with , Benedicite omnes angeli, is organized throughout in the manner that passages in 3 within a mensuration are organized. It could just as easily have been notated in , but Du Fay probably wanted to indicate the faster tempo of his English notation with a triple division of the breve. Finally, the single use of in In medio ecclesiae is also almost surely a scribal error: the figuration for the Sicut erat is exactly that of the psalm verse, signed with . This leaves only the seven pieces signed with . This is indeed a true modus cum tempore sign, indicating perfect longs, imperfect breves, and imperfect semibreves. Two of these are surely incorrect. Alleluia V. In conspectu angelorum and Alleluia V. Dulce lignum are organized in imperfect longs. In the first of them the sign occurs only in the tenor at the beginning; the other voices are unsigned, and at the start of the verse all voices are unsigned. Near the end of the verse cantus and contratenor shift to 3 and when they revert to duple meter the sign in both voices is . The entire work is organized as . It may be that the respond was at one point signed if we understand this as a sign that Du Fay might have used for a time before settling on English . The Alleluia V. Dulce lignum presents a similar case: the respond is signed with , the verse with , but the organization remains that of ; near the end the cantus shifts to 3, and the cancellation is signed with . Thus the is surely a scribal error,

Mensurations in the Mass for St. Anthony and St. Francis

perhaps reflecting a notation at one point. A similar confusion obtains in the introit Mihi autem for St. Andrew: the antiphon has in the cantus against in the lower voices, but the tempo is the same in all three voices, so either the original signature was English or its equivalent . The psalm and the doxology are signed in all the signed voices, but the metric organization is that of , and organized in perfect longs. The remaining five pieces (or sections of pieces) signed are clearly organized in perfect longs, even though the long rests in these pieces are notated as imperfect and, when necessary, rounded up by extra breve rests. Virtually all of the anomalies in the mensurations of these pieces are connected with the notation of duple meter, and probably reflect some of the changes that eventually led Du Fay to restrict himself in his late music to just two signs, and English , but it was his adoption of English , perhaps through a transitional stage using , that caused most of the copying errors we find in these pieces, and I should note that scribal problems with Du Fay’s use of remained in the transmission of all of his late music.95 Still, if one eliminates the scribal errors in these cycles, what remains is a repertory that uses mostly two signs, and English , with a small number of pieces where the music in is organized in perfect longs and signed . This is a picture virtually identical to what we meet in Du Fay’s music from 1450 to his death.

Mensurations in the Mass for St. Anthony and St. Francis The Ordinary of the St. Anthony and St. Francis Mass adds a number of other mensurations to those in Table 13.2: apart from and , it has a large number of sections signed with that were surely not in the original, since it survives only in Tr 90, a source where all of the English works as well as those by Du Fay have had their duple meter sections signed with instead of the original , which can be established by concordances in better sources. But O in the Gloria (cantus, m. 89),96 in the Gloria in addition we encounter 3 (cantus, mm. 215, 256) and Credo (cantus, m. 369), Ͻ in the Gloria (cantus 263) and Credo (cantus 238), and in the Credo (cantus 298). There are also two sections signed with , Gloria (all parts, m. 273) and Credo (cantus, m. 383). The first of these uses of is surely not authentic, 95 96

Cf. Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1976), 44–47. Cf. Blackburn, “Obrecht, Busnoys, and the Sign of ‘3’ before 1500.”

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The Mass Propers

and the second is the last instance we find in Du Fay’s music of this sign used against parts in with a strict proportional meaning of 2:1. In addition in the Credo, at Et in spiritum sanctum, where Tr 90 has , Giovanni Spataro mentions that his copy of the piece was signed .97 This again might indicate that Du Fay used for a time in the 1440s before deciding to restrict his usage to English . Of the mensuration signs in the Ordinary that are not found in the propers is quite common in Du Fay’s music of the 1420s and 1430s with the same meaning it has in this Mass, but this is possibly the last use of the sign in his works except for a short passage in the Credo of the Missa L’homme armé. Similarly, Ͻ is found in a few of his works of the 1420s, notably the introit of the Missa Sancti Iacobi,98 and it appears again in his music only in that same passage in the Credo of the Missa L’homme armé.99 In all of these passages Ͻ has the same meaning, as a O sesquitertial proportion. On the other hand, is unique; it appears in the 3 cantus while the other voices are in (that surely was English in the original), and its function is exactly what the simple figure 3 would have produced in or . This most likely a sign added in the transmission of the work and not part of Du Fay’s original notation. Thus the variety of mensuration signs is something of a ghost and the setting of the chant at pitch as well as an octave up is also something of a red herring, since both transpositions are found in the proses. Nonetheless, there are still some matters of structure and liturgical usage that remain. These aspects largely concern the alleluia settings. Du Fay had composed a polyphonic alleluia for the Missa Sancti Iacobi, most likely in 1429 or 1430,100 and this might serve as a useful point of departure for a discussion of his later alleluias.

Structure of the Alleluia Settings Like the introit and the offertory of the Missa Sancti Iacobi, the Alleluia V. Hispanorum clarens stella is set in a motetlike fashion, with two cantus voices, tenor, and contratenor. The plainsong intonation is copied in the tenor part in the other propers of that Mass, and carries the plainsong. The performance of a plainsong alleluia followed a fixed pattern: the intonation 97

98 99 100

Spataro, Tractato, cap. XXXI. The treatise has no pagination, but the passage is at the very start of the chapter, and all citations of music by Du Fay have “G.dufai” written on the margin. OO Planchart 3/2, Introit, mm. 34–45 of cantus 1 and 34–47 of cantus 2. OO Planchart 3/5, Credo, mm. 83–92 of the contratenor. See Bent, “Music and the Early Veneto Humanists,” 124–26.

Structure of the Alleluia Settings

was sung by the cantors and then repeated by the schola, followed by the iubilus, sung by the schola, and then the verse sung by the cantors. Now, in the Alleluia V. Hispanorum clarens stella the tenor of the polyphonic setting of the word “alleluia” does not repeat the intonation. The verse, however, begins with a plainsong intonation that is identical to the intonation of the respond, but when the polyphony resumes the tenor part shows no relationship to either the intonation or the music of the tenor in the respond. This is a pattern that does not appear in a single one of the surviving plainsong alleluias published by Schlager.101 One could assume that, in the case of the respond, the polyphony begins with the iubilus, and of course in a good number of plainsong alleluias material for the respond returns in the verse. But the repeat of music from the respond in the verse is never limited with surgical precision to just a short intonation. Most often music from the respond appears at the end of the verse,102 and when the common material appears at the beginning of the verse it goes well beyond the intonation of the respond.103 But the surgical neatness of the correspondence in Du Fay’s Alleluia V. Hispanorum clarens stella, which is limited to the twelve notes of the intonation, does not happen in any plainsong alleluia. As I note elsewhere, this was an ad hoc solution by Du Fay to the intractable problem of using a plainsong alleluia with its long and often diffuse melody as a cantus firmus for a motetlike setting. He simply ended up devising that entire voice, including the plainsong intonations, himself, and he uses the intonations as formal markers in the way he used the Sanctus and Agnus intonations in the Missa sine nomine and in some of the Sanctus–Agnus pairs as formal markers.104 This, however, apparently gave him the idea of a multiple approach to the setting of the alleluia respond, and the surviving propers show two or possibly three different approaches: 1. The beginning of the polyphony paraphrases the plainsong intonation and the iubilus. This is the procedure he uses in Alleluia V. Dilexit Andream, Alleluia V. Laudate deum, Alleluia V. Verbo domini (Holy Ghost), Alleluia V. Dulce lignum, Alleluia V. Verbo domini (Trinity), Alleluia V. Iudicabunt sancti, Alleluia V. Posuisti domine, Alleluia V. Sebastiani gratia, Alleluia V. Antoni compar inclite, Alleluia V. O patriarcha pauperum. 101 102

103

104

Schlager, ed., Alleluia-Melodien I and II. Cf. Alleluia V. Pascha nostrum (LU 779), Alleluia V. In die resurrectionis (LU 809), Alleluia V. Acendit deus (LU 848), Alleluia V. Non vos relinquam (LU 856), and numerous others. Cf. Alleluia V. Posuisti domine (LU 1148), which uses material from the respond both at the beginning and at the end of the verse. See p. 482.

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2. The beginning of the polyphony paraphrases only the iubilus. This is the procedure he uses in Alleluia V. Ego vos elegi, Alleluia V. In conspectu, Alleluia V. Emitte spiritum, Alleluia V. Dicite in gentibus, Alleluia V. Benedictus es. 3. No plainsong intonation (at least in the source that survives); the polyphony paraphrases the intonation and the iubilus. This is the case with Alleluia V. Tu puer propheta. The first of these procedures duplicates exactly the manner in which the alleluia is sung when it is done in plainsong. The second is a modification mutatis mutandis of the ad hoc solution he had come to for the alleluia of the Missa Sancti Iacobi. The third, if the lack of plainsong intonation is authentic,105 may reflect a later development, but if the lack of intonation is the result of an accident of transmission, then the Alleluia V. Tu puer propheta is simply a representative of the first approach. The distribution of the first two approaches is not random. The second approach is used in only five alleluias, one each from each pair of alleluias in the Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece and nowhere else. From the surviving works Du Fay appears not to have used the second procedure beyond these Masses, which are surely the earliest set of propers he composed during these years, just as in the later alleluias he largely abandoned three-voice settings of the verse. It is possible that setting of the Alleluia V. Tu puer propheta without a plainsong intonation might have to do with whatever traditions of polyphony were employed in the institution for which it was written. Since this is the normal alleluia for St. John the Baptist in the modern chant books neither Feininger nor Gerber appears to have given it much thought in liturgical terms. It was, of course, one of the two alleluias indicated for the saint in the Franciscan tradition, which became the basis of the modern Roman liturgy.106 But this alleluia was not used at all at Cambrai in the fifteenth century, where the Alleluia V. Hic praecursor (Schlager no. 54) appears consistently in all the graduals and missals from the twelfth to the early sixteenth century.107 Hic praecursor has a minuscule

105

106

107

It is unique in this respect in Tr 88; the later Trent codices, 89 and 91, have one or two instances. LU 1501; Van Dijk, The Sources, 2:286, edition of the Ordo missalis of Haymo of Faversham; the other is the Alleluia V. Ne timeas Zacharia (Schlager, Thematischer Katalog, no. 395), no longer in the modern chant books but widely used in the Middle Ages for the Mass of the vigil. Only in Ca 12, 44r, copied in 1540, it is replaced by the more common Alleluia V. Inter natos mulierum.

Structure of the Alleluia Settings

concordance in Schlager’s catalogue, which reports it only in Cambrai and Bobbio;108 in Cambrai it is the only alleluia for St. John, while in Bobbio it follows the Alleluia V. Tu puer propheta. The possibility that Du Fay might have written this alleluia for the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon, where St. John the Evangelist and St. John the Baptist were the joint patrons – and St. John the Baptist was indeed the patron saint of the city of Dijon itself109 – is foreclosed by the fact that the Dijon Graduals use instead the Alleluia V. Inter natos mulierum for St. John. In earlier studies I passed over the Mass for St. John the Baptist in silence, even though I had become increasingly confident that Feininger’s instincts in the case of the propers were quite correct, because I saw no liturgical possibility for this Mass being used in any institution with which Du Fay was connected in the 1440s. It will not do to assume that he wrote it for a Franciscan foundation; this kind of polyphony was not the norm among the Franciscans in northern France, and Du Fay’s enormous Franciscan cycle, which was copied in parchment and in black notation, was clearly a presentation copy for an important event or institution, something that ties in well with what Fallows has postulated about its connection with the dedication of Donatello’s altar in Padua in 1450.110 But now some evidence has surfaced that Du Fay kept some communication with the court of Savoy throughout the Schism, protected as he was by his connection with the duke of Burgundy, whose familiares were exempted from the papal interdict about communicating with the schismatics.111 Chambéry was in the diocese of Grenoble and followed the use of Grenoble, and in that use the Alleluia V. Tu puer propheta is the alleluia for St. John the Baptist.112 Du Fay might have received, as he surely did in the case of the Mass for St. Maurice, a request to write a set of propers for St. John the Baptist, with a list of text incipits. In the case of the Mass for St. Maurice, as I have noted, he could find all of the pieces in the Cambrai books, but for the offertory there was nowhere in the entire region where he could find the offertory with the final alleluia, which led him to write the extraordinary close of that piece, with two full cadences and a texture change, as a way of indicating to the singers in Savoy where they could sing the word “alleluia” in his setting.113 This was not the

108

109 110 112

113

Schlager, no. 95, gives Ca 60, fol. 78r; Ca 78, fol. 92v, and Turin G.V.20. fol. 123v. It appears also in the later Turin F.IV.18, fol. 115r. See Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 297, and n. 130; also Malone, “The Rotunda,” 307–8. Fallows, Dufay, 66–68. 111 Planchart, “Connecting the Dots,” 21–22. Cf. Paris, BnF, lat. 876, missal from Grenoble (15th century), fol. 300v: Alleluia V. Tu puer propheta followed by Alleluia V. Inter natos mulierum as a second option. Cf. Planchart, “Connecting the Dots,” 24–27.

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The Mass Propers

case with the Alleluia V. Tu puer propheta; the chant was not in any of the cathedral books, but he could easily get it from any of the Franciscan convents in Cambrai and its vicinity. Whether the absence of a plainsong intonation was intentional or an accident of transmission remains an open question. Still, the Mass for St. John apparently came to Wiser together with the music from Dijon, and this opens one last possibility, that it was written for the other ducal church in the city, the Chartreuse of Champmol, founded in 1383 by Philip the Bold and not as sealed off from the world as other Carthusian establishments because it was there that the dukes of Burgundy were buried. The Chartreuse, like all Carthusian abbeys, followed the liturgy of Grenoble, and used the Alleluia V. Tu puer propheta as the only alleluia for St. John. The other exceptional alleluia, the Alleluia V. Sebastiani gratia, which led Feininger to label that pool of propers a Mass for St. Sebastian,114 has a simpler explanation. The alleluia is set to the music of the alleluia for St. Francis, and the verse text is unique to Tr 88; it has not turned up in any chant book or missal thus far, but it is part of a pool of settings for the common of martyrs, so it was probably an alleluia written ad hoc at Cambrai for a special purpose. That purpose is not far to seek: in 1455, Du Fay’s friend and his colleague in the papal chapel, Gilles Flannel called L’Enfant, provided an endowment to increase the feast of Fabian and Sebastian from nine lessons to a greater double, “with full assize and solemn bell ringing, and the lighting of tapers in front of the image of St. Sebastian,” which Flannel himself had given to the cathedral.115 The description of the increase in the obituary of the cathedral deals, as usual in that book, with the changes in Vespers, but the change in rank affected the entire feast, including the Mass, and the one place in the Mass where that could be reflected was the alleluia, which in the case of most martyrs could be variable. When this endowment took place Du Fay was not at Cambrai, but it would have been a very simple process to use his music for the immensely impressive alleluia for St. Francis (a piece that would, in fact, not normally be part of the cathedral’s liturgy) and adapt it to St. Sebastian. This is something that could have been done easily by someone like Gilles Carlier, who only a year or so later was to write the texts for Du Fay’s plainsong settings for the Recollectio.

114

115

The mass has no rubric in Tr 88; Feininger, Auctorum Anonymorum, 166, provided the entire cycle with the rubric “S. Sebastiani” over the introit. CBM 1059, fol. 131v (28 Apr. 1455): act allowing the foundation of the tapers; LAN 4G 4661 (Fabric, 1454–1455), fol. 7v: first mention of the “double of St. Sebastian”; CBM 39, fol. 53v: obituary, description of the payments for the Vespers in that double.

Matters of Transmission

Matters of Transmission How these pieces reached Trent from Cambrai remains a mystery. Some of the introits were available to the scribe of Tr 93 in Munich in the early 1450s,116 but the complete cycles as well as the Ordinary of the St. Anthony and St. Francis Mass did not reach Wiser until the mid-1450s in the case of the Ordinary,117 and the late 1450s in the case of the propers. Thus far the most plausible hypothesis is that of Reinhard Strohm, who suggested that the immediate source of the cycles was probably the imperial chapel at Wiener Neustadt, which probably collected music for the Mass, Proper and Ordinary, from numerous centers, and also had some of the local composers contribute to the repertory. This has the merit as well of explaining the presence in Tr 88 of cycles such as that for St. Stephen, where, as Strohm has shown, the chant variants are traceable to the Passau Gradual.118 Strohm also pointed out the implausibility of Gerber’s hypothesis of the cycles being compilations, either by Wiser or in transmission.119 These cycles are what we have left, surely a small fragment, of what was the culmination of Du Fay’s work as a “systematic” composer of liturgical music, something that began in the early 1430s with the hymns and the Kyries, and apparently continued until his departure for Italy in 1450. They represent the central period of his full maturity as a composer and constitute the foundation of his later style. At the same time, whenever I have performed these works in connection with his later Mass cycles or some of the cycles by other composers, such as the English Missa Caput, I have been struck by the sense that the propers in every respect speak a far more austere and subdued language. Intercalating even the most expansive of the propers such as those for the Holy Ghost or the Trinity with a work as serene as the Missa Se la face ay pale creates a strong impression that the propers are the Apollonian side of Du Fay’s music and the Ordinary the Dionysian side.120 What is common to both is the extraordinary inventiveness of the musical lines, the clarity of phrasing, and the euphony of the ensemble. The more flamboyant aspect of the music of the propers that Du Fay would use much less in the later music is the apparently deliberate metric “disarticulation” that he creates in a number of duets by the use of 3 in one voice against a plain in the other, essentially throwing the 116 118 120

P. Wright, “Watermarks,” 300–310. 117 Ibid., 304 and 313. Strohm, “The Medieval Mass Proper,” 50–54. 119 Ibid. This was also remarked to me on the occasion of several performances by William Prizer.

541

542

The Mass Propers

motivic ensemble of the voices slightly out of focus. The recovery of this repertory has gone a long way to explaining what connects the composer of the extraordinarily varied music of the 1420s and 1430s to the man who produced the sublime works of the last twenty-five years of his life.

The Plainsong Propers Finally, there is a small repertory of settings of the Mass proper by Du Fay that has elicited almost no attention and that extends from the 1430s to the 1450s: his plainsong settings. Ironically, since the Mass for St. Anthony Abbot, which surely was a very late work, has disappeared, as have the two polyphonic proses copied in Cambrai, the plainsong settings represent the last settings of the mass propers we have from him. These are listed in Table 13.3. All are transmitted anonymously, but Du Fay’s authorship can be established either by documentary references or by the context, listed in the table. One plainsong that at one point I speculated might be by Du Fay is a third-mode melody for the liturgy of St. Anthony Abbot that was used at Cambrai in the 1450s.121 Since then, I discovered that it is not his but rather the French plainsong for that introit, found already in fourteenth-century chant books from Lyon and the Dauphiné.122 Du Fay’s authorship of the dedication prose was suggested by Craig Wright with his customary caution and prudence,123 and mentioned by Holford-Strevens in terms that suggest he considers Du Fay’s authorship of the text a possibility.124 The prose survives as a unicum in Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Aedilium 151, a fifteenth-century manuscript from the cathedral where the Mass for the Dedication of a Church begins with a full-page illumination showing Pope Eugenius IV entering the cathedral.125 The text is a perfectly competent prosa in rhymed and rhythmic verse of the kind that Du Fay had written for the alleluia of the Missa Sancti Iacobi,126 and the language recalls that of Nuper rosarum flores. Wright calls the melody “another reworking of the twelfth-century Victorine sequence Laudes crucis attollamus.”127 The melody is not a simple contrafact of the Victorine melody, as is the case with Lauda Sion 121 123 124 125 127

Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 148–49. 122 See p. 624. C. Wright, “Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores,” 434–37. Holford-Strevens, “Du Fay the Poet?,” 136 and 161. Reproduced in C. Wright, “Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores,” fig. 11. 126 See p. 571. C. Wright, “Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores,” 435, n. 87.

The Plainsong Propers

543

Table 13.3 Plainsong propers by Du Fay and their context Feast

Genre

Music

Text

Date

Dedication of the Church Nuper almos rosae flores

Prose

Du Fay

Du Fay?

1436

Introit Gradual

– Du Fay

– Carlier

“Gregorian” 1457

Alleluia Prose Offertory Communion

Du Fay – Du Fay Du Fay

Carlier Carlier Carlier Carlier

1457 Music 12th c. 1457 1457

Recollectio Gaudeamus omnes Ps. Eructavit Luce splendida V. Nationes de longiquo Alleluia V. Beati omnes Mittit ad sterilem Beatam me dicent Benedicite Deum

salvatorem, but a loose reworking of some of its general traits. This was a well-known procedure for generating new prose melodies that had been used since the late twelfth century,128 and nothing in the melody precludes Du Fay as the man who generated it. In fact, there probably was no one else at that moment who would have even felt the need to do something like this piece. The propers for the Recollectio present a slightly different profile. As with those for the office, Carlier, in producing the texts, resorted to a mixture of the traditional texts for the Marian liturgy and newly composed texts. The transmission of the texts themselves in Cambrai is entirely unproblematic, since we have sources like CBM 184, a missal copied in the second half of the fifteenth century that includes the entire liturgy,129 as well as some earlier missals where the liturgy was appended at the end,130 and these can be compared with the Missale parvum published in 1507.131 The prayers follow the normal liturgical formulas with the appropriate mention of the feast (or in this case of the series of recollected feasts); the epistle, labeled Lectio libri sapientiae canticorum, is a cento from the Song of Solomon, chapters 2 and 4. For the gospel Carlier used the gospel for the recently established feast of the Visitation, Luke 1:39–56, which includes the entire Magnificat. For the sung parts Carlier simply began with what had become the Marian introit par excellence at the time, Gaudeamus omnes, for which 128 129 131

The most detailed description is in Fassler, Gothic Song, 291–320. CBM 184, fols. 177v–178v. 130 E.g., CBM 147, from St-Géry, fol. 218r–v. Missale parvum, 2nd foliation (proper of saints), fol. 50r–v.

544

The Mass Propers

Du Fay left the Gregorian melody intact. For most of the others Carlier constructed a careful tissue of scriptural phrases or references to them in the gradual, the offertory, and the communion, and a new text in the alleluia. The case of the prose is slightly more complicated. One of the earliest Cambrai sources for the Recollectio, CBM 181, a thirteenth-century missal used in the fifteenth century in the chapel of the 11,000 Virgins at the cathedral,132 with additions of the fifteenth century, has the famous prose for the Annunciation, Mittit ad virginem, copied for the Recollectio,133 while CBM 184 has a contrafact text, Mittit ad sterilem, which then becomes the prose for the Recollectio in most of the late fifteenth-century sources. The main problem with transmission of the propers, however, is that we simply have no notated sources for the propers of the Mass from Cambrai before the Gradual copied in 1540 for Bishop Robert de Croy, CBM 12,134 and a comparison of the liturgy in that source shows a number of divergences and corruptions when compared to the earlier missals. In the case of the prose it substitutes a unique work, O castitatis lilium, for Mittit ad sterilem. Further, as Barbara Haggh-Huglo notes, in the course of the sixteenth century the liturgy for the feast came to be comprised entirely of older chants taken from other Marian feasts.135 Alerted by a short study of Aimé-Pierre Frutaz, published in 1956, long before anyone realized that the liturgy of the Recollectio was the work of Carlier and Du Fay,136 Haggh-Huglo did an extensive search of the sources in Aosta, which had been studied systematically since 1974 by Robert Amiet and several of his students,137 and found that the text in the Aostan sources, well into the eighteenth century, was the text found in the fifteenth-century Cambrai books, and a number of the Aostan manuscripts transmitted between them the entire liturgy of the feast in what appears to be its earliest form.138 Haggh-Huglo has made a detailed comparison of the Cambrai and Aostan liturgies for the Mass and the Office, including the lessons, which are apparently the most variable element, and promises a far more 132 134

135 137

138

Molinier, Catalogue, 55. 133 CBM 181, fols. 301v–302r. A particularly complete list of Cambrai sources appears in Haggh, “The Aostan Sources,” 360, n. 20. Haggh-Huglo, “The Celebration.” 136 Frutaz, “La Recollectio festorum.” The published series, Monumenta Liturgica Ecclesiae Augustanae, now consists of fourteen volumes by different authors; the foundational study is Amiet, Repertorium liturgicum Augustanum, 2 vols., with a detailed catalogue of the holdings of all the Aostan libraries in terms of liturgical books. Haggh-Huglo, “The Aostan Sources,” 355–56, with a list of the sources for the Recollectio.

The Plainsong Propers

extended study soon.139 She posits that it might have reached Aosta not directly from Du Fay and the Savoy court, but through Baudoin Escuyer, from Fleurus in the diocese of Liège, who became archdeacon of the cathedral in Aosta, and whose missal of ca. 1460 is the earliest Aostan source for the liturgy.140 This is a very plausible hypothesis, but her speculation that Baudoin might be related to Pierre l’Escuyer, who was briefly a colleague of Du Fay in Rome, is probably incorrect since Pierre was from Noyon.141 Unlike the chants Du Fay wrote for the Office, the chants for the Mass are not modally ordered. The introit is mode 1, Du Fay’s gradual and alleluia are both mode 7, the offertory is mode 3 or 4 (a restricted range chant, d to cc), and the communion is mode 7 again. The prose, although the music is not by Du Fay, poses a problem, because Mittit ad virginem has a complicated transmission history as a plainsong;142 it survives in most sources with two finals, G (the most common) and F (with a flat signature), and in most sources in two textual traditions, one of eleven stanzas and the other with two further stanzas interpolated between stanzas 10 and 11.143 At Cambrai in the fifteenth century the prose had only ten stanzas (nos. 1–10 in AH 54).144 The only Cambrai source with music, CBM 12, fol. 83r–v, has an F final, but is a shortened version, consisting of stanzas 1–2 and 9–10 of the earlier Cambrai version.145 Mittit ad sterilem, however, is based in the more common eleven-stanza form, but the author of the text wrote a twelfth stanza, so that the prose consists entirely of regular couplets.146 This could sow doubt that Carlier wrote the text or that the prose was connected with the Recollectio. The Toul manuscript used by Dreves in Analecta Hymnica assigns it to the feast of the Visitation, but Dreves remarks, “Der Inhält der Sequenz hat mit dem Feste der Heimsuchung keinerlei Bezührung,”147 and the text, in a remarkably clumsy manner, 139 142 143 144

145

146

147

Ibid., 366–67. 140 Ibid., 358. 141 Cf. Planchart, “Institutional Politics,” 129. Planchart, “The Polyphonic Proses,” 89–92. Cf. AH 54:296–98; Planchart, “The Polyphonic Proses,” 90. Thus, e.g., in CBM 184, fols. 279–280r and the Missale parvum, third foliation (common), fol. 20r. CBM 12 is also anomalous in being the only Cambrai source with the Recollectio that replaces Mittit ad sterilem with an unique prose, O castitatis lilium; cf. Haggh-Huglo, “The Aostan Sources,” 365. See AH 8:51, from Paris, BnF 11592, from Toul, and cf. Haggh-Huglo’s discussion in “The Aostan Sources,” 363–65. AH 8:51.

545

546

The Mass Propers

does make references to all the different feasts of the Virgin. HagghHuglo provides a very plausible hypothesis of how the prose might have reached Toul, a hypothesis that preserves the original connection to the Recollectio.148 The music for Mittit ad sterilem poses the same problems as the music for Mittit ad virginem. The sources with music for the model prose are widely scattered, with no clear pattern. German and English sources transmit the prose most of the time with a G final,149 north Italian sources with a C final,150 and French sources use an F final.151 None of the northern French and Netherlandish sources for Mittit ad sterilem, carefully listed by Haggh-Huglo in her study,152 transmits the music. Two of the Aostan sources do so, Aosta Cathedral 35, fols. 137v–138v, and Aosta Seminary 58, fols. 277r–279v;153 they present the melody with an F final and in a version with a number of unique variants, but most close to the version in Paris, Arsenal 197, a Victorine Gradual of the late thirteenth century.154 The correspondence is not exact; it is clear that Carlier, or Du Fay, or someone else, tinkered with the melody and often normalized a good deal of the ornamentation. At the same time, it is also clear that the model version was not the version from Cambrai, since the final melodic strain would never had been used for the ten-stanza version of Mittit ad virginem sung at Cambrai. But Carlier, more than almost any of his colleagues, retained an active contact with Parisian intellectual circles, particularly in the years when he composed the texts of the Recollectio.155 Du Fay’s authorship of the gradual, alleluia, offertory, and communion is not stated explicitly anywhere, but it is implicit in the commission by Beringhen,156 and in fact the term officium, used by Beringhen’s executors, was not only understood to mean the Hours, but also the introit of the Mass and by extension the propers. Haggh-Huglo presents a careful case for Du Fay’s authorship.157 148 149

150 151

152 153

154 157

Haggh, “The Aostan Sources,” 363–64. Thus Klosterneuburg 588, fol. 1v; Kremsmünster 190, fol. 1v; Munich UB 156, fol. 218r; Cambridge 710, p. 42; Paris, Arsenal 135, fol. 277r; Wolfenbüttel W1 (200v), fol. 183v. Thus Cividale 56, fol. 340v; Cividale 58, fol. 344v; Cividale 79, fol. 190v; Gorizia I, fol. 179r. Thus Assisi 695, fol. 228r; Cambrai 12, fol. 83r (very short form); Paris, Arsenal 197, fol. 257r; Paris, BnF n.a.l. 1177, fol. 80r (partly erased later addition). Haggh, “The Aostan Sources,” 362. Ibid., 355–56. I am most grateful to Professor Haggh-Huglo for photographs of these manuscripts. Cf. Fassler, Gothic Song, 147. 155 Haggh, “Carlerius, Egidius.” 156 See pp. 248–49. Haggh, “The Aostan Sources,” 360–66.

Example 13.6 Gradual for the Recollectio (version of Aosta 35)

548

The Mass Propers

The music for these propers is present in Cambrai 12 as well as in Aosta 35 and 58. Again, as Haggh-Huglo shows, the version in Cambrai 12 has a number of omissions,158 and one spectacular error, ending the respond of the gradual on the subfinal.159 Thus far the most reliable musical text for these chants is Aosta 35. As with the pieces for the Office, the Mass chants are constructed with exquisite care in terms of the tetrachords and pentachords of the modal octave, with phrases clearly delineating one or the other. The melismatic sections of the gradual and the alleluia are relatively short, and the gradual verse in particular is almost entirely neumatic (see Ex. 13.6). Du Fay’s setting of the gradual is typical of his approach. Both the respond and the verse begin with a basically neumatic setting, with the respond becoming more melismatic toward the end and the verse having one extended melisma on the last word. But the music does not have either the ecstatic oscillations one finds in most Gregorian graduals nor the extended melismas on the final syllable of either respond or verse; rather Du Fay sets the melisma to the first syllable of the final word. In this respect Du Fay’s setting looks toward the kind of humanist text-setting of plainsong preferred by sixteenthcentury thinkers.160 The first two words compose the lower pentachord of the mode, and the verb of the sentence, albeit rising to an f ′, is an ornamented recitation on d′. The subject of the second phrase, by contrast, actually composes the upper pentachord of the mode; and the last two words, verb and object, descend “in waves,” so to speak, to the final. The verse, instead, is conceived as an intonation and an extended recitation on d′, albeit with a good deal of ornament, and the melisma of the last phrase, like the final section of the cantus in many of his polyphonic propers, sounds like a summary of the entire ambitus of the piece, although with a slight shift, since the melisma actually covers the octave e–e′. Still, the emphasis on g is made very clear by the three large segments of the melisma: the first sounds g four times; the second, covering the rise from e to e′, actually aims at the d′, which is sounded three times, and the last begins with the lead d′–g, and recapitulates the tonal space of the first segment and again sounds the g four times. In a sense the middle segment functions, 158 159

160

Ibid., 360–61. Aosta 58 shares this reading, but it is modally so absurd that the ending in Aosta 35 has to be considered right. Note in this respect the contrast between this text-setting and the enormous melismas one finds in many of his songs and his cantilenas.

The Plainsong Propers

within the constraints of the modal system, as something like the shifts of color that Du Fay wrote into his polyphony throughout his career by the use of discursive accidentals. As I noted in connection with the plainsongs for the office, the plainsong per se was probably no longer a “living music” for Du Fay, but even when producing what he probably regarded as an “anonymous work” in this gradual, his sense of both formal balance and tonal color remained lively, although not as “showy” as in his songs or his cantilenas.

549

14

The Early Masses

Beginning in the third quarter of the fourteenth century fairly extensive repertories of settings of the Ordinary of the Mass arose independently in France and Catalonia, England, and Italy.1 Most of these settings are of individual movements, or at most of pairs, usually Gloria and Credo or Sanctus and Agnus, but only one complete setting of the Ordinary survives from the fourteenth century, Guillaume de Machaut’s La Messe de Nostre Dame, composed as a votive Lady Mass in loco obitus for Machaut and his brother.2 Others, such as the Mass of Tournai, are compilations that look like “a Mass” because their movements were the only polyphony copied in the source that contains them,3 but there are traces of three or possibly four other complete Masses: the so-called “Sorbonne Mass,” by Jehan Lambullet, from which we have what appears to be fragments of a complete cycle,4 and two lost Masses: a document of 1431 records the existence of a manuscript at the Château de Quesnoy containing “la messe de Machault, la messe Vaillant, la messe Rouillart.”5 Thus these were Masses by Jehan Vaillant and Philippe Royllart, both immensely influential composers at the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth.6 Lawrence Earp suggests, on the basis of certain kinds of textures, that some of the Mass movements that survive anonymously could perhaps be remnants of Royllart’s Mass.7 There is also a fragment consisting of three related movements, Kyrie, Credo, and Sanctus, spread between Ivrea 115 and Apt 16b, which were most likely a complete cycle.8 They may be a 1

2

3

4

5 6

550

8

The French and Catalonian repertory has been published and studied by Stäblein Harder, in Fourteenth-Century Mass Music, and by Cattin et al. in French Sacred Music, the last with an extensive bibliography of studies not only of the sources but the music. The fundamental study of the English repertory remains Bent, “Old Hall,” and the edition, The Old Hall Manuscript, ed. Bent and Hughes. The Italian repertory is edited by von Fischer and Gallo in Italian Sacred and Ceremonial Music. Its extent has been dramatically expanded through the discovery of new sources in the last decade, much of it the work of Cuthbert; cf. his “Trecento Fragments.” Robertson, “The Mass of Guillaume de Machaut”; see also the edition and study in Leech Wilkinson, Machaut’s Mass. See Huglo, La Messe de Tournai, and also Schrade, Le Roman de Fauvel, and Stäblein Harder, Fourteenth-Century Mass Music. Cf. Cattin et al., eds., French Sacred Music, nos. 1–6; Jackson, “Musical Interrelation”; Chailley, “La Messe”; and Gomez, La Música medieval, 293, 354–56. Devillers, Cartulaire, 6/1:630. Cf. Earp, Review of Wilkinson, Machaut’s Mass, 296, n. 5. 7 Ibid. Cattin et al., eds., French Sacred Music, nos. 13–15.

The Early Masses

fourth lost Mass or, on the basis of a whimsical passage at the end of the Sanctus, the remnant of Vaillant’s Mass. The practice of composing polyphonic Mass cycles was still something quite exceptional on the Continent when Du Fay began his career, and it remained so to some extent to the end of his life. Still, in the 1420s and early 1430s there are two parallel developments, one largely in northern Italy and the other largely in England, that led to the composition of a number of Mass cycles. The Continental repertory, as it survives today, consists of two Masses by Du Fay, Sine nomine and Sancti Iacobi, and Masses by Arnold de Lantins, O pulcherrima mulierum, Jehan Reson, Sine nomine, Jehan Vinand de Limbourg, Sine nomine, Reignault Liebert, De Beata Virgine, and Estienne Grossin, Sine nomine (Trompetta).9 Du Fay, Lantins, de Limbourg, and presumably Reson (about whose biography we know nothing) were all active in northern Italy in the 1420s and early 1430s, and the main (or only) sources for their Masses are Bo Q15, BU 2216, and Ox 213, all copied in the Veneto at this time. Liebert is documented only at Cambrai starting in 1425, and died shortly after 1434.10 Grossin is documented in Paris in 1418 and again in 1421.11 Their Masses appear instead in Ao 15 and Tr 921, manuscripts copied in the later 1430s in the Strasbourg–Basel region that reflect the repertory of the Council of Basel. The English development is one of the most discussed of the entire century and consists of the development of the cantus-firmus Mass by composers of the generation of Leonel and Dunstaple. There are no early English sources for this type of Mass, and their presence in Continental sources begins with Ao 15 and Tr 871, manuscripts that reflect the conciliar repertory of the 1430s,12 where the long English Kyries with the Latin verses of the Sarum use have largely been eliminated.13 Continental musicians, even though they admired English music, did not adopt this procedure until after the middle of the century.14 On the Continent 9

10 12 13

14

Du Fay’s Masses have been edited in OO Besseler 2, nos. 1–5; OO Planchart 3/1–2; Lantins’s in van den Borren, ed., Polyphonia Sacra, 1–36; Reson’s in Missa sine nomine, ed. Cvejić; Limbourg’s in Etheridge, “The Works,” 2, nos. 11–15; Liebert’s in Reaney, ed., Early FifteenthCentury Music, 3, nos. 30–41, and Grossin’s id., nos. 15–18. On the name of Grossin’s Mass, see Bent, “Trompetta and Concordans,” 46–57. See Appendix 2. 11 C. Wright, “Estienne Grossin.” Cf. P. Wright, “The Compilation,” “On the Origins,” and “The Aosta–Trent Relationship.” The only exception is the Kyrie Deus creator omnium of a fragmentary Missa Alma redemptoris mater (Kyrie and Gloria) in Tr 87, fols. 146v–148r. A convenient list of the surviving English cantus-firmus Masses in the first half of the 15th century appears in Strohm, The Rise, 230. Two lists of the Continental Mass cycles with strict and free cantus firmi appear in id., 423 and 430–31.

551

552

The Early Masses

there appears to have been something of a hiatus in the composition of Mass cycles between ca. 1435 and 1450, and the only cycle we have from those years is Du Fay’s immensely complicated Missa Sancti Antonii de Padua et Sancti Francisci.15 Among Continental composers it was Du Fay’s younger contemporary, Jehan de Ockeghem, who apparently devoted most of his efforts as a composer to Mass Ordinary cycles, and Ockeghem’s example was not followed by all composers of the succeeding generation, with the exception of Josquin, Obrecht, La Rue, and Isaac. Three of the four were, in a way, followers of Ockeghem, and two, Josquin and La Rue, were among those whose names Molinet used in his Déploration on the death of Ockeghem, set to music by Josquin. Only in the case of Isaac, about whose early biography we are entirely in the dark, there seems to be no connection with Ockeghem. In terms of Du Fay’s output the seven works that are the topic of this chapter, together with a few songs and motets, are his best known and most discussed works, if not always the most frequently performed, because they are all quite difficult. Ironically, the least well known among them, the Missa Sancti Antonii de Padua et Sancti Francisci, to give it its full name, appears to have been one of the few works of Du Fay that remained in the minds of music scholars well into the second quarter of the sixteenth century, when most of his other music had been largely forgotten outside Cambrai.16 From the surviving evidence we can posit that Du Fay composed at least nine complete Mass cycles. Table 14.1 gives his entire known output of Mass cycles.

Missa sine nomine The earliest of the complete Mass cycles, the Missa sine nomine, probably predates the summer of 1423, when Du Fay used some of the material of the Mass in the ballade Resvelliés vous for the wedding of Carlo Malatesta da Pesaro with Vittoria di Lorenzo Colonna on 18 July 1423.17 The connection between a series of passages in the Mass and the

15 16

17

A complete edition of the entire cycle as such appears only in OO Planchart 3/3. Fallows provocatively titled his first published discussion of the work as “Dufay’s Most Important Work: Reflections on the Career of his Mass for St Anthony of Padua”; see also id., Dufay, 85. It is copied in a section of Bo Q15 that Bent has shown dates from ca. 1422. See Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:20.

Missa sine nomine

553

Table 14.1 Mass Ordinary and plenary cycles by Du Fay No.

Title

Voices

Earliest source

Date

Type

1 2 3

Missa sine nomine Missa Sancti Iacobi Missa Sancti Antonii de Padua et Sancti Francisci Missa Se la face ay pale Missa L’homme armé Missa Ecce ancilla – Beata es Maria Missa Sancti Antonii Abbatis Missa pro defunctis Missa Ave regina caelorum

3 3–4 3–4

Bo Q15 Bo Q15 Tr 90

1420–1423 1426–1430 1445–1450?

ordinary plenary plenary

4 4 4 3?a 3b 4

Tr 88 Lu 238 Br 5777 lost lost Br 5777

1453 1460–1461 1463 1460s? 1470 1471–1472

ordinary ordinary ordinary plenary plenary ordinary

4 5 6 7 8 9 a

b

Number of voices inferred from an anonymous Missa Sancti Antonii Abbatis in Tr 89, fols. 59v–70r, where the introit follows a version of Scitote quoniam found in Cambrai missals of the late fifteenth century that imitates a large number of traits of his late Masses, but clearly the work of a composer considerably less skilled, perhaps one of the small vicars. It may well be an imitation of Du Fay’s lost Mass. Number of voices from a description of a performance of the work during the ceremonies of the Order of the Golden Fleece in Brussels in 1501 in a letter of Niccolò Frigio to Francesco II Gonzaga. See Prizer, “Music and Ceremonial,” 133 and 142.

start of the ballade is striking, to the point that Fallows calls it the Missa Resvelliés vous.18 It is considered Du Fay’s earliest complete Mass cycle despite some reservations voiced by Charles Hamm, who finds the transmission of the piece scattered enough to give him pause as to its unity.19 The piece survives complete and as a cycle only in Bo Q15, and this is one of the aspects of it that troubled Hamm. The source situation is shown in Table 14.2. All the movements in Bo Q15 are ascribed to Du Fay, as are those in Ao (both copies) 15, BU 2216, and Tr 92. The movements in Tr 90, Tr 93, and Ven are anonymous, and all the copies in Trent are missing the final section of the Gloria, from Qui sedes to the end. The only continuous copy of the work is in Bo Q15, whose scribe had a penchant for constructing factitious cycles. Two movements are copied consecutively in Ao2, and in Ven the consecutive copy of the Kyrie fragment and the Gloria and that of the Sanctus and the Agnus is interpolated with an anonymous Credo that does not show any traces of being by Du Fay. 18

Fallows, Dufay, 22–23 and 165–68.

19

Hamm, “Manuscript Structure,” 180–81.

554

The Early Masses

Table 14.2 Sources of the Missa sine nomine Source

Kyrie

Gloria

Credo

Sanctus

Agnus

Bo Q15 Ao 151 Ao 152 BU Tr 90

M 10 26v–27r 49v–50r p. 9 –

M 13–14 33v–34r 129v–132r – –

M 15 – 151v–152r – –

M 16 – 155v–156r – –

Tr 921

–

–

–

–

Tr 93

–

–

–

–

Ven

1v–3r (3v)

M 11–12 32v–33r 66v–68r – 165v–166r (inc.) 125v–126r (inc.) 197r–198r (inc.) 3v–5r (c, t)

22v–25r (c, t)a

9v–11r (c, t)

11v–12r (c, t)

a

Anonymous, and probably not by Du Fay.

Still, the music itself offers incontrovertible evidence that at the very least the Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus belong together. The Kyrie, and this is the main trait that led Fallows to rename the work, opens with a gesture that resembles the astonishing opening of Resvelliés vous, and after the Gloria and the Credo, the Sanctus begins with an outline of that same gesture (see Ex. 14.1). The Sanctus and the Agnus are connected in a subtler manner. The first Sanctus and the Benedictus open with a chant intonation, and each of the three Agnus Dei invocations opens with a chant intonation, and the first two chant intonations of the Agnus Dei are, note for note, the two intonations of the Sanctus. Although this is not unheard of in plainsong Ordinaries, it is extremely rare, and none of these intonations appears in Peter Thannabaur’s extended catalogue of plainsong Sanctus melodies.20 When performing the Mass one gets the immediate impression that the intonations are part and parcel of the motivic structure of the work and they must have been written by Du Fay ad hoc. Though the polyphony is entirely free, the intonations would push the naïve listener into thinking that the composer is elaborating a plainsong Sanctus and Agnus that were identical, something that could be a sly reference by Du Fay to his early Mass for Constance 20

Thannabaur, Das einstimmige Sanctus; they do not appear either in Schildbach, Das einstimmige Agnus Dei, which is less exhaustive than Thannabaur’s study.

Missa sine nomine Example 14.1 Missa sine nomine, head motive, Kyrie and Sanctus, Resvelliés vous (beginning)

(OO Planchart, 5/2), where indeed the Sanctus and Agnus are identical.21 There are other connections among these three movements. They all progress through two (or more in the Sanctus) sections in , and a final one in . The Gloria begins in with what appears to be an unrelated motive, but at “qui sedes ad dexteram” it shifts to and “quotes” the opening gesture of the Kyrie, contaminated by the opening of the Gloria (see Ex. 14.2).This phrase in the cantus is even closer to what we find at the start of Resvelliés vous, but I think that Du Fay arrived at it by conflating the opening gestures of the Kyrie and the Gloria. The Gloria progresses to a final section in with voice alternations that recall the end of the Kyrie. The Credo, entirely in , expands loosely on 21

Such motivic use of “chant intonations” composed ad hoc is typical of Du Fay; they reappear in the Alleluia V. Hispanorum clarens stella of the Missa Sancti Iacobi, the Sanctus–Agnus 1 (OO Planchart 5/6), the Sanctus papale (OO Planchart 5/7), and the Missa Sancti Antonii de Padua et Sancti Francisci.

555

Example 14.2 Missa sine nomine, Gloria, beginning, and Qui sedes

Missa sine nomine

the gestures of the first section of the Gloria. Even though it has no text omissions nor the telescoping of the text found in the cursiva-style works22 it is an astonishingly compact work. In any case, once one understands the sets of relationships Du Fay has constructed, it is much simpler to accept it as a complete cycle, and one rather carefully and subtly planned. To some extent the twentieth-century preoccupation with musical unification, viewed largely through the lens of the cycles with a cantus firmus, blinded historians for a while to other procedures used not just early on but throughout the fifteenth century to create coherent works that “belonged together.”23 The progress in the Mass from the Kyrie to the Et in terra and then to the Qui sedes produces an opening in the last of these that is almost identical to that of Resvelliés vous. In the ballade, however, the counterpoint is more pungent and a resolution of the G♯ in the cantus is avoided (see Ex. 14.1). When Fallows pointed out the relationship between the two works he suggested that the ballade came later, which caused some reviewers to question the relationship.24 Fallows is probably right both that the Mass and the ballade are related and that the Mass is the earlier work; this is why I prefer the name Missa sine nomine, since in all other instances, using the song’s name for a Mass implies influence in the opposite direction. In the Mass Du Fay works a very interesting moment into the Qui sedes through a process of filtering and manipulating motives; he probably realized how extraordinary that section was and how it could be used at the outset of an important ceremonial work to astonish his audience. But this, I think, is the full extent of the connection between the two works,25 and for that reason I find that giving the Mass the ballade’s name is going a bit too far. By contrast, the relationship brings up the question of what else is implied. At the time, the Missa sine nomine was Du Fay’s most extended work, and it is, when sung correctly, a stunning and radiant work.26 Surely it was a work written for an important Malatesta occasion now lost to us, but 22

23

24 25

26

The term is used in Ox 213 to describe a Gloria by Loqueville where the text moves from one voice to another; see Schoop, Entstehung und Verwendung, 49. A particularly thoughtful critique of these blind spots appears in Strohm, “Einheit und Funktion früher Meßzyklen,” 141–60. See Leeman Perkins’s review of Fallows, Dufay, in Notes. Fallows, Dufay, 166–68 hears other connections, but to my ears these are unconvincing and more a case of contrapuntal and melodic patterns that are part of Du Fay’s musical language at the time. Virtually all recordings of all of Du Fay’s major liturgical works released in the last two decades or so still cling to absurdly slow tempos that do not allow the listener to hear either the motivic work nor the rhythmic intensity of the music. In this respect Fallows’s optimistic prediction in 1982, that “the performance and understanding of medieval music are among the few things

557

558

The Early Masses

important enough for the composer to recall at the wedding ceremonies in 1423. Fallows notes other musical connections between the Mass and the ballade, but I find these less convincing.27 Strohm proposed a genesis for the work as a Gloria–Credo pair that was later amplified by the addition of a Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus.28 This is not impossible, but it presupposes that Du Fay wrote the ballade before the Mass, which flies in the face of the date for the completion of the first version of Bo Q15, or else that Du Fay wrote the very striking passage of the Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris of the Gloria and greatly simplified it in the Kyrie and the Sanctus before tightening it even further in the ballade, a sequence I find improbable. I hear the genesis of the work differently. Du Fay probably began writing the Mass using a procedure derived from his early Mass pair for Constance, with a Sanctus and Agnus, where the Sanctus and the Agnus refer to each other through the use of plainsong incipits composed by himself and a metric structure consisting of two sections in followed by a section in .29 In this respect the Sanctus and Agnus of the Missa sine nomine appear to be a more elaborate version of the Sanctus–Agnus pair that is the core of the three-movement cycle written for Constance.30 The Kyrie follows the same structure, but takes the opening of the polyphony of the Sanctus and elaborates it, making more of a continuous gesture of the descent d″– d′ of the cantus. In view of the long text of the Gloria, Du Fay begins with a section in duple meter that provides a more efficient declamation of the text. It may be that the Credo had been composed as a separate movement, but I doubt it, because Du Fay has left us no self-standing Credos. The Credo of the Gloria–Credo pair where the Gloria is by Hughes de Lantins cannot count as one because the motivic connections between the two movements, already noted by

27 28

29

30

likely to improve” (Dufay, vii), has proved sadly wrong in terms of the performance of almost all 15th-century music. Fallows, Dufay, 167–68. Strohm, The Rise, 170–71. Here Strohm has one of the exceedingly rare slips in his study, when he states that “It is not clear, however, whether Dufay derived the Credo from the chanson or vice versa.” The Credo is the one movement of the Mass with almost no relationship to the chanson; on the other hand, the Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris of the Gloria (mm. 139–44) virtually cites the opening of the chanson in the cantus. In the Sanctus the return of the Osanna produces a further section in , but this, to my mind, underscores the notional aspect of the structure, something comparable to the way acrostics work in rondeau texts, where the repeats of the refrain do not form part of the acrostic. OO Planchart 5/2.

Missa sine nomine Example 14.3 Lantins–Du Fay, Gloria–Credo 1, beginning of the Credo

Fallows,31 indicate that the pair was part of a joint project. Interestingly, Du Fay’s Credo in that pair opens with a simple but quite dramatic gesture: the words “Patrem omnipotentem” are set to a descent from a′ to c′, ending in a 3–6 sonority (see Ex. 14.3). True, the discant framework could not be more straightforward, and the sonority in measure 5 is a simple preparation for the D sonority of measure 6, but the stop of all motion at measure 5, the rest in the cantus, and the motionless bare fifth in the tenor and contratenor at the start of measure 6 bring into relief measure 5. Further, the gesture in measures 5–6 is a cliché of endings, not something we expect to hear seconds after the piece started.32 This figure appears to have inspired Du Fay for the opening of the Gloria in the Missa Sine nomine, although here he compresses the melodic motion, descending in the cantus from c′ to a′.33 Halfway through the Gloria, at “Qui sedes,” Du Fay shifts to (m. 138), and the rest of the movement follows the mensural pattern of the Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus, except that instead of two sections in we have only an extended one divided by the passage in cantus coronatus at “Iesu Christe” (mm. 159–62). In performance the beginning of the Sanctus, particularly after the Gloria and the Credo, sounds like a recall of the Kyrie, and the similar intonations in the Sanctus and the Agnus are immediately noticeable. All these traits effectively bind the piece together in the listener’s ear. In addition, we have something that Du Fay would use a number of times in later cycles: the endings of movements (or of sections) tend to be related by the use of a texture 31 32

33

Fallows, Dufay, 175–77. Bonnie Blackburn (private communication) kindly pointed out to me the extent to which the opening of the tenor resembles the corresponding passage of the “Credo Cardinalis”; cf. LU, Credo IV, even though the remainder of the tenor is different from the plainsong. See Chapter 2, Example 2.3.

559

560

The Early Masses Example 14.4 Missa sine nomine, hocket sections

where short motives are exchanged hocketlike between the voices. The motives themselves vary slightly from section to section, but the texture they create has a very similar sound, and is always used near the end of a movement or a section: Kyrie, measures 69–74; Gloria, measures 40–52 and 54–58 (end of the first section), and 198–204 (end of the movement); Sanctus, measures 51–62 and 97–107 (end of the Osanna), and a very attenuated echo in the compact Agnus Dei, measures 48–50 (end of the movement). A sample of these passages appears in Ex. 14.4. The version of the Sanctus shows how Du Fay changes the rhythmic structure of the motives while keeping some of their melodic shape and

Missa sine nomine Example 14.5 Missa sine nomine: Et ascendit

their interaction. As Allsen has noted, this is a procedure that Du Fay uses in a number of his motets from this period as well, creating a musical intertextuality among them.34 Only the Credo makes no use of it, since this texture is usually found in melismatic passages, and the Credo sets the text with virtually no melismata whatever. But the melodic and contrapuntal substance of the Credo is related to that of the duple-meter section of the Gloria, something that Fallows has already called attention to.35 Despite its compactness and apparent simplicity, the Credo has a few passages that recall procedures of the ars subtilior. At “et ascendit in caelum” Du Fay, with very simple means, creates a rhythmic surface as dizzyingly unstable as anything Senleches or Vaillant could come up, and which always takes the singers by surprise when beginning to work on the piece (see Ex. 14.5). All in all, the connection with the opening of the ballade Resvelliés vous is so noticeable that one is tempted to think that the Mass itself was intended to be sung as a nuptial Mass.36 But Du Fay mined the Mass for ideas he used not only in Resvelliés vous but in other early songs as well. Graeme Boone makes a case for Belle vueilliés vostre mercy donner and Ma belle dame, je vous pri.37 I also hear echoes of the duple-meter sections of the Gloria and Credo in Entre vous gentils amoureux. The Mass, then, is a unified cycle, and possibly the earliest one among the group of early fifteenth-century Mass cycles listed earlier, which makes 34 36 37

Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 113–14. 35 Fallows, Dufay, 169. This has already been suggested by Fallows, Dufay, 23. Boone, “Dufay’s Early Chansons,” 161, 166–67.

561

562

The Early Masses

Du Fay one of the pioneers of the new genre in the fifteenth century. Most likely it was not, as was surely the case of Lantins’s Mass, a votive Lady Mass in the mold of Machaut’s La Messe de Nostre Dame.38 The contrapuntal and harmonic world of the piece is very similar, mutatis mutandis, to that of the motet Apostolo glorioso, which we now know dates from the second half of 1424. This would support the date of 1423 for the Mass suggested to Fallows by the connection with Resvelliés vous.39 But as Bent notes, the Mass was copied in the undisturbed earliest layer of Bo Q15, which was begun, according to her study, between 1420 and 1422.40

Missa Sancti Iacobi Du Fay’s next Mass, the Missa Sancti Iacobi, apparently had a long gestation; it has a curious manuscript transmission and has had a tortured history in terms of modern scholarship. It is an incomplete plenary Mass, which includes all five movements of the Ordinary and four of the five movements of the Proper; the missing movement is the gradual, which probably was never composed. The transmission and nature of the movements, which have affected much of the scholarship on the piece, are shown in Table 14.3. Several things need to be noted at the outset. The Mass uses four different textures: the Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo are written in a strict a versi manner, where passages for the full ensemble of cantus, tenor, and contratenor alternate in a regular manner with duos for a divided cantus. The Sanctus and the Agnus are written for two cantus, tenor, and contratenor, with regular alternation between duos and the full texture; the plainsong cantus firmus is paraphrased in cantus 1 in the duos and in the tenor in the four-voice sections. The introit and the offertory are written in motet style, with a plainsong cantus firmus paraphrased in the tenor and an elaborate introitus section in the offertory. The alleluia is written in the same manner, except that the “plainsong” is surely a voice written ad hoc for this piece. Finally, the introit repetition and the communion are written in the kind of plainsong paraphrase texture, including the use of fauxbourdon in the communion, that Du Fay began using after he reached Rome in late 1428. 38 40

On this, see the discussion in Strohm, The Rise, 170–81. Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:165.

39

Fallows, Dufay, 23.

Missa Sancti Iacobi

563

Table 14.3 Transmission of the Missa Sancti Iacobi Section

Text

Voices

Texture

Source

Introit Introit repetition Kyrie

Mihi autem Mihi autem –

4 3 3

tenor motet chant paraphrase a versi

Gloria Alleluia Credo Offertory Sanctus Agnus dei Communion

– Hispanorum – In omnem – – Vos qui secuti

3 4 3 4 4 4 fb

a versi tenor motet a versi tenor motet (a versi) (a versi) chant paraphrase

Bo Q15 Bo Q15 Bo Q15, Ao 151, Ao 152, Tr 871,a Tr 90,b Tr 93c Bo Q15, Ao 151, Tr 871 Bo Q15 Bo Q15, Ao 152, Tr 871,d Tr 921e Bo Q15 Bo Q15, Ao 152 Bo Q15, Ao 152 Bo Q15, Tr 871

a

Missing Kyrie 1. Christe eleison in reverse order: 6–5–4. Kyrie 3, Christe 6, Kyrie 9 only. c Kyrie 3, Christe 6, Kyrie 9 only. d Tenor and contratenor missing from m. 226 to end. e Mm. 185 to end missing, replaced with mm. 50–99 of the Gloria set to Et unam sanctam. b

Except for the communion, all the movements in the Trent codices have been garbled or reworked in one manner or another. In Ao 1541 all the Ordinary movements except the Kyrie carry the rubric “de apostolis,”42 which implies that the Mass had a set of propers for an apostle. This has been misunderstood by both Bent and Fallows, who while they took it correctly to mean that the rubric implied a Mass with propers, they assumed that the propers were generic for Apostles, and only the alleluia made it into a Mass for St. James the Elder.43 This is simply not the case. Three of the five Ordinary movements paraphrase the plainsong: the Kyrie paraphrases Kyrie IV (Melnicki 18) in the cantus of Kyrie 3, Christe 6, and Kyrie 9; the Sanctus paraphrases Sanctus II (Thannabaur 203) in the tenor, and the Agnus paraphrases Agnus XI (Schildbach 220) in the tenor. Kyrie IV was commonly used in Italy for the minor duplex feasts, which included all the feasts of the Apostles; Sanctus II was commonly used for major

41

42

43

The superscript numbers 1 and 2 following Ao 15 in Table 14.3 refers to the sections of the manuscript. The best description of these, with reference to earlier literature, is P. Wright, “The Aosta–Trent Relationship,” 139–40. In addition Giovanni Spataro cites the Introit and calls it “de apostolis”; see Blackburn et al., eds., Correspondence, 588. Fallows, Dufay, 171; Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:157.

564

The Early Masses

Table 14.4 Propers of the Apostles Apostle

Introit

Graduala

Alleluiab

Offertory

Communion

Andrew

Mihi autem

Constitues eos

Mihi autem

Dicit Andreas

Bartholomew James the Elder John

Mihi autem Mihi autem

Constitues eos Constitues eos

Nimis honorati Per manus Vos estis

Vos qui secuti Vos qui secuti

In medio

Exiit sermo

Hic est

Matthew

Os iusti

Beatus vir

Te gloriosus

Peter Philip & James

Nunc scio Exclamaverunt

Constitues eos A. Confitebuntur

Simon & Jude

Mihi autem

Nimis honorati

Tu es Petrus A. Tanto tempore Isti sunt

Mihi autem In omnem terram Iustus ut palma Posuisti domine Constitues eos Confitebuntur

Thomas

Mihi autem

Nimis honorati

Vos estis

Matthias

Mihi autem

Constitues eos

T. Desiderium

a b c

In omnem terram In omnem terram In omnem terram

Exiit sermo Magna est Tu es Petrus Tanto tempore Vos qui secuti Mitte manum Amen dicoc

Alleluia in Easter season. Tract in Lent. In many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French (but not Italian) sources the communion for Matthias is Vos qui secuti (kept in the modern liturgy).

doubles, and Agnus XI for Sundays.44 This is a sui generis combination, but it is very unlikely that Du Fay picked the chants at random; he was probably following the sequence of a specific source now lost to us.45 By contrast, the propers, even without the alleluia, present a very distinct profile. The Propers for the Apostles, with the exception of their alleluias, are among the most stable items in the entire liturgy. These are given in Table 14.4. Four of these liturgies are not part of the oldest layer of the Gregorian tradition, that is, they do not appear in the sources for the Sextuplex,46 44

45

46

Kovarik, “The Performance,” 235; see also p. 234 for the different assignation of Kyrie XIV to apostles in German sources. A survey of some fifty Italian Graduals and Kyriales from the 14th to the 16th century did not turn up a single instance of these three chants as part of a cycle, but they might have been present in the Gradual or the Kyriale volumes of Bologna’s San Giacomo il Maggiore, which are entirely lost. The antiphoner, which survives essentially complete, has a good number of unique liturgies, including that for the church’s patron. Hesbert, Antiphonale Missarum Sextuplex.

Missa Sancti Iacobi

namely St. Bartholomew, St. James the Elder, St. Thomas, and St. Matthias. The liturgy of these saints was derived, with small variations, from the Mass for SS. Simon and Jude in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries, but the only one of these derived liturgies that coincides with that of SS. Simon and Jude in most of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century graduals and missals I have examined is that of St. James the Elder. A saint reckoned by the church as an apostle, St. Barnabas, usually shares the introit and the communion, but not the offertory with them. Thus, given the liturgical traditions of northern Italy in the early fifteenth century, a Mass containing the introit Mihi autem, the offertory In omnem terram, and the communion Vos qui secuti was not a generic missa apostolorum but a Mass either for SS. Simon and Jude or a Mass for St. James the Elder. Another “clue” that disoriented early scholarship was the proximity of the Mass to the motet Rite maiorem for St. James. Both the full Mass cycle and the motet are unique to Bo Q15, and they share a number of stylistic traits. The texts of the upper voices of the motet form a single poem with the acrostic “Robertus Auclou, curatus Sancti Iacobi,” referring to the Dominican church of St-Jacques de la Boucherie on the right bank of Paris, where Auclou had been the nominal curate since 1420;47 thus scholars assumed that the motet and the Mass were connected and the Mass was written for StJacques.48 In 1976 I showed that the liturgy for St-Jacques de la Boucherie, which survived in two fifteenth-century manuscripts and in a printed book published by the canons of St-Jacques,49 contained neither the Alleluia V. Hispanorum clarens stella of the Mass nor any chant with the text Ora pro nobis dominum qui te vocavit Iacobum, which serves as the tenor for the motet. Bologna, however, had an important Augustinian church, San Giacomo Maggiore, and though neither its gradual, a missal, nor a breviary survived, and the volumes of the antiphoner then available did not include the summer volume of the sanctorale, a number of the other antiphoner volumes had the suffrage for the patron saint, which was an antiphon with a rhymed text, O doctor et lux Hispaniae. I proposed then that both works were written in Bologna, where Du Fay was from early in 1426 to August 1428, and that their chants were probably taken from the books of San Giacomo.50

47 48

49

50

ASV, RS 146, fol. 141r. See p. 85. Besseler, “Das Neue,” 83–84; OO Besseler, 1:xvi, and 2:vi. The last two are in reaction to objections raised in Clercx, “Aux origines,” 160–61. Paris, BnF lat. 17315 (missal), fols. 271r–272r, and lat. 1051 (notated breviary), fols. 192r–207r, and Ordo divini officii (Paris, 1581). Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1976), 26–33.

565

566

The Early Masses Example 14.6 Plainsong, Alleluia V. Ascendit Deus

Subsequently two things happened. In 1990 the very damaged summer volume of the antiphoner of San Giacomo, which had not been catalogued with the other books of that church, was identified as such and restored,51 and this provided the source for the tenor of Rite maiorem,52 and a closer analysis of the Alleluia V. Hispanorum clarens stella showed that the work is not based upon a plainsong but rather freely composed, and that the plainsong intonations of the respond and the verse, like the intonations of the Sanctus and Agnus of the Missa Sine nomine, were probably written ad hoc by Du Fay. This last statement requires some further elaboration. All plainsong alleluias are always notated as in Example 14.6. The cantors sing the intonation up to the short bar; then the schola repeats the intonation and continues on to the end of the iubilus. The cantors then sing the verse, joined by the schola in the last phrase unless the respond is to be repeated after the verse. Thus, in a normal setting of plainsong the polyphony repeating the word “Alleluia” paraphrases the intonation and the iubilus.53 Du Fay’s setting does not do this; the tenor voice of the polyphonic alleluia setting has nothing in common with the intonation. By contrast, the intonation of the respond is repeated, note for note, as the intonation of the verse, but after that nothing in the tenor part of the verse recalls any of the tenor part of the respond. This simply never happens in any of the plainsong alleluias indexed and edited by Schlager.54 A number of alleluias, such as the one above, repeat some of the 51 52 53

54

A detailed account is in Alessandri, “I corali,” and id., “Il restauro.” Cf. Baroffio and Kim, “La tradizione,” 138–40, and p. 88. Apart from the alleluia of the Missa Sancti Iacobi all of Du Fay’s polyphonic alleluias were composed after 1439 and follow an entirely different compositional procedure. His various approaches to the structure in these alleluias are discussed in Volume II, Chapter 13. Schlager, Alleluia-Melodien I and II; id., Thematischer Katalog.

Missa Sancti Iacobi

music of the respond at the end of the verse. A smaller number, for example, Alleluia V. Posuisti domine (LU 1148), begin the verse with the same music as the start of the respond, but in these cases the similarity continues beyond the intonation. In other words, the surgical precision found in Du Fay’s setting, where the only music shared by the respond and the verse is the intonation, never happens in any plainsong alleluia. But the use of plainsong incipits written ad hoc by Du Fay and used as formal markers appears already in the Sanctus and Agnus of the Missa sine nomine and in a number of his other works. This indicates that the Alleluia V. Hispanorum clarens stella, including its plainsong, is an entirely new composition. At this point we may advance a hypothesis about the chronology of the genesis of this Mass. The most likely scenario is that sometime after his arrival in Bologna in early 1426, Du Fay wrote a three-movement cycle, Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo, using the a versi texture combined with a wellordered sequence of mensurations: , , and for successive sections. The melodic writing in the and sections is quite close to that of Rite maiorem, which was probably written at approximately the same time. The only outside liturgical reference in this cycle is the unique use of Kyrie IV (Mel 18) paraphrased in the cantus of the sections in , that is, Kyrie 3, Christe 6, and Kyrie 9, and presented in such a manner that its appearance serves as a climax for each set of invocations. Two things need to be emphasized about this: this is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, uses by Du Fay of this kind of chant paraphrase, and he never again used it in this manner. This is a very dramatic way of pointing to the listener that this piece is a setting of Kyrie IV. Then there is the matter of the end of the Credo, an extended Amen in three sections (essentially a triple Amen), ending with a passage in cantus coronatus that gave trouble to all copyists, including the scribe of Bo Q15.55 This is a very elaborate ending and it suggests that originally the Credo was the end of the cycle. To some extent this undercuts Bent’s worries that the scribe of Bo Q15 might have discarded the last two movements of Du Fay’s other three-movement cycle, Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, also in Bo Q15.56

55

56

Besseler’s transcription in OO 2, no. 2, is incorrect; it tacitly suppresses all the rests and has a number of other unreported emendations. The passage shifts tacitly to major modus; if it is read that way the only problems are a missing breve rest in the contratenor (m. 259) and a conflict between the cantus (a long) and the other voices (a breve) in m. 260. Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:153–54. By contrast, this also strengthens her argument there against Besseler’s designation of these short cycles as “fragments.”

567

568

The Early Masses

A second layer consists of the introit and the offertory, elaborate works that combine traits of what Strohm calls “antiphon settings”57 and the motet style, which include not only the rhythmic complexities of the introit but also the introitus of the offertory. They are scored for the same ensemble as the Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo, except that the double cantus is used throughout, so the alternation is not between two and three voices but between two and four. I have noted before that this change was surely prompted by the difficulty all copyists had with the a versi scoring of the three Ordinary movements (and the contemporary Sanctus papale), resulting in garbled copies of all of them.58 Related to this layer are the Sanctus and Agnus, which use the same texture as the introit and offertory, with the cantus firmi mostly in the tenor, as in the introit and offertory, and which do not follow the mensural plan of the first three Ordinary movements. It may be that these four movements form a single layer, or that the Ordinary and the Proper movements were composed at different times. It is worth noting that in the duos of the Sanctus and the Agnus the plainsong is paraphrased in cantus 1, which ties these movements to the climactic sections of the Kyrie and to the movements of the final layer of the Mass. A third (or fourth) layer consists of the repetitio of the introit and the communion. These are chant paraphrase settings of the kind that Du Fay began writing extensively after he joined the papal chapel in 1428, including the hymns and the Kyries. Both are for three voices. The introit repetitio consists of cantus, tenor, and contratenor, while the communion is a fauxbourdon setting. The communion has elicited an enormous amount of commentary because scholars regarded it as the earliest fauxbourdon by Du Fay and possible by anyone.59 This notion was based on what is probably the wrong dating of the entire Missa Sancti Iacobi, in the mid-1420s. The pieces of this third layer were composed almost certainly after 1429, as was the alleluia, where Du Fay uses the same texture of the introit and offertory. This does not entirely mean that the communion of the Mass is not “the earliest fauxbourdon,” but if it is it preceded other settings by Du Fay only by a few months and not by several years.60 57 58 59 60

Strohm, The Rise, 179. Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1976),” 31–32; id., “Parts with Words,” 238–44. The literature on fauxbourdon is immense; cf. Trowell, “Fauxbourdon.” One can still argue the primacy of the communion as the earliest fauxbourdon from its unique and relatively elaborate canon, while all other fauxbourdon settings usually carry only a “fauxbourdon” rubric.

Missa Sancti Iacobi

Charles Hamm regarded the Mass as a compilation of relatively disparate pieces.61 In an earlier study I considered it as a work written over a number of years, but as part of a reasonably unified whole, given the time when it was composed.62 Margaret Bent, in a number of studies, has presented an evolving view of its genesis, first as a composite work compiled by the scribe of Bo Q15,63 but later admitting to the possibility of some initiative on Du Fay’s part as well.64 Strohm, on the other hand, emphatically denied that the stylistic differences reflected a chronological progression.65 Strohm, I believe, underestimates the stylistic break between layers 2 and 3 above; Du Fay wrote no music like the repetitio and the communion before his Roman years. Though Bent overestimates the initiative by the scribe of Bo Q15, she has nevertheless provided the most convincing explanation for the existence of the Mass as it survives in that manuscript, noting that it was the copying of this Mass that opened the second stage of that manuscript. More significantly, she connected the copying with the will of Bishop Pietro Emiliani, made in 1429, which endowed a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela by four pilgrims. The scribe of Bo Q15 was both a member of the most intimate circle around Emiliani and from the 1420s had almost immediate access to virtually everything Du Fay composed until ca. 1433.66 I believe that, in terms of its relationship to Emiliani’s will, the Mass is something of what Bent has called a “second-hand Mass.”67 The first three movements, with the nearly programmatic use of Kyrie IV, hint at its being a Mass for an apostle, and the introit and offertory (not counting the communion, which had not yet been written) limit the possible feasts to St. James the Elder, SS. Simon and Jude, St. Thomas, and St. Matthias. As we know, only the first of these had a prominent church dedicated to him in Bologna, and furthermore a church whose unique patronal office was mined by Du Fay for the cantus firmus of Rite maiorem. There is also another connection between the church and Du Fay’s milieu. San Giacomo served one of Bologna’s parishes, and a spacious chapel was rebuilt in the 1360s by the side of the conventual church for the parishioners.68 The chapel was dedicated to St. Cecilia, and on 26 May 1426, Louis Allemand, the papal legate to Bologna, had been elevated to cardinal by Pope Martin V and given the titulus of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, after which he was commonly called “the Cardinal of Saint Cecilia.”69 Thus it is more 61 63 65 67 69

Hamm, “The Reson Mass,” 14. 62 Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1976), 30–32. Bent, “Music and the Veneto Humanists,” 125–26. 64 Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:157. Strohm, The Rise, 179. 66 Bent, “Music and the Veneto Humanists,” 110–14, 124–26. Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:158. 68 Benevolo, “Gli Agostiniani,” 18. Pérousse, Le Cardinal, 74–75.

569

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The Early Masses

than likely that Du Fay had intended the Mass to serve the needs of Allemand in his relationship with the church of San Giacomo, which now housed a parish church dedicated to the same saint as his titular church in Rome. The difference in texture between the first and second layers of the Mass is not so much one of style as one of practicality. Except for the first three movements of the Ordinary in this Mass and the Sanctus papale Du Fay never again used the specific a versi scoring that posed so many problems to the copyists; I assume that it took some time for this problem to become obvious to him; he might well have seen what copyists were doing to his music. Still, it is conceivable that the Ordinary and the Propers were at first only loosely connected. If the introit and offertory preceded the Sanctus and Agnus, at one point what existed was a threemovement self-contained cycle of Ordinary settings bookended by two small “motets” setting the introit and the offertory texts. This is also suggested by the fact that the introit does not set the psalm or the doxology. Allemand and his court, including Du Fay, were expelled from Bologna in August 1428 after the Canedoli uprising,70 and by October of that year Du Fay had joined the papal chapel. From his years in Rome we have the enormous flowering of pieces using chant paraphrase and fauxbourdon, the techniques used in the introit repetitio and the communion. Emiliani made his will in 1429, and the scribe of Bo Q15, who surely knew the terms of the will, set about to produce a copy of a Mass for four singers, a number that coincides with the number of pilgrims that Emiliani calls for in his will.71 The scribe of Bo Q15 surely knew about the St. James cycle and probably urged Du Fay to “complete” it, and Du Fay did so up to a point. The Sanctus and the Agnus might already have been in existence. Du Fay then wrote the alleluia in the same texture as the introit and offertory, but as noted earlier, without a plainsong cantus firmus and with plainsong intonations composed by himself. He did not set the gradual, although he could have done so using the same procedure he used in the alleluia.72 He provided a setting of the introit repetitio and the communion in his new style, even though there is, particularly in the introit, an almost shocking discrepancy of styles between the complicated first setting of the antiphon and the utter simplicity of the repetitio. 70 72

See pp. 96–97. 71 Bent, “Music and the Veneto Humanists,” 125–26. As noted above, using the plainsong alleluia and gradual as cantus firmi would have made the composition of the setting unwieldy and the pieces uncommonly long. Du Fay, like any cleric at the time, would have known a good number of unique metric alleluias, so that an entirely new alleluia was a believable option. This simply was not the case for the gradual, as Constitues eos is the most widely used gradual for Apostles.

Missa Sancti Iacobi

In the case of the alleluia, however, Du Fay went even further: he probably wrote the rhymed text of the verse himself. The verse is a single stanza in a meter commonly found in proses, which any competent versifier could have written: Hispanorum clarens stella, Charismatum Iacob cella, Mundi liminis sis stella Mare transfretantium. The smoking gun proving this case is the second word of line 3, “liminis”: the scribe of Bo Q15 apparently could not make it out, and wrote it three times, in cantus 1 and 2 and the tenor, as “liiis” or “lins,” a nonstandard abbreviation found nowhere else. Both modern editions omit the word and pass over the omission in total silence.73 Brian Trowell, who was aware of the omission but could not make out the word, provided a substitution that was used by some of the performers in a recording.74 The correct reading was arrived at in 2004 at a seminar in Dozza directed by Margaret Bent and was an insight of Donato Gallo, who observed that his proposed reading, “mundi liminis,” surely referred to the cape of Finisterre (finis terrae), some 80 km to the west of Santiago. This in turn strengthens Bent’s thesis that the final form of the Mass was connected with Emiliani’s will, because a secular tradition had pilgrims to Compostela continuing on to Finisterre and picking up a scallop shell on the beach as proof that they had completed the pilgrimage, to the point that the scallop shell became one of the symbols associated with St. James the Elder. As it turns out, this alleluia text is the only text for any of the liturgies proper to St. James that I have examined that refers in any way to a pilgrimage, so it is reasonable to connect its genesis with Emiliani’s desire to send four pilgrims to Santiago. If the text of the verse had come from a chant book or had been supplied to Du Fay by anyone in Emiliani’s circle, the scribe of Bo Q15 would have been able verify the word. At the same time one has to wonder in what form the piece reached him. The setting, as copied in Bo Q15, is the only instance in Dufay’s music before 1450 where the coordination between text and music crosses over into nonsense. The music for the verse has four sections, and the distribution of the text is as follows:

73

74

OO Besseler 2:xxi, 28–29; OO De Van 4:vii. De Van at least leaves an extra space in lieu of the missing word when he prints the text on p. vii. Dufay, Music for St James the Greater, The Binchois Consort, Andrew Kirkman, director (Hyperion: CDA 66997, 1998).

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Propers of St. Anthony Abbot in Tr 88 and Tr 89 Intonation

Four voices

Duo

Four voices

Hispanorum

clarens stella / Charismatum Iacob cella / Mundi liminis

sis stella / Mare

transfretantium

Whereas it should surely be Formularies for St. Anthony Abbot in Cambrai and Dijon Intonation

Four voices

Duo

Four voices

Hispanorum

clarens stella / Charismatum Iacob cella

Mundi liminis sis stella

Mare transfretantium

The problems with the alleluia indicate that the piece (and probably the much simpler introit repetitio and the communion) reached the scribe of Bo Q15 when the almost immediate communication between him and Du Fay had stopped, although he was able eventually to get a good number of the hymns, some of the Kyries, and a work like the motet Supremum est mortalibus, which is one of the last pieces we have from Du Fay’s Roman years. With all of this, the wonder is not that the Missa Sancti Iacobi is not quite a tightly unified cycle, but rather how unified it is when one considers the circumstances of its creation. The Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo share not only the large-scale mensural progression and the shifts in textures, but a great deal of motivic work. The one curious moment is the end of the Credo, coming as it does now in the middle of a cycle rather than at the very end. It is essentially a triple Amen: measures 223–38 a trio in , measures 239–50 a duo in , and measures 251–62 a trio in four phrases, each separated by a breve rest (the last rest of the contratenor is missing in both manuscripts), with a corona over each note. The first two sections are a continuation of the mensural pattern of the movement, but the last is a unique coda. Its transmission in the Trent codices is hopelessly garbled: Tr 87 is missing the tenor and contratenor from measure 226 to the end, and in Tr 92 the scribe replaced measures 183 to the end with measures 50–99 of the Gloria, set to the Credo text starting at Et unam sanctam. The third amen is slightly garbled in Bo Q15 and Ao 15 and has been mistranscribed in every modern edition. In the putative earliest version of the work the tightly unified Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo, with the extraordinary peroratio of the Credo, would have been bookended by the impressive settings of the introit and the offertory, which at this early stage were not quite “proper settings” but

Missa Sancti Iacobi

rather “motets.”75 The Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo, which I believe were the earliest movements written, are unified not so much by motivic recurrences, though one can find them,76 as by the ordered succession of textures. In this Du Fay might have had a model in a Dunstaple Gloria– Credo pair that is organized in a similar manner,77 but to end the Credo he used an entirely new texture in a manner that he had tried in a number of his early cantilena motets. The introit and offertory would then have provided a second, quite different texture, even though they use the same ensemble as the three Ordinary movements. As Du Fay expanded the Mass, the Sanctus and Agnus blend together the texture of the first three Ordinary movements and that of the introit and offertory. In the Sanctus Du Fay keeps a semblance of the mensuration changes of the Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo, although the shifts are no longer strictly connected with a texture; thus we have no section in and both and appear in duos and in full sections, including a shift from to in a duo (mm. 9–27). The Agnus dei begins in , the only movement of the Mass that does so, but the rhythmic density of the section is reminiscent of the upper voices of the introit, which are notated in Ͻ against the of the lower voices, and for the second Agnus (a duo) and the third he shifts to . The notational density indicates a sharp increase in the tempo, although he avoids here the ornamental melodic writing we find under this sign in the introit and the offertory. Of the three movements that surely come from the Roman years the alleluia adds nothing new texturally to the mix; it belongs together with the introit and the offertory, but the repetitio and above all the starkly severe communion present a very different texture. Moving their genesis to 1429 or 1430 probably does not change the communion’s status as Du Fay’s first attempt at fauxbourdon, and musically it sounds quite different from his later essays in this texture; it is in some ways one of his most dissonant pieces. Even though the two-voice counterpoint of cantus and tenor is impeccable, the fauxbourdon voice produces a number of sharp clashes, such as those in measures 17:1 and 21:1, and the kind of suspended dissonant passage found in measures 20:2–21:1 seldom returns in Du Fay’s other works (see Ex. 14.7). Thus it is not surprising that Hamm, writing in 75

76 77

Significantly, the early version of the introit includes no psalm verse, doxology, or repetendum. When expanding the introit Du Fay did not set the psalm verse or the doxology (which he would do in all his other polyphonic introits), and the repetendum is composed in a drastically different style from that of the first setting of the antiphon. Cf. Fallows, Dufay, 171. Dunstable, Complete Works, rev. edn., nos. 10–11 (Ao 15, fols. 234v–238r).

573

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The Early Masses Example 14.7 Communion, Vos qui secuti

1965, regarded it as a piece surely written “for some other occasion.”78 The communion expands upon the texture found in sections 3, 6, and 9 of the Kyrie, and it is likely that Du Fay composed the repetitio of the introit to create a more obvious musical point of reference for the communion early on in the cycle. Indeed, in the Mass as it survives, once one has heard the introit and the Kyrie, all of the textures that Du Fay will use in the Mass have been exposed, and in a sense the entire Mass is organized in the same manner as the movements that were its original core, the Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo, that is, as a succession of alternating textures. They are interconnected by the presence of the texture of the repetitio and the communion, albeit briefly, in sections 3, 6, and 9 of the Kyrie, and by the melding of the texture of the Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo with that of the introit, alleluia, and the Sanctus and Agnus. Even the curious different ending of the earliest layer, with the final section of the Credo, is now projected onto the entire Mass with the severe simplicity of the communion.

The Mass for St. Anthony of Padua and for St. Francis Du Fay’s next Mass, although more unified than the Missa Sancti Iacobi, is even more exceptional and its transmission is far more problematic, resulting in a complicated reception by modern scholarship. Du Fay’s will mentions two Masses, one for St. Anthony of Padua and the other for St. Anthony Abbot, both of which he left to the chapel of

78

Hamm, “The Reson Mass,” 14. Hamm regarded the work as a composite Mass, which in a sense it is, and it is a tribute to his musical acuity the extent to which he intuited the order of composition of the different layers. He is incorrect, however, in his claim that the chant paraphrased in the communion is “for St. Matthew, not St. James” (id.). That chant was used sometimes for St. Matthias; cf. Table 14.4.

The Mass for St. Anthony of Padua and for St. Francis

St. Stephen.79 Among the pieces by Du Fay that survive in the Trent codices an isolated anonymous Kyrie in Tr 93, fols. 103 v–104r, was copied by Hanns Wiser in Tr 90, fols. 72v–73r with the ascription “Duffay” and a note at the end: “et in terra et totum officium quaere post missam Bedingham.” Beginning on fol. 383v Wiser copied the Gloria and Credo of Bedyngham’s Missa Dueil angoisseux, with the only ascription to Bedyngham we have for this cycle,80 followed by a different Sanctus and Agnus, which might be by Bedyngham, and which at least Wiser considered to be part of that Mass. Immediately following we find a Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus that must be the movements to which the note on fol. 73r refers. Nothing in the cycle as it stands in Tr 90 gives a clue to its origin or destination. It is a long and intricate three-voice Mass without a cantus firmus or any connection to the plainsong whatsoever. In the introduction to his edition of the work Besseler makes a number of patently wrong claims: that the Mass certainly makes use of chant because the Sanctus and Agnus have plainsong intonations, that the plainsongs of the Sanctus and Agnus are identical, and that they turn up in numerous Italian manuscripts. In a note he thanks Bruno Stäblein for sending him the plainsong melodies, and finishes by stating that how far the chant is paraphrased in the superius can only be determined when the version of the plainsong melody used by Du Fay has been found.81 I am quite sure that Stäblein sent him some plainsong melodies that could conceivably be related to the intonations of the Sanctus and Agnus, but neither the intonations nor the melodic ductus of the cantus in the two movements are remotely alike, much less identical. Stäblein’s students, Peter Josef Thannabaur and Martin Schildbach, subsequently published their thematic catalogues of Sanctus and Agnus melodies based upon the collection in Stäblein’s institute, but not a single one of the melodies can be identified with the intonations in the Mass.82 In the critical notes Besseler passed over the matter of the chant in absolute silence.83 From what we now know about the intonations in the Missa sine nomine, the alleluia of the Missa Sancti Iacobi, and the two Sanctus– Agnus pairs, it is clear that in this piece Du Fay himself wrote the 79 80

81 82 83

LAN, 4G 1313, p. 71; Houdoy, Histoire, 411. See also Chapter 6 and Appendix 4. It appears anonymously in Tr 88, fols. 17v–31r in the following order: Sanctus, Agnus, Gloria, Credo, Benedicamus Domino. OO Besseler 2:vii. Thannabaur, Das einstimmige Sanctus; Schildbach, Das einstimmige Agnus Dei. OO Besseler 2:xiii–xiv.

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The Early Masses

plainsong intonation ad hoc, and that the entire Ordinary is freely composed without a cantus firmus of any kind. Faced with a second Missa sine nomine, Besseler turned to Du Fay’s will, the writings of Tinctoris, and the correspondence between Giovanni Spataro and Pietro Aaron. The will mentions two Masses: one for St. Anthony Abbot and the other for St. Anthony of Padua. In his Proportionale musices Tinctoris cited excerpts from a Missa de Sancto Antonio, which were identifiable as measures 184–89 of the Gloria and measures 202–10 of the Credo in Besseler’s edition.84 A letter of Spataro to Pietro Aron cites a series of five ligatures that occur in the tenor of the “Missa de Sancto Antonio da Padoa.”85 Besseler could not find these ligatures in the Mass in Tr 90 and therefore assumed it was not the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua, but that for St. Anthony Abbot, and published it as such.86 David Fallows, who realized that Spataro was essentially engaged in a controversy with Tinctoris and his followers, thought it would be very odd if he were writing about a Mass different from that mentioned by Tinctoris. Spataro conveniently stated that the ligatures he was referring to happen in “the tenor of the second part” of the Gloria, a relatively short section,87 and Fallows was able to show how the music in Tr 90 can be ligated as Spataro indicated without changing any of the note values (Spataro compressed the notation onto fewer lines and gave no clefs). An earlier ligature, which Spataro claimed to see “in the first section” of the Gloria, requires only a tying together of three repeated Fs, the kind of variant one finds constantly in this music. Only one ligature, which Spataro claims appears at the start of the Qui sedes, presents a real problem (see Ex. 14.8). The problem is not the melodic intervals of the ligature, which in most of Spataro’s letter are approximate since he is discussing rhythm only, but that the breve between the maxima and the black notes will throw off the counterpoint. Given the graphic closeness 84

85 86

87

Tinctoris, Opera theoretica, 2a:47 and 57–58; OO Besseler 2:53–54 and 60; OO Planchart 3/3, Gloria, mm. 253–58, Credo, mm. 293–315. Blackburn et al., eds., Correspondence, 588–89; see also Blackburn’s commentary, 605–8. The work itself was edited in OO Besseler 2, no. 3, but Besseler’s explanation of why he thought the Mass was for St. Anthony Abbot appears in p. i of the Foreword of OO Besseler 3. Besseler’s edition of this work is inexplicable. The score has several hundred errors of transcription and misprints. In mm. 194–203 of the Gloria, a duo of the cantus and the contratenor parts is off by as many as six beats, with several simultaneous vertical sevenths, ninths, and tritones between two parts. The edition in Bockholdt, Die frühen Messenkompositionen, 2:68–86, is entirely accurate. OO Besseler 2, mm. 67–105; OO Planchart 3/3, mm. 67–144.

The Mass for St. Anthony of Padua and for St. Francis Example 14.8 Ligatures in the Gloria of the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua and St. Francis

of the two ligatures, it is more likely that the second note in Spataro’s ligature is a copying error, either in his exemplar, by Spataro, or by the copyist of the letter.88 Thus, the surviving Mass is the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua mentioned in Du Fay’s will, and not the Mass for St. Anthony Abbot, which is now to be considered lost. Spataro has further references to the Mass in his Tractato de musica of 1531, where he discusses one of the passages mentioned by Tinctoris, the point at “Et in Spiritum Sanctum” when the cantus shifts into , producing a 9 against 4 cross-rhythm.89 Further, for the Mass to be for St. Anthony of Padua it must have included propers, and Spataro mentions a shift from to 3 “nel verso” of Du Fay’s Mass for St. Anthony of Padua,90 and indeed, in the verse of the gradual for St. Anthony of Padua copied by Wiser in Tr 88, this shift occurs.91 Thus Fallows could make a very convincing case that the cycle of propers for St. Anthony in Tr 88 belongs with the Ordinary in Tr 90.92 But there is even more to this Mass: Spataro, in the same letter to Aron, mentioned an odd ligature in an introit “de confessoribus” by Du Fay,93 and in 1972 I traced it to the tenor of the introit Os iusti in Tr 88, fol. 168v, which forms part of a cycle of propers for St. Francis of Assisi copied immediately after the cycle for

88

89

90 91 92

93

Fallows, Dufay, 183–85; cf. Blackburn et al., eds., Correspondence, 607. Bonnie Blackburn (personal communication) kindly reminded me that the letter is not an autograph. Fallows, loc. cit., cautiously allows that the error might be in Tr 90, but since the passage leads immediately to a cadence after the black notes this is extremely unlikely. Spataro, Tractato, ch. 31, cited in Tinctoris, Opera theoretica, 2a:58. See also Haberl, Wilhelm Du Fay, 11, and van den Borren, Guillaume Dufay, 67. The passage is in OO Planchart 3/3, starting at m. 297. Spataro, Tractato, ch. 24; see also Fallows, Dufay, 188. OO Planchart 3/3, gradual, m. 162 in the cantus and m. 174 in the contratenor. Fallows, Dufay, 188; id., “Dufay and the Mass Proper,” 47–50. Later doubts about the authenticity of the communion and other movements in this and other proper cycles raised by Gerber in “Du Fay’s Style,” and Sacred Music, are based on faulty understanding of the liturgy and of the limits of Du Fay’s style; cf. p. 175. Blackburn et al., eds., Correspondence, 588.

577

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The Early Masses

St. Anthony of Padua.94 This cycle shares two movements with the cycle for St. Anthony of Padua, the gradual, which is indicated in Tr 88 by a crossreference,95 and the offertory, which is the same for both saints, but for which Wiser forgot to add a cross-reference. The cycle for St. Francis, as noted earlier, follows exactly the liturgy found in the Franciscan books for the feast of this saint and its octave. With three pieces securely ascribable to Du Fay, this entire cycle is also surely his work, and its existence helps explain the curious transmission of this Mass, where we find the Ordinary by itself in Tr 90 and the propers for St. Anthony and St. Francis, side by side, in Tr 88. This probably goes back to the ways these works were copied in Du Fay’s exemplar. We have a description of this exemplar, albeit a summary one made by the executors of his will, which describe it at one point as “one book in large format in vellum containing the Masses of St. Anthony of Padua with many other antiphons in black notation.”96 The use of the plural here indicates that almost surely the Ordinary and the Proper were not interwoven but copied as separate units, and the “many other antiphons” indicates that the book contained other music. The obvious candidates for this would be the propers for St. Anthony and St. Francis and a full set of polyphonic Vespers for both saints, surely including motets (following a Cambrai tradition),97 remnants of which survive in Tr 87, Tr 88, and ModB.98 In other words, the book apparently contained a complete liturgy for Mass and Vespers for the two major saints of the Franciscan Order that followed the Franciscan liturgy rather than that of the cathedral of Cambrai. Fallows has made a compelling argument that Du Fay intended this Mass to be sung at the dedication of Donatello’s altar at the Basilica del Santo in Padua in 1450.99 The book, given that it was in parchment, which had become unusual for polyphony at Cambrai in the 1440s, and was written in black notation, which is also unusual for this time, was clearly a deluxe object and has all the appearance of having been meant as a presentation copy, perhaps one that was never given away, or a twin of such a volume.100 The Ordinary and Proper were most likely not interwoven in Du Fay’s exemplar because the Ordinary was probably intended to serve both the Propers for St. Anthony and those for 94 95 96

97 98 99

Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1972), 16–17. Tr 88, fol. 192r: “Graduale Os iusti queras antea in missa Sancti Anthonii de Padua.” LAN, 4G 1313, p. 6: “Item i livre en grant volume en parchemin contenant les messes de Saint Anthoine de Pade aveuc plusieurs aultres anthiennes en noire note.” Cf. Planchart, “Choirboys in Cambrai,” 137. See p. 220. For a reconstruction of the contents of the book, see Planchart, “The Books,” 176–90. Fallows, Dufay, 66–67. 100 See pp. 233–4.

The Mass for St. Anthony of Padua and for St. Francis

St. Francis, and the survival of the two Propers side by side tends to strengthen this possibility. The date of the Mass remains vague. The earliest source for any of it is Tr 93, copied in the early 1450s, which transmits the Kyrie unascribed (the ascription appears only in Tr 90, one of the very rare ascriptions in that manuscript, particularly in that it comes in the section copied directly from Tr 93). The rest of the Ordinary did not reach Wiser until the mid- to late 1450s, and the propers arrived even later. On the other hand, traces of the Vespers cycle for both saints appear in Tr 871, copied in the late 1430s or early 1440s, and in ModB, which is roughly contemporary with Tr 87. It is likely that the Vespers are a product of that time, and the Ordinary and the propers are a product of Du Fay’s years at Cambrai in the 1440s, and that the entire repertory was collected in the book mentioned in his will, and perhaps in a twin manuscript, as he prepared to leave for Italy in 1450. At the outset this composite Mass cannot have been written for Cambrai, since the cathedral’s calendar did not include St. Anthony and its liturgy had a different formulary for St. Francis, which shared with the Franciscan formulary only the introit and the communion.101 Eventually Du Fay established in the chapel of St. Stephen a celebration of St. Anthony’s Mass, with its Vespers, which was continued after his death for nearly a century. This, and the nature of the book that contained the Mass, tend to confirm Fallows’s intuition that the Mass was intended for the Paduan celebration. His reasoning is based on a very clever process of deduction: in his will Du Fay mentions that “some of the better singers” of the choir, together with the magister puerorum and the boys, are to perform in Vespers and the Mass,102 and assigns a payment of 30s to be divided among the adults (the boys are paid separately), each receiving 3s 4d. This second quantity is contained nine times in 30s, so there were nine adult singers. He then notices that when Du Fay traveled south in 1450, the court of Savoy paid for his lodgings together with nine religiosi, at the Hostlery of the Red Hat in Turin,103 some two weeks before the date of the dedication in Padua,104 precisely the same number of adult singers needed for the Mass. Elsewhere Fallows writes a careful appreciation of the music of the Ordinary, noting the concentrated melodic style that resembles some of the late songs, and pointing both to the complexity of the rhythmic writing and the elegance of the melodic style.105 101

102 104

I: Os iusti, G: Inveni David, A: Iustus germinabit, O: Desiderium, C: Fidelis servus, in Missale parvum, 2nd foliation, fols. 61v–62r. LAN, 4G 1313, p. 73. 103 TAS, Camerale Savoia, Inv. 16, Reg. 98, fol. 270r. Fallows, Dufay, 66–67. 105 Ibid., 186–87.

579

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The Early Masses

An aspect of the Mass that gives pause to some writers is the shifts in ranges between the movements.106 In the Ordinary, as Fallows has already noted, the Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus have the tenor and contratenor in a range about a fourth higher than the Kyrie and Gloria. The cantus has a total range of nearly two octaves; it begins with a tenth, a–c″, in the Kyrie (although the a and b are barely touched on), and expands gradually, with the f″ appearing for the first time in the Credo (at “Et ascendit in caelum,” mm. 170–77), and then in Agnus II, a duo forty-nine breves long, where the cantus covers the entire range in one sweeping long line.107 These shifts become more pronounced when the Mass is performed with the propers, be they those of St. Anthony or St. Francis. The introits are roughly in the same range as the Kyrie and Gloria, the gradual (the same in both cycles) is slightly lower, but the alleluias are considerably lower, with the one for St. Anthony cleffed c2, c4, c4, and the one for St. Francis c4, F5, F5. The offertory (also the same in both cycles) is for four voices, roughly in the range of the alleluia for St. Anthony, but with the plainsong set at the written pitch of the chant books. Both communions set the chant at pitch and have a tessitura slightly lower than that of the offertory. Thus the low textures that are gradually abandoned in the Ordinary are reinforced in the propers. This shows a suggestive parallel with the tonal structure of the extraordinary Office for St. James in Bologna from which Du Fay took the cantus firmus for Rite maiorem, where the modally ordered antiphons and responsories rise in texture, but the next-to last responsory returns to mode 1, followed by a final responsory in modes 7 and 8 that covers the entire modal range.108 In this context it could be that if we had the complete set of Vespers for both saints rather than the fragments that survive in Tr 87 and ModB we would see more clearly the pattern Du Fay was using, since Julian’s chants are modally ordered, and in the hymn for St. Anthony Du Fay also sets the chant at pitch.109 Beyond the range problems that face the singers of the Mass there is also the rhythmic language, which can often be quite forbidding. The mensuration signs in the Ordinary clearly have been altered in transmission, something noted by both Hamm and Fallows.110 In the Ordinary all the sections signed with in Tr 90 were surely or in Du Fay’s original, but even so, the numerous mensural shifts in both the Ordinary and the propers would tax the concentration and skill of the singers. The most extreme passage 106 108 109

Hamm, Chronology, 105; OO De Van 3:i–ii. 107 OO Planchart 3/3, Agnus, mm. 32–82. Baroffio and Kim, “La Tradizione,” 133. The three lacunae were obviously in modes 1, 2, and 3. OO Planchart 7/24. 110 Hamm, Chronology, 105–13; Fallows, Dufay, 187–88.

The Mass for St. Anthony of Padua and for St. Francis Example 14.9 Mass for St. Anthony of Padua and St. Francis, Credo, mm. 236–50

Example 14.10 Hanns Wiser’s alternative reading of the Credo (mm. 235–50)

occurs in the Credo at “cuius regni non erit finis” (see Ex. 14.9). This apparently proved too much for Wiser, who provided a bland and marginally correct alternative version at the end of the part (see Ex. 14.10). Both Besseler and Bockholdt published only Wiser’s alternative passage. Besseler blandly reports the original, with an incorrect sign ( ) and in the original notation with the disingenuous remark that “before 163 the following section has to be omitted; it is very similar to the passage 164– 170,”111 giving the impression that the passage is somehow superfluous, when what he does is print an addition appended to the end of the part, following a single barline. Bockholdt at least admits that the passage is in the main text of the part: “in der Oberstimme zuerst eine rhythmisch komplizierte Fassung (Ͻ), die hier nicht wiedergegeben wurde.”112 Hamm is the only one who provides a transcription of the passage in its original form, when listing the kinds of mensural usages in the Mass that led him to reject Du Fay’s authorship.113 And yet, this passage, more than any other in Du Fay’s earlier music, is a harbinger of the extraordinary section in the Credo of the Missa L’homme armé.114 In his discussion of this 111 113

OO Besseler 2:xxiii. 112 Bockholdt, Die frühen Messenkompositionen, 2:xvi. Hamm, Chronology, 108. 114 OO Planchart 3/5, Credo, mm. 81–92.

581

582

The Early Masses

passage Hamm calls it unprecedented in Du Fay’s music, but that is partly because he assumed the St. Anthony and St. Francis Mass was not authentic.115 This Mass probably arose, like the Missa Sancti Iacobi, over a period of a few years. From the source situation, it appears as if the set of Vespers for both saints came first, then perhaps the propers and the Ordinary. Stylistically, it is still a remarkably unified work. When performing it with either set of propers, there does not seem to be the sharp division that one hears when performing, say, the Missa Se la face ay pale in conjunction with any of Du Fay’s Proper cycles. Although the main melodic ductus of the Ordinary is freely composed and that of the propers is derived from plainsong, Du Fay appears to have taken care that these two melodic strategies blend well. Fallows is certainly correct when he observes that the melodic and contrapuntal style of the Ordinary appears to grow from the kind of music Du Fay writes in the songs of his middle period,116 but also among the important antecedents of the work is the extraordinary but little-known Gloria 10 in Tr 92, fols. 144v–146r discussed in Chapter 5.117 The three Masses examined in this chapter, particularly in terms of their Ordinary movements, represent in a way a summa of Mass composition on the Continent before the English influence of the cantus-firmus Mass began to be felt across the Channel. Despite many stylistic similarities, with these works, Du Fay’s late Masses based upon a cantus firmus inhabit a different world in terms of their organization but also, because of that, in terms of their melodic and contrapuntal world. In this respect, it is a tragedy that two surely late works that probably looked back to the procedures Du Fay uses in these three Masses, the Mass for St. Anthony Abbot and the Requiem, are lost to us. 115 116

117

Hamm, Chronology, 145. Fallows, Dufay, 186. Fallows dates these songs from the 1450s, but the redating of the Porto chansonnier to the late 1440s proposed by Gallagher in “Seigneur Leon” places many of these even closer to the time of the Mass. OO Planchart 5/28 (Gloria 10); see also Chapter 12.

15

The Late Masses

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent With the Missa Se la face ay pale we cross a subtle but nonetheless sharp divide in Du Fay’s Mass composition, one that reflects a shift that was shared by almost all composers across the Continent. Admired though they were and composed in the 1430s, the English cantus-firmus Mass cycles apparently generated no imitation on the Continent until after mid-century. The lone exception is the four-movement cantus-firmus Mass added to the Cyprus Codex, which was perhaps the work of Jehan Hanelle sometime in the mid1430s.1 But shortly after 1450 a number of Masses in imitation of the English cantus-firmus procedure begin to appear. They represent two different approaches to cantus-firmus treatment: a strict one, where the pitch and rhythmic configuration remain the same from movement to movement, and a free one, where the rhythmic configuration changes in each statement of the melody and where often the borrowed melody is ornamented or paraphrased in different ways in each movement.2 Similarly, there are two textures, a three-voice texture with the tenor at the bottom, which is found in most of the English cantus-firmus Masses until the 1440s,3 and a four-part texture with a voice below the tenor. This second texture is now generally known as the “Caput” texture, as among the earliest, if not the earliest, Masses to exhibit it is the widely influential Missa Caput once thought to be by Du Fay.4 Perhaps the earliest Continental imitations of the English cantus-firmus Masses, if we take their transmission at face value, turn up in the second section of Tr 90, copied in the mid-1450s, which transmits Du Fay’s Ordinary for St. Anthony and St. Francis. These are Guillaume Le 1

2

3

4

Hoppin, ed., The Cypriot-French Repertory, 1, nos. 11a–d; but cf. Kügle, “The Repertory,” 175– 77; id., “Glorious Sounds,” 678–79, which argues plausibly the manuscript was actually copied in Brescia ca. 1434–1435. Strohm, The Rise, 229–36 offers a perceptive description of these typologies in connection with the English repertory. Cf. ibid., 230, table 2. Note that in the case of the lone exception, the Missa Salve sancta parens, Bent, ed., Four Anonymous Masses, 181, indicates that the fourth voice is probably a later addition. Cf. Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Masses” (1972), 1–13.

583

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The Late Masses

Rouge’s Missa Soyez apprantiz and two anonymous Masses, one on O rosa bella (II), and another on La belle se siet.5 Wiser continued this appendix of Tr 90 in a second manuscript, now Tr 88, probably contemporary in its beginning with the later stages of Tr 90, and continued until ca. 1462.6 The three Masses in Tr 90 are all for three voices and use the free cantus-firmus procedure one finds in the Power/Dunstaple Missa Rex saeculorum. Tr 88 transmits a number of other such works, including the very elaborate Missa Ayo visto la mappamundi of Joan Ximeno de Cornago, but also a group of early four-voice Masses with strict cantus-firmus treatment that use the “Caput” texture, notably Pierre de Domart’s influential Missa Spiritus almus, Ockeghem’s Missa Caput, and Du Fay’s Missa Se la face ay pale, as well as Faugues’s Missa Le serviteur, which uses a free cantus-firmus treatment.7

The Missa Se la face ay pale Already in 1960, when the Missa Caput was still thought of as a work of Du Fay, Hamm had noticed the close relationship between the Missa Caput and the Missa Se la face ay pale.8 The circumstances and origin of the work have been discussed above.9 The connection of the Mass with the Holy Shroud might explain one unusual trait of the Mass: in earlier studies I had noted that the cantus firmus of this work, more than that of any of the other Masses of Du Fay, appears to be incompatible not just with the setting of the liturgical text but also the distribution of the phrases, which can be more or less coordinated in the other three voices.10 But it is even possible that the cantus firmus was intended to be played on a slide trumpet or an early version of the trombone together with the organ. During the years Du Fay wrote the Mass, the senior trumpeter of the court, Estienne Ferrier, was actually an active member of the chapel, listed in the payments together with the singers and the organist, who was then Vincent du Bruequet.11 Du Fay might have decided on this for symbolic reasons. He had a lifelong concern with the resurrectio mortuorum, which finds expression in several 5 6

7

8 10 11

Strohm, The Rise, 430, table 5. On the dates of Tr 93, Tr 90, and Tr 88, see Saunders, “The Dating,” 68–69 and 73–75, and P. Wright, “Johannes Wiser’s Paper,” 35–37. A complete list of these appears in Strohm, The Rise, 423–24 (strict), and 431–32 (free), which includes all cycles or possible cycles from the second quarter of the 15th century. 9 Hamm, Chronology, 129–30. See pp. 246–7. Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1976), 40–41; id., “Fifteenth-Century Masses,” 6–7. CAS, Inv. 124, Reg. SA 3603, fols. 39v–43r: letter of appointment and payments from 1449 to 1454.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent

of his works, notably the Masses on L’homme armé and Ave regina caelorum.12 The death of Christ is the central episode in the process of redemption that begins with his birth and will find its final act in the Day of Judgment, so Du Fay might well have thought of having the sound of the tuba be heard throughout this Mass, precisely in the voice that refers to the bitter fruit of love, expressed in this case by his death and burial.13 Another possibility is that the text of the ballade, particularly the first stanza, most of which can be read as Christ speaking of the torments he is willing to suffer for the sake of humanity, was sung to the tenor. A small hint of this might be the “wrong incipit” set to the tenor of the last Kyrie in CS 14.14 It is probably no coincidence that the changed text, which might be garbled, takes the place of “La belle a qui suis” in the ballade text, which is the one phrase in the first stanza that points unequivocally to a love song. A few small changes in the last three lines would be all that it would take to turn the ballade stanza into a “spiritual” text.15 Either of these possibilities, in turn, may connect with another aspect of the transmission of the Mass itself, implied in the subheading of Richard Sherr’s recent study of it: “Du Fay’s Missa Se la face ay pale: A Mass Singers and Scribes of the Fifteenth Century Did Not Care About.”16 Of the three surviving sources for the Mass, Sie K. I. 2 transmits only bits and pieces of the Credo and the Sanctus in a fragmentary appendix, CS 14 is missing measures 179 to the end (203) of the cantus in the Sanctus, and Tr 88 is riddled with lacunae that make the work unperformable. Thus, as Sherr notes, there is no evidence that the Mass was sung from either of the two surviving “complete” sources.17 The popularity of the Mass with performers and scholars in the twentieth century, however, is not just a function of the fact that it was among the earliest works by Du Fay that became available in modern transcription, either in part or as whole, and not only in a critical edition but in an easily available commercial edition.18 The 12 13

14

15

16 18

See pp. 595–96 and 619–20. On the performance problems of the slide trumpet in this Mass see the introduction in OO Planchart 3/4. The date of the work, ca. 1453, places it at a time when a tuba could be a prototrombone capable of playing the problematic b in the tenor, all the more so in that Estienne Ferrier surely had the best instruments available then. It occurs in m. 78 of the Kyrie in OO Planchart 3/4, which the scribe copied as “tant je me deduis.” It is not reported in OO Besseler 3, notes iv, but misled Ambros in Geschichte der Musik, 2:456, into reporting a Missa Tant je me deduis among Du Fay’s works surviving in Vatican sources. Although more than a century later, this is precisely what happens to many of the texts in Francisco Guerrero, Canciones y villanescas espirituales of 1589. Sherr, “Thoughts on Some of the Masses,” 322. 17 Ibid., 323. Vierstimmige Messe, ed. Besseler.

585

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The Late Masses

balance and formal perfection of the work combined with a particularly graceful and flowing musical surface make it highly appealing. It is impossible even to guess how Du Fay regarded it. It was a commissioned work for a specific occasion, very much like the isorhythmic motets that are in a sense its immediate predecessors. In his will Du Fay mentions a number of works beyond those that he asked to be sung in his exequies simply because they are contained in books that he is leaving to a person or an institution. Most of them were then very recent, but those that were several decades old, such as the responsory Si quaeris miracula, the motet O sidus Hispaniae, and the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua, were works that he had continued to perform year after year, and thus were very much part of his present at that time. Still, the Missa Se la face ay pale can be heard as the gateway to his late style and the first of his works where one can see and hear the synthesis of the complex music he wrote in Nuper rosarum flores and Fulgens iubar ecclesiae, the long-line melodies he developed in the graduals, offertories, and alleluias of the 1440s, and the graceful melodic style of the songs, particularly those of the 1440s and the 1450s. Also, like Fulgens iubar ecclesiae, but in a more elaborate and extended manner, this Mass is Du Fay’s response to what he heard in the English Missa Caput. Among his cantus-firmus Masses Se la face ay pale is the one that in texture and structure stands closest to the big tenor motets of the 1430s and 1440s. As the cantus firmus he uses the tenor of his ballade, an exceptional work in many respects, where the music is entirely through-composed. The song is thirty measures long. The longest break in the tenor occurs in measure 18, two semibreves, and Du Fay used this as the main point of articulation in the Mass, expanding the break to different lengths in the different movements. A consequence of this is that each segment of the tenor begins on c′. The large-scale structure of the Mass resembles that of the Missa sine nomine: a Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus group surrounding a Gloria and Credo, although in Se la face ay pale the Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus have some structural differences among them absent from the Gloria and Credo. In Du Fay’s putative original the tenor was probably written only once through in each movement, with the introductory rests in the Sanctus and Agnus, but with just the indication of “tacet” for the long internal rest.19 In the Gloria and the Credo it was also copied down just once in the values it has in the song, but with all the introductory and internal rests carefully notated, so that its appearance was identical to the tenors of pieces such as Nuper rosarum flores and Fulgens iubar ecclesiae. In the Kyrie, 19

Indeed, traces of this manner can be seen in the copy in CS 14.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent Example 15.1 Tenor of the Gloria and Credo of the Missa Se la face ay pale

Sanctus, and Agnus it carries the indication “Crescit in duplo,” so that a minim of the tenor is equal to a semibreve of the other voices; in the Gloria and the Credo it has the indication: “Tenor ter dicitur. Primo quilibet figura crescit in triplo, secundo in duplo, tertio ut iacet.” Thus the tenor is performed three times in each movement, first augmenting each note value by three, then by two, and finally it is sung as written. Because of this the Gloria and the Credo are the most motetlike movements of the Mass, including the acceleration of the contrapuntal rhythm in each successive statement of the cantus firmus, which leads to an ecstatic Amen at the end of both movements. In a way, these Amen sections carry a small echo of the troped Amen of the Gloria–Credo pair that Du Fay wrote for the Malatesta but continued using through his papal years and took to Cambrai in 1435, since they appear in Ca 6 and Ca 11, see sigla, p xviii.20 Given the symbolism of the cantus firmus of this Mass explained by Anne Robertson, it is probably no coincidence that the troped Amen of the earlier pair are specifically connected with the Resurrection. In Du Fay’s original probably each movement, including the Gloria and the Credo, took one opening, so the tenor had to be written only once. Thus in the Gloria and Credo the notation of the tenor was as shown in Example 15.1. The cantus firmus has a C final, but the Mass has an F final; thus the last note of the cantus firmus is always the fifth of the final sonority of the section. Still, for a good deal of its length, the Mass sounds like music with a C final, and the move to a clear F final usually happens relatively late in each section. In the Kyrie, the Sanctus, and the Agnus, where the final note of the first section of the cantus firmus is g, Du Fay incorporates the two semibreve rests into the structure of the tenor and uses the two beats to move the music to a cadence on F, whereupon the tenor adds a short tag: a, b, c′, which is a standard tenor cadential tag that Du Fay had used, minus the passing tone, in Nuper rosarum flores and Fulgens iubar ecclesiae. In the 20

OO Besseler 4, no. 4; OO Planchart 5/4.

587

588

The Late Masses

Gloria and the Credo, where this place does not mark the end of a section, he adds a long rest after the two semibreve rests. Virtually alone among Du Fay’s late pieces, the Mass is written throughout in modus maior, where the long is worth three breves. This is indicated by the long rests, which cover three spaces. Thus the entire large-scale metrical structure of the piece is built of modules of three breves. In the sections where the tenor is in double augmentation but the other voices are in perfect time (Kyrie, mm. 1–38 and 78–103; Sanctus, mm. 1–32 and 75– 90; Agnus, mm. 1–44 and 114–39) this structure is masked because each breve of the tenor corresponds to two breves of the other voices in and Du Fay adjusts the phrasing accordingly. Still, in terms of the length of the sections of each movement, in these movements the number of breves between the beginning of the section and the final long is in all cases but one a number divisible by 2 and by 3. The lone exception occurs in the Sanctus, where because of his decision to divide the movement into five sections – Sanctus à 4, Pleni à 3, Osanna I à 4, Benedictus à 3, and Osanna II à 4 – he was forced to segment the cantus firmus into three sections, and the only note that he could use as a cadential note for the first section, given the tonal structure of the Mass, was the c′ in measure 10 of the ballade. This breve corresponds to breves 30–31 of the other voices. If he were to keep the module-tree structure rigidly, he had only two choices, both of them poor: either alter the breve of the cantus firmus to a semibreve and end the section at thirty breves, or write an extension of two breves to end at thirtythree breves, which would elongate the cadence in a manner no other internal cadence in the Mass is elongated and would probably call undue attention to itself. In the end he cut his losses, so to speak, and the section ends with the full breve of the tenor at thirty-one breves, the only such numerical hiccup in the entire work.21 As if to compensate for this, the following trio, also in perfect time, is almost ostentatiously phrased in groups of three breves, since the tenor is not sounding, and is the only section in perfect time outside the Gloria and the Credo where the modus comes to the surface. The Sanctus is also the odd movement out where the music never returns to tempus perfectum at the end, and thus is the one movement where the mensural shape is the same as that of the Missa Caput. Still, in the Kyrie, the Sanctus, and the Agnus, where the double augmentation of the tenor imposes a de facto imperfect modus on the other voices this ambiguity spills over into the sections where the tenor is silent 21

That the number is thirty-one, which had a connection with the Order of the Golden Fleece, has caused some confusion in commentaries on the Mass; cf. Brothers, “Vestiges,” 17 and n. 13.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent

and the modus can come to the surface. Some phrases in these sections cadence on the first breve of a modal unit, others in the third, so that a new texture begins at the start of a modal unit. This was the last piece Du Fay would write using major modus. Thereafter all his music in tempus perfectum is organized simply as a series of breves, and that in tempus imperfectum as a series of imperfect longs (minor modus) with an occasional extra breve either before a cadence or as a form of “punctuation mark.”22 The most important traits of Caput that Du Fay took over in Se la face ay pale are the use of a tenor cantus firmus to organize the large-scale structure of the Mass and the texture of the piece, with a second tenor below the cantus firmus that is not locked into a rhythmic pattern like those of his four-voice motets of the 1430s and 1440s, but freely composed. Moreover, the similarity extends to the range of the parts, where the cantus and the tenor 2 lie an octave apart, and the tenor 1 and contratenor share the same range.23 Further, the marvelous and quite noticeable contratenor–tenor 2 duets of Caput, particularly that in the Credo at Et unam sanctam,24 are echoed in Se la face with a new structural twist derived from similar (but short) duets in Fulgens iubar ecclesiae,25 which serve as musical punctuation marks and isomelic formal markers that bind together the odd and then the even taleae across the three repetitions of the color. In the Mass Du Fay uses these duets to relate the corresponding sections of the Gloria and the Credo. This is most noticeable in the first such duet of each movement (see Ex. 15.2). Here Du Fay makes the melodic similarity most obvious in the opening gesture; after that what we have is a melodic variation with similar but not identical contrapuntal progressions, but the texture itself creates the sense in the Credo that we have already heard something like that in the Gloria, and a similar impression of familiarity connects the corresponding duets in the second and third sections of each movement. The Mass uses the same short motive to open all the movements. From the Gloria to the Agnus, the motive is presented in imitation by the cantus and contratenor at the opening of the initial duet. In the Kyrie a variant of it is presented in the cantus in a four-part texture. Fallows, with his usual 22

23

24 25

On this, see Ave regina caelorum 3, OO Planchart, 1/6, mm. 224–33, two duets of four breves each articulated by a single breve between them. In fact the ranges of Caput and Se la face are virtually identical: cantus c′–e″ and b–e″, contratenor f–g′ and e–a′, tenor 1 g–g′ and g–a′, and tenor 2 c–e′ in both, and the b of the cantus and e of the contratenor are barely used in Se la face. OO Planchart 12/1, Credo, mm. 197–203, Et unam sanctam. OO Planchart 2/4, mm. 35–37, 131–33, 227–29 and 83–84, 179–81, 257–77.

589

590

The Late Masses Example 15.2 Isomelic passages in the Gloria and the Credo of the Missa Se la face ay pale

musical acuity, hears this in connection with traits in the Kyrie of the Missa L’homme armé as possible evidence that perhaps Du Fay wrote his Kyries last, using them as a way of giving an intimation of the procedures that were to come in the work.26 He is surely right on this, but in addition in Se la face ay pale Dufay may be playing another game. The motive from the Gloria on sounds like a variation of the motive that opens the Missa Caput, from which Du Fay by this time surely knew the last four movements. If he also knew Ockeghem’s Missa Caput he was aware that after the Kyrie, which begins with all four voices, Ockeghem writes introductory duets where he mimics the start of the duets of the English Mass down to the similar graphic form that the notation takes (see Ex. 15.3). In this case Du Fay’s motive can be heard as a sly reference both to his indebtedness to the English work and his knowledge of Ockeghem’s very

26

Fallows, Dufay, 206.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent Example 15.3 Head motto of the English and Ockeghem Missae Caput

Example 15.4 Opening of the cantus in the Missa se la face ay pale and the two Missae Caput

different Mass. An echo of this is present also in Obrecht’s much later Missa Caput, where after an entirely independent Kyrie the Gloria, albeit starting with an extended trio, cites in the contratenor the first eight breves of the cantus of the English model.27 Ockeghem, in his own Caput Mass, intimates his knowledge of other English Masses by including a simultaneous breve rest for both voices in the introductory duets of the Gloria and Credo, something that does not happen in the English Caput but is a frequent trait in other English Masses.28 In Se la face ay pale Du Fay does something similar with the cadences of the middle sections of the Gloria and the Credo, with a full triad and a tenth over the bass as the highest sounding voice,29 which recall the sudden bursts of divisi and the full-triad sonorities one finds in the anonymous Missa Fuit homo missus, which is one of the “traveling companions” of the Missa Caput in every source in which it survives and surely had arrived at Cambrai in the 1440s together with Caput.30 27 28 29 30

Bukofzer, Studies, 301. Cf. the Missa Veterem hominem, in Bent, ed., Four Anonymous Masses, no. 4. OO Planchart 3/4, Gloria and Credo, mm. 235–40 in each. Bent, ed., Four Anonymous Masses, no. 1.

591

592

The Late Masses

The writing in the Mass resembles in a number of significant ways that of the songs of the late 1440s and 1450s in that it is largely free-flowing counterpoint anchored by the cantus firmus and the progressions it generates with the cantus. Phrases are carefully delineated and small motives appear to return seemingly at random, but create a sense of a uniform melodic language. In sections without the cantus firmus, a certain amount of imitation begins to appear; this is most noticeable in the Christe eleison, where after two nonimitative duets (although the first begins with the two voices presenting the same gesture, which is a variant of what will become the head motto of the later movements, starting simultaneously at two different speeds),31 a series of imitations follow, although the beginning is masked because the first gesture of the section in the cantus is not part of the imitation. At the end of the passage, what appears as free counterpoint is the kind of hidden imitation that opens the Christe.32 To end the Christe Du Fay constructs a metric jeu d’esprit on the 2 against 3 structure that underlies all the crescit in duplo sections of the Mass by grouping the gestures in such a way that we hear the underlying metric structure not in groups of three imperfect breves but in groups of two perfect breves, though the mensuration stays the same.33 This brings up the matter of the mensurations of the Mass. The tenor stays in throughout, and the other voices alternate between and , with strict minim equivalence between the two, even though the textures in duple meter often look like English . In both of his editions34 Besseler tacitly changed the rate of reduction from 2:1 in to 4:1 in , and even though he indicated a proportion in the commercial one (though not in the Opera Omnia), this has affected almost all the performances and recordings of the Mass that I have heard, distorting the tempos and creating odd shifts that never sound convincing. There is no material from other voices of the ballade in the Mass, and the melodic substance of the tenor seldom finds an echo in the other voices except near the end of sections, where the fanfare ending of the tenor tends to generate arpeggiations in the other voices, which become very similar to the fanfare gestures in all voices at the end of the ballade, particularly in the Amen of the Gloria and the Credo. Although at one point at the beginning of the last section of the Credo, where the melody of the song is brought forcefully to the fore in a tenor–bass duo, the contratenor offers an

31 33

OO Planchart 3/4, Kyrie, mm. 39–59, particularly 39–41. 32 Ibid., mm. 59–69. Ibid., mm 69–72. 34 OO Besseler 3, no. 1; Vierstimmige Messe ed. Besseler.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent

anticipatory imitation of the third phrase of the song in such an overt manner as to put it literally in quotation marks.35 All in all, whatever the reception of the Mass in its own time, possibly hinted at in Sherr’s comments,36 the view of modern commentators is certainly correct. The Mass represents a crystallization of what we now view as Du Fay’s late style, and a beautifully balanced synthesis of this new manner with many of the traits of his earlier music. It is also one of the most transparent examples of the new cantus-firmus Mass that swept Continental Europe in the middle decades of the fifteenth century. The music gives an appearance of effortlessness that one does not hear in the later Masses except for Ecce ancilla – Beata es Maria. Also, unlike the earlier motets, the Mass does not call attention to its formal “numerical” structure, although it is built along a tightly constructed and elaborate plan of Pythagorean ratios, both harmonic and arithmetic, golden sections, and Fibonacci numbers. In the case of Se la face ay pale the numerical structure, unlike that of Nuper rosarum flores, does not seem to carry a symbolic significance per se. Rather, it appears that composers like Du Fay regarded such numerical structures the way architects regarded proportion and painters regarded perspective: that was the way of structuring a “well put together work.” The consistent modus maior points to an old tradition associating it with the Trinity. The prominence of augmentation points to the second person, which is the main subject of the symbolism of the cantus firmus, and the number of times the cantus firmus is used in the movements, connected with its augmentation pattern, could be made to form the shape of a cross: Kyrie Gloria and Credo (identical) Sanctus Agnus

3

2 2 2 2

1

In terms of the actual numerical and proportional structure of the Mass, two of the three published studies that deal with it are marred by a misunderstanding of Du Fay’s proportional practice, for example by including the final longs in the numerical counts.37 The most thorough and accurate analysis is that of Robert Nosow, who offers a detailed and exhaustive view of the work’s number-based structure.38

35 36 37 38

OO Planchart 3/4, Credo, mm. 247–55. Sherr, “Thoughts on Some of the Masses,” 322–23. Trowell, “Proportions,” and Sandresky, “The Continuing Concept.” Nosow, “Le proporzioni temporali.”

593

594

The Late Masses

Missa L’homme armé If the Missa se la face ay pale had a relatively small reception in the fifteenth century, as far as we can tell, Du Fay’s next Mass, the Missa L’homme armé, had both a wider reception and considerable influence on other composers. It was copied in Bruges sometime in 1461–1464, and if that manuscript, Lu 238, were not fragmentary it would be our best source for the work and very close to Du Fay’s original.39 The Kyrie and Gloria were copied into CS 14, the same manuscript that has the Missa Se la face ay pale, which might have originated in Ferrara, Venice, or even Rome in the 1480s,40 and the entire Mass was copied in Rome between 1495 and 1497 in CS 49.41 This last is a fairly good copy and its exemplar could be the manuscript with some of his Masses that Du Fay sent to Rome in 1467.42 Further, in the early sixteenth century it was also copied in Scotland, the only Mass of Du Fay that survives in a manuscript from the other side of the Channel.43 It stands together with Ockeghem’s Missa L’homme armé at the head of a long and influential tradition, and echoes of it or reactions to it can be heard in Masses by Regis, Firmin Caron, Antoine Busnoys, and Josquin des Prez.44 In contrast to the serene balance of the Missa Se la face ay pale, it is a showy and outgoing piece, full of incident. The circumstances surrounding its origins, probably in late 1460 or early 1461, were discussed in Chapter 6,45 and may explain some of its character. It was almost certainly part of a joint commission by Philip the Good to Du Fay and Ockeghem, connected with the meeting of the Order of the Golden Fleece in St-Omer in May 1461, part of Philip’s reaction to the call for a crusade by Pope Pius II. Du Fay was the logical agent to transmit the commission to Ockeghem, which is supported by the fact that Ockeghem, beyond the tune itself, clearly had access also to Du Fay’s Il sera par vous – 39 40

41 43

44

45

Strohm, ed., The Lucca Choirbook, 33–34. The origins of CS 14 and 51 remain contentious. The evidence until 2009 is marshaled most carefully in Sherr, ed., Masses for the Sistine Chapel, 10–18. A new hypothesis by Jeffrey Dean suggests that the manuscript was actually copied in Rome and for the papal chapel, but selected leaves were sent to be provided with stock illuminations by a number of Venetian artists. Some of it is presented in Dean, “Verona 755”; the rest I owe to personal communications. The evidence he presents is in fact compatible with almost all of what Sherr presents as the most plausible scenario for the genesis of the manuscript. The repertory itself, as a repertory, shows strong connections with the court of Naples and the work of Tinctoris. Sherr, Papal Music Manuscripts, 194. 42 See p. 284. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS 5.I.15, fols. 24v–40r; see Stevens, “The Manuscript Edinburgh.” Cf. Planchart, “The Origins”; Strohm, The Rise, 463–70; Gallagher, Johannes Regis, 59–85; Rodin, Josquin’s Rome, 233–68. See pp. 272–75.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent

L’homme armé, which at the time must have been a relatively private work.46 This appears to have triggered what Fallows has called Du Fay’s insecure mood.47 By this time Binchois was dead, and if Du Fay was aware of the work of Regis and Busnoys, neither of them was at that point someone who could challenge Du Fay’s preeminence, but Ockeghem was another matter. Here was a younger composer with skills and imagination fully on a par with his, and with a new voice as well. Further, they were both writing for a man who at that point had been Du Fay’s most important patron. The result was that Du Fay produced a long and complex work. It is the most extended setting of the Ordinary that we are to encounter until the extravagant works of Obrecht’s middle period such as his Missa Maria zart. The Missa L’homme armé, like the Missa Se la face ay pale, is built on a secular song, but in this case the source of the cantus firmus is not a voice of a polyphonic chanson but a monophonic chanson rustique, or more accurately an imitation of such a piece, probably composed sometime after 1433 at the court of Burgundy and tied through number symbolism to the Order of the Golden Fleece.48 In earlier studies I thought that, as in the Missa Se la face ay pale, the cantus firmus of L’homme armé was intended to be instrumental,49 but David Fallows, in his perceptive treatment of the work, notes the lengths to which Du Fay sometimes goes in order to hide the nature of the tune at its initial entrances, something that would be spoiled by the use of an instrument, with its different timbre from that of the voices.50 This is indeed quite true in the Mass up to the Sanctus. At the same time the change in the presentation of the cantus firmus in the last two movements seems to be part of a Christological plan in the piece. For Du Fay (and not necessarily for other composers who used the tune), the armed man who will guide the crusaders in their endeavors is Christ, and the treatment of the cantus firmus creates a metaphor of incomplete statements, long-note statements, and odd segmentations that make the cantus firmus difficult to discern, particularly in the Gloria and the Credo. By the Sanctus we can hear it more clearly, though not complete, and only from the Osanna II on, that is after the consecration of the host, is the entire cantus firmus presented complete in a single section. The Agnus Dei uses the cantus firmus to symbolize Christ’s presence on earth during his life (Agnus I), 46 48 49

See pp. 274–75, and also Planchart, “The Origins,” 326–27. 47 Fallows, Dufay, 213. Planchart, “The Origins,” 309–13. Planchart, “Guillaume Dufay’s Masses” (1976), 41–42. 50 Fallows, Du Fay, 200–201.

595

596

The Late Masses Example 15.5 Opening motives of the Missa L’homme armé

the spread of his work throughout the world (Agnus II) and his death and his resurrection (Agnus III) in that the cantus firmus is presented at first in retrograde, which makes it audibly unrecognizable, and prevents any clear cadences in that section, and then it bursts forth in “prime” and twice as fast, so it comes forcefully to the foreground.51 A number of traits already present in the Missa Se la face ay pale are expanded and elaborated in the new Mass. The large scale of the work is very similar: a Gloria–Credo pair surrounded by the three other movements, with the Kyrie being more independent and serving as a preamble to the entire structure. Like the earlier Mass, each movement of the Missa L’homme armé begins with a head motive, but here, rather than an identical opening in the last four movements, with the Kyrie being slightly different, the openings give in themselves a hint of the large-scale structure of the Mass (see Ex. 15.5). The beginnings of the Gloria and the Credo are identical, and so are those of the Sanctus and the Agnus, with subtle differences between each pair, the most noticeable of which is the change of tonal color in measure 3 of the Sanctus and Agnus, which refers to the considerable tonal shifting that is one of the main traits of the Mass. The beginning of the Kyrie is quite different on account of the contratenor, but in all five movements the tonal armature of cantus and tenor is identical for the first eight breves. 51

Planchart, “The Origins,” 331–32. C. Wright also notes this in The Maze, 175–76, but I think he “mishears” the symbolism of the retrograde in this case, since I believe that Du Fay did indeed intend the entire section with the tenor in the retrograde to be a disorienting aural experience that is set right, so to speak, by the rise of the armed man at the end of the work.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent

While the cantus firmus of Se la face ay pale remained unchanged except for the length of the introductory rests and that of the rest after the eighteenth breve of the tune, Du Fay drastically varies the note values and the segmentation of the tune in L’homme armé. In the case of the Gloria and the Credo, however, he retains the same segmentation and rhythm of the cantus firmus of the Gloria for most of the first two statements in the Credo (the Credo has a third statement not found in the Gloria), but he goes further: he ornaments slightly some of the phrases of the song, and after a number of them he inserts elaborate melodic continuations. In the first two statements of the cantus firmus of the Credo, both the rhythmic fashioning and segmentation of the tune, and the ornamentation and melodic additions at the ends of phrases are either identical or similar to the kinds melodic gestures that cover the same ambitus, either at the same pitch or at a transposition (see Ex. 15.6). This is an extension of the isomelic aspects of Se la face ay pale that hark back to his practice not only in Nuper rosarum flores, but the “looser” kind of isomelic traits in Ecclesiae militantis, and they are used here to bind the two central movements as a pair. Another recurrence connects the Kyrie and the Agnus: the last six measures of both movements are absolutely identical in all voices. Fallows argues that Du Fay might have planned the symmetry between Agnus and Kyrie from the beginning, but that the last measures of the Kyrie were added only after the Agnus was written.52 He is undoubtedly correct in that the last six measures of the Kyrie are an addition. In the Agnus they grow naturally out of what precedes them and the tenor is finishing the tune. In the Kyrie measures 104–7:1 are a perfect “final cadence” for the movement, which surely ended there at one point. Then in 107:2–3 Du Fay writes a short transition derived from the cantus motive in measure 109, which leads to the “quotation” from the Agnus. This is probably connected with the Christological plan of the Mass. The end of the Agnus, beginning with the moment the cantus firmus ceases to be sung in retrograde and begins to be sung forwards and in diminution, is a powerful symbol of the risen Christ and the vita venturi saeculi,53 when the faithful will see Christ “not through a glass darkly, but face to face.”54 Thus the Kyrie, particularly with the added six measures, becomes a harbinger of the entire Christological plan of the Mass.

52 53

54

Fallows, Dufay, 206. In the Credo the setting of et vitam venturi saeculi coincides roughly with the same last phrase of the cantus firmus. 1 Corinthians 13:12.

597

598

The Late Masses Example 15.6 Tenor of the Gloria and the Credo of the Missa L’homme armé

One of the most extraordinary traits of the Mass is its tonal structure. I believe it is the result of Du Fay’s knowledge that Ockeghem was also writing a Missa L’homme armé, coupled with his knowledge of Ockeghem’s Missa Caput. In Caput Ockeghem produced an extravagant work, where a

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent

G Mixolydian cantus firmus, placed at the bottom through a canon, has three voices in D Dorian composed above it. In the Missa L’homme armé Du Fay created a tonal jeu d’esprit by inverting Ockeghem’s tonal conceit, and having a Mixolydian cantus moving over three Dorian lower voices.55 Of course, since the tune itself has a G final, Du Fay uses a less radical combination: G Dorian and G Mixolydian, but this led him to add a flat signature to the tune when he uses it in the Mass, something that is absent from his earlier setting in Il sera par vous combatu – L’homme armé. Du Fay’s decision, however, sparked an entire tradition of settings of the tune with a one-flat signature.56 Such a tonal combination is already present in a number of his earlier works, for example Nuper rosarum flores and Fulgens iubar ecclesiae, but in these pieces the second tenor has no signature and this lessens the number of cross-relations in the texture. In the Mass Du Fay appears to go out of his way not only to stress them but to write the counterpoint in such a way as to create sudden shifts of sonority in the entire texture from G with a B mi to G with a B fa. The shifts are both relatively frequent and sometimes abrupt and go beyond what Du Fay wrote in other G final pieces such as the two motets mentioned above.57 It is very possible that Du Fay regarded them in this case as a metaphor for the armed conflict into which the crusading knights were going as well as a metaphor for the theology of salvation. As noted a number of times, Du Fay was very much concerned with the death and resurrection of Christ, not least on his tomb, and might have had in mind the opening of the third stanza of the prose Victimae paschali laudes: “Mors et vita duello conflixere mirando.” The shifts, however, clearly distressed Besseler, since they run entirely counter his concept of Du Fay as a forerunner of modern tonality,58 and in his edition he sought to erase many of the cross-relations and the shifts through a liberal use of musica ficta flats in the cantus, thus obscuring one of the most notable aspects of the work.59 The internal arrangement of sections has a good deal to do with how one perceives the work. The Kyrie is not much longer than that of the Missa Se la face ay pale, but one hears it as a far more spacious work because each of the three main sections is clearly articulated internally. Here Du Fay comes 55 56

57

58

Cf. Planchart, “The Origins,” 328–29. Ibid. Van Benthem’s contention that the tune originally had a flat signature, in the introduction to his edition of Ockeghem’s Missa L’homme armé, vii–x, flies in the face of all the surviving evidence, and leads him to add a flat signature to the Du Fay song, which has no signature in the only source that transmits the original version. Virtually all the recorded performances of the work take pains to smooth many of them away through uncalled for musica ficta, a great deal of it a product of Besseler’s “tonal” thinking. Besseler, Bourdon und Fauxbourdon, 87–102. 59 OO Besseler 3, no. 3.

599

600

The Late Masses

close to what he did in the Missa Sancti Iacobi: writing different music for each of the nine invocations. Kyrie 1 is articulated into three sections: an opening trio leading to the tenor entrance and ending as the tenor concludes the first phrase of the tune on G (mm. 1–8), a trio that cadences in D (mm. 8– 16), and a four-voice section based on the second and third segments of the tune, ending on G. The Christe starts with a long duo for cantus and contratenor that is clearly divided into three phrases, each with a firm cadence (mm. 25–55), then an “evolving” trio in two sections, cantus, tenor, bassus, and then contratenor, tenor, bassus (mm. 56–72), which melds into the final fourvoice section (mm. 73–83). The cadence pattern in the Christe is A, D, G for the initial duets, C for the first trio, and G at the end. Finally, Kyrie II also has three sections, a trio without the tenor, ending on a firm G cadence (mm. 84– 98), a four-voice passage on the last two segments of the tenor tune, also ending on a firm G cadence, and the section based on the repeat of the same two sections of the tune that is identical to the end of the Mass, so that all the cadences of the last Kyrie are on G and all are quite definite. What is also interesting is that the last Kyrie would be unbalanced without the “addition” from the Agnus Dei, which might mean again that it was composed after the Agnus and planned to end with this “premonition” of the end of the entire work. The Gloria and the Credo are written on the pattern of the Missa Caput, as two large sections, one in triple and one in duple meter, while both the Sanctus and the Agnus return in the last section to triple meter. The tune of L’homme armé can be heard as a tune with some clarity in the Kyrie, but it becomes inaudible as such in the Gloria and Credo, only to return to the level of the Kyrie in the Sanctus. Part of the reason is that in some cases Du Fay uses very long note values; also contributing is the irrational partitioning of the melody in the Gloria and Credo, as well as the addition of melodic tags to a number of phrases in all movements up to the Sanctus. Beginning with the second Osanna, that is, with the first section heard after the consecration of the host, the tune is presented without ornamentation and is quite audible not only here but in the first Agnus Dei. Throughout the Mass, bits and pieces of the tune, particularly the leap of a fifth at “Et l’homme armé” (or the repeat of “doibt on doubter” as written in the version in the Naples Masses),60 are occasionally imitated in one of the other voices, but in the 60

This phrase has two different texts: “et l’homme armé” in the Mellon Chansonnier, and a repeat of “doibt on doubter” in the the Naples Masses. I believe that the reading in Mellon is the original one.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent Example 15.7 Missa L’homme armé, Sanctus (mm. 89–95)

Sanctus the entire set of phrases on “on a fait par tout crier” is presented in canon between the tenor and the bassus.61 This, like the end of the Kyrie, is a prefiguring of what happens in Agnus Dei II, where the tune is presented at various pitch levels by all the voices, and its substance permeates the entire texture. This makes the absolute inaudibility of the tune at the start of Agnus Dei III, when it is presented in retrograde, and its sudden burst at the end, when it returns in forward motion and in diminution, all the more noticeable, making Agnus Dei III a clear metaphor of the death and resurrection of Christ.62 This indicates that the treatment of the cantus firmus throughout the Mass was carefully planned to convey a Christological message. In the sections when the tenor is silent there is considerably more imitation than there is in the comparable sections of the Missa Se la face ay pale, and sometimes the imitation is used in ways that deliberately calls attention to itself, as in the passage of the Sanctus shown in Example 15.7. In these sections the melodic writing, rather than recalling that of the Proper settings of the 1440s, resembles what one finds in Du Fay’s songs from the 1440s and 1450s. The beginning of Agnus II is not only songlike, it sounds like a partial quotation of the opening of Ockeghem’s D’ung aultre amer. Occasionally in these reduced-scoring passages there are sudden bursts of rhythmic activity, often with close-spaced imitation that can barely be heard as such, which resemble such bursts in Ockeghem’s music, where they are far more frequent. There are also echoes of the music Du Fay wrote in the 1440s in the passages where one voice goes into triplet coloration, producing a three-against-two cross-rhythm with the other voices and the kind of “fuzzy counterpoint” that one finds in virtually all of the Proper cycles. In the Credo at “Genitum non factum” there is a

61 62

OO Besseler 3, Sanctus, mm. 41–51; OO Planchart 3/5, Sanctus, mm. 35–51. Planchart, “The Origins,” 330–32.

601

602

The Late Masses Example 15.8 Missa L’homme armé, Credo (mm. 85–95)

fearsome passage in multiple mensurations that recalls a similar moment in the St. Anthony and St. Francis Credo (see Ex. 15.8). At the end of the Credo a passage in the Amen can be heard as a reworking of the strategy Du Fay had used in the Missa Sancti Iacobi, just as the Kyrie, as noted above, may also be such a reworking. The cantus firmus comes to a close in measure 42563 with a three-voice cadence, as the bassus falls silent on the cadence itself. There is a short and fairly active cadenza for the three voices (mm. 425–30), and then as the bassus re-enters the tenor has an extended melodic addition, which moves largely in breves and semibreves; thus the end of the Credo is quite stately and almost entirely homophonic. As in the earlier Mass we have here a triple Amen. There are also what appear to be reminiscences of Nuper rosarum flores. The cadence formula in the motet at “grandis templum machinae,”64 which does not turn up in any of his works in the intervening years, makes enough appearances in the Mass to call attention to itself.65 As the 63 65

Measure numbers are those in OO Planchart 3/4. 64 OO Planchart 2/7, mm. 32–33. The cadences are not direct citations, but more allusions: Kyrie, mm. 7–8, 57–59, 97–98; Gloria, mm. 15–16, 224–29 (transposed); Credo, mm. 38–39, 105–9, 351–55; Sanctus, mm. 27–29, 125–26. It does not occur in the Agnus, where Du Fay is intent on the transformations of the cantus firmus.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent

ending of Fulgens iubar ecclesiae shows, Du Fay clearly remembered Nuper rosarum flores and valued it,66 so the sudden reappearance of that cadence in a work where Du Fay was in a certain sense trying to assert his primacy as a composer would make sense even if it was almost a subconscious gesture. All in all, the Missa L’homme armé is not only an impressive work, but a work that appears to have been written specifically to be impressive, and here and there the effort shows. The Mass does not have the grace and serenity of the Missa Se la face ay pale, and its complexities are considerably more obvious than those of the St. Anthony Mass. No wonder, then, that it sparked a host of responses and emulations by later composers.

Missa Ecce ancilla – Beata es Maria Du Fay’s next surviving Mass, the Missa Ecce ancilla – Beata es Maria, appears to be another Mass connected to his relationship with Ockeghem. Symon Mellet was paid for copying the Mass into the cathedral choirbooks late in the fiscal year 1463–1464, in the same payment entry that records his copying of the Kyrie of the English Missa Caput.67 In March 1464 Ockeghem had spent at least two weeks at Cambrai, and had stayed at Du Fay’s house.68 There are a number of connections between Du Fay’s Missa Ecce ancilla – Beata es Maria and Ockeghem’s Missa Ecce ancilla, although both Masses are based on different cantus firmi. The head motive that opens every movement of Du Fay’s Mass is very similar to the one Ockeghem uses in his Mass, and the direction of the influence is made clear by two traits that are not common in Du Fay’s late music. The Missa Ecce ancilla – Beata es Maria is pitched roughly a fourth below any of his other Masses, which places it in the range of most of Ockeghem’s Masses,69 and as I have noted a number of times, Du Fay abandoned the use of in the 1440s in favor of English ; in all cases among the late works where we have manuscripts relatively close to Du Fay the found in Italian, German, and even Loire Valley sources for his music is invariably notated with English . But the Missa Ecce ancilla – Beata es Maria, which survives in a fascicle 66 67

68 69

See p. 384; see also Planchart, “Four Motets,” 28–30. LAN, 4G 4671, fol. 24r; Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 248; Houdoy, Histoire, 194. All payments for this year are undated, but this one comes near the end of the series, and thus late in the fiscal year. See p. 281. Du Fay’s usual cleffing for music in four voices is c1, c3, c3, c4 (or F3); the cleffing in this Mass is c2, c4, c4, F4.

603

604

The Late Masses

Figure 15.1 Lille, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 599 (opening 30 of second foliation). Fol. 30v shows the start of second Vespers of the Visitation of the Virgin. Photo author.

added to the Burgundian chapel choirbook Br 5777, and which could even be an autograph,70 all the duple meter sections are consistently notated in , which is the mensuration used by Ockeghem in his Mass. Du Fay constructs the cantus firmus of the Mass from two office antiphons, Ecce ancilla Domini and Beata es Maria. In manuscripts from Cambrai and other northern French establishments the antiphons appear, in the order Du Fay used them, for second Vespers of the Annunciation,71 a feast when the Gloria was not sung at Mass except in the very rare years when the feast fell after Easter,72 thus the choice of cantus firmi was 70

71

72

This has been presented as informed speculation by Bloxam, in “Du Fay as Musical Theologian.” I am most grateful to Professor Bloxam for a copy of this paper. The problem in this case is that the two specimens of Du Fay’s handwriting that we have, a quittance written in Savoy in 1455 (CAS, Inv. 24, SA 3605, piece 24) and a letter written in Geneva, most likely in 1456 (FAS, Mediceo Avanti il principato, filza 22, no. 118), although written with very different pens, are recognizable as the same handwriting, but they are quite different from the text script in the copy of the Mass in Br 5557. Thus in CBM 27, fol. 114r–v; 38, fol. 267v; 69, fols. 45r and 48r; Antiphonale. . . Cameracensis, fol. 126v; LBM 599, fol. 50v. In the Cambrai manuscripts this is not as obvious because the antiphon series is copied only once for Lauds. Between 1400 and 1500 the Annunciation falls beyond Lent in 1410, 1421, 1448, 1459 (coincides with Easter), and 1478, and in all of these it falls in the week in albis.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent

symbolic rather than strictly liturgical. Strohm has suggested that this Mass, together with the Ecce ancilla Masses of Ockeghem and Regis, which form a clearly connected group, were intended for the missus Mass or “Golden Mass” said for the Virgin on Ember Wednesday in Advent.73 This is not impossible, since such a ceremony was regarded as a feast, and as such it fell outside of the prohibition against singing the Gloria in excelsis between the first Sunday in Advent and Christmas Eve, but it is unlikely since, for all its splendor and elaboration, it fell on the apex of the penitential cycle in Advent. Even though this Mass, unlike the Masses on Se la face ay pale and L’homme armé, was copied into the Cambrai choirbooks, it is unlikely that it was composed for Cambrai, because the version of Ecce ancilla that Du Fay uses begins with a leap of a fourth, g–c′ (as does the cantus firmus of the Regis Mass), while in virtually every surviving chant book, including those of the cathedral at Cambrai and the modern Vatican editions, it begins with a simple c′. A plainsong source with the opening fourth found in the Du Fay and Regis cantus firmi was not discovered until 1993, when Reinhard Strohm found it in a double cantatorium for the Mass and the Office from St-Pierre de Lille (see Fig. 15.1 sic).74 Thus it is more likely that this Mass, like the Missa L’homme armé, was written for a ceremony connected with the court of Burgundy and in all likelihood one of the ceremonies of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Lille was the duke’s administrative capital and St-Pierre was one of the churches where a good number of important Burgundian ceremonies took place. Whatever the reason for the traits of Ockeghem’s Mass that Du Fay adopted in this Mass, the work reveals none of the competitive nervousness one can sense in the Missa L’homme armé. If there is a sharp contrast between the Missa Se la face ay pale and the Missa L’homme armé, the contrast is even greater between this last piece and the Missa Ecce ancilla Domini – Beata es Maria, which is far and away the shortest of Du Fay’s festal Masses, and the most transparent in terms of texture. A great deal of this transparency results from the fact that much of the work consists of duos between shifting pairs of voices. As in the Missa Se la face ay pale, in this Mass the cantus firmi have a final a fifth above that of the Mass, and much of the work sounds as if the tonal center is G rather than C. Still, the 73 74

Strohm, The Rise, 473; cf. id., Music in Late Medieval Bruges, 52–53. Strohm, The Rise, 473. The manuscript is LBM 599 (26). Strohm incorrectly calls it an incipitarium, but it is a true cantatorium, with incipits of all the antiphonal chants and the respond, and all the solo verses given in full. It has also a full set of invitatories and of the invitatory psalms. For a detailed description see Planchart, “Un manuscrit liturgique,” 64. The incipit of the antiphon appears on fols. 30v (Visitation), 49v, and 50v (Annunciation).

605

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The Late Masses

kind of control of the tonal goals one finds in the Missa L’homme armé is present in the Missa Ecce ancilla Domini – Beata es Maria. The pattern in the Kyrie, for example, is Kyrie I: G, D, G, G, C, C; Christe: E, C, G, C, G; Kyrie II: G, C, C, (G), C. The G in parenthesis indicates a cadence that, unlike any of the others, is essentially “run over” by the melodic and contrapuntal motion (m. 151),75 so that the final Kyrie emphasizes the final of the piece as a whole. One could claim that the first cadence on E in the Christe is part of a “linear triad” C–E–G, but that still would not explain what a change in sonority this represents. But that seems to be Du Fay’s goal here: to move the first cadence of the Christe to a sonority far away from the G and C sonorities with a major third over the final. To ears used to hearing primarily the colors of plainsong, the cadence on E in the Christe would be quite a change. Another of Du Fay’s procedures in this Mass is to cadence on one note quite firmly (that is without any continuation tags) and then start the next phrase on a different sonority. Two cases might be noted here. In the Christe, at measures 67–76, following the cadence on E, a duet of bassus and contratenor moves the music firmly back to C (m. 76), but then, almost as a parenthesis, the next phrase in the same voices, with the help of strategically placed B fas and E fas, changes the sonority to a G with a minor third. This is followed immediately by a duet of cantus and contratenor, again firmly in C (mm. 87–91), as if the previous phrase had never happened – that is, “changing the topic” of the sonority of the piece. The shifts are done with the simplest of means but with consummate skill to create a sense of tonal logic and cohesion: at measure 67 the e′ of the unison cadence lingers alone in the cantus for a breve, followed by the entrance of bassus and contratenor on c–g, which is also allowed to linger for a breve before moving anywhere. At the end of that phrase the c of the bassus lingers again for a breve, and the contratenor then adds the e♭ above it to start the shift to the G with a minor third sound. At the end of that phrase the G of octave G–g in the bassus (m. 85) lingers for a breve before the cantus and contratenor begin the next phrase on the octave g–g′, moving the music back to C. Du Fay makes sure that we hear each phrase as a syntactical unit. In the last Kyrie, a long internal duet of the cantus and contratenor that ends on a unison c′ at measure 138 is followed in measure 139 by a fourvoice sonority on F, with the c′ of that sonority being the c′ that ended the previous phrase, and the cantus rising eventually to a′. Throughout the 75

All measure numbers from OO Planchart 3/6.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent

Mass all the changes of tonal color are planned with the same care. Here Du Fay is avoiding the sudden tonal lurches one finds in the Missa L’homme armé, which are clearly part of that work’s essential language, but are still disorienting six hundred years later. In the Missa Ecce ancilla – Beata es Maria the tonal shifts are not so much softened as presented with extraordinary subtlety, bordering on slyness. In this Mass Du Fay retained the antiphon texts in the cantus firmus, and although he uses a different rhythmic configuration for each statement, there is very little paraphrase, and the melodic substance of the antiphons does not filter through to the other voices even to the small extent that the melodic substance of the cantus firmi of the Se la face ay pale and the L’homme armé Masses do. Du Fay organizes the structure of the Mass so that each of the two antiphons serves as a cantus firmus for a complete section. In the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus there are only two sections of full polyphony, and only in the Credo there is a third, with a return of the first antiphon as its cantus firmus. This points to a curious anomaly in the Agnus: the copy in CS 14 directs the singers to sing the final Agnus to the music of the first. In Br 5557 the first Agnus is copied with both the miserere nobis and the dona nobis pacem underlaid to the cantus and contratenor (the bassus has only an incipit), but after the second Agnus we meet with a third Agnus set to the music of the second Osanna. The version in Br 5777 thus implies two choices for the last Agnus, either the music of the first Agnus (as indicated in CS 14) or the music of the second Osanna. In fact, only the second of these choices is right; if one sang the third Agnus to the music of the first, the Agnus would be the only movement of the Mass where the antiphon Beata es Maria is not used as cantus firmus. Fallows is probably correct that the choice of singing the third Agnus with the music of the first, being more common, may have entered the transmission of the Mass through scribal initiative.76 Wolfgang Nitschke, in his detailed study of the cantus-firmus Masses of Du Fay, also notes the extent to which the choice of the music of the second

76

Fallows, Dufay, 209 and n. 18. A recently discovered source for the Mass confirms that Agnus III should have the music of the Osanna. Eduardo Henrik Aubert and Dominique Gatté, who are preparing a catalogue of newly found musical sources in French Archives kindly sent me photos of the new manuscript, France, Archives Nationales de France, AB XIX 1722. The manuscript is a bifolium with the following music: 1r, Credo, contra and tenor 2, from Et in Spiritum to end; 1v, Sanctus, cantus and tenor 1 to the end of Osanna 1. [There is clearly an intervening bifolio missing], 2r. Agnus 1–2, contra and tenor 2, and 2v, Agnus 3, cantus and tenor. With the music of Osanna 2 for the Agnus and no alternative music. The fragment was before in Archives Départementales de l’Allier.

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608

The Late Masses Example 15.9 Missa Ecce ancilla – Beata es Maria, Credo, corresponding passages

Osanna for the final Agnus creates a formal balance between the Gloria– Credo pair and a Sanctus–Agnus pair in the work.77 This choice is also tied to the isomelic structures that Du Fay builds into the piece; for example, as Fallows notes, the entrance of the second cantus firmus is treated very similarly in all four versions (the Sanctus and Agnus being identical in this case).78 Du Fay also uses isomelic procedures to bind sections of a movement together. In the Credo, which is the only movement where we find two settings of the same cantus firmus, he avoids isomelic procedures when the cantus firmus enters, and instead writes a variation of a striking phrase of the introductory duet in both sections (see Ex. 15.9). Note that the contratenor is virtually identical in both passages, and the rhythmic language is the same, but while at “Et in unum Dominum” the imitation is at the fifth above, at “qui ex Patre” it is at the octave below. In the Sanctus, as Nitschke notes, the end of the first section and the start of the duet at “pleni sunt” use the same melodic progression, c′–e′–f′–g′ (mm. 32–34 and 35–36).79 But Du Fay goes further: the same melodic figure opens the duet of the Benedictus, and the cantus of both duets in the first phrase of each has the same melodic strategy: ascent from c′ to g′ (a′ in the Benedictus) and a descent to g.80 A similar figure, descending only to c′, opens the largely canonic duo of Agnus II as well. Each movement starts with the same motto. In the cantus and contratenor the first three measures (breves) are identical in all movements. In the Kyrie the fourth measure is a simple cadence on G that leads to the entrance of the tenor in measure 5; in the Gloria and Credo measures 4–6 are an identical extension leading to a cadence on G on the second beat of 77 80

Nitschke, Studien, 1:193–95. 78 Fallows, Dufay, 208, ex. 78. OO Planchart 3/6, Sanctus, mm. 35–38 and 82–90.

79

Nitschke, Studien, 1:190.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent

measure 6 before the duet continues. In the Sanctus and Agnus the extensions are different in contour and length, but both lead to a cadence on C on the first beat of measure 8 (Sanctus) or 7 (Agnus). Thus, as in the Missa L’homme armé, the openings hint at the large-scale structure of the Mass, a Kyrie followed by two pairs of movements, Gloria–Credo and then Sanctus–Agnus, but the second pair, which is so closely tied up at the end of each movement, is less closely tied at the beginning, and as if to underscore this, Du Fay added the tenor 2 to the entire introduction of the Sanctus, which becomes a trio. To make the contrast even more stark, the tenor 2 produces a diminished fifth with the cantus on the second beat of measure 2 and Du Fay not only does not hide it but lingers on it, and the part-writing is such that this is clearly not a sonority that was intended to be altered by musica ficta. One finds some diminished fifths in the Missa Se la face ay pale, which occasionally also has direct melodic tritones,81 but nothing quite as blunt as what happens here. Unlike what happens in the Masses on Se la face ay pale and L’homme armé, where certain melodic figures of the cantus firmus are often shared by the other voices, and in the Agnus II of L’homme armé where the melodic substance of the cantus firmus permeates the entire texture, in the Missa Ecce ancilla Domini – Beata es Maria the cantus firmus remains melodically separate and carries the text of the antiphons rather than the Mass text. But among the other voices there is a marked increase in the use of imitation, and imitation in this Mass is used in a particularly flexible manner, ranging from echoing a short motive to long stretches of canon, mostly at the unison or the octave, but occasionally also at the fifth. The voices, more often in the duos and trios, appear to move back and forth from free counterpoint to motivic imitation and to strict canon with remarkable fluidity, and this fluidity also applies to the sudden bursts of rhythmic activity, which are here less drastic than those of the Missa L’homme armé. The tension between voices using different key signatures, which is stressed in the earlier Mass, is absent here, and the passages where suddenly a number of discursive accidentals appear and then disappear seem to be more like the application of tonal color as part of a musical rhetoric, almost as musical figures of speech, though they do not seem tied to the text but function entirely in musical terms. The passage in the Christe, described above, is a perfect example of such a procedure. If we assume that Du Fay began this Mass after Ockeghem’s visit to Cambrai in March 1464, the payment for copying it, which although 81

Sherr, “Thoughts on Some of the Masses,” 323–24.

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The Late Masses

undated must be May or early June of that year, indicates that Du Fay wrote it relatively quickly. This may account for the extreme economy of means that Fallows notes in his perceptive treatment of the work,82 including the use of Osanna II for Agnus III. Nevertheless, there is a quiet perfection to the work that contrasts with the outward splendor of the Masses on L’homme armé and Ave regina caelorum. In this respect, the Missa Ecce ancilla Domini – Beata es Maria is closer to the Missa Se la face ay pale, although the “tone of voice” of the Missa Ecce ancilla Domini – Beata es Maria is much quieter. The nearly ecstatic passages one finds in the other Masses, the Amen of the Credo in Se la face ay pale, the final Agnus Dei in L’homme armé, or the dancelike episode in the last Agnus Dei of Ave regina caelorum, are not to be found in this Mass. The one extraordinary passage, extraordinary in the sense that it breaks with the surface musical rhetoric of the rest of the Mass, is the final Kyrie eleison invocation, a solemn passage of breves coronatae, which recalls the Osanna II of the Sanctus papale or the end of the Credo of the Missa Sancti Iacobi. In the interaction between the text of the two antiphons that serve as cantus firmus and the texts of the Mass Ordinary that are being sung over them M. Jennifer Bloxam has detected something like a deliberate theological plan built upon the traditional modes of biblical exegesis, whereby Du Fay’s musical setting “captures the potent eucharistic theology of the incarnation of Christ” and the role of Mary in the history of salvation.83 She has presented a number of papers on similar topics concerning the Masses of Regis and Obrecht, and in every case her observations have been particularly acute and illuminating. A full discussion of this, however, must wait the publication of her promised monograph on ritual narratives.

Missa Ave regina caelorum Du Fay’s last surviving Mass, and surely the last Mass he composed, the Missa Ave regina caelorum, had a very different genesis from that of the Missa Ecce ancilla. The little documentation we have hints at a much slower gestation, with some interruptions and a change in the process, whereby a Mass intended for Du Fay’s own foundation was also used for the dedication of the cathedral of Cambrai before eventually being used in Du Fay’s foundation in the last two years of the composer’s life.84 This, as Rob Wegman shows, has left traces in the one copy of the Mass that we have 82 84

Fallows, Dufay, 209. 83 Bloxam, “Du Fay as Musical Theologian,” 124–25. See pp. 288–91, and Planchart, “Notes on Guillaume Du Fay’s Last Works,” 64–69.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent Example 15.10 Opening motto of the Missa Ave regina caelorum

that is closest to Du Fay, an appended fascicle in Br 5777.85 Unlike the Missa L’homme armé, the work does not appear to have had an “afterlife” in the sense of an obvious influence upon later music, although one can hear echoes of it in the music of Josquin,86 but from the evidence we have of it today, it was one of the most popular sacred works of his later years: copies of it survive from the Burgundian chapel, the basilica of St. Peter in Rome, the chapel of the Este in Ferrara, and an unidentified church in Lwów.87 Contrapuntally it is an extraordinarily dense work. It is a cantus-firmus setting along the lines of the Missa Ecce ancilla, where the cantus firmus is the Marian antiphon sung at the end of Compline from the Purification until Holy Week, which Du Fay had used as the cantus firmus of his motet of 1464. In addition, the Mass cites short passages from that motet here and there, seemingly at random, until Agnus II, where the entire section of the motet set to the trope “miserere supplicanti Du Fay” is used as the concluding passage. But there are also a large number of references to the motet, rather than citations, where the rhythmic and contrapuntal texture of the Mass reflects a similar one in the motet. This, of course, makes sense if the texture referenced is in some way noticeable as a texture, and the clearest references are to the extraordinary passage in the motet at the words “et iuva” (mm. 192–223) and the short burst of triple meter near the end (mm. 224–34). Structurally the Mass retains traces of Du Fay’s way of constructing a Mass cycle: Kyrie, plus two pairs of movements. But in this case the Kyrie, if one accepts Wegman’s hypothesis about its original structure,88 is closer to the Gloria in size and shape, while the Sanctus and Agnus are less tied 85 86 87

Wegman, “Miserere supplicanti,” 32; Wegman’s argument is detailed later in this chapter. Fallows, Dufay, 209; Planchart, “Masses on Plainsong Cantus Firmi,” 103. Br 5557; SP B80; ModD; Poz. 88 Wegman, “Miserere supplicanti,” 42–44.

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together than in earlier Masses. In this Mass the opening motto yields no clue to the larger organization. It is identical in all five movements89 and it involves all four voices (see Ex. 15.10). The motto presents a microcosm of the contrapuntal world of the Mass. A perfectly balanced phrase exposes clearly the C tonal type of the work, anchored by the C sonority at measure 4 and another with virtually the same voicing at the end of the phrase.90 The sonority in measure 4 is set off by the beautiful cross-relation between cantus and bassus, and that at the end of the phrase by the contrapuntal cadence between tenor and bassus. This is another aspect of this Mass that shows Du Fay’s extreme care: all the contrapuntal cadences in the section (Kyrie I) are carefully calculated down to the detail of which voices are involved, and only the one at the very end of the section involves the cantus and the tenor, so it becomes clear that Du Fay is hearing these cadences as different degrees of syntactical articulations of the musical discourse. The elegant phrase of the contratenor in measures 4–8 is also a portent of the expanded role the contratenor plays in the work, not as part of the basic contrapuntal grammar, but in terms of the musical and motivic rhetoric of the work. This is another instance of a trait that begins to appear in Du Fay’s music in the 1430s and becomes increasingly important throughout his life: the contratenor (and in the four-voice music the high contratenor) may remain grammatically an inessential part in terms of the contrapuntal armature of the music, but compositionally it is a fundamental part of the texture and its importance increases throughout Du Fay’s entire canon. In Br 5557 the tenor has a B♭ signature throughout most of each movement, to the point that it is better to regard the entire part as having a running signature with the necessary B mi added ad hoc. The bassus begins each movement with the unusual E♭ signature seen in Ex. 7.10, which appears only in the first staff,91 and probably did not affect anything beyond measure 3, as any well-trained singer who could hear what the contratenor was doing would have sung an E mi at measure 5. The anticipatory imitation of the tenor by the bassus (which is the reason for the E♭) also indicates that in this Mass, unlike in the Missa Ecce ancilla, the 89

90

91

The only difference is the absence of a double note in the contratenor in m. 7 of the Kyrie. Although all sources transmit that passage without the double note, I believe it is a scribal oversight in an early prototype, and have added it in the edition of the Mass in the Opera Omnia. This, more than anything else, justifies the use of the double notes in the contratenor and their inclusion in the Kyrie. Given the unusual character of this signature, in the example as in OO Planchart 3/7, I have added flats to the Es in mm. 2–3 of the bassus (in all movements) to alert the singers that these are “obligatory” flats.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent

melodic substance of the cantus firmus will appear in the other voices, largely on account of imitative procedures. As in the case of the motet, the use of a B fa in the tenor distressed Besseler, and in his edition of the Mass, though using Brussels 557 as his main source, he eliminated the key signatures of both tenor and bassus, following the far more distant sources SP B80 and ModD; he also used a B mi ficta in the tenor at measure 6 and ignored entirely the E fa in the bassus.92 This goes beyond mere absurdity into the realm of the unmusical. Fallows corrected most of this in his discussion of the Mass, but did not realize that the E fa in the bass essentially disappears in the rising line at measure 5, and thus his version of the opening motto is distorted at the end and creates a jarring tonal discontinuity with what follows.93 By contrast, the motto, as Du Fay wrote it, and assuming that the bassus singers knew their métier, blends seamlessly with the music that follows it in each movement. The cross-relation in measures 3–4 can sound quite jarring when one plays the work on a modern keyboard (as many conductors do when beginning to learn the work), and this may be one reason why most recordings (including my own in 1972 and 1981) shied away from it. In a vocal performance it becomes surprisingly mild, indeed far milder than those one finds in the Missa L’homme armé or in Nuper rosarum flores. This is all the more interesting because the Mass has a number of striking tonal shifts, but those are managed more like the tonal shifts in the Missa Ecce ancilla, and are not meant to be a metaphor of conflict like those of the Missa L’homme armé. The complicated genesis of the Mass has left a number of traces in the copies that survive, particularly in the Kyrie and the Agnus. From what we can tell, the Kyrie was most likely an anomalous setting to begin with. As Wegman demonstrates, it consisted originally of seven sections, which for convenience we can refer to as Kyrie 1–2, Christe 4–5, and Kyrie 7–9.94 In Br 5557 a number of repeat signs and the indications 1um and 3um in all voices for Kyrie 1 and Christe 4, and 2um in all voices for Kyrie 2 and Christe 5, direct the singers to repeat Kyrie 1 after Kyrie 2, and Christe 4 after Christe 5. In SP B80 the repeat marks and numbers are absent and the same obtains in ModD, which in addition omits all the music for Kyrie 8, thus making all the three divisions of the Kyrie consist of two sections each. Besseler edited the Mass for the Opera Omnia from Br 5557, and virtually 92

93

OO Besseler 3, no. 4, passim. On p. xv he calls the bassus signature “evidently wrong,” despite the fact that it always occurs in the motto. Fallows, Dufay, 210, ex. 79. 94 Wegman, “Miserere supplicanti,” 42–44.

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all performances and recordings of the Mass follow that.95 Still, singing the full version of the Kyrie, as Fallows notes, destroys the structural shape of the movement in terms of the cantus firmus, a shape that is retained in all the other movements.96 It also makes the Kyrie extraordinarily long, lasting longer than the Credo. In 1995 Wegman, in a careful study of the genesis and transmission of the Mass, suggested that the indications in Br 5777, like the editing in ModD, were all reactions attempting to normalize an anomalous setting.97 After the publication of his study I was asked to conduct the Mass for a concert in Cambridge, Mass., and I decided to perform the Kyrie ut iacet, that is, without any of the repeats and as a sevensection Kyrie. I had a few years before come across a few other anomalous Kyries, most notably the Kyrie of Orlando di Lasso’s Missa In te domine speravi,98 so that the Kyrie of Du Fay’s Missa Ave regina caelorum was no longer a unique exception. I was struck by how much more integrated the Kyrie became with the rest of the Mass, and how logical the progression of the work sounded.99 Wegman’s suggestion that an explanation for the anomaly might be found in the “liturgy of occasion” at Cambrai is probably misguided.100 One of the consequences of the rise of the private Mass and eventually the low Mass in the Middle Ages was that what the choir did was purely ornamental, since the clerics at the altar read the complete texts in their proper order.101 Thus the well-known omissions of phrases in a polyphonic Credo, or an oddly shaped Kyrie, were probably reflections of musical decisions. Still, Wegman might be correct in that the version in Br 5557 might have had a liturgical reason, because the manuscript has another change, in this case in Agnus Dei II, the section of the Mass that ends with the citation of the entire “miserere supplicanti Du Fay” passage in the Ave regina caelorum of 1464. As he notes, in Br 5557 Agnus Dei II originally ended at measure 119, and the remaining measures, which correspond to the passage in the motet where Du Fay’s 95

96 98

99 100 101

The only exception is a recording of the Kyrie with the Yale Collegium conducted by Paul Hindemith, which sings the version of ModD: Collegium Musicum School of Music, Yale University, cond. Paul Hindemith (New Haven: Overtone LP 5, 1955), band 2. 97 Fallows, Dufay, 213. Wegman, “Miserere supplicanti,” 42–44. Lasso, Missa In te domine speravi, in Sämtliche Werke, neue Reihe 5, ed. Hermelink, no. 19, has an extra Christe eleison movement. This was the first Mass of Lasso ever published (1566), and all sources except for the very late edition of 1591 have the extra movement. The earlier prints were surely proofread by Lasso; cf. loc. cit., x–xi and xviii. In OO Planchart 3/7 I therefore have edited the Kyrie as seven continuous sections. Wegman, “Miserere supplicanti,” 48. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, 1:207–33.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent

name is sung, were added after an erasure that can be seen only under ultraviolet light. Wegman makes the interesting case that perhaps a certain sense of public decorum would render the passage with the composer’s name in the motet less apt for a performance of the Mass in a circumstance other than at the ceremony he founded loco obitus in the chapel of St. Stephen, a “private” as opposed to a “public” performance. The version in Br 5557 ante correctionem was the public version of the Mass, and the correction, Wegman posits, was entered in the manuscript only after the duke of Burgundy received the legacy Du Fay left him: a number of music books, one of which contained the Missa Ave regina caelorum, surely in the private version.102 Now, the documentary evidence concerning Du Fay’s foundation indicates that the Mass had not been finished in 1470 or 1471, the first two years when his endowed Mass was celebrated, and it is more than likely it was used for the dedication of the cathedral of Cambrai in July 1472.103 This is the ultimate public context for such a work, and the same sense of decorum that might have led to the elimination of measures 120–28 of Agnus Dei II probably also led to the decision, found only in Br 5557, to regularize the Kyrie by adding the rubrics 1um, 2um, and 3um and the repeat signs in Br 5557, which are clearly part of the original copy in that manuscript and are absent in the two other sources, which, at least in the case of ModD (since the Agnus is missing in SP B80) transmit the private version of Agnus II.104 In fact, apart from the rubrics themselves, the repeat signs in Br 5557 are neither clear nor consistent, since in some instances they indicate, albeit clumsily, the repetitions already made clear by the rubrics, and in others they point to the alternative versions of Christe 5 and Kyrie 8. The alternative versions of Kyrie 2, Christe 5, and Kyrie 8 are not presented in the same manner in any of the sources.105 That of Kyrie 2 is merely implied in Br 5557 by the rubric “Duo” in the cantus and what remains of the tenor, even though the manuscript has music for all four voices in this section, and is invisible as such in the other two manuscripts, which have no “Duo” rubrics. In Br 5557 the contratenor and bassus are labeled, for this section only, as “Concordans 1um” and “Concordans 2um.” 102 103 104

105

Wegman, “Miserere supplicanti,” 49–50. See p. 291; also Planchart, “Notes on Guillaume Du Fay’s Last Works,” 68–69. That the editor of ModD then made his own decision to make the three main sections of the Kyrie correspond by eliminating Kyrie 8 is not relevant to this argument. In this discussion I use the numbers for the invocation following the “normal” nine invocations of the plainsong Kyrie even though Du Fay “leaves out” Kyrie 3 and Christe 6.

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The Late Masses Example 15.11 Missa Ave regina caelorum, Kyrie 2 as a duo

The cantus and tenor, as one would expect, make a self-contained contrapuntal duo,106 but this would be the case virtually all the time between those two parts. Nothing tells the singers, beyond the rubric “Duo” and the changes in the part names, that the section might be performed in reduced scoring, thus making it the equivalent of Christe 5 and Kyrie 8 when performed as a duo. If one sings Kyrie 2 as a duo it has what sounds like a curious rhythmic hole in measures 21–22 (see Ex. 15.11). But it is a rhythmic hole only in the very dense context of this Mass; such relatively relaxed dovetailing of phrases is more common in the Missa Ecce ancilla. The alternative version of Christe 5 is the only one present in all sources and indicated as such: one version is a fuga at the unison after a long in the cantus that becomes a fuga at the octave after a breve when the mensuration changes from to 3, as indicated by the canon “longa fugat bino, terno brevis in diapason,” which is accompanied by a “concordans cum fuga” in the section of the opening where the bassus is normally copied. This is followed by a “concordans sine fuga” that provides a different accompaniment to the cantus alone, and duplicates the canonic part for the section in triple meter. Thus Christe 5 must have been composed as a fuga and the duet version as an alternative. Kyrie 8 carries the rubric “Duo” in the cantus and contratenor in Br 5557, and the bassus for that section is labeled “concordans si placet,” so Kyrie 8 can be sung as a two-voice or a three-voice section. The situation in SP B80 and ModD is instructive in this respect. In both sources the alternative version of Kyrie 2 is invisible, there is no duo rubric,

106

Bonnie Blackburn pointed out to me that the duo has a very irregular cadence, parallel thirds with an escape fourth. The four-part version, however, has an equally irregular cadence, with a semibreve B in the bassus and b–g (dotted minimim, semiminim), in the contra leading to the c–g fifth in the final measure.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent

and the parts do not change names. Both manuscripts present the alternatives for Christe 5, but in the case of Kyrie 8 SP B80 gives all three voices without the rubric “concordans si placet” and not even a barline separating any of the three sections in any of the parts, which makes the alternative version invisible. Kyrie 8 was eliminated in the copy in ModD. While all of this appears at first sight as an incoherent jumble of variants, it is possible to see a pattern to them. The pattern begins to be clear if we assume with Wegman that there were two versions of the Mass, one private and one public. Where Wegman goes slightly astray is in his assumption that the public version would have been a Saturday Lady Mass, or a celebration for any of the feasts of the BVM, or a votive Mass composed for another canon.107 It is clear to me that both the private and public versions go back to Du Fay, and that the revisions of the Kyrie, as well as the change in the Agnus Dei, are connected to the public version. From what the documentary history of Du Fay’s obit indicates, the public version was for the dedication of the cathedral. For such an event Du Fay, for whatever reasons of his own, perhaps a sense of modesty or decorum, deleted the section of the Agnus with a reference to his own name. In addition, he also reworked the Kyrie from its anomalous seven-section form to a ninesection form where Kyrie 2, Christe 5, and Kyrie 8 consist of duets, thus duplicating mutatis mutandis the shape of the Kyrie of his own Missa Sancti Iacobi.108 For a ceremony as profoundly public as the dedication, with all the clergy from the entire region in attendance, it would have been sensible not to have an anomalous Kyrie that surely would have given rise to questions that would detract from the focus of the ceremony. The copy in Br 5557 transmits what this public version looked like, where the alternatives to Kyrie 2, Christe 5, and Kyrie 8 could be entered as rubrics, voice changes, and in the case of Christe 5 the addition of the part labeled 107

108

I do not entirely accept Wegman’s argument that the polytextuality of the Mass automatically precludes its being composed for the dedication (“Miserere supplicanti,” 45), even though I agree it was originally intended for Du Fay’s loco obitus Mass. The cathedral was dedicated to the Regina caelorum, because its calendars invariably note the Assumption (and therefore the coronation) of the Virgin as the most important feast, and the polytextuality, in the same manner as a cantus firmus, has an emblematic meaning and not just a liturgical one. This, together with the seven-section version of the Kyrie, suggests that Du Fay was looking back to the music of his youth. A missing piece in this is the lost Requiem of 1470, which we know was a three-voice work (Prizer, “Music and Ceremonial,” 133), and surely a chant paraphrase work. It is worth noting that the Kyrie of Ockeghem’s Requiem, which as Bent gently suggests might echo the Kyrie of Du Fay’s (Bent, “Ockeghem’s Requiem?”), has no structural parallel in 15th-century music other than the Kyrie of Du Fay’s Missa Sancti Iacobi, so it may well be that Du Fay had been revisiting his music of the 1420s and 1430s at the time.

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“concordans sine fuga.” The change in the Agnus Dei, however, required the omission of some music, restored, as Wegman suggests, after Du Fay’s personal copy reached the duke. ModD and SP B80 transmit the private version, which clearly circulated even during Du Fay’s life (since the exemplar of the copy in SP B80 probably reached Rome before the composer’s death). In terms of the Kyrie SP B80 presents the straightforward seven-section version with only the alternative for Christe 5, and I suspect that if the Agnus Dei of that copy had not been lost, it would contain the music suppressed in Br 5557 ante correctionem, all the more so since SP B80 is our only source for the motet itself. The editor of ModD, faced with the oddly shaped Kyrie, simply regularized it by suppressing Kyrie 8. The texture of the Mass as a whole is considerably more integrated than any of the earlier cantus-firmus Masses. The plainsong cantus firmus is given a different rhythmic structure in each movement and variously paraphrased or ornamented. The ornamentation may go from virtually none in long stretches of the Gloria and the Credo, to the extraordinary cadenza-like statement in Agnus Dei II, when the cantus firmus migrates to the contratenor for the entire section. Its melodic substance also permeates the texture of the work more because Du Fay uses imitation in this Mass far more extensively than in any of the others. This is also a reflection of how imitation is used in the motet as well, although in the Mass the texture tends to be denser. Much of the imitation consists of unison canons, mostly in the introductory and internal duets, which are used with even more flexibility than in the Missa Ecce ancilla. In a number of cases Du Fay shifts the temporal interval of the canon and uses a cadence point to switch the voices.109 The bursts of rhythmic activity one finds in the Missa L’homme armé return in this work, usually in some of the duets, but under much tighter control,110 and many of the duets, though quite active rhythmically, move in successions of minims with the very precise text underlay that resembles that of the early works and gives them a considerable amount of forward motion. Two moments of the motet, the extraordinary change of texture and tonal color between the opening duet and the four-voice texture when the tenor enters and the cantus sings the high E fa on “miserere tui labentis Du Fay,” and the massive four-voice entrance in slow values at “vale, valde decora” in the tenor,111 are referenced in the Mass at a number of points, 109 111

OO Planchart 3/7, Credo, mm. 25–38. OO Planchart 1/6, mm. 21 and 176.

110

Ibid., Gloria, mm. 26–41; Credo, mm. 62–74.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent

particularly in the shifts of color and patches full of discursive accidentals, for example in the Gloria at the beginning of the duple-meter section,112 where the lower voices, singing alone, produce what amounts to a Marian trope before the four-part texture with the upper voices singing the Mass text resumes: “Gaude, gloriosa, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis,” as well as in a number of other places in the Mass. As in the motet, the changes of tonal color in the Mass are carefully placed and appear to have an affective goal, which is not the impression the changes of color in the Missa L’homme armé give. A great deal of the writing in the duplemeter sections, particularly in those in full scoring, is remarkably energetic, for example the beginning of the duple-meter section of the Credo and at Et unam sanctam.113 I hear echoes of this last passage in Josquin’s Missa Gaudeamus.114 The sesquialtera passage near the end of the motet is referred to rather than cited in a good number of places in the Mass. Among the most noticeable of them are the identical conclusions of the Gloria and the Credo, where a duet in sesquialtera between cantus and contratenor is then replicated an octave below by the tenor and bass, leading to the three longae coronatae of the Amen. This replication of the duet is also a reference to the beginning of the motet, with its opening duets an octave apart. In the Mass Du Fay combines the two textures in a long passage that calls attention to itself and serves in this way to tie together the Gloria and Credo, which are otherwise structurally quite different. The most extraordinary reference to the sesquialtera in the motet, which at the same time is a development of the conclusion of the Gloria and Credo, is the final Agnus Dei, and the way Du Fay sets it up is particularly telling. The second Agnus Dei, which is in three voices, begins with a duo for cantus and contratenor that sounds almost like a reminiscence of the beginning of the Missa Se la face ay pale on the words “Agnus Dei.” This is followed by a duo for contratenor and bassus, both voices in imitation with material from a section of the antiphon that is otherwise not present in the movement, and with the text of the antiphon, producing again what amounts to a Marian trope in the Mass: “Salve radix sancta, ex qua mundo lux est orta,” followed by another duo for the cantus and contratenor to the words “qui tollis peccata mundi.”115 The separation of the 112 114 115

OO Planchart 3/7, Gloria, m. 93 ff. 113 Ibid., Credo, m. 236 ff. Planchart, “Masses on Plainsong Cantus Firmi,” 103. The antiphon text reference is unique to ModD, fol. 175r. Given that the scribe of that manuscript sought to eliminate all references to the antiphon text (the incipit “Ave regina” appears at the start of the tenor only in the Kyrie and the Sanctus), this appears to me like

619

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duos both in terms of tessitura and text is matched by a sharp rhythmic division: the outside duos move in breves and semibreves, the “trope” duo moves constantly in minims and sounds like a reference to the “et iuva” section of the motet. This procedure is very similar to what was described above in the Kyrie of the Missa Ecce ancilla, but here it is not a matter of tonal goals or sonority but rather of rhythmic texture and text. In that respect, particularly in terms of the text, it has become more openly affective. This entire episode is then followed by the music for “miserere nobis,” which cites note for note the entire “miserere supplicanti Du Fay” section of the motet and ends on c–g–c′ with the cantus near the bottom of its range. Agnus Dei III then begins with an octave c′– c″, with three voices on the lower c′ and the cantus on c″, a leap comparable to the extraordinary shift in the motet at the first “miserere tui labentis Du Fay,” but without any altered notes, and the radiant “Gaude gloriosa” phrase in the tenor. A few measures into this passage Du Fay drops the cantus; when it re-enters an elaborate section in sesquialtera involving all the voices begins. Halfway through the section the motion stops on a long with a corona, and then resumes, still in sesquialtera. This, as I have noted elsewhere,116 is a perfect example of a round dance, with the typical stop (the longa coronata) and the resumption of the motion. In the Agnus Dei this becomes a tripudio, the dance term used in countless hymns and proses to describe the rejoicing in heaven, a version of the visio beatifica, and its depiction as a round dance in the music is probably a reflection of the painted heavenly scenes depicted in the round cupolas of the Italian churches that Du Fay had seen in his youth. It is also a reference to the sesquialtera section of the motet, and the transition out of this passage and into the final “dona nobis pacem” is virtually note for note identical in Mass and motet. It ties this Agnus Dei with the resurrection symbolism of the Agnus Dei in the Missa L’homme armé and the “et vitam venturi saeculi, amen” of the Missa Se la face ay pale. David Fallows, with his usual acumen, notes that Du Fay probably regarded the Missa Ave regina caelorum as something of a summa of his art as a composer, and particularly as a composer of Masses, and

116

another of such “editorial lapses” whereby an opening mensuration, changed from to by the scribe, returns as (surely Du Fay’s original sign) when, say, a 3 sign is being cancelled. Although I agree with Wegman, “Miserere tui labentis,” that all sources of the Mass show editorial alterations, I come to a different conclusion and think that they all reflect imperfectly a more careful and detailed autograph text-setting that was simply quite eccentric by the traditions of the time. Planchart, “Notes on Guillaume Du Fay’s Last Works,” 69–70.

Cantus-Firmus Masses on the Continent Example 15.12 Missa Ave regina caelorum, Credo, polymetric section

Example 15.13 Written pitch field in the Missa Ave regina caelorum

discusses a number of traits in each of the earlier Masses that are present in this one.117 One could adduce dozens of other examples in addition to the ones he cites, some of which are apparent to the ear and others part of an intellectual game being played by the composer. For example, the Credos of the St. Anthony Mass and the Missa L’homme armé each have one passage of extraordinary mensural complexity. Nothing quite that complicated happens in the Credo of the Missa Ave regina caelorum, but the only instance of a deliberate 3 against 2 mensural conflict happens in the Credo at “et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum” (mm. 263–68), and right before it, a short passage, mostly a seemingly simple little duet between cantus and tenor is notated with minim equivalence between in the tenor and English in the bassus and cantus, with the cantus shifting almost immediately to 3. This is the only instance in Du Fay’s canon of the tempo of becoming dependent as a subsidiary mensuration upon the tempo of English (see Ex. 15.12). In his last surviving work Du Fay is, in fact, introducing a mensural innovation. 117

Fallows, Dufay, 212–13.

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The Mass is full of invention and incident. At the same time it is tonally Du Fay’s clearest and still most complex work. There are only two tonal goals throughout its enormous structure, C and G; only once, near the very end, the music stops on another sonority: the halt in the “round dance” in the Agnus Dei is on A. On the other hand, the pitch field of the work, in terms of signed notes, without including musica ficta in the sense of unwritten accidentals, is extraordinarily wide (see Ex. 15.13). In a few places a G is called for as musica ficta, but C, which is otherwise a relatively common pitch found both as a signed note and frequently as musica ficta, even in pieces with a C final (e.g., Craindre vous vueil), is entirely absent. But unlike the Missa L’homme armé the tonal shifts in the Missa Ave regina caelorum are carefully circumscribed and, like the stunning high E fa in the first “miserere” of the motet, appear to be there for affective reasons. The wealth of detail in this work remains astonishing, and repeated listening always reveals more. Here Du Fay appears to be working like the stonemasons who carved extraordinary detail in stones destined for the top of a church spire, where no human eye could ever perceive it. Here the old man was talking to God and to the Virgin, and whether the rest of humanity understood every detail of his discourse was no longer something that mattered.

Lost Masses From Du Fay’s will we know of two further Masses that have not survived, one for St. Anthony Abbot and the other a Requiem. They were both copied in a paper manuscript in large format that he left to the chapel of St. Stephen at his death, presumably so that the Requiem could be sung each year on 5 August, as he had stipulated in his foundation.118 As noted earlier, Besseler mistook the Ordinary of the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua as the Mass for St. Anthony Abbot and published it as such.119 Only after Fallows correctly identified that Ordinary and its Propers as the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua could we determine that the lost St. Anthony Mass was that for St. Anthony Abbot. The name of the Mass implies that it was a plenary Mass that included the Ordinary and the Proper, and this opens a number of possibilities. In an earlier study I had suggested that the liturgy for St. Anthony Abbot at Cambrai changed in the course of the fifteenth century from a formulary that used chants from the common of confessors to one that used chants from 118

119

LAN, 4G 1313, p. 71; Houdoy, Histoire, 411; Planchart, “The Books,” 175–76. See also Chapter 6, and Appendix 4. OO Besseler 2, no. 3.

Lost Masses

623

Table 15.1 Propers for St. Anthony Abbot in Tr 88 and Tr 89 Genre

Tr 88

Tr 89

Introit Gradual Alleluia Offertory Communion

Scitote quoniam, Ps. Cum invocarem Deus qui das vindictas, V. Et praecinxisti V. Felix corpus et felix anima Quis similis ei in fortibus Orabat Dei famulus

Scitote quoniam, Ps. Et factus est Thronus eius sicut sol, V. Et ponam in mari V. Vox de caelo Inclito Antonio Spiritus Sanctus missing

the liturgy of the canons regular of St-Antoine de Vienne.120 Barbara HagghHuglo, in a careful study based on the origins of the different surviving missals, proposed what I see now as a more convincing solution: that the cathedral liturgy in choro retained the formulary of the common of confessors, as shown in the printed Missale parvum of 1507,121 while at the chapel of St. Stephen the Antonine formulary was adopted, as shown in the missal CMM 184, fols. 132r–133r, which she connects with that chapel.122 She also suggests a plausible origin for Du Fay’s Mass: Philip the Bold (d. 1404), the first duke of Burgundy, had taken St. Anthony as his patron saint, and his descendants continued the veneration as a dynastic tradition.123 Further, the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon claimed among its relics the head of St. Anthony,124 and by the late fifteenth century the Mass for St. Anthony in Dijon used a liturgy very close to that found in CMM 184. Further, after Charles the Bold’s death in 1477 a collective obit for all the dukes was celebrated at St. Gudule in Brussels on Saint Anthony’s day.125 Thus it is likely that Du Fay wrote the St. Anthony Mass not as a votive Mass, but as a way of solemnizing the liturgy of a saint that the Burgundian dynasty regarded as a collective patron saint, and, probably in deference to his patron at that time, either Philip or Charles, he had the chapel of St. Stephen, which was largely under his authority, adopt the Antonine liturgy. This in turn would explain a number of circumstances. Du Fay’s Mass was not copied in the Cambrai choirbooks since the liturgy in choro used the Common of Confessors.126 Also, the Burgundian chapel 120 121 122

123 124 125 126

Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 146–47. Missale parvum, second foliation (Sanctorale), fols. 11v–12v. Haggh-Huglo, “Nonconformity,” 376–77. Her conflation of this with the presence of a votive Mass for St. Anthony using the Antonine propers in the Missale parvum, second foliation (Sanctorale), fol. 75r–v, is incorrect: the Mass in CMM 184 is not a votive Mass but a Mass for St. Anthony’s feast on 17 Jan. Haggh-Huglo, “Nonconformity,” 377. DACO, G 1128; see also Haggh-Huglo, “Singing for the Most Noble Souls,” 81. Haggh-Huglo, “Music,” 1:371–73; id. “Singing for the Most Noble Souls,” 80–81. The Mass in choro, if it was sung in polyphony, could have used an Ordinary and the polyphonic propers for the common of confessors.

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Table 15.2 Formularies for St. Anthony Abbot in Cambrai and Dijon Genre Introit Gradual Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Prose Tract Offertory Communion

Text Scitote quoniam. Ps. Et factus Thronus eius. V. Et ponam Vox de caelo Antoni pastor inclite Felix corpus felix anima Antonius humilis sanctitate Antonius de Aegypto transtulit Inclito Antonio Spiritus Sanctus Orabat dei famulus

Cambrai

Dijon a

CBM 184, MP CBM 184, MP CBM 184, MP MP – MP MP CBM 184, MP CBM 184, MP

BnF lat. 879, Lyon 525 BnF lat. 879, Lyon 525 – Lyon 525 BnF lat. 879 – – BnF lat. 879, Lyon 525 BnF lat. 879, Lyon 525

and/or St. Gudule most likely had copies of this Mass, so the manuscript with it and the Requiem was left not to Duke Charles but to the chapel of St. Stephen, since the grand vicars would need it to sing the Requiem after his death. There are two surviving polyphonic settings of the Propers for St. Anthony Abbot, one in Tr 88, copied immediately before Du Fay’s Propers for St. Anthony of Padua and for St. Francis,127 which Feininger did not ascribe to Du Fay, and another, which is part of an incomplete plenary Mass (missing the Kyrie and the Communion), in Tr 89.128 Both make use of a set of Propers unique to St. Anthony Abbot, some of them quite late, and without too many pieces in common, although in both sets the alleluias, the offertories, and the communion specifically mention St. Anthony Abbot in the text (see Table 15.1). The only piece the two cycles would have in common would be the communion, which although it is missing in Tr 89 was surely Orabat Dei famulus, as will be seen below. The introits, although beginning in the same manner, are two different pieces: Tr 88

Tr 89

Scitote quoniam mirificavit Dominus sanctum suum dominus exaudivit eum et constituit eum im pace. Ps. Cum invocarem [exaudivit me Deus iustitiae meae]: in tribulatione dilatasti mihi.

Scitote quoniam mirificavit Deus sanctum suum dominus exaudivit eum stolam gloriae induit eum. Ps. Et factus est in pace locus eius: et habitatio eius in Sion.

127 128

Tr 88, fols. 176v–182r; Feininger, Auctorum Anonymorum, 122–31. Tr 89, fols. 59v–70r.

Lost Masses

The introit in Tr 88, as Feininger noted, is a contrafact of the introit Cibavit eos for Monday after Pentecost,129 a melody in mode 2. It is part of an Antonine formulary found only in manuscripts from east of the Rhine, for example, Münster, Bistumarchivs 269, fols. 173v–174r, and Namur, Musée diocésain 395, fol. 48r–v (original second foliation xvir–v).130 That in Tr 89 paraphrases a melody in mode 3; its text is part of a formulary found only in French manuscripts, for example, Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale 525, fols. 148v–149v, and in CMM 184, fols. 132r–133r, for the feast of St. Anthony on 17 January, as well as the Missale parvum, end foliation, fols. 74v–76r, which uses the introit as part of an elaborate votive Mass for St. Anthony that includes two alleluias and a tract as well. The second alleluia and the tract would be unnecessary in a formulary only for St. Anthony’s feast. Given the possibility that the Mass was written for the Burgundian court, it is interesting to note that a late fifteenthcentury missal from Dijon, Paris, BnF, lat. 879, fols. 177v–179v, uses a formulary nearly identical to the Cambrai missal, while the earlier gradual from the thirteenth century uses the Common of Confessors for his Mass (see Table 15.2).131 As one can see, the formulary of Tr 89 is identical to the formulary of both Cambrai missals, particularly that used for the chapel of St. Stephen, which would be the liturgy for the Saint’s day. The work is a lovely three-voice Mass that resembles in many way the Mass for St. Anthony of Padua and St. Francis; the surviving Ordinary movements have no cantus firmus, but have an unusually long opening motto that involves all the voices, but is most uniform in the cantus.132 Both Fallows and I thought at one point that this could be the lost Mass for St. Anthony Abbot by Du Fay,133 but after transcribing and performing the work we came to the conclusion that it cannot be.134 Despite its lovely sound it is riddled with metric and contrapuntal solecisms, while at the same time showing an awareness of a number of traits of Du Fay’s very late style.135 Given how close it hews to the 129 130

131 133 134 135

Feininger, Auctorum Anonymorum, iii; LU 887. The manuscript has two Masses for St. Anthony, the first is the common Os iusti and the second, with the rubric “Alia missa de sancto Anthonio” is the “German” version of the Scitote quoniam Mass (the notation is in late German neumes). There is a lacuna in Namur 395 near the end of the alleluia, so the offertory and communion are lost. For an inventory see Long, “The Sanctorale,” 67–68. I am deeply grateful to Professor Long for photographs of the relevant folios. Brussels 3284, fol. 170r. 132 Planchart, “The Books,” 210–11. Fallows, Dufay, 192; Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 145–46. Fallows, Dufay, 310; Planchart, “The Books,” 207–9. Cf. Planchart, “The Books,” 207–9.

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Cambrai liturgical use for the saint, it has all the appearance of an imitation of Du Fay’s lost Mass by someone at Cambrai. The word “Piret” appears over the Gloria in the manuscript; if this is an ascription, which I now tend to doubt, it could be to one of the small vicars at the time, listed as “Sire Pierre,” and as “Pieret.”136 By the same token, I no longer think that the plainsong introit paraphrased in the cantus can be ascribed to Du Fay, since it was already used in Lyon and Dijon in the fourteenth century. But the Mass in Tr 89 cannot be a German Mass, since it uses the French rather than the German formulary for St. Anthony. It is, in all likelihood, a work written in imitation of Du Fay’s lost Mass, and as such it allows us to postulate that Du Fay’s Mass, like his earlier St. Anthony Mass, was most likely for three voices, and that like the Missa Ave regina caelorum it began with an extended opening motto in the Ordinary movements that probably involved all the voices. The other lost Mass, the Missa pro defunctis, which had been “recently composed” (de novo compilata) when it was copied in the choirbooks of the cathedral in 1470,137 was also for three voices. This we gather from a letter of Niccolò Frigio to Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, concerning the meeting of the grand chapter of the Order of the Golden Fleece in Brussels in 1501. Frigio had come to Brussels as ambassador of the Gonzaga precisely to be present at the meeting, and he sent his ruler a long and detailed description of the ceremonies and festivities.138 Frigio’s description of the Office of the Dead and the Requiem Mass at the meeting are particularly detailed. He describes both as the work of “a canon of Cambrai being the most renowned musician to be found in that area,” and notes that he had “left in his testament that they should be sung after his death for his soul, but the order took them for their own use.”139 The description, as Prizer notes, fits only one person, Guillaume Du Fay. Frigio, then, is also telling us about another lost work of Du Fay, an Office of the Dead, which I have postulated was also probably copied in the manuscript Du Fay left to the chapel of St. Stephen, though not mentioned by the executors.140 Regarding the Requiem itself, however, Frigio observes that both it and the Office were “for three voices, mournful, sad and very exquisite.”141 If the anonymous Mass for St. Anthony Abbot in Tr 89 reflects in any way the structure of Du Fay’s Mass, then it is likely that both it and the 136 137 138 139 141

See Appendix 1. LAN, 4G 4678, fol. 22v (5 July 1470); Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 251; Houdoy, Histoire, 498. Prizer, “Music and Ceremonial,” 124 and 136–53 (text and translation of Frigio’s letter). Ibid., 133. 140 Planchart, “The Books,” 201–4. Prizer, “Music and Ceremonial,” 133.

Lost Masses

Requiem were for three voices, and probably both written sometime shortly before 1470. Frigio’s letter tells us that Du Fay’s Requiem was still being sung in Brussels in 1501, which means then the court of Burgundy had a copy of it, a copy that probably perished with the other manuscripts that Du Fay left to Charles in the library fire in 1731.142 More frustratingly, the Requiem continued to be used at Cambrai well into the sixteenth century,143 but it was not recopied in the series of cathedral choirbooks that were produced in the 1520s and 1530s. In 1984, struck by the stylistic discrepancies in what survives of Ockeghem’s Requiem and its opaque transmission, and the uncanny similarity of the Kyrie of that work to the Kyrie of Du Fay’s Missa Sancti Iacobi, I proposed tentatively that perhaps the Introit and Kyrie of the work we know today as Ockeghem’s Requiem could be either by Du Fay or a reflection of his work.144 At the time there were no further leads that appeared to be fruitful, but recently Margaret Bent has reopened that possibility, particularly in the case of the Kyrie.145 Pending the publication of her findings, it is possible to add one further bit of circumstantial evidence to the case. Whatever the original purpose of Du Fay’s Missa Sancti Iacobi when he began it, the completion of the work and its final form were connected to the will and death of Pietro Emiliani. At a time when a polyphonic Requiem was probably unthinkable, the final version of Missa Sancti Iacobi comes as close as any work to being a Mass for a dead person. From the recall of the end of Nuper rosarum flores at the end of Fulgens iubar ecclesiae and the way the Missa Ave regina caelorum incorporated not only the motet of six years before, but traits of Masses going back to Se la face ay pale, it is clear that Du Fay had a long memory and an acute sense of his own oeuvre. If the Kyrie of Ockeghem’s Requiem, with its rather unusual structure, turns out to be either a work of Du Fay or a work that reflects the Kyrie of Du Fay’s Requiem in the manner that I suggested, the anonymous Mass for St. Anthony Abbot probably reflects Du Fay’s lost Mass; we have the old man, at the end of the day in both of his last major works, looking backward over his own long artistic life while at the same time looking ahead to whatever he expected on the other side of his death. 142 144

145

Lemaire, “Histoire de la Bibliothèque,” 15. 143 C. Wright, “Performance Practices,” 303. Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (Oct. 1984), 10–11. Since at the time there were no further leads, I omitted that speculation from the published form of the article in Early Music History 8. Bent, “Ockeghem’s Requiem?” I am deeply grateful to her for her generosity in sharing her research with me.

627

16

The Songs

Like the music for the Mass, Du Fay’s song production spans his entire creative life. While the music for the Office appears to be concentrated in the 1430s and 1440s, and the large-scale motets with two exceptions are earlier than the mid-1440s, there are songs that can be dated back to the early 1420s and perhaps slightly before, such as Belle plaissant et gracieuse,1 which according to Graeme Boone is the first song by Du Fay entered in Ox 213, and may date from Du Fay’s days as a student of Loqueville.2 Others, for which our only sources are manuscripts from the 1480s and 1490s, such as Dieu gard la bone,3 were probably written in the late 1460s and did not find their way to the chansonniers copied in the 1460s and 1470s.4 The pattern of survival of Du Fay’s songs is different from that of his sacred music. As with the sacred music, a great number of the early songs appear in manuscripts from the Veneto and northern Italy by scribes who had clearly relatively fast access to his music. But his later songs have survived in larger number because despite the nearly complete absence of Burgundian sources from the second half of the fifteenth century, it is clear that from around 1450 on, and despite the political tensions between France and Burgundy and between France and Savoy, there was a lively commerce among the three regions in terms of courtly secular music. Moreover, in two centers further away, Florence and Naples, there were people interested in Du Fay and his music. Among them were the Medici in one instance, as the surviving letters of Du Fay in 1456 and Antonio Squarcialupi in 1467 attest,5 and Tinctoris in the other, who clearly sought to collect repertory not only from him but from other composers in the Low Countries. Further, as Jane Alden has shown, in the circles around the French royal court a number of royal secretaries, as well as noblemen with literary inclinations, particularly around the circle of Charles d’Orléans, 1 2

3 4

628

5

OO Besseler 6, no. 40; OO Planchart 10/5/4. Boone, “Dufay’s Early Chansons,” 157. Boone’s work, particularly pp. 155–267, remains the best overview of the development of Du Fay’s early songs; see also Danneman, Die spätgotische Musiktradition, 35–44. OO Besseler 6, no. 79; OO Planchart 10/5/15. The literature on the origins and dating of late 15th-century chansonniers is both vast and often contentious. The best introduction, with judicious commentary of the manuscripts and an extended bibliography is Fallows, Catalogue. See pp. 240, 283.

Songs with Italian Texts

sought and commissioned collections of songs that included a great deal of the music of composers associated with the Burgundian court, not only Binchois and Du Fay, but also from a later generation, Hayne van Ghizeghem, Robert Morton, and Antoine Busnoys.6 Further, while the utilitarian cathedral choirbooks were copied on paper and subjected to prolonged and communal use and then discarded when the repertory was no longer current, chansonniers were copied on parchment, often richly illuminated in a manner that resembled books of hours, and were private copies treasured by their owners not only for their repertory but as luxury artifacts, and thus they had a better chance of survival all around. Thus, a relatively large number of Du Fay’s later songs survive, and in copies that often transmit the music, if not always the words (particularly in the case of French songs copied by Italian scribes), in generally good versions. Despite a number of datable songs, and a rough chronology that one can establish from the sources and, as Hamm did with some success, from notational practice7 – which admittedly we see at some distance, since it is clear that some of Du Fay’s notational habits puzzled scribes time and again8 – I will deal with the songs by categories, albeit showing, when it is possible or germane, the chronological progression of each repertory. I will not, however, offer a general description of the different textures and procedures Du Fay uses in his songs. Two particularly useful summaries of these traits have appeared, one by Erna Danneman,9 and another by Graeme Boone,10 although I will not be using Danneman’s categories, of “rondeau,” “conductus,” and “motet,” to refer to textures. These are metaphors that are useful in the context of her own study, but which carry perhaps too many connotations of repertories outside the songs.

Songs with Italian Texts Table 16.1 gives the Italian songs with ascriptions to Du Fay. The bestknown Italian “song” by Du Fay, his setting of Petrarch’s Vergene bella, is not a song but a motet and was discussed in Chapter 8 of this volume with the cantilena motets. Beyond this work seven songs by Du Fay set to Italian texts survive; all but two are unica in their sources, and all have unusual features besides what David Fallows has called “perverse accentuation.”11 6 7 9 10

Alden, Songs, Scribes, and Society, 167–241. 8 Hamm, Chronology; see also Boone, “Dufay’s Early Chansons,” 146–54. See earlier. Danneman, Die spätgotische Tradition, 20–22. Boone, “Dufay’s Early Chansons,” 237–41. 11 Fallows, The Songs, 31–32.

629

630

The Songs

Table 16.1 Italian songs with ascriptions to Du Fay No.

Title

Main source

Ascription

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Invidia nimica L’alta belleza Passato è il tempo Dona i ardenti ray Quel fronte signorille La dolce vista Dona gentile

Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 RU 1411 Mel

Guillermus Dufay composuit Guillermus dufaya G Dufay Guillermus duy Guillermus du y Rome composuit G. DVFAY G du Fay

a

Over an e-=-rasure: “Vgo de [Lantins].”

Further, all but one are relatively early works composed before the mid1430s. The Italian songs also present some puzzles. Quel fronte signorille has a rubric in Ox 213: “Guillermus duy Rome composuit,”12 which clearly dates it between 1428 and 1433, and that is also the most likely date of Dona i ardenti rai,13 copied immediately below it in Ox 213. Both pieces are presented as two stanzas with a rentrement, something found nowhere else in Du Fay’s canon. Besseler classified them as rotundelli or rondeaux in his edition of the Opera Omnia,14 but they are nothing of the sort, and there is no way of turning either of them into a rondeau. Dona i ardenti ray has a corona at measure 20,15 which apparently simply signals an important mid-point in the poem and an articulation the singers could perhaps overlook in performance and needed to be reminded of, but Quel fronte signorille does not even have such a mid-point corona. Nino Pirrotta noted that both settings are most likely related to the canzonette introduced in the early fifteenth century by Leonardo Giustinian and other poets.16 Although most composers did not set such texts to polyphony, it makes some sense for Du Fay, given the very varied and adventurous nature of his early repertory, to have tried his hand at something like this. Thus their basic form is simply ABA. Quel fronte signorille ends with a curious noncadence on G, although for most of its length the melodic and contrapuntal language of the piece indicates a C final. These and other anomalies led Margaret Bent to question its authenticity,17 but the ascription, like most of those in Ox 213, is quite authoritative. Some years later Du Fay reworked 12 14 15 16

OO Besseler 6, no. 7; OO Planchart 10/1/5. 13 OO Besseler 6, no. 6; OO Planchart 10/1/4. OO Besseler 6, nos. 6–7. Measure numbers from OO Planchart 10/1/5. See Example 16.8. Pirrotta, “On Text Forms,” 679–82. 17 Bent, “The Songs of Dufay,” 458.

Songs with Italian Texts

this piece into a French rondeau, Craindre vous vueil, probably one of his best songs, and the reworking adds a phrase that brings the piece to a C final. It also provides an unusual window into Du Fay’s thinking in terms of tonal planning and formal structure.18 In the case of Quel fronte signorille by far the best solution to the tonal conundrum is that proposed by Pirrotta, who suggested that the rentrement should be reduced to the first line of the stanza, bringing the piece to a proper cadence on C.19 Invidia nimica20 was also misunderstood by Besseler, a misunderstanding corrected in the revised edition by Fallows.21 The piece is a three-stanza ballata, but Du Fay decided to set each of the piedi and the volta to new music in a continuous section, so the actual musical structure of the piece is A B A B A B A, in a sense something of an expansion or prolongation of the form of Quel fronte signorille and Donna i ardenti ray. The song was added anonymously in an empty opening in FP 26 by the original scribe22 as a three-voice piece, but BU 2216 and Ox 213 transmit it with a second low contratenor. Charles Hamm suggested that the version in FP 26 was an anonymous work to which Du Fay added a contratenor,23 but the ascriptions in BU and Ox 213 are clearly intended to apply to the entire piece, and the scribe of Ox 213, who certainly had a good deal of knowledge of Du Fay’s music, makes a point in La belle se siet of adding Du Fay’s name only on the side of the added voice. Invidia nimica is also an adventurous work both tonally and mensurally. The cantus has a one-flat signature, the other voices two flats, and the counterpoint requires numerous A♭s and even a D♭ as musica ficta. The A section is in an unsigned , and the B section is signed in BU and Ox 213, but Ͻ in FP 26, a lectio difficilior and surely the original signature. Near the end the cantus shifts into coloration and Du Fay writes the kind of melodic line he usually wrote under . With all of these features, and the song’s dark-sounding tessitura, reaching F below Gamma ut in contratenor 2, it is sometimes hard to imagine it as an early work. André Pirro, on the basis of the text, suggested that it might be connected with the beheading of Parisina Malatesta in May 1425 by order of her husband, Niccolò III d’Este, on account of her affair with her stepson Ugo.24 This is now entirely improbable since by that time Du Fay was already in northern France. But there are some Malatesta pieces that share traits with Invidia nimica: one is Gloria–Credo 3, which is even more harmonically adventurous and which Margaret Bent has shown had been 18 20 22 24

Cf. the discussion on pp. 674–78. 19 Pirrotta, “On Text Forms,” 680–81. OO Besseler 6, no. 2; OO Planchart 10/1/1. 21 OO Besseler 6, rev. edn., no. 2. Nádas, “The Structure,” 396 and 409–10. 23 Hamm, Chronology, 8. Pirro, Histoire, 69.

631

632

The Songs

copied in the original version of Bo Q15, which antedates 1425.25 Another is He compaignons, which mentions a number of singers in the service of Malatesta di Pandolfo in 142326 and has the tessitura of Invidia nimica, including a low contratenor. The third is O sancte Sebastiane,27 which shares the to Ͻ progression in the cantus and the same kind of ornamental melodic writing, and, as noted above, is surely a Malatesta work.28 L’alta bellezza29 was copied in fascicle 3 of Ox 213 together with songs such as Bon jour bon mois and J’attendray tant qu’il vous playra, with which it shares the melodic grace and insouciant rhythmic drive. The scribe originally attributed it to Hughes de Lantins, but erased the attribution and wrote Du Fay’s name. The text appears to be a ballata with the volta missing, but the rhyme of the piedi is anomalous: they have more lines than the ripresa, which has no main verb. It is possible that the original poem was a sonnet with some lines suppressed to force it into a ballata form.30 If this is so, it would not be the only case of Du Fay altering the received text for musical purposes, particularly in his Italian songs; apparently he did something similar to Dona gentile, discussed below. La dolce vista31 presents a curious problem. The mensural usage (an unsigned throughout)32 and the counterpoint, with a number of accented appoggiaturas, suggest a date in the early 1420s. Its text is a ballata that, as James Haar has shown, is part of a Florentine tradition that goes back to a canzone by the early Trecento poet Cino da Pistoia (1270–1336/37), “La dolce vista e ’l bel guardo soave,” which was cited and emulated by Petrarch and Boccaccio and continued to inspire poets well into the fifteenth century.33 Its absence from Ox 213, its unique transmission in RU, and the nature of the poem suggest that Du Fay might have composed the work during his years in Florence in the 1430s. If that is the case, this would be a peculiarly old-fashioned piece for that time. The music, particularly in the relationship between cantus and tenor, seems to be influenced by the style of Ciconia, which might explain the oldfashioned tone if the piece is indeed from the 1430s. In contrast, Passato è il tempo,34 a straightforward ballata copied ca. 1431–1432 in Ox 213 directly below Vergene bella, appears to be, like 25 27 30 32

33

Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:187–88. 26 Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 124. OO Planchart 2/10. 28 See pp. 355–56. 29 OO Besseler 6, no. 1; OO Planchart 10/1/2. See Fallows, The Songs, 29. 31 OO Besseler 6, no. 4; OO Planchart 10/10/6. Hamm, A Chronology, 35, places the song in his group 2a (1415–1429), on the basis of the mensural usage. Both the mensural usage and the counterpoint suggest a date in the early 1420s. Haar, ed., Città del Vaticano, 37–39. 34 OO Besseler 6, no. 3; OO Planchart 10/1/3.

The Ballades

that piece, a product of Du Fay’s last year in the service of the Malatesta. The Italian setting is far less problematic than in the other songs, and it makes use in the cantus of the kind of ornamentation that one finds in the middle section of Vergene bella, while at the same time the tonal organization shows the kinds of tonal shifts one finds in Invidia nimica and in Quel fronte signorille. The last of Du Fay’s Italian songs, Dona gentile, is an entirely different kind of piece. The style of the music, an elegant duet between cantus and tenor with considerable imitation between the two voices and a remarkably smooth contratenor, as well as the sources that transmit it – Cord and Pav 362, both from Savoy, and Mel, copied in Naples under Tinctoris – indicate that the piece was written during Du Fay’s years in Savoy between 1452 and 1458. The piece, despite the lack of signa congruentiae in all three manuscripts, is clearly a rondeau with Italian words, something entirely absent from the literary sources of the fifteenth century and several decades after the few examples of it found in Rei 3 and Ox 213. The text is badly garbled in all sources. Nino Pirrotta has posited a substratum of dialectal forms in the rhymes “ona”/“una” and the form “stago,”35 and Howard Garey presented elaborate linguistic evidence in a heroic attempt at recovering the putative original text.36 But the sheer implausibility of the rhyme ona/una led Fallows to propose that the readings purgatorio and martirio in the Chansonnier Cordiforme are correct and that the poem was originally a ballata with a four-line refrain and two-line piedi, where two lines of the volta were suppressed in order to force the text into a rondeau form.37 Thus this song is yet another example of Du Fay tinkering with an Italian text to accommodate it to his musical conception. It remains one of his most affecting songs, and at one point the textual repetitions, accompanied by motivic repetitions, sound like deliberate references to the most famous Italian song of Du Fay’s time, Ciconia’s O rosa bella (see Ex. 16.1).

The Ballades By the time Du Fay’s career began the ballade was in many ways an old and waning genre, and except for a few pieces by English composers the genre as such had disappeared by about 1450. It had become, however, an important public genre, in the sense that among the vernacular song genres 35 36

Pirrotta, “On Text Forms,” 678. Perkins and Garey, eds., The Mellon Chansonnier, 1:328–30.

37

Fallows, The Songs, 48.

633

634

The Songs Example 16.1 Dona gentile (mm. 20–24)

of the period it was, together with the Italian madrigal, one that composers and poets turned to when writing works in celebration or in honor of their patrons or of important figures in myth or history. It was also a genre used, often in connection with mythic figures, for the expression of moral and philosophical ideas. This did not preclude the existence of ballades that continued the simpler tradition of being expressions of courtly love. Among the ballades ascribed to Du Fay in the sources we encounter examples of every type being written at the time, including one or two unusual ones, which is typical of the inventive attitude he took toward every genre he treated. All of them are early works; none of them can be dated beyond 1435. In terms of the song styles of the time most, though not all, are large-scale ambitious pieces, none more so than Resvelliés vous. Fifteenth-century manuscripts transmit eleven ballades with ascriptions to Du Fay in one or another of the sources. The authorship of a few of them presents complications; I give a preliminary list of them in Table 16.2. The first seven pieces present no problem in terms of Du Fay’s authorship. The last four offer a number of different problems, and it might be as well to deal with them first. Bien doy servir38 survives with a fragment of two very corrupt lines of texts. From the length and the shape of the music it is clearly a ballade, and despite the late transmission probably a very early work. In measures 53–54, after a full stop in the music, we have a series of notes with fermatas, which probably indicate the start of the refrain and were set to the name of the person honored in the piece, as in Resvelliés vous. This trait, small as it is, might support Du Fay’s authorship, because among early fifteenth-century ballades only this one and Resvelliés vous share it. The piece clearly has suffered a great deal in transmission and in its present form it sounds indebted to Binchois’s style. It might be the one ballade that predates Du Fay’s journey to Rimini in 1420.

38

OO Besseler 6, no. 20; OO Planchart 10/2/1.

The Ballades

Table 16.2 Ballades with ascriptions to Du Fay No.

Title

Main source

Ascription

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Resvelliés vous J’ay mis mon cuer Je me complains Ce jour le doibt Mon chier amy C’est bien raison Se la face ay pale Bien doy servir La belle se siet Or me veult Je languis

Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 Tr 87 Ox 213 Mel Tr 92

Ox 213: Guillermus du y Ox 213: Guillermus du y Ox 213: Guillermus dufay Ox 213: Guillermus dufay Ox 213: Guillermus du y Ox 213: Guillermus dufay Ox 213: Guillermus du y Tr 87: Dufaÿ Ox 213: G. du y over cantus 2 Str 222: G. Dufay; MuL: Guillermus Dufaÿ Tr 92: Du y

La belle se siet39 presents a different problem; the piece is not properly a ballade but rather a narrative song with an ABA′ form. The scribe of Ox 213 placed the ascription in the manuscript in a manner indicating that to his knowledge only cantus 2 was by Du Fay. The piece survives as an anonymous two-part song in BU 2216, p. 104, and Rei 3, fols. 108v–109r. The tenor had a long life both as a cantus firmus and as a popular tune that took a number of forms, including a version that has survived into modern times, La pernette.40 The two-voice version is a very simple setting, very close to note-against-note counterpoint with numerous parallel fifths and octaves (some barely covered by a melodic ornament) and a number of hard appoggiatura dissonances typical of music in in the early fifteenth century. Du Fay’s cantus 2 adds florid passages and imitations and covers some of the contrapuntal crudities, but at the same time it embraces some of the dissonant counterpoint of the original, sometimes with stunning results: at the beginning of the second part, measures 16–18, he uses a varied counterpoint to enliven the near literal repetition of measures 13–15, and plays up the rise to the dissonant d′ in measures 13 and 16 39 40

OO Besseler 6, no. 12; OO Planchart 10/2/9. The tenor was used in an anonymous Mass in Tr 90 (fols. 446v–457r), in Masses by Ghiselin (Petrucci, 1503) and De Orto (Petrucci, 1505), and in a Credo ascribed to Robert de Fevin in Petrucci’s Fragmenta missarum (RISM 15011). A fragmentary partbook, Paris, BnF, Département de Musique, Rés. 1431, has the melody twice, as the tenor of a now lost Stabat mater ascribed to “Prioris,” with the song text of the first stanza fully underlaid. Tinctoris, in the Liber de arte contrapuncti (Opera theoretica omnia, 2:142), quotes a passage from a lost Mass on La belle se siet by Ockeghem. On the ballad see Weckerlin, L’Ancienne Chanson populaire, 66, 234. On La pernette see Danckert, Das europäische Volkslied, 237–41.

635

636

The Songs

with an “off center” rise in measure 14 with a figure that, although dissonant with the tenor on the second semibreve of the measure, manages to soften the major seventh between cantus 1 and tenor and produce a gradual resolution of the dissonance on the second and third minims of that beat (see Ex. 16.2). It is entirely unconventional counterpoint and at the same time a stunningly beautiful moment. The entire cantus 2 does things like this throughout the piece. The case of Or me veult41 is similar to that of La belle se siet. The piece was known only with a contrafact Latin text in MuEm (Ave tota casta virgo) and an incipit “Portugaler” in Str 222, which was also given as an incipit in the tenor in MuEm.42 Besseler, who distrusted the ascriptions in Str 222, declared it inauthentic without any explanation.43 Since the publication of Besseler’s edition several things have happened. Perkins and Garey identified the song as Or me veult, preserved anonymously in Mel.44 Margaret Bent noticed that measures 1–29 of the tenor had an extensive life as a square in English Masses of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and the square had been identified as early as 1960 by Hugh Baillie.45 Helmut Hell discovered in two further leaves of MuL, the source for Du Fay’s Iuvenis qui puellam, our song with another Latin contrafact, O incomparabilis Virgo Maria, but now with an ascription, “Guillermus Dufaÿ.”46 This changes the picture considerably. The Munich fragment belonged to a Veneto manuscript of the 1430s, and even though the song has a contrafact text, it comes from a manuscript that could identify Du Fay as a bachelor of law in the ascription to Iuvenis qui puellam, which means that its compiler had some information about the composer. Hell suggested that Du Fay might have composed only the contratenor.47 In his commentary to the song Fallows balanced all the possibilities and remained both uncommitted to its authenticity and puzzled by the “Portugaler” label; he noted that the English square tradition revealed knowledge of the existence of Or me veult, even though none of the English pieces used any polyphony from the song.48 In the biographical part of this study I provide what I think is the most likely nexus of historical circumstances for this work, which connects it to England, to the “Portuguese” fiddlers of the wife of the duke of Burgundy, and the 41 42

43 45 47

OO Besseler 6, no. 88; OO Planchart 10/2/10. There are two other textless versions, both also in MuEm, and an intabulation, “Portigaler,” in Bux. OO Besseler 6:xiv. 44 Perkins and Garey, eds., The Mellon Chansonnier, 1:393–94. Bent, “The Songs,” 459; Baillie, “Squares,” K. 3. 46 Hell, “Zwei weitere Blätter.” Ibid., 47. 48 Fallows, The Songs, 243–45.

Example 16.2 La belle se siet (mm. 13–21)

638

The Songs

Chambéry wedding of 1434.49 This nexus supports Hell’s hypothesis that what we have here is an added voice by Du Fay to what was an elaboration of a tune by the fiddle players, but a tune that was known in one form or another on both sides of the Channel. The case of Je languis50 is different. Besseler discussed the song at some length,51 but Du Fay’s authorship has been in question since Margaret Bent reported that the ascription in Tr 92, which is partly cut off, was written over an earlier one that had been erased, which she read as “Dumstabl.”52 Fallows pointed out that one could argue that the earlier ascription might have been prompted by some features of the song and its context in the manuscript, where it is entirely surrounded by English music, and that later someone with new information could have rectified matters, but he remained unconvinced of either case.53 From the style of the song, both in terms of melodic ductus and contrapuntal language, I think that it cannot be by either Dunstaple or Du Fay. It is surely an English work, but also the work of a younger composer. Some of the gestures in the music, particularly at the end of sections, recall those of Frye’s So ys emprentid,54 although I am not proposing Frye as the composer. The piece, moreover, is not really a ballade; Tr 92 gives only a set of corrupt incipits, but the correspondences with a poem in Le Jardin de plaisance, fol. 97r, make it clear that it is the text of the song. There the poem is labeled “un autre rondel” and it consists of two stanzas with a rentrement. There is no refrain, and while in a proper ballade the ending of the A section and that of the entire work would correspond, in the setting of Je languis there is only a vague correspondence, limited mostly to the cantus. In his edition Besseler emended both endings to make the cantus lines agree.55 In the new edition I restored the asymmetries found in the manuscript, and suggest that the song had a sui generis form, ABCA. Whoever the composer is, and despite some contrapuntal problems, it is a lively and engaging piece. In contrast to the problematic ballades, the first seven pieces in Table 16.2 are all relatively large-scale works and something of virtuoso displays, none more so than Resvelliés vous,56 composed in connection with the marriage of Vittoria di Lorenzo Colonna to Carlo di Malatesta, 49 51 52

53

54 56

See pp. 127–8. 50 OO Besseler 6, no. 17; OO Planchart 12/5. Besseler, Bourdon und Fauxbourdon, 59–67. Bent, “The Songs,” 459. The lower writing is barely legible with the manuscript at hand and under ultraviolet light, although the erasure is obvious in the online facsimile. Fallows, The Songs, 73. For an edition of So ys emprentid see Perkins and Garey, The Mellon Chansonnier 2:157–59. This is the case with mm. 28–58 and 65–76. 55 OO Besseler 6, no. 17. OO Besseler 6, no. 11; OO Planchart 10/2/1.

The Ballades

brother of Du Fay’s patron, Archbishop Pandolfo di Malatesta, which took place in Rimini on 18 July 1423. The genesis of the piece and the derivation of some of its motives, particularly the very striking opening from the Missa sine nomine, have been described in connection with the Mass.57 The shift from to as the piece moves from the A to the B section may have been inspired by similar shifts in the Mass, although I do not discern here the motivic connections that Fallows hears.58 The piece is both a display of compositional virtuosity, with an enormous wealth of motives and gestures, and a vehicle for vocal virtuosity that Du Fay seldom attempted again, including roulades in semiminims. On account of some notational scruple the composer or the scribe wrote these in proportional notation as minims under the sign 2.59 They resemble some of the ornaments one finds at the beginning of Flos florum, although those in Resvelliés vous are more overtly virtuosic. An unusual trait in the ballade is the setting of Carlo’s name in four “chords” with fermatas, in the manner that the nomina sacra are set off in some Gloria settings.60 In the ballade repertory this has a very narrow tradition: between 1350 and 1450 I can find only six pieces that do something comparable: two by François Andrieu, Armes, amours and De Narcisus, one by Jehan Cuvelier, Se Galaas, one by Jehan de Méru, De home vray,61 and two by Du Fay, Bien doy servir and Resvelliés vous. In all cases the passages with fermatas are set to the opening of the refrain, and of the four that carry text two of them have what may be a device: “Fébus avant!” (Se Galaas) and “Dont l’en couvint” (De Narcisus). One could be a device, “S’a grant henour” (De home vray), and two have the name of a person, “Charle gentil” (Resvelliés vous) and “La mort Machaut” (Armes, amours). This last one, setting Eustace Deschamps’s lament on the death of Machaut, appears to be both the origin of this tradition and the most direct model for Du Fay.62

57 59

60

61

62

See pp. 554–55. 58 Fallows, Dufay, 165–67. This proportional notation appears in La belle se siet, probably as the result of a scruple about setting syllables under semiminims, although in that song the melismas are notated in semiminims. Cf. the Gloria of Du Fay’s Missa sine nomine, mm. 161–64 (OO Planchart 3/1), although the chords are not the same as those in Resvelliés vous. De Narcisus in I. Bent, French Secular Music 1, no. 16; Se Galaas, De home vray, and Armes Amours, in I. Bent, French Secular Music 2, nos. 55, 83, and 84. See also Apel, French Secular Compositions, 2, nos. 2, 17, 26, and 47. Andrieu’s ballade survives only in the Chantilly manuscript, but given the fame of both the poet and of Machaut, it is more than likely that it was a well-known work, and that someone who had travelled as widely, and in particularly literate circles, as Du Fay had already by 1423, would have known it.

639

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The Songs

Mon chier amy63 has been regarded as another Malatesta ballade. Fallows has proposed that this piece, a song of condolence addressed perhaps to Carlo di Galeotto Malatesta on the death of his brother Pandolfo di Galeotto on 3 October 1427,64 finds support in textual echoes,65 notational mannerisms (the use of 2 to notate a fast melisma), and also two direct quotations from a passage in Vergene bella (mm. 10–11 and 35–36, which cite the melisma on amor), and a near quotation (mm. 26–27), which are even more convincing now that we know that Vergene bella is indeed a Malatesta work as well.66 But now we also know that Du Fay’s patron was Pandolfo di Malatesta, not Carlo di Galeotto, so perhaps it was the death of Taddea di Malatesta, sister of Pandolfo and the wife of Ludovico di Migliorati, who died of the plague in 1427,67 that brought about this piece. Still, by this time Pandolfo and Cleofe were in Patras and the Morea respectively, and Carlo was a condottiero in the service of Milan in the war against Venice, and by 11 October of that year he had fallen prisoner in the battle of Maclodio.68 At this time the Malatesta were far from the orbit in which Du Fay moved, but from what we know from Du Fay’s later years, sending a work to a distant land was not out of the question, and the musical references connect the ballade to other Malatesta works, so perhaps it was indeed written for Pandolfo. The ballade, although a song of consolation, belongs to the tradition of moral topics that had become part of the ballade repertory. Its cryptic mention of “Ces trois chapiaux en don de charité” remains unexplained. As is appropriate to the tone of the text, the virtuoso fireworks of Resvelliés vous are absent here. C’est bien raison69 belongs with the two Malatesta ballads, although it is later than both. It is a massive work in praise of Niccolò III d’Este and marks the beginning of an intermittent connection between Du Fay and the rulers of Ferrara that was to last until the death of Leonello in 1450 and to be revived posthumously in the copying of Du Fay’s Missa Ave regina in Ferrara under Ercole ca. 1480. The ballade has been connected with Niccolò’s efforts as a peacemaker, particularly the peace between Florence, Venice, and Milan signed on 26 April 1433.70 But Hans Schoop noted that this aspect of Niccolò’s activity is not mentioned until the third stanza, and cautioned against too close a connection between that event and Du Fay’s piece.71 Originally Lewis Lockwood sought to connect the ballade with a payment 63 65 67 69 71

OO Besseler 6, no. 15; OO Planchart 10/2/6. 64 Fallows, Dufay, 30. Notes in Fallows, The Songs, 68. 66 Bent, “Petrarch, Padua, Malatesta”; see also pp. 397–8. Angiolini and Falcioni, La Signoria di Malatesta, 207. 68 Ibid., 204. OO Besseler 6, no. 16; OO Planchart 10/2/2. 70 Besseler, “Neue Dokumente,” 166. Schoop, Entstehung und Verwendung, 120–21.

The Ballades

made to Du Fay when he visited Ferrara in 1437.72 Later he changed his opinion and saw the ballade as the product of an otherwise unrecorded visit by Du Fay to Ferrara on his way to Chambéry late in 1433.73 Still, Lockwood’s earlier concern, that the text of the ballade is not so much about the peace treaty but rather a praise of Niccolò’s virtues and of his rule (which echoes Schoop’s view), is also correct. The peace treaty was a relatively fresh memory when Du Fay came through Ferrara, but the ballade is not really about the peace treaty.74 Melodically the piece is not quite as elegant as Resvelliés vous, but like a number of pieces from the 1430s it is quite adventurous in its use of signed notes to produce sudden shifts of color. This is one of a number of works organized throughout in tempus perfectum where Du Fay shifts between a rigid organization in imperfect longs (modus minor) and a simple series of breves (no modus). The notational density and the texting of the outer sections in modus minor call for a faster tempo than that of the middle section, with syllables on the minims, but the differences between the sections are not as pronounced as they are in Vergene bella, another work organized in the same manner. The tone of the pieces just discussed could not be more different from J’ay mis mon cuer,75 yet another ballade surely connected with the Malatesta and probably composed before 1425. The text of the only surviving stanza has the acrostic “Isabette,” most likely referring to Elizabetta di Galeazzo Malatesta (1407–1470), niece of Carlo, Cleofe, and Pandolfo, and apparently a favorite of the last of these, who made her his heir.76 As befits a piece in praise of a very young woman, for Elizabetta was only seventeen by the time Du Fay left the service of Pandolfo, the piece is a short, dancelike song with the kind of rhythmic writing and phrase structure one finds in some of the rondeaux, particularly Bon jour, bon mois and Ce moys de may. The missing stanzas probably had the rest of the acrostic and an explanation of the occasion, but the music presents itself as the kind of charming May Day song that is so common among Du Fay’s early works.77

72 73

74 76

77

Lockwood, “Dufay and Ferrara,” 3, and n. 10. Fallows, Dufay, 40–41, is rather noncommittal on the two possible dates; Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 36, gives his revised dating, and Fallows, The Songs, 70, comes out more clearly in favor of 1433. Lockwood, “Dufay and Ferrara,” 3. 75 OO Besseler 6, no. 13; OO Planchart 10/2/4. Litta, Famiglie celebri, 10:46 = dispensa 161, pl. vii. The possibility of “Isabette” being Elizabetta di Galeotto is increased by the fact that Pandolfo di Malatesta was actually Du Fay’s patron. Cf. Planchart, “Du Fay and the Style of Molinet,” 63.

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The Songs

Ce jour le doibt and Je me complains78 date from 1425, Du Fay’s year in Laon. The first has a line of text telling the lady for whom the piece was written that she is “the most joyful lady from here to the Meuse or the Euse.” Wherever “here” was, the two rivers that define the area at that time were those which marked the borders of the diocese of Laon.79 The second has a precise date in its only source, Ox 213, “Guillermus Dufay 1425 adi 12 luio,” at which time Du Fay was in Laon. Together with J’ay mis mon cuer these two ballades present a microcosm of some of the problems that bedevil our view of Du Fay’s music, and not just his songs. None of the three songs has a mensuration sign, but J’ay mis mon cuer and Je me complains are notated clearly in with text on the minims; Ce jour le doibt is in perfect time with syllables on the semibreves, with an even number of breves before each final long, and a number of rhythmic gestures, particularly in the lower voices, that appear in music that in Du Fay’s sources is often signed with .80 Besseler viewed the use of , signed or implicit, as always indicating a faster tempo, where a minim in equals a semibreve in .81 Margaret Bent has produced a series of studies that seek to show that the sign , particularly in the early fifteenth century, had a range of meanings that could go from a simple toggle to an indication of a different tempo.82 Some of her work in this has been misunderstood as denying the traditional interpretation of as a sign of acceleration, whereas she simply is pointing out that the sign had a range of other meanings and one should look very carefully at the context in every case. In Du Fay’s music the use of in all voices, when it appears and when we can assume that the sign goes back to the composer, is usually connected with perfect time where the breves are arranged in pairs (that is modus minor) and the notational density is lighter than in works notated in . In addition, the music shows a number of the rhythmic patterns described by Cumming in her treatment of what she calls “cut circle style.”83 Bent rightly complains that editors of fifteenth-century music (which of course, 78 79

80 81

82

83

OO Besseler 6, nos. 18 and 14; OO Planchart 10/2/4 and 5. Boone, “Dufay’s Early Chansons,” 225, is skeptical of the use of the rivers as localizers, pointing out that the poet had to find some geographical terms that rhymed with “gracieuse.” Still, one need not use any geographical markers to tell a woman you like her better than anyone else, and the poet chose to use such geographical markers. The best summary of these traits appears in Cumming, The Motet, 108–24. Besseler, Bourdon und Fauxbourdon, 122–32; this also results in his tacit doubling of the rate of reduction for music with cut signs in the Opera Omnia or his use of a 6/4 time signature for music in . Bent, “On the Interpretation of ”; “The Early Use”; “The Use of Cut Signatures in Sacred Music by Binchois”; “The Use of Cut Signatures in Sacred Music by Ockeghem.” Cumming, The Motet, 99–124.

The Ballades

includes Besseler), overdid the assignment of unsigned pieces to a putative ,84 but in some cases Besseler’s interpretation makes immediate sense in terms of the rhythmic density,85 and from his later career it is clear that Du Fay assumed that rhythmic density, more than any sign, would guide the performer to a proper tempo. There surely was a range of possible tempos within any given sign or rhythmic surface, depending on the text and the nature of the music, but the range probably had limits that by later criteria would be relatively narrow. There would be a point, for example, where a composer would prefer to sign a work in instead of .86 J’ay mis mon cuer is a May Day song and Je me complains is a song for a young girl, a complaint about something quite unpleasant that befell Du Fay or the persona of the poem (unfortunately, the further stanzas that would have explained what this was are missing). They use almost the same rhythmic language, but if in the case of J’ay mis mon cuer it makes intuitive sense to move the tempo along and emphasize the dancelike traits of the song, in the case of Je me complains, unless we assume that Du Fay intended the kind of irony that we find in postmodern times, it makes equally intuitive sense to take a more relaxed tempo that allows the sense of the text to come across. From the reading of the theorists, and the way the signs are used in successive sections in hundreds of pieces, there was minim equivalence between and in the early fifteenth century.87 Singing Ce jour le doibt at any of the tempos that one could take for the minim in either of the other two ballades not only would make a May Day song sound utterly morose, but would tax the breath control of the performer. At the same time, a strict reading of the piece in modus minor would make a number of cadences and rhythmic gestures fall metrically in places where they never fall in those pieces explicitly signed with in Du Fay’s music,88 and yet the notational density and the presence of a number of the rhythmic gestures associated with indicate that we have here a

84 85

86

87 88

Bent, “The Early Use,” 223. This is the case, for example, with Belle, veulliés vostre mercy donner, Pour l’amour de ma doulce amye, and Mon cuer me fait tout dis penser; cf. OO Besseler 6, nos. 47, 48, and 54; OO Planchart 10/5/8, 43, and 50. This became a problem for Continental scribes with Du Fay’s music after ca. 1440, when he simply abandoned most cut signatures and assumed that rhythmic density was a sufficient indicator. This led to the extensive and not always consistent renotation of his music in English with . See also earlier in this chapter. Busse Berger, Mensuration and Proportion Signs, 54–66; Hamm, Chronology, 4–8. Besseler sensed this, and uses a sui generis barring for this piece; cf. OO Besseler 6, no. 18. In OO Planchart 10/2/2, I retain the simple breve barring.

643

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The Songs

song in a “fast ,”89 that is, almost but not quite organized as those pieces of Du Fay also in a “fast ,” but explicitly signed with . At the same time it will no longer do to assume that the rise of the sign in Du Fay’s music is a product of the 1430s, since Vergene bella, which uses that sign in every surviving source, has been convincingly redated by Bent to 1424.90 Another assumption that makes little sense is that the loss of the stanzas in Je me complains is probably due to the distance the song traveled from the place of composition to wherever in the Veneto Ox 213 was copied.91 The full text of Ce jour le doibt apparently made the journey safely, while that of J’ay mis mon cuer, surely composed in the Veneto, did not. Further, if Schoop and Boone are correct, while Mon cuer me fait and Je me complains were copied into Ox 213 ca. 1430–1431, Ce jour le doibt was not entered until ca. 1434–1436;92 there is much that we still do not know about how this repertory was acquired by the scribe of Ox 213. If Ce jour le doibt shares the rhythmic style of a number of rondeaux, Je me complains shares that as well as the voice ranges and unusual voice designations (differently unusual but unusual nonetheless) with one of Du Fay’s most extraordinary early rondeaux, Ma belle dame souveraine.93 In both works we have three texted voices moving in the same range, those in Je me complains each has a range of a–c″ and those in Ma belle dame have a range of a–d″, with the voices labeled “primus, secundus, tertius” in Je me complains and “[cantus], tenor, triplum” in Ma belle dame souveraine; the rondeau also has a fourth voice, lower and untexted, labeled “contratenor.” Both pieces move in the contrapuntal field of a D tonal type, and both end on A. In both pieces the contrapuntal structure is anchored between the two “top” voices, primus and secundus in the ballade and cantus and tenor in the rondeau, which produce the clausulae at the important cadences (although the medial cadence of Ma belle dame souveraine is a masterpiece of unorthodox counterpoint without a clausula).94 The third voice is not only an integral part of the motivic structure, but in a number of places becomes the main melodic voice of the piece (e.g., at the start of the B section in Je me complains and at its entrance in Ma belle dame as well as 89

90 91

92 93 94

Tinctoris, faced with something like this, although in an entirely different context, resorts to a unique locution, “excited sesquialtera”; cf. Musica Theoretica, 2a:14; also Seay, “The Proportionale musices,” 29. Bent, “Petrarch, Padua, Malatesta,” 90–96. Fallows, Dufay, 27–28, presented with all due caution, and left out of the commentary in id., The Songs, 67. Schoop, Entstehung und Verwendung, 40–47; Boone, “Dufay’s Early Chansons,” 155. OO Besseler 6, no. 44; OO Planchart 10/5/40. Cf. the discussion in Boone, “Dufay’s Early Chansons,” 243.

The Ballades

the start of the imitation on “nuit et jour”). All three voices take part in a dense motivic web in both pieces, based mostly on similar rhythmic shapes, which Graeme Boone calls “motivic reaction.”95 This becomes true imitation in Ma belle dame souveraine at “nuit et jour,” the high point of the rhetoric of the song. For a long time Se la face ay pale96 was considered a work written in Savoy in 1434–1435, largely on account of the fact that Du Fay used the tenor for the Missa Se la face ay pale, a Savoyard work that we had long assumed was connected with a dynastic wedding at that court.97 The source situation makes this assumption problematic: the earliest sources are Ox 213, fascicle 3, whose copying Boone places ca. 1432–1434,98 and NYB, which might be a bit earlier.99 At the same time, Anne Walters Robertson’s proposal of a nondynastic feast for the Mass removes the possible dynastic connections of the cantus firmus and makes it appropriate for purely emblematic reasons,100 which further weakens the hypothesis about the chanson’s origin in Savoy, although it does not eliminate it entirely. In any case, this is certainly one of the last ballades we have from Du Fay’s pen. Unlike his other ballades, it had a relatively long life in the repertory. It survives in eleven manuscripts ranging from the early 1430s to the 1470s, which transmit twelve copies, two of them organ intabulations, and four different versions of the song: 1. What is probably Du Fay’s original version in Ox 123, NYB, and five other sources up to the 1460s. 2. A closely related version, but with an almost entirely different contratenor, in EscB, an Italian manuscript after the middle of the century.101 3. A version with an entirely new contratenor in Sche, the private songbook of Dr. Hartmann Schedel (1440–1514), mostly copied when he was a student in Leipzig (1456–1462, which includes the fascicles that contain Se la face ay pale). 4. A version of no. 3, with the contratenor of Sche and a second contratenor and transposed down a fourth, copied by Hanns Wiser in Trento in the early 1470s (Tr 89). The two voices added to Du Fay’s cantus and 95 97 99

100 101

96 Ibid., 246–47. OO Besseler 6, no. 19, cf. also 87; OO Planchart 10/2/8 and 11. 98 Fallows, Dufay, 68–70. Boone, “Dufay’s Early Chansons,” 155. Fallows, “Ballades,” 28–29. In note 17 Fallows clings to the 1434 date for the song, but the evidence of similar north Italian manuscripts that he presents on pp. 28–29 would point to a date in the late 1420s for NYB. Robertson, “The Man with the Pale Face.” The provenance remains a matter of dispute; cf. the summary of opinions in Fallows, Catalogue, 15.

645

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The Songs

tenor in Sche and Tr 89 are surely not by Du Fay; they are, however, spectacularly good, and the four-voice version in Tr 89, which almost certainly was an arrangement to be played by one of the dozens of Stadtpfeifferei, is a piece that merits wide dissemination. The ballade, as a ballade, is entirely anomalous. The poem consists of lines of five syllables (as does La belle se siet, which is also an irregular ballade in terms of its text) and the stanza, apart from the one-line refrain, does not have the usual ballade structure. In addition, in the first stanza the verbal syntax creates an enjambment between the putative A and B of the ballade form. Du Fay’s setting reflects this and there is no repeat of the first section – instead the entire stanza is through-composed. The poem uses an unusual form of rime équivoquée, where the rhyme is often an entire word, but with two meanings, as in amer (“to love” or “bitter”). The large number of sources and relatively long life of this song indicate that it was one of Du Fay’s most popular early works, even though except for the Mass and the four-voice arrangement in Tr 89 it elicited no further elaboration. The music is deceptively simple, a straightforward C tonal-type setting with sharply delineated phrases ending with a bright fanfare that involves all the parts. Still, Du Fay starts what would be the B section with a swift moment of imitation between cantus and tenor, reversed two measures later, and that phrase contains a sudden burst of musica ficta that, even though necessary and quite obvious to a well-trained singer at the time, sharply heightens the dissonance level and tonal ambiguity of the phrase (see Ex. 16.3). The E fa in the contratenor produces a sudden shift of color that is typical of Du Fay’s pieces with a C final and that is often introduced by the contratenor. The cantus in measure 14 has to outline a diminished fifth or strike a tritone against the contratenor.102 Then in measure 17 the cadential mi of cantus and contratenor, unexceptional by all rules of discant, creates a harmonic “purple patch” in conjunction with the B fa of the tenor. The passage is even more striking in that apart from this phrase the music of the entire piece is virtually devoid of inflected notes. There are two other unusual traits to the ballade. The first is the extraordinary tunefulness of the tenor, which for much of the piece does manage to sound like the main melodic part, to the point that I believe that Du Fay began with it almost as a monophonic song before writing the rest of the work. The other is that, for all the bitter tone of much of the text, the music is full of fanfares and martial gestures, a truly proclamatory 102

Aspects of this kind of melodic writing filter into the Mass, and as Sherr shows, caused a mental block in the scribe of Tr 88; see Sherr, “Thoughts on Some of the Masses,” 323–24.

The Virelais and Bergerettes Example 16.3 Se la face ay pale (mm. 12–18)

work. Rather than the sorrow of unrequited love, it presents an almost heroic picture of love against all odds that is quite unusual in the love poetry of the time. Given this aspect of the song’s rhetoric, it is little wonder that Du Fay regarded it as appropriate for a Mass to honor the Holy Shroud, which in many ways is a symbol of the heroic aspect of Christ’s love for mankind.

The Virelais and Bergerettes At the end of the fourteenth century the virelai was one of the common formes fixes for the expression of courtly love, but a relative large repertory of them had also developed where the metaphors used in the poetry dealt with birdsong or hunt themes, often with onomatopoeic imitations of the bird cries and the calls of the hunt. There could be a considerable variation in how much these “realistic” elements, as Nigel Wilkins calls them,103 were part of the text and the music. In Jehan Vaillant’s Par maintes foys the birdsong imitation takes over the entire B sections of the virelai and incorporates the nightingale’s commands to the other birds to kill the cuckoo. In Jacob de Senleches’s exquisitely lyrical En ce gracïeux tamps, in contrast, the birdsongs are incidental to the narrative of the song, although the charming device of having one of the instrumentalists suddenly echo the call of the cuckoo that is singing “d’ung aultre part” is the one token of realistic elements in the piece.104 By 1430 the composition of virelais had essentially stopped; for example, Ox 213 transmits 103 104

Wilkins, “Virelai.” Both are edited in Apel, French Secular Music, nos. 69 and 50; id., French Secular Compositions, 1, nos. 222 and 91; Par maintes foys in Bent, French Secular Music 1, no. 100, and En ce gracïeux tamps in Bent, French Secular Music 3, no. 3. Both songs were extremely popular: Par maintes foys survives in six sources plus three more for Oswald von Wolkenstein’s contrafact Der May (cf. Bent, French Secular Music 2, 195), En ce gracïeux tamps survives in four (cf. PMFC 21,

647

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The Songs

only nine virelais, as opposed to more than 100 rondeaux, and the virelais are anonymous, or else the works of composers whose writing career had ended by 1430, such as Guillaume Lemacherier (Legrant) and Antonio da Cividale. Around the middle of the century, however, virelais began to be composed again, but the new virelais no longer have any trace of the naturalistic effects of the late fourteenth-century repertory; they fit squarely in the tradition of courtly love songs, and many of them are single-stanza virelais, which modern scholars call bergerettes. David Fallows offers a particularly intriguing explanation for the rise of the virelai. He notes that the single stanza of the bergerette has been allowed to expand, and that the second part of the form now often includes a change of meter and a slight lightening of the texture.105 In this expanded form, the A section often has five lines of text, and each of the B sections three lines. The A section, often with a cadence at the end of the third line, tends to sound like a complete rondeau refrain. Fallows then compared one of Du Fay’s rondeaux and one of his bergerettes, Adieu m’amour and Malhereux cuer, with telling results. His comparison is worth reproducing here in full:106 Rondeau

A

B

a

A

a

b

A

B

Number of poetic lines Number of measures Bergerette (conventional) Bergerette (actual sound) Number of poetic lines Number of measures

3 30 A A 3 16

2 25

3 30 B c 3 26

3 30 b c 3 33

3 30 a a 3 16

2 25

3 30 A A 3 16

2 25

B 2 11

b 2 11

B 2 11

For the bergerette I have added the ABbaA diagram that is conventionally used for the form, and the measure counts reflect those in the new Opera Omnia.107 Fallows’s point is that one tends to hear a rondeau as four panels, AB, aA, ab, and AB, and the new bergerette also consists of four panels, AB, cc, ab, and AB, which is virtually identical to a rondeau except that the second panel is “changed and made to contrast instead of adding to the internal complexity of the repeating form.”108

105 107 108

167); of these only Rei has the extra text in the triplum. I use the term “instrumentalist” in the text above advisedly: Senleches was a harp player. Fallows, Dufay, 151–52. 106 Ibid., 154. Adieu m’amour, in OO Planchart 10/5/2; Malhereux cuer, in OO Planchart 10/3/3. Fallows, Dufay, 155, and n. 4, citing Pierre Fabri, Le Grand et Vrai Art, 2:70–71.

The Virelais and Bergerettes

We have four virelai/bergerettes by Du Fay, two of them incomplete. They are shown in Table 16.3. The transmission of all of them is very fragile: all but Malhereux cuer are unica. S’il est plaisir survives in a desperately corrupt and incomplete version and Helas mon dueil is missing the text of the tierce. Chronologically, the order of their composition is most likely S’il est plaisir (late 1430s), Helas mon dueil (late 1440s or 1450 at the latest), Malhereux cuer (1450s), and De ma haulte (1460s), and their sources support this: the music scribe for S’il est plaisir has been identified by Ian Rumbold as “Scribe C,” who finished his work around 1442.109 Helas mon dueil is in Por, dated by Lockwood ca. 1454.110 The manuscript had been redated by Fallows to after 1460, based on the presence of En triumphant, which Fallows regarded as a lament on the death of Binchois, since he heard in the work what to him sounded like references to Binchois’s Triste plaisir and Dueil angoisseux,111 but Sean Gallagher points to a date in the 1450s, since the main argument for Fallows’s date is now moot;112 further, the text of the song contains geographical references to the area of Cambrai, where Du Fay was until 1450. The text of Malhereux cuer is ascribed to Le Rousellet. Fallows mentions a number of men who could have been that poet; significantly, all of the plausible candidates were connected in one way or another with the French court, the most probable candidate being the J. Rousellet who was a lawyer at the cour du trésor in Paris in 1477.113 This becomes more plausible when we realize that one of the early owners of Lab was a royal notary.114 This indicates that the song is surely one of the “new songs” written by Du Fay while being with the “Lords of France,” in 1455 at St-Pourçain.115 Finally, De ma haulte survives only in a manuscript from the 1480s. Table 16.3 Du Fay’s virelais and bergerettes No.

Title

Main source

Ascription

1 2 3 4

S’il est plaisir Helas mon dueil Malhereux cuer De ma haulte

MuEm Por Lab FR 2794

Dufay dufai Dufay dufay

109 110 111 112 114 115

Rumbold and Wright, eds., Der Mensuralcodex, 1:94. Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, rev. edn., 128–29. Fallows, “Two More Dufay Songs; id., “A Postscript.” Gallagher, “Musical Quotation” 637–40. 113 Fallows, Dufay, 249. Alden, Songs, Scribes, and Society, 206–10, but cf. 30–31 and 88–90. Letter to the Medici of 22 Feb. 1456; see p. 240.

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S’il est plaisir116 has a desperate transmission, which is a pity because it is the earliest bergerette/virelai that we have by Du Fay and was composed when virtually no such works were being written, which again shows Du Fay’s adventurous spirit. The version in MuEm has two contrafact Latin texts for cantus 1 and 2, O pulcherrima and Quam pulchri sunt, plus garbled incipits of the French text in both voices that allowed its identification with a bergerette published in the Jardin de plaisance. This text can easily be set to cantus 1, which begins with a gesture that Du Fay would repeat at the start of Fulgens iubar ecclesiae nearly a decade later, but it barely fits with cantus 2.117 The music for the contratenor stops at measure 29, with a marking “etc.” The German transmission of other Du Fay songs provides a cue to what possibly happened. Cantus 1 and tenor are surely by Du Fay and fall well within the kind of music he was writing in the late 1430s in Savoy. The piece most likely was a three-voice work with cantus, tenor, and contratenor, which included a long cantus and contratenor duet at the start of the second part, something one finds in a number of his works in the 1430s and 1440s. Cantus 2 is probably a replacement for the contratenor, which is something that happens in another song copied in MuEm, Pour l’amour de ma doulce amye,118 although it is nowhere as competent or inspired as the addition to that song. Finally, the arranger began writing a low contratenor that ironically sounds like a poor imitation of the one added contratenor we have by Du Fay, his addition to a Gloria by Grenon.119 I say “ironically” because for reasons of the social politics at the time, that is one contratenor where Du Fay was at pains not to sound quite like himself, but to produce something utterly conventional.120 When one performs S’il est plaisir as a three-voice work without the clumsy fragmentary contratenor one can get a slightly out-of-focus idea of what Du Fay’s first attempt at the virelai was, a work with echoes of the Florentine cantilenas of the mid-1430s and one that points to the kind of ascetic melodic style one finds in the Proper cycles and motets of the 1440s. With Helas mon dueil121 we enter an entirely different world. This is one of Du Fay’s most emotionally charged works and one that apparently was 116 117

118 119 120 121

OO Besseler 6, no. 21; OO Planchart 10/3/4. Besseler leaves cantus 2 without text even though this is very unusual in Du Fay’s music with two cantus parts. OO Planchart 10/4/4 sets the text under cantus 2, but it feels very forced. OO Besseler 6, no. 48; OO Planchart 10/5/50. OO Besseler 4, no. 30; OO Planchart 5/29. See also pp. 132–3. Planchart, “Du Fay and the Style of Molinet,” 67. OO Besseler 6, no. 23; OO Planchart 10/3/2.

The Virelais and Bergerettes

important to him, since he uses the melodic outline of the opening of the cantus as the center of the phrase that sets the words “miserere supplicanti Du Fay” in his Ave regina caelorum of 1464. Du Fay is always extremely careful to make clear the tonal structure of his music and nowhere is this care more apparent than in his songs. He constructs his melodies by carefully spanning the fifths, fourths, and octaves of whichever tonal type or mode he is using,122 and, as noted above, the power of the opening gesture of Resvelliés vous lies in that it spans the octave d″–d′ in a piece with a G final that is obvious from the first sound of the piece, and yet the cantus divides the octave not at G♯ but at G, and the G is simply not sounded at all in that voice (see Ex. 14.1). The power of Helas mon dueil derives from a similar gambit: the D final is obvious from the start, but the first phrase of the cantus is entirely unrelated to either the fifth or the fourth of the authentic D mode that underlies the tonal type of the piece (see Ex. 16.4). Even though the song is signed with English , where the breves are grouped in pairs, the first gesture is a group of three breves. This insertion of an extra breve in the modus is something that Du Fay does in many of his late works in English , but usually right before a cadence; here, however, it is used to underline rhetorically the first statement of the song. The listener, of course, does not hear this until measure 8, where the cadence falls incorrectly for the modus, the effect is perhaps one of metric disorientation at that point, which serves the expressive intent of the song. From the very first sonority we know that we are in a piece with a D final. The first four notes, setting the textual motto of the song, circle the reciting tone of the mode (Du Fay is not writing “in a mode” but he is nonetheless making references to it). The singer, seeing the line (even a moderately good sight reader knows that you do not sight-read note by note but phrase by phrase), would solmize the phrase mi, mi, fa, mi / sol, sol, fa, mi, mi, re, ut, mi. Despite the very strange beginning this is an f′–c″ fifth: a soft hexachord with the first ut distorted (a variant of the gambit that opens Resvelliés vous), but what does it have to do with the D mode or a D modal type? There are two answers: the first is that it has nothing to do with it, and that is part of its point: it is a perfectly good musical metaphor for the disorientation of extreme sorrow, made more clear by the tenor’s solid outline of the armature of the d–d′ octave. The second answer is that the opening, despite the raised F, outlines the space f′–b♭′ and sounds like an elaborate flex on the a′. This probably means nothing to modern listeners, but listeners steeped in plainsong, as were those for whom Du Fay wrote, 122

See below for the analysis of Craindre vous vueil and Quel fronte signorille, pp. 674–78.

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The Songs Example 16.4 Helas, mon dueil, opening

would have heard in the background the first flex of the Lamentation tone, and to make sure that they do not miss the reference without making it overly obvious, the contratenor has a figure in measures 3–6, separated by wide leaps from all that surrounds it, that cites the start of the Lamentation tone, albeit a third down. The entire opening tells the listeners of the time: “this is a lamentation in D, and one as profound as those of Jeremiah himself.” But even this is part of the long-range disorientation aspect of the song. After the opening phrase the melodic writing of the cantus uses the conventional tetrachords and pentachords of the D mode, including not only the fifth d′–a′, but rising to c″ (though never to d″), and the fourth a–d′, and all the phrases cadence on D for the first thirty-two measures. Then the final phrase of the first section begins with the only point of imitation thus far, starting on d and d′ in the tenor and cantus, traversing the entire range in both voices and cadencing on G. The second half of the song plays exactly the same game, with consistent D cadences, and only the coda of the second b section moves to a cadence on G. This coda, incidentally, traces an identical melodic arc in both the cantus and tenor, including the use of imitation, as the passage that ends the A section and eventually the entire song. A moment of emphasis in the first part comes at “tout le monde ne me sauveroit nye,” where the tenor climbs above the cantus and essentially recites the text on the high f′, a proclamation of despair made all the more clear by the high tessitura and the inversion of the normal order of the voices.123 In his excellent study of Du Fay’s songs of the 1440s Sean Gallagher places this piece, without comment, among the songs of the 1450s because of its use of semiminims and dotted minims, something that does not begin to appear in Du Fay’s music until the mid- to late 1440s.124 His analysis of 123

124

Such inversions were used by Machaut for symbolic and expressive purposes; cf. Zayaruznaya, “‘She has a wheel’,” 214–20. Gallagher, “Seigneur Leon,” 20–27.

The Virelais and Bergerettes

the evolution of the notation is entirely convincing; still I place the song in the late 1440s, close enough to the other songs that use dotted minims and semiminims, but still while Du Fay was in Cambrai because of the geographical references in the text: Il ne fault ja que je voise a la mer N’a Saint Hubert pour moy faire guerir.

It is useless to go to the sea Or to Saint Hubert to heal myself.

This text makes more sense in Cambrai, where the beaches of Calais or Boulogne-sur-Mer were about a three days’ journey on horseback (150 km) and the shrine of Saint-Hubert in Flanders about the same distance (137 km), than it would make in Chambéry (740 km) or Geneva (692 km), both in the Alpine region.125 In Malhereux cuer126 we find a refinement of the features of Helas mon dueil carried out on several levels. The distinction between the first and second sections of the song is accompanied by a shift of mensuration, from in the first section to (which surely was English in Du Fay’s original) in the second section, with its consequent shift in tempo and a lightening of the contrapuntal texture, which also has the effect of making the declamation of the text more regular. Du Fay emphasizes the division of the first section into two parts (which, as noted above, has the effect of making it sound like a rondeau refrain) by having the setting of the fourth line of the poem be the only point of imitation in the entire song, and writing the densest counterpoint in the piece for lines 4 and 5 of the section, which are not only the end of the first part but the end of the entire song as well. The conceit of the poem, a dialogue between the poet and his heart, is elegantly expressed but entirely conventional, and does not have even the shift of tone and address that one finds in Ockeghem’s Ma bouche rit, another bergerette that has a poem that consists partly of such a dialogue.127 Du Fay deals with it by writing long lines that, particularly at the beginning of the song, cover almost an entire octave in each phrase, in which each line is set as a musical unit, with an extra phrase as a coda to the repeat of the second part before the return to the first part. The musical structure is balanced and quite sophisticated. As noted above, he divides the first half subtly into

125 126 127

Cf. Planchart, “Du Fay and the Style of Molinet,” 67. OO Besseler 6, no. 24; OO Planchart 10/3/3. Cf. Planchart, “Du Fay and the Style of Molinet,” 61–62.

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two sections, one for the first three lines and another for the last two. The points of departure and cadences of the phrases are as follows: A

B

Coda of B2

C–G, G–G, C–C / C–E, A–E

E–A, D–A, E–C

A–E

This is a sophisticated and varied structure that emphasizes stability in A and change in B, but in a particularly understated manner. The shift from a C goal to an E goal in the A section is achieved gradually in that the first E cadence on measure 22 is part of a “continuing” gesture that leads to an a–a′ octave between contratenor and cantus in measure 23,128 but the A sonorities of measures 24 and 25 are contaminated by strong C sonority in the second beat of measure 23 and a cantus gesture that emphasizes C as a goal. The A–E motion at the end of A is not entirely clear, but the coda at the end of B2 makes it absolutely unequivocal and allows us then to hear the endings of the stanza and the repeat of the refrain in a new way that is more determinate. This is one piece where the tonal structure of the song is very much dependent for its full effect on the performance of the entire text. Du Fay’s last surviving virelai, De ma haulte et bonne aventure,129 is an extreme rarity: a full-blown virelai from the late fifteenth century. It is a Massive piece that takes between seven and eight minutes to sing through even at a relatively fast tempo of ca. MM 72–80 to the semibreve, and is cast in a tessitura lower than that of most of his songs; it is cleffed c3, F3, F3 (Ex. 16.5). Rhythmically it is not as dense as some of the other late songs, although the cantus at the end of the first section is set to the kind of ornamented line one finds in the late rondeaux. Perhaps because it is not a bergerette Du Fay does not change mensuration in the second section. He sets the poem line by line, with parallel articulations in the first half that read it 1–2/3 and 4–5/6, with a strong cadence after line 3, thus retaining the semblance of a rondeau refrain in the first half, with a clear set of tonal goals: D–A/D–A/A–D and D–E/F–C/D–D. The elided cadence between lines 4 and 5, where line 4 ends on an E sonority on the third beat of measure 18, leading to F (without the cantus) in measure 18 and the cantus coming in on the third beat on a sonority that only at the last minute becomes A, is a master-stroke, rendered senseless by an E in the 128

129

The cadence in measure 22 is typical of the sophistication of Du Fay’s use of the contratenor. Cantus and tenor produce a contrapuntal clausula on B, but the contratenor leaps from a to e, effectively changing the sonority of the cadence itself. OO Besseler 6, no. 22; OO Planchart 10/3/4.

The Virelais and Bergerettes Example 16.5 De ma haulte et bonne aventure

contratenor that has to be a scribal error. Du Fay likes sudden shifts in color, but this one not only goes beyond anything else in his canon, it completely destroys the tonal plan of the piece. The two-line second half is set to a very stable progression: D–A/A–D/coda: D–D, but begins with an extraordinary shift in texture: the cantus, immediately after the busiest line it has sung, shifts to a group of four perfect breves under which the lower voices have the only point of imitation in the piece with the kind of gesture and rhythmic language that sound like a premonition of the style that composers like Josquin and Agricola were to develop some two decades later. It is a startling moment that underlines the change from the first to the second section as forcefully as a change of mensuration would, a wildly inventive “solution” to the sameness of the mensuration across the formal shift.

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The Songs Example 16.5 (cont.)

Hybrid Forms and Combinative Songs Du Fay’s inventiveness, and the traits that led Julie Cumming to refer to him as “a master of generic mixture,”130 induced him in the songs to produce a number of hybrids, two of which become essentially the harbingers of a new subgenre in the late fifteenth century, the “combinative chanson,” where a rondeau is superimposed upon a chanson rustique that serves as a kind of cantus firmus to the piece.131 In a way the 130 131

Cumming, The Motet, 286. On the combinative chanson see Maniates, “Combinative Chansons in the Dijon Chansonnier,” and “Combinative Chansons in the Escorial Chansonnier.”

Hybrid Forms and Combinative Songs

657

predecessors of that procedure are a small number of rondeaux with a cantus firmus from Du Fay’s early years as well as one from his middle period. The entire repertory of such pieces in his canon is given in Table 16.4. As the table shows, Du Fay wrote such pieces only occasionally but throughout his career. The authorship of the last three has posed problems: Seigneur Leon was ascribed to Du Fay by Dragan Plamenac on the basis not only of the style but of what can be seen of a cutoff ascription in Pix.132 His ascription is now universally accepted, and Sean Gallagher has provided a particularly convincing argument for its date and purpose: an encomium of Leonello d’Este when he received the papal sword in 1448.133 Il sera par vous had long been regarded as the work of Robert Morton on the basis of the ascription to one “Borton” in the four-voice arrangement of it for wind instruments in RCas, but I have provided an extended historical and stylistic argument for ascribing it to Du Fay and for its date.134 Je vous pri has an ascription to Du Fay in Fl 178, a very late manuscript, and its transmission is problematic in terms of the texts, which are both corrupt and incomplete, but its musical transmission and style are consistent with a number of very late chansons of Du Fay, most notably Dieu gard la bone. The earliest of these is clearly Resvelons nous – Alons en bien.135 This song appears on a page of Ox 213 that contains three canonic songs of Du Fay: this one, Entre vous gentils amoureux, and Bien veignés vous. The text of the song consists of two couplets and appears to be complete; the corona on measure 9 of the cantus simply indicates the division of the stanza; it cannot indicate a point of return. This piece simply cannot be a rondeau. The mention of singing a virelai in line 3 is probably no more than a Table 16.4 Du Fay’s hybrid and combinative chansons No.

Title

Main source

Type

Date

1 2 3 4 5

Resvelons nous – Alons en bien Je ne puis plus – Unde veniet Seigneur Leon – Benedictus Il sera par vous – L’homme armé Je vous pri – Ma tres douce – Tant que mon argent

Ox 213 Ox 213 Pix Mel Pix

Cantus firmus Cantus firmus Cantus firmus Combinative Combinative

by 1431 by 1434 1447–1448 1459–1460 1460s

Plamenac, “An Unknown Composition,” 14–16. Planchart, “The Origins”; see also Chapter 5. OO Besseler 6, no. 28; OO Planchart 10/4/1.

133

132 134 135

Gallagher, “Seigneur Leon.”

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generic term in this case for “each shall sing a song”; the poet needed a song category that would rhyme with “may.” David Fallows notes that the Manuscrit de Bayeux includes virelais that seem to be set strophically,136 but that manuscript is much later, and if this were really a virelai it would predate by several decades the other virelais of Du Fay. If there were more text to this piece, I suspect it would be a simple strophic poem. The tenor and contratenor present a little melodic phrase, halfway between a snippet of a chanson rustique and an old-fashioned rondeau refrain, in canon at the fifth with fourfold repetition and a cadence pattern at the end, in effect an ostinato pattern. By themselves the lower voices have a distinctly Ars antiqua sound. Fallows finds a passage in the lower voices of the motet O sancte Sebastiane (mm. 98–107) that nearly duplicates the contrapuntal pattern of the lower voices in this song and could have served as an inspiration for it.137 This is plausible, all the more so in that O sancte Sebastiane is a work from Du Fay’s Malatesta years and this song is a bit later. The contrapuntal combination is not repeated in the motet when the tenor passage returns in the second color. In the song, the phrase structure of the cantus cuts across the ostinato pattern and is quite fluid, with a final coloratura reminiscent of those in Flos florum or the final Amen of Ecclesiae militantis. If there were more text to the song it was surely intended to be sung strophically, for there is no sensible place to stop within the song. Je ne puis plus – Unde veniet138 pretends to be a rondeau set over a Latin cantus firmus, but I am sure that it was never intended to have more text than the “rondeau refrain” that is set to it (see Ex. 16.6). The corona in the cantus (m. 12) is at an entirely implausible cadential point, as noted by Margaret Bent.139 Graeme Boone proposes a barely better cadence point in measure 13.140 There is a solid cadence on G at measure 18, which, however, falls not only on an odd tonal goal for a piece in D plagal, but also in the middle of a cantus-firmus statement. The corona in measure 12, however, falls precisely where the text would call for the medial cadence. There is also the fact that the cantus setting of the second line (mm. 7–12) is a cliché phrase that is heading to a cadence on D, but the cadence is impossible because of the held E in the tenor. The end of the cantus for this phrase sounds like a melodic mistake. Bent, in the study cited above, already touches upon what I think is the solution here: the piece probably had no more text than what appears in the manuscript. But I think that the 136 138 140

Fallows, The Songs, 105. 137 Fallows, Dufay, 88–89. Cf. Planchart OO 2/10. OO Besseler 6, no. 29; OO Planchart 10/4/2. 139 Bent, “The Songs of Dufay,” 455–56. Boone, “Dufay’s Early Chansons,” 213.

Example 16.6 Je ne puis plus

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The Songs

corona is indeed original. When one puts together the text, the form of the piece, which imitates the grandest of the early fifteenth-century genres, the tenor motet, the setting of the second line with its “wrong note ending” from a melodic point of view, the very strong cadence at the end of the third line and on an improbable tonal goal at that, what we have is something of a musical joke very similar in spirit to Mozart’s Ein musikalischer Spass. It is a minuscule piece, full of clearly deliberate formal miscalculations, that apes the most complex genre of the time, the tenor motet. The song was surely intended to get a giggle out of Du Fay’s colleagues.141 The contrast between this piece and Seigneur Leon – Benedictus qui venit142 could not possibly be sharper. Seigneur Leon – Benedictus qui venit is a full rondeau (although only the refrain survives) built upon a cantus firmus. The piece was written in earnest as a panegyric to Leonello d’Este upon his being given the papal sword and hat, which as Sean Gallagher has convincingly shown, took place in December 1447,143 so the song probably dates from early in 1448. It is scored for four voices: cantus, tenor, and high and low contratenors, the second of which behaves exactly like the second tenor of the big motets of the 1440s, and the sonority of the piece recalls strongly that of a piece such as Fulgens iubar ecclesiae, which is probably a near contemporary. The similarity with the motet does not end there, the presence of a double note in the cantus at the medial cadence (m. 25) indicates that Du Fay had in mind the kind of ensemble used for motets in Cambrai in the 1440s, with the choirboys on the cantus and the magister puerorum and two other adult singers on the lower voices. The piece is signed with in Pix (all parts) and in Fl 2794 (tenor only), but the breves are rigidly organized in pairs and the lower voices move mostly in longs and breves, so that one does not find here the small passages of an active contratenor 1 that occur in Du Fay’s motets of this time. Clearly this is a piece in a fast tempo, that earlier Du Fay would have signed with ,144 and offers further confirmation of his abandonment of cut signatures altogether from the 1440s onward. The medial cadence divides not only the rondeau text but the cantus-firmus text at a logical place: Benedictus qui venit / In nomine domini, which suggests that the cantus-firmus text,

141 142 144

Cf. Planchart, “Du Fay and the Style of Molinet,” 64. OO Besseler 6, no. 85; OO Planchart 10/4/3. 143 Gallagher, “Seigneur Leon,” 14–15. Du Fay very seldom used as an initial signature; significantly, however it appears in all sources for O proles Hispaniae – O sidus Hispaniae, the earliest of the motets that follow the Cambrai usage, and a work that shares a number of traits with the texture of Seigneur Leon – Benedictus qui venit, although it is far more complex than the song.

Hybrid Forms and Combinative Songs

although present only in a peripheral source,145 was intended to be sung. The loss of the full text is a tragedy, for this is a piece that requires all the repetitions and complexities that singing a full rondeau would produce in order to yield its full effect. The case for Du Fay’s authorship of Il sera par vous – L’homme armé146 has been made extensively in the biographical section of this book and elsewhere.147 The piece must date from the years between the proclamation of a crusade by Paul II in 1458 and the composition of Du Fay’s and Ockeghem’s Masses on L’homme armé, which must have been finished by May 1461,148 since Ockeghem’s Mass shows he had knowledge of the three-voice chanson.149 Thus I place the genesis of the song in 1459 or 1460. The piece is a sui generis double chanson that does not fit comfortably in any of the categories proposed for combinative chansons by Maniates.150 Du Fay’s treatment of the chanson rustique in this piece is complex and entirely unique in the combinative chanson repertory. The song contains an elaborate numerical pun that, following the text of the rondeau, inducts Symon le Breton as an extra chevalier into the Order of the Golden Fleece. Virtually the entire chanson rustique is in the tenor, with the contratenor providing carefully wrought musical filler to the structural duo of cantus and tenor, albeit with words drawn largely from the chanson rustique. But Du Fay moved the music and text of the fourth line of the chanson rustique to the contratenor, and set it in such a manner that the beginning of the music for the fifth line overlaps for three minims with the end of the music for the fourth line, compressing the length of the song by one semibreve. The chanson rustique has thirty-one semibreves, counting the final one. In his polyphonic settings Du Fay never counts the final for the purposes of number symbolism, so for his purposes the chanson rustique lasts thirty semibreves and a final note.151 Now, the start in the cantus of the song one semibreve before the cantus firmus begins, plus two extensions of a single semibreve each, one to allow the medial cadence to fall on the start of the tempus, and the other to 145 147 149 150 151

Vie 5904, notated in stroke notation. 146 OO Planchart 10/4/4. See p. 274, and Planchart, “The Origins,” 314–23. 148 See pp. 274–5. Cf. Perkins, “The L’homme armé Masses,” 374–78. Maniates, “Combinative Chansons in the Dijon Chansonnier,” 229–32. Bonnie Blackburn (personal communication) pointed out to me that the final note of the chanson rustique, qua chanson rustique, was surely not a semibreve, but most likely a long (as in the version of the song in Naples VI. E. 40, fol. 58v). This, in fact, makes the symbolism of the chanson rustique even more telling since at the time (after 1433), the order consisted of thirty chevaliers and a master, represented by thirty semibreves and a note of greater duration, be it a breve or the conventional long.

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balance the enormous rhythmic energy of the high phrase of the cantus (mm. 19–22), would have lengthened the song to thirty-three semibreves (not counting the final long) and the telescoping brings the song down to thirty-two semibreves, of which thirty-one are in polyphony and one (the opening of the cantus) is not. Thus the song now has thirty-one semibreves of polyphony, that is, the number of chevaliers and master of the Order of the Golden Fleece, plus an “extra” semibreve in monophony, a witty symbol of the crusading order plus one “extra member,” the hapless Symon le Breton. The added counterpoint in the tenor, and the transitional phrases in the contratenor have a single text, a repetition of “a l’assaut,” and it is arranged in fanfares that recall Du Fay’s Donnez l’assault. A couple of details are worth noting. One is the careful way that Du Fay sets the two high phrases of the chanson rustique to avoid any temptation on the part of the singers to sing F mi. The other is the interaction of the lower voices in measures 3–4 and 15–16: the individual voices are quite graceful, but their combination imitates convincingly the brash blaring of war trumpets alternating G and D. A Ferrarese manuscript from the 1480s has a clumsy four-part arrangement for wind instruments ascribed to one “Borton,” which Rob Wegman has proposed might be Pieter Bordon.152 Je vous pri – Ma tres douce – Tant que mon argent dura153 is another combinative chanson that, like Il sera par vous – L’homme armé, does not fit comfortably in any of the categories proposed by Maniates.154 The piece has what are most likely four different texts, which were probably used in an unorthodox manner in the original and have been quite garbled in transmission. The cantus, which is the only textually unproblematic voice, has the refrain of a rondeau. Contratenor 1 has a second text, Tant que mon argent dura, a popular chanson known from a number of other sources,155 but the final two lines, Helas, mon ami! Et quant revenrés vous? are most likely a separate element, and are presented at the place where the mensuration shifts to triple meter. Contratenor 2 has a third text, also a popular chanson, Ma tres douce amie, which lasts only to the point in the song where the two halves of the rondeau stanza are divided by the coronas, at which point it shifts to the last two lines of the second text and its added tag: Adieu mon ami! Adieu ma tres doulce amie! Helas mon ami! Et quant revenrés vous? The tenor begins with the rondeau text up to the midpoint, 152 154 155

Wegman, “Pieter Bordon.” 153 OO Besseler 6, no. 25; OO Planchart 10/4/5. Cf. Maniates, “Combinative Chansons in the Escorial Chansonnier,” 74. Cf. Fallows, The Songs, 97.

Hybrid Forms and Combinative Songs

and then shifts to the penultimate line of the third text, followed by the Helas mon ami tag. The result is a very sophisticated ending to the song: when the mensuration shifts to triple meter we hear the cantus on the penultimate line of the rondeau refrain over contratenor 2 with the Helas tag. Then all three lower voices repeat that tag (contratenor 1 and tenor have the text, contratenor 1 has no text, but the entire tag can be set to it), and then the cantus sings the final phrase of the rondeau, which given the text-shifting in the lower voices, was most likely sung by the entire ensemble. Although the piece is rigidly organized in pairs of breves, the number of minims with text and the presence of semiminims, not to mention the nature of the text, indicate a moderate tempo that would allow the multiple texts to be heard. The jumble of texts under the cantus, not only in terms of the number of them but also in terms of the fragmented manner in which they are presented, is probably a metaphor for the confused feelings expressed by the entire complex of poems in the song. The surviving stanza of the rondeau is in a woman’s voice, the second text is clearly a dialogue, and the third is a man’s voice. The tag is a woman’s voice that relates to the last line of the rondeau refrain. Two particularly dramatic aspects of the song are the sudden emergence of the Helas tag in the lower voices, followed by the final line of the rondeau without any other text against it. Whether one has all four voices sing this line, as I would suggest, or just the cantus over vocalized lower voices, it puts a considerable emphasis on the notion of “what you have promised me.” The coronas in measure 20 divide the stanza of the rondeau at midpoint, so that presumably a full rondeau text existed at one time. The placement of the coronas puzzled Maniates, who hears the medial cadence at measure 26, although she admits that in terms of the rondeau text this makes no sense.156 Stopping at the corona for a return would cut through the motive of “Adieu mon ami!” in contratenor 2, but rhetorically it works perfectly well, turning it into a simple exclamation: “Adieu!” But it is the coronas and the peculiar tonal structure they enforce when a full rondeau is sung that are one of the clues to Du Fay’s authorship. Here is brief summary of the formal and tonal aspects of the song: A song with a D final, with a medial cadence on E (an oldfashioned relationship that obtained in the fourteenth century and the early fifteenth century), with a strong cadence on D six bars after the 156

Maniates, “Combinative Chansons in the Escorial Chansonnier,” 74.

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medial cadence, followed by a shift to sesquialtera that continues to the end of the song. This is almost exactly the plan of Du Fay’s late rondeau Dieu gard la bone,157 a song in D with a medial cadence on E at measure 27, then a strong cadence on A at measure 36, followed by a shift to sesquialtera to the end of the song. In both songs Du Fay, for his own ends, is referencing the sesquialtera passages in his late Masses; indeed, that in Je vous pri, which probably postdates Dieu gard la bone, the textural shift in measures 31–34 resembles, mutatis mutandis, what happens at “genitum, non factum” in the Missa Ave regina caelorum. Du Fay also creates a strong tonal and phrase structure in the sesquialtera section of Je vous pri. The duo between cantus and contratenor 2 in measures 27–30, coming after a strong D cadence, sounds like a passage starting in D and moving to A; the tenor in measure 30 returns the music to a D final, but the trio that follows is a phrase entirely on A, and the final section starts on an F sonority and uses a simple contrapuntal process to move to D and reestablish quite forcefully the D final for the entire final segment of the song. At all levels the piece is a very sophisticated and atypical combinative chanson, conveying some of the affect one meets in Ockeghem’s Petite Camusette but without the pastoral aura. It uses Tant que mon argent dura to place the scene in an urban environment and conveys the mixture of hurt and faint hopes with blunt directness. In a sense, this is perhaps the most serious of Du Fay’s “bourgeois” songs, and remains puzzling not only because of the incomplete transmission, which does not allow us to hear the entire rondeau structure (which, to judge from the other parts, might also have been a dialogue) but also because we have so little of his very late music with which to compare it. It is, nonetheless, a masterpiece.

The Rondeaux Du Fay’s ballades are mostly early works. The virelai and bergerettes are middle period and late works, and although the Italian songs and the combinative and cantus-firmus songs present us with examples of his early and late styles, they are too few and too exceptional to give a clear picture of how his song style developed. But the rondeaux give us abundant examples from every period in his career. The earliest may date from his years at Cambrai, either before or immediately after his journey to 157

Cf. Planchart, “Du Fay and the Style of Molinet,” 68–71.

The Rondeaux

Constance, and the latest surely come from his final decade at Cambrai, when he probably came to know not just the songs of Ockeghem but those of Busnoys. But unlike the Masses, the isorhythmic motets, or even the ballades, the rondeaux are extremely difficult to date with much precision. The most systematic and ambitious attempt at a chronology of Du Fay’s works, that of Charles Hamm in 1960,158 assigned pieces to nine broad categories, some of them as long as two decades, based on the assumption that Du Fay was a consistent and fastidious notator and that his habits changed relatively slowly. Hamm’s hypothesis remains fundamentally correct, particularly in terms of the notational density and the gradual appearance of certain note values, and his work continues to be valuable particularly because it is informed by his own musical instincts, which are both refined and sure. But at the time he was writing our knowledge of the evolution of Du Fay’s style in the 1440s was very limited, as was our awareness of the extent to which his later mensural usage, particularly his abandonment of cut signs, had been distorted by the editorial intervention of scribes who simply could not believe Du Fay’s use of English .159 At the same time Hamm accepted some of Besseler’s teleology concerning the evolution of rhythm in Du Fay’s music, particularly his views about the rise of the cantabile style and its connection with the use of around 1430 to notate music that Du Fay notated earlier with .160 Besseler’s hypothesis has become moot with the redating of a number of pieces, particularly Vergene bella, which uses , and He compaignons, which although unsigned was edited by Besseler as a piece in an implied , to the years before 1425.161 Basically this points to the fact that even though Du Fay notated his music in a consistent manner that evolved through time, his range of notations appears to have been larger at any given time than Besseler or Hamm suspected. More recently Sean Gallagher has used one notational trait, the presence of dotted minims and semiminims, together with a consideration of their earliest source of each song, to group the songs Du Fay wrote in into five chronological groups.162 Wisely, Gallagher points out that the chronological borders are probably porous,163 and again his chronological categories are relatively 158 159

160 161

162

Hamm, Chronology. One should note that we owe a great deal of our understanding of English to Hamm, and that he does sense Du Fay’s abandonment of (cf. Chronology, 89). Besseler, Bourdon und Fauxbourdon, 121–38. Bent, “Petrarch, Padua, the Malatestas,” 91–96; Planchart, “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices” (1988), 124–25. Gallagher, “Seigneur Leon,” 25. 163 Ibid., 26.

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wide: songs grouped in A and B in his table go from the early 1420s to around 1435; his group C, with only four songs, he views as a transitional one, perhaps 1435–1440; his group D consists essentially of the pieces he believes were composed in Cambrai between 1439 and 1450; and his group E comprises the works composed after 1452, when he returned to Savoy.164 Table 16.5 presents Du Fay’s rondeaux in a series of chronological groups, but alphabetically within each group. The dates given are those we can posit either from dates entered for a few pieces in Ox 123, the biographical context of a few songs, and the likely date of the earliest source. In the case of Ox 213 I follow the fascicle datings of Schoop and Boone;165 in the case of the earlier Trent codices and MuEm the dates of the sections proposed in the relevant studies of Peter Wright and Ian Rumbold;166 in the case of RU 1411 the dates proposed by Haar;167 and in the contentious case of Por the last date proposed by Lockwood of ca. 1454.168 Absent from the table are Mon seul plaisir, ma seule joye,169 ascribed to Du Fay in Fl 176, a very late manuscript, but to John Bedyngham in Por, a particularly authoritative source for both composers; and Je ne vis onques,170 ascribed to Du Fay in MC 871, but to Binchois in Niv. The song was performed at the famous Feast of the Pheasant in Lille in 1454. At that time Binchois had already retired from the Burgundian chapel and had become the provost of St-Vincent de Soignies, but was still being paid as an “absent” member of the Burgundian chapel,171 and Du Fay had been, for all intents and purposes, one of the official composers for the court since 1439.172 There is no record of either composer being present at the feast, but this is simply a function of there being no record of those present except for sporadic mentions in the chronicles.173 Nonetheless, the celebration was one of the most important events in the entire history of Philip’s reign as duke of Burgundy, so the composition must have come from one or another of the two most important composers connected with the court. Fallows sensibly notes we must consider the possibility that

164 165 166

167 168 169 171 173

Ibid., 20–27. Schoop, Entstehung und Verwendung, 123–24; Boone, “Dufay’s Early Chansons,” 155. P. Wright, “The Compilation of Trent 871 and 922; id., “Johannes Wiser’s Paper”; Rumbold and Wright, eds., Der Mensuralkodex, 1:71–74. Haar, Città del Vaticano, 20–27. Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, rev. edn., 128–29. OO Besseler 6, no. 90; OO Planchart, 12/5. 170 OO Besseler 6, no. 91; OO Planchart 12/6. Fallows, “Binchois and the Poets.” 172 See pp. 169–71. La Marche, Mémoires, 2:340–80; Escouchy, Chronique, 2:154–59. See also DeVries, “The Failure,” 161–65, and esp. n. 13, with extensive reference to further studies.

The Rondeaux

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Table 16.5 Du Fay’s rondeaux No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Text Cambrai 1414–1420 Belle plaisant et gracieuse Rimini – Pesaro – Patras 1420–1425 Belle, vueilliés vostre mercy donner Entre vous gentils amoureux He, compaignons, resvelons nous Je ne suy plus tel que souloye Je veuil chanter de cuer joyeux Ma belle dame, je vous pri Par droit je puis bien complaindre et gemir Laon 1425–1426 Ma belle dame souveraine Pour l’amour de ma doulce amye Adieu ces bon vins de Lanoys Bologna – Rome 1428–1433 Bien veignés vous, amoureuse liesse Ce jour de l’an voudray joye mener Ce moys de may soyons lies et joyeux Helas, ma dame, par amours Mon cuer me fait tous dis penser Pour ce que veoir je ne puis Belle veulliés moy retenir Bon jour, bon mois, bon an et bonne estraine J’atendray tant qu’il vous playra Savoy – Cambrai 1434–1435 Estrinez moy, je vous estrineray Helas et quant vous veray? Je donne a tous les amoureux Je requier a tous amoureux Las, que feray? ne que je devenray? Navré je sui d’un dart penetratif Or pleust a dieu qu’a son plaisir Pouray je avoir vostre mercy? Se ma dame je puis veir Florence – Savoy 1436–1439 Belle que vous ai ie mesfait Craindre vous vueil, doulce dame de pris Hic iocundus sumit mundus J’ay grant dolour Je n’ay doubté fors que des envieux Je prens congié de vous, amours

Main source

Date

Ox 213

1414–1419?

Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 Rei 3 Ox 213 Ox 213 Q15

By 1424 By 1424 By 1424 1420s By 1424 By 1424 By 1424

Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213

1425 1425 1426

Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213

By 1430 By 1430 By 1430 By 1430 By 1430 By 1430 By 1432 By 1432 By 1432

EscA Rei 3 Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 Ox 213 EscA Ox 213 Ox 213

1434? 1434? 1434 1434 1434 1434 1434? 1434 1434

Tr 87 Ox 213 MuEm Str 222 Tr 87 Rei 3

By 1440 By 1436 By 1440 By 1440 By 1440 1436–1440

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Table 16.5 (cont.) No.

Text

Main source

Date

36 37 38

Mille bonjours je vous presente Puisque celle qui me tient en prison Vo regard et doulce maniere Cambrai 1439–1451 Adyeu quitte le demeurant Donnés l’assault a la fortresse

EscB Tr 87 MuEm

By 1440 By 1440 By 1440

Tr 90 Tr 87 / Mel Tr 92 / EscB Por Tr 87 Por RU 1411

By 1455 By 1445, rev. 1450s By 1445 By 1454 By 1442 By 1454 1436–1440

Por Por Por Niv / Di Niv / Di Por Por Cord

By 1454 By 1454 By 1454 1450s 1455 By 1454 By 1454 1455–1460

Fl 176 MC 871 Fl 176 Pix Fl 176 Niv / Di

1460s 1460s 1460s 1460s 1460s 1460s

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 a

Franc cuer gentil, sur toutes gracieuse Le serviteur hault guerdonné Mon bien, m’amour et ma maistresse Par le regard de vos beaux yeux Trop long temps ai esté en desplaisir Savoy 1452–1458 Adieu m’amour, adieu ma joye En triumphant de Cruel Dueil Entre les plus planes d’anoy La plus mignonne de mon cuer Les douleurs dont me sens tel somme Qu’est devenue laulté? Va t’en mon cuer, jour et nuitie Vostre bruit et vostre grant fame Cambrai 1458–1474 Belle, vueillés moy vengier Departés vous, Malebouche et Enviea Dieu gard la bone sans reprise Du tout m’estoie abandonné Ne je ne dors ne je ne veille Puisque vous estez campieur

Conflicting attribution to Ockeghem in Pix.

the song could have been sent from a distance,174 but we should also note that Du Fay was at the time in Savoy, while Binchois was at Soignies, 90 km east of Lille, or about two days’ travel, and as Gallagher notes, between June 1453 and June 1454 Binchois was absent from Soignies for more than twenty weeks.175 Thus it is quite plausible that he was actually in Lille at the time. The style of the song prompted Fallows to comment that it “seems unlikely to be by either composer,”176 yet at the same time he noted that if it 174 176

Fallows, The Songs, 255. Fallows, The Songs, 256.

175

Gallagher, “After Burgundy,” 29.

The Rondeaux

were by Binchois, the context for this piece should be sought in what Fallows calls the “unfathomable question of his late years,”177 since most of the supposedly late works of Binchois have conflicting attributions. But we have Comme femme desconfortée, a song with close similarities to Je ne vis onques and with an uncontested attribution to Binchois in Mel, a manuscript compiled under Tinctoris, one of the best-informed observers of the music of his time.178 Even though Wolfgang Rehm discounts the ascription on stylistic grounds,179 and Allan Atlas adduces further that the sources for the song are “not fruitful repositories of Binchois’s works,”180 the fact remains that not a single ascription in Mel has been proved incorrect. Thus, on balance, I think the work is by Binchois. One last piece has been omitted from the table, Resistera, an unicum in Fl 176,181 with an ascription to Du Fay in a later hand. This is an attractive work, but the contrapuntal style and the motivic construction are those of a generation or two beyond that of Du Fay. In some ways it resembles the four-part elaborations of Du Fay’s hymns that are part of the hybrid hymn setting in Cappella Sistina 15, although this is not to imply that there is any material from Du Fay in this song. The ascription to Du Fay might have been prompted by the opening of the cantus, which recalls something of Du Fay’s style. It may well be that the composition did reach Florence from Cambrai, where a number of composers were active in the 1470s and 1480s, the most likely dates for this piece, and the provenance was conflated with the name of the most famous musician from that city. David Fallows suggested that the music was for a rondeau with a four-line stanza, and placed a corona on the third beat of measure 13.182 This is a sound assumption and at the same time a further argument against Du Fay’s authorship: in no authentic song of his is the medial cadence of a rondeau placed on the last semibreve of a perfection, something that makes the close of the first half sound particularly perfunctory when the music continues on to the second half. In his study of Du Fay’s songs Fallows begins the discussion of the early songs with a particularly perceptive and refined description of Adieu ces bons vins de Lannoy,183 where he summarizes, without making it obvious, a number of procedures that remain basic to Du Fay’s songwriting: each 177 179

180 182 183

Ibid., 255. 178 Cf. Garey and Perkins, eds., The Mellon Chansonnier, 2:292–96. Die Chansons, ed. Rehm, no. 56, where it is placed as an opus dubium; id., “Mellon Chansonnier,” col. 19. Atlas, ed., Cappella Giulia, 1:183. 181 OO Besseler 6, no. 94; OO Planchart 12/7. Fallows, The Songs, 268. Fallows, Dufay, 86–88; the song is in OO Besseler 6, no. 27; OO Planchart 10/5/1.

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texted phrase has its own shape; basically, the first two phrases expose the tonal ambitus of the melody and its tonal structure, the third phrase is a composite one reversing the course of the first two, and descending to a close on e′ (this was a traditional medial cadence goal in the fourteenth century that would soon be replaced by a sonority based on a fifth above the final). The first phrase after the medial cadence is something entirely new, and beginning, as Fallows notes, with the most prominent rising line in the song. It leads to a final phrase that essentially restates the opening gesture in a different rhythm. Fallows is entirely correct in underscoring the subtlety and the expressive power of the song, and it is indeed an “early” song, but we should remember that this is a piece by a composer who had already written Vergene bella and Resvelliés vous, the Missa sine nomine, the two Gloria–Credo pairs (not to mention the one written in collaboration with Hughes de Lantins), and all the Malatesta motets (both tenor and cantilena) as well as large number of other songs that included He compaignons and Ma belle dame souveraine. This is a repertory that all by itself would lead scholars and critics to rank its creator as an important and influential composer. For this reason is may be useful to examine a song that is probably one of Du Fay’s “student compositions,” Belle plaisant et gracieuse,184 copied in Ox 213 several years before any of the other Du Fay songs in that manuscript, and in close proximity to all the surviving songs of Richard de Loqueville, who was surely his last teacher at Cambrai.185 Belle plaisant (Ex. 16.7) does not have the elegant control of Adieu ces bon vins, but in many ways it follows the same strategy. The cantus in the opening period covers the entire ambitus of the melody from c″ to c′, ending on the final, but Du Fay divides it into two phrases, a texted one and a melisma, which divide the period into a section that outlines the upper fifth and one the lower forth. What is interesting is that Du Fay barely touches the limit tone, f′, and we hear it only at the end of the phrase. The underlying sonorities move from F to C and back to F, and there is imitation between the contratenor (which begins the song) and the tenor, but the cantus uses only motivic reaction. Nowhere else in the song is there imitation or motivic reaction, and it is hard to gauge whether this opening, with its barely audible imitation, is the result of inexperience or a sly feint. The second phrase is entirely unproblematic: it moves the cantus from f′ to c″ and the sonority from F to a very solid C. The third phrase, like the first, consists of two elements, a texted descent from c″ to a′ 184 185

OO Besseler 6, no. 40; OO Planchart 10/5/4. Boone, “Dufay’s Early Chansons,” 157–60; Fallows, The Songs, 131.

The Rondeaux Example 16.7 Belle plaisant

and an ascent from e′ to a′, each underpinned by a very similar motion in the tenor, and with the endings on A emphasized both times by the nearly identical appoggiaturas in measures 12 and 14. What follows after the medial cadence is very similar to what happens in Adieu ces bons vins; the line moves up, very deliberately and without ornament, from a′ to d″, the highest note of the song, and emphasizes it with the leaps d″–a′–d″ in measure 17, but then it descends a full fifth: d″ to g′. Here Du Fay is not adding a fourth and a fifth to produce an octave, but changing the size of the melodic space in the same

671

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range: first the fourth a′–d″ and then the fifth d″–g′, and the underlying sonorities are D for the first segment and G for the second. This is a play on the tonic versus supertonic that is the common relationship between ouvert and clos at the time, but carried over an entire phrase precisely at the start of the B section of the rondeau, which, as Fallows perceptively notes, is the phrase that will not return for a while in a complete performance and thus needs to be made more striking.186 The final phrase covers the same ambitus as the first and has the same melodic and contrapuntal strategy. With this it should be clear that the formal and compositional strategy of Belle plaisant is virtually the same as that of Adieu ces bon vins, even though the surface of the later song is considerably smoother and more refined. What Belle plaisant lets us know is that the young Du Fay was apparently from the start an inventive composer with a very sure ear for sonority, for melody, for counterpoint, and for the formal rhetoric of music. Both pieces, with their very different sound world, are elaborations of the same “template,” so to speak, and this is not a matter of both being rondeaux. One of the most startling examples of such twin pieces, if we might call them so, are the ballade Se la face ay pale187 and the rondeau Helas et quant vous veray,188 where the rondeau, despite its very different sonority, appears to be a compendium of gestures from the ballade, and the shape and range of the individual phrases also recall those of the ballade. Two instances can be mentioned. The cantus of measures 5–9 of Helas et quant vous veray echo the the “c’est la principale” phrase of the ballade (mm. 7–10), and the repeated high a′ in the contratenor of the rondeau at the start of the second section also echoes the noticeable high a′s of the tenor in the ballade at measure 11 (see Ex. 16.8). In both works, despite the different finals, the phrase group starting with those high a′s leads to a firm cadence on G, and both songs end with rather showy fanfare gestures. The most remarkable trait of the early songs, that is those composed before ca. 1435, is the extraordinary variety of approaches, even if we restrict ourselves to the rondeaux. These go from the lyrical refinement of Adieu ces bon vins, to the dancelike rhythms of Ce jour de l’an, which produce nonetheless a light and airy texture, to the immense rhythmic energy of Bon jour, bon mois or Pour l’amour de ma doulce amye,189 to the dense motivic structure and contrapuntal inventiveness of Ma belle dame 186 188 189

Fallows, Dufay, 87. 187 OO Besseler 6, no. 19; OO Planchart 10/2/10. OO Besseler 6, no. 35; OO Planchart 10/5/24. In this song the triplum in MuEm is not a fourth voice but an alternative to the contratenor. Most likely it is not by Du Fay, but it is a marvelous part, and performers might well use it in alternation with the contratenor in some of the repeats or as a thoroughgoing substitute for it.

The Rondeaux Example 16.8 Helas et quant vous veray?

souveraine,190 which has probably the most intricate contrapuntal and motivic structure of any of Du Fay’s early songs. The piece combines the unusual three equal-voice texture (and some of the gestures) of the ballade Je me complains with a lower fourth voice that is surely an instrumental part,191 and although laid out in the formal template of Belle plaisant and Adieu ces bon vins, it is motivically a far denser piece than those two. The cantus opens with a rise a′–d″, which is not heard as “a melody,” but which prepares the entrance of the triplum on that d″, which at that point sounds like the principal voice. That d″ is briefly echoed in the tenor, but disappears from the texture from the rest of the A section. There is no motivic 190

191

OO Besseler 6, no. 44; OO Planchart 10/5/40. Cf. the sensitive analysis of the work in Fallows, Dufay, 94–95. It ends with a double stop a–a′, which is playable by a medieval fiddle or a harp.

673

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imitation, only a pervasive minim motion and a number of phrases that start with a pick up, leading to an effervescent texture. The B section starts with slow rise in the cantus from a′ to the d″, the only “slow line” in the song and as startling and prominent in this context as the sudden “melody” in the second violins near the end of the Triple Pas-de-Quatre in Stravinsky’s Agon.192 This rise is exactly the same gesture that opens the B section in Belle plaisant and Adieu ces bon vins, but what follows it is formally even more startling: the three texted voices launch in close imitation a single motive: c″, b♭′, a, on “nuit et jour,” followed by the tenor and triplum emphasizing the high d″ as the point of departure for the last line. Thus here the B section is marked not only by the rising line, where most of A consists of descending gestures, but by a dramatic shift in the motivic strategy of the song. A final curious trait of the piece is that twice in the song Du Fay writes a combination of signed notes in one part and a motive in another that inevitably lead to an augmented unison (c′–c#). That both clashes occur in parallel situations in the A and B sections (mm. 13 and 24), and the second one is intensified because both notes are struck simultaneously, makes me think that they are absolutely intentional. Craindre vous vueil,193 a reworking of Quel fronte signorille into a French rondeau copied into its earliest source, Ox 213, around 1436 according to Graeme Boone,194 gives us a particularly clear insight into two aspects of Du Fay’s compositional world (see Exx. 16.9 and 16.10). One is the manner in which in his early maturity he organized the tonal and contrapuntal world of his songs, and the other is his approach to discursive accidentals in the 1430s. The Italian setting was copied in Ox 213 with the note “Romae composuit” added to the ascription, which places its composition between the end of 1428 and August 1433. The curious form of the Italian setting suggested to Pirrotta that it consists of two stanzas with a rentrement that probably should be restricted to the first two lines of the text. The syllable count in the Italian text would normally would be 11, 7, 7, 11, in each quatrain, but lines 1.4 and 2.1 are hypermetric. Du Fay treated all the long lines as twelve syllables, breaking the elisions with rests, so his setting deals with the text as 7+5, 7, 7, and 5 +7. Adapting this to a rondeau cinquain with regular lines of ten syllables resulted in a number of anomalies, even with the addition with a double phrase to accommodate the fifth line. Du Fay sets the first line of the rondeau to the first phrase of the music by having a syllable on every 192 194

Stravinsky, Agon, mm. 114–17. 193 OO Besseler 6, no. 61; OO Planchart 10/5/13. Boone, “Dufay’s Early Songs,” 229.

The Rondeaux Example 16.9 Quel fronte signorille

semibreve in the first three measures, something that happens in none of his other songs. The second line is divided among phrases 2 and 3 and the third is divided between phrases 4 and 5 in a similar manner. As a result, some of the most important internal cadences of the music before the medial cadence, those in measures 6 and 12, fall in mid-phrase in the text. The coordination of text and music in the B section of the piece is considerably smoother, particularly on account of the extraordinarily expressive ending that Du Fay has added to the song. The first change in the French version is the addition of a flat signature to the tenor and contratenor, which is present in three of the six surviving

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The Songs Example 16.10 Craindre vous vueil

sources.195 This will affect the possibilities for musica ficta in measures 9– 11 and beyond. The two new notes in measure 7 could well have been added to accommodate the new text, but their presence considerably 195

Ox 213, EscA, and Cape. Lei 1084, MuEm, and Tr 90 have no signature but are considerably less reliable.

The Rondeaux

changes the formal shape of the song. The opening two phrases, where the main tonal architecture of the piece is first exposed, present the authentic octave, c′–c″, in the cantus in two segments, the first a closed statement of the pentachord c′–g′, and the second an open statement of the tetrachord g′–c″, supported by the tenor presenting the plagal octave: first the tetrachord g–c′ and then the pentachord c′–g′, each in a closed arch that returns to the note of origin. The E fa in the contratenor in measure 8, together with the new key signatures in the lower voices, triggers a series of musica ficta notes in the next four measures. It might be that the two notes added to the cantus in measure 7 were included simply to allow the text, oddly as it might be placed, to be sung, but the result of this is that the third phrase of the cantus now covers the entire octave c″–c′, descending with an interval structure (and sonority) quite different from what we hear in the first two phrases. The next two phrases once more cover the entire ambitus of the cantus, and are treated as a mirror of the first two phrases: measures 10–12 present the pentachord not as a closed gesture as in measures 1–4, but as an open one and with the tone color of measures 7–8, while measures 13–17 present the tetrachord, with the tone color of measures 4–7, but as a closed gesture. Thus for the first half of the rondeau every presentation of the melodic material of the song has been different. Measures 18–25 are a clearly articulated double phrase, first presenting the octave c″–c′ descending but without any altered note, and thus with the tonal color of the opening. This openly stepwise and entirely diatonic descent of the cantus is matched by the strongest contrary motion of the contratenor, which reaches its highest note at measure 21 (where it is the highest sounding voice in the texture). This is followed by the largest leap in the cantus, as it rises to c″ for a descent to g′. This is the only time in the song where the upper tetrachord is presented alone in a downward gesture, and the only time where this tetrachord has the B fa in the cantus. The burst of energy in the contratenor and the contrary motion in the tenor in measures 22.3–23 have the effect of making us hear that B fa of the cantus as an accented note, and the extravagant part-writing in measure 24 also calls attention to this point. After all of this, the opening of the added double phrase also sounds extraordinary. Melodically, the cantus, for the first time in the entire song, duplicates the large gesture of a previous phrase: the c′–g′ rise through an E fa we heard in measures 10–12, but here the cantus starts at the bottom of its range with the other two parts above it, and essentially stays there for seven semibreves before rising to the top of the texture. Finally, measures 30–33 restore both the phrase structure and the tone color of the first two phrases of the song. Whatever the problems

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in the relationship between text and music in this piece, it remains the most thoroughgoing display of varietas in Du Fay’s song repertory, all the more astonishing because of the nearly schematic simplicity of its melodic construction. It is almost as if Du Fay were showing all the ways one can go through and combine a pentachord and a tetrachord. With this song, too, we meet a subtle change in Du Fay’s songwriting; after Craindre vous vueil, the whimsical texts of many of the early songs, as well as the May Day and New Year texts, largely disappear, not only in the rondeaux but in all of his song production, and with a few exceptions the texts become poems dealing with amour courtois. Still, for all that it is a contrafact text, Craindre vous vueil is immediate and more emotionally intense than the texts of most of the later songs; compared with it, the text of Vostre bruit et vostre grand fame reads as almost impersonal. Most of the songs listed in Table 16.5 as being from the years in Florence and Savoy come most likely from the years 1437–1439, when Du Fay had returned to the court of Savoy. Their transmission is fragile, most are unica, and all but one of them appear in Tr 87, MuEm, Str 222, or Bux, manuscripts that in terms of their song repertory reflect the music from the Council of Basel. Only Je prens congié is found in a Veneto manuscript, the additions to the Reina codex, and Mille bonjours was also copied in the late fifteenth century in Italy (EscB) and Spain (PC 4), although its early sources are MuEm, Str 222, and Bux. The sources are full of small errors, and most of the songs were copied with only incipits or at most the refrain. At the same time, there appear to be all kinds of musical intertextuality among them. Je prends congié and Mille bonjours have the kinds of color shifts produced by inflected notes one finds in Craindre vous vueil, and the end of Je prens congié sounds like a further expansion of the shift that marks the final phrase of Craindre vous vueil. The opening gambits of J’ay grant doulour and Je n’ay doubté are very close, although the songs develop in different ways, while Puisque celle qui me tient en prison recalls the writing of the Benedicamus Domino 2, which is probably also a piece from the late 1430s. A few of the songs have strange moments: J’ay grant dolour has a leap from e′ to b′ in measure 26, where the B has to be flatted. In context the passage sounds plausible, and Du Fay on more than one occasion has a direct melodic diminished fifth.196 The cantus cadence in measure 34 of the same song is not only inelegant but very uncommon in Du Fay’s music. In Je n’ay doubté, at measure 40, the second beat has a harsh-sounding 6/4 sonority; the only plausible emendation of the passage is reversing the 196

Sherr, “Thoughts on Some of the Masses,” 323–24.

The Rondeaux

rhythm of the tenor, from breve–semibreve to semibreve–breve, which produces parallel fifths between the tenor and the contratenor, which is not unheard of in Du Fay’s early works, but something he usually went to considerable lengths to avoid later on. The texture and sonority of all of these songs is basically very similar to those we find in the early songs, but the lines are slightly more relaxed, and the kind of motivic reaction one encounters in pieces like Ce moys de may is generally absent. The boundaries suggested in Table 16.5 are both vague and porous. Just as the small group of songs just discussed could include some pieces from the 1440s, I have preferred not to make a sharp distinction between the songs Du Fay might have written in his decade in Cambrai and those written in the 1450s in Savoy. By 1440 Du Fay’s style as a song composer was fully evolved; the resulting works are generally more homogeneous in their musical texture, which makes purely stylistic attempts at a chronological order far more problematic. Still, the transmission of some of the songs, which appear first in manuscripts copied in the 1440s, as well as the texts of others, which point to the time when the courts of Savoy and France met in 1455, allow some songs to be placed in one or another of the two decades. In terms of the manuscript sources, the most problematic is Por, which had originally been dated in the late 1440s, was redated by Fallows to the early 1460s on the basis of his assumption that En triumphant is a piece commenting upon the death of Gilles de Bins, and has now returned to a date of ca. 1455 (for a discussion of En triumphant, see later in this chapter). At least one of the songs from the 1440s, Donnés l’assault,197 was revised in the 1450s with the addition of a fourth voice found in Tr 93 and in Mel, and was probably in Du Fay’s mind as he composed Il sera par vous – L’homme armé in 1459. Donnés l’assault is signed with in Tr 93 and Mel, the two sources from the 1450s, after Du Fay stopped using cut signatures, but is rigidly organized in pairs of breves, which in his music always indicates a fast triple meter. The song looks back in some ways to earlier songs such as Bon jour bon mois, but it is laden with the inflected notes that Du Fay uses in his music of the mid-1430s. The absence of imitation in most of the song makes it more noticeable that both the A and B section begin with a point of imitation involving the three original voices. The motive of the first point is a simple repeated-note figure on c, g, and c′ that does not to call attention to itself as imitation; the second, although more elaborate, is veiled by the contratenor figuration (with the added second contratenor making the veil thicker), and it involves the cantus and 197

OO Besseler 6, no. 70; OO Planchart 10/5/16.

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the tenor, with the contratenor having a shortened version of the motive. The second point, rather than opening the texture, is in unison imitation and begins with a prominent E fa. Significantly, after the first phrase of the B section virtually all inflected notes disappear, and Du Fay even avoids the B fa in the lower voices, so that the end of the song shows a marked change in color. This change becomes a particularly effective means of contrast as the full rondeau form is sung. Far more typical of the songs of the 1440s is Franc cuer gentil,198 setting an acrostic poem referring to one “Franchoise,” who remains unidentified. This is one of Du Fay’s most crystalline pieces, both in terms of its melodic and contrapuntal structure and its formal layout. Each section of the piece consists of two phrases, with all but the first provided with an extension. The piece begins with imitation in all three voices, starting with the contratenor (another sign of the compositional importance of the contratenor in Du Fay’s music). The imitation between the cantus and the tenor, however, is the most extended in the song. Du Fay makes a virtue of a contrapuntal bind he finds himself in as the cantus enters, which leads him to start the cantus on a G rather than an F, and measures 1–4 of the piece become a microcosm of what the song is about in terms of tonal goals: a piece that appears to be in F through most of its length but ends in C.199 The most influential song by Du Fay comes most likely from the mid1450s: Le serviteur hault guerdoné,200 which survives in fifteen sources and two intabulations and served as a cantus firmus in five Mass cycles and a motet.201 Besseler rejected it with an explanation that the ascription to Du Fay in MC 871 is wrong because all Du Fay’s late songs are in duple meter.202 Both of his assumptions are wrong: some very late songs, such as Dieu gard la bone, are in triple meter, and Le serviteur, copied in Por, which has been redated back to the mid-1450s, has a text that suggests that the author is a French court poet.203 As Fallows notes, a number of other songs, including En triumphant and Par le regard, also copied in Por, provide a context for Le serviteur.204 The piece is, contrapuntally, 198 199

200 202 203

204

OO Besseler 6, no. 74; OO Planchart 10/5/22. The B♭ in the cantus in m. 3 in Tr 93 is an absurd solecism in terms of the discant structure of the piece. OO Besseler 6, no. 92; OO Planchart 10/5/37. 201 Fallows, Catalogue, 251–53. Besseler, “Falsche Autornamen,” 203. The text with its persona stating that he is one of the most fortunate men of France suggests, albeit ambiguously, that it is the work of a French court poet. One would perhaps allow such an expression in a Burgundian poet at the time, but it strikes me as less plausible from a Savoyard poet. Fallows, The Songs, 261.

The Rondeaux Example 16.11 Le serviteur hault guerdoné (start of the B section)

considerably more dense than Franc cuer gentil; it uses imitation less consistently but with very deliberate dramatic effect. In the A section the first two lines of the text are set to fairly dense nonimitative counterpoint, but the third begins with a rising line in unison imitation at the semibreve in all voices, with the cantus descending for the first time to g at the start of its motive. This is accompanied by a shift in the sonority, from C (with two flats) to G, leading to the medial cadence on D (an old-fashioned point of rest for a piece with a C final). The B section also begins with unison imitation in all three parts, which ends in a harmonically static moment with the characteristic sound of the motive becoming something like an ostinato (see Ex. 16.11). Characteristically, the imitation here begins with the contratenor, and the nonmotivic material in the other voices manages to keep the same sonority throughout the passage without being the same at any point. The final line of the refrain is also set in imitation with a motive that is a loose inversion of that which opens the B section and is used by Du Fay to restore the sense of a C final to the song. The end of this phrase is contrapuntally the most active moment in the song. It has the most extended imitation, in this case between cantus and tenor only, and is a loose inversion of the first imitative moment of the piece, producing a forceful ending. A number of other songs that were probably the product of Du Fay’s interaction with the court of France at St-Pourçain in 1455, as he notes in his letter to Piero de’ Medici,205 can be teased out in his canon because the texts are by poets from the circle of Charles d’Orléans. Notable among them is Les douleurs dont me sens tel somme,206 set to a poem by Antoine de Cuise, Seigneur de la Motte. The work begins with a mensuration canon in the upper voices (see Ex. 16.12). The song is a canon between two voices in 205

See p. 240.

206

OO Besseler 6, no. 84; OO Planchart 10/5/38.

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The Songs Example 16.12 Les douleurs (beginning)

different mensurations, and , supported by two concordans (both labeled contratenor in Di), each of them in a different mensuration. Only cantus 1 and the two supporting voices are notated. Whether or not the piece is a mensuration canon or not depends on how one reads the rubrics. Besseler published the song as a three-voice song, but puzzled by the rubric in Niv, printed it twice, once in duple and once in triple time.207 Already Geneviève Thibault had described the song as a four-voice piece, and published the opening after Niv,208 and Charles Hamm published the entire song in 1966.209 This version was also adopted by Fallows in the revision of Besseler’s edition.210 The version of Niv, which is what Hamm and Fallows print, is perfectly usable and makes good contrapuntal sense, but it is based on a misreading of the canon of Di by the scribe of Niv, and that probably led scholars also to misread the script of the Dijon scribe. The canon in Niv reads clearly “Ad secundum perfecte,” that of Di “Auge 2 m perfecte,” with the “2” of 207 208

209

OO Besseler 6, no. 84, first edn. Thibault, “Le xve siècle,” 158, where she also mentions the name of the poet; id., “La Chanson française au xve siècle,” 903–5. Hamm, Review of Guillelmi Dufay Opera Omnia. 210 OO Besseler 6, rev. edn., no. 84.

The Rondeaux

secundum written very similarly to the letter “r.”211 The single mensuration in Niv is correct, since the canon “Auge 2 m [cantum] perfecte” makes the mensuration in Di superfluous. After this the only moment of ambiguity in the song is the second f of Cantus 2, which the singer needs to sing as a perfect breve, so it is possible that the canon consisted of two phrases, and the canon in Niv reflects a phrase directing the singer to sing the second f as a perfect breve as well. After this the triple-meter part has lost three semibreves to the duple-meter part, and the rest of the song functions as a straightforward canon until measures 13–15 of cantus 1, where the breve rests increase the distance between the parts to six semibreves. The opening in mensuration canon is contrapuntally as good as that of the simple canon. It is also by far the lectio difficilior, and one of the last things that we could imagine is that any kind of mensuration canon happens by chance. The piece, in terms of the written ranges, has the lowest notes in Du Fay’s entire canon. In fact, since the cantilena Ave virgo quae de caelis is surely not by Du Fay,212 none of his works until the later 1440s, with the exception of the Alleluia V. O patriarcha pauperum for St. Francis, reaches low F a step below Gamma ut, while this song, within thirty-six breves, has thirtysix notes below Gamma ut, including six instances of the low C. This might be a reflection of Du Fay’s meeting with Jehan de Ockeghem and hearing his voice, both of which would have taken place precisely at the same time when he met Cuise.213 The case of En triumphant de cruel dueil,214 which Fallows regards as a lament for the death of Binchois, and thus dates it (and consequently Por) after 1460, is very problematic.215 The recent work of Lockwood has again made a case for the manuscript being earlier, probably going back to ca. 1455.216 The song survives in Por with a corrupt refrain, and Fallows has made a good case for the complete text being a poem found in the Rohan poetry manuscript.217 The song text cites the incipits of two wellknown texts that were set by Binchois, Dueil angoisseux and Triste plaisir. There are two ways one can view that: one is that the song is citing the texts (but not the music) of two well-known songs by Binchois; the other is that the poem itself is quoting the incipits of two of the best-known poems by two of the most important poets of the fifteenth century, Christine de Pizan 211 213 214 216 217

I am indebted to Bonnie Blackburn for this reading. 212 See p. 394. Planchart, “Du Fay and the Style of Molinet,” 68. OO Besseler 6, no. 72; OO Planchart 10/5/18. 215 Fallows, “Robertus de Anglia,” 112–13. Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, rev. edn., 122–25. Guillaume Dufay: Two Songs, ed. Fallows; id., The Songs, 191–92.

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(Dueil angoisseux) and Alain Chartier (Triste plaisir).218 The second view is one that aligns the poem with a practice that was quite prevalent in fifteenth-century poetry, something that writers like Molinet indulged in quite frequently. This would be a simpler explanation of the presence of these incipits in the poem, but Fallows, with his extraordinary ear for fifteenth-century music, argues that the music itself contains hints of Binchois, and the beginning of the secunda pars of the rondeau is reminiscent of the similar place in Binchois’s Comme femme desconfortée.219 That Fallows sensed that the beginning of the secunda pars sounded like a quotation of another song is simply a symptom of his immense knowledge of the repertory of fifteenth-century song as sounding music and not just as notes on paper, but in this case it is possible that the literary allusions misled his recollection. Recently Sean Gallagher has made an even more convincing case that the passage is a near quotation, not of a Binchois song but of a passage in Du Fay’s virelai Malhereux cuer.220 This would also be in line with the relatively large number of self-references that one finds in Du Fay’s music throughout his entire career. In his later years, just as Du Fay had come to know the music of Ockeghem in the 1450s and incorporated a number of traits of the music of the younger composer into his own music, he must have come to know the music of Antoine Busnoys, particularly the songs. As in the first pieces to show Ockeghem’s influence, where one encounters a certain friction between Du Fay’s own style and Ockeghem’s,221 something similar happens in a few of the late songs. In Vostre bruit et vostre grant fame,222 setting what is probably the most formal and almost impersonal amour courtois text in Du Fay’s canon, the traces of Busnoys’s style are quite apparent in the long melodic lines of the song opening and the extended imitation between the structural voices arranged in an almost mechanical manner, in alternation between tenor–cantus and cantus–tenor in successive phrases throughout. The only variant comes in the last phrase, a double point of imitation where a rest in the tenor, followed by a new motive, shortens the interval of the imitation, something akin (but done less flexibly) to what happens in the duets of the Credo of the Missa Ave regina caelorum. There 218

219 220

221 222

This view is proposed by Nicoletta Gossen, Musik in Texten, 147. She also proposes that the text in Por, with all of its problems, is probably an independent poem and fits better with Du Fay’s music. Fallows, The Songs, 191. Gallagher, “Musical Quotation.” The passages in question are mm. 26–35 of Malhereux cuer and mm. 14–21 of En triumphant (references from OO Planchart 10/3/3 and 10/5/18). Cf. Crocker’s perceptive comments in his History of Musical Style, 156–60. OO Besseler 6, no. 83; OO Planchart 10/5/59.

The Rondeaux

is also a certain rhythmic squareness to the entire song, which is softened by the simple melodic elegance of the writing. Still, it shows a certain stylistic discomfort, as though Du Fay is still “digesting” a new style. Something like this, in the case of Du Fay and Ockeghem, was noted by Crocker in his comments of the Missae L’homme armé of both men.223 Occasionally the whimsical side one finds in early Du Fay shows itself in the very late songs. Puisque vous estez campieur224 is a perfect example of this. Structurally the song is very similar to Vostre bruit, but even more rigidly organized as a straightforward canon at the octave between tenor and cantus. The organization in this case is a reflection of the text, a context that begins with the terminology of a joust or a tournament, but is really about who can drink and eat more. Here the rhythmic squareness one finds in Vostre bruit is turned into a virtue: the parts declaim the text largely in semibreves until the final phrase, lending the text-setting something of the style of the chanson rustique;225 each line of the poem is set to a phrase, and the declamation emphasizes the start of the phrase, which then broadens out slightly. All of this underlines the forward motion of the music, and the canon, given the regularity of the phrases, portrays the dogged determination of the two contenders. This relatively square canonic structure is accompanied by a wildly careening contratenor, which covers a range of an eleventh and is motivically and rhythmically entirely unrelated to the other voices. Only at the very end do the canonic voices echo what the contratenor is doing with a sudden burst of rhythmic activity, a true pirouette to end the song. Here Du Fay, whom Cumming aptly called “a master of generic mixture,”226 produces a true polyphonic chanson rustique. Some of the procedures in the song show an indebtedness to Busnoys, but the style of the younger composer has been entirely internalized and is being used for a piece that is, in many ways, a reworking of the kinds of songs Du Fay wrote in his youth.227 The discussion of Puisque vous estez campieur brings us to another late song of Du Fay that, like Le serviteur, was misguidedly asserted as inauthentic by Besseler, in this case on account of a conflicting attribution to Ockeghem in Pix. The attribution to Du Fay is in MC 871, a manuscript that Besseler distrusted, although in fact all of his suspicions about

223 224 225 226 227

Crocker, A History of Musical Style, 157–60. OO Besseler 6, no. 81; OO Planchart 10/5/53. Cf. Zazulia’s perceptive comments in “Corps contre corps,” 349. Cumming, The Motet, 286. Cf. Planchart, “Du Fay and the Style of Molinet,” 64 and 66.

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The Songs

the attributions in this manuscript have now been proven wrong.228 The song is Departés vous Malebouche.229 Fallows at first tended to agree with Besseler,230 but in his notes to the revised edition of the songs he noted a series of similarities between this piece and a number of the late songs: the opening phrase is similar to that of Dieu gard la bone, albeit treated in this case in imitation by all three voices. The first section consists of three long phrases cadencing on D, A, and E as the medial cadence, an old-fashioned point for the medial cadence in the late fifteenth century. The first and third phrases involve imitation, but the second does not. The motive of the third phrase, imitated between cantus and tenor is, note for note, the music found in Puisque vous estez campieur at “a scavoir moy,” to the point that it sounds like a deliberate quotation, and the entire phrase sounds like a summation of the kinds of gestures one finds at the end of that song. The B section consists of two phrases, the second one in sesquialtera (in black notation), which recalls at the beginning the sesquialtera section in the Christe of the Missa Ave regina, and this use of sesquialtera at the end is common to a group of late songs by Du Fay, including Dieu gard la bone, Belle veulliés moy vengier, and the combinative Je vous pri. Further, the personifications in the text are suggestive: Malebouche and Jonesse appear in Le Roman de la Rose, but Envie, Aysance, and Noblesse do not. They are found, however, in Martin le Franc’s Le Champion des dames, and it is worth remembering that among Du Fay’s possessions at his death was a now lost book of “eclogues,” by Martin le Franc.231 The extraordinarily balanced world of Du Fay’s late songs is most apparent in Dieu gard la bone.232 It shares a number of traits with Departés vous, Belle veulliés moy vengier, and Je vous pri, but in many ways it presents these elements in the most sophisticated and balanced manner. In a number of these songs Du Fay returns to the rather old-fashioned use of the note above the final for the medial cadence, but in Dieu gard la bone he makes something of a jeu d’esprit out of it, combining it with the use of sesquialtera (in the manner that he uses it in the late Masses) and a judicious use of imitation. The song begins with two long phrases of nonimitative counterpoint, with one of 228

229 230 231

232

OO Besseler 6:xiv, in an absurdly laconic manner. As Fallows notes in The Songs, 265, part of the problem is that Besseler’s transcription was incorrect, creating contrapuntal problems in the piece. OO Besseler 6, no. 93; OO Planchart 10/5/14. Fallows, Dufay, 237, but with a retraction on p. 311. LAN, 4G 1313, p. 6: “Item pour i petit livret en paper contenant eglogas magistri Martini le Franc, 2s.” OO Besseler 6, no. 79; OO Planchart 10/5/15.

The Rondeaux

Du Fay’s most melodious contratenors, and enormous melismas in each of the phrases. The texted section of the first phrase explores the entire range of D authentic, cadencing on a′, and its extension the entire range of D plagal, cadencing on d′. The texted part of the second phrase once again covers the entire authentic range, but starting on a′ and ending on e′, and the extension covers the pentachord d′–a′, leading to the medial cadence on E. The beginning of the B section of the rondeau is extraordinary. The contratenor, which was on b at the medial cadence, moves to c′ and has a figure that descends to a before the other voices re-enter on an A sonority with the cantus on c″. The entire phrase is centered on A, and leads to a firm cadence on A, which would have been the “modern” goal for a medial cadence. It is at this point where the three voices switch to sesquialtera, beginning with the contratenor, and a point of imitation at the octave lasting four breves ensues between tenor and cantus, the only imitation in the entire song. The entire B section is one long arc of music with text and an equally long extension, both covering the entire octave d′–d″, and both starting from the midpoint, a′, in the texted section and g′ in the extension. The surface of the song is not quite as tonally adventurous as that of Belle veulliés moy vengier,233 which also has a more varied set of tonal goals: G, D, and C in the first part and D, G, and C in the second, but its tonal structure, although simpler, is more sophisticated, and so is its use of sesquialtera: in Belle veulliés moy vengier the entire second part is in sesquialtera and imitation is also used throughout the second part. The combination of the displaced modern cadence point and the use of sesquialtera in Dieu gard la bone is considerably subtler in its effect. Although both songs end with an extended sesquialtera section, it is in Dieu gard la bone where one hears most prominently the echoes of the gravitas of the late Masses with their extended use of sesquialtera at the end of movements. In terms of the text Dieu gard la bone also represents something of a change. Compared with the almost impersonal tone of Vostre bruit, it sounds like a return to the direct passion one finds in Craindre vous vueil, filtered through the refinement of the late fifteenth-century amour courtois style. The opening, no longer in direct speech, invokes a blessing upon the lady, and the remainder is both a recitation of her virtues and a simple statement of the poet’s devotion, all the more affecting because it is so unadorned. Departés vous and Belle veulliés moy vengier belong to an older tradition of allegorical poetry, and I would not be surprised, should the lost book of Eclogues of Martin le Franc turn up, if both poems were found there. The intensity of Dieu gard la bone, both in terms of text and 233

OO Besseler 6, no. 78; OO Planchart 10/5/7.

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music, is also found in the combinative Je vous pris, and the common formal and tonal traits of these four late pieces, Je vous pri, Departés vous, Belle veulliés moy vengier, and Dieu gard la bone, make of them a kind of tetralogy of late songs, a mixture of innovations, archaic traits, and utterly personal approaches, that makes it quite tempting to compare them with Johannes Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge, Op. 120, a late collection that is at once a summation of his style and a glimpse into the future. The crystalline intensity and luminosity of these very late songs, together with works such as the Missa Ave regina caelorum, call to mind Dylan Thomas’s extraordinary phrase in the poem about the death of his father: “Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight.”234 234

Thomas, The Collected Poems, 128.

Appendix 1 Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

Among the surviving records of the cathedral four series of documents are the main sources of information concerning the singing men, the small vicars, in the fifteenth century: the accounts of the small vicars (LAN, 4 G 6787–93; 1361–1509), the accounts of the aumosne (LAN, 4 G 7757–73; 1378–1516), the accounts of wine and bread (LAN, 4 G 7425–73; 1427–1500), and the chapter acts (CBM 1052–65 and LAN, 4 G 1090; 1360–1508). Two other series provide invaluable complementary information: the accounts of the grand community of chaplains (LAN, 4 G 6882–6998; 1380–1510), and the accounts of the small community of chaplains (LAN, 4 G 7253–58; 1463–1521). References to small vicars appear in isolated cases in other series, such as the accounts of the fabric or those of the grand métier. Each of these series has lacunae and the kind of information they provide is different, so it may be useful to summarize briefly these matters here.

Accounts of the Small Vicars With the exception of the accounts of the grand vicars, for which only one register survives from the entire fifteenth century, the accounts of the small vicars is the series that has suffered the largest losses in the cathedral documentation; furthermore, many of the surviving registers are damaged by humidity and mildew: the parchment is disintegrating and appears to be beyond restoration. The series, as it exists today, actually transmits documents from two different series, as follows: A. The accounts of the office of the small vicars, headed by one of the canons and written by one of the chaplains, often a former small vicar. They run from a (varying) weekday near the feast of St. Barnabas (11 June) of one year to the day before the weekday a year later. They are all written on parchment and the following survive: LAN, 4 G 6787, four accounts: 1361–1362, 1386–1387, 1393–1394, 1399–1400; LAN, 4 G 6789, eleven accounts, 1409–1410, 1411–1412, 1453–1454, 1458–1459, 1459–1460,

689

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

1462–1463, 1465–1466, 1466–1467, 1467–1468, 1468–1469, 1469–1470; LAN, 4 G 6790, one account, 1463–1464; LAN, 6791, eleven accounts as follows: 1483–1484, 1474–1475, 1486–1487, 1487–1488, 1491–1492, 1492– 1493, 1493–1494, 1494–1495, 1495–1496, 1496–1497, 1497–1498; LAN, 4 G 6792, one account, 1499–1500; LAN, 4 G 6793, six accounts, 1501– 1502, 1503–1504, 1504–1505, 1506–1507, 1507–1508, 1508–1509. B. An internal account of the community of small vicars, written in French by one of the small vicars and submitted to his companions. These are written on paper and the following survive: LAN, 4 G 7488, two accounts, 1409–1410 and 1410–1411. In terms of giving us the names and the tenure of the small vicars, these accounts provide very little information, since they record financial transactions. Twice a year, once before All Saints and once before Lent, the vicars were granted a grace by the chapter: for robes before All Saints, and for herring before Lent. In each case the entry is followed by a list of the names of those vicars who received the grace. Often the names recorded are just a given name, a diminutive, or a sobriquet. The accounts also transmit the disbursements for the weekly distributions to those vicars who took part in the Masses at the chapel of the Trinity. These entries include the number of vicars, semivicars,1 and choristers present each week, but only two or three times in the century do they explain, when the number changes, who left or joined the ensemble. The entries concerning the yearly buying of cloth for the robes of the choristers occasionally mention a chorister by name, mostly the names of those who were beyond the number of six (and later seven) that represented the normal complement. Finally, a number of entries for occasional graces to a vicar or a chorister will record their name, infrequently as a full name. The internal accounts in French give one or two lists of all those vicars who received distributions throughout the year. Thus the accounts of the small vicars provide us only with snapshots of the ensemble in late October and early March of each year plus occasional references to individual vicars, some dated and some not.

1

The accounts and the acts refer a number of times to “semivicars” without any further explanation. From the contexts it appear these were either probationary appointments or appointments at half-stipend, even though the duties of men so described were apparently the same as those of the full vicars.

Accounts of Wine and Bread

Accounts of the Aumosne The accounts run from the feast of St. John Baptist (24 June) of one year to the vigil of St. John the next. Those considered here run from 1378 to 1515 with the following lacunae: 1379–1383, 1384–1385, 1386–1387, 1388– 1391, 1394–1395, 1402–1403, 1406–1407, 1437–1438, 1443–1444, 1464– 1465, 1467–1468, 1488–1490, 1495–1496, 1500–1515. The aumosne paid half of most the expenses of the small vicars; thus it duplicates what one finds in the accounts of the small vicars concerning the robes for the choristers and the occasional grace to a small vicar. It also duplicates the gift for robes in All Saints and for herring in Lent, but unfortunately it does not list the names of the vicars receiving these until once or twice at the end of the century, so it does not fill the numerous lacunae left by the missing registers for the small vicars. In terms of the occasional graces, however, it adds considerably because even when we have both kinds of registers the aumosne records numerous other graces made to small vicars and equally numerous graces made to the magister puerorum and the magister scholarum for the upkeep of supernumerary choristers and those who had just finished their term but remained as clerks in the cathedral. The entries in the aumosne do provide a substantial number of full names for the small vicars.

Accounts of Wine and Bread Like the aumosne, these accounts run from 24 June of one year to 23 June of the next. What were originally two separate accounts were brought in 1427 under a single administrator, although still entered as a computus vini followed by a computus panis. In 1439–1440 the decision was made to record in the computus panis the daily distributions of bread to the small vicars. The usual form this takes is a list of those vicars present on 24 June, and then a note of the date when the number changed, giving the name of who left or who joined, the number of days in that period, and the amounts of the expense. Occasionally the scribe will simply write the complete list afresh in the middle of the fiscal year. A grand vicar was charged with noting marrantiae (defects) in the performance of the office, which usually cost the offending vicar that day’s distribution. With only one lacuna

691

692

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

(1450–1451) this gives an extraordinarily detailed account of the number of vicars working in the cathedral virtually day by day from 1439 to 1500. The wine accounts, like those of the small vicars, use for the most part only a given name, often a diminutive or a sobriquet, so that the full name of the vicar has to be found in other documents.

Chapter Acts The volumes of acts with which we are concerned here, labeled with letters from A to S perhaps in the sixteenth century, run continuously from 1364 to 1508. Three of these volumes are now lost: F, going from 1428 to 1435; H, going from 1439 to 1442; and N, going from 1468 to 1476. It is probably wrong, however, to regard them as a single series despite their continuous old signatures, which are probably not original. The nature of the information they transmit is not always the same, although there is a good deal of overlap, and the differences cannot be entirely explained by the different times in which they were compiled or the priorities of the secretaries of the chapter. A few remarks in them suggest that they are what survive of what was apparently two roughly parallel series of registers that recorded slightly different kinds of activities in the chapter. In fact, in at least one instance we may have the two parallel registers for one period, since the originally unsigned CBM 1053 covers largely the same period as Register B, now CBM 1054. These registers note a good number of the appointments as well as the firings (although by no means even a majority of them) of the small vicars, sometimes with full names and sobriquets but also sometimes with a blank space when the chapter’s secretary did not know or hear the name. Further, the full names of the vicars, often with their qualification as vicars, are given whenever they collate or resign a benefice, when they serve as witness, when they are subject to discipline, when they are promoted to grand vicars, and for those whose careers ended in the cathedral when their testaments are presented to the chapter or their benefices are collated to someone else per obitum. In this they provide a wealth of biographical details for these men that goes beyond their years as small vicars and sometimes beyond their years at Cambrai, as for example when someone no longer in residence resigned or exchanged a benefice by procuration.

Accounts of the Communities of Chaplains

Accounts of the Communities of Chaplains Virtually all vicars who remained in Cambrai for a number of years joined one of the two communities of chaplains in the cathedral. The accounts of these communities provide a record of the reception of chaplains into the community, and extended lists each year of all of the members who received distributions, giving their full names, sometimes in Latin and sometimes in French, which allows us to have a sense of the length of their service to the cathedral. This list, in alphabetical order by first names, includes all the vicars whose names turn up in the documents, with a short précis of what we know about their service in the cathedral and their lives. The aumosne records also give the names of a good number of choristers. These are not recorded here except in those cases where their full names and further careers can be determined. Exceptionally, a few men who were surely choristers or vicars, but whose status as such can only be deduced indirectly, largely because of the loss of documentation before 1439, have been listed as well. Their pattern of employment at the cathedral makes it likely that they were small vicars (cf. the case of Jehan Caron 1). The list also includes choristers whose full name we have but who are not documented as small vicars, or those whose service as choristers can be inferred with some certainty (cf. the case of Barthélemy Poignare). In all such exceptional cases the reasons for inclusion are stated as fully as possible. In a few instances last names or toponymics are missing in all surviving documentation, and an equally small number of singers appear in the documentation as “some vicar” or “some tenorist.” These are referred to as “Anonymous” with a number.

List of Small Vicars Adam (Magister Adam) was a small vicar from 7 September 1463 to 20 April 1465 (LAN, 4 G 7462, fol. 5v; 7463, fol. 6r). He is most likely Adam Malart, documented as a grand vicar in 1485 (CBM 1061, fol. 241v), who died shortly before 20 September 1489 and whose grand vicariate went to Denis de Hollain (CBM 1061, fols. 346r, 347r). The acts do not record his appointment as grand vicar, possibly because it took place between 1467 and 1476, for which the volume of acts (old register N) is lost.

693

694

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

Adam de Bailleux is documented as a chorister in an undated entry in the aumosne for 1429–1430, implying he had been a chorister the previous fiscal year as well (LAN, 4 G 7760 [1429–1430], fol. 10v), and as a small vicar in entries for 14 March and 15 April 1435 (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1434–1435], fols. 10v–11r). He is the Adinet or Adenet in the lists of small vicars in the wine accounts from 24 June 1439 until his promotion to grand vicar on 8 June 1442 (LAN, 4 G 7439, fol. 8r; 7441, fol. 9r). His promotion would have been recorded in the lost register H of the acts, but an entry of 3 November 1442 refers to him by his full name as a grand vicar, confirming the identification (LAN, 4 G 1090, fol. 10v). Adam exchanged his grand vicariate for the parish church of Antoing with Jehan de Maldet on 16 March 1446 (CBM 1058, fol. 38v), and from this point disappears from the Cambrai records. Adam Hocquet is first documented as small vicar in an act of 1 November 1437, where he served as a witness (CBM 1057, fol. 58v). The earliest mention of Hocquet known to me is as a (small) vicar in St-Géry taking part in the obit of the emperor Charles the Bald on 6 October 1414 (LAN, 7 G 2411 [1414–1415], fol. 14r [Adinet]), and as the clerk in the chaplaincy of the Salve that same year, when Du Fay was the chaplain (LAN, 7 G 2918, fol. 19r). He became a fullfledged chaplain at St-Géry in 1418–1419 and remained until 1437– 1438 (LAN, 7 G, 2923, fol. 6r; 2945, fol. 4r). On 8 November 1437 he obtained the chaplaincy of St. Nicaise resigned by Symon Gossart (CBM, 1057, fol. 60v). That year he joined the grand community of chaplains and appears in the lists until 1445–1446 (LAN, 4 G 6098, fol. 14v; 6913, fol. 20v). His name is in the first list of small vicars in the wine accounts on 24 June 1439 (LAN, 4 G 7439, fol. 8r), and he served until 24 October 1446 (CBM 1058, fol. 84v; LAN, 4 G 7446, fol. 6v). He died on 18 December 1446 and Du Fay was one of his executors (CBM 1058, fol. 91v). Alain Victor was received as a small vicar on 4 April 1500 (CBM 1064, fol. 245r) but began serving on 28 May (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1499–1500], fol. 8v). On 27 June he was granted a leave until St. Rémy (1 October) to visit his parents and given a certificate that he had belonged to the cathedral for some time (CBM 1064, fol. 236v). Albert Marchier, tenorist. He was a small vicar from 1 March to 19 November 1468 and from 5 April to 16 May 1469 (LAN, 4 G 7466, fol. 5r; 7467, fol. 6r). His last name appears only on his reception in the account of the small vicars (LAN, 4 G 7869 [1467–1468], fol. 7r).

List of Small Vicars

Alexander Ackerman (Agricola) was a small vicar from 8 February to 14 May 1476 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1475–1476], fol. 7v). His identity is established by an entry in the aumosne dated 8 March 1476 granting him £4, which gives his full name (LAN, 4 G 7766 [1475–1476], fol. 15r). See Wegman et al., “Alexander Agricola.” Andrieu du Mez (Mes, Metz, Mays) was a small vicar from 10 February 1460 to 23 June 1500 (LAN, 7458, fol. 5v; 7472, fol. 8r–v).2 The canons decided to remove him on 13 May 1500 (CBM 1064, 251v), but apparently he was allowed to finish the fiscal year, since the wine account does not record his departure. Over the years his name in the wine accounts changes back and forth from Andreas to Druet and Du Mez. On 10 February 1462, together with Nicaise Bourdin, he was charged with assaulting Adam Nicolai and shedding blood (CBM 1060, fol. 130r); he was briefly suspended from his vicariate around 26 August 1463 (CBM 1060, fol. 176v). On 15 August 1480 he collated the chaplaincy of Notre-Dame la Flammenghe on the death of Jacques Haurotte, and that same day he resigned the chaplaincy at the altar of St. Nicaise, which went to Robert Lamour (CBM 1061, fol. 114r); on 16 August 1488 he was cited for concubinage (CBM 1061, fol. 317r); on 29 March 1490 he exchanged the parish church of Escaudain [Escohain MS] for that of Raillencourt with Pierre Denglos (CBM 1061, fol. 360r). He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1470– 1471 and appears in the lists until 1508–1509 (LAN, 4 G 6943, fol. 11v; 6995, fol. 34r).3 It is quite probable that he died during the 1508–1509 fiscal year. His chaplaincy in 1470 was probably that of St. Nicaise, and his collation would have been noted in the lost register N of the acts. Andrieu le Petit (Andreas Parvus) was a small vicar from 6 July 1485 to 3 April 1486 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1485–1486], fol. 7r–v). Angelus (no other name recorded) is documented as small vicar in weeks 2–26 in 1409–1410 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1409–1410], fols. 3v and 4v). Anonymous 1, companion of Noel le Clerc, documented as small vicar in 1413–1414 (cf. Noel le Clerc). Anonymous 2, companion of Jehan Noel, documented as small vicar in an undated entry in the aumosne for 1414–1415 (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1414–1415], fol. 7v] (cf. Jehan Noel).

2 3

He was briefly absent from 2 to 24 Aug. 1463 in a breach of discipline (CBM 1060, fol. 176v). His name is only on the second list for 1508–1509, not the first, on fol. 22r.

695

696

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

Anonymous Flemish, “cuidam parvo vicario flammingio,” mentioned in an undated entry in the aumosne for 1412–1413 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1412–1413], fol. 8r). Anonymous tenorist, an unnamed tenorist from Abbeville, served only from 1 to 8 August 1494 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1494–1495], fol. 10r). The wine account refers to him as “cuidam tenorista”; the acts record his reception on 18 July 1494 but leave his name out as well (CBM 1062, fol. 200v). Anselme de Bourbaille is documented as small vicar in an undated entry in the aumosne for 1416–1417 as Anselm (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1416–1417], fol. 9v) and with his full name as having held the feast of fools in 1417–1418 (LAN, 4 G 5052, fol. 15v). By 19 November 1419 he held the chaplaincy of St. Michael,4 which he exchanged with Nicolas de Waspail for a chaplaincy in the parish church of Fontaine-au-Bois (CBM 1056, fol. 73v). He became a grand vicar on 1 November 1419, when Guillaume de Nivers was transferred to another vicariate on the death of Nicaise le Ville (CBM 1056, fol. 73v), and is mentioned in the chapter acts here and there until 1425 (CBM 1056, fols. 83v, 125v, 127r, 128r, 131r, 131v, 133r, 149r), mostly on account of unpaid debts to various creditors. Anselme Doublier was a small vicar from 15 October 1477 to 29 August 1478 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1477–1478], fol. 4v; [1478–1479], fol. 5v). His full name is given only in the act of his reception (CBM 1061, fol. 32v). Antoine (no last name recorded) was a small vicar from 6 June 1488 to 10 July 1490 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1487–1488], fol. 6r; [1489–1490], fol. 6r); since he is also called sire Antoine it is likely that he was already a priest. Antoine de Louvain became a small vicar on 9 June 1498 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1497–1498], fol. 9v; CBM 1064, fol. 71v). He was present throughout 1499–1500. Antoine Dent de Leu, tenorist, was a small vicar from 21 May 1487 to 23 June 1492; his departure is indicated only by his absence from the opening list for 1492–1493 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1486–1487], fol. 7v). Antoine Robillart was a small vicar from 27 October 1475 to 14 May 1476 and from 16 September 1476 to 1 September 1477 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1475–1476], fol. 7v; [1476–1477], fol. 4v; [1477–1478], fol. 4v). He appears to have been in constant trouble with the chapter (CBM 1061, fol. 23v). 4

He is never mentioned in the accounts of the grand community.

List of Small Vicars

Apollonius Scribanus was a small vicar from 30 June to 24 September 1485 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1485–1486], fol. 7r). Argentin (no other name recorded) is documented as small vicar after Lent 1405 and before Lent 1407–1408 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1405–1406], fol. 7v; [1407–1408], fol. 7v). Barthélemy (no last name recorded) was a small vicar from 30 March to 3 May 1497 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1496–1497], fol. 9v–r). The acts record his admission without any name but at the correct date and without any enthusiasm (CBM 1063, fol. 197v). Barthélemy Poignare is not recorded as vicar or chorister in the cathedral documents, but as one of the choristers taken by Grenon to Rome in 1425.5 Born in 1408, probably in Arras (ASV, 202, fols. 30v–31r), he must have been a chorister at Cambrai by early 1425. He was a papal singer (chorister and adult) from June 1425 to September 1433 (ASV, I&E 383, fol. 44v; RAS 827, fol. 165r), was a scriptor to the Council of Basel from at least 1436 to 1438 (TAS, Corte, Materie ecclesiastiche per categorie, Scismi, concilii generali e providenze concernenti la disciplina della Chiesa, Cat. XLV, Mazzo 1, nos. 15–16; Haller et al., Concilium Basiliense, 6:318). He had been granted a canonicate in Arras as early as 1418 (ASV, RL 247, fols. 26v–27v), when he was only ten, and probably went there after Basel. He was a fine calligrapher and in 1446 (as a canon of Arras), he was paid £42 for copying a treaty between the bishop, the chapter, and the city of Cambrai (CBM 1058, fol. 92v), and received presents of wine from the cathedral in September 1447 and January 1448 (LAN, 4 G 5081, fol. 10r–v). In 1451 he copied and signed the illuminated manuscript of Martin le Franc’s Le champion des dames now in Paris (Paris, BnF, fr. 12476, fol. 174v, cf. Avril, “Un Auteur, son copiste et son artiste”). He died shortly before 30 September 1484 (ASV, RS 840, fols. 249v–250r). A Gloria by him survives in Tr 87, fols. 51v–52r.6 Bastien (no last name recorded) is probably the “former chorister” documented in the aumosne for 1485–1486 (LAN, 4 G 7767 [1485– 1486], fols. 22v–23r). He was a small vicar from 21 May to 6 July 1487 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1486–1487], fol. 7v; [1487–1488], fol. 6r). Baudouin Boutri was a small vicar from 7 November 1470 to 10 October 1477 (LAN, 4 G 7469, fol. 6r; 7472 [1477–1478], fol. 4v), wherepon he became a grand vicar on the death of Jehan Hertbeke 5 6

Cf. Planchart, “Institutional Politics,” 137. See also Chapter 2. Planchart, “Music for the Papal Chapel,” 98–102.

697

698

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

(CBM 1061, fol. 32r). On 12 March 1481 he had to be disciplined for absences and indiscipline (CBM 1061, fol. 124r), and on 24 October 1485 he resigned his grand vicariate through Paul Auclou to someone whose name was left blank in the act even though he was present at the resignation (CBM 1061, fol. 237r); clearly Boutri was no longer at Cambrai, and this is his last notice. Baudouin de Landreches is documented as small vicar from his arrival on 23 February 1429 to the end of that fiscal year in three entries in the aumosne (LAN, 4 G 7760 [1429–1430], fols. 11r–12r). Bernard (no other name recorded) is documented as small vicar after Lent 1405 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1405–1406], fol. 7v). Bruyant, see Mathieu Thorote. Calonne (no last name recorded) was a small vicar from 3 February to at least 23 June 1450 (LAN, 4 G 7449, fol. 7r). He must have left some time between July 1450 and June 1451 (account lost) since he is no longer among the small vicars the following fiscal year. No documents in the 1450s give his first name, but he might be the Pierre Callonne who held one of the foreign chaplaincies at St-Géry in 1474–1475 (LAN, 7 G 2956, fascicle of 1469–1470, fol. 3v), and eventually became a canon of Cambrai on 14 February 1483 (CBM 1061, fol. 154v). Perhaps it is significant that after his death on 13 February 1503 his prebend went to Denis de Hollain, who had also been a small vicar (CBM 1064, fol. 437r). Canis (no other name recorded) is documented as small vicar for all of 1399–1400 (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1399–1400], fol. 3r). Charles (no last name recorded) is recorded in the account of the small vicars in an undated entry after 9 November 1495 as “cuidam Karolo receptus, 20 s” (LAN, 4 G 6791 [1495–1496], fol. 6v). He might be the unnamed tenorist reported as received on 15 January 1496 (CBM 1063, fol. 78r). Apparently he never served, for there is no record of his service in the wine accounts, but cf. the entry for Frigalus. Charles de Meurs called de Rivo became a small vicar on 10 March 1493.7 He is still on the list in the wine account for 1499–1500, and there is a lacuna of twelve years in the accounts after that (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1492–1493], fol. 7v; [1499–1500], fol. 8r–v); the acts indicate that he served until 23 June 1502 (CBM 1064, fol. 403v). He was a relative of Thomas Bloquel, cantor and grand minister, who on 19 July 1493 complained that Charles was still paid only as a semivicar, but the 7

The act of his reception is dated 11 March; he was received as a semivicar (CBM 1062, 54v).

List of Small Vicars

canons replied that he was inconsistent and lazy, and kept him at half stipend (CBM 1062, fol. 79r). On 28 August 1499 he collated the chaplaincy of St. Elizabeth on the resignation of Jehan Rogier, canon of Ste-Croix (CBM 1064, fol. 205r), but problems arose and he was not confirmed to it until 25 October (CBM 1064, fol. 217v).8 He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1500–1501 (LAN, 6985, fol. 15v). On 5 July 1501 he was granted the chaplaincy of St. Christopher, resigned by Jacques Canobes (CBM 1064, fol. 329v) and on 12 September 1502 he was made a grand vicar upon the death of Jehan de la Porte; on that same day he resigned the chaplaincy of St. Christopher, which went to Vincent Tonober (CBM 1064, fol. 403r). He is listed among the chaplains in 1502–1503 (LAN, 4 G 6988, fol. 37r) but not thereafter. Charles Orsie (Charles de Gressier) was a small vicar from 8 August to 5 October 1498 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1498–1499], fols. 7v–8r). Cornelius Robelaer called Lalleman and Hollandinus was a small vicar from 9 August 1495 to 12 March 1497 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1495– 1496], fol. 8v; [1496–1497], fol. 8v). His full name is given in an entry in the acts (CBM 1063, fol. 53v). The first sobriquet appears in the notice of his entry in the wine account, the second in the record of his entry in the acts. Like many others during this period he was admitted at half stipend on the condition that he go to school (CBM 1063, fol. 30v), and by 2 September 1495 he was paid at full stipend (CBM 1063, fol. 36v). On 10 March 1497 he was given license to depart on a pilgrimage to Rome (CBM 1063, fol. 193r). Daniel (no last name recorded) was a small vicar from 9 June to 28 September 1476 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1475–1476], fol. 8r; [1476– 1477], fol. 5r). Denis de Hollain (de Sanctoro) is documented as a chorister in 1470– 1471 (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1470–1471], fol. 22v), and as a former chorister in 1480–1482 (LAN, 4 G 7766 [1480–1481], fol. 15v; [1481–1482], fol. 16r). He was a small vicar from 27 June 1482 to 23 September 1483, and from 9 November 1485 to 23 June 1490 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1482– 1483], fol. 9r; 7473, fol. 8v; 7472 [1485–1486], fol. 7v). His final departure is not recorded per se; he simply is not named in the opening list for 1490–1491. On 3 November 1485 the chapter asked him to become magister puerorum, and the entry explains his activity 8

The accounts of the chaplains for 1499–1500 and 1500–1501 list the chaplaincy as foreign and in litigation between Rogier and De Meurs (LAN, 4G 6984, fol. 36v; 6985, fol. 38r).

699

700

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

during the gap in his service as a small vicar, for it indicates that at the time he was the magister puerorum at St-Géry (CBM 1061, fol. 238v). The wine accounts never give his last name, but the two surviving accounts of the small vicars that coincide with his service do (LAN, 4 G 6791 [1486–1487], fol. 4r; [1487–1488], fol. 4r). His beneficial career at Cambrai is unusual: the record is entirely silent until 30 October 1489, when he was made a grand vicar on the death of Adam Malart (CBM 1061, fol. 347r). At the time he chose to continue singing with the small vicars to the end of that fiscal year. On 15 February 1503 he was made a canon by collation of the chapter on the death of Pierre Callone (CBM 1064, fol. 437r). Two days later he resigned the only other recorded benefice we have for him, the parish church of Graucourt, and the canons promptly returned it to him (CBM 1064, fol. 438v). Probably he stopped being the magister puerorum around this time, for on 3 April his former student Louis van Pullaer was appointed to that post (CBM 1064, fol. 448r). He died on 8 November 1503; his will and its execution survive (LAN, 4 G 1371). He is most likely the composer of three chansons ascribed to “Holain” in Florence, Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica Luigi Cherubini, MS 2442. His brother Henri was an advocate at the court of Cambrai in 1497 (CBM 1063, fols. 249v, 259r), and Paul de Hollain, received as small vicar on 15 November 1503 (CBM 423v) and who died on 1 January 1436 (LAN, 4 G 7024 [chaplains], 45r), might be another relative, as well as Pasquier (Paschasius) de Hollain, documented as a chaplain of St-Géry in 1487–1488 (LAN, 7 G 2962, fol. 6r), and later as a canon from 1494–1495 to 1503–1504 (7 G 2416 [1494– 1495], fol. 18r; 7 G 2417 [1503–1504], fol. 14v). Denis de Purol (Denisot, Dionysius de Puroli) was a small vicar from 30 November 1445 to 25 February 1446 (LAN, 4 G 7445, fol. 6v). His departure is implied in the wine account, which gives the list of those present on 25 February without him. Two graces granted to him are recorded in the acts on 30 January and 26 July 1454 (CBM 1059, fols. 80r, 98v), and it is the last of these that gives his last name. The first of these calls him a small vicar and the second a former small vicar, but in fact the wine accounts record no other Denis between 1445 and 1454, and neither do the accounts of the small vicars, which survive for 1454–1455, so probably in both instances he was a former small vicar. Donet Manee (Manet), tenorist, was a small vicar from 25 November 1484 to 17 March 1487 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1484–1485], fol. 7v; [1486–

List of Small Vicars

1487], fol. 7v). He came to Cambrai from Douai (CBM 1061, fol. 201v). Durand Prunotiau was a small vicar from 24 October 1463 to 11 June 1464 and 5 September 1465 to 3 April 1466 (LAN, 4 G 7462, fols. 5v– 6r; 7463, fols. 5v–6r). Elias de Waignet is documented as small vicar in 1409–1410 (LAN, 4 G 6788 [1409–1410], fol. 2v, and 4 G 6789 [1409–1410], fols. 3v and 5r)9 and in the lists of vicars for 1410–1411 (LAN, 4 G 6788 [1410–1411], fol. 2r–v). Enguerran (Enguerammant) (no last name recorded) was a small vicar from 7 June 1449 to 10 December 1450 (LAN, 4 G 7448, fol. 6v; 7449, fol. 7v). His leaving is not expressly noted but rather the list of vicars on 11 December omits his name. No document gives his last name, but he might be Enguerran Cobe, probably a relative of one of the several men with this sobriquet at Cambrai, whose burial on 5 January 1496 is recorded in the grand métier (LAN, 4 G 5115, fol. 13v). Ernoul Campion is documented as a son of Henri Campion and a chorister from 1445 to 1451 (CBM 1058, fols. 3r, 269r). He was a small vicar from 28 February 1452 to 9 September 1460, 24 June 1461 to 30 September 1464, and 6 February to 4 August 1465 (CBM 1059, fol. 12v; LAN, 4 G 7450, fol. 6r; 7459, fol. 6r; 7460, fols. 5v–6r; 7454, fol. 5v). As many other small vicars, he was sometimes cited for disrespect and indiscipline (CBM 1059, fols. 147r, 260v). On 4 January 1458 he collated the parish church of Amieux on the death of Pierre Puillencourt (CBM 1060, fols. 9v, 16v), and on 4 April 1461 he collated the chaplaincy at the altar of SS Peter and Paul on the death of Jehan Ocon (CBM 1060, fol. 107r). That year he became a member of the grand community of chaplains and appears in the lists until 1465–1466 (LAN, 4 G 6931, fol. 13v; 6938, fol. 19v). On 11 June 1462 he resigned the church of Amieux, which went to Pasquier Coutel (CBM 1060, fol. 142r), and he died on 1 September 1465 (CBM 1060, fol. 222r). Ernoul Cauwet is documented as small vicar in 1410–1411 (LAN, 4 G 6788 [1410–1411], fol. 2r–v), but not in 1409–1410 or 1411–1412, for which we have fairly complete documentation. Cawet joined the grand community of chaplains in 1416–1417 and appears in the lists of chaplains until 1466–1467 (LAN, 4 G 6897, fol. 7r; 6940, fol. 19r). He died shortly before 19 December 1466 (CBM 1060, fol. 254r). 9

Although Elias did not receive a robe in All Saints, the entries for the weekly distributions indicate that he had been a semivicar and became a full vicar in the 27th week.

701

702

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

Etienne de Condé, Etienne Bourgois was a small vicar from 25 October 1457 to his death, noted in the wine account, on 18 September 1469 (LAN, 4 G 7456, fol. 7v; 7468, fol. 5v). The identity of two names comes from the acts, who refer to him as Etienne Bourgois at times when the only Etienne in the lists is Etienne de Condé. He became a member of the community of chaplains in 1465–1466 (LAN, 4 G 6938, fol. 13r) and remained in the lists until his death. On 1 March 1462 he obtained the parish church of Marech on the resignation of Jehan du Sart (CBM 1060, fol. 161v), and on 19 October 1464 he was imprisoned for three days when his servant, Jacqueline, and Guillemette, servant of Hughes le Caron, created a big disturbance (CBM 1060, fol. 210v). On 26 April 1465 he collated the chaplaincy at the altar of St. Nicholas, although the acts do not mention why it had become free,10 and that same day he exchanged the parish church of Marech for that of Heries with Oudard Chariot (CBM 1060, fol. 210v). Etienne de la Porte was a small vicar from 17 September to 3 February 1497 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1496–1497], fol. 8v; [1497–1498], fol. 9r). His last name can be determined by a comparison of the All Saints list in the account of the small vicars with the personnel listed in the wine account up to that time. He was singing at a salary even below half that of a semivicar (CBM 1063, fol. 183v). He is described as a nephew of Jehan de la Porte (the grand vicar, not the canon) (CBM 1063, fol. 104r) and variously as a nephew and a cousin of Sébastien de la Porte (LAN, 4 G 6791 [1497–1498], fol. 7r; CBM 1063, fol. 183v). Etienne Heldedroncque. As in the case of Poignare, the evidence for his having been a chorister under Grenon in early 1425 comes from the fact that he is one of the four northern French choristers who served under him in the papal chapel. He was born in 1409 (ASV, RS 197, fols. 193r–194r) in the diocese of Cambrai, was granted a canonicate at St-Hermès in Renaix [Ronse] in 1424 (ASV, RL 249, fols. 28r–29r) and Grenon’s canonicate at St. Donatian in Bruges when Grenon became a canon of Cambrai (ASV, RS 197, fols. 193r–194r) but never held possession of it (BAB, Reeks A 50, fols. 174v–175r). He sang in the papal chapel only as a chorister from June 1425 to November 1427 (ASV, I&E 383, fol. 44v; I&E 385, fol. 151r). The last notice of him is as a canon of St-Hermès in 1439, when Gilles Du Pont requested that Heldedroncque be deprived of all his benefices because he had killed a fellow cleric (ASV, RS 358, fol. 227v). 10

The most likely possibility was the death of canon Jehan Lambert.

List of Small Vicars

Etienne Robastre, tenorist, had been one of the messengers of the church before his reception as a small vicar on 16 October 1455 (CBM 1059, fol. 170v). His reception was not noted in the wine account, but he appears on the list for 23 December 1455 and served until 21 December 1456 (LAN, 4 G 7454, fol. 5v; 7455, fol. 5v). He is probably the “new tenor from Peronne” given a robe in November 1455 (CBM 1059, fol. 172v), since he had been promised one upon his reception. Curiously, on 9 March 1457 he and Jehan de Guise, described as small vicars, are to be punished for their absences, but Robastre had stopped being a small vicar the previous December (Guise would serve until 4 November 1457) (CBM 1059, fol. 261r). This is the last notice of him I have found. Eustace (Mauclerc) called de Sancto Paulo was a small vicar from 23 September 1440 to 26 April 1441 (LAN, 4 G 7440, fol. 7r). The documents never give his patronymic, but mention that Eustace is the brother of Jehan Mauclerc, small vicar at Cambrai, papal singer, and canon of Ste-Croix. Eustace had obtained the chaplaincy of SS. Peter and Paul at Ste-Croix by 17 August 1430 (ASV, RS 255, fol. 93r–v), and the surviving accounts of the fabric list it as a foreign chapel under his name from 1429–1430 to 1446–1447 (LAN, 6 G 702 [1429–1430], fol. 7r; [1446–1447], fol. 10r); there is a lacuna after 1446–1447, and the next fascicle, for 1454–1455, does not list his chaplaincy. Eustace de Havrech (Tassin), tenorist, was a small vicar from 28 October 1445 to 10 February 1446 (LAN, 4 G 7445, fol. 6v). His full name is noted in a grant from the aumosne on 4 October 1445, referring to him as about to arrive (LAN, 4 G 7762 [1445–1446], fol. 10r). When he was received on 5 October 1445 the canons felt compelled to make him promise not to leave without permission (CBM 1058, fol. 19v);11 the relatively long delay between his reception and his first day of service remains unexplained. Fermo (no other name recorded), tenorist, is documented as a former small vicar in an undated entry in the aumosne in 1410 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1410–1411], fol. 7v). Franchois Lebertoul is documented with the unusual term “frequentans chori” in the aumosne for 1409–1410 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1409–1410], fol. 8v), suggesting that he was a supernumerary vicar who sang only 11

As Bonnie Blackburn notes, surely every one had to do that; still that requirement is never explicitly mentioned in the acts for any other appointment, which makes me think that the canons had some reason to be extra cautious with him.

703

704

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

on certain feasts (a situation documented for others as well). This is supported by a discrepancy in the entry for the gift of robes for the small vicars at All Saints in 1409 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1409–1410], fol. 3v), which mentions and lists ten vicars. But the weekly distribution for that week states that there were thirteen vicars at the time. It is likely that Hanelle and Seneschal, who left the following week, had announced their departure and received no robes, which leaves still one more singer present during that week; Lebertoul’s presence would close that gap. He is also documented as a regular small vicar in weeks 7–52 in 1411–1412 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1411–1412], fol. 4v–5r). See C. Wright, “Franchois Lebertoul.” Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 219, n. 31, would place him in Rimini ca. 1423 as the “Franchois” of Du Fay’s He compaignons. Although purely hypothetical, his surmise has considerable plausibility. Frigalus (no other name recorded) was a small vicar from 24 June to 27 August 1496 (LAN, 4 G 7472, fol. 8v). There is a possibility that Frigalus (Frigale?) is a patronymic, and that he might be one of the two small vicars whose advent is recorded in the acts and the account of the small vicars in the previous fiscal year but not in the wine accounts: either Léon, received on 9 November 1495 or Charles, possibly received on 15 January 1496, neither of which is given a last name in the records. Gautier Gerstrelme or Geersceline was a small vicar from 4 February to 7 July 1475 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1474–1475], fol. 6v; [1475–1476], fol. 7r). Georges de Buisson (Georgius de Duino) is documented (de Buisson) as a former chorister still living with Jehan Hemart from 13 August 1474 to 12 August 1475, whom the canons asked to join with the singers of polyphony (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1474–1475], fol. 16v). He was a small vicar (de Duino) from 8 February to 27 September 1476 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1475–1476], fol. 7v; [1476–1477], fol. 5r). The wine accounts for these years have an unusual number of odd spellings for a number of names, so the transformation of Buisson into Duino is plausible. On the other hand, it is possible that both de Buisson and de Duino are different names for the same man. Fiala (“Le Mécénat,” 1:416) shows him as G. Dunis or G. de Duno in St. Peter’s and in the papal chapel from 1478 to 1497, and notes that Buisson entered the chapel of Philip the Fair on 12 April 1498 and is last mentioned on 1 June 1501, indicating he was not retained for the fateful trip to Spain. His name in the chapel of Philip the Fair is given as Jooris vander Haghen,

List of Small Vicars

and Fiala notes that he could be the Jooris vander Haghen who was a member of the confraternity of the seven sorrows in Brussels in 1499. Gerard Willequin was a small vicar from 15 January to 1 July 1466 (LAN, 4 G 7464, fol. 5v; 7465, fol. 5v). His full name appears in the account of the small vicars and not in the wine accounts (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1465–1466], fols. 7r, 8v). Gilles (no last name recorded). This man, whose name is given only as Giletus and parvus Giletus, was a small vicar from 21 September to 1 October 1446 (LAN, 4 G 7446, fol. 6v). He is probably the same man as the parvus Egidius who was a small vicar from 14 September 1448 to 16 March 1449 (LAN, 4 G 7448, fol. 6v). Gilles Antoine (Auchion) was a small vicar from 2 December 1484 to 18 June 1485 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1484–1485], fol. 8r). On 17 June 1485 the chapter ordered him (mentioned only as a vicar from Douai) and Symon le Breton 3 to be dismissed on account of an unspecified infraction (CBM 1061, fol. 216v). Gilles Boulengier, tenorist, was a small vicar from 14 May 1496 to 27 May 1502 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1495–1496], fol. 9v; CBM 1064, fol. 377v).12 On 10 April 1504 he was again received as a small vicar (CBM 1064, fol. 497v). He became a priest in 1499 and said his first Mass on 14 April (CBM 1064, fol. 169v). A quarrelsome man, he was involved in numerous fights and severely injured in one (CBM 1064, fol. 99v); he had to be admonished about his work and demoted for a time to half stipend (CBM 1064, fols. 251r, 254r). On 15 October 1501 he collated the chaplaincy at the altar of Notre Dame de la Poudre on the death of Pierre Hochart (CBM 1064, fol. 340r), and on 27 May 1502 he was removed as a small vicar (CBM, 1064, fol. 377v). Gilles Bourier was a small vicar from 20 April 1444 to 27 February 1447 with a short absence in September 1446 (LAN, 4 G 7443, fol. 7r; 7446, fol. 6v). His is one of the instances where the wine accounts record his departure just by providing a new list without his name. The aumosne account and the acts give a date for his departure (LAN, 4 G 7762, fascicle of 1446–1447, fol. 13r, CBM 1058, fol. 99r) and the acts add the information that he was leaving for Rome in the service of the “Lord of Bologna,” apparently Thomas Parentucelli, who barely a week later would become Pope Nicholas V. On 6 April 1455 a littera de fructibus describes him as canon and dean of St-Géry and a papal chaplain and singer (ASV, DC 28, fol. 5r–v), but he was not in the papal chapel as of 12

The acts record his reception on 4 May 1496 (CBM 1063, fol. 103r).

705

706

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

March 1452 nor in May 1455 (the cameral mandates for the intervening months are lost), so he must have been a papal singer during the final year of Nicholas V. Later the Cambrai acts mention him as dean of St-Géry on 14 July 1456 (CBM 1059, fol. 223r) but do not indicate if he was present at Cambrai then. The lists of canons at StGéry give a Gilles Bruay, documented as canon between 1462–1463 (LAN, 7 G 2413 [1462–1463], fol. 17r) and 1503–1504 (LAN, 7 G 2417 [1503–1504], fol. 14v) who may be the same man. Gilles de Crépin was a small vicar from 7 May 1465 to 8 July 1468 (LAN, 4 G 7463, fol. 6r; 7467, fol. 5v). In February 1461 he was rector of the church of St. Peter in Gispen, and had been dispensed from illegitimacy (BAV, RG 8, no. 992, RS 538, fol. 210r–v). He had been a chaplain at the court of Savoy from September 1461 to December 1464 (Bouquet, “La cappella,” 283). The account of the small vicars refers to him as Gilles from Savoy (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1468–1469], fol. 7v) and then a singer in San Pietro in Vaticano from perhaps March to August 1464 (Reynolds, Papal Patronage, 94, 200). Upon leaving Cambrai he returned to Rome, passing through Savoy late in 1468 or early in 1469 (AST, TG 114, fol. 261r–v, dated 19 January 1469), and from 1471 to 1481 he was again a singer in San Pietro (Reynolds, Papal Patronage, 95). Gilles Dippre (d’Ypres?) was a small vicar from 14 December 1440 to 23 June 1447 (LAN, 4 G 7439, fol. 8r). His departure from the small vicars is not specifically recorded in the wine accounts. Before 1442 he had obtained a chaplaincy at the altar of Notre Dame de la Poudre,13 and another at the altar of All Saints in an exchange with Nicole de le Cambe, the rector scholarum, for a chaplaincy at the altar of St. Augustine in the monastery of Saint-Jean de Valenciennes on 12 May 1445 (CBM 1058, fol. 2v), but despite his multiple chaplaincies at the cathedral he was never a member of the grand community of chaplains, which probably means he was a member of the small community. On 17 July 1443 he exchanged a chaplaincy the altar of Notre Dame des Moutons in the parish church of St. Brice in Tournai for a canonicate in Laon with Yves Gruyau (LAN, 4 G 1090, fol. 91r). In June 1447 he and Jehan de Mauldet sought to exchange benefices, but ran into opposition from the chapter, which took from 2 to 21 June to allow the permutation, but in the end he obtained Mauldet’s 13

This probably took place between 1439 and 1442 and was recorded in the lost register H of the acts.

List of Small Vicars

grand vicariate in exchange for his chaplaincy of Notre Dame de la Poudre (CBM 1058, fols. 113v, 115v, 117r). He accumulated a considerable number of other benefices in Cambrai and elsewhere, and died shortly before 15 July 1476, when his grand vicariate was collated to Pierre Hochart (CBM 1061, fol. 3v). He had an illegitimate son, Jonathan Dippre, eventually canon of Ste-Croix, whose conduct and morals, including sharing a mistress with his father, caused repeated scandal (CBM 1060, fols. 184v, 222r, 224r, 251r, 271r, 272v). Gilles Flannel called l’Enfant is not documented by the cathedral documents as a small vicar, but it is inconceivable that he was not one since he was from Cambrai and several members of his family worked for the cathedral (Planchart, “Institutional Poitics,” 136). He was probably slightly older than Du Fay and his time as a vicar was most likely in the years between 1411 and 1418, for which no records survive. On 7 January 1418 he was received in the papal chapel (ASV, RAS, Camerale I, 1711, fol. 91r), and served with two interruptions (February–May 1425, and August 1433–February 1435) until September 1441. His first leave was to travel north when he recruited Grenon and six choristers for the papal chapel (Planchart, “Institutional Politics,” 136–7). He was granted a canonicate in Arras in 1422 (ASV, RL 228, fols. 147r–148v; LA 1, fol. 185v), and one in Cambrai in 1437 (ASV, RL 331, fols. 252v–253r), which was contested (CBM 1057, fol. 51v) but which he collated in 1438 (CBM 1064, fol. 154v). He is first documented at Cambrai on 27 July 1442 (LAN, 4 G 1090, fol. 2r) and remained there until his death on 7 June 1466. His will and its execution survive (LAN, 4 G 1337). Curiously, for the longest-serving papal singer in the early part of the century, he apparently took no part in the musical life at Cambrai. Gilles Grandin is documented as a recent chorister on 3 May 1424 and 12 April 1425 (LAN, 4 G 7760 [1423–1424], fol. 8r; [1424–1425], fol. 8r). He then disappears from the record until 1439. He held one of the foreign chaplaincies at St-Géry from 1439 to 1441 (LAN, 7 G 2947, fol. 6r; 2948, fol. 6r). He was a small vicar from 14 December 1440 to 27 April 1448 (LAN, 4 G 7439, fol. 8r; 7447, fol. 6v). He probably joined the grand community of chaplains in 1444–1445,14 and his name is in the lists from 1445–1446 (LAN, 4 G 6912, fol. 11v) until 1450–1451 (LAN, 4 G 6916, fol. 23r–v). Beginning 1452–1453 his 14

For some reason the accounts of the community do not record the advents for a few years in the mid-1440s.

707

708

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

chaplaincy (unnamed) is listed as foreign (LAN, 4 G 6917, fol. 40r) and remains thus for the next year, after which he disappears from the accounts of the community. He may have become a member of the small community of chaplains, since on 12 June 1465 he exchanged the chaplaincy at the altar of St. Christopher with Jehan de Condé for a chaplaincy at the altar of St. Géry (CBM 1060, fol. 215v). Documented as a member of the chapel of Queen Marie d’Anjou, wife of Charles VII, from 1452 to 1463 (Perkins, “Musical Patronage,” 548). Gilles le Canoine, see Robert le Canoine. Gilles Mane was a small vicar from 25 June 1485 to 24 June 1486 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1485–1486], fol. 7r). His recess is not indicated per se; he is simply not mentioned in the opening list for 1486–1487. He came from Bergues and was admitted only with the provision that he should also attend the maîtrise and improve his proficiency (CBM 1061, fol. 217v). On 10 and 13 February 1486 he was cited for the beating and bloodying of Pierre, a chorister (CBM 1061, fol. 251r); entries of 31 May and 2 and 5 June detail another incident when Mane insulted and hit Guillaume, a chaplain (either Guillaume Gaillart or Guillaume Riquelet) and his mother (CBM 1061, fol. 263r–v), leading to the imprisonment of both men, and entries on 6 and 9 September detail another bloody fight, this one with Jehan Crassequale, which also led to their imprisonment (CBM 1061, fol. 269r–v). Gilles Martel was a small vicar with two short absences from 20 August 1460 to 7 September 1463,15 and from 6 September 1464 to 31 July 1465 (LAN, 4 G 7459, fol. 6r; 7462, fol. 5r–v; 7463, fol. 5v; 7464, fol. 5v). His last name is known only from the acts. It is possible that he left under a cloud, since the last reference to him, on 12 June 1465, is an injunction to pay a debt he owed to the office of the grand métier by St. Rémy (1 October) or risk suspension (CBM 1060, fol. 216r). Gilles Oscon (Oston) came from Leuze-en-Hainaut and was tried as a chorister for twelve days in 1466 and rejected as unsuitable (perhaps for disciplinary reasons) (LAN, 4 G 7764 [1466–1467], fol. 14r–v). He was a small vicar from 12 December 1484 to 29 October 1485 and from 24 June 1486 until 10 March 1493 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1484–1485], fol. 8r; [1485–1486], fol. 7r; [1486–1487], fol. 7r; [1492–1493], fol. 7v). Throughout his career at Cambrai he was cited numerous times for 15

He was on a pilgrimage from 9 to 25 September 1460, and was gone again from 2 to 24 August 1463; this last absence was a breach of discipline (CBM 1060, fol. 176v).

List of Small Vicars

fights and indiscipline (CBM 1061, fols. 373v, 386v; 1062, fols. 38r, 263r; 1063, fol. 195v), including adding the phrase “Fabri tu es ung tres maulvaix garchon” to his singing of the lesson on Matins of the Innocents in 1492 (CBM 1062, fol. 37r). On 4 November 1492 he was made a grand vicar on the death of Robert le Voiturier (CBM 1062, fol. 26r), but apart from this the Cambrai records are silent on his benefices within the cathedral. On 4 March 1504 he collated the parish church of Aubengoul on the death of an unnamed titular (CBM 1064, fol. 493r). He died in 1522 and his will and its execution survive (LAN, 4 G 1844). Gillet Velut is documented as small vicar from the twenty-eighth to the fifty-second week of 1409–1410 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1409–1410], fols. 3r and 4r), and in the list of vicars for 1410–1411 (LAN, 4 G 6788 [1410– 1411], fol. 2r–v). Later he served in the chapel of the king of Cyprus; see C. Wright, “Gillet Velut.” Gobert (no last name recorded) was a small vicar from 18 November 1472 to 30 July 1474, when he and Jehan Pelu left for Antwerp (LAN, 4 G 7471, fol. 6v; 7472 [1474–1475], fol. 6r). Gobert le Mannier (Gobertus Multoris). His full name is never given in connection with a small vicariate, but his career at Cambrai would make no sense unless he had been a small vicar. His tenure as such must have been in the 1430s, when our only sources are the occasional mentions in the records of the aumosne and in the chapter acts. He is then surely the small vicar called simply Gobertus, who received a gift from the aumosne some time before 23 October 1438 by order of Grenon (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1438–1439], fol. 14r). On 6 October he collated an unnamed chaplaincy vacant on the death of Jehan Caron 1 (CBM 1057, fol. 80v), an act that often marked the end of a singer’s tenure as a small vicar, and indeed, on 27 October the grand vicariate of the late Henri Soris was assigned to Gobertus, while his chaplaincy went to Paul d’Inchy (CBM 1057, fol. 81v). Throughout the 1440s he appears as witness and proctor in a number of entries, and on 29 November 1447 he was elected magister puerorum (CBM 1058, fol. 140v), replacing Pierre du Castel. Among his charges was the future magister puerorum Robert le Canoine (CBM 1058, fol. 253r). He resigned the post on 15 October 1451 and the canons were sufficiently grateful to him to provide him with lodging and victuals after his resignation (CBM 1059, fol. 1r). In July 1460 he was involved in an altercation that landed him in prison, and the chapter had him pay a fine and do a pilgrimage to Notre-Dame des Joyes in Laon (CBM

709

710

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

1060, fols. 87v–88v). On 12 July 1465 he and Pasquier Coutel were to proofread the new ordinal of the cathedral in the company of the Dean, Gilles Carlier (CBM 1060, fol. 218v). He died some time before 6 October 1479, when his grand vicariate was conferred upon Pierre de Reust (Petrus de Rivo). Guillaume 1 (no last name recorded) is documented as small vicar between 24 June and 26 July 1451, when he left together with Vairet, another small vicar (LAN, 4 G 7450, fols. 5v–6r). Guillaume probably arrived together with Vairet (no first name recorded) some time during 1450–1451 (accounts lost). They, like a number of other apparently itinerant singers documented in the Cambrai accounts, traveled in pairs. Guillaume 2 (no last name recorded), see Jacques and Guillaume. Guillaume 3 (no last name recorded), called Rasibus, tenorist, was a small vicar from 8 August 1494 to 17 August 1495 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1494–1495], fol. 10r; [1495–1496], fol. 9r). On 10 June 1495 he had to be imprisoned for attacking the grand vicar whose task was to point the marrantiae of the small vicars (CBM 1063, fol. 15r). All the references to him in the acts call him Guillermus tenorista, dictus Rasibus (CBM 1063, fols. 15r–v, 32v). Guillaume Boulengier was a small vicar from 8 August 1474 to his death on 4 August 1475 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1474–1475], fol. 6r; [1475– 1476], fol. 7r). Guillaume des Mares, tenorist, was received on 24 October 1446 (CBM 1058, fol. 84r) and served from 28 October 1446 to 22 March 1449 (LAN, 4 G 7446, fol. 6v; 7448, fol. 6v). He may or may not be the Guillaume des Mares who held the chaplaincy of St. Blaise as a foreign chaplaincy in 1488–1489 (LAN, 4 G 6969, fol. 42r) and presented one of the subsidiary accounts for the grand métier in 1494–1495 (LAN, 4 G 5114, fol. 46r). He may be the Guillaume des Mares appointed in the late summer of 1449 as a scribe in the Sacra Poenitentiaria in Rome, and later as a singer in St. Peter’s in the Vatican, which Reynolds identifies as the composer Guillaume Faugues (Reynolds, Papal Patronage, 194–202). Guillaume la Fraire, tenorist, was a small vicar from 18 August to 28 December 1494 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1494–1495], fol. 10r–v). The acts indicate that he was received as a semivicar on 8 August (CBM 1062, fol. 296v), but apparently he did not start singing with the vicars until he was received as a full vicar on 18 August (CBM 1062, fol. 208v).

List of Small Vicars

Guillaume le Petit (Guillermus Parvus) was a small vicar for three days, 10–12 August 1463 (LAN, 4 G 7462, fol. 5v). He might or might not be the Parvus Guillermus documented as a chorister between 1441 and 1445 (LAN, 4 G 7762 [1441–1442], fol. 5v; [1444–1445], fol. 10r). Guillaume Mervillet was a small vicar from 22 March 1490 to 26 May 1498 (LAN, 4 G 7272 [1489–1490], fol. 6r; [1497–1498], fol. 9v). His last name appears only in an entry of 7 July 1491 in the aumosne (LAN, 4 G 7768 [1490–1491], fol. 21v), when he was given £4. Guillaume Papegay is documented as small vicar being promoted to grand vicar in an undated entry in the fabric for 1430–1431 (LAN, 4 G 4636, fol. 9r). The details of his promotion would have been recorded in the lost register F of the acts. Papegay appears in the list of chaplains for 1427–1428 (LAN, 4 G 6904, fol. 20v), but I found no record of his advent, even though the accounts of the previous years survive. The accounts are missing from July 1428 to June 1432 and Papegay is not mentioned in the account of 1433–1434. The fabric account for that year, however, records the receipt of a legacy from his will (LAN, 4 G 4639, fol. 10r). He is possibly related to Jehan Papegay, dean of St-Amé in Douai between 1414 and 1429 (LAN, 1 G 15, fol. 139r). Guillaume Rogier is documented as small vicar in 1409–1410 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1409–1410], fol. 3v) and in the lists for 1410–1411 (LAN, 4 G 6788 [1410–1411], fol. 2r–v). Rogier joined the grand community of chaplains in 1405–1406 and appears in the lists until 1413–1414 (LAN, 4 G 6887, fol. 5v; 6896, fol. 29v). Guillaume Wasset was a small vicar from 26 June 1454 to 24 September 1455 (LAN, 4 G 7453, fol. 6v; 7454, fol. 5v). His first name is not given in any of the Cambrai documents I saw, but surely he is Guillaume Wasset, who together with Guillaume Werel appears for the first time in the lists of the Burgundian chapel as a clerk in 1456. The list for March to May 1464 indicates that he was a tenorist and died at the end of March (Marix, Histoire, 254–57). He is probably related to another Guillaume Wasset who was tried as a chorister in 1471–1472 but not admitted (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1471–1472], fol. 18r), who is later praised by Tinctoris in 1482 as a high tenorist (Weinman, Johannes Tinctoris, 33). Guillaume Werel, tenorist, was received on 9 February 1452 (CBM 1059, fol. 11r) and served from 11 February 1452 to April 1454 (LAN, 4 G 7450, fol. 6r). For some reason the wine account does not record his recess, but the account of the small vicars places it on

711

712

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

the 45th week of the fiscal year, that is between 12 and 19 April 1454 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1453–1454], fol. 5v). His last name appears in entries in the aumosne on 24 May 1452 and 16 February 1453 (LAN, 4 G 7763 [1451–1452], fol. 12r; [1452–1453], fol. 10v] and in the acts on 24 May 1452 (CBM 1059, fol. 23v), all concerning gifts to him. From 1456 to September 1462 he was a clerk of the Burgundian chapel (Marix, Histoire, 212, 254–55; more detailed in Fiala, “Le Mécénat,” 328–29). Helbin Haimabut is documented as small vicar in an undated entry in the aumosne for 1416–1417 as Helbin (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1416–1417], fol. 9v] and with his full name on 11 November 1419 when he collated the chaplaincy at the altar of St. Andrew vacant on the death of Jehan Hubbard (CBM 1056, fol. 74v). He was illegitimate, born of an Augustinan canon and a single woman, and sought a papal dispensation on 6 September 1426 (ASV, RS 187, fol. 109v). He was granted a licentia testandi on 16 August 1426 (CBM 1056, fol. 171v). He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1420–1421 and appears in the lists until 1427–1428 (LAN, 4 G 6899, fol. 6r; 6904, fol. 20v), and by 1428 he had become a chaplain of the duke of Burgundy (LAN, B 1938, fol. 159v) and appears in the Burgundian lists from 1436 (the first complete list) until 1441 (Marix, Histoire, 242–44). At the Burgundian chapel he was considered a tenorist (LAN, 4 G 5066, fol. 37r). He retained his chaplaincy in the cathedral and some of his privileges of absence are recorded in the acts (CBM, 1057, fol. 27v) as well as some of his visits when he was presented with wine (in 1430, 1431, 1433, 1437, and 1438) (LAN, 4 G 5065, fol. 12r; 5067, fol. 11r; 5071, fol. 16r; 5072, fol. 13r). He exchanged the chaplaincy of St. Andrew for the parish church of Benignes with Ernoul Cawet on 12 August 1455 (CBM 1059, fol. 179v). He was a canon and cantor of Arras (Marix, Histoire, 165) and as such he probably visited Cambrai each year on St. Mary Magdalene’s Day (22 July); his presence is specifically recorded in 1445 (LAN, 4 G 7445, fol. 6r). Hellin or Helbin Bourel is documented as small vicar for all of 1399– 1400 as Hellinet (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1399–1400], fol. 3r) and mentioned with his full name as a small vicar on 10 March 1399 (CBM 1055, fol. 48r). He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1400–1401 and appears in the lists until 1410–1411 (LAN, 4 G 6886, fol. 6v: 6891, 6v). On 19 June 1411 he succeeded Jehan Rogier de Hesdin as a grand vicar (CBM 1055, fol. 250v), and on 15 December 1418 he was one of the executors of the will of Nicaise le Ville (CBM 1056, fol. 61v).

List of Small Vicars

Hendrik Ziller called Rose. The reception of this vicar presents a very strange case. The wine account records on 9 September 1453 the reception of one Johannes de Domo Beringhen (LAN, 4 G 7452, fol. 6r), but the account of the small vicars reports the reception of Henricus on the fourteenth week, which that year fell between 8 and 15 September (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1453–1454], fol. 5r). Later lists in the wine accounts have indeed a Henricus in the place where Johannes de Domo Beringhen should go on account of his seniority, and no other mention of Johannes ever turns up. Henricus, then, is the name of the new vicar, who served until 28 October 1454, when he left for Rome in the company of Jacobus and Laurentius (LAN, 4 G 7453, fol. 6v). This makes it a virtual certainty that he is Hendrik Ziller called Rose, from Zeele in the diocese of Tournai (but who called himself a clerk of Cambrai), who entered the papal chapel in May 1455 together with Jaques Boni and Laurent Canner. He served in the papal chapel from 1455 to July 1468, and made efforts to obtain a canonicate at Cambrai (Starr, “Music,” 130–32). The Cambrai records never give his last name until 20 April 1459, when Martin Prévost, as proctor of Henricus de Zeele, called de Rosa, a papal singer, presented Hendrik’s letters of collation to the chapter (CBM 1059, fol. 42v). By 30 May 1464 he had obtained a canonicate in St-Géry, where he was sworn in person (LAN, 7 G 575v, fol. 71v; also ASV, DC 32, fol. 24v), and on 2 December 1466 he was installed by procuration as a canon of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw in Antwerp (Starr, “Music,” 132; Van den Nieuwenhuizen, “De koralen,” 44). He had benefices in Anderlecht and in Steenhuffel as well (ASV, RV 500, fols. 4v and 6v; RS 525, fols. 111r–112r; RV 477, fols. 151r–152r). By 22 July 1468, when Thomas le Lièvre sought his prebend at St-Géry, he had died (ASV, RS 627, fol. 237r–v; RL 666, fol. 280v). Henri Brou (Brouwe) is documented as a chorister from 1444 to 1448 (LAN, 4 G 7762 [1445–1446], fol. 10v; [1446–1447], fol. 13r–v; [1447– 1448], fol. 11r). He was a small vicar from 5 February to 27 April 1448 and from 2 June to 17 September or 6 October 1449 (LAN, 4 G 7447, fol. 6v; 7448, fol. 6v; 7449, fol. 7r).16 A curious aspect of his reception is that on the very day of his first reception the acts record a report of his 16

The entries in LAN, 4G 7449, show some confusion. Jehan Montigny was received on 20 July and left on 12 Sept., returned on 23 Sept. and left on 3 Oct. An entry on 17 Sept. shows Montigny leaving, but he is already not there. The full list of those present is given for 6 Oct., and both Brou and Montigny are absent from the list, so it is most likely that the man leaving on 17 Sept. was Brou, but the scribe wrote Montigny’s name in error.

713

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

dissolute life, and the canons propose that he be hired at half stipend to encourage him to mend his ways (CBM 1058, fol. 148r). He might be a relative of Jehan Brou, chaplain of St-Géry from 1416 to 1422 and grand vicar at the cathedral (d. 1438; CBM, 1057, fol. 81r) and of Constant Brou (de Langebroek), canon of Cambrai from 1451 to 1481 (CBM 1046, fol. 143v). Henri Brunel was a small vicar from 8 to 15 December 1495 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1495–1496], fol. 9r–v). Henri de la Place is documented as a small vicar on 5 May 1412, when he was admonished for lack of discipline (CBM 1056, fol. 25v). He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1412–1413 and appears in the lists until 1438–1439 (LAN, 4 G 6894, fol. 6v; 6908, fol. 29v). He held a chaplaincy at the altar of St. Nicaise at the time of his death shortly before 31 August 1438, when his chaplaincy was granted to Lucas Warner (CBM, 1057, fol. 79v). Henri de Liège became a small vicar on 23 April 1498 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1497–1498], fol. 9r; CBM 1064, fol. 54r). He is still in the lists of the wine account for all of 1499–1500, and is documented on 26 November 1501, when Pierre Daix was reprimanded for insulting him (CBM 1064, fol. 348v). The accounts of the small vicars for 1499– 1500 show his name (LAN, 4 G 6792, fol. 5r), but he is not in the lists for 1501–1502 (the account for 1500–1501 is lost). Henri de Mont Henri was a small vicar from 22 November 1492 to 23 September 1499 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1492–1493], fol. 7v; [1499–1500], fol. 8r). In 1496 he is documented as a chaplain in the parish church of Braine-l’Alleud (LAN, 4 G 1082, no. 172). On 23 August 1499 he was granted the chaplaincy at the altar of St. James, vacant on the death of Jehan Cornuel, and only a few days later, on 28 August, the canons decided to relieve him of the vicariate (CBM 1064, fol. 204r–v), but as the wine account shows, he served for about a month more. The accounts of the grand community of chaplains for 1500–1501 and 1501–1502 show him holding his chaplaincy as a foreign one (LAN, 4 G 6985, fol. 38r, 4 G 6986, fol. 32v). In 1498–1499 and 1499–1500 he was paid by the fabric for copying a number of Masses (LAN, 4 G 4697, fol. 23v; 4698, fol. 34v). Henri le Renier is documented as small vicar on the first forty-eight weeks of 1409–1410 (LAN, 4 G 6788 [1409–1410], fol. 2v; 6789 [1409– 1410], fol. 5v), the list of 1410–1411 (LAN, 4 G 6788 [1410–1411], fol. 2v), and on first forty-seven weeks of 1411–1412 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1411–12], fols. 3v and 4v).

List of Small Vicars

Henri Macheclier was a small vicar from 10 October 1445 to 23 June 1446 (LAN, 4 G 7445, fol. 6r). His recess is not recorded in the wine accounts; he simply disappears from the opening list for 1446–1447. The acts record his reception on 27 October rather than on 10 October (CBM 1058, fol. 22v] and refer to him as a chaplain, but his name never appears in the records of the grand community, so he must have belonged to the small community. On 31 May 1446 he became a grand vicar when he exchanged his chaplaincy at the altar of All Saints for the grand vicariate of Pierre du Castel, and this probably marks the end of his tenure as a small vicar (CBM 1058, fol. 46v). He became a canon of Ste-Croix in October 1453 (LAN, 6 G 177, fol. 134r] and had died by 19 February 1480, when his chaplaincy in the parish church of Bremeran was granted to Nicolas Berquier (CBM 1061, fol. 122r). Honoré (no last name recorded) was a small vicar from 27 May to 19 July 1483 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1482–1483], fol. 9v; 7473, fol. 8r). Hughes le Caron was a small vicar from 11 July 1455 to 3 May 1463 (LAN, 4 G 7454, fol. 5v; 7461, fol. 6r). There is a problem with his name: the entry recording his reception names him as Jo. Caron; thereafter he is listed only as Caron until 1458–1459; then the opening list of 1459–1460 gives the name Hugo in exactly the place in the list where Caron was until the previous year (LAN, 4 G 7458, fol. 5v), and Hugo appears consistently in the lists until 1462–1463. The chapter acts refer to Hugo (no last name), a small vicar, on 7 January 1457 (CBM 1059, fol. 252v), when there is no Hugo in any of the lists of small vicars, and then to Hugo le Caron, small vicar, on 28 May 1460 (CBM 1060, fol. 81r). This makes it clear the Jo. indicated in the entry on his reception is most likely a scribal misreading of Ho.17 On 28 May 1460 he collated the parish church of Moury (Arras) on the death of Jehan Legier; on 3 May 1463 he was granted a grand vicariate on the death of Nicolas de Waspail (CBM 1060, fol. 167r), the day indicated in the wine accounts as his recess from the small vicars. On 17 September 1481 he is mentioned as one of the executors of the will of Symon Mellet (CBM 1061, fol. 132v), and on 27 February 1493 he resigned his grand vicariate to collate the chaplaincy at the altar of the Trinity vacant on the death of Jehan Hemart (CBM 1062, fol. 51r).18 17

18

It is also possible that Hugo was the son of Jehan Caron 2, who was a married clerk, and this might have contributed to the confusion. The assignation of the grand vicariate posed a problem. On 1 Mar. the acts record that it was assigned to “one Jermot, as small vicar, despite his bastardy” (CBM 1062, fol. 51r); three days

715

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

He must have become a member of the grand community of chaplains in 1493 (the account for that year is lost); he appears in the lists until 1500–1501 (LAN, 4 G 685, fol. 23v) although the acts, on 26 March 1502 when he is described as very old and of long service, still refer to him as a chaplain (CBM 1064, fol. 366r). He died shortly before 10 March 1503, when his chaplaincy at the altar of the Trinity went to Jehan du Wez (CBM 1064, fol. 441v). Hughes Portier is documented as a former small vicar in an undated entry in the aumosne in 1410 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1410–1411], fol. 7v). He is listed among the socii chori (not the chaplains) in the account of the chaplains of St-Géry in 1406–1407 (LAN, 7 G 2192, fol. 5r). Jacob Obrecht was a small vicar from 1 September 1484 to 29 October 1485 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1484–1485], fol. 7v; [1485–1486], fol. 7r). The chapter had appointed him magister puerorum on 28 July 1484 (CBM 1061, fol. 187r), but on account of serious problems with the administration of the maîtrise they decided to dismiss him on 21 October 1485, although on 24 October they also agreed to pay him for a music book with several of his compositions (CBM 1061, fol. 237r). Since Obrecht probably auditioned for the post some days before his appointment, it is very likely that he and Jehan de Ockeghem met at Cambrai, since Ockeghem is documented as receiving wine while staying in the house of Rogier van Eeckhoute (de Lignoquercu) on 21 July 1484 (LAN, 4 G 5110, fol. 13v). The accounts of Ste-Croix from June 1484 to June 1485 list Obrecht and Hemart as magistri cantus, Hemart for three months and Obrecht for nine, so presumably he began teaching at Ste-Croix in mid-August 1484 (LAN, 6 G 706 [1484–1485], fol. 17v), and those for 1485–1486 list him as magister cantus for four months and Denis de Hollain for eight months (LAN, 6 G 707 [1485–1486], fol. 24v). The most detailed study of his life is Wegman, Born for the Muses. Jacob van Welsenes (Copin) served as a small vicar from 21 December 1456 to 23 January 1458 (LAN, 4 G 7455, fol. 6v; 7456, fol. 7v). There is a problem in that even though he is entirely absent from the lists of small vicars in 1455–1456, acts of 23 and 30 April 1456 refer to him as a small vicar (CBM 1059, fols. 109v, 111v). The acts recount a bizarre episode, when Jacob, on the night of the later the canons reversed themselves, and finally on 6 Mar. they assigned it to Jehan Ribault, a chaplain (CBM 1062, fol. 52v). Jermot is not traceable among the small vicars that year; it is probably a corrupt diminutive for Jehan, thus either Jehan Daussy or Jehan Villeroy.

List of Small Vicars

18th or the 19th, tried to abduct a young woman, Marie le Clerc, who had come to Cambrai to hear the first Mass of a relative, Jaspar Caignet. Her cries alerted the neighbors and she managed to escape into the house of Guillaume Damien de Soignies, grand vicar, where she and her mother were staying, whereupon Jacob tried to enter the house and shouted insults at her and at Caignet. The result was that he was arrested and imprisoned and on 30 April had to do public penance, on bended knee, seeking the forgiveness of the chapter, the girl, and her relatives. There is no record of when he had been received as a small vicar, but often a comparison of the acts shows a delay ranging from a few days to a fortnight between the reception and the time when the vicar actually sang his first service (which is what the wine accounts tally). In this case the resulting scandal might have caused a delay of several months. Jacob held the matutinal chaplaincy of St. John Baptist in 1457– 1458 and 1458–1459 (LAN, 4 G 6925, fol. 46v; 6926, fol. 39v), but after that he disappears from the Cambrai records. Jacques (Jacob) (no last name documented) was small vicar for all of 1399–1400 (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1399–1400], fol. 3r). He is most likely Jacques le Sellier, who joined the grand community of chaplains 1395–1396 and appears in the lists until 1413–1414, by which time his chapel is listed as foreign (LAN, 4 G 6883, fol. 7v; 6896, fols. 29v, 32r). Another possibility is Jacob Helbart or Helbaut, who is in the lists of small vicars from 1409 to 1412, q.v. Jacques and Guillaume, brothers, were small vicars from 30 January to 3 February 1454 and from 25 February 1454 to 30 May 1456 (LAN, 4 G 7453, fol. 7r; 7454, fol. 5v). Jacques Bon (Boni), tenorist, was a small vicar from 16 September 1451 to 28 October 1454, when he left with Henricus and Laurentius in order to go to Rome (LAN, 4 G 7450, fol. 6r; 7453, fol. 6v). During his term as a small vicar he is called only Jacotin tenorista or Jacques de Hainaut (CBM 1059, fol. 96r). He is surely Jacques Bon, a tenor from Tournai, who together with Hendrik Rose and Laurent Canner appears in the papal chapel in May 1454 (ASR, MC 832, fol. 12r). Jacques served in the papal chapel until 1473 and became a canon of Notre Dame in Antoing (Starr, “Music,” 132–33). He petitioned the pope for a canonicate in Cambrai (Starr, “Music,” 123; ASV, RV 448, fols. 5v–6v). The acts record the presentation of his letters, this time with his full name, which included not only a petition for a canonicate at the cathedral but one at St-Géry (CBM 1060, fol. 235v). He was

717

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

unsuccessful as regards the cathedral, but Vatican documents show that by 7 February 1472 he was a canon at St-Géry, at Ste-Croix, and at Notre Dame d’Antoing (ASV, DC 36, fol. 88r). Jacques Castellain, tenorist, was received as a small vicar on 7 February 1500 (CBM 1064, fol. 233r) but began serving on 28 March (LAN, 4 G 7473 [1499–1500], fol. 8r). He is mentioned as a vicar in an act granting him a grace on 14 January 1501 (CBM 1064, fol. 298v). Jacques Corneille was never actually a small vicar. He had been a chorister in the 1450s and his voice had broken in 1458 (CBM 1060, fol. 15v), but he was encouraged to continue in the service of the church and given a series of stipends (LAN, 4 G 7764 [1458–1459], fols. 20r, 21r; [1459–1460], fols. 17v–18r; [1460–1461], fol. 14v; CBM 1060, fols. 41v, 61v, 72v). Some of these were to allow him to pursue an expectative. On 24 August 1460 he tried out but was not admitted as a semivicar, but given £8 for the year (CBM 1060, fol. 90v). The aumosne reports a payment of £4 to him “on his leaving for Rome” (LAN, 4 G 7764 [1462–1463], fol. 14r). Since the aumosne always shared these payments with other offices, the payment of £4 must refer to that ordered by the chapter. Significantly, the accounts of the small vicars, which survive for this year, do not report the other half. Jacques Dablaing is documented as small vicar on 13 September 1404 (CBM 1055, fol. 93v) and consistently from 1409 to 1412 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1409–1410], fol. 3v; [1411–1412], fol. 3v). By 1409 he was already a priest (LAN, 4 G 6788 [1409–1410], fol. 1v). He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1413–1414, appears in the lists until 1422–1423 (LAN, 4 G 6896, fol. 6r; 6901, fol. 23r), and probably became a canon of St-Géry at this time (records from St-Géry are missing, but he was a canon by 1426 [CBM 1056, fol. 172r]). He was received as a canon of Cambrai on 9 September 1437 and died on 10 September 1451 (CBM 1049, fol. 143v). Jacques de Camma is documented as small vicar in an entry in the aumosne copied between entries dated 31 January and 19 February 1435 (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1435–1436], fol. 12r). Jacques le Mannier (Jacobus Multoris) called Cobe, tenorist, is first documented as small vicar in an undated entry in the aumosne for 1431–1432 reporting 100s given to him “after the close of the account of the previous year,” implying that he had been a small vicar also in 1430–1431 (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1431–1432], fol. 10v). There are four people with the sobriquet Cobe connected with the cathedral or with St-Géry, Jacques and Jehan le Mannier, both small vicars (Jehan being

List of Small Vicars

much younger); Symon Cobe, a chorister and small vicar; and Jacques Faverel, a chaplain of St-Géry. The first three were blood relations, and they might be relatives of another small vicar, roughly contemporary with Jacques, Gobert le Mannier (who is not ever given the sobriquet). A second Jacques le Mannier is briefly mentioned in the Cambrai records, a married man who lost his wife and unborn child during the plague in November 1468 (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1468–1469], fol. 17r). Jacques appears in the lists of chaplains for 1434–1435, even though his advent is not recorded, and remains in every surviving list until 1464–1465 (LAN, 4 G 6907, fol. 27r; 6936, fol. 19v). He must be the Cobe who appears in the lists of small vicars in the wine accounts from 24 June 1439 (LAN, 4 G 7438, fol. 8r) to 8 July 1455 (LAN, 4 G 7454, fol. 5v). On 7 July the canons decided to remove him on account of an illness that left him weakened and without voice (CBM 1059, fol. 146v), but on 30 April 1456 he was asked to begin singing with the small vicars on certain feasts (CBM 1059, fol. 211v), a process that continued until 1463–1464 (LAN, 6790, fol. 6r). He died on 23 December 1464 (CBM 1060, fol. 203v). He was a music scribe and a composer; a Mass of his was copied in 1457–1458, when he also assisted with proofreading and correcting the liturgical books being copied by Jehan de Namps (LAN, 4 G 4665, fol. 24r). Jacques Manessier is documented as small vicar on 28 June 1431 in the aumosne (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1430–1431], fol. 13v). Normally this entry should have been placed in the following fiscal year. Jacques Maynart (Maynnart, Maisnart), called Grenet is documented as being received as a small vicar on 22 May 1461 but never actually served as one (CBM 1060, fol. 110r). On the circumstances of his reception see the entry on Jehan de Jeumont. Maynart held chaplaincies in the cathedral and in St-Géry, and is documented as a member of the small community of chaplains from 1471 to 1473 (LAN, 4 G 7255 [1471–1472], fol. 1r; [1472–1473], fol. 1r] and as a canon of SteCroix in 1481 (CBM 1061, fol. 130r). He kept the accounts of the Fabric of Ste-Croix from 1482 on, and was supposed to keep them for 1484–1485, but died during that year, so the accounts for that year were rendered by his executors (LAN, 6 G 706 (1484–1485), fol. 1r). Jacques Morel or Moriau was a small vicar from 16 December 1449 to 11 April 1455, when he became a grand vicar on the death of Jehan de Goucourt (LAN, 4 G 7449, fol. 7v; 7453, fol. 7v). At that time he resigned the parish church of Cantaing, which went to Paul le Josne,

719

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the magister puerorum (CBM 1059, fol. 129r).19 Morel resigned his grand vicariate on 23 October 1465, which was assigned to Jehan Villain (CBM 1060, fol. 226v). He had a history of troubles with the chapter, including the wounding of Pierre le Seme in Condé (CBM 1059, fol. 248r). His last appearance in the records known to me is on 19 December 1466, when he resigned the chaplaincy of St. Mary in the parish church of Haynecourt, which went to Pasquier Coutel, and obtained the rectorship of that church, which had just been resigned by Thierry Quidet (CBM 1060, fol. 254v). It is likely that his passing and the disposition of his grand vicariate took place between 1468 and 1476, and would have been recorded in the lost register N of the acts. Jacques or Jehan Helbart or Helbaut (the accounts abbreviate his name both as Ja. and Jo.) is documented as small vicar in 1409 “until St. Andrew” (30 November) in Jaques Dablaing’s account (LAN, 4 G 6788 [1409–1410], fol. 2v), most likely the Jacob who was a small vicar in weeks 7–26 in 1409–1410 (LAN, 4 G 6786 [1409–1410], fol. 4r–v), and weeks 8–30 in 1411–1412 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1411–1412], fols. 4r and 5r). He might be the same man as Jacques Hagobart, who held the chaplaincy of St. Elizabeth as a foreign chaplaincy from 1410–1411 to at least 1413–1414 (LAN, 4 G 6891, fol. 15v; 6896, fo. 31v; accounts for 1414–1416 are lost), became a member of the grand community of chaplains in 1416–1417, and appears in the lists until 1433–1434 (LAN, 4 G 6897, fol. 7r; 6906, fol. 62r). Jacques Patineaux (Patinier) was a small vicar from 30 September 1491 to 28 September 1492 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1491–1492], fol. 8v; [1492– 1493], fol. 7r). Jacques Poullen is documented as small vicar on 3 April 1412. He was a familiar of canon Renier Lamelin, and was being allowed to travel to France with him and have his vicariate back upon his return (CBM 1056, fol. 24v). Jacques Prayau was a small vicar from 28 April 1475 to his death on 9 June 1477 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1474–1475], fol. 6v; [1476–1477], fol. 5r; CBM 1061, fol. 27v). Jacques Ragot is documented as small vicar in 1424–1425 (LAN, 4 G 5060, fol. 18r). In 1434 Ragot describes himself as a priest from Arras (ASV, RS 298, fol. 49r–v). In 1427–1428 he joined the grand community of chaplains and appears in the lists until 1433–1434 (LAN, 4 G 6904, fol. 6v; 6906, fol. 56r) even though he was not resident for part of 19

This resignation was recorded again in the acts on 5 June 1455 (CBM 1059, fol. 141r).

List of Small Vicars

that time. He appears in the roster of the papal chapel on 5 March 1431 and remains there until September 1433 (ASR, LO 1712, fol. 82r; MC 827, fol. 165r), at which time he returned north, most likely to ensure his reception to canonicates at St-Piat de Seclin and Notre Dame in Arras, which Eugenius IV had granted him (ASV, RS 288, fol. 127r–v; RS 298, fols. 49v–50r). Around 6 June 1434 he set back for Rome (LAN, 4 G 5068, fol. 32r) and was in the papal chapel from October 1434 to April 1436 (ASR, MC 828, fols. 10v, 87v), when he returned north, having obtained the desired canonicates. He resigned the chaplaincy of St. Nicaise at Cambrai for a parish church of Arras in an exchange with Mathieu Aubron on 1 June 1436 (CBM 1057, fols. 28v–29r), and remained a canon of Arras and Seclin, residing in Arras to his death some time before 23 June 1468 (LAN, 17 G 11, pieces 40– 42). Jaques Robaille is documented as a puer altaris in 1407–1408 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1407–1408], fol. 8v] and 1408–1409, when he left to go to school (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1408–1409], fols. 8v and 10r). He must have been one of the grammar students of Nicolas Grenon during Grenon’s first sojourn at Cambrai. He is reported as being in the papal chapel by 20 December 1428 (ASR 1752, fol. 114v), but both his supplications and papal letters mention him as a papal chaplain on 25 June 1427 (ASV, RS 213, fols. 217r–218r) and as a chaplain and singer on 17 August 1428 (ASV, RS 244, fol. 194r–v). His association with Grenon is made clear in the supplication where Grenon asks for the canonicate at Cambrai on 10 April 1426 (ASV, RS 197, fols. 93r–94r), since the same petition contains requests from two of Grenon’s choristers and from Robaille for benefices resigned by Grenon, in Robaille’s case a chaplaincy at the altar of the Trinity of Cambrai, which he collated on 7 February 1427 through his proctor Jehan de la Porte (CBM 1056, fol. 176r). On 17 August 1428 he was granted a canonicate in Amiens on the death of Hotricus de Spernaco, papal scriptor, who died in Rome in 1428 (ASV, RS 244, fol. 194r–v). In 1442 Robaille claims old age, seeking to be relieved of the duty of visiting a parish church he held in Bragny-sur-Saône while still receiving its fruits (ASV, RS 386, fol. 178r–v). Robaille is reported as a canon of Amiens from 1429 to 1446, probably the year of his death (Millet, ed., Fasti, 1:135). Jacques Roussel was a small vicar from 21 September 1476 to 23 June 1477. His departure is not noted; he is simply absent from the initial list of 1477–1478 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1476–1477], fol. 5r; [1477–1478], fol. 4v).

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

Jacques Stert called Rifflart was a small vicar from 17 November 1475 to his death on 15 July 1483 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1475–1476], fol. 7v; 6463, fol. 8r). The combination of last name and sobriquet is documented only in the aumosne (LAN, 4 G 7767 [1482–1483], fol. 25v). Jacques Tolasse is documented as small vicar in 1409–1410 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1409–1410], fols. 3v and 5r) and 1410–1411 (LAN, 6788 [1410– 1411], fol. 2r). He became a member of the grand community of chaplains some time between July 1401 and June 1405 (accounts lost), and appears in the lists from 1405–1406 to 1412–1413 (LAN, 4 G 6887, fol. 6r; 6894, fol. 7r); by 17 November 1419 he was a grand vicar (CBM 1056, fol. 73r), although the date of his promotion has not turned up.20 He is still mentioned as a grand vicar on 8 November 1437 (CBM 1057, fol. 59v). It is likely that he died some time between 1439 and 1442, and that his death and the transfer of his grand vicariate were reported in the now lost register H of the chapter acts. Jaspar du Sanchoy was a small vicar from 21 January to 27 August 1496 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1495–1496], fol. 9v; [1496–1497], fol. 8v). It is from the entry concerning a grace given to him on his departure that we learn his toponymic (LAN, 4 G 7769 [1496–1497], fol. 22v). Shortly before he left, on 22 August, he was forgiven 40s from the rent on his house (CBM 1063, fol. 133r). Jehan Baudouin is documented as small vicar on 17 June 1412. Baudouin joined the grand community of chaplains between July 1414 and June 1416 (records lost), and appears in the lists from 1416–1417 to 1423–1424 (LAN, 4 G 6897, fol. 8r; 6902, fol. 40v). Jehan Baudre (Bedore) was a small vicar from 16 February to 26 June 1498 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1497–1498], fol. 9r; [1498–1499], fol. 7v). His first name is documented in the accounts of the small vicars and the act of his reception, which indicates that he was a priest (CBM 1064, fol. 24v). On his recess the wine account gives his name erroneously as Pierre, a scribal error made plausible by the presence of Pierre Vaudre, a canon (1496–1513). Jehan Baulde (Baude, Baule, Balduinus), tenorist, was a small vicar from 15 January 1479 to 2 July 1492 (LAN, 7472 [1478–1479], fol. 5v; [1491–1492], fol. 8r). On 21 February 1480 the parish church of Ruacourt, which was at the collation of the chapter, was granted to 20

If the promotion took place, as often was the case, with Tolasse exchanging his chaplaincy for a grand vicariate, the process was probably recorded in the heavily damaged and virtually illegible early folios of CBM 1056, which cover the period when Tolasse’s name drops from the lists.

List of Small Vicars

him on the death of Jehan [blank] (CBM 1061, fol. 122v). At some point he had collated the parish church of Ohain, which he exchanged for that of Planchenort with Jehan de le Verdure on 22 June 1490 (CBM 1061, fol. 367r). On 12 October 1490 the chapter granted him an unnamed chaplaincy in the cathedral vacant on the death of Antoine Boubers (CBM 1061, fol. 379v). He probably joined the grand community of chaplains in 1491–1492 (accounts lost), for he appears in the lists from 1492–1493 (LAN, 4 G 6974, fol. 31v) until 1506–1507 (LAN, 4 G 6993, fol. 24r). Jehan Bernard was a small vicar from 1 June 30 November 1484 (LAN, 4 G 7473, fol. 9r; 7472 [1484–1485], fol. 7v). Jehan Blondel (Blondiau, Blondeau) was a small vicar from 27 February 1458 to 24 January 1460 (LAN, 4 G 7456, fol. 7v; 7458, fol. 5v). His dismissal came about on account of his obsessive pestering of Michelette, sister of one of the vicars of Ste-Croix, and getting into a public fight with Jehan Bauregard, canon of Ste-Croix (CBM 1060, fol. 65r). On 21 January 1463 he is documented as a monk of StAubert (CBM 1060, fol. 65r), which probably means he came from a prominent family, and the accounts of the grand métier report on 5 November 1472 a gift of bread and wine to the duke of Calabria (Alfonso d’Aragona; “illustrissimo principi domino duci Calabriae”) at the house of one Tristan Blondiau (LAN, 4 G 5105, fol. 9v). Jehan Bosquet is documented as small vicar in weeks 1–26 of 1399–1400 (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1399–1400], fols. 3r, 4r). He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1399–1400 and is in the lists until 1400–1401 (LAN, 4 G 6885, fol. 6v; 6886, fol. 26v); he could have been a chaplain longer, but the accounts for 1401–1405 are lost. Jehan Bouchain (probably Jehan de Torgoin, called Bouchain) is documented as a chorister in an undated entry in the aumosne for 1416–1417 (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1416–1417], fol. 9v), and as a small vicar in two entries: one before All Saints and another on Easter in the aumosne for 1419–1420 (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1419–1420], fols. 7v–8r). There is also a chorister documented in undated entries in the aumosne for 1419–1420 (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1419–1420], fol. 8r), 1420– 1421 (LAN, 4 G 7760 [1420–1422]), fol. 8r), and 1421–1422 (LAN, 4 G 7760 [1421–1422], fol. 7v) called Jacques de Torgoin; he is called Bouchain in the first entry, Jacques the brother of Bouchain in the second, and Haquinet Bouchain (probably a confusion) in the third, when he was leaving the choristers. There could be little doubt that Jehan and Jacques were brothers, and Torgoin may well be a

723

724

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

misspelling of Turcoing near Lille. Jehan Bouchain disappears from the Cambrai records until 1457–1458, when one Jehan de Bouchain is admitted as a chaplain of St-Géry and remains in the lists until 1472– 1473 (LAN, 7 G 2956 [1457–1458], fol. 3v; 2956 [1472–1473], fol. 4r), when he is the first chaplain. The accounts of the fabric of St-Géry for that year note that Jehan de la Mort, called Bouchain, paid 36s to the officium adventitiarum et releviorum when he exchanged his chaplaincy for an unnamed benefice with Jacques Faverel, called Cobe (LAN, 7 G 2225 (1472–1473), fol. 1v). If this is the same man as the small vicar we have a toponymic, a last name, and a sobriquet for him. Jehan Brosach from Languedoc, tenorist, is documented as a small vicar in three entries dated 21 September, 10 October, and 30 November 1433 (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1433–1434], fol. 11r–v). The first records his iocundus adventus; the last reports him as a prisoner in the chapter’s tower. Jehan Carette was a small vicar from 13 August 1483 to 27 May 1484 and from 5 March to 23 May 1485 (LAN, 4 G 7473, fols. 8v–9r; 7472 [1484–1485], fol. 8r). The acts record his second reception on 4 March (CBM 1061, fol. 211r). Jehan Charlet, clerk of the parish church of St. George in Cambrai, was received as small vicar on 1 June 1500 and began serving on 3 June (CBM 1064, fol. 256r; LAN, 4 G 7472 [1499–1500], fol. 8v). He is mentioned in the act of 21 September 1500 concerning the prebend of the small vicars (CBM 1064, fol. 282r). By 1503–1504 he was a grand vicar and the receiver of the grand vicars (LAN, 4 G 6749 [1503– 1504], fol. 1r). He could possibly be the Jehan Charlet who held the chaplaincy of St-Blaise at the cathedral as a foreign chaplaincy in 1470–1471 (LAN, 4 G 6943, fol. 37r), and a relative of Christofle Charlet, a longtime chaplain of the cathedral, 1466–1510 (LAN, 4 G 6490, fol. 13r; 6997, fol. 6r). Jehan Collemanque is documented as the officer of the small vicars on 2 February 1417 (CBM 1056, fol. 42v). This is the only reference to him I have found in the cathedral records. He was received as a chaplain at St-Géry in 1423–1424 (LAN, 7 G 2929, fol. 3r) but is absent from the lists. On 21 December 1427 he became a canon of Ste-Croix (LAN, 6 G 177, fol. 68r). In 1435 he was one of Cambrai’s delegates to the Council of Basel (CBM 1057, fol. 21r). He died shortly before 26 September 1446 (LAN, 6 G 177, fol. 120v). Jehan Cornuel called Verjus was a small vicar from 24 April 1475 to 15 March 1485 and from 7 November 1485 to 2 July 1492 (LAN, 4 G

List of Small Vicars

7472 [1474–1475], fol. 6v; [1484–1485], fol. 8r; [1485–1486], fol. 7v; [1491–1492], fol. 8r). On his advent in the wine account he is referred to as Johannes Cormer, but his identity can be established by his position in the list in the following years and by an entry in the aumosne for 1474–1475 (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1474–1475], fol. 18r), which refers to him as Johannes Cornuel. Later accounts shift inconsistently between his last name and his sobriquet. He came to Cambrai from Thérouanne and had been assaulted by armed men en route (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1474–1475], fol. 18r). The hiatus in his service came about when he was dismissed for using abusive language to refer to Cornelius de Berghes, brother of the bishop of Cambrai (CMB 1061, fol. 211v). On 24 March 1477 he collated the chaplaincy of St. Nicholas in the parish church of Jurbise, resigned by Martin Tranchet (CBM 1061, fol. 70r) and on 15 August 1480 he collated the chaplaincy of St. Elizabeth resigned by Robert Lamour (CBM 1061, fol. 114r). He held the chaplaincy of the Trinity as a foreign chaplaincy in 1480–1481 (LAN, 4 G 6959, fol. 42r) and became a member of the grand community in 1485–1486, remaining in the lists until 1498–1499 (LAN, 4 G 6967, fol. 13v; 6981, fol. 22v). On 17 September 1481 he collated the chaplaincy of St. James, resigned by Jehan le Mannier, and resigned his chaplaincy of St. John Baptist to Jehan de Beauvoir (CBM 1061, fol. 133r). His attempt in 1489 to exchange the chaplaincy of St. James for a benefice outside Cambrai, a chaplaincy of the BVM in the parish church of Gavere, was foiled by the chapter because the chaplaincy of St. James was one of the thirty “vicarial” chaplaincies that the cathedral used for the support of its own clergy, and the exchange would have given it to an outsider (CBM 1064, fol. 156r). Cornuel died on 22 August 1499 (CBM 1064, fol. 204r), and the day after his chaplaincy of St. James went to Henry de Monthenry (CBM 1064, fol. 204r). Cornuel was, by his own testimony, a native of the region of Boulogne sur Mer. He became a friend of the poet Jehan Molinet, canon of Valenciennes, and among the works of Molinet in Tournai, Bibliothèque de la Ville, MS 105, are a long poem by Molinet addressed to Cornuel and a versified letter of Cornuel to Nicolas Reimbert, canon of Cambrai, resident in Rome, both of which contain some biographical information on him (see Droz, “Notes”). An account of his life in Cambrai appears in Pirro, “Jehan Cornuel.” He was in Tours, perhaps in the 1450s (Molinet), became a singer at San Pietro in Vaticano in 1465 (Reynolds, Papal Patronage, 45), and stayed in Rome until 1473. He might have become a member of the

725

726

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

papal chapel during the early years of Sixtus IV (ASV, RL 731, fol. 183v, cited in Merkley and Merkley, Music, 92), was a singer in the chapel of Galeazzo Maria Sforza some time between July 1474 and March 1475 (ibid., 101–2 and 127), and may be the composer of a chanson, Au hault de la rue, attributed to “Verjeust” in Paris, BnF, fr. 2245, fol. 6v–7r (Droz, “Notes,” 187–89). Pierre Cornuel called Verjus (q.v.) was his nephew. Jehan Courtois is documented in the wine accounts only as Haquinetus, but two entries in the aumosne for 1439–1440 and 1440–1441 granting “Haquinetus et Martinus Courtois” an extra stipend beyond their salary as semivicars (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1439–1440], fol. 9v; [1440–1441], fol. 9r) make it clear that the last name applies to both men. Jehan was Martin’s brother. He was a small vicar until 29 May 1441 (LAN, 4 G 7440, fol. 7r) and seems to have left Cambrai in 1441. On 7 March 1449 he resigned through procuration a chaplaincy in Aubechel au Bac and another in St-Pierre de Douai in an exchange with Jehan Artut for the parish church of Busignies (CBM 1058, fol. 189v), but on 6 September 1458 he was at Cambrai when he exchanged his chaplaincy at the lazar-house of Pontours for his brother’s chaplaincy of SS. Nicolas and Catherine in Cambrai (CBM 1060, fol. 23v). In 1461– 1462 he joined the grand community of chaplains and his name is in the lists until 1475–1476 (LAN, 4 G 6931, fol. 13v; 6948, fol. 30r). From 1481 to 1506 he was a member of the small community of chaplains (LAN, 4 G 7255 [1481–1482], fol. 1r; 7258, [1505–1506], fol. 1r). Jehan Craspournient was from Hainaut and served as small vicar from 29 March 1465 to 14 May 1466 and from 15 August 1469 to 10 September 1476 (LAN, 4 G 7463, fol. 6r; 7464, fol. 6r; 7568, 5v; 7472 [1476–1477], fol. 4v). He was a member of the grand community of chaplains from 1475–1476 (LAN, 4 G 6948, fol. 12v) until 1485– 1486 (LAN, 6967, fol. 42v), when his chaplaincy of St. Elizabeth went to Pierre Mignot in exchange for Pierre’s grand vicariate on 29 August 1485 (CBM 1061, fol. 227r). On 13 March 1500 he collated the parish church of Amieux resigned by Jehan L’Abbé (CBM 1064, fol. 239v). On 28 July 1505 he was made a canon ex dono capituli following the death of Martin Tranchet (LAN, 4 G 4700, fol. 17r; CBM 1046, fol. 114v). His will no longer survives, but it was in the cathedral archive in the seventeenth century when a catalogue was made (LAN, 4 G 1177), which lists it with a death date of 3 March 1513.21 21

This could be an old-style date.

List of Small Vicars

Jehan Crispin was a small vicar from 24 February 1494 to 23 June 1495 and from 16 September 1495 to 23 June 1496 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1493– 1494], fol. 12r; [1494–1495], fol. 9v; [1495–1496], fol. 9r–v). He is referred to as dominus Crispinus, which indicates he was a priest. His second admission was on 27 July 1495, but he was in Douai, where there had been an outbreak of the plague and a child had died in his house, so he was told to wait before returning to Cambrai (CBM 1063, fol. 26r). Jehan d’Arras 1 was a small vicar from 8 January 1486 to 28 March 1488 (LAN 4 G 7472 [1486–1487], fol. 7r, [1487–1488], fol. 6r). Jehan d’Arras 2, tenorist, began serving on 24 June 1494 and died on 1 July (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1494–1495], fol. 9v). This man could be the same as Jehan d’Arras 1, although his designation as tenorist, absent from the mention of the other man, argues against it. Jehan Daussy (Jehan de Douai) is documented as a chorister between 1477 and 1479 (LAN, 4 G 7766 [1477–1478], fol. 15r; [1478–1479], fol. 16r) and in 1483 (LAN, 4 G 7767 [1483–1484], fol. 21r). He was a small vicar from 24 June 1491 to 16 November 1495 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1491– 1492], fol. 8r; [1495–1496], fol. 9r). His full name is documented in the aumosne, both as a chorister and as a small vicar (LAN, 4 G 7769 [1492–1493], fol. 24v). By 25 October 1493 he had collated a chaplaincy at Braine-l’Alleud (CBM 1062, fol. 106v). On 16 November 1495 he was granted the chaplaincy of SS. Nicholas and Catherine on the death of Nicolas Bridoul (CBM 1063, fol. 60v); he joined the grand community of chaplains in 1496–1497 and is in the lists until 1499– 1500 (LAN, 4 G 6967, fol. 16r; 6984, fol. 34v). On 29 May 1500 he resigned his chaplaincy at Cambrai in a permutation with Jehan Main for a chaplaincy in the church of St-Pierre in Douai; the resignation was done by procuration, indicating that Daussy had moved away from Cambrai (CBM 1062, fol. 254v). He is again documented as a small vicar from 1504–1505 to 1506–1507 (LAN, 4 G 6793 [1504– 1505], fol. 7v; [1506–1507], fol. 5r), and as a grand vicar from 1511 to 1529 (LAN, 4 G 6749 [1511–1512], fol. 6v; [1528–1529], fol. 8v). Jehan de Bonis Gabriel called Verdvestu, sopranist, was received on 7 February 1500 (CBM 1064, fol. 233r) but began serving on 28 March (LAN, 4 G 7473 [1499–1500], fol. 8r). He was dismissed on 6 July 1500 (CBM 1064, fol. 266r). An act of 1 June 1500, granting him 20 patards, calls him Iohannes Vero, called Verdvestu, and notes that he came from Louvain (CBM 1064, fol. 256r).

727

728

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

Jehan de Calais is documented as small vicar for all of 1399–1400 (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1399–1400], fol. 3r); he served apparently continuously as a small vicar to his death on 13 October 1453 (LAN, 4 G 7452, fol. 6r). He joined the grand community of chaplains between July 1401 and June 1405 (accounts lost) and appears in the lists from 1405–1406 to 1453–1454 (LAN, 4 G 6887, fol. 6r; 6920, fol. 22v). For a number of years he was the receiver of the small vicars. Jehan de Fontenay. The aumosne for 1447–1448 has an undated entry granting Jehan de Fontenay, small vicar, 25s for a robe at Du Fay’s instance (LAN, 4 G 7762, fol. 12r). But no mention of Fontenay appears in the wine accounts and there is no other mention of him in other documents for this year. Apparently the fact that the request came from Du Fay, who was then master of the small vicars (CBM 1058, fol. 118v), misled the scribe of the accounts into thinking that Jehan was a small vicar, and this misapprehension has been reported in C. Wright, “Dufay,” 207. Fontenay was indeed a musician, who served in the French royal chapel from 1459 to 1486 (Perkins, “Musical Patronage,” 554) and a friend of Du Fay who sent the composer a portrait of Louis XI (LAN, 4 G 1313, p. 71), but he was never a small vicar. Jehan de Guise was a small vicar from 24 June 1456 to 4 November 1457 (LAN, 4 G 7455, fol. 6v; 7456, fol. 7v). Probably his departure had something to do with a violent altercation he had with Jehan Bostel, the magister puerorum of St-Géry, which embarrassed the chapter, for the date of his departure coincides with the chapter’s discussion of the incident (CBM 1060, fol. 4v). Jehan de Jeumont is documented as being received as a small vicar on 20 May 1461 but never actually served as one. The same day he was received he obtained the chaplaincy at the altar of Notre Dame des Fiertres, resigned by Andrieu de Louvain (CBM 1060, fol. 110r). Two days later he exchanged this chaplaincy and the parish church of Faloen with Jacques Maynart for the parish church of Ysier (Ysére?) (CBM 1060, fol. 110r–v). Maynart had just been received as a small vicar but, like Jeumont, never served as one. Both Andrieu and Maynart were members of the small community of chaplains. In this case it appears as if the receptions of Jeumont and Maynart were part of a legal fiction needed to accomplish the permutation since the chaplaincy in question was one of the thirty vicarial chaplaincies.

List of Small Vicars

Jehan de la Porte 1, Jean Courpin, is documented as a chorister who left the maîtrise before June 1399 in order to go to the schools (LAN, 4 G 7757 [1398–1499], fol. 8v). He might have been a small vicar after June 1411 and joined the grand community of chaplains in 1417–1418 (accounts lost) since he appears in the lists from 1418–1419 until 1434–1435 (LAN, 4 G 6898, fol. 6v; 6907, fol. 26v). In 1425 he is among the executors of Du Fay’s relative, Jehan Hubert (LAN, 4 G 1372, p. 3). On 12 June 1433 he became a canon of Ste-Croix (LAN, 6 G 177, fol. 85v) and by 1446–1447 he was also canon of St-Géry (LAN, 7 G 2412 [1446–1447], fol. 19v). In 1452 he reports his age as seventy years (LAN, 4 G 1081, fol. 65v). On 12 November 1456 he joined Michiel van Beringhen, Gilles Flannel called L’Enfant, and Nicolas Plonchet in a gift of lands to the chapter of Cambrai in support of their obits (LAN, 4 G 133, no. 1997). He died on 28 March 1457 (LAN, 6 G 177, fol. 147r). His will survives (LAN, Cum G-H, 233] and the inventory shows an extensive library. Jehan de la Porte 2 (Iohannes de Porta) was a small vicar from 27 May 1462 to 26 May 1474 (LAN, 4 G 7460, fol. 5r; 7472 [1473–1474], fol. 6v). His recess is not noted with his name, only with the indication that there was one less vicar as of that date; his absence is confirmed by the opening list for 1474–1475. He is documented as a chaplain, probably with the small community, by 24 January 1460 (CBM, 1060, fol. 66v). In 1460–1461 he is reported as the past holder of the chaplaincy of St. Elizabeth and the present holder of the chaplaincy of the Trinity, both as foreign chaplaincies (LAN, 4 G 6929, fol. 43v). In 1470–1471 he became a member of the grand community of chaplains and appears in the lists until 1473–1474 (LAN, 4 G 6943, fol. 11v; 6946, fol. 20r). By 9 October 1476, when he collated the chaplaincy of St. John Evangelist at the parish church of St. Brice in Tournai on the death of Rasse des Pres, he was a grand vicar (CBM 1061, fol. 9v), which means that his promotion would have been recorded in the lost register N of the acts, and on 12 August 1478 he became librarian to the chapter (CBM 1061, fol. 53v). On 27 March 1480 he resigned the chaplaincy at St. Brice in favor of Pierre Hubert (CBM 1061, fol. 94v). On 12 August 1480 he collated the chaplaincy at the hospital in Braine-l’Alleud on the death of Raoul Mortier (CBM 1061, fol. 133v). On 2 March 1486, the day after the burial of canon Nicolas Fierin, the chapter gave his canonicate to Jehan du Wez, the grammar teacher, but two weeks later du Wez exchanged his canonicate with de la Porte for a chaplaincy at the altar of St. Nicholas in the parish church of Goy (CBM 1061, fols. 254r, 256r).

729

730

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

This action mystified the chapter; de la Porte had obtained a papal nova provisio just in case, but du Wez reaffirmed his decision (CBM 1061, fol. 261r–v), so de la Porte was formally received as a canon on 17 May 1486. He had become a canon of Ste-Croix, but resigned this canonicate the day of his reception (CBM 1061, fol. 261v). He died on 13 June 1515 (CBM 1046, fol. 175r). Jehan de Lavalle François was a small vicar from 20 January to 21 March 1483 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1482–1483], fol. 9r). Jehan de le Place is documented as small vicar on 12 July 1426 (CBM 1056, fol. 170r). On 10 February 1466 one Jehan de le Place (Johannes de Platea) resigned the chaplaincy at the altar of the Trinity in Cambrai, in a permutation with Jan van Muntenberghe, for a chaplaincy at the altar of the Holy Ghost in the church of St. Michael in Ghent. Neither man was present at Cambrai (CBM 1060, fol. 234v), thus this chaplaincy was a foreign chaplaincy; the accounts for the community of chaplains in 1465–1466 list two foreign chaplaincies at the altar of the Trinity that year, one held by Jehan du Pont and the other by Lievin des Mares (LAN, 4 G 6938, fol. 38v). Jehan du Pont is variously called in the accounts of the chaplains Johannes du Pont, Jehan du Pont, Johannes de Porta, and Jehan de le Porte, although clearly these are references to the same man. He held the chaplaincy of the Trinity as a foreign chaplaincy at least from 1452–1453 (the account for 1451–1452 is lost), as the successor of Nicolas Cabaret (LAN, 4 G 6918, fol. 37r). If this is also the Jehan de le Place who resigned that chaplaincy in 1466, he must have joined the grand community of chaplains between July 1424 and June 1426 (accounts lost); he appears in the lists from 1426– 1427 to 1432–1433 (LAN, 4 G 6903, fol. 29r; 6905, fol. 28v). He then disappears from the record until he succeeds Cabaret as the chaplain of the Trinity. This career is consistent with that of other small vicars. The matter of the different names by which he is called is rare but not unheard of in the Cambrai records. In fact, the holder of the other foreign chaplaincy at the altar of the Trinity is called alternately Livinus and Henricus in the accounts. Jehan de le Quellerie called Crassequale (Crassequande) was a small vicar from 2 December 1484 to 15 February 1494 and 13 May 1494 to 27 August 1496 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1484–1485], fol. 8r; [1493–1494], fols. 11v–12r; [1496–1497], fol. 8v). The wine accounts use the sobriquet (in wildly varying orthographies) until 1491–1492 and Quellerie from then on. On 18 June 1485 he was enjoined, under threat of lost wages, to take music lessons with the choristers (CBM 1061, fol. 216v),

List of Small Vicars

an injunction repeated on 10 December 1485 (CBM 1061, fol. 243r). In September 1486 he had to be punished for a fight that included the shedding of blood (CBM 1061, fol. 279r), and on 12 February 1492 he killed someone during a procession right after the singing of the Pretiosa (CBM 1061, fols. 415r, 416r). Possibly as a purgation of this crime he petitioned on 14 February 1494 to be allowed to retain his place as a small vicar while undertaking a pilgrimage to Compostela (CBM 1062, fol. 150r) and indeed the wine accounts report his absence for that reason from 15 February to 13 May 1494. On 27 February 1489 he resigned the chaplaincy of St. James in the parish church of Binche, which went to Jehan Nainekin, called Binchois (CBM 1061, fol. 330r). On 6 March 1493 the chaplaincy at the altar of the Trinity, resigned by Jehan Ribault, was granted to Quellerie (CBM 1062, fol. 52v). Quellerie must have joined the grand community of chaplains in 1493–1494 (accounts lost) since he appears in the lists from 1494–1495 to 1496–1497 (LAN, 4 G 6976, fol. 34r; 6979, fol. 34v). On 2 June 1497 Quellerie exchanged this chaplaincy for the grand vicariate of Raoul de Molinbel (CBM 1063, fol. 217v). He was one of the executors of Denis de Hollain, and on 8 November 1503 he was received in the canonicate of Hollain and his grand vicariate went to Louis van Pullaer (CBM 1064, fols. 482v–483r). He died on 5 February 1505 (CBM 1046, fol. 114v). Jehan de Lens is documented as small vicar in an entry of 10 October 1426 in the aumosne as he was let go (LAN, 4 G 7760 [1426–1427], fol. 11r). Jehan de Luwere is documented as small vicar on 4 November 1414, when he collated the chaplaincy of Notre-Dame de la Poudre resigned by Jehan de Calais (CBM 1056, fol. 17v). He might have been received in the community of chaplains, but the records from 1414 to 1416 are lost and by 1417–1418 his name is not in the lists; in fact he disappears from the cathedral records until 1472–1473, when the grand métier paid him £10 as the notary assisting the secretary of the chapter (Georges Bouchel) (LAN, 4 G 5105 [1472–1473], fol. 7r). Luwere is one of the scribes of CBM 1060 (indicated on fol. 1r as a public, imperial, and apostolic notary) and of the execution of Du Fay’s will. On 18 August 1476 the canons grant him the habitus ecclesiae and describe him as “presbytero musico in lectione et cantu experto” (CBM 1061, fol. 6v), and within a year he was the main secretary of the chapter (LAN, 4 G 5108, fol. 9r). On 18 July 1478 he was granted the chaplaincy of St. John the Baptist resigned by Martin Tranchet (CBM 1061, fol. 49r).

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1479–1480 and appears in the lists until 1483–1484 (LAN, 4 G 6958, fol. 12r; 6963, fol. 16v). On 19 July 1482 he was made canon and treasurer of Ste-Croix (CBM 1061, fol. 143v), but by 10 May 1484, when the widow of the baker to the chapter sued him, he was probably no longer living in Cambrai (CBM 1061, fol. 180r).22 On 30 July 1484 he resigned by procuration an unnamed chaplaincy in Cambrai in an exchange with Andrieu Verdure for a chaplaincy in St-Amé de Douai, and on 18 October 1484 he is described as the provost of St-Pierre de Douai (CBM 1061, fol. 197v). This is his last appearance in the Cambrai records. Jehan de Mauclerc, called de Sancto Paulo, from Thérouanne, is documented as small vicar for all of 1410–1411 and 1411–1412 (LAN, 4 G 6788 [1410–1411], fol. 2r–v; 6789 [1411–1412], fol. 4v). Mauclerc is probably not the same Johannes de Sancto Paulo who was a chorister at Cambrai in 1383–1384 (LAN, 4 G 7757 [1383–1384], fol. 8r), but he is probably the Johannes de Sancto Paulo who was “recently made a cleric” and was to be the bishop of the children in December 1413 (CBM 1056, fol. 3v). He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1414–1415 and appears in the list for 1416–1417 (LAN, 4 G 4619, fol. 9r; 6897, fol. 8r). On 10 November 1418 he was in Constance and was received into the papal chapel (ASR 1711, fol. 92r), where he sang until at least July 1419 (ASR 824, fol. 62r). On 27 January 1419 he was granted as expectatives canonicates in Arras and Ste-Croix de Cambrai (ASV, RL 199, fols. 22v–23r). By 3 March 1420 he was back at Cambrai and was received in person as canon of Ste-Croix (LAN, 16 G 177, fol. 43v). A good number of documents show him in residence at Cambrai until 1432, when he exchanged his canonicate at Ste-Croix for one in Béthune with André Despars (LAN, 16 G 177, fol. 81v). He might be the Johannes de Sancto Paulo who became a grand vicar at Cambrai in 1438–1439 (LAN, 4 G 4644, fol. 9v), and he was still alive in 1469 when he resigned a chaplaincy in St-Géry that went to Gilles le Carlier’s brother Jehan (LAN, 7 G 575, fol. 120r). Jehan de Mauldet (Malda) was a small vicar from 1 August 1451 to his death on 23 May 1459 (LAN, 4 G 7450, fol. 6r; 7458, fol. 8v; CBM 1060, fol. 46r). He presents a curious case of a “regressive” ecclesiastical career at Cambrai. On 16 March 1446 he was examined to see if he qualified for the grand vicariate that Adam de Bailleux wanted to 22

The acts give no details about the suit, only that Jehan did not appear and was declared contumacious.

List of Small Vicars

exchange for the parish church of Antoing; two days later he was found qualified and the permutation took place, with Robert Auclou serving as Mauldet’s proctor (CBM 1058, fols. 38v–39r, 40r). By 24 May 1447 Mauldet had not yet become a priest and the canons had to threaten him with the privation of his vicariate (CBM 1058, fols. 112r–113v). Finally, on 21 June 1447 Mauldet exchanged his grand vicariate for a chaplaincy at the altar of Notre Dame de la Poudre with Gilles Dippre (CBM 1058, fol. 117r). Mauldet had further trouble as a small vicar: on 16 December 1451 the chapter had to hear a case between Mauldet and Jehan Hertbeke, grand vicar; Mauldet had hit Hertbeke and drawn blood (CBM 1059, fols. 6v–7r). Jehan de Poix is documented as small vicar in 1410–1411 (LAN, 4 G 6788 [1410–1411], fol. 2r–v) and 1411–1412 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1411– 1412], fol. 3v). He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1413– 1414 and appears in the lists until 1438–1439 (LAN, 4 G 6896, fol. 6r; 6908, fol. 41r). As with other long-term chaplains, his absence from the lists probably indicates his death, which would have been recorded in the lost register H of the acts. Jehan de Poson is documented as small vicar in 1410–1411 (LAN, 4 G 6788 [1410–1411], fol. 2r–v). Jehan de Rumelly is documented as small vicar in an undated entry in the aumosne in 1410–1411 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1410–1411], fol. 7v). Jehan de Saint-Martin, Jehan de Condé, Jehan du Plouch is documented in the aumosne for 1422–1423 as Jehan de Saint-Martin from Condé, granted 18s “around Christmas” because he “was for a number of days with the small vicars in the divine office” (LAN, 4 G 7760 [1422–1423], fol. 7r), and as Jehan de Condé, small vicar, in an undated entry in the grand métier for 1429–1430 (LAN, 4 G 5064, fol. 15r). He joined the grand community of chaplains between July 1428 and June 1432 (accounts lost), and appears in the lists from 1432–1433 to 1468–1469 (LAN, 4 G 6905, fol. 28v; 6942, fol. 34v); in some of the later lists he is also called Jehan du Plouch. He may be the Jehan du Plouch documented among the chaplains of St-Géry in the accounts of the bourse from 1446 to 1450 (LAN, 7 G 2412 [1446– 1467], fol. 20r; [1447–1448], fol. 16v; [1448–1449], fol. 19r; [1449– 1450], fol. 17v) (the accounts of the chaplains are missing for all these years), but not the Jehan de Condé received as a new chaplain at StGéry in 1463–1464 (LAN, 7 G 2956 [1463–1464], fol. 3v). His disappearance from the list of chaplains at the cathedral after such a long tenure suggests that he died between July 1468 and June 1469; the

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

collation of his chaplaincy to his successor would have been recorded in the lost register N of the acts. Jehan de Senleches was a small vicar from 23 November 1446 to 30 January 1460 (LAN, 4 G 7446, fol. 6v; 7458, fol. 5v) when he became a grand vicar upon the death of Guillaume Damien, called de Soignies (CBM 1060, fol. 66v). He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1454–1455 (his advent is not recorded) and appears in the lists from 1455–1456 to 1456–1457 (LAN, 4 G 6922, fol. 23r; 6923, fol. 21v), when he resigned his chaplaincy at the altar of St. Lawrence in a permutation with Honeste Maressel for the parish church of Inchy (CBM 1059, fol. 266v). The acts, passim, mention a number of financial problems and his long and devoted service to the church (e.g., CBM 1059, fol. 212r). The last mention I have found in the documents is a gift of £10 from the aumosne recorded between 20 September and 4 October 1473 (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1473–1474], fol. 21v). Senleches probably died before 1476 and his passing and the transfer of his vicariate would have been recorded in the lost register N of the acts. Jehan de Somme (Sommam) is documented as a chorister from 1466 to 1473, who left after Lent 1473 “with many years of service” (LAN, 4 G 7764 [1465–1466], fol. 25r; [1466–1467], fol. 14r; [1467–1468], fol. 16v; [1472–1473], fol. 20r). He was a small vicar from 8 May 1482 to 30 November 1484 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1482–1483], fol. 9v; [1484– 1485], fol. 7v). An entry in the account of the grand community of chaplains for 1482–1483 that the chaplaincy of St. Anne, a foreign chaplaincy, had belonged to Jehan but was now in the hands of the chapter (LAN, 4 G 6962, fol. 30v) is the only notice we have of him besides his service as a small vicar. Jehan de Valenciennes is documented as a chorister from 1445 to 1451 (his tenure coincided with that of Ernoul Campion) (CBM 1058, fols. 3r, 269r). He was a small vicar from 28 February to 12 December 1452 (CBM 1059, fol. 12v; LAN, 4 G 7450, fol. 6r; 7451, fol. 5r), when he created a big scandal through posting notes defaming Symon Mellet, trying to lure choristers away from their house, and erasing part of a motet, causing the performance to fall apart, whereupon he was banned from the church (CBM 1059, fol. 46r). Jehan du Boeuf is mentioned as a small vicar in an act of 3 July 1499 allowing him and Pierre de Reust to go to Arras (CBM 1064, fol. 193r) and again in the act of 21 September 1500 dealing with the prebend of the small vicars (CBM 1064, fol. 282v). Not in the wine list nor in those of the small vicars at these times, he does appear, however, in the lists

List of Small Vicars

of small vicars from 1501–1502 to 1516–1517 (LAN, 4 G 6973 [1501– 1502], fol. 7v; [1516–1517], fol. 10v). Jehan du Quesnoy 1 is documented as small vicar for all of 1399–1400 as Hanotin (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1399–1400], 3r) and mentioned with his full name as a small vicar on 23 September 1399 (CBM, 1055, fol. 41r). Jehan du Quesnoy 2 was a small vicar from 9 October 1476 to 4 July 1479 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1476–1477], fol. 5r; [1479–1480], fol. 6v). He is probably one of the two choristers from Le Quesnoy mentioned in the records of the aumosne for 1474–1475 (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1474–1475], fol. 16v). Jehan du Roeulx (de Rota) was received as a small vicar on 13 June 1498 (CBM 1064, fol. 72v) and began serving on 24 June (LAN, 7472 [1498– 1499], fol. 7v). He was still a small vicar on 9 December 1503 when the chaplaincy of St. Andrew was collated to him upon the death of Guillaume Bernard (CBM 1064, fol. 486v). Jehan du Sart, see Petit Jehan 2. Jehan Durin was a small vicar from 12 May 1445 (when he worked for two days) to 24 October 1446 (LAN, 4 G 7444, fol. 5v; 7446, fol. 6v). He may be a relative of Guillaume Durin, documented as a chorister in 1444–1445 (LAN, 4 G 7762 [1444–1445], fols. 6v, 11r, 12r). Jehan Fabri 1, tenorist, was a small vicar from 20 June 1459 to 16 April 1460 (LAN, 4 G 7457, fol. 8r; 7458, fol. 5v). Because of the different dates when the accounts of the wine and the small vicars began Fabri’s advent and recess are reported in the account of the small vicars for 1459–1460 instead of over two years (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1459–1460], fols. 7r, 9r). That he was a tenorist is reported when he received a gift of 1 écu during an illness (CBM 1060, fol. 59r). On 13 June 1460 he was given a farewell gift of £10 (CBM 1060, fol. 82v). On 14 May 1465 he took part in a quadrangular permutation, exchanging the parish church of St. Nicholas de Tournai for a chaplaincy at Ste-Croix with Georges Bouchel (CBM 1060, fol. 211v). He is not to be confused with Jehan Fabri 2, who was a small vicar in the 1480s, nor with Jehan Fabri 3, documented as canon of St-Géry from 1437 to 1468. Jehan Fabri 2 was a small vicar from 24 June 1485 to 3 February 1497 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1485–1486], fol. 7r; [1496–1497], fol. 9r). Over the years he had numerous run-ins with the authorities and was reprimanded for bloody fights, frequenting taverns during the times he should be in a service, and other infractions, for which he was imprisoned a number of times (CBM 1061, fols. 249r, 257r, 258r, 377r; 1062, fol. 251v; 1063, fols. 12v, 25r, 130v). At the same time his

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

musical judgment was valued, for on 7 July 1494 he was sent on a tour seeking expert musicians (CBM 1062, fol. 197v). By 5 January 1495 he was a member of the grand community of chaplains (CBM 1062, fol. 247r), although he paid his bienvenue in 1495–1496 (LAN, 4 G 6978, fol. 15v). He appears in the lists until 1498–1499 (LAN, 4 G 6798, fol. 15v; 6981, fol. 34r). On 21 August 1499 he exchanged the chaplaincy at the altar of SS. Peter and Paul for the grand vicariate of Jehan Ribault (CBM 1064, fol. 203r). He is documented on 17 April 1504, when he assaulted Mathieu Feron (CBM 1064, fol. 498r). Jehan Ferne is documented on 24 and 26 March 1462 as a small vicar (CBM 1060, fol. 136r) but is absent from all the lists, so he probably never served as one. The first entry uses an unusual formula, “Domini constituent dominum Johannem Ferne in parvum vicarium,” indicating that, as with Jeumont and Maynart, his vicariate was a legal fiction to allow him to collate one of the vicarial chaplaincies being resigned by Robert le Canoine. He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1462–1463 and appears in the lists until 1465–1466 (LAN, 4 G 6932, fol. 13r; 6398, fol. 19v). Jehan Foursel is documented as small vicar before Lent 1407–1408 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1407–1408], fol. 8r). Foursel does not turn up in any other Cambrai documents known to me, but a supplication to Martin V by Nicolas Petit (Nicolaus Parvi), priest of Amiens, dated 23 January 1426 (10 Kl. Feb. A 8) (ASV, RS 182, fols. 238v–239r) sheds some light on him. Petit is asking for the parish church of Ducrotoy in Amiens, with a tortuous history of holders that he details. The first of these is one Jehan Forsuel [sic], who apparently resigned the church on his pacific assecution of the archdeaconate of Antwerp in Cambrai. There is no record of this in the Cambrai acts, but the archdeaconate of Antwerp, which was at the time not associated with a canonicate, is not particularly well documented in the early decades of the fifteenth century. Eustace Carlier became archdeacon of Antwerp in 1403, and Guillaume Monnard was the archdeacon beginning in 1419, according to François-Dominique Tranchant (CBM 1046, fol. 83r; no exact reception dates given), neither of whom was resident. Tranchant, who usually indicates the per obitum in all such successions, does not do so in this case. This fits well with the tale Petit presents, for he states that Forsuel was in the Curia and died when the Curia was in Mantua, which would be in 1418. This would indicate that Forsuel left Cambrai to pursue a career in the Curia and obtained the archdeaconate shortly before his death some time in 1418. The main difficulty with all of this,

List of Small Vicars

besides the two spellings of the last name, is the lightning speed that it implies in the beneficial career of Foursel, which would be quite atypical for the time, even in the immediate aftermath of the Council of Constance. Jehan Franchois de Gembloux is documented as small vicar after Lent 1402, when he received £4 as he left (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1401–1402], fol. 8r). See Fallows, “Johannes Franchois de Gemblaco.” It may be that he is the “Franchois” in Du Fay’s He compaignons, and that he was among the singers of Archbishop Pandolfo di Malatesta who accompanied him to Patras in 1424 (Planchart, “The Liègeoise Diaspora,” 94–95). Jehan Fresneau is documented as living in the house of the choristers in 1468–1469, so he might have been a chorister at the cathedral (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1468–1469], fol. 6r). He was a small vicar from 24 June to 22 October 1468 and from 16 January to 5 May 1469 (LAN, 4 G 7468, fols. 5v–6v). The wine account notes his advent only by including his name in the first list of 1468–1469; the account of the small vicars, which starts on the Saturday before St. Barnabas (11 June), notes his advent in the third week (LAN, 6789 [1468–1469], fol. 7v). Later he served in the French Royal Chapel (1469–1475), the Sforza chapel in Milan (1475–1476), and in 1485 he is documented back in the French Royal Chapel. From 1494 to his death in 1505 he ran the choir school at Chartres (Atlas and Alden, “Jehan Fresneau”). Jehan Gautier, tenorist, is documented as small vicar on 15 May 1433 (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1432–1433], fol. 12r). Jehan Gilles, tenorist, is documented as small vicar in entries of 2 August 1431 in the aumosne and on 28 March 1432 in the grand métier (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1431–1432], fol. 12r; 5066, fol. 36v). He came to Cambrai from Louvain and is probably the same Jehan Gilles, master of arts and clerk of Tournai, who on 24 February and again on 27 March 1436 sought the matricularia of St. Salvator in Bruges, which Walter de Male, former papal singer of Alexander V and John XXIII, was about to resign on account of old age (ASV, RS 320, fol. 31r–v; RS 323, fols. 152v–153r). Jehan Hachin was a small vicar from 15 January to 16 August 1466 (LAN, 4 G 7464, fol. 6r; 7465, fol. 5v). Jehan Hanelle from Tournai is documented as small vicar after Lent 1408 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1407–1408], fol. 8r, for weeks 1–22 of 1409– 1410 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1409–1410], fol. 4v), and the undated lists of 1410–1411 (LAN, 4 G 6788 [1410–1411], fol. 2r). By 7 August 1428 he

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

was in Cyprus, was married, and was in the service of the king of Cyprus (ASV, RS 228, fol. 101r). He traveled to Savoy in 1434 with Anne of Lusignan. Savoy documents refer to him on 16 August 1434 as a singer of the king of Cyprus (TAS, Inv. 16, Reg. 79, fol. 473v) and the chapel master of the king on 14 November 1436 (TAS, Inv. 16, Reg. 81, fol. 207v). He is probably one of the composers represented in the Cyprus Codex and possibly its scribe (Kügle, “Jean Hanelle”). Jehan Hemart called de Landreches is documented as a supernumerary chorister in 1450–1451 (LAN, 4 G 7763 [1450–1451], fol. 11r). By 1457–1458 he was no longer a chorister but was going to school and staying with the magister scholarum (LAN, 4 G 7763 [1457– 1458], fol. 18r). Probably ca. 1460 he became magister puerorum at St-Géry. The registers of St-Géry present a problem in that the magister puerorum is virtually never named except by title. The only mention of Hemart as such is in the acts, when he was punished for an infraction on 24 October 1464 (LAN, 7 G 575, fol. 74v); he was then probably removed as magister puerorum but retained his post as vicar in St-Géry, where suddenly his name appears in the lists of clerics being paid for services and processions (LAN, 7 G 2414 [1464–1465], fol. 12v; [1465–1466], fols. 10r, 12r, 12v; [1466–1467], fols. 10r–12v; [1467–1468], fol. 11v. The accounts mention specifically that for the fiscal year of 1464–1465 there were two magistri scholarum. As magister puerorum until late in 1464 he was probably one of the teachers of one Gossequin de Condé, who almost certainly is Josquin des Pres (LAN, 7 G 2414 [1466–1467], fol. 20v). In 1468 he returned to the cathedral and was a small vicar from 23 May 1468 to 14 May 1476 (LAN, 4 G 7466, fol. 5r; 7272 [1475–1476], fol. 7v). He must have become a grand vicar shortly afterward; his promotion would have been recorded in the lost register N of the acts. He is first mentioned as a magister puerorum on 20 March 1469 (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1468–1469], fol. 17v), though his appointment probably dates back to 1468. He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1474–1475 but appears in the lists only in 1475–1476 (LAN, 4 G 6947, fol. 13r; 6948, fol. 30r), which indicates that either he resigned his chaplaincy or shifted to the small community.23 On 30 June 1483 he collated a chaplaincy at the altar of the Trinity on the death of Pierre de Castelier (not Pierre du Castel) and that same day he resigned his grand vicariate, which went to Robert le 23

All these transactions would have been recorded in register N of the acts.

List of Small Vicars

Voiturier (CBM 1061, fols. 162v, 163v). The accounts of grand community of chaplains show him holding the chaplaincy as a foreign chapel from 1485 on and the indication that he held it ad privilegium from 1489 on (LAN, 4 G 6967, fol. 42r; 6971, fol. 40r). As with Gobert le Mannier, Hemart was asked to sing with the small vicars, although no longer one of them, for a whole year on 8 August 1483, and was paid accordingly (CBM 1061, fol. 164r). His career as a magister puerorum at the cathedral came to an end in the wake of a scandal: on 5 November 1483 Hemart was denounced as having a religiosa as his concubine and was punished severely (CBM 1061, fol. 170v). He was replaced as magister puerorum on 28 July 1484 (CBM, 1061, fol. 187r). On 15 April 1482 he had collated the custody of the parish church of Lessines on the death of Jehan le Caron 2 (CBM 1061, fol. 139r), but after a lawsuit instituted by Henri Macheclier in 1484 (CBM 1061, fol. 201v) the custody of the church was assigned to canon Jacques Daussut on 14 April 1485 (CBM 1061, fol. 241r). Hemart died shortly before 27 February 1493, when Hugo le Caron collated the chaplaincy at the altar of the Trinity (CBM 1062, fol. 51r). He was a composer; his name is mentioned among the musicians in Compère’s Omnium bonorum plena, and in 1475–1476 Symon Mellet copied a Lamentation by Hemart, presumably on the death of Du Fay (LAN, 4 G 4683, fol. 23r). A song by him survives in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Banco Rari 229, fols. 226v–227r. Jehan Herangiere or Hecangiere is documented as small vicar in 1410– 1411 (LAN, 4 G 6788 (1410–1411), fol. 2r–v. The aumosne records his death and burial some time after Lent 1411 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1410– 1411], fol. 7r). Jehan Herlevin was a small vicar from 19 June 1444 to late May 1445 (LAN, 4 G 7443, fol. 7r; CBM 1058, fol. 5r). His name is the most mangled among those of the small vicars: he is referred to as Herlevin, Helling, Harlemin, Valentin, Helbin, and Helluwin. His departure is exceptionally not recorded in the wine account, but is noted in the acts, when he is referred to as “recently let go” on 2 June 1455, and in an undated entry in the aumosne (LAN, 4 G 7762, fascicle of 1444–1445, fol. 12r). His connection with Cambrai was apparently limited to his small vicariate. Jehan Holinghe [Mouton] was a small vicar from 16 February to 30 May 1498 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1497–1498], fol. 9r–v). The wine account calls him only “parvus magister.” The act of his reception gives only his first name and records that he was a clerk (CBM 1064,

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

fol. 24v), but the account of the small vicars gives his full name in the list for Lent 1498 (LAN, 4 G 6791 [1497–1498], fol. 7r). See also H. M. Brown, “Jean Mouton (de Holluigue).” Jehan Hurtault was a small vicar from 7 May 1490 to 7 August 1491 (LAN, 7472 [1486–1490], fol. 6r; [1490–1491], fol. 7r). His first name is not in any of the documents from the cathedral, but appears in the acts of St-Géry on 17 October 1481 (LAN, 7 G 575, fol. 229r). He is surely a relative of Jehan Hurtault, a papal singer who was a canon of St-Géry from 1449 to his death in Cambrai in June 1475 (LAN, 7 G 2224 [1449–1450], fol. 1v; 7 G 2225 [1475–1476], fol. 1r). Jehan Hyrondart (Herondart) is documented as a chorister, probably finishing his years as such in 1496, when he was granted a chaplaincy in the parish church of Camières on the death of Jehan le Mannier (CBM 1063, fol. 76r). On 16 March 1496 the canons granted him 12 écus if he would live with the magister puerorum or else 10 écus if he planned to go to school outside Cambrai (CBM 1063, fol. 92v). On 26 October 1497 he is mentioned as a small vicar and granted a grace of 15s by the aumosne, but the entry for All Saints in the aumosne for that year has, exceptionally, a list of names with the specific notation that Hyrondart is not included (LAN, 4 G 4770, fol. 23v), and his name does not appear in the same list in the account of the small vicars (LAN, 6791 [1497–1498], fol. 7r). His name never appears in the wine accounts, so it is more than likely that he never served as a small vicar. Jehan Jonas was a small vicar from 24 June to 30 July 1472 (LAN, 4 G 7471, fol. 6r). Jehan le Barbier was a small vicar from 30 March 1497 to 3 February 1498 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1496–1497], fol. 8v; [1497–1498], fol. 9r). His full name is recorded in the act of his admission: he had been a chorister and was advised to remain studying with the magister puerorum (CBM 1063, fol. 197v). Jehan le Bocheux was a small vicar from 15 August to 10 September 1495 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1495–1496], fols. 8v–9r). An entry in the acts on 9 September 1495 notes that he came from Hesdin and was being let go as useless (CBM 1063, fol. 39r). Jehan le Caron 1 is documented as a chorister from Arras living at the house of Nicolas de le Cambe in an undated entry in the aumosne for 1421–1422 (LAN, 4 G 7760 [1421–1422], fol. 7v), as a former chorister living with Nicolas Grenon in 1423–1424 (LAN, 4 G 7760 [1423– 1424], fol. 7v), and curiously enough also as a former chorister in an undated entry falling between 27 October and 27 December 1435

List of Small Vicars

(LAN, 4 G 7761 [1435–1436], fol. 12r). He probably was a small vicar in the late 1420s or early 1430s (for which no records survive). In 1433 he held the chaplaincy at the altar “feretrorum” as a foreign chaplaincy (LAN, 4 G 6006, fol. 85v), and he is called maistre Hacquinet le Caron. He became a member of the grand community of chaplains between July 1435 and June 1438 (records lost) because he is in the list of chaplains for 1438–1439 (LAN, 4 G 6908, fol. 30r), but he died shortly before 6 October 1438, when his chaplaincy was collated by Gobert le Mannier (CBM 1057, fol. 80v). There are what appear to be two other Jehan Carons mentioned in the Cambrai records, but a careful examination reveals them to be the same man. Jehan le Caron 2 was probably a member of the small community of chaplains, for which there are almost no records from the fifteenth century. On 22 November 1426 he collated the custody of the parish church of Lessines on the death of Jehan Maulion (CBM 1056, fol. 174r). He became the sommelier of the duke of Burgundy (Marix, Histoire, 142–63) and was a married man, for an undated entry in the grand métier mentions a gift to him of £10 as a grace on the day of his wedding in Lille (LAN, 4 G 5093, fol. 14r). He was never a small vicar, but is referred in the acts of Ste-Croix on 28 April 1480 as the father of Philippe Caron (LAN, 16 G 178, fol. 80v). He was one of the executors of the will of Grégoire Nicole in 1469 (LAN, 4 G 1039, fol. 1r). He died shortly before 15 April 1482, when his custody of the parish church of Lessines was granted to Jehan Hemart (CBM, 1061, fol. 139r). Jehan le Clercq de Péronne was a small vicar from 8 to 30 August 1494 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1494–1495], fol. 10r). The acts record his reception on 13 August, but this may reflect instead a promotion from semivicar to full vicar. The acts also note that he received 1 écu to help him move, so the canons were probably expecting a longer service than what they got from him (CBM 1062, fol. 208r). Jehan le Josne, a tenorist from Douai, asked for an audition on 27 June 1464, and a committee consisting of one of the archdeacons (probably Pierre du Hamel), Carlier, Le Breton, and Du Fay was set to hear him (CBM, 1060, fol. 167v); on 6 July 1464 they recommended admission (CBM 1060, fol. 167v). Jehan served from 5 July 1464 to 20 April 1465 (LAN, 4 G 7463, fols. 5v–6r). Jehan le Mannier (Multoris) called Cobe was a small vicar from 8 June 1470 to 23 June 1481. His departure is not indicated in the wine account; he simply is not named in the opening list for 1481–1482 (LAN, 4 G 7468, fol. 5v; 7472 [1481–1482], fol. 5v). He is probably a

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

son of Jacques le Mannier, though perhaps not the child whose birth so scandalized the chapter on 28 June 1454 (CBM 1059, fol. 96v). On 24 August 1477 he collated the chaplaincy of St. Andrew on the death of Baudouin Cauwet, and that same day he exchanged it for the chaplaincy of All Saints with Pierre Hochart (CBM 1061, fol. 31r). On 19 June 1481 he collated the chaplaincy of St. James on the death of Symon Gossart and resigned the chaplaincy of All Saints to Gilles Cosse, “a former chorister” (CBM 1061, fol. 103v).24 On 17 September 1481 he was officially dispensed from bastardy and granted the grand vicariate vacated by the death of Symon Mellet and resigned the chaplaincy of St. James to Jehan Cornuel (CBM 1061, fol. 133r). On 13 December 1495 he was granted a licentia testandi (CBM 1063, fol. 70r). He he died on 4 January 1496 (his will was read on 5 January) (CBM 1063, fol. 75r). On 7 January 1496 a chaplaincy of St. Nicholas in the parish church of Carnières, which he had held, was collated to Jehan Herondart, a chorister, and his grand vicariate went to Raoul de Molinbel (Molenberg) (CBM 1063, fol. 76r). His advent in the grand community of chaplains is recorded in 1481–1482, but he appears on the lists only for the following year (LAN, 4 G 6959, fol. 12v; 6961, fol. 31v), suggesting that he changed over to the small community.25 Jehan le Pontchenu (Petit Jehan 4) was a small vicar from 31 March to 31 August 1493 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1492–1493], fol. 7v; [1493–1494], fol. 11v. The identity of Pontchenu and Petit Jehan 4 can be deduced from the position of the latter in the opening list for 1493–1494. Jehan Legier, tenorist, came from Soissons and was a small vicar from 11 November 1455 until his death on 23 May 1460 (LAN, 4 G 7454, fol. 5v; 7458, fol. 6r). On 25 March 1457 he was about to celebrate his first Mass (LAN, 4 G 7763 [1456–1457], fol. 12v). On 8 May 1458 he resigned the chaplaincy of Pocquettes in the parish church of Nivelles, which was then granted to Jehan (probably Vilain), another small vicar, who together with Martin Prévost became one of his executors (CBM 1060, fol. 78r). He is probably the Johannes Tenorista who had recently arrived from Rome in March 1456, as reported in the aumosne (LAN, 4 G 7763 [1455–1456], fol. 10v). Jehan Massoule or Massouille, a priest from Noyon, is documented as small vicar for weeks 1–15 of 1399–1400 (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1399– 24

25

Gilles was not present; he was at that point a ducal singer in Milan (Merkley and Merkley, Music and Patronage, 373), so Hemart swore for him. Another Jehan Multoris, possibly a relative and also a small vicar, died on 7 Mar. 1527; his will survives (LAN, 4G 1469).

List of Small Vicars

1400], fol. 4r] and again from 1407 to 1410 (LAN, 4 G 7558 [1407– 1408], fol. 7r; 6789 [1409–1410], fol. 3v; CBM 1055, fols. 118v–119r). He became a grand vicar on 26 June 1410 (CBM 1055, fols. 132r and 228v), was a member of the grand community of chaplains by 1416– 1417, and appears in the lists until 1433–1434 (LAN, 4 G 6897, fol. 8r; 6006, fol. 62r). Jehan Maubergois called Dassonville was a small vicar from 24 December 1457 to 8 July 1458 (LAN, 4 G 7456, fol. 7v; 7457, fol. 8r). The last name is reported on his recess in the account of the small vicars (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1458–1459], fol. 6r). The Cambrai documents report nothing further of him; a Jehan Derchin, called Maubergois, is documented as a chorister in 1466–1467 (LAN, 4 G 7764 [1466–1467], fol. 14r), but that is also an unique record. Jehan Mercier was received as a small vicar on 29 April 1442 but left that same day and returned on 10 May following. He then served continuously until 18 February 1444 (LAN, 4 G 7441, fol. 9r; 7443, fol. 7r). Jehan Montigny was a small vicar from 2 November 1443 to 18 February 1444 and 20 July to 6 October 1449, with a number of small absences and lost days during his second tenure (LAN, 4 G 7443, fol. 7r; 7449, fol. 7r–v). He might be the Jehan Viewarner who exchanged the parish church of Montigny for that of Yssier with Guillaume le Métayer (Modiator), called Malebeque, former papal singer and canon of St. Vincent de Soignies in 1455 (CBM 1059, fol. 130r). His presence in Cambrai was minimal. Jehan Moreau (Moriau) was a small vicar from 1 June 1491 to 29 July 1492 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1490–1491], fol. 7v; [1492–1493], fol. 7r). He came from St-Géry and the canons accepted him with reservation because he was married and “knew little,” but he had a loud [alta] voice and was enjoined to learn to improvise (cantare super librum) (CBM 1061, fol. 392r). Around the time he left, on 24 May and then 13 August 1492, one Richard de Caumont, called Moriau, and his wife were given were given graces. Richard is not identified as a small vicar, but is probably a relative of Jehan (LAN, 4 G 7769 [1492–1493], fol. 22v). Jehan Nainekin called Binchois was a small vicar from 30 November 1485 to 20 June 1488, and from 25 December 1488 to 20 July 1490 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1485–1486], fol. 7v; [1487–1488], fol. 6r; [1488– 1489], fol. 6r; [1490–1491], fol. 6v). He was admitted on the condition that he attend the maîtrise (CBM 1061, fol. 241v) and thus he is probably not the “little Binchois” documented as a chorister in

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

1469–1470 (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1469–1470], fol. 17r). On 27 February 1489 the chaplaincy of St. James in the parish church of Binche, resigned by Jehan de le Quellerie, went to Binchois (CBM 1061, fol. 330r); this is the only benefice for him noted in the records. He is probably not the “quidam Binchois” received as a small vicar on 9 October 1500 (CBM 1064, fol. 285v). Jehan, nephew of sire Louis (Johannes nepos domini Ludovici). On 4 February 1424 the canons decided that Jehan, nephew of sire Louis, should no longer be a chorister and should become a semivicar (CBM 1056, fol. 135r). Not only is Jehan not readily identifiable, there is no Louis at this time among the known clergy of the cathedral. The unusual designation suggests someone well connected, and this, in turn, recalls an unusual entry on 21 September 1421, where canon Gérard Robesart, in his turn to confer a benefice, confers the chaplaincy of St. Calixtus in the chapel of All Saints to Jehan de Laumort, called Le Tordeur, a chorister (CBM 1056, fol. 109v), who could conceivably be this Jehan. Jehan Noel is documented as small vicar in two undated entries in the aumosne for 1414–1415 (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1414–1415], fols. 7v–8r). See also Noel (le Clerc?). Jehan Pannier is documented as small vicar in an undated entry in the aumosne for 1414–1415 (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1414–1415], fol. 8r). He is documented as a socius chori in the accounts of the chaplains of StGéry in 1407–1408 (LAN, 7 G 2914, fol. 4r), and as a chaplain in 1409– 1410 (LAN, 7 G 2915, fol. 3v). Presumably he was a socius chori in 1408–1409 (accounts lost). He is listed as a chaplain until 1412–1413 (LAN, 7 G 2917, fol. 4v); the account for 1413–1414 is lost, and by 1414–1415 his chaplaincy is held as a foreign chaplaincy by Guillaume Brou (LAN, 7 G 2918, fol. 15v), which coincides neatly with his shift to the cathedral’s service. Jehan Pelu was a small vicar from 18 July 1462 to 8 April 1463, 28 May to 2 August 1463, 22 September to 6 December 1464, and 1 June to 30 July 1474 (LAN, 4 G 7461, fols. 5v–6r; 7462, fol. 5r; 7463, fols. 5v–6r; 7472 [1473–1474], fol. 6v, [1474–1475], fol. 6r). He was apparently restless in Cambrai and already on 2 June 1473 had traveled to Arras specifically to seek a position (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1473–1474], fol. 22v). On his final departure it is noted in the wine account that he is leaving for Antwerp. Pelu is documented in the chapel of Charles the Bold briefly in April 1468, and in June 1477 in the service of David of Burgundy, bishop of Utrecht (Higgins, “Antoine Busnois,” 79, n. 140).

List of Small Vicars

Jehan Pestel is documented as small vicar for all of 1399–1400 (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1399–1400], fol. 3r). He was a member of the grand community of chaplains by 1399–1400 and is in the lists in 1400–1414 (LAN, 4 G 6885, fol. 7v; 6886, fol. 26v). The accounts of the chaplains have lacunae for 1397–1499 and 1401–1405; the year of his advent is not known. Jehan Pinchon is documented as small vicar for all of 1399–1400 (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1399–1400], fol. 3r) and on 17 September 1401 (CBM 1055, fol. 78v). The second reference gives his full name. He reappears in the Cambrai records in 1425–1426 as a papal scriptor, when he collated the prebend of Jehan du Homme (LAN, 4 G 7425, fol. 2r), which he then resigned in favor of Louis de Montchauve in 1426–1427 (LAN, 4 G 7426, fol. 1v). He was not a resident, but is reported as the former holder of the chaplaincy of St. John Baptist as a foreign chaplaincy in 1453 (LAN, 4 G 6918, fol. 37r). He was a married clerk, and with his wife Isabeau he sold a house to Jehan du Riez, the future papal singer (also married), on 13 March 1400 (LAN, 3 G 182, no. 2748). Jehan Placquier was a small vicar from St-Quentin, who served at Cambrai from 5 August to 19 October 1475 in an exchange with Andrieu de Mez (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1475–1476], fol. 7r). Jehan Poiron was a small vicar from 15 January 1466 to 7 May 1474 (LAN, 4 G 7464, fol. 5v; 7472 [1473–1474], fol. 6v). The aumosne for 1471–1472 reports that he was for some days in Valenciennes (possibly his home town) sick with an inflamed leg (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1471–1472], fol. 19r] and the illness was still continuing in September 1473 (LAN, 7765 [1473–1474], fol. 21r), which probably led to his resignation. Jehan Poulart or Poulain was a small vicar from 11 December 1464 to 13 May 1477 (LAN, 4 G 7463, fol. 6r; 7472 [1475–1476], fol. 7v). Given the length of his tenure the acts are curiously silent on his beneficial career. He is documented as a member of the small community of chaplains in 1493 and again in 1499 (CBM 1062, fol. 62r; 1064, fol. 226v). His bienvenue into that community is recorded in the accounts of 1473– 1474 (LAN, 4 G 7255 [1473–1474], fol. 5r), and he was the receiver of the community in 1494–1495 (LAN, 4 G 7255 [1494–1495], fol. 1r). Jehan Prévost was a small vicar from 1 April to 19 May 1483 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1482–1483], fol. 9r–v). Jehan Prommier, tenorist, was a small vicar from 10 August 1463 to 10 June 1465 and from 3 August to 26 September 1478 (LAN, 4 G 7462, fol. 5v; 7463, fol. 6v; 7472 [1478–1479], fol. 5v). The accounts of the small vicars indicate a return in the week of 8–15 March and a

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

departure in the week of 22–29 March in 1466 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1465– 1466], fol. 9r), not recorded in the wine account. Jehan Rifflart called Ghingherlot was a small vicar from 24 June to 10 August 1498 (LAN, 4 G [1498–1499], fol. 7v). The acts date his reception on 11 June (CBM 1064, fol. 72r), but he does not appear in the lists in the wine account until the first list for 1498–1499. Rifflart is the man who, on 8 August 1498, severely wounded Gilles Boulengier during a fight (CBM 1064, fol. 99v), which resulted in his imprisonment and dismissal (CBM 1064, fol. 101v). Jehan Rongh was from Douai; like Poignare and Heldedroncque, he was one of the Cambrai choristers whom Grenon took with him to Rome. He sang in the papal chapel from June 1425 to November 1427 (ASV, I&E 383, fol. 44v; I&E 385, fol. 151r). In 1426 he was granted a canonicate at St-Amé in Douai (ASV, RS 202, fol. 108r–v), and apparently went back to Douai after his years in Rome. The acts of St-Amé have a lacuna from 1423 to 1434, but Rongh is listed as present at the chapter meeting of 10 March 1435 (LAN, 1 G 16, fol. 14r), and he continues to appear consistently in the acts until his death in January 1492. His will survives (LAN, 1 G 155, fol. 160r). Jehan Salomon (Jehan de Moncheau), tenorist, was a small vicar from 3 July 1493 to 5 May 1494 (LAN 4 G 7472 [1493–1494], fols. 11v–12r). He came from Laon and promised to study diligently (CBM 1062, fol. 76r). Jehan Sohier called Fede (his name and sobriquet are given thus in the Vatican documents) was a small vicar from 28 June 1446 to 15 March 1447. His departure is signaled only by his absence from the list of vicars on 15 March (LAN, 4 G 7446, fol. 6r–v). Curiously, the chapter acts record his reception on 19 September 1446 (CBM 1058, fol. 77v) even though the wine accounts specifically mention his presence on 28 June. Fede’s biography is given in Fallows, “Johannes Fedé,” albeit with the wrong dates concerning his service in Cambrai (following C. Wright, “Dufay,” 204). To the data given in Fallows one should add that on 19 May 1441 one Johannes de Mortuocampo sought the chaplaincy called “retro chorum de furno” in St-Amé de Douai because its chaplain, Jehan Sohier, called Fede, was in Basel in the camp of Felix V (ASV, RS 373, fols. 196v–197r). This is all the more curious since Fede joined the chapel of Eugenius IV in November 1443 (ASR, MC 830, fol. 19v). A second Jehan Fede from Douai, noted by C. Wright in the Cambrai documents (“Dufay,” 204, n. 163), was a contract baker who provided the cathedral with “common bread” and

List of Small Vicars

millet (LAN, 4 G 4654, fol. 18v [1447–1448]; 4657, fol. 17v [3 February 1451]). Jehan Symon called Basse, also Jehan Basre called Caudrelier, tenorist, was a small vicar from 25 April 1467 to his death on 14 July 1469 (LAN, 4 G 7465, fol. 6r; 7468, fol. 5v). Both names and sobriquets are in the wine accounts. On 7 July 1469 the aumosne had given Jehan £4 on the illness and death of his father (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1469–1470], fol. 17v). There had been an outbreak of the plague at Cambrai. Jehan Tournier called le Pucelle, tenorist, began serving as a small vicar on 24 June 1500 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1499–1500], fol. 8v). He is named in the act of 21 September 1500 concerning the prebend of the small vicars (CBM 1064, fol. 282r). On 5 July 1501 he was suspended because he disrupted the Vespers of the dedication (CBM 1064, fol. 325r), but he was readmitted on 22 November (CBM 1064, fol. 347r). Jehan Tuyau was a small vicar from 10 June 1465 to 8 November 1466 (LAN, 4 G 7463, fol. 6v; 7465, fol. 5v). Jehan Venisse was a small vicar from 27 April 1444 to 19 October 1445 and from 22 February 1446 to 9 October 1451 (LAN, 4 G 7442, fol. 8r; 7444, fol. 5v; 7450, fols. 5v–6r). He was a tenorist (LAN, 4 G 1090, fol. 199v) and came from Soignies (LAN, 4 G 1090, fol. 16v). He is referred to as a chaplain in 1451 (CBM 1058, fol. 277v) but his name appears in the accounts of the grand community only once, in 1455–1456, as the former chaplain at the altar of St. Thomas, which was then a foreign chaplaincy (LAN, 4 G 6922, fol. 38v); this means he was a member of the small community. Jehan Villain was a small vicar from 30 May 1455 to 23 June 1457 and from 24 June 1458 to 27 October 1465, when he became a grand vicar on the resignation of Jacques Morel (LAN, 4 G 7454, fol. 5v; 7455, fol. 6v; 7457, fol. 8r; 7464, 5v; CBM 1060, fol. 226v). Villain’s absence for all of 1457–1458 might be a mirage; the list for that year reports as a small vicar one Quienran, a name found in no other document from Cambrai known to me, who served the entire fiscal year. I believe that this is a sobriquet for Villain. He probably joined the grand community of chaplains in 1444–1445 (one of the years where the advents are not recorded) and appears in the lists from 1445–1446 to 1452–1453 (LAN, 4 G 6912, fol. 11v; 6918, fol. 22r). In 1470–1471 he held the chaplaincy of the 11,000 Virgins as a foreign chaplaincy but in the following year he is recorded as the past holder (LAN, 4 G 7943, fol. 37r; 7944, fol. 39r). He probably shifted to the small community of chaplains because on 25 October 1465 he resigned the chaplaincy of St. John Baptist to Henri

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

Macheclier in preparation for his becoming a grand vicar (CBM 1060, fol. 226v). He probably died in 1471–1472, and his passing would have been recorded in the lost register N of the acts. Jehan Villeroy, tenorist, was a small vicar from 9 September 1492 to 5 May 1494 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1492–1493], fol. 7r; [1493–1494], fol. 12r). The report of his arrival and the yearly lists use his last name; at his departure he is called Johannes tenorista. This departure cannot refer to Jehan Moncheau, received on 3 July 1493, who can be found in the list for 1494–1495. Jehan Wyet was from Cambrai, and was one of the choristers taken by Grenon to Rome in 1425, so he must have been a cathedral choirboy at the time (Planchart, “Institutional Politics,” 136–37). He sang in the papal chapel from June 1425 to November 1427 (ASV, I&E 383, fol. 44v; I&E 385, fol. 151r). By December 1425 he was a canon of St-Géry, and on 25 April 1423 he had been granted a canonicate at Ste-Croix (ASV, RL 263, fol. 187r–v), but it is not clear that he ever collated the prebend at Ste-Croix. The chapter acts of St-Géry are extremely disorganized, and the accounts of the bourse, which are more systematic, have a lacuna from 1418 to 1446, but the acts note that Wyet presented himself for his first residence on 28 August 1430 (LAN, 7 G 753, fol. 292v). Eventually he became the magister adventitiarum of the church; the earliest reference to him in that capacity is in the accounts of the bourse for 1446–1447 (LAN, 7 G 2224 [1446–1447], fol. 10v). On 14 April 1483 he is reported as ill, and by 21 April he had died (LAN, 7 G 575, fols. 237v and 238v). Jehan Zemberch (de Zemberch, Yzemberch) is documented as a chorister coming from St-Rémi in 1450–1451 (LAN, 4 G 7763 [1450– 1451], fol. 11r) and as a former chorister in 1454–1455 (LAN, 4 G 7763 [1454–1455], fol. 12v). He was a small vicar from 30 May 1455 to 10 December 1461 and from 21 October 1463 to 8 April 1464 (LAN, 4 G 7454, fol. 5v; 7460, fol. 5r; 7462, fol. 5v).26 In June 1460 he was magister puerorum for about a week, as the canons were dissatisfied with Robert le Canoine (CBM 1060, fols. 84v–85r), but then on 7 November 1460 Robert was definitively dismissed as magister puerorum, and on 10 November the canons asked Du Fay to write to Jehan le Roy (Johannes Regis) asking him to come as magister puerorum. On 12 November Zemberch was installed as magister puerorum until the arrival of Le Roy (CBM 1060, fols. 97v–98r). Le Roy did not accept the 26

He appears as Henin from 1455 to 1458 and as Zemberch thereafter.

List of Small Vicars

offer, however, and Zemberch remained as magister puerorum. His tenure did not last long: on 30 November 1461 he wounded a chaplain during a fight and on 6 December 1461 he disrupted the Pretiosa service. On 9 December 1461 the canons dismissed him as magister puerorum and imprisoned him until Symon Mellet posted bail (CBM 1060, fols. 126v–127v). He had a chaplaincy in the parish church of Nivelles, which he resigned on 14 March 1460 (CBM, 1060, fol. 67v), and on 19 August 1461 he collated the parish church of Petit Wargny on the resignation of someone whose name was left blank in the act (CBM 1060, fol. 119v), which he resigned on 8 March 1462 in favor of Symon Mellet (CBM 1060, fol. 133v). His second reception as a small vicar on 5 October 1463 was clearly conditional on promises of good behavior (CBM 1060, fol. 180v), which were apparently kept since the record is silent on disciplinary measures. He apparently had no benefices in Cambrai itself. He might be the Iohannes Ysenbaert who became a canon of St. Pieter in Anderlecht in 1489 and later canon and scholaster of St. Goedele and St. Rombout, as well as sommelier at the imperial court until his death on 25 November 1505 (Haggh, “Music,” 2:695). Jerome (no last name recorded) is documented as small vicar in 1408– 1409 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1408–1409], fol. 10v). Jerome Burridan is documented as small vicar in the aumosne for 1422– 1423 in the gift to ten small vicars at All Saints, “including Jerome who appeared suddenly (supervenit)” (LAN, 4 G 7760 [1422–1423], fol. 8v). A series of entries in the acts, which give his last name, document his service as a small vicar until 31 January 1424 (CBM 1056, fols. 129r, 129v, 135r); the last, granting him a gift of 4 écus, is reflected in the aumosne on 9 February, giving him four gold crowns, worth £6 18s, as he is going to Rome (LAN, 4 G 7760 [1423–1424], fol. 8r). Burridan must have been one of a number of singers recruited for the chapel of Alfonso de Aragón in Rome in the 1420s, for his name appears in a rotulus of Alfonso for his chaplains dated 12 February 1433, expanding on a now lost rotulus of 23 April 1431 (ASV, RS 282, fols. 173v–174v). He is not in the list of the chapel in 1444 printed in Atlas, Music, 29. João (no last name recorded), a Portuguese singer, was a small vicar from 27 October 1491 to 28 March 1492 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1491–1492], fol. 8r–v). He was dismissed the same day as Petit Jehan 3 with the same comment on his uselessness (LAN, 4 G 7768 [1491–1492], fol. 24v).

749

750

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

Jonathas Bacheler (Bachelier?) is mentioned in the ausmosne as a small vicar “who had been imprisoned in Paris” (LAN, 4 G 7768 [1486– 1487], fol. 18v). He never appears in the lists of small vicars, and perhaps was a small vicar of St-Géry or Ste-Croix. He might be a relative of Pierre Bachelier (canon 1481–1511). Julien (no last name recorded) was a small vicar from 7 May to 28 October 1445 (LAN, 4 G 7444, fol. 5v; 7445, fol. 6v). Kine or Kinne (no other name recorded) is documented as a small vicar in weeks 37–52 of 1411–1412 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1411–1412], fol. 4r) and in undated entries of the aumosne for 1411–1412 and 1412–1413 (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1411–1412], fol. 10r; [1412–1413], fol. 8r). Lambert (?) Watelet, without a first name, is documented as small vicar on 11 February 1451, when the échevins of Ste-Croix went into his house and removed items that a woman claimed were hers (CBM 1058, fol. 249v), which set up a confrontation between the échevins and the chapter. On 9 April 1451 Watelet was given money for a robe, provided he serve the church for at least eight months (CBM 1058, fol. 257r). The opening list of small vicars for 1451–1452 does not have his name (LAN, 4 G 7450, fol. 5v), but when the matter between the échevins and the chapter was settled on 12 July 1451 Watelet is still called a small vicar (CBM 1058, fol. 270v), so he must be one of the three men whose names are absent from the lists for 1449–1450 and appear for the first time in the list for 1451–1452, namely Guillermus, Vairet, and Lambertus. Guillermus and Vairet seem to be itinerant singers, who, like most such singers in the fifteenth century, traveled in pairs, and both left Cambrai on 24 July. Lambertus left on 1 August 1451 (LAN, 4 G 7450, fol. 5v). He returned briefly from 7 October 1457 to 27 January 1458 (this time called Watelet in the lists [LAN, 4 G 7456, fol. 7v]), eventually fulfilling his promise of serving the cathedral for at least eight months. Thus I believe that Lambertus and Watelet are the same man. He might be the Watelet (no other name) reported as chaplain of the second Marian chaplaincy at the Zavelkerk in Brussels in 1459–1460 (Haggh, “Music,” 2:687). Laurent Canner is documented as a former chorister in the act reporting his reception as a semivicar on 19 March 1449 (CBM 1058, fol. 190v). He served from 19 March 1449 to 1 August 1451 and from 1 September 1451 to 28 October 1454 (LAN, 4 G 7448, fol. 6v; 7450, fol. 6r; 7453, fol. 6v). During this period his last name never appears in any Cambrai document, but the entry on his recess states that Laurentius, Jacobus, and Henricus left “in order to go to Rome.” As

List of Small Vicars

it turns out, the cameral mandates of the Roman Curia reveal that Laurentius Canner, Jacobus Boni, and Henricus Rosa all joined the papal chapel in May 1454 (ASR, MC 832, fol. 12r), providing us with the last names for all three singers. Laurentius was in the papal chapel from May 1455 to July 1456 (Starr, “Music,” 177–78). In Rome he sought canonicates at Onze Lieve Vrouw in Antwerp and Cambrai, the rectorship of St. Cornelius in Hoorbeke, and the cantoria at StGéry in Cambrai (Starr, “Music,” 176, citing papal supplications and letters). The Cambrai request passed unnoted in the chapter acts. The acts record that on 29 November 1454 he resigned by procuration the chaplaincy at the altar of SS. Nicholas and Catherine in an exchange with Alexandre Bouillart for the parish church of Lonsart (CBM 1059, fol. 112r).27 He may be the same man who was twice briefly in Cambrai in the 1460s: on 1 April 1462 Laurentius Cannoner, priest and MA, as proctor Baudouin le Gay, presented letters from the Roman Curia granting Le Gay the canonicate and archdeaconate of Brabant vacant on the death of Pierre le Clerc (CBM 1060, fol. 137v), and on 4 July 1463 Laurentius, canon of St. Quentin “in the church of St. Aldegundis in Maubeugue,” as proctor of the Cardinal of Siena (Francesco Piccolomini), presented letters of reservation for a canonicate at Cambrai (CBM 1060, fol. 173r). Laurent le Liègeois (Laurent de Hamont) was a small vicar from 20 January to 21 November 1492, from 24 May 1493 to 8 May 1494, and from 15 May to 9 September 1497 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1491–1492], fol. 8v; [1492–1493], fols. 7v–8r; [1493–1494], fol. 12r). He is described as having a loud (alta) voice in an entry of 4 April 1492 (LAN, 4 G 7768 [1491–1492], fol. 25r). Laurenz van Gent was a small vicar from 15 May to 9 September 1498 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1497–1498], fol. 9v; [1498–1499], fol. 8r). His toponymic is given in the act of his reception on 14 May (CBM 1064, fol. 62v). Le Flamenc is documented as small vicar “called Le Flamenc” who received £4 when he departed after Lent 1402 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1401–1402], fol. 8r). He cannot be Jehan Flandrois, who had become a chaplain in 1394–1395, and appears in the lists until 1418–1419 (LAN, 4 G 6882, fol. 6r; 6898, fol. 6v, lacuna 1419–1420), and died on

27

This is not reflected in the accounts of the chaplains, which show Bouillart as chaplain of SS. Nicholas and Catherine only in 1459 (LAN, 4G 6926, fol. 39v).

751

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

11 November 1420 (CBM 1056, fol. 91r), since the kind of gift received by le Flamenc implies leaving the service of the cathedral. Léon (no last name recorded) was received as a small vicar on 9 November 1495 (LAN, 4 G 6791 [1495–1496], fol. 6v; CBM 1063, fol. 57v). Apparently he never served, for there is no record of his service in the wine accounts, but cf. the entry for Frigalus. Probably not the same man as Léon de Frise, listed below. Léon de Frise, tenorist, was received on 31 August 1500 (CBM 1064, fols. 278v, 282r). We cannot know how long he served. The accounts of wine and bread are missing from 1501 to 1512, and those of the small vicars for 1500 to 1501 are also lost, but the list of vicars present at All Saints in 1501 (LAN, 4 G 6793 [1501–1502], fol. 7v) does not include him. Louis Courtin, Louis de Cambrai was a small vicar from 1 July 1473 to 30 October 1481 and from 21 July 1483 to 14 March 1491 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1473–1474], fol. 6r; (1481–1482), fol. 5v; [1490–1491], fol. 7r; 7473, fol. 8v).28 On 19 December 1477 he collated the chaplaincy at the altar of SS. Cosmas and Damian on the death of Pierre Daule (CBM 1061, fol. 35r), and from 1477–1478 to 1483–1484 he held the chaplaincy of St. Christopher as a foreign chaplaincy (LAN, 4 G 6955, fol. 39r; 6963, fol. 42v). He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1484–1485 and appears in the lists until 1500–1501 (LAN, 4 G 6965, fol. 13v; 6985, fol. 34v). He is still documented as a chaplain in 1513 (LAN, 4 G 7004, fol. 35v). His possession of two other chaplaincies is documented: on 26 September 1492 he collated the chaplaincy at the altar of St. John Baptist on the death of Jehan Verdure and resigned the chaplaincy at the altar of St. Martial to Jacques Canivet, clerk of the revestiary (CBM 1062, fol. 20r). For over a decade the canons had to reprove him on and off for wearing his hair long like a layman (CBM 1061, fol. 124r; 1063, fol. 153r, 165v), and twice he was accused of rape (CBM 1061, fols. 135v, 170r). The first of these, on 28 October 1481, cost him his vicariate and is the reason for the hiatus in his service. Louis de Terasse (Thérache) was a small vicar from 9 April 1488 to 14 March 1491 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1487–1488], fol. 6r; [1490–1491], fol. 7r), brother of Pierre de Thérache. Documented in the HabsburgBurgundian chapel from November 1495 to June 1501 (Fiala, “Le 28

Note that LAN, 4G 7473 is the account for 1483–1484. The patronymic and toponymics appear only in the acts.

List of Small Vicars

Mécénat,” 471), he returned to Cambrai and was received as a small vicar on 31 August 1500 (CBM 1064, fol. 338v). He is documented as a small vicar until 1506–1507 (LAN, 4 G 6793 [1506–1507], fol. 5r); he joined the grand community of chaplains in 1504–1505, and appears in the list to his death on 5 February 1536 (LAN, 4 G 6989, fol. 18r; 7024, fols. 24v, 26r). In 1507–1508 and again in 1511–1512 he was paid by the fabric for copying Masses and Magnificats (LAN, 4 G 4702, fol. 32v; 4705, fol. 34r), identified as works copied in CBM 4 and 18 (C. Wright, “Musiciens,” 222). Louis van Pullaer, son of Pierre van Pullaer, called Lentailleur (Lentretailleur), is documented as a supernumerary chorister from before Christmas in 1485 to St. John Baptist 1486 (LAN, 4 G 7767 [1485–1486], fol. 23r) and as a regular chorister in 1494–1495 (LAN, 4 G 7769 [1494–1495], fols. 19v, 20v; 6791 [1494–1495], fol. 5r). He was given funds for further study and his father was encouraged to send him to school (CBM 1062, fols. 221v–222r), but according to an act of 19 June 1495 he chose instead to move to Liège to be magister puerorum at St. Denis (CBM 1063, fol. 17r). On 5 April 1503, however, he was back in Cambrai, appointed magister puerorum (CBM 1064, fol. 448r). On 8 November 1503 he was made a grand vicar on the promotion of Jehan de le Quellerie to canon (CBM 1064, fol. 483r). On 23 April 1507 he was dismissed as magister puerorum and by 22 December 1507 he had become the magister puerorum in Notre Dame in Paris, a post he held until he became a canon of Cambrai on 15 April 1527; he died 21 September 1528. On Van Pullaer’s career see C. Wright, Music and Ceremony, 310–14, and Pirro “Dokumente,” 354–56. Lucas Warner is documented as small vicar in an entry of 27 October 1435 (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1435–1436], fol. 11v), and with his full name when he collated the chaplaincy at the altar of St. Nicaise on the death of Henri de la Place on 31 August 1438 (CBM 1057, fol. 79v). He is in the list of small vicars on 24 June 1439 and in the wine accounts and served until 1 April 1441 (LAN, 4 G 7439, fol. 8r; 7440, fol. 7r). He became a member of the grand community of chaplains between July 1439 and June 1441 (accounts lost) since his name appears in the lists for 1443–1444 (LAN, 4 G 4910, fol. 19v), although by then he had left Cambrai. His last year in residence was 1442 and was plagued by numerous derelictions of duty (LAN, 4 G 1090, fols. 16v–35r, passim). Before coming to Cambrai he had been a vicar choral at Notre Dame in Antwerp (Starr, “Music,” 178). By January 1443 he was in the papal chapel, where he sang until December 1445 (ASR, MC 829, fol. 199r;

753

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

830, fol. 146v). His whereabouts in 1446 are unknown, but by April 1447 he was back in the papal chapel, where he remained until his death in July 1450 (ASR, MC 831, fol. 12v; ASV, RV 412, fols. 97r–98r; see also Starr, “Music,” 178–80). Malestrinet or Malescurier (no other name recorded) is documented as a chorister in the aumosne for 1415–1416 and 1416–1417 (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1415–1416], fol. 9r; [1416–1417], fol. 9r), the second entry granting him £12 as he left that office. He is documented as small vicar in the aumosne for 1420–1421 upon his return from Antwerp (LAN, 7759 [1419–1420], fol. 8r). The implication of the last entry is that he was already a small vicar by the time he had left for Antwerp. Malin is documented as small vicar for all of 1399–1400 as Malynet (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1399–1400], fol. 3r). This man could be Nicolas Malin, who was magister puerorum at the time, but if that is true his beneficial career is atypical. The earliest mention I have of him is 15 June 1391, when he served as a witness as a grand vicar (CBM 1054, fol. 63r). A few grand vicars sang with the small vicars and received their distributions for a few years here and there in the course of the fifteenth century, but none with the apparent consistency of Malin. The earliest mention of Malin as magister puerorum comes from 1393–1494 (LAN, 4 G 7757 [1393–1494], fol. 9r), and he remained magister puerorum until 1413,29 although he apparently was not the magister puerorum between 1407 and 1408 (cf. LAN, 4 G 7758 [1407– 1408], fol. 8r). He died in 1430–1431, since the fabric account for that year notes a receipt from his legacy (LAN, 4 G 4636, fol. 10r). The day of his death and the transferral of his grand vicariate would have been recorded in the lost register F of the acts, but the obituary of the grand vicars has 9 April as his obit (LAN, 4 G 2009, fol. 4r). Malostrut (no other name recorded) is documented as small vicar in weeks 7–52 of 1411–1412 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1411–1412], fol. 4r–v). Martin (Martinet) (no last name recorded) was a small vicar from 11 August 1465 to 17 February 1466 (LAN, 4 G 7464, fol. 5v; 7465, fol. 5v). He is probably the Martin, small vicar, who was briefly excommunicated from 20 to 23 June 1466 for pummeling Jehan Gronen with his fists (CBM 1060, fol. 244r–v). Martin Courtois, a native of Cambrai, is documented as a chorister in 1438–1439 (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1438–1439], fol. 14r] and as a small vicar 29

The first mention of his successor is in the aumosne before Lent 1414 (LAN, 4G 7759 [1413– 1414], fol. 9r).

List of Small Vicars

from 24 June 1439 to 20 October 1442 (LAN 4 G 7439, fol. 8r; 7442, fol. 8r). He apparently left Cambrai, although he held the chaplaincy of SS. Nicolas and Catherine as a foreign chapel from 1452–1453 (LAN, 4 G 6918, fol. 37v) until 1458, when he exchanged it for a chaplaincy in the lazar-house of Pontours with his brother Jehan (CBM 1060, fol. 23v). He held a canonicate at Bayeux that he exchanged for one at Cambrai in November 1463 (CBM 1060, fol. 184r).30 He is mentioned as a member of the French Royal Chapel from at least 1451 to 1470 (Perkins, “Musical Patronage,” 553), although during the last three years of his tenure he was most often at Cambrai, where he became a resident canon in 1467 (CBM 1060, fol. 262v) and took a very active part in the administration of the cathedral. He died on 13 March 1481 (CBM 1061, fol. 124v), but his brother Jehan procrastinated with the settlement of the estate, which despite repeated urgings by the chapter, was still unsettled in 1490 (CBM 1061, fol. 374v). Martin Prévost, tenorist, Martin tenorist, or simply Martin with no last name is the only Martin in the lists of small vicars between 1446 and 1459. The chapter acts, however, mention Martin Prévost, a small vicar, as witness in an act of 30 November 1451 (CBM 1058, fol. 248r). Prévost was a small vicar from 15 March 1447 to 30 September 1464 (LAN, 4 G 7446, fol. 6v; 7463, fol. 5v). In the 1450s he was a member of the small community of chaplains (CBM 1059, fol. 117r–v), but he joined the grand community of chaplains in 1460–1461 (LAN, 4 G 6929, fol. 15v) after he obtained the chaplaincy at the altar of St. Elizabeth on the death of Jehan de Hainaut (CBM 1060, fol. 55r); he appears in the lists until 1476–1477 (LAN, 4 G 6951, fol. 22r). He died on 2 April 1477 (CBM 1061, fol. 22r). Martin Tranchet, tenorist, was a small vicar from 31 May 1460 to 10 February 1504, when he became a canon (LAN, 4 G 7558, fol. 6r; CBM 1046, fol. 114v). This unusual promotion is part of what became a tradition with the canonicate given to Tranchet; it went to Denis de Hollain on 15 February 1503, to Jehan de le Quellerie on 11 November 1503, to Tranchet on 10 February 1504, and to Jehan Craspournient on 28 July 1505. Three of the four canons had been small vicars, and by the eighteenth century the canonicate was reserved pro deservitoribus ecclesiae (CBM 1046, fol. 114r). The acts, even with the lacuna from 1468 to 1476, document an unusually active beneficial career for 30

Martin did it by procuration and his proctor was Symon le Breton.

755

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

Tranchet: 20 April 1463, the chaplaincy of St. Gengulphe goes to Tranchet on the death of Pierre Baudouin (CBM 1060, fol. 166r); 6 June 1462, he resigns it to Pierre Marechal (CBM 1060, fol. 169r); 4 September 1465; the chaplaincy of St. Nicolas in the parish church of Jurbisse, resigned by Jehan Doucement, is granted to Tranchet (CBM 1060, fol. 222v); 26 June 1466, the parish church of Berchem is given to Tranchet (CBM 1060, fol. 244v); 11 August 1466, the chaplaincy at the altar of the Trinity is granted to him on the death of Jehan du Pont (CBM 1060, fol. 248r); 19 December 1466, the chaplaincy at the altar of SS. Christopher and Martial, resigned by Renaud Fabri, is granted to Tranchet, who resigns the chaplaincy of the Trinity to Rasse de Lavenne [Laverne] (CBM 1060, fol. 254r); 8 July 1578, the chaplaincy at the altar of the Trinity goes to Tranchet on the death of Jehan le Nain, and Tranchet resigns the chaplaincy at the altar of St. John Baptist to Jehan de Luwere (CBM 1060, fols. 48v–49r); 13 March 1479, the chaplaincy at the altar of St. Nicholas in the parish church of Jurbise is resigned by Tranchet to Jehan Cornuel (CBM 1061, fol. 70r); 17 September 1481, the chaplaincy at the altar of St. Nicaise is resigned by Tranchet to Ernoul de la Croix (CBM 1061, fol. 132v); 17 September 1483, the parish church of Bos de Lesines goes to Tranchet on the death of Jan van Gent (CBM 1061, fol. 185r); 20 June 1484, the parish church of Bos de Lesines is resigned by Tranchet to Jehan Dore (CBM 1061, fol. 182v); 9 June 1486, the parish church of Villers, resigned by Pierre Guisart, is granted to Tranchet (CBM 1061, fol. 264v); and on 29 March 1490 he exchanges the parish church of Villers Pol for that of Espinay with Guillaume Aufroy (CBM 1061, fol. 359v). The canons valued him and his work highly (CBM 1062, fol. 76v; 1064, fols. 153v, 438v). He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1466–1467 and appears in the lists until 1499–1500 (LAN, 4 G 6940, fol. 38v; 6984, fol. 20v). He died on 26 July 1505 (CBM 1064, fol. 116r). Mathieu (no last name recorded) “and his companion,” later called Vincent, were small vicars from 6 October to 15 December 1449 (LAN, 4 G 7449, fol. 7r–v). Their last name is never given and neither do any of the other documents provide a plausible identification. Mathieu Bersaghel (de Lille) was a small vicar from 10 October 1494 to 13 March 1495 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1494–1495], fols. 10v–11r). The last name appears in the act of his reception on 8 October (CBM 1062, fol. 220v).

List of Small Vicars

Mathieu de Gavre, tenorist, was a small vicar from 2 June 1460 to 17 June 1464 (LAN, 4 G 7458, fol. 6r; 7463, fol. 5v).31 Although the accounts of the wine and the small vicars refer to him only by his first name, an act of 2 December 1463 reports scandalous behavior by Mathieu de Gavre, small vicar, at a time when there is only one Mathieu in the list of small vicars (CBM 1060, fol. 184v). Mathieu de Melle, called le Franch, Mathieu Foisseur was a small vicar from 20 February 1467 to 26 March 1468 (LAN, 4 G 7465, fol. 5v; 7466, fol. 5r). The name and sobriquet are in the wine accounts. The account of the small vicars calls him Mathieu Foisseur, and notes that the canons decided to dismiss him at the chapter meeting after the feast of the Annunciation because of physical weakness (“propter indebilitatem [sic] corporis”) and “for other things he did against their wishes” (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1467–1468], fol. 5r). Mathieu le Douch de Cambrai was a small vicar from 20 February 1467 to his death on 28 September 1471 (LAN, 4 G 7465, fol. 6r; 7470, fol. 5v). Mathieu Pane, clerk of Noyon, is documented as a small vicar on 19 October 1408, when he was let go (CBM 1055, fol. 145v). Mathieu Thorote called Bruyant, tenorist (Rome), was a priest from Noyon documented as small vicar for weeks 1–11 of 1399–1400 (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1399–1400], fol. 3v); he is also documented as small vicar at All Saints 1386 (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1386–1387], fol. 4v). On 31 October 1404 the chaplaincy of St. John Evangelist, vacated by Johannes de Hesdin on becoming a grand vicar, was granted to Thorote (CBM 1055, fol. 95r),32 but his name is never recorded in the accounts of the grand community, so he must have belonged to the small community, for which there are no records at this time. He is documented in Cambrai in April 1407, when he bought oats from the office of the grand métier (LAN, 4 G 7378, fol. 3v). Some time during the pontificate of John XXIII he joined the papal chapel and was a papal singer on and off until 1426 (ASV, RS 106, fols. 208v–209r; I&E 383, fol. 77v). By 5 December 1417 he was a canon of Noyon; he exchanged that canonicate and the parish church of Maudetour (Rouen) with Jehan Rogier de Hesdin for the parish church of Binche (ASV, RS 106, fols. 208r–209v; LAN, 4 G 4622, fol. 9v). On 31 32

He was briefly absent from 2 to 24 Aug. 1463 in a breach of discipline (CBM 1060, fol. 176v). The accounts of the chaplains for 1401–1405 are lost; those of 1405–1406 show the chaplaincy as foreign with the note “formerly held by Hesdin” (LAN, 4G 6887, fol. 25r).

757

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

30 December 1423 he was received through his proctor Mathieu Hanelle to a Cambrai canonicate (CBM 1056, fol. 95r), which he resigned to Jehan le Jeune, who received it on 26 September 1426 (CBM 1056, fol. 172r), also by procuration. He received a number of benefices while in Rome, including a canonicate in Arras and a chaplaincy in St-Quentin, which he held to his death (ASV, RS 340, fol. 74v [St-Quentin]; RS 350, fols. 164v–165r [Arras]). The earliest notice of his death comes on 7 December 1436 (ASV, RS 332, fols. 34v–35r). Maurice (no last name recorded) is documented as small vicar, scribe, and bookbinder in the accounts of the fabric from 1402 to 1404, when he left (LAN, 4 G 4606, fol. 12v; 1607, fol. 34r; 4608, fol. 22v). Michault (Michel) Berruyer is documented as a former chorister ad mensam magistri from 12 January to 24 June 1479 (LAN, 4 G 7766 [1478–1479], fol. 16r). He was a small vicar from 18 December 1480 to 23 October 1485 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1480–1481], fol. 6r; [1485–1486], fol. 7r). His name is given as Michaut or Michault with no other name except in the accounts of 1481–1482 and 1482–1483, where it is given as Michael. On 5 September 1485 the acts report that Michaut had been asked to join the chapel of Maximilian; this might explain his departure a few weeks later (CBM 1061, fol. 229v). His last name appears in the record only long after his departure: an act of 27 November 1494 reports the reading of a letter from Philip the Fair asking for a benefice for Michel Berruyer, a former small vicar and now in his chapel (CBM 1062, fol. 164v). He joined Maximilian’s chapel and by 1498 was a vicar at Onze Lieuve Vrouwe in Antwerp, becoming zangmeester in 1501. The accounts of the chaplains there record his funeral in 1531–1532. (For Berruyer’s career beyond Cambrai see Fiala, “Le Mécénat,” 102.) Michel (no last name recorded) was a small vicar from 12 December 1487 to 21 July 1488 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1487–1488], fol. 6r; [1488– 1489], fol. 6r). Nicaise Bourdin was a small vicar from 6 June 1459 to 9 October 1464 (LAN, 4 G 7458, fol. 8v; 7463, fol. 5v). Curiously, an entry in the account of the small vicars for 1458–1459 indicates that Bourdin was not admitted (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1458–1459], fol. 5v); apparently he appealed the decision and was received, for he appears not only in the wine lists but on those of the small vicars that survive for the years of his tenure. He is also mentioned as a small vicar in the acts when on 10 February 1462 he and Andrieu du Metz had to be absolved from assaulting Adam Nicolai and shedding blood (CBM 1060, fol. 130r). On

List of Small Vicars

10 October 1464 he was given a gift of £10 as he was leaving for Rome (CBM 1060, fol. 201r). Nothing is known of his Roman sojourn, but by December 1469 he was back at Cambrai (LAN, 4 G 5102, fol. 12v). His return and promotion to grand vicar were probably recorded in the now lost Register N of the acts, but he is referred to as a grand vicar and a chaplain in the fabric accounts of 1471–1472, at which time he had become one of the music scribes for the cathedral (LAN, 4 G 4679, fol. 30r). His name is not in the accounts of the grand community of chaplains, so he must have belonged to the small community. He died in 1504 and his will and the execution survive (LAN, 4 G 1625). Nicolas 1 (Colinet) (no last name recorded) was a small vicar from 22 July 1440 until 11 November 1441 with an absence from 3 December 1440 to 29 May 1441 (LAN, 4 G 7440, fols. 6v–7r; 7441, fol. 8v). The aumosne shows no trace of him, and the acts for this period (register H) are lost, so no source gives us his full name. Nicolas 2 (no other name recorded) is documented as small vicar for all of 1399–1400 as Colin (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1399–1400], fol. 3r); he is possibly Nicolas de la Victoire, mentioned as a small vicar in 1419, q.v. Nicolas Coutier is documented as small vicar in an undated entry in the aumosne for 1412–1413 (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1412–1413], fol. 8r). Nicolas de la Victoire is documented as a small vicar on 24 August 1419, when he was fined for assaulting another clerk (CBM 1056, fol. 68r). Nicolas de Liège was a small vicar from 9 February to 9 March 1495 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1494–1495], fol. 10v). His name is left blank in the act of reception (9 February) but he was then admonished “not to follow the malcontents on pain of dismissal,” which apparently he did not heed (CBM 1062, fol. 257r). Nicolas de Mons, tenorist, was a small vicar from 26 July 1490 to 9 September 1492 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1490–1491], fol. 7r; [1492– 1493], fol. 7r). His full name and vocal designation are given in an entry in the aumosne granting him a robe on 6 October 1490 (LAN, 4 G 7768 [1490–1491], fol. 22r). Nicolas de Waspail, called de Douai is documented as small vicar for fifteen days in an undated entry in the aumosne in 1410–1411 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1410–1411], fol. 7r), but not in 1411–1412, for which we have fairly complete documentation. He is mentioned as a small vicar on 12 June 1415 (CBM 1056, fol. 26r) and again on 1 November 1437 (CBM 1057, fol. 58v), and he appears to have been a small vicar consistently all those years because he is second on the first list of small vicars in the wine accounts on 24 June 1439 (LAN, 4 G 7439, fol. 8r).

759

760

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

He became a grand vicar on 10 September 1440 (LAN, 4 G 7440, fol. 7r). He died on 1 May 1463 (CBM 1060, fol. 167r], He was probably illegitimate, for he had received a licentia testandi on 17 August 1426 (CBM 1056, fol. 170v). Nicolas le Berquier is documented as a former chorister on 28 June 1456 when he was given £6 by the aumosne in order to go to school (LAN, 4 G 7763, fascicle of 1456–1457, fol. 12r). He was a small vicar from 4 July 1479 to 21 February 1481, from 24 June to 30 October 1481, and from 7 November 1481 to 21 June 1490 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1479–1480], fol. 6v; [1480–1481], fol. 6r; [1481–1482], fol. 5v; [1489–1490], fol. 6r). The gaps in his service were caused by his removal by the canons on account of a violent and dissolute life (CBM 1061, fols. 122r, 125r, 132r, 135v, 136r). On 19 February 1481 he collated a chaplaincy in the parish church of Bermeries on the death of Henri Macheclier (CBM 1061, fol. 122r). On 21 June 1490 he was made a grand vicar on the death of Pasquier Coutel (CBM 1061, fol. 366v), and he was the receiver of the small vicars from 1494 to 1500, but was frequently censured for sloppiness (CBM 1062, fol. 198r). On 17 September 1493 he resigned a chaplaincy in the hospital of St. Philippe in Braine-l’Alleud to Jehan Dasse (CBM 1062, fol. 98r). He was repeatedly cited for concubinage and resisted orders to send his concubine away (CBM 1062, fols. 55r, 82v, 84v, 108r, 109v; CBM 1063, fol. 56v). He died on 30 October 1503 and his will survives (LAN, 4 G 1608), but the chapter felt compelled to invalidate legacies to his concubine (CBM 1064, fol. 480r). Nicolas le Vornier began serving as a small vicar on 5 April 1500 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1499–1500], fol. 8v). His reception is not recorded in the acts. The wine account gives only his first name; the full name appears in an act of 1 June 1500 granting him and two other small vicars 30 patards each (CBM 1064, fol. 256r). His name, however, is not in the apparently comprehensive list of small vicars in the act concerning the administration of their prebend on 21 September 1500 (CBM 1064, fol. 282r). He is not the Corniere who shows up in the small vicar lists from 1518–1519 to 1521–1522 (LAN, 4 G 6974 [1518– 1519], fol. 8v; [1521–1522], fol. 6r). Nicolas Macqueflan was a small vicar from 7 July 1480 to 22 March 1483 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1480–1481], fol. 6r; [1482–1483], fol. 9v). He might be Nicolas d’Antoing, received as an eighth chorister on 11 November 1469 and still living in Hemart’s house in All Saints 1470 (LAN, 7665 [1469–1470], fol. 16v; [1470–1471], fol. 22r). Nicolas Malin, see Malin.

List of Small Vicars

Noel (no other name recorded) is documented as small vicar for all of 1399–1400 (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1399–1400], fol. 3r). Probably neither the Jehan Noel who was a promotor curiae in 1391 (LAN, 7 G 53, no. 836), nor the Noel received as a small vicar in 1413–1414, q.v. Noel (le Clerc?), tenorist. The accounts of the aumosne for 1413–1414 and 1414–1415 pose a curious problem. The first records several gifts to Noel, referred to both as Natalis and as Noel, priest and tenorist, and his companion (unnamed): on their reception as small vicars (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1413–1414], fol. 9r–v; a joint grace undated; a further grace to Noel on 7 August, and to his companion on 15 August. The second records undated graces to Jehan Noel (Johannes Noel) and his companion (unnamed) on their reception and a further grace to Jehan Noel on his illness (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1414–1415], fols. 7v–8r). These are four different men (the mention of a companion (socius) is very common in the accounts of traveling singing men). The first of them is, in all likelihood, Noel des Grauwes (de Grauwe?), more often called Noel le Clerc in the Cambrai documents. An entry in the aumosne for 1421–1422 notes a grace to Noel (no other name), “qui continue cantat cum parvis vicariis” (LAN, 4 G 7760 [1421– 1422], fol. 7r). An entry in the acts of 27 August 1425 concerning Jehan Bourget, Gerard le Duc, Noel le Clerc, and his brother Jehan le Clerc reports an assurance they have given the chapter not to associate with Bourget since apparently some of them had slept with Bourget’s wife (CBM 1056, fol. 153v). Noel must have joined the grand community of chaplains between July 1428 and June 1432 (records lost), for he appears in the lists from 1432–1433 to 1450–1451 (LAN, 4 G 6905, fol. 28v; 6916, fol. 23r). Pasquier Blimam (Blimau)33 was a small vicar from 12 May 1469 to 11 May 1475 (LAN, 4 G 7467, fol. 6r; 7273 [1474–1475], fol. 6v). His last name is documented in the aumosne (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1471– 1472], 19v; [1472–1473], fol. 21r). Pasquier Coutel was a small vicar from 24 June 1447 to 4 October 1451 and 11 February 1452 to 28 February 1455 (LAN, 4 G 7447, fol. 6r; 7450, fol. 6r; 7453, fol. 7r). He became a grand vicar on 25 February 1455 on the death of Philippe Brunet (CBM 1059, fol. 121v). The acts note only his second reception as a small vicar and date it 14 February 33

The spelling Blymam is very clearly written in the cover of LAN, 4G 7024, a bull of Sixtus IV of 15 Kl. Mai. 1467, granting him a pension of £20 on a chaplaincy of St. Aycard in the parish church of Haspre.

761

762

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

1452 even though the wine accounts show him present on 11 February (CBM 159, fol. 11v). He held a number of chaplaincies in the cathedral but was not a member of the grand community (CBM, 1059, fols. 23v, 122r; 1061, fol. 177v), and a number of benefices outside Cambrai. On 12 July 1465 he was one of those charged with proofreading the new ordinal of the cathedral (CBM 1059, fol. 218v), and the accounts of the wine (passim) show that for years he was the grand vicar entrusted with noting the marrantiae of the small vicars. He died on 17 June 1490, although he had written his will as early as 6 June 1479, and his grand vicariate was granted to Nicolas Berquier (CBM 1061, fol. 366v). Paul Collepin (Colpin), tenorist, is documented on 12 July 1492 as a chorister being sent to school after his term was completed (CBM 1062, fol. 12v). On 17 July 1493 he was granted ten measures of wheat as he left the cathedral to serve as tenorist elsewhere (CBM 1062, fol. 78r). He was received as small vicar on 24 July 1499, began serving the next day, and is in the lists for all of 1499–1500 (CBM 1064, fol. 198r; LAN, 4 G 7472 [1499–1500], fol. 8r). On 10 May 1502, when he was declared contumacious for failing to appear before the chapter on a matter of unpaid debts, and on 4 August, when a schedule of payments was set, he was still a small vicar (CBM 1064, fols. 375v, 396v). Documentation for him in the accounts of the small vicars is intermittent between 1501 and 1515. He might be the Paulet in the lists between 1501 and 1508, when it is indicated that he left (LAN, 4 G 6793 [1507–1508], fol. 6v), but reappears as Colpin in the lists of 1511–1512 and 1515–1516 (LAN, 4 G 6794, fol. 8r; 6793 [1515–1516], fol. 8r). Paul le Jeune, le Josne, De Jonghe was a small vicar from 1 November 1451 to 2 March 1456 (LAN, 4 G 7450, fol. 6r; 7454, fol. 5v). He had been appointed magister puerorum on 25 October 1451 (CBM 1059, fol. 2v) after the canons sent Guillaume Turpin to Tournai to recruit him. Their alternate choice would have been Petrus de Domarto (CBM 1059, fol. 2v). The last mention of Paul as magister puerorum comes from the aumosne for 1455–1456, indicating that he had left that office (recessit) at the end of February of 1456 (4 G 7763 [1455– 1456], fol. 12r). On 14 April 1455 he collated the parish church of Cantaing on the resignation of Jacques Morel (CBM 1059, fol. 129r), and on 4 February 1461 he resigned by procuration the parish church of Crameux, diocese of Cambrai, in an exchange with Philippe de le Warde, for the parish church of Long Avesnes, diocese of Noyon

List of Small Vicars

(CBM 1060, fol. 102r). This is, to my knowledge, his last appearance in Cambrai documents. Petit Jehan 1. The name Petit Jehan appears in the Cambrai records in four different chronological contexts. The acts record that on 21 November 1446 Iohannes [blank], called Petit Jehan, was received as a small vicar (CBM 1058, fol. 87v). He served from 23 November 1446 to 15 May 1449 (LAN, 4 G 7446, fol. 6v; 7448, fol. 6v); his departure has to be teased from the number of vicars reported on 15 May, which indicate one less vicar than previously, and the full list on 7 June, which omits his name. In 1447–1448 and 1448–1449 he was paid three times for binding books, including two books of polyphony copied by Symon Mellet (LAN, 4 G 4654, fol. 28r, 4 G 4655, fol. 27r); significantly, the first of the last two entries for 1448–1449, copied at the end of the fiscal year, refer to him as a former small vicar. Petit Jehan 2 (Jehan du Sart) was a small vicar from 3 December 1454 to 29 March 1455 and from 6 April 1455 to 27 Ocrober 1465 (LAN, 4 G 7453, fol. 7r–v; 7464, fol. 5v). The chapter acts record on 20 August 1455 that the parish church of Marech, vacant on the death of Jehan Haiselin, was granted to Jehan du Sart, small vicar (CBM 1059, fol. 150r). Since Petit Jehan is the only Jehan among the small vicars at that point, this establishes the identity of Petit Jehan 2 and Jehan du Sart.34 The lists in the wine account call him Petit Jehan until June 1463 and Jehan Du Sart afterward. On 24 November 1462 he collated the chaplaincy at the altar of St. Anne on the death of Thomas le Turcq (CBM 1060, fol. 152r) and was a member of the grand community of chaplains from 1463–1464 to 1466–1467 (LAN, 4 G 6934, fol. 14r; 6940, fol. 19v). On 1 March 1463 he resigned the parish church of Marech, which went to Etienne Bourgeois (CBM 1060, fol. 161v). On 29 May 1467 he was granted the habitus ecclesiae of Cambrai until the feast of St. John Baptist following, and that same day he resigned his chaplaincy at the altar of St. Anne for a canonicate at Notre Dame de la Salle-le-Combe in Valenciennes (C. Wright, “Dufay,” 206, erroneously refers to the canonicate as a chaplaincy), and apparently left Cambrai permanently. The accounts of the fabric during the 1460s record the copying of several of his liturgical works, but none of these apparently survive. Two secular works ascribed to him, however, have been preserved (Fallows and Haggh, “Jean du Sart”). His name is mentioned in Loyset Compère’s Omnium bonorum plena, indicating 34

It is possible that Petit Jehan 1 and 2 are the same person.

763

764

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

that Du Sart might have been present at the performance of the work (Montagna, “Caron, Hayne, Compère,” but cf. Rifkin, “Compere, ‘Des Pres’”). He might be the Jehan du Sart who matriculated at Leuven in August 1466 (Fallows and Haggh, “Jean du Sart”) and more probably the zangmeester at Ste-Gudule in Brussels, who died in October 1485. He was magister puerorum at Cambrai for two periods, 1456–1458 and 1461–1465. The acts record a gift of cloth to Johannes, the new magister puerorum, in March 1456 (CBM 1059, fol. 206r), and the record of that gift in the aumosne refers to him as Parvus Johannes (LAN, 4 G 7763 [1455–1456], fol. 10v). On 23 August 1458 the canons formed a committee to find a new magister puerorum (CBM 1060, fol. 22v) and an undated entry in the aumosne for 1458–1459 refers to Jehan as a former magister puerorum (LAN, 4 G 7764 (1458–1459), 20r). He apparently had a brother who worked at Cambrai, for an entry in the aumosne for 1456–1457 mentions one Nicaise, “brother of the magister puerorum,” who taught grammar to the choristers during the plague (LAN 4 G 7763 [1456–1457], fol. 13r). His second stint as magister puerorum began with a temporary appointment on 9 December 1461, the same day Jehan Zemberch was dismissed, and was confirmed on 14 September 1462 after Regis declined the post (CBM 1060, fols. 127v, 149r). The canons deposed him on 25 October 1465 (CBM 1060, fol. 226v) and temporarily installed Rasse de Lavenne (Laverne) (LAN, 4 G 7764 [1465–1466], fols. 4r and 25r). Petit Jehan 3 was a small vicar from 1 September 1491 to 28 March 1492 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1491–1492], fol. 8r–v). He is surely the unnamed vicar with a loud (alta) voice who was received in an act of 31 October 1491 (CBM 1061, fol. 399v). On his advent the wine account describes him as a relative (cognatus) of Guillaume Mervillet. As early as 30 September 1491 he was demoted to semivicar (CBM 1061, fol. 402v), and on his dismissal he is described as useless (LAN, 4 G 7768 [1491–1492], fol. 24v). Petit Jehan 4, see Jehan le Pontchenu. Philippe (no other name recorded) is documented as small vicar in an undated entry in the aumosne for 1413–1414 (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1413– 1414], fol. 9r). Philippe Brunet is documented as small vicar in an undated entry between 12 and 21 December 1432 in the aumosne (as Philippe) (LAN, 4 G 7761, fol. 11r). He must have been quite young in 1432 (the entry in the aumosne is for him to have a robe “like those of the choristers”). He apparently left Cambrai after 1432–1433 and had

List of Small Vicars

become curate of Pequecourt by the time he rejoined the small vicars on 29 June 1442 (LAN, 4 G 7442, fol. 8r), serving continuously until he was promoted to grand vicar on the death of Fursy Mallaifren on 4 May 1444 (LAN, 4 G 7443, fol. 7r and 4 G 1090, fol. 147r). He died on 21 February 1455 and his grand vicariate went to Pasquier Coutel (CBM 1059, fol. 121r–v). Philippe le Caron was the son of Jehan Caron 2 above. He is documented as a chorister in 1471–1472 (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1471–1472], fol. 18v) and as a clerk in 1479–1480 (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1479–1480], fol. 18r). He was a small vicar from 30 July 148335 to 20 August 1484, from 10 November 1484 to 9 June 1485, and from 20 January 1486 to 28 January 1487 (LAN, 4 G 7473, fol. 8v; 7472 [1484–1485], fols. 7v–8r; [1485–1486], fol. 7v; [1486–1487], fol. 7v). Two days before his departure from the cathedral service he was received as a vicar in St-Géry (LAN, 7 G 577, fol. 27r). On 20 March 1480 he received the chaplaincy of St. Mary in the parish church of Nivelles on the resignation of canon Pierre Godemare, but that same day he exchanged it through procuration with a chaplaincy in St-Géry held by Jacques Maisnart (CBM 1061, fols. 92v, 93v); the entries indicate that he was not at Cambrai at the time. His first absence from the small vicars was ostensibly on account of a pilgrimage to Rome (CBM 1061, fol. 188r), although the length of the second is more consonant with such a journey, so perhaps Caron postponed the pilgrimage until 1485. The accounts of the chaplains of St-Géry show that Caron held a foreign chaplaincy in 1480–1481 (LAN, 7 G 2959, fol. 10r) but not during the following two years, although his name is not among those of the resident chaplains; this most likely means he held the foreign chaplaincy ad privilegium.36 There is a lacuna in the accounts from 1483 to 1487. In 1487–1488 Caron was a member of the community of chaplains at St-Géry (LAN, 7 G 2962, fol. 4r) but he is absent from all lists after that. On 9 April 1487 he was still a deacon, when he sought license from the St-Géry chapter to be promoted to further orders and to go to Brussels in order to say his first Mass there (LAN, 7 G 577, fol. 31r). Apparently he never returned to Cambrai. Haggh, “Music,” 2:567–68 details his life from 1489, when he became a singer and later a zangmeester at Ste-Gudule in Brussels, to his death there on 18 January 1509. A very strange document of 5 January 35 36

The acts do nor record his admission until 4 Aug. (CBM 1061, fol. 164r). In St-Géry foreign chaplaincies held ad privilegium simply disappear from the accounts and their rents are considered within the global account of the community.

765

766

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

1477 in the Vatican archives (ASV, LA 25, fols. 95v–96r, published in Roth, Studien, 542–43) shows Henri de Berghes, future bishop of Cambrai and the proctor of the duke of Burgundy in Rome, promising to pay the annates for benefices not yet collated for a number of persons. In it the young Philippe, barely a clericus at the time, is described as a canon of Cambrai, a position he never came close to even aspiring to.37 On 7 January 1480, perhaps as a result of the duke’s efforts, Jehan Hemart, as his proctor, presented letters of Sixtus IV to the chapter of Ste-Croix awarding a canonicate there, vacant on the death of Grégoire Rasse, to Caron, and indeed Hemart was duly installed as Caron’s representative (LAN, 6 G 178, fol. 80v). But the chapter had also awarded that canonicate on 20 December 1479 to Jacques Maisnart (LAN, 6 G 178, fol. 69v) and on 28 April 1480 the chapter, and a commission of clerics from the cathedral as well, rejected Caron’s claim in favor of Maisnart. It is this act where Jehan Caron is mentioned as the father of Philippe (LAN, 6 G 178, fol. 80v). Haggh, “Busnoys and ‘Caron’,” 299–309, provides a very good summary of what is known of Philippe Caron and his father, marred only by her acceptance of the document published by Roth as other than a fiction on the part of Berghes. Pierre 1 (no last name recorded), tenorist, was a small vicar from 30 January to 7 July 1455 (LAN, 4 G 7453, fol. 7r; 7454, fol. 5v). His recess is implied in that an entry for 8 July 1455 counts one vicar less than the previous entry but does not name the one who left; a list, however, follows the reception of Caron on 11 July, and Pierre is missing from that and all subsequent lists. Given that the Multoris family produced a veritable dynasty of musicians in fifteenth-century Cambrai, he might be Petrus Multoris who held the parish church in Binche in 1457 (CBM 1059, fol. 262v). 37

The fiction concerning Caron is repeated in the descriptions of Philippe Siron and Gilles Godeval, named as canons of Cambrai, Gilles de Bonsies and Philippe Coquel, named as canons of St-Géry, and Robert Morton, named as canon of St. Paul in Liège. For the context of the document and a possible explanation of both its unusual form and numerous inaccuracies see Fiala, “Le Mécénat,” 85–87, and Planchart, “Robert Morton.” To be sure, reception of such letters could have been recorded in the lost register N of the acts. But the payment of an annate implies at the very least that the candidate or his representative had been received by the chapter. Without exception the Cambrai record shows payments by the candidate to the office of wine and to the office of ornaments of the fabric when such a reception (even eventually unsuccessful ones) took place, and the records of these offices are absolutely silent not only in the case of Caron, but also in the case of two other supposed canons of Cambrai named in the same annate, Philippe Siron, and Gilles Godeval. The St-Géry records are equally silent on two supposed canons of St-Géry, Gilles de Bonsies and Philippe Coquel.

List of Small Vicars

Pierre 2 (no last name recorded) is documented as small vicar in weeks 8–52 in 1409–1410 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1409–1410], fol. 4r); he could be Pierre Loher or Pierre Somis, q.v. Pierre 3 (no other name recorded) is documented as small vicar for all of 1399–1400 as Pieret (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1399–1400], fol. 3r). This could be one of two men: Pierre Bailly, who joined the grand community of chaplains in 1399–1400 and remains in the lists until 1427–1428 (LAN, 4 G 6885, fol. 6v; 6909, fol. 21r), or else Pierre Sonim or Somis 2,38 who joined the grand community of chaplains in 1400– 1401 and remained in the lists until 1412–1413 (LAN, 4 G 6886, fol. 6v; 6894, fol. 7r). Pierre 4 (Pierre Franchois?), tenorist, is documented as a chorister in 1428–1429 (LAN, 7760 [1428–1429], fol. 11r), and as Petrus tenorista on his reception as a small vicar on 24 October 1431 (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1431–1432], fol. 10v). He remained a small vicar and is documented as Petrus tenorista in the aumosne for 1439–1440 (LAN, 7761 [1439– 1440], fol. 9r). He appears as Pieret in the first list of small vicars on 24 June 1439 in the wine accounts, which also report his departure on 29 December 1439 (LAN, 4 G 7439, fol. 8r). He may be the Pierre Franchois who appears in the lists of the grand community of chaplains precisely around the time when Pierre’s career would suggest that he would have obtained a chaplaincy. Pierre Franchois must have joined the community between July 1435 and June 1438 (accounts lost), and appears in the lists from 1438–1439 until 1446–1447 (LAN, 4 G 6908, fol. 29v; 6913, fol. 20r). Pierre Calonne, see Calonne. Pierre Daix (Dais, Pierre Chantecler), tenorist, became a small vicar on 1 September 1494 and appears in the lists for 1494–1500 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1494–1495], fol. 10v; [1499–1500], fol. 8r–v). An entry in the aumosne on 7 November 1494 refers to him by the sobriquet Chantecler (LAN, 4 G 7769 [1494–1495], fol. 20v). On 29 July 1500 the chaplaincy at the altar of St. Elizabeth, vacant on the death of Jehan du Puit, was granted to Daix (CBM 1064, fol. 272r), and that year he joined the grand community of chaplains (LAN, 4 G 6986, fol. 18v). He is documented as a small vicar until 1504–1505 (LAN, 4 G 6793, fol. 7r), and again from 1515–1516 to 1519–1520 (LAN, 4 G 6794 [1515–1516], fol. 8r; [1519–1520], fol. 6r), and as a chaplain until 1536–1537 (LAN, 4 G 2023, fol. 24v).

38

An earlier Pierre Sonim or Somis cannot be traced beyond 1396–1397.

767

768

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

Pierre Daule, Pierre de Douai was a small vicar from 23 September 1460 to 16 May 1466 and from 28 June 1466 to 27 March 1473 (LAN, 4 G 7459, fol. 6r; 7464, fol. 6r; 7465, fol. 5v; 7471, fol. 6v). He held the chaplaincy of St. Christopher as a foreign chaplaincy from 1473–1474 to 1476–1477 (LAN, 4 G 6946, fol. 38r; 6949, fol. 33r) and, though there is no record of his collating it, he had a claim to the chaplaincy of SS. Cosmas at Damian (see below). Apparently he had left Cambrai and was seeking his fortune in the Sforza court. He is listed among the Sforza singers in March and December of 1475, and in the clothing lists of March of that year (Motta, “Musicisti,” 318 and 323 n. 2).39 In a document of 27 October 1477 Gilles Cosse (former chorister at Cambrai and later a member of the Sforza and papal chapels) appoints Nicaise Bourdin and Jehan Hemart as his proctors to obtain the chaplaincy of SS. Cosmas and Damian in Cambrai, vacant on the death of Pierre Daule in Milan, and includes a bull of Sixtus IV stating that Cosse had won it by prevailing in a trial (Merkley and Merkley, Music, 289). The Cambrai record shows no trace of this action: instead, on 19 December 1477, Daule’s chaplaincy at the altar of SS. Cosmas and Damian went to Louis Courtin, and the parish church of Betrechies went to Robert Carnent (le Voiturier) (CBM 1061, fol. 35r). Pierre de Béthune [not Pierre de Castel] is documented as Pierotin de Bethune, a recently departed chorister in 1456–1457 (LAN, 4 G 7763 [1456–1457], fol. 13r). He is named consistently as Pierotin in the wine accounts, and as Sire Pierre or Sire Pieron in the accounts of the small vicars (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1462–63], fol. 4v). He was a small vicar from 24 June 1462 to 14 May 1466 and from 28 June 1466 to 24 March 1473 (LAN, 4 G 7461, fol. 5v; 7464, fol. 6r; 7465, fol. 5v; 7471, fol. 6v). His first advent is not recorded per se; his name simply appears in the opening list for 1462–1463. There is no trace of a beneficial career at Cambrai for him. Pierre de Lens, tenorist, was a small vicar from 29 August to 3 December 1440 and from 23 June to 16 August 1441 (LAN, 4 G 7440, fol. 7r–v; 7441, fol. 8v). Pierre de Mays (Pierrequin) was a small vicar from 15 January 1466 to 7 September 1473 (LAN, 4 G 7464, fol. 5v; 7472 [1473–1474], fol. 6r). His full name is given only in the grand métier, in an entry granting him £10 for the feast of fools in 1469–1470 (LAN, 4 G 5102, fol. 12v). He is also the “dominus Petrus,” small vicar, who was granted the 39

I am grateful to Bonnie Blackburn for this reference.

List of Small Vicars

parish church of Amieux on 7 September 1467 on the resignation of Pasquier Coutel (CBM 1060, fol. 269v). Pierre de Reust (de Rieu, de Rivo) has a particularly complicated history in terms of his service at Cambrai. He was a small vicar from 25 May 1476 to 20 February 1479, and 1 September 1479 to 23 June 1480 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1475–1476], fol. 7v; [1478–1479], fol. 6r; [1479–1480], fols. 6v–7r; CBM 1061, fol. 75v). Later he was a small vicar from 17 June 1495 to 5 October 1498 (LAN, 7472 [1494–1495], fol. 11r; [1498–1499], fol. 8r). Between February and September 1479 Rivo journeyed to Rome, since on 6 September 1479 the aumosne notes that he had recently returned from Rome (LAN, 4 G 7766 [1479–1480], fol. 18v). On 6 October 1479 he was made grand vicar on the death of Gobert le Mannier (CBM 1061, fol. 79r), but he continued singing with the small vicars to the end of that fiscal year. On 10 November 1483 the canons had to admonish him not to exchange his grand vicariate except with someone known to the canons and qualified (CBM 1061, fol. 170v), and on 10 November 1484 he exchanged the vicariate with Baudouin Brillet for a chaplaincy in St-Géry (CBM 1061, fol. 174r). After that he did not work at the cathedral until his return as a small vicar in 1495.40 On 8 April 1496 he was given permission to join the chapel of Archduke Philip the Fair for a short time (CBM 1063, fol. 96r). The wine account does not record his departure, which must have taken place after 14 April (CBM 1063, fol. 200r), but reports his return on 23 June 1496 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1495–1496], fol. 9v). On 26 March 1498 he was granted 2 florins for copying a magnificat (CBM 1064, fol. 42v).41 On 27 July 1500, following the death of Brillet, the grand vicariate that Pierre had resigned was returned to him (CBM 1064, fol. 271v). Pierre de Saint-Denis, tenorist, is documented as a small vicar in weeks 40–52 of 1411–1412 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1411–1412], fol. 4v). His being a tenorist is mentioned in the aumosne (LAN 4 G 7758 [1411–1412], fol. 10r).

40

41

The accounts of the chaplains of St-Géry have a lacuna from 1483 to 1487. The account of 1487– 1488 has no mention of Pierre and that of 1488–1489 is missing. Beginning with the account of 1489–1490, however, Pierre’s chaplaincy is noted as a foreign chaplaincy until 1492–1493 (LAN, 7G 2963, fol. 8v; 7G 2966 [1492–1493], fol. 6v). Apparently during his long absence he was in the Burgundian chapel (Fiala, “Le Mécénat,” 361–62). The act orders the fabric and the aumosne to pay Rivo. The fabric account is lost, but the aumosne account records a payment of 50s to “P de Ruie,” small vicar, on 2 April 1498 (LAN, 4G 7770, fol. 25v).

769

770

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

Pierre de Terasse (Thérache) was a small vicar from 9 April 1488 to 16 April 1491 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1487–1488], fol. 6r; [1490–1491], fol. 7r). He was the brother of Louis de Terasse (q.v.). By October 1492 he had joined the ducal chapel of Lorraine at Nancy, where he remained to his death on 30 March 1528. A good number of his works survive; see Freedman, “Pierrequin de Thérache.” Pierre de Vaux (de Vaulx), tenorist, was a small vicar from 9 May 1498 to 5 June 1499 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1497–1498], fol. 9r; [1498–1499]). His recess is not noted in the wine accounts because on 5 June he was given a leave of absence for fifteen days on account of an illness (CBM 1064, fol. 184v), but on 26 June he was granted a small gift and dismissed (CBM 1064, fol. 191v). He appealed his dismissal, but it was confirmed on 8 July (CBM 1064, fol. 194r). On 21 November 1498 he had been granted a gift on his promotion to orders (LAN, 4 G 7771, fol. 29v, also CBM 1064, fol. 131r), so he was probably quite young. Pierre Dibout from Tournai was a small vicar from 5 April to 8 November 1493 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1492–1493], fol. 8r; [1493– 1494], fol. 11v). His full name and provenance are documented in the act recording his admission (CBM 1062, fol. 60r). Pierre du Castel (Pierre de Béthune) is first documented as small vicar in an entry dated 3 January 1434 reporting that he had held the feast of fools (LAN, 4 G 5068, fol. 27r). An undated entry in the aumosne, between those of 14 July (letting go of Rénaud Liebert) and 1 October 1434, reports the replacement of the straw in the beds of the choristers “in the reception of Sire Pierre du Castel,” implying that he had replaced Liebert as magister puerorum (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1434–1435], fol. 10r). For some time he was regarded as a different man from the Pierre de Béthune mentioned as magister puerorum on 25 February 1435 (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1434–1435], fol. 10v), but documents from the church of St-Barthélemy de Bethune mention a Sire Pierre du Castel who was punished in 1432 for leading the enfants de choeur in merrymaking outside the city limits (La Fons, “Documents inédits,” 42). Pierre had acquired the chaplaincy of St. Lawrence,42 but he is not in the lists of the grand community and neither is his chaplaincy listed as a foreign chaplaincy; this indicates that he belonged to the small community. On 20 April 1435 he resigned this chaplaincy in an exchange for the parish church of Doucy with Guillaume de Gardane (CBM 1057, fol. 2r). On 10 November 1437, when he collated 42

This would have been recorded in the lost register F of the acts.

List of Small Vicars

the grand vicariate of Nicolas Raimillies, he is referred to again as magister puerorum (CBM 1057, fol. 59v) and the accounts of the aumosne have numerous entries concerning his duties during the following ten years. His last mention in this capacity is an undated entry shortly before All Saints of 1447 (LAN, 4 G 7762 [1447–1448], fol. 11v), and on 9 December 1447 he is referred to as “recently dismissed” (CBM 1058, fol. 140v). On 31 May 1446 he had exchanged his grand vicariate for a chaplaincy at the altar of All Saints with Henri Macheclier (CBM 1058, fol. 46v) and in 1448–1449 he became a canon of St-Géry (cf. LAN, 7 G 2412 [1447–1448], fols. 17v–18r; [1448– 1449], fols. 18v–19r). By 22 May 1454, however, he was in Paris, when canon Jehan Artus presented the chapter with a littera de fructibus for Pierre from the treasurer of the Sainte-Chapelle (CBM 1059, fol. 90r), and by 27 June 1455 he had resigned his chaplaincy at the cathedral (CBM 1059, fol. 146r). He died most likely in 1465 or 1466, for his obit first appears in the accounts of the fabric of St-Géry in 1466–1467 (LAN, 7 G 2225 [1466–1467], fol. 10v); at his death, as noted in the obituary of the grand vicars, he was canon of Noyon (LAN, 4 G 2009, fol. 3v). His name is entered in an acrostic, “Petrus de Castello canta,” in the motetus of Du Fay’s Fulgens iubar ecclesia dei. Pierre du Wez was a small vicar from 14 May to 18 October 1443, 5 December 1443 to 3 January 1445, and 25 February 1446 to 8 July 1457 (LAN, 4 G 7442, fol. 8v; 7443, fol. 7r; 7444, fol. 5v; 7445, fol. 6v; 7456, fol. 7r). His first absence was connected with a journey to the Council of Basel; no explanation for his second absence has turned up. Du Wez joined the grand community of chaplains in 1449–1450 (accounts of those years do not record the advents), and appears in the lists from 1450–1451 until 1482–1483 (LAN, 4 G 6916, fol. 23v; 6962, fol. 24r). In 1462 he was chaplain of the revestiary (CBM 1060, fol. 144v). He kept Du Fay’s house for him during the seven years Du Fay was in Savoy in the 1450s and was one of his executors. He died on 8 May 1483 (CBM 1061, fol. 159v). Though he was of modest means (the aumosne granted him 100s on 22 March 1482 on account of old age and poverty) (LAN, 4 G 7767, fol. 14v), the execution of his will (LAN, 4 G 1705) shows that he was a learned man who left behind a large library. Pierre Haverelle or Heverelle was a small vicar from 15 March 1441 to 18 April 1442 (LAN, 4 G 7440, fol. 7r; 7441, fol. 8v). Before his arrival at Cambrai he had served the duke of Burgundy in some capacity. Marix reports a payment in 1436 to Jehan Wassault and Pierre

771

772

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

Heverelle, priest and tenorist, sent to the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon (Marix, Histoire, 162). Pierre Hochart 1, called Gallifre or Gailliefere, tenorist, was a small vicar from 6 April 1470 to 11 May 1499 and from 21 May 1499 to at least 23 June 1500 and possibly beyond (LAN, 4 G 7468, fol. 5v; 7472 [1498–1499], fol. 8r; [1499–1500], fol. 8r–v). On 17 July 1476 he was made a grand vicar on the death of Gilles Dippre, but resigned the vicariate the same day in exchange for a chaplaincy at the altar of All Saints resigned by Pierre Meungot (CBM 1061, fol. 4r). At this point an extraordinary complication arises: there were two men with exactly the same name at Cambrai, and on 11 January 1477 Pierre Hochart 1, a priest, resigned the chaplaincy at the altar of All Saints in a permutation with Pierre Hochart 2, a clerk, for the chaplaincy of St. Blaise in the parish church of St-Hilaire (CBM 1061, fol. 13r). There is no evidence whatsoever that Pierre Hochart 2 was a musician, but he might be the Hochart who became a member of the grand community of chaplains in 1478–1479 and appears in the lists to 1500–1501 (LAN, 4 G 6955, fol. 12v; 6985, fol. 34v), although Pierre Hochart 1 at the time of his death held another chaplaincy, at the altar of NotreDame de la Poudre, which would also allow him to be a member of the community. The subsequent career of Pierre Hochart 1 can be traced thanks to the mentions of the sobriquet and his designation as a small vicar. He had a number of troubles with the cathedral authorities, including severely wounding a young clerk while practicing archery (CBM, 1061, fol. 13v). On 5 November 1498, on account of his old age and his long service to the cathedral, he was allowed to come to only some of the services, but on 10 May 1499 the canons decided to remove him as a small vicar (CBM 1064, fol. 116v). He remonstrated and was essentially reinstated starting on 21 May 1499. The acts record his death some time before 15 October 1501, when the vicarial chapel he held at the altar of Notre-Dame de la Poudre went to Gilles Boulengier (CBM 1064, fol. 340r). He must be related to Constantius Hochart, called Gailliefere, received as a small vicar in June 1502 (CBM 1064, fol. 380v). Pierre le Canoine. Since his brother Robert is documented as a chorister between 1449 and 1452, Pierre might well be one of the several choristers with that name documented during those years. He was a small vicar from 20 October 1458 until 3 August 1460 (LAN, 4 G 7457, fol. 8r; 7459, fol. 6r). The expression in the wine account where his reception is reported and where his name follows that of Robert,

List of Small Vicars

Petrus frater dictus Robini, must be read as “Pierre, brother of said Robert.” The wine accounts never give his last name, but the account of the small vicars gives it on his reception (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1458– 1459], fol. 6v) and the acts document it twice, on 6 August 1459 when he served as a witness, and on 17 October 1459, when he received a gift of 4 écus provided he would serve the church for a full year (CBM 1060, fols. 55r, 59r). In 1461 he became a clerk in the Burgundian chapel and by 1464 he was promoted to chaplain and was in the chapel until July 1482 (Marix, Histoire, 212). His presence at the court becomes intermittent thereafter, suggesting that he had retired to Condé, where he had become dean by around 1470 (Fiala, “Le Mécénat,” 443–44). The next documented dean of Condé, Baude le Clerc, became a canon in April 1489, but was not yet dean in 1492, suggesting that Pierre was still alive then. The Condé accounts are very fragmentary, and the earliest mention of Le Clerc as dean is from 1499, so Pierre must have died some time between 1492 and 1499 (Fiala, “Le Mécénat,” 228–30). Pierre Loher is documented as small vicar (Peronino) before Lent 1407– 1408 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1407–1408], fol. 7v), and on 19 October 1408, when he was let go (CBM 1055, fol. 145v). He might be a relative of Guillaume Lohier, canon from 1387 to 1434. Pieter van Breda (Petrus de Breda) began serving as a small vicar on 8 February 1500. He is mentioned among the small vicars in an act of 21 September 1500 dealing with the administration of the new prebend for the small vicars (CBM 1064, fol. 282r). He is documented as a small vicar until 1506–1507 (LAN, 4 G 6793 [1506–1507], fol. 5r) and again from 1520–1521 to 1523–1524 (LAN, 4 G 6794 [1520–1521], fol. 4v; [1523–1524], fol. 5v). Pierre Wardaker is documented as a former chorister in the act reporting his reception as a semivicar on 19 March 1449 (CBM 1058, fol. 190v). He served from 19 March 1449 to some time between July 1450 and June 1451 (LAN, 4 G 7448, fol. 6v; 7449, fol. 7v); he is among the small vicars at the end of 1449–1450, the wine account for 1450–1451 is lost, and Pierre is absent from the first list for 1451–1452 (LAN, 4 G 7450, fol. 5v). No entry identifying him as a small vicar ever gives his last name, but two entries in the acts point to Petrus Wardaker as our small vicar (CBM 1058, fols. 162v, 265v). On 10 June 1448 Jehan de Cominghen resigned by procuration the chaplaincy at the altar of SS. Peter and Paul, which was one of the vicarial chaplaincies, in an exchange for the matricularia of the parish church of St. Andrew in

773

774

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

Straten, diocese of Tournai, which was held by Petrus Wardaker (if he is our Pierre he would have been a chorister then), who was installed by Du Fay (CBM 1058, fol. 162v), and on 15 June 1451 Wardaker resigned that chaplaincy in an exchange with Jehan Oscon for two benefices outside Cambrai (CBM 1058, fol. 265v). The accounts of the grand community of chaplains record no reception for Wardaker, but his name appears in the list for 1450–1451 (LAN, 4 G 6916, fol. 23v). Piugnet (no other name recorded) is documented as small vicar after Lent 1405 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1405–1406], fol. 7v]. Platiel (no other name recorded) is documented as small vicar after Lent 1405 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1405–1406], fol. 7v). Quentin Darly was a small vicar from 10 March 1493 to 17 August 1495 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1492–1493], fol. 7v; [1495–1496], fol. 9r). His first name can be deduced from its position in the list of 1493–1494. He was probably a relative of Robert Darly, canon from 1447 to 1495. Raoul (no last name recorded), tenorist, is documented as a small vicar on 28 November 1432 in the aumosne (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1432–1433], fol. 10v). This entry could refer to one of three men: Raoul de Blagny, Raoul Terasse, or Raoul de Champ, all documented between 1434 and 1436, but none of which is ever described as a tenorist, or else to an older small vicar whose last name does not survive in the records. Raoul de Blagny is documented as small vicar in an act of 25 June 1435 (CBM 1057, fol. 7v), but he was no longer a small vicar by 24 June 1439. Blagny is called a chaplain in a citation for concubinage on 28 June 1454 (CBM 1059, fol. 96r) and on his death on 16 October 1458 (CBM 1060, fol. 28r), but his name is absent from the accounts of the grand community, which means he was a member of the small community, which has left no records for this time. Raoul de Champ is documented as small vicar in an entry dated 27 October 1435 in the aumosne (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1435–1436], fol. 11v), and as Raoulin de Campo in an act of 17 April 1436 collating to him the parish church of Gaynette (Genech?) (CBM 1057, fol. 23r). Raoul de Molinbel (Monchiel, Molenberg) has a fairly complex history in terms of his vicariate. He was a small vicar from 24 May 1493 to 9 March 1495 and from 30 April 1495 to 23 June 1496 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1492–1493], fol. 8r; [1494–1495], fol. 10v–11r; [1495–1496], fols. 8v–9v). He was made a grand vicar on 7 January 1496 on the death of Jehan le Mannier, but exceptionally was allowed to keep his small vicariate until the end of that fiscal year, provided he lived modestly and kept no women (CBM 1063, fol. 76r). As a grand vicar he had to

List of Small Vicars

be admonished a number of times for neglect of his duties (CBM 1063, fols. 110r, 130r), and on 2 June 1497 he resigned his grand vicariate to Jehan de le Quellerie in exchange for the chaplaincy at the altar of the Trinity, but three days later he exchanged this chaplaincy with Jehan de la Pierre (de Lapide) for a chaplaincy at the altar of St. Nicholas in the parish church of Villereau (CBM 1063, fols. 217v, 219r). Both of these permutations were done through procuration, indicating that Molinbel was then not in Cambrai. On 21 August 1497, however, he was received again as a small vicar, provided he got rid of his lover, the clavigera [illa clavigera] (CBM 1063, fol. 246r), and reappears in the wine accounts until 1499–1500 (there is a lacuna until 1512 in the wine accounts). He is still documented as a small vicar on 10 March 1503, when the chaplaincy of St. John, resigned by Jehan du Wez, who had been his proctor in the earlier permutations, was granted to him (CBM 1064, fol. 441v), and as Raulequin in the lists of small vicars until 1504–1505 (LAN, 4 G 6793 [1504–1505], fol. 7r). Raoul Terasse is documented as a small vicar in an undated entry (after Easter) in the aumosne for 1434–1435 (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1435–1436], fol. 11r); he is perhaps the Raoulin, small vicar, noted in the aumosne on 28 October 1436 (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1436–1437], fol. 12r). Rasse de Lavenne or Laverne was a small vicar from 24 June 1457 to 24 March 1458, 17 April 1458 to 19 March 1459, and 15 October 1460 to 1 October 1468 (LAN, 7456, fol. 7r–v; 7457, fol. 8r; 7459, fol. 6r; 7467, fol. 5v; CBM 1060, fol. 17v). The aumosne for 1465–1466 indicates that Jehan du Sart had recently been relieved as magister puerorum and Rasse de Lavenne had been temporarily installed (LAN, 4 G 7764 [1465–1466], fols. 4r and 25r). He was formally installed as magister puerorum on 20 January 1466 on the condition that he expel his servant Jehanne and try get her to leave Cambrai, and evict Marc, a young lodger in his house (CBM 1060, fol. 233v). The chapter acts have a lacuna from 1468 to 1476, but the aumosne for 1466–1467 notes that Rasse left the office some time during that year and was replaced by Robert le Canoine (LAN, 4 G 7764 [1466–1467], fol. 14r). His last appearance in the documents is when he served as a proctor in a permutation on 13 April 1467 (CBM 1060, fol. 260v). Robert was magister puerorum by 5 June of that year. Rasse was a composer, and the accounts of the fabric for 1463–1464 record Symon Mellet copying a Mass written by him (LAN, 4 G 4671, fol. 24r). One of his short absences was apparently to conduct some business at St-Omer, since the account of the aumosne for 1457–1458 reports a gift of £12 to

775

776

1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

Rasse “on his return from St-Omer” (LAN, 4 G 7763 [1457–1458], fol. 18r). On 19 December1466 a chaplaincy at the altar of the Trinity, resigned by Martin Tranchet, was granted to Rasse (CBM 1060, fol. 254r). He is probably not the Grégoire Rasse who joined the grand community of chaplains in 1466–1467 and appears in the lists until 1471–1472 (LAN, 4 G 6940, fol. 13r; 6944, fol. 19r). Rasse le Peletier (Pletier) was a small vicar from 21 December 1476 to 23 June 1481 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1476–1477], fol. 5r). His departure is not noted; he is simply absent from the opening list for 1481–1482. He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1485–1486 (LAN, 4 G 6967, fol. 13v) and appears in the lists only in that year. An act of 17 June 1485 states that his chaplaincy at St. Thomas was declared to be with cure (CBM 1061, fol. 216v). The accounts of the chaplains for 1486–1488 are lost, but in 1488–1489 he is indeed listed as the holder of St. Thomas as a foreign chaplaincy, which he held at least until 1492 (1493–1494 lost) (LAN, 4 G 5959, fol. 40r; 6974, fol. 41r). Renaud du Mez (Reignauldin) was a small vicar from 11 August 1465 to 1 June 1470 (LAN, 4 G 7464, fol. 5v; 7468, fol. 5v). His full name is given in the account of the small vicars (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1465–1466], fol. 8r). Renaud Liebert was magister puerorum from 1425 to 1428 and from 1430 to 1434. His arrival is noted in an entry of 5 May 1425 in the grand métier (LAN, 4 G 5059, fol. 22r) and his activity is recorded in a number of entries in the aumosne. On 8 August 1425 he collated the matutinalia of the parish church of Ste-Croix (CBM 1056, fol. 152v). By 25 July 1428, when Jacques de Savoie was paid for a notarized inventory of Liebert’s goods, he was no longer the magister puerorum (LAN, 4 G 5063, fol. 36r). His return is noted in an undated entry in the aumosne for 1430–1431 (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1430–1431], fol. 7v), but by 14 July 1434 he was relieved of his charge (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1434– 1445], fol. 10r). Liebert, like Loqueville, was married; he must have died not long after 1434. The chapter helped his son, Jehan Liebert, during an illness in 1441–1442 (LAN 4 G 7762 [1441–1442], fol. 9v) and his widow and daughter upon the wedding of the daughter in 1442 (LAN, 4 G 1090, fol. 8r, 5 September 1442). Richard de Loqueville is documented as magister puerorum from 1413 to his death, probably in 1418. An entry in the aumosne before Lent of 1414 notes the arrival of Loqueville (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1413–1414], fol. 9r). The last recorded payment to him is from the aumosne of 1418– 1419, referring to the last day of January “of the past year,” thus 1417

List of Small Vicars

(LAN, 4 G 7759 [1417–1418], fol. 8v), but the first mention of his successor, Vincent Breion, as magister puerorum, is in the aumosne after Lent 1419 (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1418–1419], fol. 8v), and the fabric records a payment by his widow for tapers used at his Requiem Mass in 1418–1419 (LAN, 4 G 4623, fol. 11r). All this indicates a death date in 1418. He was a harp player and a composer, and surely Du Fay’s teacher at Cambrai. See Reaney, “Richard de Loqueville.” Robert Bretin or Bertin is documented as small vicar as Robin in weeks 7–52 of 1411–1412 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1411–1412], fol. 4r–v), and with his full name, and the mention that he was a priest and a small vicar, when the canons granted him the chaplaincy of Notre-Dame de la Poudre on 8 January 1417 (CBM 1056, fol. 41v). He was cited for concubinage on 10 February and 24 May 1417 (CBM 1056, fols. 43v, 44v). On 29 September 1419 he was planning to undertake a pilgrimage to Rome (CBM 1056, fol. 71r). By 28 October 1420 he had died and his chaplaincy was granted to Guillaume d’Amiens. Robert Caulier (Robert de Thérouanne) served as a small vicar on 7 and 8 August 1458. The account of the small vicars calls him Caulier and the wine account calls him de Thérouanne (LAN, 6789 [1458– 1459], fol. 6r; 7457, fol. 8r). Robert de Lamour (Robert de Lannoy), tenorist, was a small vicar from 13 October 1469 to 20 September 1482 (LAN, 4 G 7468, fol. 5v; 7472 [1481–1482], fol. 5v). The beginning of his beneficial career at Cambrai would have been recorded in the lost register N of the acts. He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1476–1477 (LAN, 4 G 6949, fol. 12r), having collated the chaplaincy at the altar of St. Elizabeth, and appears in the lists until 1480–1481, but in retrospective accounts for 1479–1480 (LAN, 4 G 6961, fol. 31v). On 15 August 1480 he resigned the chaplaincy at the altar of St. Elizabeth, which went to Jehan Cornuel, and collated the chaplaincy at the altar of St. Nicaise, resigned by Andrieu du Mez (CBM 1061, fol. 114r). An entry of 30 August 1481 in the aumosne notes that he had been diagnosed with leprosy, and a small gift to him in 1482–1483 is the last notice we have of him (LAN, 4 G 7767 [1481–1482], fol. 12r; [1482–1483], fol. 23v). Robert le Canoine is documented as a chorister living in the house of Gobert le Mannier from 23 February 1449 to 14 April 1450 (LAN, 4 G 7763 [1450–1451], fol. 12v), where he was still on 1 March 1451, when the canons decided he should continue residing there for another year (CBM 1058, fol. 253v). His first turn as a small vicar was from 17 September 1458 to 27 April 1459 (LAN, 4 G 7457, fol. 8r), when

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he became a grand vicar on the death of Nicaise Bouteille (CBM 1060, fol. 43v). His reception as a small vicar is the earliest notice we have that he had become magister puerorum following Jehan du Sart, probably in August 1458 (CBM 1060, fol. 22v). Originally he planned to leave the service of the church by 24 June 1459, and the canons granted him 50 écus if that were the case (CBM 1060, fol. 41r), but he apparently stayed on. At the beginning of the fiscal year of 1460–1461 the canons, dissatisfied with Robert, removed him and installed Jehan Zemberch as magister puerorum (25 June 1460), but less than a week later, after an appeal by Robert, they reinstated him (30 June 1460) (CBM 1060, fols. 84v–85r). On 7 November 1460 the canons noted that Robert had a woman of uncertain morals in the house of the choristers as a servant and on 10 November 1460 he was dismissed and the canons wrote to Jehan Le Roy (Regis) to ask him to be the new magister puerorum (CBM, 1060, fol. 98r). On 15 June 1461 Robert exchanged his grand vicariate for chaplaincies at Cambrai and Laon (unnamed) and the parish church of Welu with Symon Mellet (CBM 1060, fol. 113r), and on 22 June he sought permission “to live outside the church” (CBM 1060, fol. 114v). By 26 March 1462 he was no longer living in Cambrai, and Alexandre Bouillart, Du Fay’s chaplain, acted as his proctor when he resigned a chaplaincy at the altar of St. Elizabeth, which went to Jehan Ferne (CBM 1060, fol. 136r). In 1463–1464 and 1464–1465 he was a vicar chaplain at St-Pierre de Lille. He returned from Lille on 5 June 1467 as a small vicar and as magister puerorum, and served until his death on 1 November 1470 (LAN, 4 G 7465, fol. 6r; LAN 7469, fol. 6r; CBM 1060, fol. 264r); he had stopped being the magister puerorum by 20 March 1469 (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1468–1469], fol. 18r). His brother Pierre was also a small vicar at Cambrai, and two orphaned nephews are documented in 1459–1460 at Cambrai (LAN, 4 G 7764 [1459–1460], fol. 18v). A Gilles le Canoine is documented as a chorister in 1446 (LAN, 4 G 7762 [1445–1446], fol. 11r), perhaps another brother. Robert le Gouch is documented as small vicar after Lent 1405 as “Goghet” (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1405–1406], fol. 7v), as a small vicar and the magister puerorum before Lent as “Robertus” in 1407–1408 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1407–1408], fols. 7v–8r), and as a small vicar with his full name on 2 December 1414 (CBM 1056, fol. 20r). He is not, however, among the small vicars in 1409–1410 and 1410–1411, years for which we have nearly full documentation. But it must be noted that such intermittent service was not uncommon among the small vicars.

List of Small Vicars

Robert’s tenure as magister puerorum was apparently limited to 1407– 1408, the only interruption in Malin’s tenure from ca. 1391 to 1414. Robert le Voiturier called Carnent (Carneur) was a small vicar from 27 January 1476 to 19 July 1483, when he became a grand vicar (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1475–1476], fol. 7v; 7473, fol. 8v; CBM 1061, fol. 163v). An absence recorded on 11 October 1479, when he left on account of some resentment against the canons, has left no trace in the wine account and was probably no more than a day or so (CBM 1061, fol. 79v). He appears to have had no benefices in the cathedral outside his vicariates. On 19 December 1477 he collated the parish church of Betrechies on the death of Pierre Daule. He died on 7 November 1492 (CBM 1062, fol. 26r); his will and its execution survive (LAN, 4 G 1808). Robert Presel, tenorist, was a small vicar from 9 October 1498 to 1 June 1500 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1498–1499], fol. 8r; [1499–1500], fol. 8v). His full name is never recorded in the earlier Cambrai documents, where he is listed as Binet, and scribes did not always mark the “i” in Binet, so that some of the entries read almost as “Bruet.” An act of 9 October 1498 records that Binet, habituatus, became small vicar at half stipend (CBM 1064, fol. 120v). An act of 28 January 1499 that can only refer to this man, when he was promoted from half to full stipend, calls him Robinetus (CBM 1064, fol. 146v). He appears as Binetus tenorista in an act of 21 September 1500 (CBM 1064, fol. 282r), and on 31 October 1503 (as Robertus Presel, clerk of Soissons). He was made grand vicar on the death of Nicolas Berquier (CBM 1064, fol. 480v). He was engaged by the Burgundian/Habsburg chapel on 22 April 1504; returning to Cambrai in 1509, he received a payment for copying a number of Masses, and by 1513 he is documented in the chapel of Anne of Brittany. In the Burgundian documents he is mentioned as a “basse contre” instead of a tenorist. It is also possible that he served Juana of Castile in 1498 shortly before his arrival at Cambrai. On his career outside Cambrai see Fiala, “Le Mécénat,” 375, 466, although I doubt he is the same man as the Robinetus Grisel who resigned a chaplaincy in the parish church of Binche on 20 March 1480 (CBM 1061, fol. 92v). Roboam (no other name recorded) was a small vicar from 6 June 1442 to 31 August 1443 (LAN, 4 G 7441, fol. 9r; 7443, fol. 6v). This is an unusual name and most likely a sobriquet. It is possible that he is the same as the Jehan le Sellier, called Roboam, who appears in the lists of chaplains of St-Géry from 1467–1468 until 1475–1476 (LAN, 7 G

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2956 [1467–1468], fol. 4r; [1475–1476], fol. 5r [lacuna 1476–1478]). He became a canon of Cambrai on 20 June 1498 (CBM 1064, fol. 79r). He died on 9 March 1499 (CBM 1046, fol. 70bisr), and by 29 April 1499 his prebend, by a bull of Alexander VI, was turned over to the office of small vicars (CBM 1064, fol. 174r and LAN, 4 G 84). Rogier (Rogelet) (no last name recorded) was a small vicar from 18 November 1441 to 22 March 1449 (LAN, 4 G 7441, fol. 8v; 7448, fol. 6v). He is mentioned a few times in the acts, but exceptionally these never give his full name nor any information on his career. Sébastien de la Porte was a small vicar from 10 May 1496 to 3 February 1498 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1495–1496], fol. 9v; [1497–1498], fol. 9r). He began at half-stipend and twice the acts record his impatience for a promotion (CBM 1063, fols. 183v, 197v). He became a full vicar on 28 April 1497 (CBM 1063, fol. 206v). He was related to Jehan de la Porte, grand vicar. He is absent from the lists in the surviving accounts of the small vicars from 1501–1502 to 1503–1504, but is present in those from 1504–1505 to 1508–1509 (LAN, 4 G 6793 [1504–1505], fol. 7v; [1508–1509], fol. 6r). Seneschal (no other name recorded) is documented as a small vicar for the first twenty-two weeks of 1409–1410 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1409– 1410], fol. 4v). Symon called Hustin, Symon de Heugion was a small vicar from 1 January 1474 to 15 March 1476 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1474–1475], fol. 6v; [1475–1476], fol. 6v). He came to Cambrai from Soignies and may be a relative of Jehan Hustin, rector scholarum from 1485 to 1492. Symon de Poran (Portan) was a small vicar from 13 November 1481 to 14 April 1483 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1481–182], fol. 5v; [1482–1483], fol. 9v; CBM 1061, fol. 136r). Symon Jauce (Janghe) called Lapplicant was a small vicar from 18 August 1490 to 21 July 1492 and from 3 April 1493 to 30 August 1494 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1490–1491], fol. 7r; [1492–1493], fol. 7r–v; [1494–1495], fol. 10r). His last name is documented in the acts (CBM 1062, fols. 82v, 210v) and the aumosne (LAN, 4 G 7768 [1490–1491], fol. 21v; 7769 [1492–1494], fol. 25r), and the sobriquet in the accounts of the small vicars (LAN, 4 G 6791 [1492–1493], fol. 5v). He had to be admonished about his musical competence and against concubinage (CBM 1062, fol. 82v), but still was sent to Laon to recruit a tenorist, although upon his return the canons were doubtful about the recruit (CBM 1062, fol. 73v). On 3 July 1493, however, they

List of Small Vicars

accepted a Johannes tenorista from Laon, probably Jehan Salomon (CBM 1062, fol. 76r). Symon le Breton was a small vicar from 24 June 1484 until 18 June 1485 (LAN, 4 G 7472 [1484–1485], fols. 7v–8r). An act of 6 October 1484 giving him a robe describes him as a nephew of the late canon of the same name (CBM 1061, fol. 197r). On 17 June 1485 the chapter ordered him and Gilles Antoine to be dismissed on account of an unspecified infraction (CBM 1061, fol. 216v). He might be the Symon le Breton whose death Haggh reports in 1485.43 Symon le Gaignier (Symon de Mersault) is documented as a chorister in 1441–1442, 1442–1443 (LAN, 4 G 7762 [1441–1442], fol. 9v; [1442– 1443], fol. 11v) and as a former chorister in 1444–1445 (LAN, 4 G 7762 [1444–1445], fol. 11r). He was a small vicar from 21 December 1456 to 23 June 1457 (LAN, 4 G 7455, fol. 6v) and again from 10 to 13 December 1460 (CBM 1060, fol. 99v; LAN, 4 G 7459, fol. 6v). A comparison with the act recording his reception in 1460 with the wine account is what established the identity of Le Gaignier and Mersault. On 4 and 20 February the acts record the hearing of a dispute between Fursy [blank] and St-Géry against Symon on the matter of an unnamed benefice; the first entry refers to Symon as a small vicar, although he no longer was one, and the second does not. Both refer to him as a chaplain at Cambrai, but his name is absent from the accounts of the grand community, which means he was a member of the small community, for which little documentation survives. Symon Mellet or Meslet was a small vicar from 18 April 1442 to 23 June 1456 (LAN, 4 G 7442, fol. 8r; 7454, fol. 5v), with only two short absences from 6 to 14 February 1455 and for sixteen days “ad Sanctum Nicolaum” starting on 24 September 1455 (LAN, 4 G 7453, fol. 7r; 7454, fol. 5v). His reception as a small vicar is the earliest mention of Mellet in Cambrai. Mellet was from the diocese of Cambrai; a petition by Cardinal Niccolò Asti da Forlì on 10 October 1436 mentions that Mellet had been in his service at least since 24 April 1431 (ASV, RS 329, fols. 183r–184v), which indicates that Mellet had been in the Roman 43

There are two other men with this name, but they were never small vicars at Cambrai. Haggh, “Music,” 2:559 conflates the biography of all three. The Symon le Breton who became a major canon of Ste-Gudule in 1398 cannot be the Burgundian chaplain, ordained in 1436, who died in 1473, and neither can he be the Symon who died in 1485. Symon le Breton 1, the canon of SteGudule in 1398, had died by 5 Dec. 1417, when Michael de Curia requested the parish church of Falaise on his death (ASV, RS 111, fol. 47r–v). Symon le Breton 2 is the Burgundian chaplain and canon of Cambrai (Fallows, “Simon”), and Symon le Breton 3, the small vicar, is his nephew.

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1. Choristers and Singers at Cambrai in the Long Fifteenth Century

Curia since then. By 31 October 1439 Mellet had two benefices in Laon, the parish church of St-Rémy-à-la-Place and the altar of St. Elizabeth in the cathedral (ASV, RS 363, fol. 194v), and by 9 November 1440, as an unmarried clerk not in holy orders, he had become a papal notary (ASV, RS 369, fol. 20v). Petitions of 9 and 28 November 1440 state that Mellet had been outside the Curia for about nine months (ASV, RS 369, fol. 66r); presumably he went to Laon, where there was some problem with his benefices, and he had been despoiled of the church of St-Rémy (ASV, RS 369, fols. 66v and 216v–217r). By 14 July 1441 he petitioned the Sacra Penitentiaria, where his patron Niccolò Asti was subdean, to allow any Catholic bishop to confer orders upon him (ASV, SP 2 bis, fol. 245v). Upon his final return north Mellet went to Cambrai and not to Laon. At Cambrai he became a member of the grand community of chaplains in 1454–1455 and appears in the lists until 1460–1461 (LAN, 4 G 6921, fol. 11r; 6929, fol. 22v). On 15 June 1461 Mellet exchanged his chaplaincies in Cambrai44 and Laon and the parish church of Welu for a grand vicariate at Cambrai with Robert le Canoine (CBM 1060, fol. 113r). He died on 17 September 1481 (CBM 1061, fol. 132v). Mellet was a prodigious music scribe and the accounts of the fabric record his activity in considerable detail (see Curtis, “Music Manuscripts,” 227–56). Symon Mouton is documented as small vicar in an entry of 1 October 1434 in the aumosne (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1434–1435], fol. 10r). Terage (Teragio) (no other name recorded) is documented as small vicar before Lent 1407–1408 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1407–1408], fol. 7v). Thibaut (no other name recorded) is documented as small vicar after Lent 1405 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1404–1405], fol. 7v). Thomas (last name illegible on account of water damage) is documented as small vicar on 19 October 1408, when he was let go (CBM 1055, fol. 145v). Thomas (Massin) is documented as small vicar in weeks 3–46 of 1409–1410 (LAN, 4 G 6789 [1409–1410], fols. 4v–5v). He was a semivicar until the 27th week. Thomas de la Pasture (Thomas de Soignies) was a small vicar from 20 April 1458 to 24 August 1460 (LAN, 4 G 7456, fol. 7v; 7459, fol. 6r). The second form of the name is recorded in the aumosne when

44

There is no record of the name of the chaplaincies Mellet had at Cambrai, but one is named as that of St. Elizabeth when Robert le Canoine, who had obtained it after Mellet, resigned it (CBM 1060, dol. 136r).

List of Small Vicars

he was given £4 upon his departure (LAN, 4 G 7764 [1460–1461], fol. 15r; CBM 1060, fol. 90v). Thomas Maillet was a small vicar from 10 January to 18 July 1442 and from 31 October 1444 to 11 May 1445 (LAN 4 G 7441, fol. 8v; 7442, fol. 8r; 7444, fol. 5v). His final departure is not recorded per se; his name is simply left out of the list of vicars active on the day after the procession. He must have joined the grand community of chaplains in 1442–1443 (account lost) for he is in the lists for the following two years (LAN, 4 G 6910, fol. 19v; 6911, fol. 25r) and then disappears from the accounts. In 1452–153 the chaplaincy of SS. Peter and Paul is listed under his name as a foreign chaplaincy (LAN, 4 G 6918, fol. 37r), and the acts record that on 22 June 1453 he exchanged it for a chaplaincy in St-Géry held by Adam Heughot (CBM 1059, fol. 63r). Unfortunately, the accounts of the chaplains at St-Géry have a lacuna from 1444 to 1456, but the acts of St-Géry record that on 10 July 1456 he exchanged his chaplaincy at StGéry for the parish church of Ablencourt, held by Martin Espiart. He did this through procuration, indicating that he was no longer at Cambrai. Tonsart (no other name recorded) is documented as small vicar for weeks 1–6 of 1399–1400 (LAN, 4 G 6787 [1399–1400], fol. 3v). Vairet (no first name recorded) is documented as small vicar between 24 June and 26 July 1451, when he left together with Guillaume, another small vicar (LAN, 4 G 7450, fols. 5v–6r). Vairet probably arrived together with Guillaume (no last name recorded) some time during 1450–1451 (accounts lost). They, like a number of other apparently itinerant singers documented in the Cambrai accounts, traveled in pairs. Vermont Tournel documented as small vicar on 23 October 1438 in the aumosne (as Vermandin) (LAN, 4 G 7761 [1438–1439], fol. 14r) and in the wine lists from 24 June 1439 to 22 November 1441 (LAN, 4 G 7439, fol. 8r; 7441, fol. 8v). His full name appears only in an act of 8 April 1440, where he was a witness (CBM 1057, fol. 82r). Vincent, see Mathieu.

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Appendix 2 The Magistri puerorum of Cambrai in the Fifteenth Century

This appendix lists the magistri puerorum of the cathedral for the entire fifteenth century, in chronological order (thus some appear twice). St-Géry had an independent maîtrise, but Ste-Croix, which was a dependence of the cathedral, did not; the pueri altaris of Ste-Croix lived with one of the chaplains of that church, but studied grammar and music with the cathedral teachers. The accounts of the fabric at Ste-Croix begin to mention the magister scholarum and the magister puerorum (called in these registers magister cantus) in 1443 (LAN, 6 G 702 [1443–1444], fol. 13v), but sporadically and often listing no more than a magister cantus or magister scholarum without a name attached. Whenever there is a name, however, it always coincides with that of the magister puerorum or the magister scholarum at the cathedral. 1393–. Nicolas Malin. Malin was a grand vicar by 1391 (CBM 1054, fol. 63r) and possibly already the magister puerorum. The earliest mention of him as such is from 1393 (LAN, 4 G 7757 [1393–1494], fol. 9r). He held office until early in 1413 with some possible interruptions noted below, and apparently lived until 1430 (LAN, 4 G 4634, fol. 10r). 1407–1408. Robertus [le Gouch]. Mentioned as magister puerorum in 1407–1408. He appears in an entry in the aumosne (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1407–1408], fol. 8r), and may be the same Robertus who was a small vicar, as well as the Goghet mentioned as a small vicar in 1405–1406 (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1405–1406], fol. 7v). 1410–1411, 1412–1413. Nicolas Malin. Mentioned as magister puerorum extra festo purificationis in 1410–1411, 1412–1413. The aumosne (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1410–1411], fol. 7r) mentions Malin as magister puerorum, but it should be noted that he is named several times in the accounts of the aumosne for the previous year (LAN, 4 G 7758 [1409–1410], fol. 10r) without the title, which would not be the normal practice if he was the magister puerorum at that time, even though those payments are for trips seeking choristers. 784

2. The Magistri puerorum of Cambrai in the Fifteenth Century

1413–1418. Richard de Loqueville. An entry in the aumosne before Lent of 1414 notes the arrival of Loqueville (LAN, 4 G 7759, fascicle of 1413–1414, fol. 9r). The last recorded payment to him is from the aumosne of 1418–1419, referring to the last day of January “of the past year,” thus 1417 (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1417–1418], fol. 8v), but the first mention of his successor, Vincent Breion, as magister puerorum, is in the aumosne after Lent 1419 (LAN, 4 G 7759 [1418–1419], fol. 8v), and the fabric records a payment by his widow for tapers used at his Requiem Mass in 1418–1419 (LAN, 4 G 4623, fol. 11r). All this indicates a death date in 1418. 1418–1421. Vincent Breion. The earliest mention of Breion is 19 October 1408, when he had a chaplaincy of St. Maxellendis at the altar feretrorum, which belonged to the small community of chaplains (which has left very few records in the fifteenth century) (CBM 1055, fol. 45v). On his resignation of the chaplaincy on 16 May 1410 (his proctor is Jehan Hubert, Marie Du Fayt’s cousin), he is described as a vicar without the designation small or grand, but this probably means grand vicar. The benefice he is acquiring in exchange for the Cambrai chaplaincy is the chaplaincy of Notre-Dame de la Treille in St-Pierre de Lille. The use of a procurator means that he was not in Cambrai at that point (CBM 1055, fol. 225r). On 19 August 1414 he is described as a grand vicar and given an unnamed chaplaincy at Cambrai (CBM 1056, fol. 15v). He probably became a chaplain in the grand community in 1417–1418 (the account is lost, but in March 1418 [no day given] he had to be admonished to make his residence (LAN, 4 G 1086, no. 248]) and appears in the lists from 1418–1419 (LAN, 4 G 6898, fol. 6v) until 1422–1423 (LAN, 4 G 6901, fol. 25r). The first mention of Breion as magister puerorum comes after Lent in 1419, but probably he had been appointed on the death of Loqueville. The last mention of Breion as a magister puerorum is in the aumosne after Lent 1421 (LAN, 4 G 7760, fascicle of 1420–1421, fol. 8r). It is likely that he had left Cambrai by 14 May 1423, when he resigned a chaplaincy [unnamed] at the cathedral in a permutation with Pierre du Pont for a chaplaincy at Notre-Dame d’Arras, using Pierre Bailli as his proctor (CBM 1056, fol. 127v). In a papal supplication signed 15 December 1427 (18 Kl. Ian. A 10 of Martin V), Breion describes himself as a presbyterus Tornacensis, and the son of a single man and a single woman. The supplication is a long one, and apparently Breion is making sure that his illegitimacy does not get in the way of a big benefice. In any event, he rehearses some of his beneficial career: he

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had “a chaplaincy” in Cambrai, and then entered orders; later he exchanged it with another chaplaincy in St-Pierre de Lille. Subsequently he exchanged that chaplaincy in St-Pierre for another in the same church, and somehow he acquired the chaplaincy of St. Nicaise in Cambrai, and later he exchanged the chaplaincy in StPierre for one in Ste-Croix de Cambrai. He then exchanged the chaplaincy in Ste-Croix for one in the parish church of St. Mary Magdalene in Noyon, whose fruits were nil, so he resigned it [simpliciter resignavit] and exchanged the chaplaincy of St. Nicaise in Cambrai for the chaplaincy of St. Nicholas in the chapel of the Episcopal palace in Noyon. The long and the short of it, according to him, is that he held these chaplaincies as follows: chaplaincy in StPierre, worth £20, five years; altar of St. Nicaise, £12, eight years; chaplaincy in Ste-Croix, £10, two years; altar of St. Nicholas, £12, for three years; and this one he still has. He is asking the pope to remove any “macula” or “inhabilitatio” that he might have incurred, so that he can hold on to his chaplaincy of St. Nicholas. The pope signs “Fiat ut petitur et dispensamus. O. Datum Rome apud Sanctos Apostolos, 18 Kl Ian A 10.” The implication of this last item is that he was in Noyon in 1423, and probably had run into some bureaucratic problems. Breion eventually became a [grand] vicar at St-Omer, where the chapter acts report his death shortly before 16 September 1463.1 A Breion, no first name, was a small vicar in Cambrai from 21 February to 30 May 1440. 1421–1424 or 1425. Nicole Grenon. The first mention of Grenon as magister puerorum is in the aumosne, two days before the closing of the accounts for 1420–1421 (LAN, 4 G 7760, fascicle 1420–1421, fol. 8r), after an entry dated “Thursday before St. Barnabas,” which would be 5 June 1421. The time of the end of Grenon’s tenure as magister puerorum is not entirely clear. An entry in the aumosne on 7 May 1424 records a payment to Grenon with the note qui non complevit totum annum (LAN, 4 G 7660, fascicle of 1423–1424, fol. 8r). But a payment from the aumosne on 31 January 1425 indicates that it is for the Christmas term of 1424, which would extend to Lent of 1425 (LAN, 4 G 7760, fascicle of 1424–1425, fol. 7v). In any event, by 26 May 1425 he was in Bologna on his way to Rome (BAS, Tesoreria e Contrallatore di Tesoreria, Reg. 80, fol. 70r), and by June he is being paid as a member of the papal chapel (ASV, I&E 383, fol. 44v). 1

For this information I am grateful to Andrew Kirkman.

2. The Magistri puerorum of Cambrai in the Fifteenth Century

1425–1428. Renaud Liebert. The arrival of Liebert as magister puerorum is noted in an entry of 5 May 1425 in the grand métier (LAN, 4 G 5059, fol. 22r). By 25 July 1428, when Jacques de Savoie was paid for a notarized inventory of Liebert’s goods, and Versebin a cask maker (cuparius) was paid for opening a back room (unam caudam) where they were held, Liebert is no longer referred to as magister puerorum (LAN, 4 G 5063, fol. 36r). Renaud, like Loqueville, was married. 1428–1430. Eustace [de Mignau]. All references to the magister puerorum I have been able to trace in registers from 1428–1429 and 1429– 1430 have no name. Finally, the aumosne for 1430–1431 records a payment on 23 June 1430 to one Eustace, magister puerorum, for the expenses of a chorister (LAN, 4 G 7761, fascicle of 1430–1431, fol. 12r). This points to Eustace as the magister puerorum from mid-1428 to 1430. The chapter acts from 1428 to 1435 are lost, so there is no record of his appointment. Although there are a number of canons by this name, the magister puerorum was never a canon. The accounts of the chaplains, however, list Eustace de Mignau as a chaplain in 1432–1433 (LAN, 4 G 6905, fols. 18v and 29v). He must have joined the community between 1428 and 1432 (the accounts for these years are lost), and remains in the chaplain lists until 1434–1435 (LAN, 4 G 6907, fol. 26v). His departure from the cathedral remains uncertain because the accounts of the chaplains have a lacuna from July 1435 to June 1438 and the chapter acts have a lacuna from 1428 to 1435. This is the most likely person to be the magister puerorum between 1428 and 1430. He was a canon of St-Géry by 1451 and, by his own account, was born in 1392 (he gives his age as 60 in 1452) (LAN, 4 G 1081, piece no. 33). 1430–1434. Renaud Liebert. Renaud returned as magister puerorum in 1430. On 18 June 1430 he was paid £12 as magister puerorum (LAN, 4 G 7761, fascicle of 1430–1431, fol. 13v), but on 14 July 1434 he was relieved of his charge (licenciatus) (LAN, 4 G 7761, fascicle of 1434– 1435, fol. 10r). 1434–1447. Pierre du Castel [Pierre de Béthune]. In the same folio of the aumosne that indicates the end of Renaud’s tenure as magister puerorum is the following undated entry (previous dated entry is 14 July 1434 and following dated entry is 1 October 1434): “Item pro straminibus [bed covers] positis in lectibus puerorum altaris in receptione domini Petri de Castel videlicet 9 voist pro quilibet 4 d valent 2 s 3 d.” The implication is that Pierre is the magister puerorum, although he is not named as such. Until very recently he was regarded as a different man from the magister puerorum called Pierre de Béthune in

787

788

2. The Magistri puerorum of Cambrai in the Fifteenth Century

the aumosne: on 12 October 1433 (LAN, 4 G 7761, fascicle of 1433– 1434) as a small vicar, and on 27 February and 12 July 1435 (LAN, 4 G 7761, fascicle of 1434–1435, fols. 10v–11r) as well as on 12 October, 27 December 1435, and an entry between 19 February and 24 June 1436 as magister puerorum (LAN, 4 G 7761, fascicle of 1435–1436, fols. 11v–12v), but see the more extended entry in Appendix 1 above. Pierre is again mentioned as Pierre du Castel, magister puerorum, on 10 November 1437 (CBM 1057, fol. 59v). His last mention in this office is undated, but before All Saints in 1447 (LAN, 4 G 7762, fascicle of 1447–1448, fol. 11v). On 9 December 1447 he is referred as “recently dismissed” (nuper dimissis) (CBM 1058, fol. 140v). He is named as the magister cantus of Ste-Croix in 1443–1444 and 1446– 1447 (LAN, 6 G 702 [1443–1444], fol. 13v; [1446–1447], fol. 15r). 1447–1451. Gobert le Mannier. On 27 November 1447 the chapter decided to appoint Gobert le Mannier as magister puerorum, provided he agreed to be resident; otherwise they would ask Paul le Josne from Tournai (CBM 1058, fol. 140r). Gobert resigned the post on 15 October 1451 (CMB 1059, fol. 1r). 1451–1456. Paul le Josne. Paul le Josne was appointed magister puerorum on 25 October 1451 (CBM1059, fol. 2v) after the canons sent Guillaume Turpin to Tournai to recruit him. Their alternate choice would have been Petrus de Domarto (CBM1059, fol. 2v). The last mention of Paul comes from the aumosne for 1455–1456, indicating that he left that office (recessit) “at the end of February” of 1456 (LAN, 4 G 7763, fascicle of 1455–1456, fol. 12r). 1456–1458. Jehan du Sart [Petit Jehan]. The name Petit Jehan appears in the Cambrai records in three chronological contexts. Petit Jehan 1: in November 1446 “Jehan [blank space], called Petit Jehan,” was admitted as a small vicar (CBM 1058, fol. 87v). This man, without another name in the records, served as small vicar from November 1446 to June 1449.2 Petit Jehan 2: the wine account of 1454–1455 records the reception of Petit Jehan as a small vicar in December 1454 (LAN, 4 G 7453, fol. 6v). The chapter acts record in November 1455 that the parish church of Marech, in the diocese of Cambrai, vacant on the death of Jehan Haiselin, was granted to Jehan du Sart, small vicar. Since the only Jehan in the lists of small vicars for 1454–1455 and 1455–1456 is Petit 2

The wine account for 1448–1449 (LAN, 4G 7448, fol. 6r) lists him at the start of the fiscal year and does not record his departure. The numbers of vicars for each entry indicate that he served the entire year. The wine account for 1449–1450 (LAN, 4G 7449, fol. 7r) omits his name.

2. The Magistri puerorum of Cambrai in the Fifteenth Century

Jehan 2, this establishes the identity of Petit Jehan 2 and Jehan du Sart. Petit Jehan 2 was a small vicar from December 1454 to October 1465 (LAN, 4 G 7464, fol. 6r).3 He was a member of the grand community of chaplains from 1463–1464 (LAN, 4 G 6934, fol. 14r) to 1466–1467 (LAN, 4 G 6940, fol. 19v). In May 1467 he was granted the habitu ecclesiae of Cambrai until the feast of St. John Baptist following. That same month he resigned his chaplaincy at the altar of St. Anne in the cathedral for a canonicate and prebend at Notre Dame de la Salle-leCombe in Valenciennes,4 and apparently left Cambrai permanently. The accounts of the fabric during the 1460s record the copying of several of his liturgical works, but none of these apparently survive. Two secular works ascribed to him, however, have been preserved.5 His name is mentioned in Loyset Compère’s Omnium bonorum plena. He might be the Jehan du Sart who matriculated at Leuven in August 1466,6 and more probably the zangmeester at Ste-Gudule in Brussels, who died in October 1485. He was magister puerorum at Cambrai for two periods, 1456–1458 and 1461–1465. The documentation for his first stint is given immediately below; that for his second stint appears at the corresponding place in this appendix.The acts record a gift of cloth to Johannes, “the new magister puerorum,” in March 1456 (CBM1059, fol. 206r). The record of that gift in the aumosne refers to him as Parvus Iohannis (Petit Jehan). In August 1458 the canons formed a committee to find a new magister puerorum (CBM 1060, fol. 22v), and an undated entry in the aumosne for 1458–1459 refers to Jehan as a former magister puerorum (LAN, 4 G 7764, fascicle 1458–1459, fol. 20r). An entry in the aumosne for 1456–1457 mentions one Nicaise, “brother of the magister puerorum,” who taught grammar to the choristers during the plague (LAN 4 G 7763, fascicle of 1456–1457, fol. 13r). 1458–1460. Robert le Canoine. Robert must have been young and relatively inexperienced at the time of his appointment. On 1 March 1451 he was still a chorister living in the house of Gobert le Mannier (CMB 1058, fol. 253r). The earliest mention of him as magister puerorum is his reception as a small vicar on 17 September 1458 (LAN, 4 G 7457, fol. 8r). At the beginning of the fiscal year of 1460–1461 the canons, dissatisfied with Robert, removed him and installed Jehan Zemberch as magister puerorum (25 June 1460), but less than a week 3 4 5

The lists in the wine accounts call him Petit Jehan until 1462–1463 and Jehan du Sart afterward. C. Wright, “Dufay at Cambrai,” 206, erroneously refers to the canonicate as a chaplaincy. See Fallows and Haggh, “Jean Du Sart.” 6 Ibid.

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2. The Magistri puerorum of Cambrai in the Fifteenth Century

later, after an appeal by Robert, they reinstated him (30 June 1460) (CBM1060, fols. 84v–85r). On 7 November 1460 the canons noted that Robert had a woman of uncertain morals in the house of the choristers as a servant and on 10 November 1460 he was dismissed and the canons wrote to Jehan Leroy (Regis) to ask him to be the new magister puerorum (CBM, 1060, fol. 98r). Two days later they installed Jehan Zemberch as a temporary magister puerorum (CBM 1060, fol. 98v). 1460–1461. Jehan Zemberch. Jehan Zemberch (de Zemberch, de Valenciennes, Yzemberch), is first documented as a chorister in 1450–1451 (LAN, 4 G 7763, fascicle 1450–1451, fol. 11r), and by 1454–1455 he is mentioned as a former chorister (LAN, 4 G 7763, fascicle 1454–1455, fol. 12v). He appears as “Henin” in the wine lists from 1455–1456 (LAN, 4 G 7454, fol. 5v) until 1457–1458 (LAN, 4 G 7456, fol. 7r); thereafter he appears as Zemberch until December 1461 (LAN, 4 G 7460, fol. 5r). He returned in October 1463 and remained until April 1464 (LAN, 4 G 7462, fol. 5v). In June 1460 he was magister puerorum for about a week, as the canons were dissatisfied with Robert le Canoine (CBM 1060, fols. 84v–85r), but then on 12 November 1460 Robert was definitively dismissed as magister puerorum and Zemberch installed temporarily as the canons wrote to Jehan le Roy [Regis] asking him to be the magister puerorum. Since Le Roy declined, Zemberch was reconfirmed as magister puerorum. On 30 November 1461, however, he wounded a chaplain during a fight and on 6 December 1461 he disrupted the Pretiosa service. On 9 December 1461 the canons dismissed him as magister puerorum and imprisoned him until Symon Mellet posted bail (CBM 1060, fols. 126v–127v). His brief return as a singing man, from October 1463 to April 1464 (LAN, 4 G 7462, fol. 5v) is exceptional in that he had become a grand vicar that October (CBM 1060, fol. 180v). These are the last references I have found for him in the records. His few benefices were outside Cambrai. 1461–1465. Jehan du Sart. Jehan du Sart was appointed temporary magister puerorum the same day that Zemberch was dismissed (CBM 1060, fol. 127v) and confirmed on 14 September 1462 (CBM 1060, fol. 149r). The aumosne for 1465–1466 indicates that Jehan had recently been relieved of the office and Rasson de Lavenne [Laverne] had been temporarily installed (LAN, 4 G 7764 [1465–1466], fols. 4r and 25r). 1466–1467. Rasson de Lavenne or Laverne. Rasson de Lavenne was installed as magister puerorum on 20 January 1466 on the condition that he expel his servant Jehanne and try to get her to leave Cambrai,

2. The Magistri puerorum of Cambrai in the Fifteenth Century

and to evict Marc, a young lodger in his house (CBM 1060, fol. 233v). The chapter acts have a lacuna from 1468 to 1476, but the aumosne for 1466–1467 notes that Rasson left the office some time during that year and was replaced by Robert le Canoine (LAN, 4 G 7764 [1466–1467], fol. 14r). 1467–1469. Robert le Canoine. Robert returned from Lille to replace Rasson as magister puerorum in June 1467 (CBM 1060, fol. 264r). No other mention of the magister puerorum appears to survive in any account from 1467–1468, but the aumosne for 1468–1469 indicates that Robert and Jehan Hemart were successively magistri puerorum during that year (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1468–1469], fol. 18r). 1469–1484. Jehan Hemart. Jehan Hemart is first mentioned as magister puerorum on 20 March 1469 (LAN, 4 G 7765, fascicle 1468–1469, fol. 17v), although his appointment probably went back a few months by then. Until that time he had been magister puerorum of St-Géry. In November 1483 Hemart ran afoul of the cathedral authorities by keeping a religiosa as his concubine (CBM 1061, fol. 160v), and by 28 July 1484 he had been removed from the office (CBM 1061, fol. 187r). He is mentioned as the magister cantus for Ste-Croix from 1480–1481 to 1484–1485 (LAN, 6 G 706 [1480–1481], fol. 23r; [1481–1482], fol. 22r; [1482–1483], fol. 18v; [1483–1484], fol. 16r; [1484–1485], fol. 17v [for three months only]). 1484–1485. Jacob Obrecht. Obrecht was appointed magister puerorum on 28 July 1484 (CBM 1061, fol. 187r). The chapter decided to dismiss him on 21 October 1485 and pay him for music manuscripts he had copied (CBM 1061, fol. 237r). He is mentioned as the magister cantus in Ste-Croix in 1484–1485 and 1485–1486 (LAN, 6 G 706 [1484– 1485], fol. 17v [for nine months]; [1485–1486], fol. 24v [for 4 months]). 1485–1503. Denis du Hollain. Denis du Hollain, also known as Dionysius de Sanctoro, was magister puerorum of St-Géry when appointed to the cathedral on 3 November 1485 (CBM 1061, fol. 238v) after the chapter failed to entice Jehan de la Cour [de Atrio] away from Reims (CBM 1061, fol. 237v). He became a canon in 1502 and died on 8 November 1503. His will and its execution survive (LAN, 4 G 1371). He is mentioned as the magister cantus at Ste-Croix from 1485–1486 (LAN, 6 G 706 [1485–1486], fol. 24v) through all the surviving registers to the end of the century.

791

Appendix 3 Grammar Teachers and Rectores scholarum Connected to the Cathedral of Cambrai, 1400–1500

If the magistri puerorum at the cathedral are sparsely documented, the grammar teachers, sometimes called rectores scholarum, are even less so. Moreover, there were at Cambrai two levels of schools, the maîtrises of the cathedral (which included Ste-Croix) and St-Géry, and what the documents call magnae scholae, which were a separate foundation dating back to 1278, housed in the Domus bonorum puerorum. Although under the supervision of the scholaster of the cathedral,1 they were headed by different masters. A complete listing of the teachers is not possible; below I present a chronological list of the earliest mention of any of the grammar teachers and the rectores magnarum scholarum with a brief précis of what we know about their careers. 1407–1408: LAN, 4 G 7758 (1407–1408), fol. 7r (aumosne). The master of the Domus bonorum puerorum (unnamed) is paid £8 2s for teaching the choristers for six months. That would not have been his normal duty; it is clear that the cathedral maîtrise was in transition; cf. the next entry. 1408–1409: LAN 4 G 7758 (1408–1409), fol. 9r (aumosne). Nicole Grenon is hired for a year as a grammar teacher. Grenon came to Cambrai from Laon. In July 1409 he left Cambrai, but returned as magister puerorum in 1421 (LAN, 4 G 7760, fol. 8r). He left Cambrai again in 1425 to become magister puerorum of the papal chapel (ASV, I&E 383, fol. 44v). He was received as a canon of Cambrai by procuration on 10 April 1426 (CBM 1056, fol. 176r), and returned in 1428. His presence in Cambrai is attested by all accounts of 1428–1429, but since the acts for 1427–1435 are lost we have no record of the date of his return. He remained at Cambrai to his death in 1456 (CBM 1059, fol. 239r). 1411–1412: LAN, 4 G 7758 (1411–1412), fol. 7r (aumosne). Grace of 3 crowns, worth £4 12d, to Nicole de la Cambe, called to be magister scholarum in 1410. He was still in Cambrai in 1422, when he is called rector magnarum scholarum cameracensium (LAN, 4 G 7760 [1421–1422], fol. 7v). Thereafter he must have gone to Paris, where he had obtained an 792

1

Bouly, Dictionaire historique, 43 and 75; cf. Lourme, “Chanoines, officiers, et dignitaires,” 105–6.

3. Grammar Teachers and Rectores scholarum

MA by 1433 (ASV, RL 105, fols. 100r–101r). In a petition for the matricularia of the parish church of Wodeque in 1431 he is described as a married clerk (ASV, RS 270, fol. 220v). He returned to Cambrai in 1442 or 1443, and appears in the list of chaplains from 1443–1444 to 1459–1460 (LAN, 4 G 6910, fol. 19v; 6926, fol. 22v) (the account that would record his advent is lost). He died in April 1459 (CBM 1060, fol. 42v). 1414–1415: LAN, 4 G 7759, fol. 7v (aumosne). Grace to Pierre du Pont, master of the Domus bonorum puerorum, of 10 French crowns, worth £13 3s. The name Pierre du Pont is relatively common, and the scattered records suggest that we may have here more than one man. In 1398 a Pierre du Pont vacated a house in Cambrai that was then rented to Nicole Malin, the magister puerorum (LAN, 4 G 7372, fol. 1r). In 1423 Pierre exchanged a chaplaincy in Arras for one in Cambrai with Vincent Breion (CBM 1056, fol. 127r), paid his novitate to the chaplains that year (LAN, 4 G 6902, fol. 8v), and appears in the lists of chaplains until 1427–1428 (LAN, 4 G 6904, fol. 21r). There is a lacuna in the accounts of the chaplains from 1428 to 1435, during which time Pierre ceased to be a chaplain. In 1434 a Pierre du Pont, canon of St-Géry, gave to Nicole Grenon his power as proctor (LAN, 7 G 753, fol. 110r). In 1438 he presented to the chapter of St-Géry a privilege of Vincent Tavernier, canon of Laon and former papal singer (LAN, 7 G 753, fol. 110v), and he appears in the lists of canons of StGéry at least until 1479 (LAN, 7 G 2225, fol. 8v). These entries represent two different men, father and son, both canons of St-Géry at one time. The key appears in ASV, RS 530, fols. 230v–231v, where Pierre du Pont, Jr., chaplain of Emperor Frederic and the illegitimate son of Pierre du Pont, Sr., and having a dispensation from the defectum natalium, seeks license to reside at that church, where he has obtained the canonicate vacant on the resignation of Mathieu Redel, even though his father, who is now eighty years old, has another canonicate at that church that he has exchanged for a pension (cf. Repertorium Germanicum 8, no. 4952). Thus Pierre du Pont, Sr. was born in 1380 and was still alive on 27 May 1460. He is surely the magister scholarum at Cambrai. 1421–1422: LAN 4 G 7760 (1421–1422), fol. 7v (aumosne). Grace to Jehan Ceco, magister scholarum cameracensium, of 4 gold crowns, worth 108s. This is the only appearance of this name in the records known to me. 1425, 9 July: LAN 4 G 1372 (will of Jehan Hubert). A legacy of 72s to Maistre Raoul, maistre des bon enfans. Nothing else is known of this man. 1425, 7 September: CBM 1056, fol. 154v (acta). Pierre des Hailles, proctor of the scholaster, presents Jehan Boucher to be the new magister scholarum. The aumosne accounts that mention him give the Latin

793

794

3. Grammar Teachers and Rectores scholarum

Johannes Carnificis, and the chaplain accounts a macaronic Jehan Carnificit. An entry in the acts of 1465 indicates that Boucher had been the magister scholarum in December of 1436 and was not in holy orders (CBM 1060, fol. 228v). He became a chaplain on 18 April 1436 (CBM 1057, fol. 23v) and is listed among the chaplains in 1438–1439 (LAN, 4 G 6908, fol. 30r). The accounts of the chaplains from July 1439 to June 1441 are lost, and he is no longer in the lists for 1441–1442. 1443–1444: LAN 6 G 702 (1443–1444), fol. 13v (Ste-Croix, fabric). Mathieu du Pont receives 60s for teaching the altar boys. Since the teachers for Ste-Croix are virtually always the same as the teachers for the cathedral, it is most likely that by 1443 Mathieu was teaching at the maîtrise. He obtained a chaplaincy at the cathedral in 1452 (CBM 1059, fol. 26v). He might have become the master of the Domus bonorum puerorum at this time. His chaplaincy became litigious (CBM 1059, fol. 46v) and eventually he lost it to Pierre de Los in June 1453 (CBM 1059, fol. 63r). On 29 January 1459 he had left that post and was planning to leave Cambrai, which the canons tried to prevent because they suspected him of having stolen some of the books (CBM 1059, fol. 48r), but by May he had left Cambrai and was a student in Paris (CBM 1059, fol. 56r) and apparently never returned to the city. 1444, 25 June: LAN, 4 G 1090, fol. 159v (acta). The chapter discusses the recruitment of a magister scholarum. 1444, 26 June: LAN, 4 G 1090, fol. 159v (acta). Robert Auclou, scholaster, presents the new magister scholarum. The man is not named in the acts, but he is surely Guillaume Fossier. It is curious that the cathedral records, in particular the aumosne, are silent about the name of the magister scholarum for more than a decade. By 1449–1450 the fabric of Ste-Croix records the payment of 60s to a magister Guillermus for teaching the altar boys (LAN, 6 G 702 [1449–1450], fol. 12v), then on 25 February 1455 the chaplaincy at the altar of St. Maxellendis, vacant on the promotion of Paschaise Coutel to grand vicar, is granted to Guillaume Fossier, master of the Domus bonorum puerorum (CBM 1059, fol. 122r). By 3 January 1459 Fossier had left his post and the scholaster, Nicole Plonchet, was charged temporarily with grammar school (ad rectoriam scholarum grammaticalium huius ecclesiae) (CBM 1060, fol. 34v). Fossier left his post because he accepted the canonicate at Cambrai vacant on the death of Henri Beye. By December 1458 it had been declared litigiable and on February 1462 it was awarded to Servais Le Roy (CBM 1060, fols. 33v and 130r). The proctor who presented the papal judgment against Fossier and other claimants was Pierre du Pont, the former rector scholarum. Fossier

3. Grammar Teachers and Rectores scholarum

became a canon of St-Géry. He appears for the first time among the canons in 1460–1461 (LAN, 7 G 2413 [1460–1461], fol. 18r), and in January 1463 he is mentioned as the grand minister of St-Géry (CBM 1060, fol. 158r). He appears in the lists of canons until 1472–1473 (LAN, 7 G 2225 [1472– 1473], fol. 9r). He was one of the executors of the will of Nicole de le Cambe, another rector scholarum (CBM 1060, fol. 42v). 1446, 4 January: CBM 1058 (acta). Gilles le Canoine, a chorister who served the cathedral for ten years, is to be placed with the magister magnarum scholarum for two years at the expense of the aumosne that he might be instructed in grammar. Curiously, the aumosne records no payment to the magister scholarum for Gilles, but there is a payment on 27 June 1446 to Pierre du Castel, the magister puerorum, of £9 for having kept Gilles for the half year ending with St. John Baptist 1446 (LAN, 4 G 7762 [1446–1447], fol. 11r). 1456, 13 May: LAN, 4 G 7763 (1455–1456), fol. 13r (aumosne). Nicaise, brother of the magister puerorum, who taught them grammar in their house from the day of St. John Baptist, in order to avoid the dangers of the plague, is paid 50s. The magister puerorum at this time was Jehan du Sart, and this is the only notice we have of his brother. 1459, 6 August: CBM 1060, fol. 55r (acta). Nicole Plonchet, scholaster, presents Jehan Doucement, MA, ad regimen scholarum huius ecclesiae. Jehan is to teach the choristers in the school and hear their lessons in the customary manner. This is the earliest mention of Doucement known to me. He joined the grand community of chaplains in 1466–1467 and appears in the lists until 1468–1469 (LAN, 4 G 6940, fol. 13r; 6942, fol. 34v). In 1463 he was accused of killing Jehan de Bailleul (CBM 1060, fol. 173v), but apparently was found innocent because no further references to this appear and he retained all his posts. 1469–1470: LAN, 4 G 6788 (1469–1470), fol. 6v (small vicars). Guillaume Fandieu is paid 100s to instruct the choristers in grammar for half a year. This is the only reference to Fandieu I have found. 1470, 27 April: LAN, 4 G 7765 (1469–1470), fol. 18v (aumosne). Grace to Jehan Navel, rector scholarum huius ecclesiae, for three weeks, each week 40s, for £6. The only other reference to Navel is a gift of 30s from the aumosne on 8 June 1470 to help him pay a debt to Gérard le Gay (LAN, 4 G 7765 [1469–1470], fol. 18v). His rectorship apparently lasted only three weeks. 1474–1475: LAN, 4 G 7765 (1474–1475), fol. 16r (aumosne). To Pierre Chrétien, magister magnarum scholarum, for the expenses of Pierre de StVaast, chorister, for a year from 5 August 1474, £24. Pierre could have

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796

3. Grammar Teachers and Rectores scholarum

become rector scholarum right after Navel. He left Cambrai in August 1478 (CBM 1062, fol. 44r). Between April and December of 1477 he was involved in a number of permutations that indicate he was planning to move to Noyon (CBM 1061, fols. 23v, 26v, 31r, 35r). 1476, 13 September: CBM 1061, fol. 7r (acta). Magister Jehan du Wez, who taught grammar to the choristers for a year, is granted four écus, worth £8. His name is given in the different accounts as Iohannes de Parco, Iohannes de Vado, and Iohannes du Wez. This is the earliest metion of him in the records. He obtained the chaplaincy of St. Andrew in the cathedral in 1484 (CBM 1061, fol. 178r), although his bienvenue into the community of chaplains is recorded only in 1494–1495 (LAN, 4 G 6975, fol. 14r). By 1484 he was a grand vicar (CBM 1061, fol. 334r). He remained the grammar teacher until after 1500 and a chaplain until 1502–1503 (LAN, 4 G 6988, fol. 36v) (the account of 1502–1503 is lost and his name is no longer in the accounts of 1503–1504). The execution of the will of Denis de Hollain ends with an unusual note dated 21 March 1503 stating that Jehan “saw” the will by order of the dean, Gilles Nettelet (LAN, 4 G 1371, fol. 9r). 1478, 17 April: CBM 1061, fol. 33r (acta). Pierre Crétien, rector scholarum, is leaving, and the canons appoint Pierre Orgnet to the post. He is to teach the choristers at his house. The aumosne reports his salary for only one year, 1478–1479 (LAN, 4 G 7766 [1478–1479], fol. 16v), but the fabric of Ste-Croix reports his annual salary of 60s from 1479–1480 (LAN, 6 G 706 [1479–1480], fol. 22r) to 1482–1483 (LAN, 6 G 706 [1482–1483], 18v). 1485–1486: LAN, 4 G 7767 (1485–1486), fol. 23r (aumosne). To magister Jehan Hustin, rector scholarum, for keeping Bastien, former chorister, from 23 October 1485 to 6 April 1486, £11. This is Hustin’s earliest metion in the cathedral records. He remained the teacher at the cathedral and SteCroix until 1492 (see next entry). In 1487–1488, however, he was replaced for that year at Ste-Croix by Nicole Lescript, the chaplain in whose house the choristers of Ste-Croix usually lived (LAN, 6 G 707 [1487–1488], fol. 24r). 1492, 17 October: CBM 1062, fol. 22v (acta). Jehan Hustin is about to resign and Jacques Daussut, the scholaster, presents Denis Godefroy of Beauvais as the new grammar teacher, who is appointed at the customary stipend and granted the habitus ecclesiae. Godefroy became a chaplain in 1497–1498 (LAN, 4 G 6980, fol. 13r) and is in the lists until 1504–1505 (LAN, 4 G 6989, fol. 38r). He is also listed as the grammar teacher (always without the last name) in the accounts of the fabric of Ste-Croix from 1493–1494 to 1498–1499. He resigned as grammar teacher upon becoming a chaplain (cf. next entry).

3. Grammar Teachers and Rectores scholarum

1497, 25 May: CBM 1063, fol. 231r (acta). The dean [Gilles Nettelet], Jehan de la Porte, Guillaume Boyaval, and Pierre Vaudre are commissioned to talk to a magister scholarum that the scholaster considers suitable. 1499, 17 April: CBM 1064, fol. 170r (acta). The canons reduce the rent of Jehan de Lansan, rector scholarum, by 100s as a special grace. The fabric of Ste-Croix shows that Jehan became grammar teacher in place of Denis Godefroy in 1499–1500 (LAN, 6 G 709 [1499–1500], fol. 19r). Lansan was only in minor orders in 1497 (CBM 1063, fol. 260r) and clearly had been living in Cambrai before becoming rector scholarum. On 17 July 1499 the chapter made him also chapter notary for a trial period of three or four months (CBM 1064, fol. 196r), and Denis Godefroy was accorded weekly distributions on 20 July 1499 for an unspecified time when he substituted for Lansan as rector scholarum (CBM 1064, fol. 197v). 1499, 14 November: CBM 1064, fol. 223v (acta). Jehan Michoud is received as rector scholarum ad vinis et stipendia solitis. This is the only mention of Michoud I found. Ste-Croix still has Lansan teaching at this time (LAN, 6 G 710 [1500–1501], fol. 20r) and a magister Rogier in 1501– 1502 (LAN, 6 G 710 [1501–1502], fol. 20v).

797

Appendix 4 Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Guillaume Du Fay’s will, the inventory of his possessions, and the accounts of the executors are preserved in Lille, Archives Départementales du Nord, MS 4 G 1313. Like most such documents, these were originally unfoliated, but this one was provided with a modern pagination in pencil by Craig Wright in 1974.1 LAN, 4 G 1313 consists of four different documents: (1) Pages 1–32: account of the executors presented to the Cambrai chapter on 27 November 1475, copied by Jehan de Luwere, the notary of the cathedral; (2) pages 33–36: account of the executors presented to the Cambrai chapter on 27 November 1476, copied by Paul Auclou; (3) pages 39–66: inventory of Du Fay’s possessions carried out by the executors, copied by Jehan de Luwere; (4) pages 69–76: Du Fay’s will, written down by Guillaume Bouchel, the notary of the cathedral at the time (he was succeeded by Jehan de Luwere). Abbreviations have been expanded tacitly. In the case of words fully written out it should be noted that spellings are quite variable. In all cases I have followed the spelling of the manuscript, adding some punctuation to that already found there, and normalizing the use of capitals. As in all other documents transcribed in this volume, I have eliminated the distinction between long and short i in all the numerals and in Latin words. The division of the text into paragraphs is also mine and is intended to make the reading easier. The notes provide information about words deleted or corrected in the manuscript itself, words that may be unfamiliar to a reader with no access to anything beyond a modern French dictionary, and a few explanatory notes concerning terms that remain undefined even in the available lexica of Old French. A reader familiar with Middle French or one who has had experience with documents of this kind may find many of these notes 1

798

Bonnie Blackburn (private communication) has raised the possibility that the will itself might be only a copy, since it is on paper and has no notarial signature. This is clearly a possibility, but it is worth mentioning that not a single will from those of the clergy at Cambrai (the cathedral, StGéry, and Ste-Croix), which amount to several hundred, is on parchment or has notarial signatures.

[Account of the Execution of Du Fay’s Will]

superfluous. Words that are either not legible or whose meaning, even in the context of this document, has eluded me, are marked in the transcription by means of asterisks. The page numbers of the document itself are given in brackets, and in the notes all page references refer to those page numbers and not to the pages in the present transcription. All numbers are in Roman numerals in the original; I have transcribed all the monetary entries in Arabic numerals. [Cover] Du Fay Guillelmi Du Fay canonici qui obiit 1474 die Dominica 27 Novembris2

[Account of the Execution of Du Fay’s Will] [p. 1] Compte de l’execution du testament du feu jadis venerable seigneur maistre Guillaume Du Fay, en son vivant chanoine de l’eglise de Cambray, qui trespassa au dict Cambray, lan mil cccc soissante quatorze, le dimenche xxviie de Novembre, fait et rendu a messires de la dicte eglise de Cambray par Regnault de Lyons, Jehan de Rosut, Raoul Mortier, chanoines, et Pierre de Wez, prestre, capellain d’icelle eglise, executeurs du dict testateur a monnoye courant au dict Cambray.

Recepte de or et argent monnoyer3 Premiers en une bourse de blancq cuir iii nobles au soleil,4 chacun a 113 s 4 d, sont 17 lb; i noble henricus,5 416 s 8 d; i lyon,6 40 s; ii florins d’Utrecht,7 chacun a 35 s, sont 70 s; et iii mailles postulat,8 chacune 33 s 3 d, sont 70 s ensamble, 31 lb 16 s 8 d.

2 3

4 6 7 8

Entry in an 18th-century hand. In seeking to identify the coins listed by the executors here and in the inventory, pp. 39–40, four publications have been most useful: Gelder and Hoc, Les Monnaies; Grierson, “Coinage,” 379– 405 [also in Later Medieval Numismatics (11th–16th Centuries): Selected Studies (London: Variorum Reprints, 1979)]; id., Monnaies; and Spufford, Monetary Problems, esp. 29–73. It is remarkable how close Grierson’s description of the available coins in “Coinage,” 380–81, is to the range of coins in Du Fay’s possession at his death. Grierson, Monnaies, 273: English gold noble with a sun. 5 Ibid., 273: English gold noble. Ibid., 290; Grierson, “Coinage,” 391: probably Burgundian lions d’or. Grierson, Monnaies, 272, and “Coinage,” 381. The maille was used as a generic term for a number of small coins; significantly, the inventory uses another such term, obole, for these coins. On postulats see Grierson, “Coinage,” 385, n. 10, and 397–98; these coins were probably Utrecht issues.

799

800

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item une aultre blancq bourse ont este trouvez ii royaulx,9 chacun de 50 s, sont 100 s; iiii couronnes10 de diverses fachons alieuvees,11 pour 8 lb 19 s 2 d; vi ducas12 et i rider,13 chacun a 50 s, sont 17 lb 10 s; ii lyons de 6 lb; ii salus,14 chacun 18 s 4 d, pour 416 s 8 d; xxxvi guillaumes,15 chacun a 40 s, sont 72 lb; iiii pietres,16 chacun 3 s 4 d, sont 6 lb 13 s 4 d; vi florins a le17 croix Sainte Andrieu,18 chacun pour 40 s, sont 12 lb; v aultres florins de Rin,19 chacun 38 s 4 d sont 9 lb 11 s 8 d [p. 2] vi florins d’Utrecht, chacun pour 35 s, sont 10 lb 10 s; ii demi ryders, 50 s; iiii demi escus,20 4 lb 10 s; ii tierchs de lyons,21 40 s; ii florins fredericus,22 50 s; iiii postulas,23 chacun 33 s 4 d, pour 413 s 4 d; et v mailles arnoldus,24 chacune de 20 s, sont 100 s, ensemble, 173 lb 4 s 2 d. Item en une25 aultre grande bourse ont este trouvez vii gros,26 11 lb 13 s 4 d; en sengles patards27 chacun pour 22 d ob., pour 14 lb 7 d ob.; en doubles patards, chacun pour 3 s 10 d, pour 9 lb 15 s; en testars,28 7 lb 14 s 2 d; biscremons,29 4 lb; et tarelares Johannes,30 8 lb 6 s 8 d; ensemble, 15 lb 19 s 10 d ob.

9 10 11

12

13 15 17

18 19 21 22

23 24

25 27

28

29 30

Grierson, Monnaies, 265, 286: probably French royals of Charles VII. Grierson, “Coinage,” 386–87. MS: sic, a derivative of alliage (alloy), described in the inventory, p. 39, as alouees a l’orfevre, that is soldered together for an ornamental purpose. Grierson, Monnaies, 309, and “Coinage,” 387–88; since the document also mentions florins and riders, it is likely that these were Italian ducats. Grierson, “Coinage,” 399–400. 14 Grierson, Monnaies, 265, and “Coinage,” 400–401. Grierson, “Coinage,” 389–90. 16 Grierson, Monnaies, 240, and “Coinage,” 396–97. The scribes use the article le quite often with feminine nouns; in all cases I follow their usage. Bonnie Blackburn informs me that this is Picard dialect. Grierson, “Coinage,” 383: the Burgundy florin. Grierson, “Coinage,” 399: Rhenish gulden. 20 Grierson, Monnaies, 309. Coin worth a third of a lyon. Grierson, “Coinage,” 384–85: perhaps one or another of the bavarus coins common in Flanders. In the inventory, 40, these are described as florins postulat. Like the mailles postulat, listed above, these are described in the inventory, p. 40, as oboles arnoldus. On the arnoldus see Grierson, “Coinage,” 384. MS: ein unne. 26 Grierson, “Coinage,” 385–86. In the case of the patards the account and the inventory give no specific number but rather give the quantity of money found in each form. On the patard see Grierson, “Coinage,” 386. Grierson lists no single patards, but see Spufford, Monetary Problems, 39. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “testart,” teston (tester), a coin in common use in the late 15th century. I have found no reference to a coin of this name. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “tarelare”: monnaie de compte usitée a Tournai au XVe siècle.” From the account, however, it would appear that the tarelare was also an actual coin, perhaps the clinckert of John IV of Brabant described in Grierson, “Coinage,” 391.

[Account of the Execution of Du Fay’s Will]

Item une aultre petite boursette, en diverses pieches, 14 s 1 d ob. Item encore en monnoye 50 s, ensamble, 64 s 1 d ob. I. Somme pour or et argent monnoyer 265 lb 4 s 9 d

[p. 3] Recepte pour Vaselle d’argent Premiers pour v grandes tasses boullonnees aux fons et dorees aux bors, pesans vi mars, a 35 s l’onche, c’est le marc 14 lb, pour 84 lb. Item pour vi aultres tasses mineures, pesans v mars, vii onches, x esterlins, au dict pris de 35 s l’onche, pour 83 lb 2 s 6 d. Item pour i tonnelet d’argent, vi gobeles dedens, ii aighieres et ii saliers ensamble pesant vii mars, ii esterlins, a 33 s 4 d l’onche, sont 93 lb 10s. Item pour vi gobeles a rosettes dorees pesans iii mars iiii esterlins a 35 s l’onche, sont 42 lb 7 s. Item une aighiere tortinee esmaillie sur le couvercle de marguerites et vi gobeles dedens ensamble pesans vi mars viii esterlins au dict pris, 70 lb 14 s. Item pour ii aighieres gandonees31 a i pommelet sur le couvercle, pesans v mars, vi onches, viii esterlins, au dessus dict pris pour 81 lb 4 s. Item pour une coppe a couvercle, pesant ii mars, iii onches, x esterlins, au dict pris pour 34 lb 2 s 6 d. Item pour iii saliers haultes a piez, pesant x onches, i esterlin, au dict pris pour 15 lb 16 s 9 d.32 Item pour iii aultres saliers toutes omples33 a couvercles a boutons d’argent dore, pesans vi onches, xv esterlins, au dict pris sont 11 lb 16 s 3 d. [p. 4] Item pour xii louches a mances copees,34 pesans xiiii onches, xiiii esterlins, au pris que dessus de 35 s l’onche, pour 25 lb 14 s 6 d. Item pour i calice patine35 et louchette d’argent dore pesant xiii onches, au dict pris pour 22 lb 15 s.

31

32 33 34

35

Not in the lexica consulted, but from the context it clearly means “adorned”; cf. modern French gandin, dandy. MS: 6d, crossed out and corrected. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “omple”: uni; in this context “together with.” Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “louche 2”: grande cuiller, cuiller à pot. Large spoons with “cut handles,” which the entry in the inventory, p. 41, expands, “cut in six sides.” In the inventory, p. 41, platine.

801

802

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

II. Somme pour vaselle d’argent 565 lb 2 s 6 d.

Aultre recepte pour joyaux Premiers pour une aloyere36 de noir satin en i agniau37 d’argent prise et vendue, 100 s. Item une coroye batue en argent a xv claus, bloucque38 et morgant39 esmaillez, 13 lb. Item pour une coroie de velours vermeil a xvi claus, bloucque et morgant d’argent, 40 s. Item pour une coroie de tissu noir a xii claus, bloucque et morgant d’argent, 4 lb. Item pour une coroye verde a vi claus, bloucque et morgant d’argent, 15 s. Item pour i signet d’or pesant xxxiiii esterlins d’or a 15 s l’esterlin, sont 25 lb 10 s, le quel a este baillie a la fabrique ainsi qu’il est de coustume au lieu de scel, et pour tant icy, Riens. Item pour ung quadrant d’argent prise 20 s.40 [p. 5] Item pour une petite bullette d’argent et i anel couronne, 4 s. Item ung oeilles41 d’argent, 10 s. Item une pais d’ivoire en une bourse de corporal et le boiste,42 20 s. Item ung taissiau43 d’argent dore pour se cappe ad cause qu’il l’avoit donne a l’eglise avant son trespas, icy, Riens. Item pour i grant agnus dei d’argent dore, 40 s. Item pour i aultre agnus dei d’or a iiii gros perles, 6 lb. Item pour i autre agnus dei a iiii fleurs de lis, 10 s. Item pour i agnus dei a iiii boutons d’argent en fachon de perles, 30 s. Item pour i agnus dei aiant en l’escripture “de osse sancti Mauri,”44 25 s. 36 38 39

40 41

42 43

44

Pouch, possibly a coin-purse; cf. verb aloier. 37 In the inventory, anniau, ring. Buckle. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “morgant,” or “ mordant”: pièce de métal qui s’appliquait a l’extremité de la partie de la ceinture qu’on laissait pendre. Subtotal, £26 15s. All the subtotals are on the margin of each page. MS: vieillies crossed out immediately before this word. The scribe of the account had apparently some trouble reading the first letter from the inventory, p. 42. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “oeille”: brebis (ewe), apparently a small bibelot. MS: sic. In the inventory, p. 42, it is spelled boite. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “tassel”: gland, also modern French tasseau. The taissiau (in the inventory, p. 42, it is spelled tassiau), or tassel, was a kind of ornament that was hung on the priestly capes; cf. the inventories of jewels of the cathedral published in Houdoy, Histoire artistique, 336–38, 354–56, 364–65. In the inventory, p. 43, Martini instead of Mauri.

[Account of the Execution of Du Fay’s Will]

Item pour une annunciacion d’ivoire encasee en argent dore a perles, 20 s. Item pour une burlette45 d’argent dore escripte “de cingulo sancti Anthonii,” etc., 15 s. Item pour i agnus dei ront d’argent dore, 6 s 8 d. Item pour i signet d’argent dore a une pierre cornaline 50 s. Item pour i scel d’argent aux armes du deffunct, 30 s. Item pour i pommiau46 d’argent a ii aneles et en menu fraitin47 10 s sont, 12 s 6 d. Item pour une petite chainturette de verde soye, 10 s.48 III. Somme pour joyaux 47 lb 18 s 2 d.

[p. 6] Recepte pour Livres Premiers pour i messel en petit volume couvert de noir cuir de chamois, 40 s. Item pour i biau breviaire en velin couvert de noir velours a ii cloans d’argent, 28 lb. Item pour i messel en ii volumes a l’usage de Rome, 20 lb. Item pour i psaultier a plusieurs ymages et devotions couvert de cuir chammois, 50 s. Item pour i grant breviaire a l’usage de Rome a iiii afficques d’argent ii dorees, 20 lb. Item i petit journet couvert de noir a une agrappe de couvre, 40 s. Item pour i petit livret couvert de noir a i bouton de fil d’argent, 15 s. Item pour une legende doree, 6 lb. Item pour ie [une?] boutaille a fachon de livre, 10 s. Item pour i viez breviaire assez caducque, 30 s. Item pour i livre en papier contenant plusieurs sermons et instructions pour nouviaus prescheurs, 20 s. Item pour i livre en papier contenant le pelerinage de l’ame en rime, 24 s.

45 46 47

48

Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “burlette” and “bullette”: petite boule servant de sceau. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “pomel”: sorte d’ornement qu’on mettait aux habits sacerdotaux. Cf. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “fraitien”: bris, fracture, and “fraitier”: mettre en dépense, en frais. In this context en menu fraitin clearly means “in random small things” or “in things of small value.” This entry, significantly, is the next-to-last one in the account and the inventory of the jewelry. Subtotal, £21 3s 2d.

803

804

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item pour i livre en grant volume en parchemin contenant les messes de Saint Anthoine de Pade aveuc plusieurs aultres anthiennes en noire note, 40 s. Item pour i Vergile en papier, 50 s.49 [p. 7] Item pour i livre en papier contenant sacrementale Guillermi Parisis et G. de Monte Lauduno, 100 s. Item pour i livre contenant l’istoire Sainte Barbe aiant l’ymage d’icelle, 40 s. Item pour i livre des bonnes meurs, 40 s. Item pour i livre de martirologes en papier a l’usage d’Anvers, 12 s. Item pour i livre viez en parchement intitule Flores excerpti de candela magistri Gerlandi, 6 s. Item pour i livre en parchement de plusieurs sermons, 24 s. Item pour i viez livre intitule Micrologus, 5 s. Item pour i aultre livret intitule Speculum ecclesie, 5 s. Item pour i livre imparfait de Remediis Fortune, 6 s. Item pour unes decretales vieses sans glose, 30 s. Item pour unes heures de nostre dame en papier, 10 s. Item pour i livre de vieses chanteries que fut a feu messire Symon de50 Breton, 20 s. Item pour i petit livret en papier contenant eglogas magistri Martini le Franc, 2 s. Item pour i livre de le messe de Saint Anthoine de Vienne et de requiem, 15 s. Item pour vi livres de divers chanteries que avoit donnez le dict deffunct a tres excellent prince monseigneur le duc de Bourgogne, ad cause que ce don fut fait en son vivant, et n’avoit retenu que l’usage d’iceulx, n’ont este prisez, et pourtant icy, Riens.51 IIII. Somme pour le vente52 des dicts livres 104 lb 4 s.

[p. 8] Recepte pour meubles et aultres provisions de l’ostel Premiers comme puet apparoir pour l’inventaire de le priserie faite pour les priseurs de la cite de Cambray les biens meubles et anciennes furent estimees et prises a la somme de 805 lb 19 s, mais l’une des pages c’est 49 52

Subtotal, £90 19s. 50 MS: sic. 51 Subtotal, £10 5s. Vente written twice, second time crossed out.

[Account of the Execution of Du Fay’s Will]

assavoir des l’incheus53 fu mal gette et y avoit moins de 20 s que on deduit cy. Et pour ainsy se restont cy en recepte 804 lb 19 s. Item les autres provisions de l’ostel et aucuns autres meubles non compris au dessus dict inventaire ont este vendus au plus grant profit d’icelle execution par le maniere et pris qu’il s’ensuivent. C’est assavoir iiic xlii faissiaux de laigne la prens chacun faissiau 10 d, pour 14 lb 5 s. Item iic liii fagos au pris de 30 s le cent la prens sont 75 s 10 d. Item pour iiii los et une pinte de vin que eubt feu messire Philippe54 Souplet durant se maladie, a 4 s le lot, 17 s. Item pour i falot,55 5 s, et une escrainelle, 18 d, sont 6 s 6 d. Item pour i viez orilliers, 9 s. Item pour ii estuîettes de laiton, l’une 10 s, et l’autre 6 s, 16 s. Item pour une aultre estuîette sur i baston, 5 s, i petiet bucq de faucon, 2 s, et i fouet, 5 s, pour 12 s. Item i viez saloir, i tonnelet a verins56 aveuc57 pluisiers des cuvelerie et i hommiroir,58 3 s, une vuidenghe,59 3 s60 4 d, i aultre salloir 6 s, ensamble 12 s 4 d. Item iii pentes61 vieses esquelles 8 s, et toutes les aultres viez bois et peteriaux62 au dict hostel 5 s, ensamble, 13 s.63 [p. 9] Item pour i coffret de fer, 24 s, i aultre ront bande de blanques fers, 15 s, et i viez coffre a mettere candeille, 3 s, ensamble 42 s. Item pour i haulte escamme et le passer, 8 s, ix passes, 4 s 6 d, ie escammette en l’estude, 3 s, ensamble 15 s 6 d. Item pour ii pieches de fuze que estoient devant aucuns huys, 20 s. Item pour ii bloucquettes d’argent que estoient es sorles du dict deffunct, 8 s 4 d. Item pour i ymage de le magdelaine fait en toille a i rasse de bois, 40 s, i tablet de le figure de roy, et i aultre que estoit deseure l’ubys64 de le 53 55 57 58

59

60 61 62

63

Most likely a form of enquête. 54 One isolated letter: p, crossed out. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “falot”: sorte de vêtement. 56 Ibid., s.v. “verrin”: de verre. MS: isolated s, crossed out. No entry found in Godefroy for this term, but obviously it is a mirror; note that it is listed in proximity to the wash basin. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “vuidange”: action de nettoyer (washing), hence this was a wash basin. MS: iiii, corrected to iii. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s. v. “pente”: bande pendue autour du ciel du lit. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “peterau”: machine de guerre. In this context, however, probably mechanical equipment such as the hoists for the well, etc. Subtotal, £828 5s 8d. 64 Deseure l’ubys: in the will, super hostium, above the door.

805

806

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

chambre bas, 20 s, i aultre de le sotte risee, et i de Notre-Dame a compaingnie de St. Pierre et St. Pol, 20 s, i aultre de65 St. Christofle deseure le porte, 10 s, i chief de St. Jehan66 en la salle, 5 s, Item un drap de painture en le cambre que fu sire Alexandre, 3 s, ensamble et le figure d’un mort, 18 d., 4 lb 18 s 6 d. Item pour i tonnel de verins de xlvi las au environs, 20 s, et pour i autre leur67 il avoit environ xii las, 5 s. Item pour une venterelle a mettere frommage, 5 s, et les nattes de le cambrette sur la cuisine, 5 s, ensamble, 35 s. Item pour i candeler de couvre a i buhot de fer pour mettere iiii candeillettes 2 s, une pais et i bachin,68 3 s, ensamble 5 s. Et le tablet de voirre de quem genuit adoravit, l’autre de l’annunciation Notre Dame, et le ciel de taille deseure [i autel avec les escapliaux, de l’estude, et le drap deseure]69 sont demoures en le dicte maison. Item pour i ymage de Sainte Katherine enclose de bois, i tablet du crucifiement Notre Seigneur,70 i aultre de le danse de la mourisque, pour tant ensamble 35 s.71 V. Somme des dictes parties de meubles et provisions 840 lb 12 d.

[p. 10] Recepte ad cause de la prebende de Cambray Premiers pour le double de l’advent ont este rechups 13 s 6 d. Item le penultime de novembre pour le legat fait pour feu maistre Jacques Michiel, lequel trespassa au mesme72 jour que maistre Guillaume, 23 s 4 d. Item pour le double de Saint Eloy, 2 s 10 d. Item pour les capitules ordinaires de la quinzaine apres lequelle chacun trespasse gaigne plainement des vendredi iie et ixe de decembre pour chacun 3 s 4 d et pour le lundi ensuite, 10 d, ensamble, 7 s 6 d. Item pour le capitule general de lendemain de le conception NotreDame, 3 s 4 d. 65 66 67 68 69 70

71

MS: i, crossed out here. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “chief”: tête. A painting of the head of St. John. MS: ler, with a dash across the l. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “bachinoire”: qui sert à bassiner les lits, here a bed warmer. The passage in brackets is inserted between lines with a caret. This painting is described differently in the inventory on p. 49, where it listed as having the images of St. Catherine and St. Peter on the sides. Subtotal £12 15s 4d. 72 MS: mesmes.

[Account of the Execution of Du Fay’s Will]

Item pour le vin de le maison que fu au dict defunct delivree a remortier73 le xiie de decembre, 17 s 4 d. Item de Jehan d’Ambrune, censier de Caurroit, pour le gros fruis d’icelle prebende de Cambray de cest an lxxiiii, que li avoit74 revendus icelluy deffunct, c’est assavoir v mesures de bled, chacun monceau 13 s 4 d, 53 lb 6 s 8 d, et iii mesure d’avoine,75 chacun monceau 5 s 10 d, pour 14 lb, et de l’office des son ostel de Cambresis pour viii monceaux de bled a 6 s le monceau, et viii monceaux d’avenie a 5 s 10 d le monceau, 100 s, ensamble, 72 lb 6 s 8 d. Item pour xl capons, x poulles, et ii mesures de pois que debuoient les dictes prevostes pour le dict an lxxiiii, 10 lb 10 s. Item de l’office du four pour espargnes de pain que avoit faites le dict deffunct es ans lxxii et lxxiii montant a x monceaux et xv pains, revendus chacun monceau 15 s pour 7 lb 14 s. Item de l’officier de la grande assize pour abis et assizes que en li debuoit de reste de l’an lxxiii, 24 lb, et pour le gaignage fait par le dict deffunct en l’an lxxiiii a rate de temps, 30 lb 2 s, forte monnoye, qui valent 37 lb 12 s 2 d ob., tout ensamble, 61 l 12 s 1 d ob.76 [p. 11] Item ad cause des capons particulers dens a le dessus dicte prebende de Cambray que fut au dict deffunct,77 montant par an a 37 s 5 d, ont este rechupts de Pierre le Bueur pour i capon 3 d cambresis, dens sur le maison de Saint Andrieu, a 2 s 6 d le capon sont 2 s 7 d78 pour les ans lxxii, lxxiii et lxxiiii, 8 s. Item de l’office de la fabrique sur les maisons vers les escuies du glay qui doibient par an vi capons, 20 d cambresis, sont 16 s ob. pour les ans iiiiC lxxii, lxxiii, et lxxiiii, 48 s 1 d ob. Item de l’ospital Saint Julien sur les maisons en le dicte rue, i capon 3 d cambresis, valent 2 s 8 d pour les ans iiiiC lxxii, lxxiii et lxxiiii, 8 s. Item de le vesve Jaques de Hercam, sur les maisons au dict lieu, nomines Le Rouge Lion, chacun an iiii capons 8 d cambresis, que valent 10 s 5 d, pour les ans lxxii, lxxiii et lxxiiii, 32 s 73

74 75

76 77

78

MS: the word is badly drawn; the bottom trait of the capital “R” and one letter, which I assume was “e,” are lost. Neither remortier nor a similar word is in the lexica consulted, but cf. modern French, mortier, vessel. It appears that the wine was delivered to be transferred to barrels in Du Fay’s cellar. MS: rendu, crossed out. MS: dau, with the pointed boucle that usually indicates “er.” In this case, however, it may be a conventional abbreviation for avoine, oats, which in the Cambrai accounts is always listed together with the ble. Subtotal, £155 10s 7d ob. MS: The scribe jumped a line and then corrected himself; here follows ont este rechups, crossed out. MS: viii, corrected to vii by crossing out a minim.

807

808

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

3 d, et de le ville de Cambray sur certain heritage que fu a Elizabeth de Honnecourt, 9 s cambresis, qui valent 5 s 7 d ob., pour les dicts iii ans, 16 s 10 d ob., ensamble 12 s 4d. Et de 2 d cambresis que on dist que le grant maistre de Saint Géry de Cambray doit payer par an a le dicte prebende, lesquelz il n’ye ma est receu, Riens. Item de l’escuyer de l’assize de Cambray ad cause de poivre et cire que avoit gaignes le dict deffunct en cest an lxxiiii, 65 lb 14 s 9 d. Item ad cause des comptes du bailli de capitule pour les ans lxxii et lxxiii ont este rechupts 36 s 7 d. Item pour les pres d’Ormiaing, de cest an lxxiiii, 32 s. Item avoit le dict deffunct au celier de capitule xxx pietres,79 chacun en le valoir de 30 s les quelques ont este restitues par maistre Arnoul Dueron, maistre du dict celier, sont 45 lb. Item pour le gaignage a rate du tamps fait par le dict deffunct au dict celier de l’an lxxiiii, 7 lb 9 s 10 d. Item pour le bac de Wanes a rate du tamps, 3 s 4 d.80 VI. Somme ad cause d’icelle prebende de Cambray 284 lb 3 s 1 d obl.

[p. 12] Recepte ad cause des ses aultre benefices Et premiers de la prebende Sainte Wautrud de Mons en Haynau, que le dict deffunct possessait a son trespas, par les mains de Nicaise le Roy ont este rechupts pour les fruis de l’an lxxiii fine au May lxxiiii, deduits 13 lb pour ses gaiges et le vin accoustume de le donner par le dict defunct, 137 lb 9 s 4 d monnoye du dict pays,81 valent 115 lb 7 s 9 d. Item pour cest an iiiic lxxiiii, Henry Sainte Dieu, recepteur de l’eglise de madame Sainte Wautrud du dict Mons, n’a point encore rendu ses comptes pour quoy on ne puet scavoir au vray combien les fruis monterant, et y a des grans charges, tant ad cause des tailles come d’un proces pour les franchises et libertes d’icelle eglise, et a bon compte se fait icy recepte de 100 lb. [p. 13] Item le dict deffunct estoit capellain de la capelle de Peruwes,82 de la quelle valoit par an, deduits 20 lb pour le service, 25 lb 5 s, monnoye de Haynau, dont messire Ernoul Huppillon, cure du dict

79 82

Grierson, “Coinage,” 396. MS: also named Peruwez.

80

Subtotal cut off, £129 13s 6d.

81

MS: here a d, crossed out.

[Account of the Execution of Du Fay’s Will]

lieu, deboit de reste de l’an lxxiii rabatues 6 lb 2 s 6 d en reparations faites a la maison d’icelle capelle, 47 s. Et pour les fruis du ceste anee lxxiiii a este appointie aveuc maistre Jehan le Scime, ad present possesseur d’icelle capelle, le quel valoit avoir les fruis pour rate de temps a 20 lb 16 s, ensamble, 23 lb 3 s monnoye de Haynau, que valent 19 lb 5 s 10 d. Item le dict deffunct avoit une pension de xxxii salus par an aux termes de Noel et Saint Jehan, sur le cure de Goy que possesse sire Jehan Remars, chapelan83 de Condet, et ad cause que le dict deffunct est trespasse devant le terme de Noel de cest an lxxiiii, n’a volut le dict sire Jehan payer pour rate de temps, et pour ainsi cy en recepte, Riens.84 Item du parsonage de Watiebraine, du quel soloit avoir le dict deffunct 40 lb Haynau par an, ad cause que 1. [un] peu devant son trespas l’avoit resigne et donne a sire Alexandre, son chapellain, n’a este receu riens. VII. Somme des dictes parties de recepte 234 lb 13 s 7 d. [p. 14] Somme totale de le recepte d’icelle execution 2341 lb 7 s 1 d obl.

[p. 15] Mises sur le dicte recepte Et premiers pour les exequies A Thomas de le Roze pour luiscel85 de quesne, 40 s. Item a vi chappelains qui porterent86 le corps en terre, a chacun 3 s 4 d, sont 20 s. Item a l’enterrement d’icelluy deffunct eubt chacun de messires present 20 d, chacun des grand vicars 10 d, et chacun des aultres compaignons 6 d, ensamble furent distribues 4 lb 6 s 6 d. Item a iiii compaignons qui porterent les torches le jour d’icelles exequies, a chacun 5 s, sont 20 s. Item a chacun des messieurs, en nombre xxvi, pun87 le prebende de capitule et aux iiii executeurs, 20 s,88 sont 30 lb. 83 84 85 88

MS: chan, with dash over h. Marginal note: Personatur in prioris de illum qui debet pensionem pro rata, 9s. Variant of luisel, casket. 86 MS: porteront, corrected to porterent. 87 MS: sic. MS: C, crossed out.

809

810

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item a chacun d’iceulx xxvi sires pour le psaultier, 3 s 4 d, sont 4 lb 6 s 8 d. Et pour iiii miches,89 a chacun pour le dict psaultier, sont c iiii miches qui font ii mieutes, iiii pains, a 15 s chacun mieute, sont 31 s 3 d. Item a chacun des ix grans vicaires, 10 s, sont 4 lb 10 s. Item a xliii chapellains, chacun 6 s 8 d, sont 14 lb 6 s 8 d. Item a xiii petits vicaires, chacun 8 s 4 d, sont 8 s 4 d. Item au bailli et a chacun de de iiii francs sergans, 6 s 8 d, sont 33 s 4 d. Item a viiii enfans d’autel, v habitues, au tourier, procureur, messagier, iii sergans de l’eglise, ii sergans de bailli, a sire Jacques Vallain et Jehan le Roux et iiii90 [p. 16] clers de capelle ensamble xxv, a chacun 3 s 4 d, sont 4 lb 3 s 4 d. Item aux dessus dicts petits vicaires affin qu’ilz cantassent bien et a tret le service, sequence, et psaultier, 4 lb. Item pour digner ensamble le jour d’icelles exequies par91 l’ordonnance d’icelluy deffunct, 8 lb. Item pour pareil aux enfans d’autel et affin qu’ilz priassent pour le dict deffunct, 40 s. Item aux diaque, soudiaque et choriste, a chacun 5 s, sont 15 s. Item aux capellains et clerc du revestiaire, pour leur salaire de preparer ce qui estoit necessaire pour les dictes exequies par l’ordonnance d’icelluy deffunct, a chacun 10 s, sont 20 s. Item aux carpentier, machon, feure, raligueur, couvreur, placquier, plommier, estaillier, clocquemand, Jehan de Josne, verrier, et fournier, en nombre xiii, a chacun 20 d92 sont 21 s 8 d. Item au bourseur du coer pour ses painnes et labours de avoir fait les dictes distributions, 20 s. Item ce dict jour des exequies furent celebrees messes par tous venans, et furent en nombre93 vixx vi presbitres qui celebrarent, et eubt chacun, selont l’ordonnancez d’icelluy deffunct 3 s 4 d,94 et sire Jehan Marcotte, que les mist tous par escript et paya 5 s, ensamble, 21 lb 5 s. Item a iiii chapelains qui dirent le psaulter tantost apres le trespas, le corps present, a chacun 5 s, dont 20 s.

89

90 92

93

Miche = miette or mieute, small roll of white bread, in some contexts also used as measures of bread. Subtotal, £70 [10s, crossed out] 2s 9d. 91 MS: pour, crossed out. The MS gives no monetary unit here; also, even counting Jehan de Josne and the glassmaker as two different people, the list includes only twelve. MS: mombre, corrected to nombre. 94 MS: iii, corrected to iiii.

[Account of the Execution of Du Fay’s Will]

Item pour i calice d’estain mis en le fosse aveuc95 le dict deffunct ainsi qu’il est de coustume, 8 s 4 d. Item pour les offrandes d’icelles exequies, 10 s.96 [p. 17] Item selon l’ordonnance d’icelluy deffunct ce dict jour des exequies ont este donnes aux povers vi monceaux de bled convertus en pain, et de chacun monceau fait lx pains, sont iiic lx pains, et aveuc chacun pain donne 1 d, donc pour chacun mesure de pain ont este payes 15 s, sont 4 lb 10 s, et les denres97 portent 30 s, ensamble 6 lb. Item a Henry le Paintre, pour avoir fait et livre les v grans et les aultres xviii petis escuchens des armes du dict deffunct mis sur le biere,98 aux flambiaux et as chirons ainsi qu’il est de coustume, 40 s. Item a xiii enfans oultre ceulx des capelles qui aidirent a dire les messes, a chacun99 10 d, sont 10s 10 d. Item a Jacques d’Irchomme, dict Cauquepaille, machon de l’eglise, pour avoir machonne le fosse et livre les briques et mortier, ainsi qu’il est de coustume, 100 s. Item a Jehan du Mur, clocquemand, pour avoir sonne l’enterrement, 12 s, fait le fosse, livre l’escran et puis raitonne,100 50 s; pour le sonnerie101 des vigilles, commandisse et messe, 100 s; pour sonner le psaultur [sic], 100 s; et le sequence, 6 s, ensamble, 13 lb 8 s. Item a Willerme Courtois, chirier de l’eglise, pour c iiiixx cirons, chacun de iii quartes, sont 135 lb. Item pour xxiii, chacun de v quartes, 30 lb. Item pour xiii aultres chirons, chacun de 3 lb le pieche, 39 lb. Item iiii cirons pour le biere, chacun de 8 lb, sont 32 lb, et iiii grans flambiaux pesant xxxii lb, iic lxvi lb de cire, pour chacun lb102 6 s, sont 79 lb 16 s. Et pour iiii bastons,103 chacun 2 s 6 d, pour tant li ont este payes 80 lb 6 s.104 [p. 18] Item aux dames de Saint Julien, pour leur drois d’avoir ensevelli le dict deffunct ainsi qu’il est de coustume, 30 s. Item pour le digner fait ce dict jour des exequies au furent invites tous messieurs de capitule et plusieurs autres, tant d’eglise comme gens lays et les voisins105 de ii rues, ont este despendus exposes, comme appert par le compte que en on fait messire Thiry d’Augnon et sire

95 97 98 100 102 105

96 MS: isolated d, crossed out. MS: Subtotal, £45 3s 4d. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “denree”: petite quantité en géneral. 99 MS: bire, corrected to biere. MS: d, crossed out. The scribe drew the t badly and tried to correct it. 101 MS: sonerire. MS: isolated l, crossed out. 103 MS: could be bascons(?). 104 Subtotal, £107 4s 10d. MS: voisinns.

811

812

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Jaques Maynnart, oultre le vin prins en le maison du dict deffunct, en tout 45 lb 11 s 9 d. Item des ii draps d’or accoustumez de payer pour chacun chanoine apres son trespas ad cause que le dict deffunct a donne une cape de drap d’or, il en est quitte, et qu’il fist faire le piet106 et dourer tout le vraie croix a ses despens moyennant qu’il fust descharges des dictes ii draps, et pour tant icy, Riens.107 I. Somme des dictes mises 269 lb 12 s 10 d.

[p. 19] Solution de lays contenus au testament d’icelluy deffunct Premiers a monsieur le doyen a fait legas pour l’administration des sacremens, 40 s. Et pour le service d’icelluy deffunct par lui fait en propre personne le ont este donnez 40 s., ensamble 4 lb. Item a messire Pierre de Wez, capellain du revestiaire, lequel a la dicte administration des dicts sacramens, est comme clerc de mon dict seigneur le doyen a est fait legat de 5 s. Item ad cause que le dict deffunct avoit108 done par son dict testament que se109 l’eure le pooit souffrier tantost apres qu’il aroit receu son darrain sacrement viii des compagnons du coer cantassent en pres lui en fausset le himpne Magno salutis gaudio, et les enfans de coer tantost apres Ave regina celorum, ce que on ne peult faire pour le briefte du temps, et voloit que fuissent donnez aux dicts vicaires 40 s et aux dicts enfans 30 s, lesquelles ii parties, aveuc 7 s 6 d oultre, pour le presbitre, diaque et soubdiaque ont este donnez a tous les vicaires et enfans de coer pour ce que asses tost pres les exequies faites pour le dict deffunct, en le capelle des dictes petits vicaires on dict vigilles, commandisses et le messe de Requiem en descant que le dict deffunct avoit faite, et en le fin

106

107 109

Houdoy, Histoire, 352, from the inventory of relics and jewels of the cathedral prepared in 1461 by Pierre de Wez: “Item. Ung piet d’argent dore assis sur vi tourelles en fourme de mont de calvaire et ii angeles dont l’ung tient les claus et l’esponge et l’autre le lance et le couronne servant a le vraye croix, donne par monsieur maistre Guillaume Du Fay.” Subtotal £47 1s 11d. 108 A trait here, could be et. One word crossed out, not legible.

[Account of the Execution of Du Fay’s Will]

d’icelle messe le dict hymne Magno salutis gaudio, et Ave regina celorum, ensamble montent a 77 s 6 d. Item a Anthonin Hardi, filleul d’icelluy deffunct, a fait legat du livre au quel le legende de Sainte Barbe est en latin, et de i aultre livre le livre des bonnes meurs, desquelz, ad cause que cy dessus a este faicte recepte, icy s’en fait mise, prisez chacun 40 s, sont 4 lb110 [p. 20] Item a sa commere, espouse de Jacques Hardi, a fait legat le dict deffunct de i petit agnus dei, le quel a este prise, comme chy dessus apart, 6 s 8 d. Item a l’ymage de Notre Dame sur l’autel des fietres111 a fait legat le dict deffunct de son grant agnus dei, delivre a monseigneur le maistre de le fabrique, lequel fu prise 40 s. Item a la capelle Saint Estiene ont este legats ii livres, l’un en grant volume de papier, contenant la messe Saint Anthoine de Vienne et la messe de Requiem composee par le dict deffunct, prise 15 s, et l’autre en parchemin, contenant la messe Saint Anthoine de Pade, prise 40 s, ensamble, 55 s. Item a l’eglise Saint Aubert a fait le dict deffunct legat du biau tablet que estoit sur le queminee de sa salle, a le charge de dire pour luy ie fois l’obit, lequel fu celebre bien solennelement par les religieux du dict lieu aux quelz pour leur112 pitance et recreation furent donnes 4 lb, et le dict tablet, prise comme cy dessus appert, 4 lb. Et pour le faire gravir de belle questerie113 et assir et decorer comme il est en le salle du dict Saint Aubert, affin qu’il soit de plus grande duree, ainsi que avoys dist icelluy deffunct,114 ses executeurs que on fesst,115 ont este payez a monseigneur de Saint Aubert pour le painture faicte a le dicte questerie 4 lb 2 s 3 d116 ob., ensamble, 12 lb 2 s 3 d ob. Item a maistre Martin Courtois a este fait legat de i tablet de le figure du Roy, et d’un autre que estoit deseure l’huis de le cambre, lesquels ont este estimez valoir 20 s.117 [p. 21] Item a monseigneur d’Arras i coutel que le Roy de Cecile avoit donne au dict deffunct, que fu prise, 100 s.

110 111 112 113

114 116

Subtotal, £12 2s 6d. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “fiertre”: châse (bier). In the will feretrorum. MS: pains, crossed out. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “questier 2”: menuissier (woodworker). The questerie was the frame of the painting. MS: inkblot, may be covering a word, perhaps et. 115 MS: sic, fait. MS: 4d, corrected to 3d. 117 Subtotal, £19 3s 11d. ob.

813

814

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item a maistre Gobert le Mannier, dict Gobin, fu fait legat de le figure de le mort, estimee 17 d. Item a este fait legat aux grands vicaires de ceste eglise du tablet ou la representation de feu messire Symon le Breton etant118 vif a le requeste de le mettre es festes et es jours des obis des dictes feus messire Symon, et Du Fay sur l’autel de le capelle Saint Estienne, prise 40 s. Item a Notre Dame de Grace, qui est a la capelle de la trinite, a este fait legat d’un agnus dei encasse en or que fu au dessus dict messire Symon le Breton, prise 6 lb. Item a messire Pierre de Wez, 20 lb. Item a la fabrique de l’eglise de Cambray, 40 lb. Item a la fabrique de Sainte Wautrud de Mons, 20 lb. Item a la fabrique de Notre Dame de Conde, 100 s. Item a la Grande Cartuse des charteurois, 20 lb. Item au couvent des freres mineurs de ceste cyte de Cambray, ad cause que le dict deffunct est en le recommandacion de tout l’ordaine,119 100 s. Item au couvent des freres prescheurs de Valenchiennes, pour pareil que dessus, que le dict deffunct estoit en le recommandation des orisons et devotions de tout l’ordaine, 100 s. Item a maistre Gerard de Waltrelet, medecin, chanoine d’Arras, pour les services aggreables qu’il a fais au dict deffunct, 20 lb et i ymage de Notre Dame, que le dict deffunct li avoit donne, ainsi quel est apparu par une voix, prise 30 s, ensamble de legat 21 lb 10 s. Item a la table de monseigneur l’abbe de Saint Aubert, en la quelle tres souvent avait prins se refection le dict deffunct, en appelant les services et amis a sa discretion, 10 lb. Item au dessus dict messire Pierre de Wez, la table qu’il avoit donne autrefois au dict deffunct, et i autel en la petite cambrette, ensamble estimes, 15 s. [p. 22] Item aux xii des plus souffisans tans grans comme petits vicaires, que dirent le landemain des exequies, en la capelle Saint Estiene, la messe de Requiem que fist le dict deffunct en son vivant, aveuc certaine anthienne, De profundis et les colectes Inclina et Fidelium,120 comme il avoit ordonne par son testament, avoit fait legat de 4 lb. 118 120

MS: etan. 119 This word written twice, with the first one crossed out. See later, the notes to the will itself, p. 73.

[Account of the Execution of Du Fay’s Will]

Item aux hospitaulx de Saint Julien, 20 s, Saint Jehan, 10 s, Saint Jaques, 10 s, aux parsonniers du Castel de Senlles, 15 s, et au maladiaux 10 s, ensamble 45 s. Item a chacun des preudhommes de Saint Pierre de Beuris, en nombre iiii, 2 s 6 d., sont 10 s. Item a chacun des beghinage de Saint Vast, Saint Forgei121 et de Lille, 10 s, sont 30 s. Item a la reucluse de Saint Vast, 20 s. Et au beghinage de Cantimpret, 15 s. Item a chacun de iii ses executeurs assavoir, Des Lyons, Rosut, et Mortier, a fait legat de i marc d’argent, chacun marc estime a 14 lb, sont 42 lb. Item a messire Pierre de Wez, le iiiie executeur, selont par l’ordonnance d’icelluy deffunct, a este content des legas cy dessus comptez, pour tant icy, Riens. Item a messire Guillaume Bouchel, clerc de capitule a fait legat du dict deffunct, pour les services que li avoit fais et qu’il avoit esperance que li feroit, oultre son salaire de notaire, i marc d’argent estime a 14 lb. Item a Jaque des Priers de Tornay, que fu parent au dict deffunct, et que gouverne icelluy deffunct l’espasse de xviii mois par condicion que lui et ses parens ne demandront riens a ceste execution du paiement d’unne cambre de le figure d’un perliquant ou quel est escript sur le roze me repose, que le pere du dict sire Jaques envoya au dict deffunct, comme ilz a previs de ce faire, et a a quitte ceste execution, ont este legatees 40 lb.122 [p. 23] Item a ordonne le dict deffunct par son dict testament este fonde son obit a la communaulte des grans vicaires en la capelle Saint Estiene, aveuc la lumiere de iiii chirons, en certaines festes de l’an, et toutes les fois que on123 dist la Salve. Item iii haultes messes a discant, a dire par les dicts grans vicaires et autres, chacun an le jour Saint Anthoine de Pade, Saint Guillaume, et Sainte Wautrud, une aultre basses messe le jour des pasque, et xii aultres messe a dire le second jour de chacun mois de l’an, pour lesquelles fondacions furnir et accomplier selont le contenu d’icelluy testament et certaine cedulle signee du maitre de la court, les dicts grans vicaires se sont chargies, pour meme qu’ilz aient de revenue par an 8 lb 12 s, tournois, dont affin quel ayant quarte partie oultre, ainsi qu’il est de coustume, pour124 121 123 124

MS: [sic]; in the will, Georgii. 122 Subtotal, £107. MS: one word illegible, crossed out and replaced with on. MS: one word, se, crossed out.

815

816

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

supplir les facultes et scerillites125 comment acquister 12 lb 9 s 4 d. Sur quoy le dict deffunct en son vivant bailla Sainte Pol bricquet par le consentement de messires du capitule que sont employes en la queste faitte au pays des iiii mesures126 oultre Gand, 140 lb tournois, et cy pour profurnir a bon compte se fait mise de 100 lb. Item au clerq de la capelle du duct Saint Estienne, alumine ceste annee127 les iii cirons devant l’epitaphe et iii ymages ordonnes en le dicte capelle par le dict deffunct, et pour ii annees advenir, pour chacun an 5 s, sont 15 s. Item pour la messe de Saint Anthoine avoir fait celebree ceste annee, ainsi que le dict deffunct la ordonne, et avoit grant temps devant son trespas entretenue, selont la forme de son dict testament, pour cest an lxxv, le xiiie jour de juing on este payez aux presbitre, dyaque, soubdiaque, chantres et enfans du coir 41 s 8 d. Item pour ii ans advenier, assavoir lxxvi et lxxvii, 4 lb 3 s 4 d. II. Somme des dicts lays 400 lb 12 s 11 d obl.

[p. 24] Solutio des debtes Premiers a Casper pour une fourrure128 de blancs aigniaus mise au paletot du dict deffunct, inclus le fachon, 33 s 4 d. Item a Michault Havet freux129 pour avoir appointie le nuit et le jour de le maoust130 an lxxiiii, la viande pour le natal,131 5 s. Item a Willerme, pottier de terre, pour plusieurs parties de potteries, tant pour cayeres comme pour le cuisine, 16 [s]132 8 d.

125 128 129

130

131

132

MS: sic. 126 MS: mesrs, with boucle from the r. 127 MS: annnee. MS: isolated b, crossed out. MS: broux crossed out, freux written above. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “freux,” has an undefined entry, but the source listed is a document concerning the butcher’s trade; hence in the present context it meant butcher. Not in any of the lexica consulted, but the day of maoust is surely Monday after Easter Sunday, when the eating of meat is normally resumed after Lent and Holy Week. It derives its name from the day’s Gospel, Luke 24:13–15, telling of the dinner at Emmaus. Du Fay apparently had hosted a dinner that day. It could also be read as “miaoust” indicating the feast of the Assumption, which was the principal Marian feast at Cambrai. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “natal”: chacune des principales fêtes de l’année. In this case simply “the feast.” The scribe clearly left out one word here.

[Account of the Execution of Du Fay’s Will]

Item a Symon de le Ruelle, pour ii paires des sorles133 au valton et a la bacellette,134 8 s 4 d. Item a Bertrand d’Ambrune crassier pour cii lb de candeilles, a 17 d la lb. 7 lb 4 s 6 d, ix lb d’oile, a 16 d la lb., et ix lb a 12 d la livre, sont 21 s. Item pour une taille de vin aigre, moustarde, et mol sablon135 contenant lxviii crens,136 chacun cren a 8 d, sont 15 s 4 d, ensamble 10 lb 10 s 10 d. Pour tout on este payees 10 lb 10 s. Item a Willerme Courtois, cirier, pour espisses, chure,137 etc., declares en une cedulle demandant 4 lb 15 s, ont este payes 4 lb x s. Item a Jaquet de Werchin, serviteur d’icelluy deffunct, lequel avait demoure au dict hostel l’espace de v ans, et avoit eub grant labour et travail a garder le dict deffunct de nuit et de jour durant sa maladie, et aidie a dire ses heures dont pour salaire, et recompense des despens qu’il a eub et encore porra avoir a poursuivir i petit parsonage que le dict deffunct ly avoit donne du quel n’est point paisibele,138 et le regard que se son oncle eubt vesquu, li fussent en partie eschevees 100 lb que son dict maistre le donoit par testament. Item et attendu quel ne li avoit fait quelque legat par testament ont este dounees pour tant 40 lb. Item a Colle de Lourimel, serviteuse d’icelluy deffunct, a lequelle estoient dens de reste de ses loyers 2 escus demi pour le cause que le dict deffunct ne le avoit fait quelque legat, et qu’elle l’avoit bien servi139 durant sa maladie li ont donne iceulx executeurs pour tout 16 lb. Item a Nicaise de Williers, cuvelir,140 pour ouvrage de son maistre, declaire en une cedule montant a 65 s 10 d pour tout, ont este payes, dont il s’est tient pour content, 40 s.141 [p. 25] Item a Martin Lamosnier, apotiquaire, pour plusieurs besoignes de son mestier, declares en ie cedulle montant a 10 lb, on este payes 9 lb 10 s.

133

134 135 136

137 138

139

This word does not turn up in any of the lexica consulted; the fact that it consisted of “two pairs” suggests it was something like footwear. See Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “bachellette”: servante, and “valeton”: serviteur. MS: sic, mol sablon = fine sand, but why? Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “crenee”: créneau / taille, impôt, rente. D’Ambrune presented the executors a taille, where each cren (= notch) represented a debit by Du Fay. On p. 26 of the account the same two terms are used in essentially the same manner. MS: sic, a variant of cire. MS: sic. Not present in Godefroy, Dictionnaire, as a verb. In this context it seems to be a direct French translation of common phrase in canon law, pacifice assecutus. MS: servii. 140 MS: sic, cuvelier. 141 Subtotal, £97 3s 4d.

817

818

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item a Pierre le Roux pour et ad cause de viic iiiixx x faissiaus de laigne et iic lxxii fagos qu’il avoit livres au dict deffunct li estoient dens a lui payes 27 lb 7 s 3 d. Item a Jehan le Maire, cervoisier, pour ii tonnaux [et] demi de cervoise, chacun 16 s 7 d, sont a lui payer142 41 s 8 d. Item a Jehan de la Coquerie pour les orfrois de la cappe d’icelluy deffunct, qui furent fais a Bruge, 80 lb. Item a Jacques Colle, capieur, pour avoir fait la dicte cappe du drap blanc escosse d’or, et de la doublure que le dict deffunct avoit acates143 en son vivant, 53 s 4 d. Item a Willerme Courtois demie onche et une quarte de soie, 8 s 9 d, demie quarte de sougnie et demie onche de filet, 12 d ob., et pour ii aulnes de camonach144 de Bretainne a doubler une partie d’icelle cappe, 6 s 8 d, ensamble 83 lb 9 s 9 d ob. Item a maistre Jehan le Duc, chirurgien et barbieur, pour avoir barbie et visite le dict deffunct l’espasse de vi a vii septmaines, chacun jour ii fois, touchant la maladie qu’il avoit es gambes et ailleurs, et la josne fille de la cuisine, laquelle avoit la mamelle froisse et s’apostuma tellement qu’il le convint travalier145 oultre 21 patards qu’il avoit eub en son vivant, 100 s. Item a messire Pierre de Wez pour son salaire de avoir garde l’ostel du dict deffunct l’espasse de vii ans qu’il fut demourant en Savoye, receu les biens et compte, et pour plusieurs autres services qu’il avoit fait au dict deffunct sans qu’il ait este recompense ont est donnes pour les dictes causes et autres ad ce mouvans les dicts executeurs, 30 lb. Item a Jennin du Chemin, cousin au dict deffunct, demourant a Bruges, lequel par l’espace de xviii an xx ans a envoye au dict deffunct plusieurs biaux presens de confistures, raisins, fighes, et aultres viandes de quaresme dont n’avoit riens receu, mais s’attendait a le bonne grace d’icelluy deffunct, lequel se sentoit bien tenu a lui, comme plusieurs avoit dict, mais par son146 [p. 26] testament l’avoit oublieu, que ses dicts executeurs ont supplee, et pour font, affin qu’il prie pour le dict deffunct, dounne 100 lb.

142 144

145

146

MS: sic. 143 MS: sic, achetes. Not in any of the lexica consulted, but probably a variant spelling of camocas, a satin-like fabric. MS: word badly drawn, trauvier, with the accent over the i transformed crudely into a missing l. Not in any lexicon; from the context, probably a lancing. Subtotal, £157 8s 8d. ob.

[Account of the Execution of Du Fay’s Will]

Item au fournier du capitule pour pain diverses fachons147 avoit prins le dict deffunct sur une148 taille. Item xvii crens demi, chacun cren 6 d, 8 s 9 d. Item pour x prebendes et demie de meches et ii douzaines de pain de talloir montant a ii mectres i boisseau149 de bled, a 15 s chacun mectre, 33 s 9 d, ensamble a lui payes 42 s 6 d. Item a messire Jehan Maynnart, recepteur de la fabrique, pour les termes de le Saint Luc et les Roys, an lxxiiii, de la maison canoniale que fut au dict deffunct au pris de 26 lb per an, 27 lb 6 s 8 d. Item a la vesve Pierre du Puch et a son fils barbieur, pour avoir servi de barbiage au dict deffunct certain temps devant150 sa grande maladie, dont ilz n’avoient point este payes,151 10 s. Item pour parfurnir et accomplier l’acqueste de 15 lb de revenue a Wadeque,152 faite par le dict deffunct pour le fondacion des couronnes a la pasque et l’augmentacion de son obit, sur lequelle acquiste en son vivant avait baillie 3030 lb, et cy pour a bon compte, pour l’acomplissement se fait mise de 30 lb. Item en ceste anee iiiic lxxiiii, par le commandement du prevce153 a convenu poursieuvir et obtenir l’admortissement de toutes les acquistes faites en son pays puis lx ans encha se ont este payes ad cause de la moittie de l’acquiste faite par le dict deffunct a Bruselle en Brabant pour son obit a l’encontre de maistre Jehan du Bois, dont le prevce a eubt 28 lb 15 s 5 d, et pour se part des despens de le poursieulte et des lettres, 7 lb 15 s 7 d, ensamble 36 lb 11 s. Item a maistre Baude Mansel, medecin, pour son salaire, de avoir l’espasse de ii ans visite de mois a aultre, ou plus souvent a le fois, icellui deffunct, et rescript a maistre Gerard Watrelleet,154 [p. 27] medecin a Arras, l’estat de sa maladie pour avoir son conseil et ayde. Item a este acorde aveuc lui, dont il s’est tenu pour content, en la somme de 20 lb.

147 148 149 150 152

153

154

MS: there is a flaw in the paper here; maybe one word is lost, probably qui. MS: un, crossed out, une, superscript. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “metre 3”: mesure valant quatre boisseaux. MS: sic; probably should be durant. 151 MS: payees. In CBM, B 39 the place name is Wodecque. This refers to revenue from some arable lands there, apparently held communally. The office of the cathedral’s provost, who had the task of dealing with the external business of the chapter. Bonnie Blackburn reads this word as “prince.” If her reading is correct the “prince” in question would be the abbot of Dielenghem, who is metioned in the assize as the overlord of the lands in Bersele (LAN, 4G 5431, fol. 4v). The abbot, however, is never referred as a prince in any other document known to me. Subtotal, £186 10s 2d.

819

820

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item le dict deffunct estoit en le confrarie de Notre Dame de la Capelle de la Trinite,155 que paindy156 monsieur Saint Luc, se ont este payes pour la messe accoustumee de celebrer apres le trespas de chacun confrere, 12 s. Item a Hotin Cohier, qui fut serviteur a la cuisine du dict deffunct, et y demeura ii ans, pour le faire apprendre le mestier de refaire viez solles et le gouverner ii ans, a este merchandu a legier le candelier, pour tant en la somme de 16 lb, et pour son entree au dict mestier et livrer aucunnes [sic] necessites de solles, chemises et cauches en ceste premiere anee on este payes157 33 s 4 d, ensamble, 17 lb 13 s 4 d.158 III. Somme des dictes debtes 479 lb 7 s 6 d obl.

[p. 28] Mises communes Premiers au priseurs de ceste cite de Cambray pour le prisee des bien meubles montant, ainsi qu’il est declare en l’inventaire, a 805 lb 19 s, pour chacune livre 4 d, sont 13 lb 8 s 4 d. Et pour une aultre preserve des bien hors de le premier inventaire, montant a 119 s 2 s, ensamble 13 lb 10 s 4 d. Item a messire Pierre Godemare, capellain de l’eglise, commis a la garde de l’ostel et des biens d’icelluy deffunct par l’espace de xvii jours, tant que tout fu vendu, a 2 s 6 d pour chacun jour sont 45 s. Item a Martin Waterin, sergant de l’eglise, pour pareil de xviii jours qu’il garda159 le dict hostel et les biens, ainsi qu’il est de coustume, 45 s. Item pour les despens fait au dict hostel par le dict capellain, sergant, manimies,160 et les alans et vennans depuis le jour du trespas jusques ad ce que tout fu vendu, ainsi qu’il puet apparoir161 par les cedules de Jaquet, que fu serviteur du dict deffunct, 20 d. Item a Phenart, pour avoir veille le viiie de Decembre de Cambray, pour le tour d’icelluy deffunct, 20 d. Item a Gille, l’orfevre, pour avoir pese et apprecie la vaselle d’argent et les jayaux, 6 s 8 d.

155 158 160

161

This is Notre-Dame de Grâce. 156 MS: sic. 157 MS: ensambles, crossed out here. Subtotal, £38 5s 4d. 159 MS: l’ostel, crossed out. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “maniement”: administration. In this context manimies is most likely “administrators.” MS: apparier, with “oir” superscript.

[Account of the Execution of Du Fay’s Will]

Item aux gaugeurs de laignes pour avoir gaugie iiic xlii faissiaux de laigne et derasse et compte iic fagos, pour tout ensamble paye 22 s 1 d. Item a monsieurs messire Betremen Malaquin,162 messire Guillaume Bouchel, et sire Jehan Carlier, pour avoir prise les livres d’icelluy deffunct, a chacun iiii patards demi, mais le dict messire ne prinst rien, monte les ii, 15 s. Item pour avoir fait nettier l’ostel d’icelluy deffunct et fait163 mener les ordures a camps, 8 s 9 d.164 [p. 29] Item a messire Pasquier Coutel pour la foraneite de la prebende de Cambray, ad cause que le dict deffunct n’avoit point acompli se residance, 7 lb 10 s. Item a messire Jehan du Pont, capellain de maistre Gerard de Watrelet, medecin, furent donnes, quant il vint querir les legats fais a son dict maistre, pour les bons et agreables services qu’il avoit fais par165 pluisiers fois au dict deffunct, i florin poste du 23 s 4 d, et pour les despens de lui et son ceval a venier en ceste cite, 10 s 10 d, ensamble 34 s 2 d. Item au clerc du capitule et aux iiii ouvriers de l’eglise pour leur salaire acoustume de avoir visite le maison canoniale d’icelluy deffunct et fait marquer pas escript tout ce que y estoient a faire pour le rendre au166 successeur, a chacun 5 s, pour 25 s, le quelle visitation tant de machonnerie, carpenterie, placquerie, et coverture, a monte en tout 21 lb167 Se a este acorde a monsieur le doyen de Furves, que pour tous les dicts ouvrages a eubt dont168 c’est tenu pour content, 20 lb, ensamble, 21 lb 5 s. Item a maistre Jehan le Seine, ad present cappellain de la capelle a Peruwez, que fut au dict deffunct, pour les ouvrages que estoient a faire a la maison d’icelle capelle au jour de son trespas, estimes tant pour carpenterie, machonerie, couverture, et placquerie, a 20 lb 16 s, monnoye de Hainaut, et pour les despens du cure a estre venu cy pour le dicte matiere, et le salaire de ouvriers a faire le dicte visitation, 36 s, ensamble 22 lb 12 s, monnoye dicte, sont 18 lb 16 s 7 d. Item pour renouveler les ii cirons de la capelle Saint Estiene a la feste de Saint Anthoine de Pade, que eschiet169 le xiiie de juing, pour l’an lxxv, deduis les viez cirons, ont este payes 3 s 8 d. 162 164 166 168 169

MS: the i of malaquin is long and was corrected to short. 163 MS: menoir, crossed out. Subtotal, £32 18s 8d. 165 MS: par, repeated, crossed out. MS: the beginning of one word, successeur, crossed out. 167 MS: s., crossed out. MS: dont c’est, repeated, crossed out. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “echeoite”: chute, hence eschiet, “fell.”

821

822

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item le ve d’aoust, an dessus dict lxxv, fu celebre pour le premiere fois l’obit solennel d’icelluy deffunct en ceste eglise de Cambray. Se furent donnes aux petits vicaires pour boirre ensamble, affin qu’ilz prient pour le dict deffunct, 50 s.170 [p. 30] Item a Andrieu, feure de l’eglise, pour son salaire d’estre venu par plusieurs fois ouvrie171 et descaquer les serrures d’aucuns coffres et dreschoirs don on ne trouvoit point les clefs, et remettere a point le ubys de la cambre hault que ne pooit cloire, 10 s. Item pour ii aulnes de noir bougran du quel on a fait i sacculet leur on a mis les vi livres de chanteries que le dict deffunct avoit done a notre tres redoubte monseigneur le Duc de Bourgogne des son vivant, dont seulement avoit retenu l’usage,172 pour les envoiier, comme on a fait, a notre tres redoubte seigneur a Dorlens,173 ou il estoit, 7 s 6 d, et pour le fachon d’icelluy sacquelet, 40 d. Item a Jennin Tamerel pour ses despens de lui et son cheval en l’espasse de v jours qu’il sejourna tant a Darras174 comme au dict Dourlens au mois de Jullet a aler porter les dictes livres, 50 s, ensamble 58 s 9 d. Item a Alart Genois pour estre pre et graver au marbre de l’epithaphe d’icelluy deffunct le date de son trespas ainsi qu’il apart, 13 s 4 d, et au panre175 pour le dorer ainsi que l’escripture precedente, 6 s 8 d, ensamble 20 s. Item pour les despens fais par176 les dessus dictes executeurs et aultres qu’ilz appelerent au digner le jour Saint Anthoine de Pade, apres le messe dicte et descantee en la capelle dessus dicte de Saint Estiene comme avoit acoustume de faire chacun an177 le dict deffunct, 4 lb 2 s 6 d. Item pour autres despens fais et soustenues par les dicts executeurs durant l’annee de ceste execution a estre ensamble pour le besoignes et affaires d’icelle par plusieurs fois, 43 s.178 [p. 31] Item a messires de capitule pour le vin de ceste execution, dont la recepte porte, comme cy dessus appert, a 2341 lb 7 s 1 d obl., pour chacun lb 6 d, sont 58 lb 10 s 6 d. Item a messire Guillaume Bouchel, secretaire du capitule, a son lieutenant pour avoir fait l’inventaire des biens meubles de ceste execution, estre present au vendage d’iceulx, copie les dictes inventaire et testament, et ces presens comptes, 14 lb. 170 173 176

Subtotal, £51 19s. 6d. 171 MS: sic, ouvrir. 172 MS: here sq, crossed out. Doullens, between Arras and Amiens. 174 MS: sic. 175 MS: sic, paintre. MS: les dictes, crossed out. 177 MS: dessus dict, crossed out. 178 Subtotal, £10 14s 3d.

[Account of the Execution of Du Fay’s Will]

Item a R. Mortier pour avoir eub, par l’espasse d’un an, l’administration de recepvoir, et fait les paiements selon l’ordonnance d’icellui deffunct, soignie d’accomplir les fondations, et mantenu ces presens comptes, en tout 24 lb. Item a sergant de capitule pour son vin a la reddicion d’iceulx comptes, 10 s. Item pour les despens de digner que on fait au jour de la reddicion de ces presens comptes, au quel soit appelles messires les deputes a voir les comptes aveuc les dictes executeurs et autres s’il leur plest a evoquier, 10 lb. Item au vendie les biens meubles de ceste execution on este perdus ii souplis que estoient prisiez 40 s, i petit bancquier de 6 s, i doublier179 de 3 s, et ii serviettes de 4 s, sont 53 s. Item aucuns meubles d’icelle execution sont180 demoures a vendre, et les a convenu donner pour moindre pris qu’ilz ne furent prisez, et tellement que181 on a perdu sur une cape 20 s, une182 robe bleue, 4 lb, sur i pot amalette183 2 s, ensamble 102 s. Item a Iohannes de Luwere, clerc de messire Guillaume Bouchel, pour avoir receu comme notaire le testament d’icelluy, et le grosse en papier, ont este donnez 40 s. [p. 32] IIII Somme des dictes mises communes 212 lb 7 s 11 d. Somme totale de toutes les mises 1368 lb 1 s 6 d. Et le somme totale de recepte porte 2464 lb 7 s 1 d obl. Ainsy appert qu’il demeure tant en argent comme en debtes a employer selon le teneur du testament a faire celebrer messes et en autres ouvres de misericordie a le discretion de ses executeurs, 973 lb 5 s 10 d ob. Anno domini mill° quadragintesimo septuagesimo quinto, die vicesima septima Novembris ad hoc assignata, fuit presens compotus per dominos executores redditus et dominos auditores comptorum 179 180 182

183

Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “doublier 4”: nappe en tout genre, serviette, ligne de table. Entered superscript. 181 MS: here isolated l, crossed out. MS: robe bleue, written twice, crossed out. The scribe left the price out, so he crossed out the text and rewrote the entry toward the margin. Not in any of the lexica consulted, but cf. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “mailleter”: frapper à coups de maillet, a common procedure of certain forms of metalwork.

823

824

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

in loco capitulari ecclesie Cameracensis auditus Me presente. Bouchel G.

[Account of the Execution of the Residue of Du Fay’s Will] [p. 33] Compte du residu des biens de feu jadis venerable seigneur maistre Guillaume Du Fay, en son vivant chanoine de Cambray, que font et rendent Jehan de Rosut, Raoul Mortier, chanoines, et Pierre de Wez, cappellain, et presbitres en l’eglise du dict Cambray, a leurs tres honnores seigneurs, messires de capitule d’icelle eglise, selon leurs ordonnances en le fin de deux ans apres le trespas, qui furent accomplis le xxviie Novembre an present, iiiic lxxvi, tout a le monnoye de Cambray xxiiii, et monnoye de Flandre, qui valent 20 s tournois pour le livre.

Et premiers recepte Comme appert par le fin des comptes d’icelle execution, rendus a leurs dictes tres honnores seigneurs, messires de capitule de Cambray le xxviie de Novembre l’an lxxv, demourerent tant en argent comme en debtes qui relieuvent cy les dessus dictes executeurs, 973 lb 5 s 10 d ob.

Ie Somme par soy184 Aultre recepte faite d’aucuns dont es premieres comptes n’avoit este riens receu ad cause qu’il y avoit discord et ne pooit on lors scavoir quelles sommes estoient devees Premiers de Henry Sainte Dieu, recepteur de l’eglise de madame Sainte Wautrud de Mons en Haynaut, ad cause des fruis de le prebende qui fu au dict deffunct pour l’an iiiic lxxiiii dont es dicts premiers comptes fu faite recepte a bon compte de 100 lb, et ilz on monte a 188 lb 7 s 7 d, monnoye de Haynaut, qui valent 102 lb 19 s 3 d ob., ainsi cy en recepte 102 lb 19 s 3 d ob. [p. 34] Item de messire Jehan Regis, chanoine de Soignies, ad cause du personnage de Watiebranne que fu au dict deffunct, ont este recuptes 184

A line is drawn from the end of this entry to the figure listed at the end of the previous paragraph.

[Account of the Execution of the Residue of Du Fay’s Will]

qu’il debuoit pour ung demi an avant qu’il fu permue par le dict deffunct 20 lb Hainaut, qui valent 16 lb 13 s 4 d. Item du cure de Peruwes, ad cause de le capelle au dict lieu qui fu au dict deffunct, ont este recouvrez, oultre ce que au premiers compte fu faite recepte 50 s 10 d. Item de messire Jehan Renart, chanoine de Conde, le quel debouit par an au dict deffunct sur se cure de Goy xxxii salus de pension aux termes de Noel et Saint Jehan, estimes chacun salut a lviii,185 qui sont par an 92 lb 16 s, monnoye de Hainaut, pour rate de temps depuis le Saint Jehan Baptiste iiiic lxxiiii jusques au jour du trepas d’icellui deffunct, qui fu le xxviie de Novembre ensievent,186 39 lb 5 s 2 d, monnoye de Hainaut, qui valent 32 lb 14 s 3 d. IIe Somme des dictes parties 108 lb 17 s 8 d ob. Somme totale de recepte 1082 lb 3 s 7 d. [p. 35] S’ensieut le declaration comment et par quelle maniere le dessus dicte somme de recepte a este expesee selont l’ordonnance et volente darrainne d’icelui deffunct. Premiers pour le viii de messieurs de capitule de le recepte dessus dicte, dont ilz n’avoient riens eubt au premier compte montant a 108 lb 17 s 8 d ob., pour chacune livre 6 s, sont 54 s 6 d. Qui se doibuent distribuer a xxviii qui furent a le redicion des dictes premieres comptes, a chacun 23 d, croissent 10 d. Item ont fait faire les dessus dicts executeurs iii cassis de fer et de fil d’archa es iii verieres de le capelle Saint Estiene, pour les preserver d’estre rompues, pour lesquelz ont este exposees 18 lb 15 s. Item en le fin de l’an du trespas du dict deffunct ont este celebres plusieurs messes et faittes plusieurs aumosnes et distributions, tant aux grans vicaires et petits comme aux habitues, enfans de coer, et povres mendiants ce dict jour, en tout montant a 12 lb 12 s 8 d. Item ad cause des fondations ordonnees par le dict deffunct en le communaulte des grans vicaires d’icelle eglise qui sont par an de i obit, xvii messes, dont les iii sont a notte, certaine alumerie de iiii chirons le samedi et aultres festes entrues187 que on dit le Salve, et en aulcunes grandes festes, montant a 8 lb 12 s pour les furnier 185 187

MS has no monetary term here. 186 MS: sic. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “entrues”: pendant ce temps.

825

826

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

entierement jusques a le Saint Jehan Baptiste iiiic lxxvii, que l’office de l’assize commenchera a paiier, ont este exposees oultre ce que aux premieres comptes a este faite mise, 11 lb 4 s. Item messire Jehan Regis, chanoine de Soignies, qui fu clerc au dict deffunct, avoit receu du parsonnage de Watiebraine 16 lb 13 s 4 d, se li ont donne188 dessus dicts executeurs une chainture toute d’argent, qui fu prise 13 lb moienne lesquelles parties c’est comprins et obligie de fonder en le dicte eglise, comme il a fait, ung obit perpetuel pour le dict deffunct, sont 29 lb 13 s 4 d.189 [p. 36] Item pour secourir et aidier les ouvrages qui se font en aucuns lieux de ceste cite leur les dessus dicts executeurs ont, perceu estre bien employe, ont donne190 plusieurs fois a l’ospital Saint Julien 100 s, et de Saint Jaque, 100 s, a l’eglise de Saint Gery,191 26 lb, a l’eglise Saint Nicolay, 31 lb, et pour parcloire l’attre Saint Fiacre 20 lb, ensamble 97 lb. Item a l’office de le fabrique de l’eglise de Cambray pour supporter les cherges qu’elle a, 60 lb, et pour pareil a le grande assize, 40 lb, sont 100 lb. Item demeurerent en arrirage deus a ceste execution declares au papier de le dicte execution inclus i livret de 40 s, 40 lb 9 s 4 d. Et le sourplus du dict residu, selon l’ordonnance de le derraine volente du dict deffunct a este distribue a faire celebrer messes et en aultres oeuvres pitoiables et de misericordie a le discretion d’iceulx ses executeurs, montat a 749 lb 14 s 9 d. Somme totale des dictes mises 1082 lb 3s 7d. Lequelle est equale a le recepte [pp. 37–38 blank: fascicle ends with p. 38]

[Inventory of Du Fay’s Estate] [p. 39] Inventaire des biens meubles appartenant a feu venerable seigneur monsieur maistre Guillaume Du fay, en son vivant chanoine 188 189

190

191

MS: here the scribe probably left out an article, les. This entry has some apparent scribal errors, mostly missing articles, that obscure its sense. The executors returned to Regis the monies he had paid to Du Fay’s estate and, in addition, gave him the silver belt to endow Du Fay’s obit at Soignies. MS: a, crossed out. Note also that the ont before the clause between the commas, though not crossed out, is redundant. MS: a, crossed out.

[Inventory of Du Fay’s Estate]

de Cambray, lequel trespassa l’an mil iiiic lxxiiii, le xxviie jour de Novembre, fut par venerables et circumspectz seigneurs maistres Regnault des Lyons, Jehan du Rosut, Raoul Mortier, chanoines, et sire Pierre de Wez, chappellain de la dicte eglise, et192 moy, Iohannes de Luwere, notaire publique, present.

Or et argent monnoyer Premiers en une bourse de blanc cuir: Troix193 nobles au soleil, a lxviii patars, sont 16 lb. i noble henricus, 4 lb 16 s 8 d. i lyon, 40 s. ii florins d’Utrecht, 70 s. et iii oboles postulat,194 chacun 23 s 4 d, sont 70 s. Item en une aultre blancque bourse ont este trouvez deux reaulx195 de 100 s. iiii couronnes de diverses fachons alouees a l’orfevre ensamble pour 8 lb 19 s 2 d. vii ducas, parmy i rider, chacun a 50 s, sont 17 lb 10 s. ii lyons, chacun 40 s sont 6 lb. ii salus, chacun 48 s 4 d, sont 3 lb 16 s 8 d. xxxvi guillaumes, chacun a 40 s, sont 72 lb. iiii pietres, chacun 33 s,196 4 d, sont 6 lb 13 s 4 d. vi florins a le croix de Saint Andrieu, chacun a 40 s, sont 12 lb. v aultres florins de Rin, chacun a 38 s 4 d, sont 9 lb 11 s 8 d. vi florins d’Utrecht, chacun a 35 s sont 10 lb 10 s. [p. 40] Item deux demi ryders, valent, 50 s. iiii demi escus, 4 lb 10 s. ii tierch197 de lions, 40 s. ii florins fredericus, 50 s. iiii florins postulat, a 23 s 4 d chacun, sont 4 lb 13 s 4 d. v oboles arnoldus, 100 s. Item en une grande bourse ont este trouvez xii gros, 11 lb 13 s 4 d. en sengles patars, 12 lb 18 s 4 d, chacun estime a 20 d et a 22 d ob., chacun patard, valent 14 lb 12 s 7 d ob. 192 194 195

196

MS: the abbreviation for et was added later on the margin. 193 MS: sic. In the account, p. 1, these are described as mailles postulat. See n. 5 above. This coin, given as royal on p. 1 of the account, was called “royal” and “ryal”; cf. Grierson, “Coinage,” 400. MS: originally 30s, corrected to 33s. 197 MS: sic.

827

828

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

en double patars, chacun estime a 40 d, sont 8 lb 13 s 4 d, et a 15 d le piece, sont 9 lb 15 s. en testars, a 4 s 2d chacun, 7 lb 14 s 2 d. en biscremons, 4 lb en tarelares Iohannes, 8 lb 6 s 8 d. Item en une aultre boursette en diverses pieches, 14 s 1 d ob. Somme de monnoye, 56 lb 13 s 11 d. Item encore en diverse monnoye, 50 s. Somme pour or et argent monnoyer 265 lb 4s 1d d.

[p. 41] Vaselle d’argent Premiers vi grandes tasses bouillonnees aux fons et dorees aux bors, pesant vi mars, a 21 patars l’onche sont 84 lb. Item vi aultres tasses mineures, bouillonnees aux fons et dorees au bors, pesant v mars vii onches x esterlins, a 21 patars l’onche, 83 lb 2 s 6 d. Item i couvelet,198 vi gobeles dedens, deux aighieres et ii saliers pesant vii mars ii esterlins, a 20 patars l’onche, sont 93 lb 10 s. Item vi gobeles a rosectes dorees, pesant iii mars iiii esterlins, a 21 patars l’onche, 62 lb 6 s. Item une aighiere tortinee, esmaillie sur le couvercle de marguerites, et vi gobeles dedens, les gobeles pesant ii mars vii onches iiii199 esterlins, et l’aighiere ii mars une once iiii esterlins, au dict pris, ensamble v mars viii esterlins, valent 70 lb 14 s. Item ii aighieres gadonnes200 a i pommelet sur le couvercle dore, pesant v mars vi onches viii esterlins, a 21 patars l’onche, sont 81 lb 4s. Item une couppe a couvercle pesant ii mars iii onches x esterlins, au dict pris, 34 lb201 2 s 6 d. Item iii saliers haultes, a piez en fachon de roses, pesant ix onches i esterlin, a 21 patars [l’onche], 15 lb 16 s 9 d. Item iii aultres saliers toutes omples a couvercles a boutons d’argent dore, pesant vi onches xv esterlins, 11 lb 16 s 3 d. Item xii louches a mances copees a vi costes, pesant xiiii onches xiii esterlins, au dict pris, 25 lb 14 s 6 d. Item pour ung calice platine et l’ouchette d’argent dore dedens, pesant xiii onches, au dict prist, valent 22 lb 15 s. 198 200

In the account, p. 3, tonnelet. 199 MS: 3, corrected to 4. In the inventory, p. 3, gandonees. 201 MS: 33, corrected to 34.

[Inventory of Du Fay’s Estate]

[p. 42] Joyaux Premiers une aloyere de noir satin en ung anniau d’argent, prisie 100 s. Item une coroye batu en argent a xv claux, bloucque et morgant d’argent, 60 s. Item une coroie de velours vermeil a xvi claux, bloucque et morgant d’argent, 60 s. Item une coroye de tissu noir a xii claux, bloucque202 et morgant d’argent, 4 lb. Item une coroye verde a vi claux, bloucque et morgant d’argent, 15 s. Item ung signet d’or pesant xxxiiii esterlins d’or, a xviii gr. l’esterlin, sont 26 lb. Baille a monsieur le doyen de Furnes pour la fabrique. Item ung quadrant d’argent prisie 20 s. Item une petitte bullette d’argent et ung annel couronne, 4 s. Item ung oeilles d’argent, 10 s. Item une paix d’ivoire, item une bourse203 de corporal et le boite, 20 s.204 Item une petite bullete d’argent et ung annel [canceled entry that duplicates one already made]. Item ung tassiau d’argent dore servant a une cape que le deffunct a donne en son vivant a l’eglise, pour quoy non prise. Item ung grant agnus dei d’argent dore pendant a ung cordel de verde soie, 60 s, baille a monsieur le doyen de Furnes pour Notre Dame des Fietres [no price given]. Item ung agnus dei d’or a iiii gros perles, baille a monsieur le doyen de Furnes pour Notre Dame de Grace, 6 lb. Item i aultre agnus dei a iiii fleurs de lis, 10 s. [p. 43] Item ung agnus dei a iiii boutons d’argent en fachon de perles, 30 s. Item ung agnus dei ayant en escripture “de osse sancti Martini,”205 25 s. Item une annunciation d’ivoire encassee en argent dore a perles, 20 s. Item une burlette d’argent dore, escripte “de cingulo sancti Anthonii,” etc., 15 s. Item ung agnus dei ront d’argent dore, et le deffunct le dict en son testament est d’or, 6 s206 8 d. Item i207 signet d’argent dore a une pierre cornaline, 100 s. 202 204

205 207

MS: d’argent, crossed out. 203 MS: d’ivoire, crossed out. In the manuscript these three items are given in column format, but are bracketed and given a single price. In the account, p. 5, Mauri instead of Martini. 206 MS: originally 9s, corrected to 6s. MS: isolated g, crossed out.

829

830

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item i seau d’argent aux armes du deffunct, 30 s. Item i pommiau d’argent a ii anneles, 2 s 6 d. Item en menu fraitin, 10 s. Item une petitte chainturette de verde soye, 10 s. Somme, 152 lb 18s 2d.

Habits d’eglise Premiers ung souplis, pour A, 20 s. Item i souplis, pour B. 40 s. Item i aultre, pour C, 30 s. Item i aultre, pour D, 40 s. Item i aultre, pour E, 23 s. [p. 44] Item i aultre, pour F, 26 s. Item i aultre, pour G, 16 s. Item i aultre, pour H, 20 s. Item i aultre, pour I, 18 s. Item i aultre, pour K, 20 s. Item i aultre, pour L, 30 s. Item i aultre, pour M, 20 s. Item i aultre, pour N, 40 s. Item i aultre, pour O, 30 s. Item i sarot,208 pour P, 10 s. Item i sarot, pour Q, 12s. Item une aulmace,209 le meilleur, 16 lb. Item une aultre meure,210 100 s. Item ung dommiot211 a ung bouton d’argent, 100 s. Item i aultre a i dormiot212 d’argent dore, 30 s. Item une cape de soye, 8 lb.213 Item ie aultre de drap, 7 lb.

208 209

210 212 213

Not in Godefroy; a cope. Aumusse, which is mistranslated in modern French–English dictionaries as amice, which the inventory lists as amict. The almuce (amess) is a robe used at choral services; see Eisenhofer and Lechner, Liturgy, 147–50. The almuce, in fact, is the robe Du Fay is wearing in the portrait of him in the famous miniature of Le Champion de dames as well as in the sculpted likeness on his tombstone. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “meure”: fourrure de petit-gris. 211 Dalmatic. A scribal error; this word should be bouton. These were either pluvials or cappae magnae; see Eisenhofer and Lechner, Liturgy, 152.

[Inventory of Du Fay’s Estate]

Deux napes bentes,214 aube, amict, capele et chamt, estole, fanon,215 et une serviette servant en le capelle, 4 lb. Item i parement d’autel, d’ung drap de bourget, 8 s. Item l’autel ainsy qu’il se comporte, 100 s. Item une ymage de Notre Dame donnee a Magdelaine Waterlet, 30 s. Item i tablet double au personage feu sire Symon le Breton, 60 s. Item i oratoire et le scabelle, 10 s.

[p. 45] Habis de corps Premiers une robe grise fouree la plus part du fraux216 de martres et devant de martres, 20 lb. Item une aultre grise fouree de martres, toute a l’oit217 sur le colet neuf, 14 lb. Item une robe noire fouree de fissiaux,218 doublee de fuse219 deseure, 11 lb. Item une robe noire, fouree de noirs aigniaux,220 6 lb. Item une grise fouree de blancs aigniaux, 6 lb. Item ung tabart double de noire toile, 24 s. Item ung gris tabart de feutre, 12 s. Item une aulmucette fouree de noirs aigniaux, 4 s. Item une robe vermeille fouree de mertres, 46 lb. Item une robe de violet fouree de gorges de martres, 20 lb. Item une robe de camelot vermeil fouree de martres, 48 lb. Item une robe de drap221 d’asur fouree de gorges de martres, 24 lb, servie Henry Breuton pour 20 lb. Item une vermeille rosee fouree de menu vair,222 26 lb. Item une robe d’escarlate vermeille fouree de menu vair, 24 lb. Item une verde double de sendal223 vermeil, 12 lb. Item une sanguine double de noir tascas,224 16 lb. Item une robe noire double de satin vermeil, 9 lb. [p. 46] Item une gris double de saye noire, 10 lb. 214 217 218 219 221 223

224

Altar cloths. 215 Maniple. 216 Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “fraux”: fraude (fake). Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “oit 2,” gives it undefined. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “fissel”: chat sauvage. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “fuse 1”: futaine (fustian). 220 MS: aingniaux. MS: isolated s, crossed out. 222 Squirrel fur. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “sendal = cendal”: étoffe légere de soie unie qui parait avoir été analogue au taffetas. Not in any of the lexica consulted, but clearly a dialectal spelling for taffeta.

831

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4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item une vermeille fourrure de viez gris, 9 lb. Item un capron sanguine, double de vermeil tascas, a courte coruette, 30 s. Item i noir, a courte coruette, double de noir tascas, 100 s. Item i capron vermeil rose a courte coruette, 36 s. Item i capron de vermeil escarlate, 30 s. Item i noir a double coruette, 15 s. Item i capron noir a longhe coruette, 40 s. Item i paletost de vermeil escarlatte, 12 s. Item i pourpoint de camelot sanguin, 40 s. Item i capron noir a courte coruette, 30 s. Item i capronchel a chevauchier, 3 s. Item i birette de velours, 10 s. Item i capron a longhe courette noir, 24 s. Item i robe noire doublee de noire fuse, 4 lb.

Les parcavec225 et gourdinnes226 Premiers ung lit et parcavech, pour A, 12 lb. Item iii gourdinnes blancques, chiel,227 dossiere,228 et goutieres,229 avec les verghes, servant230 au lit en le cambre blancque hault sur le rue, 110 s. [p. 47] Item i lit et parcavech de couche, pour B, 30 s. Item i cheel et goutieres de blancque toille, servant a le couche de le dicte cambre, 16 s. Item i lit et parcavech, pour C, 16 lb. Item iii courans de gourdinnes roillees231 de blanc, vert, et vermeil avec le chiel et goutieres escriptes “sur le rose me repose,” 10 lb. Item i lit et parcavech, pour D, 4 lb. Item ii courans de gourdinnes pareilles, avec le232 chiel, dossieres, et goutieres, servant a le couche, 4 lb. Item i lit et parcavech, pour E, 6 lb. 225 226

227 228 229 230 231

Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “parcheveç”: traversin du lit. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “gordine”: abri, expanded in Tobler and Lommatzsch, Alfranzösisches Worterbuch, s.v. “gordine”: Bettvorhänge. Chiel, also spelled cheel = ciel [du lit]. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “dossiere”: rideau, tenture. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “goutieres”: part du ciel du lit, in this case the hangings. MS: servande, with “de” crossed out and “t” superscript. Relies, in this case “covered with.” 232 MS: scel, crossed out.

[Inventory of Du Fay’s Estate]

Item iiii courans de gourdinnes noires, chiel, dossiere, goutieres, et verghes servans au lit de la cambre bas tenant la salle, 4 lb. Item i lit et parcavech, pour F, 60 s. Item iiii courans de noires, gourdinnes, chiel, dossiere, goutieres, servans au lit empres le queminee en la cambre tenant la salle, 30 s. Item i lit et parcavech, pour G, 4 lb. Item i lit et parcavech, pour H, 10 lb. Item i lit et parcavech, pour I, 50 s. Item i aultre lit et parcavech, pour K, 16 s. Item i courant de blancque gourdinne et le verghe, servant en la cambre bas, 12 s. Item i petit lit et parcavech, pour L, 24 s.

[p. 48] Orilliers Premiers ung grant orillier, pour A, 7 s. Item i aultre, pour B, 8 s. Item i aultre, pour C, 10 s. Item i aultre, pour D, 8 s. Item i aultre, pour E, 8 s. Item i aultre, pour F, 8 s. Item i aultre entoye,233 pour F, 6 s. Item i aultre sans toye, pour G, 4 s. Item i orillier entoye en l’estude, 6 s.

Draps de pointure Premiers ung drap historie de plusieurs personnages d’enfans qui se baignent estant devant la queminee en la cambre monsieur d’Arras, 30 s. Item i aultre drap de le presse234 Notre Seigneur in vinea, 8 s. Item i aultre drap de la sepulture Notre Seigneur en le dicte cambre, 8 s. Item i drap de le patiente Job, 4 s. Item i drap de Saint Christofle, grant, 10 s. Item i drap des iii rois, 10 s. Item i drap viez du jugement Salamon, 7 s. 233 234

Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “entoier”: recouvrir de. . . une étoffe quelconque. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “presse”: rude besogne.

833

834

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item i drap d’ung personage d’ung chantre assis en cayere,235 et de Virgille pendant, 5 s. Item i drap de le vie Sainte Ghertrud, 12 s. Item i petit drap de Notre Dame ayant deux angeles autour du chief tenant ung drap, 12 s.236 [p. 49] Item i petit drap du crucifix Notre Seigneur, Sainte Katheline et Saint Pierre a ii costez, 3 s.237 Item i drap de la vie Sainte Barbe, 15 s. Item i tablet de iii personages avec les verghes et ii courans de gourdinnes, 4 lb.

Couvertoirs Premiers ung couvertoir pers,238 pour A, 20 s. Item i aultre couvertoir pers, pour B, 15 s. Item ie sarge239 vermeille, pour C, 4 lb. Item ung couvertoir vermeil, pour D, 70 s. Item i couvertoir pers, escript “sur le rose me repose,” pour E, 30 s. Item i couvertoir pers, pour F, 28 s. Item i couvertoir pers, escript “sur le rose me repose,” pour G, 4 lb. Item i aultre couvertoir pers, pour H, 40 s. Item ie grande krieutepointe,240 pour I, 60 s. Item ie aultre krieutepointe, pour K, 18 s. Item ie aultre krieute pointe, pour L, 22 s. Item ie krieutepointe, pour M, 24 s. Item i couvertoir pers roille,241 pour N, 10 s. Item ie quieutepointe, pour O, 15 s.

235 236 237 238 239

240

241

MS: sic; cf. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “caielle”: petite chaise. This entry and the preceding one are bracketed and given a single prize. Cf. the differing description of this painting in the sale account, p. 4. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “pers 1”: bleu. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “sargette”: dim. de serge, and Tobler and Lommatzsch, Worterbuch, s.v. “sarge”: serge, drap; this could have been a wall hanging. Godefroy, Dictionnaire (complement), s.v. “coutepointe”: courtepointe (quilt). Spelled also quieutepointe in the manuscript, though perhaps the two spellings refer to two slightly different kinds of needlework, since quieutepointe was also used to depict birch trees in some cushions listed below on p. 50 of the inventory. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “reille 1”: ridé.

[Inventory of Du Fay’s Estate]

[p. 50] Bancquiers et coussins Premier ung bancquier pers, pour A, 18 s. Item vi coussins pers de drap, 60 s. Item xii coussins aux armes du cardinal, 6 lb.242 Item vi coussins vers escrips “quant mieux ne puis,” 4 lb. Item vi aultres coussins a vi personages, 4 lb. Item ung bancquier vert, pour B, 100 s. Item i bancquier, pour C, 70 s. Item i bancquier, pour D, 40 s. Item i bancquier, pour E, 2 s. Item i bancquier, pour F, 14 s. Item i bancquier pers, pour G, 12 s. Item i bancquier pers, “sur le rose me repose,” pour H, 36 s. Item i aultre pareil, pour243 I, 20 s.244 Item i aultre pareil, pour K, 24 s. Item i aultre petit pareil, pour L, 12 s. Item xii coussins pers, escrips “sur le rose me repose,” 8 lb. Item vi coussins a fannes245 de quieutepointe, 60 s. Item vi coussins blancs seniez246 de feulles et fleurs, 3 lb. Item ung bancquier blanc, pour M, 30 s. Item i aultre bancquier blanc, pour N, 20 s. Item vi cossins pers et vers a diverses bestes volans, 30 s. Item x coussins pers a ung coste et vermiaulx a l’autre, 36 s. Item i petit bancquier, pour O, 6 s.

[p. 51] Linge Lincheulx247 Premiers une partie de lincheulx, pour A, 20 s. Item ie partie, pour B, 25 s. Item ie partie, pour C, 60 s. Item ie partie, pour D, 100 s. 242

243 245

246 247

“The Cardinal” must be Pierre d’Ailly, the last Cambrai cardinal to that date and apparently Du Fay’s first patron. MS: K, crossed out. 244 MS: xxiiii. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “fanne”: hêtre (beech-tree). Note that “Du Fayt” means “of the beech-grove.” Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “segnier”: marquer. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “lincel”: drap.

835

836

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item ie partie, pour E, 24 s. Item ie partie, pour F, 16 s. Item ie partie, pour G, 18 s. Item ie partie, pour H, 20 s. Item ie partie, pour I, 18 s. Item ie partie, pour K, 30 s. Item ie partie, pour L, 18 s. Item ie partie, pour M, 20 s. Item ie partie, pour N, 16 s. Item ie partie, pour O, 20 s. Item ie partie, pour Q, 8 s.248 Item ie partie, pour P, 10 s.

Napes Premiers une nape de iiii aulnes, pour A, 10 s. Item ie nape de vi aulnes, pour B, 30 s. Item ie aultre de iii aulnes, pour C, 4 s. Item ie aultre de vi aulnes, pour E,249 24 s. Item ie aultre de v aulnes, pour F, 15 s. Item ie aultre de iiii aulnes, pour G, 15 s. [p. 52] Item ie aultre de viii aulnes, pour H, 30 s. Item ie aultre de vii aulnes, pour I, 15 s. Item ie aultre de iiii aulnes, pour K, 14 s. Item ie de vii aulnes, pour L, 26 s. Item ie de vii aulnes, pour M, 26 s. Item ie de vii aulnes, pour N, 24 s. Item ie de v aulnes, pour O, 24 s. Item ie de iiii aulnes, pour P, 16 s. Item ie de vi aulnes, pour Q, 20 s. Item ie de v aulnes, pour R, 16 s. Item ie de v aulnes, pour S, 15 s. Item ie de ii aulnes, pour T, 4 s. Item ie de iiii aulnes, pour V, 8 s. Item ie de ii aulnes, pour X, 3 s. Item ie de ii aulnes, pour Y, 6 s. Item ie de iiii aulnes, pour z, 14 s. 248

249

Entries P and Q were copied as above and provided with a small sign before each letter to restore the proper order. MS: “D” crossed out, replaced with “E.”

[Inventory of Du Fay’s Estate]

Item ie de iii aulnes, pour Z. 6 s. Item ie de ii aulnes, pour 9, 5 s. Item ie de de iii aulnes, pour Aa, 6 s. Item ie de ii aulnes, pour Ab, 8 s. Item ie de ii aulnes, pour Ac, 18 d.250 Item ie de ii aulnes, pour Ad, 12 d.251 Item ie de iiii aulnes, pour D, 12 s. [sic] Item ie nape de vi aulnes, pour AE, 16 s. Item ie de vi aulnes, pour Af, 16 s. Item ie de ii aulnes, pour Ag, 8 s. Item ie de iiii aulnes, pour Ah, 8 s. Item ie de iii aulnes, pour Ai, 3 s. Item ie de ii aulnes, pour Ak, 5 s.

[p. 53] Doubliers252 Premiers i doublier de v aulnes, pour A, 4 s. Item i aultre de ii aulnes, pour B, 3 s 6 d. Item i aultre de iii aulnes, pour C, 3 s. Item i aultre de iii aulnes, pour D, 6 d.253 Item i aultre de ii aulnes, pour E, 2 s 6 d. Item i aultre de vi aulnes, pour F, 6 s. Item i aultre de vi aulnes, pour G, 6 s. Item i aultre de v aulnes, pour H, 9 s. Item i aultre de ii aulnes, pour I, 3 s. Item i aultre de iiii aulnes, pour K, 6 s. Item i aultre de vi aulnes, pour L, 12 s. Item i aultre de vi aulnes, pour M, 14 s. Item i aultre de x aulnes, pour N, 22 s. Item i aultre de vi aulnes, pour O, 7 s. Item i aultre de xii aulnes, pour P, 22 s. Item i aultre de x aulnes, pour Q, 20 s. Item i aultre de viii aulnes, pour R, 10s. Item i aultre de viii aulnes, pour S, 20 s. Item i aultre de xii aulnes, pour T, 24 s. Item i aultre de xii aulnes, pour V, 22 s. 250 252 253

MS: “s” crossed out, replaced with “d.” 251 MS: “s” crossed out, replaced with “d.” Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “Doublier 4”: nappe, serviette. MS: “s” crossed out, replaced with “d.”

837

838

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item i aultre de iiii aulnes, pour X, 4 s. Item i aultre de iiii aulnes, pour Y, 4 s. Item i aultre de xii aulnes, pour z, 16 s. Item i aultre de viii aulnes, pour Z, 15 s. Item i aultre de xii aulnes, pour 9, 24 s. Item i aultre de xi aulnes, pour Aa, 22 s. Item i aultre de iii aulnes, pour Ab, 3 s 6 d. Item i aultre de vii aulnes, pour Ac, 16 s. Item i aultre de xiiii aulnes, pour Ad, 22 s. Item i aultre de vi aulnes, pour AE, 5 s. Item i aultre de iiii aulnes, pour Af. 4 s. Item i aultre de v aulnes, pour Ag, 4 s. Item ii doubliers loyez ensamble, 12 d. Item ii doublier, pour Ah, 3 s. Item i aultre, pour Ai, 3 s.

[p. 54] Serviettes Premiers ii serviettes, pour A, 6 s. Item ii aultres, pour B, 12 s. Item ii serviettes, pour C, 8 s. Item ii serviettes, pour D, 6 s. Item ii serviettes, pour E, 4 s. Item ii serviettes, pour F, 6 s. Item ii serviettes, pour G, 12 s.

Toyes d’orilliers254 et keuverchiefz255 Premiers ii toyes d’orilliers, pour A, 3 s. Item une toye, pour B, 2 s. Item iii keuverchiefz, pour C, 10 s.

Estain Pos Premiers ung pot de pint, 20 s. Item i de iiii pintes, pour A, 10 s. Item i demy lot,256 pour B, 8 s. 254 256

Pillow covers; cf. entoyer. 255 Cf. couvercle, “cover” and chief, “head”: nightcaps. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “lot”: mesure pour les liquides contennant quatre pintes.

[Inventory of Du Fay’s Estate]

Ite, i lot, pour C, 12 s. Item i lot amalette, pour D, 12 s. [p. 55] Item i aultre lot, pour E, 12 s. Item i demi lot amalette, pour F, 6 s. Item i aultre, pour G, 8 s. Item i aultre, pour H, 6 s. Item ie pinte amalette, pour I, 5 s. Item i pinte, pour K, 6 s. Item i lot amalette, pour L, 12 s. Item i lot, pour M, 12 s. Item ie pinte, pour N, 4 s. Item ie pinte, pour O, 5 s. Item ie aultre, pour P, 3 s 6 d. Item ie aultre, pour Q, 3 s 6 d. Item i lot sans couvercle, 8 s. Item ie demi pinte couverte, pour R, 2 s. Item iii mesures lot, demi lot, et pinte, 14 s. Item ie aighiere, 3 s. Item iii saliers a ii endrois,257 18 d. Item ie boutaille d’estain, 20 s. Item ii pochonnes258 d’autel, 3 s. Item i pot de lot, pour S, 12s. Item iii vieses salieres couvertes, 18d. Item une fontaine de plonc,259 20s. Plas Premiers iii grans plas, pour A, 60 s. Item iii aultres plas, pour B, 40 s. Item i plat desparillie,260 pour C, 12 s. Item ie garde261 de tierchain,262 20 s. Item ii plas a piez, 20 s. [p. 56] Item ii estuielle263 d’aumosne, 15 s. Item v plas, pour D, 50 s. Item iii plas, pour E, 18 s. 257 258

259 260 261 262 263

MS: sic; the exact sense of endroit in this context is not clear. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “poçon”: pot, vase, tasse, burette; also Houdoy, Histoire, 329. These are the small flasks for wine and water. Variant of plomb; cf. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “plonquier”: recouvrir de plomb. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “despereiller,” p. pas., inégal. MS: ink has run here; reading tentative. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “tierçain”: sorte de tonneau. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “estuial”: vase à serrer quelque chose.

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4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item vi petis plas neufs, pour F, 30 s. Item vi aultres viez, pour G, 36 s. Item xii estuielles plates, pour H, 100 s. Item xii estuielles plattes, pour I, 54 s. Item vii estuielles parfondes,264 20 s. Item ii gardenapes, 4 s. Item iii esgoutoirs,265 9 s. Item ie dousaine de tailloirs querenez,266 25 s. Item ie aultre dousaine, 25 s. Item i plat parfont, 7 s. Item i pareil, 7 s. Item xii saussierins, 24 s. Item ii aultres saussierons, 23 s.

Caudelacs267 Caudrons Premiers ie caudiere a ii ornilles,268 60 s. Item i grant noir caudron, pour A, 12 s. Item i caudron blanc de blanc airain, 12 s. Item i aultre de rons arain, 8 s. Item i forneul269 hault de rons arain, 15 s. Item i noir caudron ratassele,270 6 s. Item i caudron a plat fons, 8 s. Item i noir souselet,271 3 s. Item ii petis caudronchiaux, 10 s. Item i viez caudronchiel noir, 3 s. Item i entonnoir, 18 d. 264 265

266 267

268

269

270 271

MS: pour K, crossed out. Cf. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “esgouter”: faire tomber, verser goutte à goutte. Thus an esgoutoir is a dropper. Serrated knives. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “chaudrelac”: cuivre, airain, tout utensil de cuivre qui sert à la cuisine. MS: ornll. Cf. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “ornicle”: bracelet; hence most likely ornilles are ring handles, but see also below, on p. 57 of the inventory, oreilles, abbreviated oreill. The tracing of this last word, however is quite different. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “fornelet”: petit fourneau, hence fourneul, a stove (a baking stove; cf. modern French fournil). Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “ratasseler”: rapiécer, raccomoder (patch up). Cf. modern French saucière, most likely a saucepan.

[Inventory of Du Fay’s Estate]

[p. 57] Bachins Premiers i grant bachin a laver, pour A, 24 s. Item i aultre mineure, pour B, 20 s. Item i aultre, pour C, 18 s. Item i aultre, pour D, 12 s. Item i aultre, pour E, 10 s. Item iii bachins barbioirs, 20 s. Item x bachins de cambre, 24 s. Item i bachin barbioir a ung anniau pendant et vert reverse, 10 s. Item i bachin barbioir a i annel pendant ratassele, 6 s. Paielles272 Premiers ie paielle a ii oreilles, pour A, 16 s. Item ie aultre, pour B, 20 s. Item ie aultre, pour C, 8 s. Item ie aultre, pour D, 8 s. Item ie ronde paielle a mance de bos, 6 s. Item ie aultre a mance273 de fer, 4 s. Item ii beaux recoffoirs,274 20 s. Item ii aultres, 24 s. Item iiii gardenapes, 15 s. Item ie paielle couverte travulee,275 10 s. Pos Premiers ung ghenlairt,276 couvert, 26 s. Item i ghenlart mineure sans couverture, 11 s. Item i petit ghenlart, 6 s. [p. 58] Item i petit pot lavoir a double brocheron,277 7 s.278 Item ii pos lavoirs a fachon de fontannes, 30 s. Item i quiequaudaine279 couverte, 14 s. Item i aultre quiequaudaine non couverte, 8 s. Item i mortier aux espices, 12 s. 272 274 275

276

277 278 279

Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “paelle”: poêle (pan). 273 MS: isolated “f” crossed out. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “rechauffoire”: chauferette (chafing dish). Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “travoul” = “troil” and s.v. “troillier”: pressurer. Here travulee (pressed) may refer to the type of metalwork of the pail. No entry found in any lexicon, but cf. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, equates the root “geil” with “jal,” and defines “jalat” and “jalet (gelet)” as mesure pour les liquides. From the present context the ghenlart was some sort of kitchen pot, perhaps a stock pot. Note that all the other containers in this subsection of the inventory, with the exception of the mortier, are for liquids. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “brochereton”: gulot. In this case a double spout. MS: an unidentifiable letter crossed out before the vii. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “quicaudaine”: fontaine accrochée au mur et servant à laver les mains ou la vaiselle.

841

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4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Candelees Premiers ung beau candeler pendant en la cambre280 sur la rue, 60 s. Item i aultre en la cambre monsieur d’Arras, 36 s. Item iii grans candeles d’une fachon,281 20 s. Item iii aultres a longhes [larges: superscript] piez, 20 s. Item ii aultres mineures, 6 s. Item ii petis candelers d’unne fachon, 6 s. Item iii candelers despareillez, 6 s. Item i candeler a pipe, 18 d. Item ii petis basses candelers, 2 s. Item i camot tenant iiii pipes de cendelers, 20 s. Item ie boite de metal, 2 s.

Feraille Paielles Premiers ie grande paielle sumeire,282 12 s. Item ie mineure, 8 s. Item ie petite a mances de bos, 3 s. Item ie paielle ronde rataselee de keuvre, 3 s. Item ie mineure, 3 s. Item ie petite paielle ronde, 18 d. Item i louche a arrouser,283 12 d. Item ii louches de pos, 2 s. Item ii escummettes,284 2 s. Item i grauwet,285 6 d.

[p. 59] Hastiers286 et mesquines287 Premier ung hastier, le plus grant, 10 s. 280 281 282

283 285

286

287

MS: isolated “s” crossed out. A set of the same type; cf. the further entry qualifying others as despareillez, unequal. MS: sic; some ink run makes this word difficult to read, but Godefroy, Dictionnaire, has an undefined entry s.v. “saumierece,” citing the following: payelles a mances et payelles saumiereces. It may be that these were used to prepare pickled foods. Cf. modern French arroser, a ladle. 284 Cf. modern French écumeuse, skimmer. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “grau”: sorte de fourche, and “graue”: griffe. In this case a kitchen fork. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “hastier”: broche à rôtir, grand chenet de cuisine à plusieurs crans où l’on mettait plusieurs broches à la fois. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “meschine”: meuble servant à tenir la vaseille.

[Inventory of Du Fay’s Estate]

Item i aultre plus court, 6 s. Item i aultre a piet, 100 s. Item ii grandes mesquinnes, 10 s.

Aultre feraille Premiers i grant andier,288 4 s. Item i aultre petit, 18 d. Item i grant gril, 10 s. Item i aultre a ix broques, 2 s 6 d. Item i aultre a vii broques, 18 d. Item i petit a vi broques, 18 d. Item i waufier,289 8 s. Item i keuvre feu, 6 s. Item i couvercle de four, 5 s. Item ie pele290 de four, 12 d. Item v ansettes,291 2 s. Item ie truelle, 2 s. Item ie aultre petitte platte, 6 d. Item unes tenelles,292 18 d. Item ie fourquette, 12 d. Item unes aultres tenelles, 18 d. Item une cramillia,293 12 s. Item ii queminaux294 haults a serpens pendans en la salle, 20 s. Item ii assez paraulx a ceurs pendans, 12 s. Item ii coutraux de cuisine,295 6 s. Item i cat,296 de fer, 2 s. Item i aultre coutel de cuisine a noire mence, 4 s. Item ii queminaux basses a pommelit,297 8 s. 288 289

290 291

292 293 294 295 296

297

Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “andier”: landier. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “waffrier”: marchand de gauffres, but s.v. “waffreç”: qui sert à faire des gauffres; hence in this context waufrier was a waffle iron. Cf. modern French pelle, shovel. MS: ansiettes, cf. modern French anse, pot handle; these were probably tools to handle heated pots. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “tenelle”: pincettes. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “crameille”: and “cramillon”: crémaillière. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “cheminal”: chenet (fire-dog). Cf. modern French couteaux; see also item two entries down from this one, i aultre coutel. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “chat”: sorte de vaisseau de guerre, vaiseau de commerce, in this context probably an elongated container like modern roasting pots. MS: pommelet, with the e partly crossed out, leaving only a trait that looks like “i.”

843

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4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item i petit queminal viez, 2 s. Item ii queminaux, 8 s.

[p. 60] Enstaille298 Calits299 et passes Premiers i calit et passet,300 pour A, 30 s. Item i calit de couche et passet, pour B, 24 s.301 Item i calit et passes, pour C, 20 s. Item i calit de couche et passet, pour D, 40 s. Item i calit et passes, pour E, 54 s. Item i calit de couche et passet, pour F, 40 s. Item i calit, pour G, 40 s. Item i calit en l’estude, 16 s. Item i calit estroit en la cambre deseure la cuisine, 18 s.

Escrins302 et coffres303 Premiers un escrin, pour A, 40 s. Item i coffre, pour B, 20 s. Item i coffre, pour C, 20 s. Item i viez escrin en la despense, 3 s. Item i escrin, pour D, 40 s. Item i coffre a ront couvercle, pour E, 30 s. Item i coffre, pour F, 30 s. Item i coffre ront, pour G, 30 s. Item petit coffret, pour H, 8 s.

Tables et hescaux304 Premiers une305 longue table, pour A, 40 s. Item iii306 hescaux, pour B, 15 s. 298

299 300

301 302

303 304

305

Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “entaille”: ciselure; in this case wood furniture, probably with basrelief ornamentation. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “eschalis”: châlit, bois de lit. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “passet”: escabeau. High beds often require a small stool to allow getting in and out with ease. MS: 20s., crossed out and corrected to 24s. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “escrin”: reliquiaire, bibliothèque, archives. In this context probably Du Fay’s bookcases and other shelvings. MS: Coffirs, corrected to coffres. Not in any lexicon, but from the context this word is a dialectal variant of escabeaux, stools for the tables. MS: longhe, crossed out. 306 MS: isolated i, crossed out.

[Inventory of Du Fay’s Estate]

Item ii hescaux, pour C, 5 s. Item ie table ronde, pour D, 30 s. [p. 61] Item ie table quarree ployche,307 pour E, 70 s. Item iii hescaux, pour F, 6 s. Item ie table, pour G, 16 s. Item ie table, pour H, 6 s. Item ie table, pour L, 20 s. Item ii hescaux, pour K, 5 s. Item ii aultres, pour L, 5 s. Item ie table quarree ployche, pour M, 5 s. Item ie aultre longhe, pour N, 8 s. Item ie table, pour O, 6 s. Item ii hescaux, pour P, 3 s. Item ie table, pour Q, 24 s. Item ie table, pour R, 6 s. Item ii hescaux, pour S, 3 s. Item ie table quarre sans piet, pour T, 20 s.

Bancqs at escammes Premiers i grant bancq tournoir et passet, pour A, 40 s. Item i aultre, pour B, 12 s. Item i aultre, pour C, 15 s. Item i308 aultre, pour D, 30 s. Item ie escamme, pour E, 15 s. Item i bancq tournoir, pour F, 30 s. Item i bancquier, pour G, 10 s. Item i bancq a coffre, pour H, 5 s. Item i309 aultre, pour I, 60 s. Item i bancq tournoir, pour K, 30 s. Item i bancquet a iiii piez, pour O, 3 s. Item i bancq tournoir, pour M, 10 s. Item i bancq, pour N, 10 s. Item ii bancques, pour P, 3 s. Item i bancq deseure la cuisine, 14 s. 307

308

Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “ploich [= plois]”: maille du habuert, clôture formée de branches pliées et entrelacées, but cf. s.v. “ploiçon”: pli, and “ploit”: manière de plier. Hence in this context table ployche was probably a folding table. MS: ie, corrected to i. 309 MS: ie, corrected to i.

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[p. 62] Dreschoirs Premiers ung dreschoir a ii enclastres310 et ung passet, pour A, 60 s. Item i coutoir311 sans serrure, pour B, 20 s. Item i dreschoir de parement,312 pour C, 12 s. Item i beau dreschoir, pour D, 100 s. Item i coutoir, pour E, 23 s. Item i mestier313 en la despence, pour F, 24 s. Item une garderobe avec314 le verghe et gourdine,315 pour G, 30 s. Item i dreschoir, pour H, 36 s. Item i coutoir en l’estude, 30 s.

Cayeres et scabelles Premiers une cayere a dos, pour A, 20 s. Item ie largue cayere a dos a coffre, pour B, 34 s. Item vi cayeres de blanc bos plyoches, 10 s. Item ie cayere apoyeresse,316 pour C, 6 s. Item vi scabelles, pour D,317 24 s. Item vi scabelles, pour E, 24 s. Item vi aultres scabelles, pour F, 24 s. Item ie318 cayere barbioire, 6 s. Ite, ie cayere a dos deseure la cuisine, 12 s.

Garderobes Premiers une garderobe, pour A, 4 lb.

310 311

312

313

314

315 316

317

Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “encloistre”: compartiment. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “coustier”: gives only faiseur de matelas (mattress maker), but cf. modern French coutier, weaver. Du Fay’s coutoir was clearly a piece of furniture and most likely the place where draps were kept. The presence of one in the study is not surprising given that there was also a lit with its gourdinnes and goutieres in the room. In modern French parement means an ornament, or certain parts of a dress; but this word is used here as a direct translation of the common late Latin paramenta (used almost always in plural) to refer to ecclesiastical vestments. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “mestier”: meubles divers, office de salle à manger, sorte de flambeau. Du Fay’s mestier could have been any kind of pantry furniture. MS: parvec, surely a scribal error like dozens of others noted elsewhere in this manuscript, except that in this case the scribe did not correct it. MS: goudine, with the “r” added superscript. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “apoieresse”: où l’on peu s’apurer, à dossier. Here it might also have meant a chair with a reclinatory, since others are described as cayeres a dos. MS: E, crossed out, corrected to D. 318 MS: kau, crossed out.

[Inventory of Du Fay’s Estate]

[p. 63] Hascutes319 Premiers une corne de cerf, 8 s. Item ung horloge, 60 s. Item iii escamelles, 20 s. Item i petit mortier, 5 s. Item i aultre mortier, 8 s. Item i blocq en le cuisine, 2 s. Item i viez mortier, 5 s. Item ie estapette,320 3 s. Item ie aultre, 12 d. Item ie boite chevauchier, 10 s. Item ii vieses escamelles, 10 s. Item i souflot,321 5 s. Item ie nates des ii cambres en hault, 25 s.322 Item i chief Saint Jehan, 10 s. Item ie lanterne de voirre, 8 s. Item i alembicq, 10 s. Item i tonere en plusieurs partes de cuvelerie au second celier, 10 s. Item i cuvier, 2 s. Item ie corde, 5 s. Item au premier celier ung tonre323 et une cuvelette, 10 s. Item une gardemangier, 3 s. Item ie baignoire, ung seau et ung miniau,324 7 s. Totale somme 804 lb 19 s. deduis 20 s qu’il y avoit peu en une pige des lincheux

[p. 64] Livres Premiers ung messel en petit volume couvert de noir cuir de chamois commenchant au second feulliet nuntiare et au penultime sanctificati, 60 s. 319

320 321 322 323

324

Not in any lexicon, but cf. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “achoeste”: aquêt. Significantly, Godefroy cites as his text ses achoestes et ses mobles. Thus in this context hascutes means “things,” or “miscellaneous things,” which is precisely what is then inventoried under this heading. Cf. the menu fraitin near the end of the jewelry inventory. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “estape”: perche. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “soufflot”: soufflet (bellows). MS: 20s., crossed out and corrected to 25s. MS: sic, probably a corrupt spelling for a word designating some form of barrel (tonnel, tonneau). Cf. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, s.v. “minete 3”: cuvette, baquet.

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4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item ung biau breviaire en velin couvert de noir velours a ii cloans d’argent325 dore comenchant au second feuillet apres le kalendrier326 de via iusta, et au penultime en rouge lettre iii ii° n° L., 28 lb.327 Item ung messel en deux volumes a l’usage de Rome, commenchant celuy et l’advent au second feuillet apres le kalendrier arbores, au penultime sedes ad. Et le second au second feuillet, est christus alleluia, et au penultime, perpetui ignibus, 20 lb. Item ung psaultier ayant plusieurs ymages et decorations devant, couvert de noir chammois a saguinnes cloans, 100 s. Item i grant breviaire a l’usage de Rome et iiii affiques d’argent et ii dores, commenchant au second feuillet secula amen, et au penultime328 consurge, 20 lb. Ite, i petit livret329 couvert de noir a ung bouton de fils d’argent, commenchant au second feuillet, rum opera, 15 d. Item i journet petit couvert de noir, commenchant au second feuillet apres le kalendrier, sainte, et une agrape de keuvre, 40 s. [p. 65] Item une Legende Doree, commenchant au second feuillet, partes vaporis, et au penultime deum usque ad, 6 lb. Item une boutaille a fachon de livre, 10 s. Item i viez breviaire assez caduque, 30 s. Item i livre330 en papier contenant plusieurs sermons pour nouviaux prescheurs, commenchant au second feuillet est signum caritate, et au penultime donant le repertoire, vos etc., 20 s. Item i livre en papier contenant le pelerinages de l’ame en rime, 23 s. Item i livre en grant volume en parchemin, contenant les messes de Saint Anthoine de331 Pade, avec plusieurs altres anthiennes en noire note, 40 s. Item i virgille en papier, 50 s. Item i livre en papier contenant Sacramentale Guillermi Parisis et Guillermi de Monte Lauduno, 50 s. Item i livre332 contenant l’istoire Sainte Barbe ayant l’ymage sante Barbe, 40 s. Item le livre des bonnes moeurs, 40 s. Item i livre333 de martirloges en papier a l’usage de Antvers, 12 s.

325 327 330 332

MS: d’argant, corrected to d’argent. 326 MS: de crossed out. MS: 29, corrected to 28. 328 MS: ge crossed out. 329 MS: journet crossed out. MS: livre written twice, first time crossed out. 331 MS: Padua, crossed out. MS: spelled liver. 333 MS: livres.

[Guillaume Du Fay’s Last Will and Testament]

Item i viez livre en parchemin intitule334 Flores excerpti de candela magistri Garlandi, 6 s. Item i livret en parchemin de335 plusieurs sermons commenchant au second feuillet apres la table, digito huius, 24 s. Item i viez livret intitule Micrologus, 5 s. Item i livret intitule Speculum ecclesie, commenchant au second feuillet, mortis raucu,336 5 s. Item i livre de remediis Fortune imperfectus,337 6 s. [p. 66] Item unes decretales viesses sans gloses, 30 s. Item unes heures Notre Dame en papier, 10 s. Item i livre de chanterie que fu a feu messieur Symon le Breton, 20 s. Item i petit livret en papier contenant Eglogas magistri Martini le Franc, 2 s. Item le livre de le messe de Saint Anthoine de Vienne et de Requiem, 15 s.

Livres de chanterie donez par le deffunct a monseigneur le duc Ung petit livre a vermeille couverture et agrapes de keuvre. Item iiii livres d’une grandeur de diverse chanterie. Item i petit livret de chanchons Item i livre des louenges de musique et la messe Ave regina celorum. [pp. 67–68, blank; fascicle ends on p. 66]

[Guillaume Du Fay’s Last Will and Testament] [p. 69] Dies nostros sicut umbra declinaverunt, et velut aqua decurrens rapidis ad mortem trahimur gressibus; cuius et si certa sit omnibus necessitas die tamen aut qualiter venerit, nullus non ignorat, nec aliud est in sorte hominum felicius, ymo nulla preter hec felicitas, quam sub fine bono presentem claudere vitam. Quem ut quis attingat facilius, prudenter agit si prius, sospitate fruens, de temporalium dispositione cogitat ne, dum cor sursum magis erigere convenit, cure graves subeant, quibus mens, infima meditando, a conditoris sui summique boni contemplatione retrahatur. Hec perpendens, ego, Guillermus Du Fay, Cameracensis et sancte 334 335

MS: intitule, copied twice, crossed out the first time. MS: en, crossed out, superscript with de. 336 MS: sic.

337

MS: sic.

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4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Waldetrudis Montensis ecclesiarum canonicus prebendatus, nolens ab hoc seculo intestatus decedere, agens primitus gratias deo pro universis donis ab eo michi, preter merita, largiflue impensis, in nomine eiusdem domini Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, testamentum, ordinationem, seu ultimam voluntatem meam condo, facio, et ordino in modum qui sequitur. In primis siquidem profiteor me veram et orthodoxam fidem catholicam tenere, quam sancta nostra ecclesia docet et predicat, in illaque vivere velle atque mori, protestans quod, si quod absit, furia, amentia, infirmitate, vel alio eventu sinistro me in futurum aliquid dicere vel facere contingat, quod sinceritati eiusdem fidei videatur contraire, ex nunc illud detestor, revoco, et annullo, petens michi, vita comite, sacramenta ecclesiastica debita et consueta ministrari, et si forte tunc illa petere non possem aut scirem, animam vero meam, dum corporis ergastulo exuta fuerit, domino deo338 meo, intemerate virgini Marie, matri dei, sanctis Michaeli archangeli, Johanni Baptiste, Petro, Paulo, Nicolao, Anthonio, Katherine, Barbare, totique curie supernorum civium humiliter et devote commendo. Corpus vero sive vile cadaver ecclesiastice sepulture in dicta venerabili ecclesia Cameracensis, scilicet in cappella sancti Stephani, ante representationem meam lapidam, quam inibi fieri feci meis expensis, quem locum domini mei capituli michi gratiose concesserunt, unde gratias ago. Item lego presbitero qui michi sacramenta in extremis ministrabit [p. 70] viginti solidos Tornacenses,339 monete Cameracensis, si decanus fuerit, 40 s, ipsius clerico quinque solidos. Item volo de per me debitis satisfieri, et forefacta emendari. Item volo exequias funeris mei fieri honeste in ecclesia Cameracensi cum pulsatione, toto luminari, et accensione quatuor cereorum ante ymaginem sancti Anthonii de Padua et epitaphium meum in dicta capella sancti Stephani, et quod ad missam cantetur sequentia Dies illa etc., interessentibus autem in illis singulis dominis canonicis lego 20 s, et pro psalterio 3 s 4 d, magnis vicariis 10 s, parvis vicariis 8 s 4 d, capellanis ac francis sergantis et ballivo 6 s 8 d, pueris altaris altaris,340 turiario, nuntio, parvis sergantis, et serganto ballivi, ac clericis capellaniarum, 3 s 4 d, cappellano et clerico revestiarii, pro laboribus eorum, cuilibet 10 s. Item vicariis magnis et parvis ut simul in ipsis exequiis psalmodient et cantent, et ipso die simul honeste reficiantur, ultra premissa 8 lb Tornacenses Et pueris altaris simul ut orent pro me, qui in eorum ordine puer serviens honores radicitus et commoda ex ipso servitio me consecutum 338 339

340

MS: superscript addition. MS: t+; Houdoy, Histoire, 410, reads parisiensis, and similar readings at all corresponding places. MS: sic.

[Guillaume Du Fay’s Last Will and Testament]

profiteor 40 s. Item eodem die dicantur pro animabus mea, parentum, et benefactorum meorum tot misse quot sacerdotes poterunt reperiri, et cuilibet celebranti dentur tres solidi 4 d, distribuanturque vi mesure bladii in panem conversi, et quot erunt pani tot cum illis denarii pauperibus erogentur. Item dicatur psalterium bene et distincte, cum pulsatione, et tam parvis vicariis quam cloquemando satisfiat valde bene, ad discretionem meorum executorum. Item lego cuilibet dominorum meorum in deportatione funeris mei ad ecclesiam 20 d, magnis vicariis 10 d, ceteris vero de choro 6 d. Item volo et ordino quod postquam ecclesiastica sacramenta michi fuerint ministrata, et ad agoniam tendere videbor, si, hora pati possit, sint octo ex sociis ecclesie iuxta lectum meum, qui submissa voce cantent hympno Magno salutis gaudio, pro quo lego 40 s Tornacenses, quo hympno finito pueri altaris una cum magistro eorum et duobus341 ex sociis, inibi similiter presentes,342 decantent motetum meum de Ave regina celorum, pro quo eis lego 30 s. [p. 71] Item lego Anthonio Hardi, filiolo meo, librum in quo habetur legenda sancte Brabare [sic] in latino, et librum bonorum meorum.343 Item lego commatri mee, uxorem Jacobi Hardi, unum ex meis agnus dei de puro auro. Item lego ymagini beate Marie Cameracensis super altare feretrorum magnum agnum dei de argento deaurato. Item lego capelle sancti Stephani una cum344 libro in quo continetur Missa Sancti Anthonii de Padua in pergameno, unum alium librum papireum magni voluminis continentem Missam Sancti Anthonii Viennensis, et missam meam De Requiem. Item volo quod quicumque dominorum meorum post obitum meum domum meam habuerit possit, si voluerit, capellam meam fulsitam, prout est, pro pretio appretiato optare. Item lego ecclesie sancti Auberti Cameracensis, tabulam que est in aula mea super caminum, cum onere quod teneantur religiosi pro anima mea celebrare in eorum ecclesia, pro semel, unum obitum solemnem. Item lego domino Martino Courtois figuram regis quam misit michi Johannes de Fontenay, cum tabula que est super hostium camere mee quam ipsum tulit de Turonibus. Item lego domino meo reverendo domino Episcopo Atrebatensis345 cultellum meum regalem quem misit michi Rex Sicilie. 341 343

344 345

MS: et, crossed out. 342 MS: one letter, illegible, crossed out. MS: sic, for morum, in this case a simple scribal error, clearly a product of vernacular contamination; cf. moeurs. MS: al, crossed out. Pierre de Ranchicourt, former canon of Cambrai, bishop of Arras who consecrated the Cambrai cathedral in 1472, and was a frequent house guest of Du Fay. One of the rooms in his house was known as “the room of the Lord of Arras.”

851

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4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

Item lego domino Goberto le Mannier figuram mortis. Item lego tabulam quam michi dimisit quondam dominus meus et confrater dominus Symon le Breton, ubi est ymago Beate Mariae Virginis cum representatione ipsius domini Symonis, magnis vicariis, ut ponatur diebus festivis, et in diebus sui et mei obituum, super altare. Item lego agnum dei, quem habui ab eodem domino Symone le Breton, ymagini Beate Marie de Gratia in capella Trinitatis ut ponatur cum aliis iocalibus. Item lego domino Alexandro servitori meo, casu quo michi in die obitus mei servierit, pro servitiis michi impensis, centum lb Turonenses, cum manipulis curatorum, et libro quem dedit michi frater Guillermus Poree,346 et volo quod possit, post obitum meum, de bonis post dominos executores meos infra nominatos tantum accipere pro pretio imposito quantum ascendit dictum legatum centum lb. Item lego domino Petro de Vado347 20 lb. Item fabrice ecclesie Cameracensis 40 lb. Item fabrice ecclesie sancte [p. 72] Waldetrudis Montensis 20 lb, et fabrice ecclesie Beate Marie Condatensis 100 s. Item lego Magno Cartusie 20 lb. Item conventui fratrum minorum huius civitatis, quia sum in recommendationibus totius ordinis, 100 s. Item conventui fratrum predicatorum Valencensi, quia similiter sum in recommendationibus orationum et devotionum totius ordinis, prout per litteras desuper factas quas habeo348 latius constat, 100 s. Item lego magistro Gerardo, medico, canonico Atrebatensi,349 20 lb pro servitiis michi impensis. Item lego mense domini abbatis sancti Auberti, in qua sepissime et egregie refectionem cepi, 10 lb, vocatis aliquibus dominis et amicis iuxta suam discretionem. Item lego domino Petro de Vado tabulam illam quam michi vita comite donavit, una cum alia tabula que est in parva camera, in qua est ymago beate Virginis associata350 ymaginibus apostolorum Petri et Pauli, etc. Item volo quod xii de sufficientoribus sive sint magni sive parvi vicarii in crastinum exequiarum decantent missa meam De Requiem in capella sancti Stephani, et in fine misse, post requiescant in pace, dicant unam351 de sequentiis aliis quam voluerint, deinde De profundis cum collecta Inclina352 et Fidelium,353 et pro hoc lego 4 lb Turonenses. Item lego hospitalibus sancti Iuliani 20 s, sancti Iohannis 346 347 348 350 352

353

Guillaume Poree, OSB, tenorista of the chapel of the dukes of Savoy from 1442 to 1459. Pierre de Wez, chaplain at Cambrai and one of Du Fay’s executors. MS: habete, corrected to habeo. 349 Gerard Watreleet; cf. account, p. 16. MS: sic, associata. 351 MS: isolated letter, “t.” It survives in the modern liturgy as the collect of the memorial Mass for a single deceased; cf. Liber usualis, p. 1819. A common collect for the dead that has survived into the modern liturgy, and is used in several liturgical locations; cf. Liber usualis, p. 1733.

[Guillaume Du Fay’s Last Will and Testament]

10 s, et sancti Iacobi 10 s. Item prisonariis in castro de Sollis 15 s. Item leprosis 10 s. Item cuilibet proborum antiquorum virorum sancti Petri de Bevres 2 s 6 d. Item cuilibet beghinagio sanctorum Vedasti, et Georgii, et de Lille, 10 s. Item recluse sancti Vedasti 20 s. Item Beghinagio de Cantimprato 15 s. Item volo certas fundationes meis expensis fieri per magnos vicarios quarum designatio sequitur. Primo volo habere, et per eosdem magnos vicarios in dicta capella sancti Stephani celebrari, unum obitum quolibet anno in perpetuum pro mea, parentumque, et benefactorum meorum animarum salute, pro cuius labore percipiant annuatim 30 s. Item volo, fundo, et ordino in eadem capella [p. 73] tres cereos ante tres ymagines et unum coram epitaphio accensuros, videlicet in die sancto pasche, et sancti Anthonii de Padua, necnon sancte Waldetrudis in omnibus horis et missis sancti Guillermi confessoris, singulisque diebus sabbatis, et aliis quibus antiphona Salve regina decantatur, quamdiu ipsa antiphona cum versiculo et collecta duraverit, quosquidem iiii°r cereos ad eorum, scilicet magnorum vicariorum, bis in anno, in festo videlicet nativitatis domini et in dicto festo sancti Anthonii Padani, renovari decerno, unde pro estimatione duarum lb. cere assigno annuatim 13 s 4 d. Item clerico eiusdem caritatis et capelle pro diligentia et accensione cereorum huiusmodi annuatim 5 s Tornacenses. Item in die festo sancti pasche hora magne misse chori ordino celebrari in eadem cappella missam unam de die cum memoria pro me et omnibus defunctis, ad instar misse que pro quondam Egidio de Bosco in die dominice adventus domini dicitur, pro qua celebranti 3 s 4 d. Item statuo in die sancti Anthonii de Padua in predicta capella perpetuo missam de eodem sancto per tres ex ipsis magnis vicariis, presbiterum scilicet dyaconum et subdyaconum, solemniter celebrandam, in qua assint magister puerorum et alii quicumque sufficientiores de choro, sive sint magni vicarii, sive parvi, vel cappellani, ad provisionem tamen dictorum magnorum vicariorum, qui missam per me compositam decantent, quibus assigno 30 s, inde cuilibet 3 s 4 d. Volo tamen quod magister puerorum prefatus, ultra dictam portionem, habeat pro suo labore 20 s. Sex autem pueri, qui post completorium in profesto ipsius sancti responsum Si quereris miracula cum versu et gloria,354 necnon motetum, O sydus hispanie de eodem sancto,355 et in crastinum ad missam Et in terra pax decantabunt, percipient 10 s, inde cuilibet 20 d. que omnia simul sunt 41 s 8 d. Volo insuper quod in fine huius misse legatur De profundis sicut in 354 355

A polyphonic setting of this respond by Du Fay survives. A polyphonic setting of this motet by Du Fay survives.

853

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4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

missa cappelle Trinitatis, presbitero incipiente, aliis respondentibus, cum orationibus Inclina et Fidelium, et post completorium veniant in dicta capella sancti Stephani socii qui fuerunt in missa, cantaturi antiphona O proles hispanie, super cantu plano, deinde dicant pueri versum et [p. 74] presbiteri collectam, postea vero dicant pueri motetum O lumen ecclesie356 vel alium ad libitum magistri eorum. Item volo quod in die sancte Waldetrudis, per eosdem magnos vicarios decantetur in dicta capella una missa de eadem sancta, et similiter in die sancti Guillermi confessoris, que est decima Februarii, in quibus missis fiat memoria de defunctis. Quod si pro cantandis huiusmodi duabus missis aliqui357 ex predictis magnis vicariis defuerint, poterunt illorum absentiam supplere quicumque sufficientes aut ydonei fuerint per eosdem vocati de corpore ecclesie; unde sacerdoti pro qualibet missa ordino dari 3 s 4 d,358 cuilibet vero illorum octo in singulis missis cantantium, 2 s, sunt insimul 38 s 8 d. Si autem festa sanctorum Anthonii, Guillermi, vel sancte Waldetrudis sabbato seu feria secunda, aut aliis impeditis diebus occurrerint, transferantur solemnitates missarum huiusmodi in crastinum vel diebus aliis convenientioribus ad tollendam concurrentiam. Item ibidem fundo et ordino quolibet mense secunda die mensis missam unam celebrari ad instar359 illius magistri Gregorii Nicolai,360 inde pro qualibet missa ordino et statuo 3 s 4 d, sunt simul 40 s. Omnes igitur misse dicende pro me et361 fundande per anni circulum, sunt numero xvii. In quarum et cuiuslibet fine a celebrante super tumbam meam aspersio fiat aque benedicte, pro quibus universis et singulis fideliter et pie faciendis ac salubriter adimplendis, ego Guillermus volo tradi et deliberari eisdem magnis vicariis et ad eorum commoditatem in pecuniam per meos executores summam centum viginti scutorum ad 40 s Tornacenses appreciatorum. Huius autem testamenti executores nomino et ordino venerabiles et carissimos dominos meos, dominos Reginaldum de Leonibus, Johannem de Rosut, Radulphum Mortier, canonicos, Petrum de Vado et Alexandrum Bouillart, cappellanos ecclesie Cameracensis, quibus humiliter supplico quatinus expensis bonorum meorum, huius executionis onus dignentur 356

357 360

361

If this motet was meant to be a work by Du Fay, which the will does not specify, it has not survived. MS: aliquu, corrected to aliqui. 358 MS: iii, corrected to iiii. 359 MS: illud, crossed out. Canon of Cambrai, secretary of the duke of Burgundy, who died in 1469. The inventory of his possessions, AN 4G 1039, included thirteen fascicles of parchment with Masses copied by Simon Mellet; see Houdoy, Histoire, 265. MS: pro, crossed out.

[Guillaume Du Fay’s Last Will and Testament]

assumere. Ita quod tres ex ipsis, altero impedito seu vacare huic rei forsan quod non credo nolente, tres reliqui proinde possunt omnia facere et exequi, ac si omnes adessent. Quorum tribus scilicet dominis canonicis, necnon domino Guillermo Bouchelli, secretario capituli, ultra salarium notariatus, si illum [p. 75] tunc excerceat, pro gratis michi impensis et spero impendendis servitiis, ut etiam assit dictis executoribus in agendis mee executionis, lego unam marcham argenti cuilibet, reliqui vero duo, scilicet domini Petrus de Vado et Alexander, sint contentis legato per me ipsis facto. Item lego domino Jacobo des Priers, consanguineo meo de Tornaco, quem per xviii menses vel circiter nutrivi, viginti scuta Frantie,362 proviso quod idem et parentes quitum me teneant de pagamento unius camere ad figuram pellicani, in quo scriptum est sur le rose me repose, quos suus pater dum viveret michi destinavit, de quo si faciat mentionem casso presens legatum. Item volo et ordino quod si omnibus fundationibus et ordinationibus premissis completis adhuc aliquod residuum fuerit de bonis meis restans, illum in missarum celebrationem, usque ad unum annuale si sufficierit, et alia pietatis opera convertatur ad discretionem meorum executorum. Per quod presens meum testamentum omnia et singula precedentia testamenta per me facta revoco, volens hoc valere iure testamenti codicillorum seu extreme voluntatis, aut quovis alio modo de iure vel consuetudine possibili meliori, de quo tamen variando, mutando, minuendo, augendo, revocandoque et annullando michi quamdiu mentis compos existam, retineo potestatem, dans prefatis executoribus meis potestatem, obscura si que sint, interpretandi ad eorum intellectum. Volo insuper quod si per cedulam manu mea aut persone publice vel autentice scriptam aut signatam, vel et per dominorum proborum testimonium constaret me in premissis aliquid immutasse, addidisse, vel subtraxisse, aut aliqua legata de novo fecisse, illa valeant, ac si in presenti testamenti363 descripta forent. [p. 76] Anno domini m° iiiic lxxiiii°, indictione septima, die vero octava mensis Julii, pontificatus sanctissimi in Christo patris et domini nostri domini Sixti, divina364 providentia pape quarti, anno tertio, circumspectus vir magister Guillermus Du Fay, canonicus ecclesie Cameracensis, sanus mente et intellectu, suum condidit testamentum sive ultime voluntatis ordinationem, precedentia revocavit, legata fecit, executores elegit, et alia 362 364

MS: sic. 363 MS: testamento. MS: badly drawn abbreviation for providentia, crossed out.

855

856

4. Guillaume Du Fay’s Will and Its Execution

fecit ac voluit prout superius describuntur, cum petitione instrumenti. Acta fuerunt hec Cameraci in loco capituli ecclesie Cameracensis, presentibus in hiis venerabilibus et circumspectis viris magistris Johanne de Busco, decretorum doctore, magno ministro, Jacobo Michaelis, canonicis, et Nichasio de Spina, presbiteris, cappellanis eiusdem ecclesie, testibus evocatis.

Bibliography

Primary Sources 1. Manuscripts (see also List of Abbreviations) Aosta, Archives Regionales, Archives Challant, carton 247. Aosta, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS 35. Responsoriale. Aosta, Cathedral, sixteenth century. Aosta, Biblioteca del Seminario Maggiore, MS 58. Gradual-Proser. Parish church of Ayas, sixteenth century. Assisi, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS 695. Troper (ordinary) and three prosers, thirteenth century (second half). Copied from models from Reims, Paris, and possibly Sens. Besançon, Archives départementales du Doubs, G 178. Chapter acts. Besançon, Cathedral of Saint-Étienne, fifteenth century. Besançon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 64. Breviary, pars aestiva. Besançon, SaintJean, later Cathedral, late thirteenth century. MS 712. Martyrologium of the cathedral of Saint-Étienne de Besançon. Martyrology, Obituary, Miscellanea. Besançon, Cathedral, thirteenth century with numerous later additions. Bologna, Archivio di Stato, Tesoreria e Contrallatore di Tesoreria, Registers 80–83. Accounts of the treasury of the Commune of Bologna, 1425–1428. Bruges, Archief van het Bisdom, Reeks 49–51. Collegiate church of Saint Donatian in Bruges, chapter acts 49 (1395–1414), 50 (1414–1438), 51 (1458–1454). Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, MS BR II.3824. Gradual and Proser. Dijon, Saint-Bénigne, mid-thirteenth century. Cambrai, Médiathèque municipale, MS 4. MS 12. Gradual, copied in 1540 by Martin L’Escuyer for Robert Croy, bishop of Cambrai. MS 29. Psalter, canticles, antiphons, some polyphonic hymns, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth century. Cambrai Cathedral. MS 38. Antiphoner. Cambrai Cathedral, thirteenth century. MS 39. Necrology-Calendar. Cambrai Cathedral, fourteenth–fifteenth century. MS 60. Gradual and Proser. Cambrai Cathedral, eleventh–twelfth century. MS 61. Gradual and Proser. Lille, St-Pierre, later Cambrai Cathedral, twelfth century. MS 146. Missal, pars hiemalis. Cambrai, St-Géry, fifteenth century.

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Bibliography MS 147. Missal, pars aestiva (continuation of 146). Cambrai, St-Géry, fifteenth century. MS 151. Missal, pars hiemalis. Cambrai Cathedral, fifteenth century, legacy of canon Paul Beye (d. 13 Feb. 1445). MS 152. Missal, pars hiemalis. Cambrai Cathedral, fifteenth century. MS 158. Votive Missal. Cambrai Cathedral, ca. 1440–1450. MS 181. Missal. Cambrai Cathedral (Chapel of the 11,000 Virgins), thirteenth century with additions of the fifteenth century. MS 184. Missal, pars hiemalis, use of Cambrai, fourteenth century with additions of the fifteenth century. MS 197. Obituary. Cambrai, collegiate church of Ste-Croix, fourteenth–fifteenth century. MS 232, Missal. Cambrai Cathedral, fifteenth century. MS 699. Julien de Ligne (d. 1605), collected notes on the history of the cathedral of Cambrai. MS 701. Denis-Henri Mutte (d. 1774), collection of notes for the history of the cathedral of Cambrai. MS 954. Compilation of treatises by Pierre d’Ailly, fifteenth century. MS 1046. François-Dominique Tranchant, list of archbishops, bishops, dignitaries, and canons of Cambrai, by order of dignities or prebends and then by chronology, ca. 1764. MS 1049. Collection of inscriptions and epitaphs in the cathedral compiled by chaplain François-Dominique Tranchant in 1764. MSS 1052–65, and Lille, Archives Départementales du Nord, 4 G 1090. Cathedral of Cambrai, chapter acts, 1364–1508. Old signatures A (CBM 1052) to P (CBM 1065). CBM 1053 had no signature, CBM 1055 is C–D, LAN 4 G is I. Old registers F (1428–1435), H (1439–1442), and N (1468–1476) are lost. Cambridge, St John’s College, MS D27. Consuetudinary. St. Mary’s York, fourteenth–fifteenth century. Cambridge, University Library, MS 710. Proser, Troper. Dublin, Trinity College, ca. 1360. Facsimile: Le Tropaire-Prosaire de Dublin, ed. René-Jean Hesbert, Monumenta Musicae Sacrae 4 (Rouen: Imprimerie Rouennaise, 1966). Chambéry, Archives départementales de Savoie, Inv. 24, SA 3604–08. Accounts of the chapel of Savoy, 1449–1459. (SA 3605, besides the booklet with the accounts, includes 26 separate pieces, most of them autograph quittances by members of the chapel.) Cividale dal Friuli, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, MS LVI. Gradual with tropes and proses. Cividale, Santa Maria Assunta, fourteenth century. MS LVIII. Gradual with tropes and proses. Cividale, Santa Maria Assunta, fourteenth century. MS LXXIX. Gradual with tropes and proses. Cividale, Santa Maria Assunta, fourteenth century.

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Cornell University Library, MS Rare BX C 36 0635 (olim MS B 31). Doubs, Archives départementales de la Côte d’Or, G 1128. Act of dedication of the Sainte-Chapelle of Dijon to the Order of the Golden Fleece, 1432. Ferrara, Museo della Cattedrale, Antifonario X. Antiphoner, de sanctis, pars hiemalis. Ferrara, ca. 1490. Florence, Archivio Arcivescovile, MS s.c. Antiphoner. Florence Cathedral, late fourteenth century. Florence, Archivio dell’Opera del Duomo, MS F. Antiphoner. Florence Cathedral, 1523. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Mediceo avanti il principato, filza 22, no. 118. Letter of Antonio Squarcialupi to Guillaume Du Fay (1 May 1467). MS VI 765. Letter of Du Fay to Giovanni de’ Medici (22 Feb. [1456]). Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Aedilium 151. Gradual. Florence Cathedral, fifteenth century. Florence, Biblioteca nazionale centrale, MS Magl. XIX. 79–81. Ledgers of the Camera Apostolica, 1410–1413. Fribourg (Switzerland), Bibliothèque des Cordeliers, MS 2. Gorizia, Biblioteca del Seminario Centrale, MS I. Proser-Troper. Gorizia, fourteenth century. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Library, MS Rare BX C 36 0635 (olim MS B 31). Ordo. North Italian, later Ferrara, twelfth century. Klosterneuburg, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 588. Gradual, tropes, proses. Klosterneuburg, thirteenth–fourteenth century. Kremsmünster, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 190. Gradual, Proser. Kremsmünster, fifteenth century. Laon, Archives départementales de l’Aisne, G 1850 ter. Laon Cathedral, chapter acts, 1407–1412. Lausanne, Archives cantonales vaduoises, MS DG 7/1. Lausanne Cathedral, chapter acts, fifteenth century. Lausanne, Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire, MS V 1184. Psalter and Hymnal. Lausanne, thirteenth century. Section de Manuscrits, MS 57: Samuel Gaudard, Catalogus venerabilium dominorum canonicorum insignis ecclesiae cathedralis Lausannensis, summo cum ex omnis generis veteribus manuscriptis, actis, instrumentis, documentis, et authenticis originalibus fideliter collectus. Seventeenth century. Lille, Archives départementales du Nord, 1 G 125, pièce 388. Douai, Chapter of Saint-Amé, Bull of Martin V ceding rights of collation of St-Amé de Douai of several chaplaincies or two semiprebends; among titulars is Jehan Du Fay, 15 July 1425. 1 G 155. Douai, Chapter of Saint-Amé, transcriptions and registers of testaments of canons and chaplains of Saint-Amé, 1452–1496. 4 G 87, pièce 1264. Bull of Eugenius IV ordering the chapter of Cambrai to attach the parish of Castrele to the Office of the Twelve Small Vicars, 10 Oct. 1439.

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Index

Ackerman, Alexander, 316 Adimari, Alamanno, 98 Adzemar, Lambert, 15 Agerulo, Marinus Nauclerius de, 70 Agricola. See Ackerman, Alexander Ailly, Pierre d’, 18, 21, 23–24, 53, 54–55, 288, 338 Tractatus de Reformatione Ecclesiae, 24 Alanus, Johannes, 10 Albergati, Niccolò, 71, 91–92, 97 Albert of Bavaria, 36 Alcuin, 170 Alençon, Louis d’ (cardinal), 14 Alençon, Philippe d’, 116 Alexander V (pope), 16, 18, 22, 116 Alexandre de Villedieu, Doctrinale, 21, 43, 337–338 Aleyn, Johannes. See Alanus, Johannes Alleluias, plainsong, 566–567 Alleluia V. Hic praecursor, 538–539 Allemand, Louis, 15, 16, 24, 53, 73, 75, 81–87, 91, 93, 96–97, 99, 123, 149, 150, 181, 244, 339, 344, 569–570 Allsen, Michael, 68, 78, 353, 356, 374, 387, 476 Amadeus IX (duke of Savoy), 247, 285 Amadeus VIII (duke of Savoy), 107, 123, 125–126, 134, 148, 156, 169, 181, 202, 228, 341, 344, 368, 497, 501. See also Felix V (pope) Ambros, August Wilhelm, 321 Amerval, Éloy d’ Le livre de la deablerie, 245 M. Dixerunt discipuli, 245 Amici, Nicolas. See L’Ami [Lami], Nicole Amiens, Jehan d’, 211n263 Amiet, Robert, 544 Anderson, Michael, 428, 434 Andrieu, François Armes, amours, 639 De Narcisus, 639 Angelico, Fra, 135 Anne of Lusignan, 125, 246, 285, 368, 479–480 Anonymous IV, 9

Anserin, Guillaume, 106, 107 Anthony Abbot, Saint liturgy for, 622–623 polyphonic propers for, 624–627 antiphoners, physical properties of, 193 Antoine (count of Estampes), 280 Antonia (maiden), 31 Antonin des Prez, 287 Antonio da Cividale, 116, 648 Apfel, Ernst, 374 Apostles, propers for, 564–565 Aquinas, Thomas, 481 Arnold de Halle, 5, 286n131 Aron, Pietro, 178, 320, 576 Ars subtilior, 5, 561 Aschbach, Joseph, 365 Assise du Cambrésis, 289–290 Assumption of the Virgin, at Cambrai, 297 Atlas, Allan, 669 Aubron, Firmin, 111 Auclou, Paul, 295, 312 Auclou, Robert, 24, 42, 75, 81–82, 83, 89, 97, 140, 149–150, 181, 184, 185, 189, 197, 236, 265, 332, 358, 565 Augustin, Jehan (“Dupassage”), 29, 113 Aurelian of Réôme, 331 Ave verum corpus natum, 481 Avignon, 12, 22, 115–116. See also schism Avril, François, 95, 209 Aynard, Jehan, 105, 107 Baillie, Hugh, 636 Baini, Giuseppe, 321 Baix, François, 323 ballade, as genre, 633, 639, 640 Baptistry of St. John, Florence, 3 Bari, 356 Bartolomei, Jacopo Antonio (“Ranuzio”), 16, 123, 134 Basilica del Santo, Padua, 578 Basilica of St. Anthony, Padua, 232–233 Battista Alberti, Leon, 135 Baudoin, Buissart, 287

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910

Index

Beata es Maria (antiphon), 604 Beaufort, Jacques de, 113 Bedyngham, John, 499, 666 M. Dueil angoisseux, 575 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 334, 497 Beldomandis, Prosdocimus de, 403 Belledame, Guillaume, 31–32, 152, 196, 198 Bellengues, Cardot de, 18 Bellengues, Richard de (“Cardot”), 114 Belle voliés (Cameracy), 44 Benedict XIII (pope), 5, 11, 13, 14, 22, 23, 111 Benerflins, Gilles de, 198 Bent, Margaret, 89, 118, 245, 334, 335, 397, 402, 428, 470, 478, 479, 481, 563, 569, 571, 627, 630, 631, 636, 638, 642, 658 Berger, Karol, 407 bergerettes, 648 Beringhen, Michiel van, 42, 183, 184, 238, 248–250, 265, 278, 313, 459, 546 Bernardi, Lodovico, 145 Bersele, 28, 37, 290, 293 Besançon, 251–252, 349 Besseler, Heinrich, 96, 261n147, 277n72, 323, 326, 351–352, 355–356, 365, 374, 376, 392, 403, 419, 425, 445, 480, 481, 482, 496, 499, 509, 513, 514, 575–576, 581, 592, 599, 622, 630, 636, 638, 665, 680, 682, 685 Bourdon und Fauxbourdon, 324, 336 Opera Omnia, 324–325, 413, 456, 465, 471, 484, 613 Béthune, Pierre de. See du Castel, Pierre Beulancourt, Jacques de (“Hardi”), 268 Beye, Henri, 238, 254 Beye, Paul, 183, 184 Beye, Pierre, 183 Binchois, Gilles, 13, 30, 31, 47, 95, 99, 127–129, 130, 197, 198, 199, 200, 209, 218, 235, 245, 277, 368, 403, 496–497, 499, 666, 668, 679, 683 Comme femme desconfortée, 669, 684 Dueil angoisseux, 649, 683 Filles a marier, 257 Je ne vis onques la pareille, 241 Triste plaisir, 649, 683 Blackburn, Bonnie, 307n247, 661n151 Bloxam, M. Jennifer, 610 Bockholdt, Rudolf, 325, 426, 482–483, 581 Boidin, Nicole, 199, 309 Boileux, Aimé, 163 Bologna, 81–82, 85, 339–340, 356, 480 Bomel, Pierre de, 145

Bone, Thomas, 32 Boniface IX (pope), 115 Boniface VIII (pope), 115 Boone, Graeme, 335, 561, 629, 645, 658 Bordon, Pierre, 274 Borghezio, Gino, 126, 323 Bouchel, Guillaume, 287, 296, 302, 305 Bouillart, Alexandre, 267, 283, 305, 306, 310, 313 Boulengier, Jehan, 17 Bourdon, Pieter, 662 Bourgogne, David de, 199 Bourgogne, Jehan de, 151, 204, 236 Bracciolini, Poggio, 365 Braecle, Mathieu de, 200 Brahms, Johannes, 688 Brassart, 18, 218, 346 Brothers, Thomas, 335 Brown, Samuel, 386 Bruille, Fursy de, 207 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 135, 368 Buc, Bernard, 56–58 Bukofzer, Manfred, 513, 515 Burgundy, court and chapel of, 13n44, 169–170, 230, 232, 235, 244, 343, 344, 376–377, 453, 524, 605, 623, 625, 629 Burkholder, Peter, 291 Burney, Charles, 320 Busnoys, Antoine, 282, 314, 594, 595, 629, 665, 684 Busse Berger, Anna Maria, 403, 519 Byrd, William, 224, 426 Bysenhay, Gilles, 70, 71–72 Cabezón, Antonio, 4 Calais, Jehan de, 45n152 Calixtus III (pope), 272 Cambe, Nicole de le, 42–43 Cambrai ecclesiastical administration, 157–158 geopolitics, 23 plan-relief, 167–168 Cambrai cathedral antiphoner, thirteenth-century, 453–454 Assize, 161 aumosne, 161, 188 cantors, 236 cathedral school, 159 choristers, 20, 25n30 choristers of, 20, 38–41 Commune sanctorum movements of Trent 88, 223–224, 225

Index

community of chaplains, 161 copying and repair of chant books, 192–194, 229, 452–453, 501, 502 copying of polyphony, 190–191, 213–217, 271, 297–298, 315–316, 316t7.1, 349, 381, 385, 501–503, 505 dedication of, 295–298 fabric, 161 financial apparatus of, 160–161 general description of, 162–163 grammar school, 41, 159 grand métier, 161, 182–183 great vicars, 161 hierarchy, 158–159 images of, 164–167, 166f4.4, 167f4.5 magistri puerorum, 40–41, 159, 276–279 masters of the small vicars, 269–271, 270t6.1 music and liturgy, 1440s, 188–189, 191–192, 194 plan of, 163–164, 164f4.2, 165f4.3 polyphonic Mass ordinaries, 297–298 polyphonic Mass propers, 215–216, 218, 345–346, 504–506 polyphony, propriety of, 452 polyphony after Du Fay’s death, 218, 318–319, 346 polyphony before Du Fay, 44–45, 46 rectors, 42 rota collationis, 159, 160f4.1 scholastici, 41–42 small vicars, 7–8, 19, 45–46, 62, 161, 269, 275–276, 281, 316–317 statutes of, 38 Cameracy (composer), 44 Caminet, Marie, 206, 268 Canedoli family, 96, 570 Canner, Laurent, 267n18, 267–268, 337 canonicate, qualifications for, 12 cantare supra librum, 6 cantor, 7–8, 18, 331 cantus-firmus compositions, 137, 256–257, 258t5.2, 262, 275, 348, 366, 390, 412, 593 cantus fractus, 61, 472 Carité, Jacques, 286 Carlier, Gilles, 7, 29, 149, 189, 237, 249, 265, 278, 287, 288, 289, 292, 306, 312–313, 337, 342, 459, 460, 462, 463, 540, 543–546 Carnin, Jehan de, 17 Caron, Firmin, 594 Caron, Jehan, 287 Caron, Jehan (1), 337

Caron, Philippe, 337 Carondelet, Albert de, 162 Carrillo, Alfonso, 81, 83 Castan, Auguste, 321 Castoris, Johannes Guillermus, 70 Cesaris, Jehan, 43 Chambéry, 125, 126–128 chansonniers, 629 chant paraphrase motet, 394 Chapel of St. Stephen, Cambrai, 166, 167, 211, 235, 281, 298, 301, 304, 306–307, 309, 346, 574–575, 579, 615, 622–624, 625, 626 Chareton, Pierre, 94–95 Charles d’Orléans, 240, 349, 628, 681 Charles the Bold, 276, 277, 280, 285, 623 Charles V, 159 Charles VII (king of France), 12, 181, 239, 273 Charlotte of Savoy, 239, 247 Chartier, Alain, 684 Choron, 320 Chouet, Barthélemy, 244 Christological symbolism, 595–596, 597, 601 Christus, Petrus, 235 Ciconia, Johannes, 47, 59, 115–116, 120, 349, 354, 357–358, 394, 399, 470, 473, 632 O felix templum iubila, 68, 357 O rosa bella, 633 Padu. . . serenans, 476 Ut per te omnes, 67, 357 Circumdederunt me viri mendaces (responsory), 138, 361 Clarke, Henry Leland, 26, 204 Clementini, Cesare, 69 Clement VII (pope), 13, 115 Cleppé, 239, 348 Clibano, Jacobus de. See Dufour, Jacques Cohier, Hotin, 305 Collemanque, Jehan, 149 Cologne, university at, 71 Colonna, Giovanni, 103 Colonna, Ludovico, 79, 356 Colonna, Oddo. See Martin V (pope) combinative chanson, 656 Comitis, Johannes. See Lecomte, Jehan Compendium de discantu mensurabili (Petrus Frater), 47 Compère, Loyset, Omnium bonorum plena, 285–286 composer, as idea, 332 compositional process, 334–335 Concordat of Vienna, 229 Concupivit rex decorem tuum (gradual), 68

911

912

Index

Condulmaro, Gabriele, 81, 339. See also Eugenius IV (pope) Congress of Mantua, 272 Conseil, Jehan (“Le Jeune”), 207 Constantinople, fall of, 240 Conzié, François de, 81 Coquillart, Rogier, 63 Corbie. See Jorland, Jehan Cordero di Pamparato, Stanislao, 323 Cordier, Baude, 5 Cordier, Jehan, 283n117 Córdoba, Juan de, 5, 127 Cordoval, Jehan de. See Córdoba, Juan de coronation rotulus of Eugenius IV, 15, 16, 102, 341 Cosse, Gilles, 337 Council of Basel, 52–53, 83, 95, 117, 121, 141, 149, 155–156, 181, 211, 229, 343, 375, 376, 408, 501, 551, 678 Council of Constance, 14, 18, 22–23, 52–59, 65, 338, 354, 470 Council of Ferrara, 149, 155 Council of Pisa, 18, 22 counterpoint, improvised, 6 Courtois, Martin (Martinet), 267n18, 302, 305, 317, 337 Coussemaker, Charles Edmond Henri de, 321 Cox, Bobby Wayne, 362 Crawford, David, 117 Crépin, Gilles, 284–285, 350 Crocker, Richard, 335, 685 Croy, Antoine de, 211n263 Croy, Robert de, 193, 544 Cuise, Antoine de, 681, 683 Cumming, Julie, 117–118, 121, 351, 361, 367, 401–402, 642 Curtis, Liane, 190, 192, 213 cut circle mensuration, 401–402 Cuvelier, Jehan, Se Galaas, 639 Cyprus Codex, 46, 68 Dandrenas, Raoul, 17 Danneman, Erna, 629 Dartus, Edmond, 27, 29, 34, 35 Dauce, Bertauld, 17, 112, 114 Daussut, Jacques, 42 David, Pierre, 151 De Beauvoir, Gautier, 41 De Fayt, Johannes Bernerii. See Du Fayt, Jehan Bernier DeFord, Ruth, 498 De la Croix, Charles, 268n28

De la Croix, Jehan (“Monamy”), 134, 187, 189, 231, 236, 268–269, 276, 309, 332 De la Rouelle, Toussaint, 113 Delattre, Victor, 298, 321 Del Castagno, Andrea, 135 De Ligno Quercu. See van Eeckhoute, Rogier Del Lago, Giovanni, 320, 506, 510 Della Robbia, Luca, 135 Denis (of Sens), 76 De Orto, Marbriano, 428, 435 Des Chevals, Jehan, 113 Des Lyons, Reignault, 278, 289 De Van, Guillaume, 204, 323–324, 326, 365, 374, 376, 509 Dèzes, Karl, 413 Di Bacco, Giuliano, 11, 14 Dijon, Paris, BnF, lat. 879, 625 Dinchy, Gilles, 269 Domart, Pierre de, 41, 237, 332 M. Quinti toni, 259 M. Spiritus almus, 237, 259, 584 Domise, Maroie, 35 Donatello, 135, 232, 539, 578 Dopstal, Wautier, 183, 185 Dornart, Jehan, 17 Dreves, Guido Maria, Analecta Hymnica, 545 Du Bois, Gilles, 210, 307 Du Bois, Jehan, 290, 302 Du Bruequet, Vincent, 245, 248, 584 Du Bruille, Fursy, 234, 289 Du Castel, Pierre, 212–213, 236, 380–381, 383, 384 Du Caurel, Jehan, 293 Du Chemin, Jennin, 303 Du Fay, Gobers, 35 Du Fay, Guillaume beneficial career, 99–111, 132, 135, 140, 200–201, 206, 277, 282–283 birth, 21–28 canonicate at Cambrai, 108–111, 148, 342 canonicate at Lausanne, 84, 103, 104, 105, 106, 200–201, 246 cantorship at Cambrai, 7, 235–236 character of, 140, 275, 304–305 as composer, or musicus, 47, 331–333, 341–342, 345, 350 compositional education, 47, 51 “death” in Patras, 76–77 De musica mensurata et de proportionibus, 207–208, 522 duties at Cambrai, 185, 187–188, 189, 195, 212, 229, 235, 269–272, 276, 282, 286 earliest documentary evidence, 19–20

Index

early compositional influences, 47, 54 early motet repertory known to, 353–354 early nonmusical training and education, 7, 38, 42–43 epitaph, 46–47, 144, 200, 298, 301, 331 estate, 304, 313 father, 29, 32–33 final illness and death, 310–311 foundations, 306–308, 309, 349, 610, 615 and French royal court, 240 funeral monument, 298–302 house of, 167–168, 183–185, 186f4.7, 187f4.8, 266 illegitimacy, 33, 48–49, 104, 304 interest in resurrectio mortuorum, 584–585, 599 legacies of, 304, 305–306 letter to Medici, 240, 241–242 lost work, 263 on mode of O quanta est exsultatio, 251–252 mother, 29–34 Musica, 207 musical training, 43 musical treatises of, 7, 207–208, 230 music books belonging to, 211, 233, 308–310, 333 obituary foundations, 287–289, 290–291, 292–295, 306, 309 ordination of, 24–25 at papal court, 244 patronymic, 25 rebus, 109 reputation, 3, 99, 304, 311 small vicars, 229 subdeacon, 63 transmission of music, 285, 317–319 will, 27–28, 47, 85, 232, 266, 290, 296, 302–304, 313, 392, 409, 450, 482, 576, 578, 579, 586 Du Fay, Guillaume, compositional chronology, 73, 325–326, 339, 465, 665. See also specific works cantilenas, 395, 403 early masses, 567–568, 579 isorhythmic and mensuration motets, 354–357, 355t9.1, 360–361, 368, 373, 375 magnificat settings, 439–440 Mass Ordinary, festal settings, 466–467 Mass Ordinary movements, 465, 468, 471 Mass Proper cycles, 318, 465–466, 501, 505, 541 plainsong settings of Mass Propers, 542

proses, 465, 517–518 Savoy works, 468, 650 songs, 628, 665, 670 ballades, 640, 645, 664 combinative and cantus firmus chansons, 657, 664 in Italian, 630 late middle period, 318 rondeaux, 664, 666, 667t16.5, 678, 679 virelai/bergerettes, 649, 664 Du Fay, Guillaume, compositional style and methods. See also cantus-firmus compositions alleluia respond settings, 537 cantilena motet, 394 cantus coronatus, 89, 120, 366 contrapuntal language, 318, 324, 357–358 discursive accidentals, 335–336, 549, 609, 619, 674 duo–chorus texture, in responsorial chant settings, 523–524 early songs, traits of, 669, 672–673 English influence, 255, 375–376, 381, 384, 390, 408, 410, 413, 455, 503, 532, 586, 589, 651, 665 formulaic and shared passages, 477, 512–513 hymns, 430, 431–432 instrumental tenor, 261, 584, 595 isorhythmic technique, 67, 117, 120, 137, 138n190, 152, 357, 360, 372, 375, 378, 383, 389, 390 Italian trecento traits, 399 Malatesta motets, 340, 355–360, 364–365, 389–390, 410, 480, 658 melodic writing, 261, 263, 387, 474, 522, 650 mensural usage, 137, 138, 245, 256, 260–261, 263, 324–325, 347, 358, 372, 385–386, 399, 402–403, 434, 457–458, 495, 498, 522, 527, 529, 530–536, 589, 603, 621, 642–644, 660 musico-rhetorical registers, 458–459 plainsong paraphrase, 340, 400, 417, 448, 518, 523, 525–529 plainsong settings, 548 proses, 518–522 rhythmic language, 275, 357, 474, 641, 643, 686 text setting, 474 tonality, 274–275, 335–336, 372, 407, 409, 477–478, 498, 651 voice leading, 121, 397

913

914

Index

Du Fay, Guillaume, works by and attributed to Ad caenam agni providi, 433 Adieu ces bons vins de Lannoys, 75, 80, 339, 479, 669, 671, 672 Adieu m’amour, 648 Agnus dei (with trope Custos et pastor) [Bessler 4], 96, 153 Alleluia V. Antoni compar inclite, 537 Alleluia V. Benedictus es, 538 Alleluia V. Dicite in gentibus, 538 Alleluia V. Dilexit Andream, 537 Alleluia V. Dulce lignum, 534, 537 Alleluia V. Ego vos elegi, 538 Alleluia V. Emitte spiritum, 538 Alleluia V. Hispanorum clarens stella, 536–537, 565, 566, 567, 571 Alleluia V. In conspectu, 534, 538 Alleluia V. Iudicabunt sancti, 537 Alleluia V. Laudate deum, 537 Alleluia V. O patriarcha pauperum, 537, 683 Alleluia V. Posuisti domine, 537 Alleluia V. Sebastiani gratia, 537, 540 Alleluia V. Tu puer propheta, 224, 347, 538–540 Alleluia V. Verbo domini [Holy Ghost], 537 Alleluia V. Verbo domini [Trinity], 537 Alma redemptoris 1, 395–397, 399–400, 401 L’alta bellezza, 632 Anima mea liquefacta est, 395, 400–401 Apostolo glorioso, 72, 77, 88, 152, 339, 355–360, 389–390, 476, 477, 478–479, 562 Audi benigne conditor, 421, 432 Aurea luce et decore roseo, 435–437 Aures ad nostras deitatis preces, 434 Ave Maria. . . virgo serena, 466, 522 Ave maris stella, 424–425, 433 Ave regina caelorum 1, 395, 400, 401 Ave regina caelorum 2, 413, 457 Ave regina caelorum 3, 25, 279, 280, 288, 291, 311, 312, 335, 349–350, 351–352, 401, 412, 413, 415–419, 611, 614, 618–619, 651 Ave virgo quae de caelis, 320, 683 Balsamus et munda, 96, 116–117, 152, 340, 361–362, 364–365, 368, 389–390 Belle plaisant et gracieuse, 628, 670–672, 671x16.7, 673 La belle se siet, 631, 635–636, 646 Belle veulliés moy vengier, 686, 687 Belle vueilliés vostre mercy donner, 561 Benedicamus Domino 1, 447–448

Benedicamus Domino 2, 447–449, 678 Benedicta sit, 525–526 Benedictus es, 526–527 Bien doy servir, 634, 639 Bien veignés vous, 657 Bon jour, bon mois, 641, 672, 679 Ce jour de l’an, 672 Ce jour le doibt, 75, 80, 642, 643–644 Ce moys de may, 641, 679 C’est bien raison, 126–127, 146, 640 Christe redemptor omnium – Conserva, 430, 434, 487 Common of Martyrs, propers for, 522 Conditor alme siderum, 430–431 Craindre vous vueil, 336, 342, 462, 631, 674–678, 687 De ma haulte et bonne aventure, 649, 654–655 Departés vous Malebouche, 308, 686, 687 Desiderium animae, 466 Dieu gard la bone, 282, 318, 628, 657, 664, 680, 686–688 La dolce vista, 632 Dona gentile, 255, 349, 632–633 Dona i ardenti rai, 630–631 Donnez l’assault, 155, 662, 679–680 Les douleurs, 240n55, 255 Ecclesiae militantis, 117–120, 121, 137, 152, 340, 361, 362–365, 368, 371, 376, 379–380, 386, 387, 390, 410, 532, 597, 658 En gratulemur hodie, 219, 424 Entre vous gentils amoureux, 561, 657 En triumphant de Cruel Dueil, 649, 679, 680, 683–684 Epiphaniam domino, 153, 520 Flos florum, 395, 401, 639, 658 Franc cuer gentil, 680, 681 Fulgens iubar ecclesiae, 212–213, 217, 256, 259, 345, 375, 377, 380–386, 390, 531, 586, 587, 589, 599, 627, 650, 660 Gaude virgo mater Christi, 509 Gloria settings, for papal chapel, 420, 490–492 Gloria 1, 491 Gloria 2, 491, 492 Gloria 3, 492 Gloria 4, 492 Gloria 5 de quaremiaux, 129, 471, 478, 479–480 Gloria 6, 471, 474 Gloria 8 cursiva, 471, 474 Gloria 9, 471, 478–479

Index

Gloria 10, 582 Gloria S 1, 499–500 Gloria [Lantin] – Credo 1, 70, 72–73, 300, 471, 475–476, 558–559 Gloria – Credo 2, 339, 341, 476, 491, 496–497, 587 Gloria – Credo 3, 132, 336, 339, 341, 476–478, 492, 496–497, 631 Gloria [Grenon], added contratenor by Du Fay, 132–133, 500, 650 He compaignons, 70, 72, 122, 339, 497, 632, 665 Helas et quant vous veray, 672 Helas mon dueil, 649, 650–653 Hostis Herodes impie, 421 hymn cycle, 148, 154, 341, 425, 426–430 Iam ter quaternis, 426 Iesu corona virginum, 427, 437–439 Il sera par vous combatu – L’homme armé, 273–274, 281, 599, 657, 661–662, 679 Inclita stella maris, 324, 404, 405 Invidia nimica, 631–632, 633 Iste confessor, 154, 427 Isti sunt duae olivae, 120, 147–148, 153, 343, 390, 518, 521–522 Iuvenis qui puellam = O incomparabilis Virgo Maria, 143–144, 403, 407–408, 493, 522, 636 J’ay grant doulour, 678 J’ay mis mon cuer, 339, 641, 643, 644 Je languis, 638 Je me complains, 75, 76, 78, 80, 339, 357, 642, 643–644, 673 Je n’ay doubté, 678 Je ne puis plus – Unde veniet, 658 Je ne vis onques [Binchois], 241, 666, 669 Je prens congié, 678 Jesu corona virginum, 154, 438x11.2 Je vous pri – Ma tres douce – Tant que mon argent dura, 657, 662–664, 686, 688 Kyrie settings, for papal chapel, 153, 420, 430, 484–487 Kyrie 1, 486, 488 Kyrie 5, 485 Kyrie [Binchois?] – Gloria, 130, 496–498, 499 Kyrie – Gloria 6, 483 Kyrie – Gloria – Credo, 470–471, 474–475, 479, 500 Kyrie – Sanctus – Agnus [Du Fay – Zacara – Loqueville], 59–62, 67, 338, 470, 472–473, 475, 500, 554–555, 558 Laetabundus exsultet, 153, 517, 518, 519

lamentations, on the fall of Constantinople, 240, 254, 349, 410 Lauda Sion salvatorem, 153, 518, 519, 520, 542 Les douleurs dont me sens tel somme, 681–683 Le serviteur, 680 M. Ave regina caelorum, 285, 291–292, 293–294, 295, 297, 301, 317n16, 318, 336, 407, 415, 418, 446, 465, 466, 522, 523, 585, 610–622, 640, 664, 684, 686, 688 M. Ecce ancilla – Beata es, 279, 282, 317n16, 318, 350, 417, 418, 593, 603–610, 611, 613, 616, 618, 620 M. L’homme armé, 274–275, 301, 336, 350, 407, 409, 412, 415, 458, 462, 477, 497, 522–523, 536, 585, 590, 594–603, 605, 607, 609, 611, 613, 618, 620, 661 M. Sancti Antonii Abbatis, 233, 308, 466–467, 542, 574–575, 576, 577, 582, 622–626 M. Sancti Antonii et Sancti Francisci, 218–223, 232, 233–234, 261, 317, 320, 325, 346, 347, 409, 424, 449, 450, 466, 482, 510–511, 516, 522, 524, 535–536, 541, 552, 574–582, 586, 602–603, 621 M. Sancti Georgi, 223, 225 M. Sancti Iacobi, 89–91, 92, 340, 394, 430, 466, 467, 471, 480, 493, 505, 536, 542, 551, 562–564, 565–574, 575, 599, 602, 610, 617, 627 M. Se la face ay pale, 154, 180, 247–248, 256, 260–262, 317n16, 323, 348, 375, 384, 385, 403, 410, 582, 583, 584–593, 596, 597, 599, 601, 605, 607, 609, 610, 619, 620, 627, 645 M. Sine nomine, 69–70, 77, 339, 466, 476, 477, 482, 493, 496, 537, 551, 552–562, 575, 586, 639 Ma belle dame, je vous pri, 561 Ma belle dame souveraine, 339, 644, 672 Magi videntes stellam, 318, 451, 452 Magnanimae gentes, 152, 205, 343, 373–374, 385, 390 Magnificat tertii toni, 413, 415, 440–441, 445–447 Magnificat quinti toni (1), 290n158, 443–445 Magnificat quinti toni (2), 290 Magnificat sexti toni, 440–442, 443, 448 Magnificat septimi toni, 349, 439 Magnificat octavi toni, 440, 442–443, 448

915

916

Index

Du Fay, Guillaume (cont.) Malhereux cuer, 240n55, 255, 648, 649, 653–654, 684 Mane prima sabbati, 466, 522 Mille bonjours, 678 Mirandas parit, 138–140, 152, 342, 374, 399, 404, 405x10.3, 408, 448, 493 missae communes, for the Sainte-Chapelle, 170–180, 189, 205, 216, 218, 224, 344–345, 346, 380, 434, 451, 458, 497, 509–511, 512–513, 515, 522–523, 524–532, 538 Mon bien m’amour, 240n55, 255, 640 Mon chier amy, 96 Mon cuer me fait, 644 Mon seul plaisir, 666 Moribus et genere, 204–205, 256, 345, 375, 376, 378–380, 385, 386, 390 Nuper almos rosae flores, 136, 542–543 Nuper rosarum flores, 117, 136–140, 205, 256, 293, 335, 336, 342, 361, 368–370, 371–374, 380, 384, 391, 404, 407, 458, 477, 483, 497, 542, 586, 587, 597, 599, 602–603, 613, 627 O beate Sebastiane, 389, 407 Office of the Dead, 291, 309, 312 O gemma, lux et speculum, 78, 79, 339, 355–359, 389 O gemma martyrum, 147, 454–455, 458 O gloriose tiro, 343, 373, 374–376, 378, 379, 380, 390 O lumen ecclesiae, 307, 351–352 O lux beata trinitas, 432, 433, 436 O proles Hispaniae – O sidus Hispaniae, 403, 408–410 O quam glorifica, 349, 425–426 Or me veult [Portugaler] = Ave tota casta virgo, 155, 480, 636 O sancte Sebastiane, 78, 339, 355–358, 632, 658 O sidus Hispaniae, 307, 351, 586 O tres piteulx – Omnes amici eius [Lamentatio Sanctae Matris Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae], 241, 254–255, 263, 410–413, 415, 416 Pange lingua, 425, 432, 434–435 Par le regard, 680 Passato è il tempo, 632 La pernette, 635 Pour l’amour de ma doulce amye, 650, 672 Proles de caelo, 421 Propter nimiam caritatem, 452 Puisque celle qui me tient en prison, 678

Puisque vous estez campieur, 685 Quel fronte signorile, 342, 630–631, 633, 674 Recollectio omnium festorum BMV, 248–250, 459–464, 540, 543–549, Requiem, 290–291, 309, 312, 319, 466–467, 582, 622, 626–627 Resistera, 669 Resvelliés vous, 69, 339, 357, 367, 371, 379, 395, 431, 552–553, 554–555, 557, 561–562, 634, 638–639, 641, 651 Resvelons nous – Alons en bien, 657 Rex omnipotens, 151, 153, 518, 519, 520 Rite maiorem, 77, 82, 88, 89, 91, 339, 358–360, 364, 371, 478, 565, 567, 569, 580 Salve flos Tuscae, 25–26, 117, 137–139, 152, 205, 256, 342, 361, 368, 372–373, 374, 378, 404 Salve regina, 413, 415, 417 Sanctorum meritis, 154, 427 Sanctus – Agnus 1 [Sirede?], 340, 480–483, 493 Sanctus – Agnus 2, 482, 493, 495 Sanctus – Agnus 3, 493, 494–495 Sanctus Ave verum corpus, 408 Sanctus papale [Sirede], 77, 92–93, 96, 153, 340, 497, 568, 570, 610 Sapiente filio, 450–451 Seigneur Leon – Benedictus qui venit, 203, 229, 347, 410, 657 Se la face ay pale, 586, 645–647, 672 Le serviteur hault guerdoné, 318, 680–681, 685 S’il est plaisir, 649, 650 Si quaeris miracula, 325, 413, 418, 450, 451, 455–458, 527, 586 A solis ortu, 421 St. John the Baptist, proper cycle for, 223–225, 522, 539–540 St. Maurice, proper cycle for, 202–203, 218, 223, 225, 226–229, 506, 510, 515, 522, 539 Supremum est mortalibus, 120–121, 122, 144, 340, 365–368, 373, 388, 390, 408, 418, 493, 572 Urbs beata Ierusalem, 425, 432, 435, 437 Vasilissa ergo gaude, 65, 66–69, 77, 339, 355–358, 364, 387, 389, 399, 473, 475, 476 Veni sancte spiritus, 153, 518, 520 Vergene bella, 339, 395, 397, 399–400, 401, 403, 497, 629, 633, 640, 644, 665 Vespers for Epiphany, 319

Index

Vespers for St. Anthony of Padua and St. Francis, 147, 219–222, 318–319, 346, 347, 352, 403, 409, 426–430, 449, 450, 456, 523 Vexilla regis prodeunt, 432–433, 434 Victimae paschali laudes, 153, 518 Vostre bruit et vostre grand fame, 282, 678, 684–685, 687 Du Fay, Guillaume (layman of Laon), 36 Du Fay, Jacques, 35 Du Fay, Jehan, 35 Du Fay, Jehan (1), 36 Du Fay, Jehan (2), 36 Du Fay, Jehan (3), 36 Du Fay, Jehan (4), 36 Du Fay, Jehan (5), 36 Du Fay, Jehan (6), 36 Du Fay, Jehan (7), 36 Du Fay, Jehanine, 36 Du Fay, Jehan (son of Gobers Du Fay), 35 Du Fay, Nicaise, 35 Du Fay (Du Fayt) family name, 34–37 Du Fayt, Gilles, 35 Du Fayt, Jehan, 35 Du Fayt, Jehan Bernier, 35 Du Fayt, Jehanne, 35 Du Fayt, Lebille, 35 Du Fayt, Marie, 35 Du Fayt, Marie (mother of Guillaume Du Fay), 29–34, 37, 73–75, 131, 206 Du Fayt, Mathieu, 35 Du Fayt, Pierre, 35 du Fayt, Pierre. See Faydit, Pierre Du Fayt, Yde, 35 Dufour, Jacques, 31–32, 198 du Four, Jacques, 203 du Hamel, Mathieu, 296 du Haspre, Colard, 35 Dunstaple, John, 47, 259, 375, 394, 467, 514 Gloria – Credo pair, 573 Du Puit, Nicaise, 199, 235 Du Quesne, Guillaume, 108 Du Riez, Jehan, 17, 65n75, 132 Du Sart, Jehan, 218, 278, 286n134 Du Wez, Pierre, 238, 266, 304, 305, 311 Duysborch, 199, 200 Earp, Lawrence, 550 Ecce ancilla Domini (antiphon), 604 Ecce quam bonum (gradual), 68

ecclesiastical benefices and preferment, 8, 9, 10, 11–14, 17 Elders, Willem, 366, 480 Elizabeth Zachariae [Sirede?], 386–388, 476 Emiliani, Pietro, 89, 92, 437, 569, 570, 571, 627 Engelmann, Godefroy, 166 English musical style, 47, 53–54, 255, 375, 638 cantus-firmus masses, 256, 551, 583 continental sources, 217, 256, 503, 535, 551 mensural traits, 255, 324, 451, 455, 532, 651 Equis, Johannes de. See des Chevals, Jehan Escouchy, Mathieu d’, 241 Escripvain, Jehan L’, 44 Escuyer, Baudoin, 545 Este, Borso d’, 251 Este, Ercole d’, 203, 367, 640 Este, Leonello d’, 203–204, 230, 347, 410, 640, 657, 660 Este, Niccolò III d’, 126–127, 141, 631, 640 Este court, 141, 146, 203–204 Eugenius III (pope), 143, 408 Eugenius IV (pope), 15, 16, 36, 42, 53, 71, 81, 96, 102–103, 105, 112, 113, 117, 118–120, 121–122, 123, 140, 141, 142, 144, 149, 155–156, 211, 229, 341, 344, 361, 365, 368, 501, 542. See also Condulmaro, Gabriele Fabian and Sebastian, Saints, feast of, 227, 540 Fabri, Anselmus. See Smits van Breda, Anselm faburden, 6 Fageto, Jacobus de. See Du Fay, Jacques Fallows, David, 3, 20, 27, 69–70, 72–73, 93, 96, 155, 203, 212, 218, 232, 240, 255, 279, 304, 311, 314, 318, 326, 356, 365, 374–375, 380, 386–387, 413, 452, 458, 471, 479, 482, 496, 509, 557, 558–559, 563, 576, 579, 582, 589–590, 595, 607, 620, 622, 625, 629, 638, 648, 658, 666–670, 679, 682, 683–684, 686 Faloen, Gilles, 278, 296 Fardel, Robert de, 149–150 Fasti ecclesiae gallicanae, 8 Faugues, Guillaume, M. Le serviteur, 584 fauxbourdon, 92, 120–121, 144, 340–341, 366–367, 390, 408, 421, 425, 429, 430, 432, 433, 434, 435, 437, 442–443, 452, 487, 488, 489, 493, 522, 526, 562, 568, 570, 573 Faydit, Jehan, 35 Faydit, Pierre, 34–35, 183 Fayolle, 320 Feast of the Pheasant, 240–241, 272–273, 666

917

918

Index

Fedé. See Sohier, Jehan Feininger, Laurence, 171, 202, 228, 465, 506, 513–516 Felix V (pope), 53, 83, 150, 156, 181, 201, 244. See also Amadeus VIII (duke of Savoy) Feragut, Bertrand, 394 Fernandez, Juan, 5, 127 Ferrara, 126–127, 146, 203, 453, 454–455, 640 Ferrier, Estienne, 5, 263n154, 584 Fétis, François-Joseph, 26, 321 Ficker, Rudolph von, 365, 409 Fierin, Nicole de, 5 Filarete, 365 Filargo, Pietro. See Alexander V (pope) Fillard, Quintiner, 287 Flandrois, Jehan, 50–51, 52 Flannel, Gilles (“L’Enfant”), 17, 42, 93, 113, 114, 123, 134, 189, 227, 268–269, 286, 309, 337, 342n55, 346, 540 Florence, 16, 81, 134, 135, 138, 144, 344, 361, 368, 428, 483, 628, 632 Flori, Jehan, 35 Fondi, Enrico Silvestri da, 16 Fontaine, Pierre, 18, 114 Fontenay, Jehan de, 208, 305, 349 Foppens, François-Jean, 320–321 Forest, John, 54 Forkel, 320 formes fixes, 647 Franchois (singer in Malatesta chapel), 72. See also Lebertoul, Franchois Franciscan liturgy, 173, 223, 224, 233, 424, 453, 510, 578 François de Conzié, 14 François II (count of Étampes), 198, 203 Frederic III, 229 Fresneau, Jehan, 337 Fresnel, Baude. See Cordier, Baude Freuet, Thomas, 149 Friedrich IV (king of Germany), 517 Frigio, Niccolò, 626 Froymont, Baudouin de, 211 Frutaz, Aimé-Pierre, 544 Fruyn, Thomas de, 201 Frye, Walter, 499 So ys emprentid, 638 Fulbert of Chartres, 250, 462 Fulda, Adam von, 319–320 Gaffurio, Franchino, 261, 320, 344, 506, 515, 516 Gallagher, Sean, 278, 649, 652, 657, 665, 684 Gallo, Donato, 571

Gallo, F. Alberto, 26 Garcia de Zamora, Alfonso, 15, 134 Garey, Howard, 633 Gembloux, Jehan Franchois de, 72, 79 Ave virgo, lux Maria, 72, 79 Geneva, 107, 132, 143, 149, 200–201, 246 Genois, Alart, 313 George, Saint, feast of, 453–454 Gérard, Quentin, 188, 200, 377 Gerber, Rebecca, 516–517, 523, 541 Gerber, Rudolf, 323, 425 Gerbert, 320 Gerken, Robert, 515 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 135 Gilles de Bins. See Binchois, Gilles Gilquin, Nicolas, 113 Giovanni da Pavia, 56–57 Giustinian, Leonardo, 630 Giustiniano, Orsato, 66 Gonzaga, Francesco, 626 Gossen, Nicoletta, 684n218 Gossequin de Condet. See Josquin des Près Gousserat, François, 56 Grancey, Ferry de, 141 Grand, Adam, 126 Grégoire, Pierre, 320 Gregory IX (pope), 408 Gregory XII (pope), 22, 52, 55, 116 Grenon, Nicolas, 65n75, 133, 188, 353 Grenon, Nicole, 17, 18, 27, 31, 41, 45, 46, 87, 93–95, 98n3, 111, 114–115, 132, 141, 182, 185, 190, 210, 265, 269, 333, 340, 341, 500, 501 Grosseteste, Jehan, 251 Grosseteste, Pierre, 251 Grossin, Estienne, M. Sine nomine (Trompetta), 551 Gruyau, Yves, 31 Guéroult, Raoul (“Mirelika”), 145 Guido d’Arezzo Micrologus, 308 Regulae rhythmicae, 331 Guillaume, Bernard, 83 Guillaume de Machaut, 10, 340 La messe de Nostre Dame, 10, 550, 562 Guillaume IV, 30 Guiselin, Barthélemy, 216 Gülke, Peter, 326 gymel, 6 Haar, James, 376, 388, 426, 428 Haberl, Franz X., 322, 355 Haec est vera fraternitas (responsory), 152

Index

Haggh-Huglo, Barbara, 28, 44, 516, 544–546, 548, 623 Hainbaut, Helbin, 276 Hamm, Charles, 117, 260, 324, 325–326, 386–387, 509, 516, 531, 553, 569, 573–574, 582, 584, 631, 665, 682 Hanelle, Jehan, 46, 59, 69, 129, 132, 583 Hanelle, Mathieu, 16–17, 58–59, 65n75, 188, 265 Hardi, Antoine, 268, 305 Hardi Jr., Jacques, 206, 268 Haucourt, Jehan de, 11 Hawkins, John, 320 Heldedronque, Étienne, 94–95 Hell, Helmut, 155, 636 Hemart, Jehan, 279, 314, 317, 337 Henry (singer in Malatesta chapel), 72 Herbare, Richard, 134 Herleville, Mathieu de, 288 Hildernisse, Willem van, 17 Hocquet, Adam, 52 Holford-Strevens, Leofranc, 140, 152, 378, 419 Holinghe, Jehan. See Mouton, Jehan Hollain, Denis de, 43, 317, 337 Honnecourt, Villard de, 162 Hothby, John, 284 Houdoy, Jules, 315, 322 Huberde, Jehanne, 30, 33, 73, 74, 131 Hubert, Guillaume, 113 Hubert, Jehan, 73–75 Hubert, Jehan (canon of Cambrai), 22n16 Hubert, Jehan [Jr.], 30–31, 131, 142 Hubert, Jehan (proctor of Jehan Du Fay 1), 36 Hubert, Jehan [Sr.], 29–30, 33, 34, 37–38, 51, 131, 132 Hughes, Andrew, 118 Hughes, David, 335 Hughes (secretary to Ranchicourt), 296 Hugo, Guillaume, 201 Hugo de Montfort, 54 Humblot, Johannes, 70 imitation mass, 291 Innocent IV (pope), 481 Isaac, Hendrik, Choralis Constantinus, 426, 511 Isabel of Portugal, 5, 170 isomelism, 137, 260, 348, 359, 364, 371, 383–384, 389, 390–391, 589, 597, 608 isorhythmic and mensuration motets, 388–391. See also specific works Isti sunt duae olivae (antiphon), 366 Izier, parish church of, 212

Jackman, James, 178 Jacques des Priers, 305 James the Elder, Saint, liturgy for, 88–89, 358, 460, 565–566, 571, 580 Jardin de plaisance, Le, 638, 650 Jehan de Bourgongne, 296 Jehan de Lens, 54 Johannes, frater Gasparris, 70 Johannes de Lymburgia, 394 John (king of Bohemia), 10 John of Burgundy, 181, 377 John XXIII (pope), 15, 16, 18, 23, 52, 56–57, 116 John XXII (pope), Docta sanctorum patrum, 115 Jonckin, Jan, 145 Jorland, Jehan, 317 Josquin des Près, 279, 318, 337, 345, 367, 428, 433n44, 435, 552, 594 Ave regina, 318 M. Gaudeamus, 619 Julian von Speyer, 219, 409, 424, 456 Kiesewetter, Raphael Georg, 321 Kovarik, Edward, 485–486, 488 Kruye, Romuald, 203 La Folie, Philippe de (“Foliot”), 113, 265 La maison du bregier, 183–184 La Marche, Olivier de, 241 Lambert, Jehan, 42, 236, 278 Lambullet, Jehan, “Sorbonne Mass,” 550 Lamentation tone, 411, 652 L’Ami, Michel, 42 L’Ami [Lami], Nicole, 150, 188, 200, 377 Lantins, Arnold de, 70–72, 79, 122, 218 M. O pulcherrima mulierum, 551 Quant je mire, 79 Se ne prenés, 79 Lantins, Hughes de, 70, 79, 339, 632 Celsa sublimatur, 78–79, 356–357 Gloria 8, 471 Gloria – Credo 1, 70–72, 471, 475–476, 558–559 Tra quante regione, 66 Laon, 27, 73, 74–75, 77, 80, 100, 106, 108, 642 Laon cathedral, 88, 98–99, 100–101 La Rochetaillée, Jean de, 110 La Rue, 552 Lasso, Orlando di, Missa In te domine, 614 Laury, Gilles, 84, 104–105, 122, 339

919

920

Index

Lausanne, 124, 147, 154, 343, 453, 518. See also under Du Fay, Guillaume La Venne, Rasse de, 278–279 Lebertoul, Franchois, 46, 72. See also Franchois (singer in Malatesta chapel) Le Bonure, Jehan (“Hachot”), 17, 56 Le Breton, Symon, 210–211, 269, 270–271, 273, 274, 281, 287, 306, 308, 309, 661, 662 Le Canoine, Pierre, 337 Le Canoine, Robert, 276, 279, 337 Le Carpentier, Jean, 320 Leclerc, Pierre. See Beye, Pierre Lecomte, Jehan, 113 Lecourt, Jaquemart de, 35 Le Duc, Jehan, 306, 311 Le Févre, Jehan, 125, 287, 312 Lefèvre, Placide, 250 Le Franc, Martin, 47, 150, 319 eclogues of, 686 Le champion des dames, 95, 128–129, 155, 209, 244–245, 308, 322, 686 Le Glay, André, 34, 163, 321 Legrant, Guillaume. See Lemacherier, Guillaume (“Legrant”) Le Jay, Gérard, 29, 204 Le Jeune, Jehan, 207 Le Josne, Paul, 213, 236–237, 332 Le Leu, Jehan, 337 Le Lièvre, Symon, 267n18, 287 Le Macherier, Guillaume, 17 Lemacherier, Guillaume (“Legrant”), 18, 54, 114–115, 648 Le Mannier, Gobert, 213, 236, 305, 331 Le Mannier, Jacques, 337, 502–503 Le Métayer, Guillaume (“de Malbecque”), 18, 29, 71, 122, 134, 150, 211–212, 283 Lenfant. See Flannel, Gilles (“L’Enfant”) Lens, Jehan de, 93 Leonin, 9–10, 426 Le Prestre, Pierre, 55, 338 Le Prestre, Raoul, 251 Le Roigniet, Thomas, 190 Le Rouge, Guillaume, M. Soyez apprantiz, 583–584 Le Rousellet, 649 Le Roux, Jehan, 312 Le Roy, Jehan. See Regis, Jehan [Johannes] Le Roy, Jehan [NOT REGIS], 283, 313 L’Escrivain, Jehan, 353 L’Escuyer, Pierre, 545 Lesme, Jehan de, 113 l’Espine, Nicaise de, 303 Le Tavernier, Guillaume, 65n75

Le Tavernier, Vincent, 17 L’homme armé, 273–274, 278, 308, 594 Liber officialium, 15 Libert, Gautier, 98, 113, 114 Li Crasse, Jehanne, 35 Liebert, Clemens, 122 Liebert, Reignault, M. De Beata Virgine, 551 Liebert, Renaud, 212, 218 Liere, Thomas de, 287 Ligier, Jehan, 149, 201 Ligne, Julien de, 298 Lindeburg, Cornelis, 277n72 Linden, Albert Vander, 26 litterae de fructibus, on Du Fay’s behalf, 87–88, 98–99, 100–101, 142 Lockwood, Lewis, 127, 146, 640, 683 Logier, Arnold, 235 Logier, Ernoul, 288 Long, Nicolas, 199 Loqueville, Richard de, 5, 46, 51, 60–61, 470, 474, 670 O flos in divo, 361 Lorenzo Colonna, Vittoria di, 64, 66, 69, 339, 552, 638 Louis (duke of Savoy), 125, 148, 152, 169, 201–202, 203, 234, 237, 238–239, 240, 242, 247–248, 368, 479 Louis I of Orléans, 30 Louis the Dauphin, 239, 247 Louis XI (king of France), 12, 208, 281 Lourimel, Colle de, 305 Lourme, Damien, 41 Lovegnée, Albert, 26 Lowinsky, Edward, 335 Luna, Pedro de. See Benedict XIII (pope) Lupard, Marie, 268, 305 Lusignan, Hughes de, 125 Lütteken, Laurenz, 139, 204, 326, 353, 356, 365, 374, 378, 380, 381, 382, 387 Luwere, Jehan de, 287 Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale 525, 625 Macheclier, Henri, 182n71, 213 Macheclier, Jehan, 182n71 magister, musicians designated as, 9–10 Maillart, Clement, 199 Maillart, Pierre, 198, 199 Malatesta family, 55–56, 69–70, 99, 244, 397, 468, 475, 557, 632, 633, 640, 641 Carlo di Galeotto, 55–56, 65, 66, 84, 96, 339, 640 Carlo I di Galeotto, 52, 64

Index

Carlo II, 64–65, 66, 69, 84, 339, 552, 638 Cleofe, 65–67, 339, 355, 640 Elizabetta di Galeazzo, 339, 641 Galeotto I di Pandolfo, 64 Malatesta di Pandolfo, 55–56, 65, 70, 72, 632 Malatesta II di Pandolfo, 64 Malatesta III [IV] di Pandolfo (“Malatesta dei Sonetti”), 64, 78 Malatesta IV, 71 Pandolfo (archbishop of Patras), 56, 64, 65, 66, 77–79, 96, 339, 354, 355, 356–357, 639, 640, 641 Pandolfo di Galeotto, 84, 96 Pandolfo I, 64 Pandolfo II, 64 Pandolfo III, 114 Pandolfo III di Galeotto, 64, 65 Parisina, 631 Pesaro, 357 Taddea, 96, 640 Malederre, Robert, 113 Malin, Jehan, 43 Manetti, Gianozzo, 136 Maniates, Maria Rika, 661, 662, 663 Mansel, Baude, 306, 310 manuscripts cited Ao 15, 470–473, 484, 509, 551, 553, 563, 572 Ao 16, 256 Aosta Cathedral 35, 546, 548 Aosta Seminary 58, 546, 548 Apt 16b, 10, 115–116, 394, 420, 550 Bo Q15, 60–62, 72, 89, 92–93, 99, 130, 148, 151, 153–154, 263, 320, 322, 324, 343, 355, 370, 395, 397, 407, 421, 425, 426–428, 429–430, 433–437, 439, 447, 468, 470–473, 475, 477, 479, 481, 484–485, 487, 490, 493, 509, 510, 517, 524, 551, 553, 558, 562, 565, 567, 569, 570–571, 572 Br 5557, 291, 297, 310, 321, 343, 502, 524, 604, 607, 611, 612, 613, 614–615, 616–618 BR II.3824, 176 BU 2216, 551, 553, 631, 635 Bux, 678 Ca 6, 132, 190–191, 215, 233, 321, 426, 433, 473, 484, 491, 496–497, 500, 502, 503, 505, 587 Ca 11, 132, 191, 213, 215, 343, 473, 484, 491, 496–497, 500, 502, 503, 505, 587 Casanatense chansonnier, 274 CBM 12, 224, 459, 544, 545, 548

CBM 28, 426, 433 CBM 29, 341, 432–433 CBM 60, 224 CBM 158, 173–180, 346, 511 CBM 181, 544 CBM 184, 543, 544, 623, 625 Ch 546, 10 Cord, 343, 633 CS 6, 429, 435, 436 CS 14, 514, 585, 594, 607 CS 15, 421, 425, 428–429, 430, 432–433, 435–437, 439, 445, 446–447, 669 CS 49, 594 Cyprus Codex, 583 EscB, 645, 678 Fl 176, 666, 669 Fl 2794, 660 Florenc, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Aedilium 151, 542 FP 26, 631 FR 2794, 411 Ivr 115, 10 Ivrea 115, 115–116, 550 LBM 599 [cantatorium of St-Pierre de Lille], 416 Lu 238, 257, 514, 594 Manuscrit de Bayeux, 658 MC 871, 445, 447, 666, 680, 685 Mel, 633, 636, 669, 679 Mel 48, 153 Mel 68, 153 Mellon Chansonnier, 274 MilD 1, 413, 445, 446 ModA, 10 ModB, 147, 219, 221, 342, 343, 345, 346, 376, 384, 388, 407, 409, 421, 424–425, 428, 429–430, 432–437, 443, 447, 448–450, 453, 454–455, 483, 524, 578, 579, 580 ModD, 613, 615, 616–618 Montpellier H159, 176, 528 MüB 3224, 154, 155 MuEm, 256, 367, 636, 650, 666, 678 MuL, 636 Niv, 666, 682–683 NYB, 645 Old Hall, 468 Ox 123, 645 Ox 213, 72, 76, 78, 79, 130, 146, 148, 154, 263, 322, 333, 343, 355, 471, 474, 551, 628, 630, 631–633, 635, 642, 644, 645, 647, 657, 666, 674 Paris, Arsenal 197, 546 Pav 352, 343, 633

921

922

Index

manuscripts cited (cont.) PC 4, 678 Pix, 657, 660, 685 Pixérécourt chansonnier, 321 Por, 649, 666, 679, 680, 683 RCas, 657 Rei 3, 633, 635 Reina codex, 678 RU, 666 Sche, 645 Sie K. I. 2, 585 SP B80, 285, 429, 443, 445, 446, 502, 613, 616–618 Str, 154, 155 Str 47, 257 Str 222, 343, 636, 678 Strahov, 171, 512 Tr 87, 114, 117–118, 153, 154, 256, 346, 387, 409, 450, 456, 458, 484, 485, 487, 492, 517, 551, 578, 580, 678 Tr 88, 171, 174–178, 180, 202, 218, 221, 223–224, 225, 226–228, 257, 344, 346, 409, 457, 504, 506, 510, 511, 512, 513, 516, 522, 523, 524, 532, 540, 541, 577–578, 584, 585, 624–625 Tr 89, 413, 445, 446–447, 624–626, 645 Tr 90, 171n39, 178, 221, 256, 409, 425, 496, 510, 512, 524, 532, 535–536, 553, 575, 576, 577–578, 583–584 Tr 92, 92–93, 96, 130, 150–151, 153, 256, 343, 367, 468, 482, 484, 485, 490, 492, 493, 495, 496–497, 502, 509, 517, 520, 521, 551, 553, 638 Tr 93, 171n39, 217, 221, 256, 262, 486, 496, 503, 512, 524, 532, 541, 553, 575, 579, 679 Trent Codices 87–92, 171, 322–323 Vat lat. 4736, 14 Ven, 553 Marie de Lamont, 5 Marsille, Jehan, 108, 134, 342n55 Martin, Georges, 152 Martin, Jehan, 193–194, 207, 381–382, 514 Martini, Giovanni Battista, 320 Martin V (pope), 15, 16, 53, 54, 57–58, 58t2.2, 70, 75, 81, 83, 91, 97, 101, 105, 112–114, 116, 121–122, 293, 323 Masaccio, 135 Mass of Tournai, 550 Mass Ordinary settings individual and paired movements (“fragmenta missarum”), 468, 470 rise of, 550–552

Matteo da Perugia, 116 Maubegois, Jehan, 312 Mauclerc, Jehan, 132, 337 Mauclerc, Jehan (“de Saint Pol”), 17 Medici, Cosimo de’, 135, 349 Medici, Giovanni de’, 240 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 202, 284, 350 Medici, Piero de’, 240, 349, 410, 681 Meelbroucq, Jan, 182n71 Mehmet II, 240 Mellet, Symon, 175, 191, 193, 213–217, 229, 230, 266–267, 278, 282, 290, 294, 297, 309, 314, 315, 346, 347, 349, 381, 385, 415, 425, 501–502, 503, 603 Menard, Quentin, 131 mensural transformation, 358, 364, 368, 371, 373, 375, 378, 383, 480 mensuration canon, 256, 682–683 Mercier, Toussaint, 183 Merques, Nicole, 150–151, 343 Castrum pudicitiae – Virgo viget melius – Benedicamus domino, 354 Méru, Jehan de, De home vray, 639 Metz-Guichard, Jacques de, 43, 54, 74n122 Meyere, Guillaume, 151 Michael, Jaques, 42 Michel, Jacques, 303, 311, 312 Milan, 355 Milet, Jehan, 268 Militis, Henricus, 124 Millet, Hélène, 8, 11 minstrels, 4, 10, 11 Missa ad tollendum schismam, 61, 338, 470 Missa Caput (English), 217, 255, 256, 259–261, 282, 284, 348, 375, 376x9.2, 381, 384, 410, 413, 417, 467, 503, 514–515, 516, 583, 584, 589, 590–591, 600, 603 Missa Fuit homo missus, 503, 591 Missa La belle se siet, 584 Missa La mort de Saint Gothard, 514, 516 Missale parvum (1507), 224, 225–227, 459, 543, 623, 625 Missa Meditatio cordis, 257 Missa O admirabile beati (Symon de Insula), 257 Missa O rosa bella (II), 584 Missa Quem malignus spiritus, 503 Missa Salve sancta parens, 503 Missa Se tu t’en marias, 257 Missa Sine nomine, of CS 14, 514 Missa veterem hominem, 514 Mittit ad virginem, 151, 509, 544, 545–546 modus cum tempore, 208, 347, 532n93, 534

Index

Molinet, 552 Déploration, 684 Mons, 254 Monson, Craig, 130, 484, 496, 499 Montefeltro, Sofia, 66 Morley, Thomas, A Plaine and Easie Introduction, 514 Mortier, Raoul, 294, 313 Morton, Robert, 274, 629, 657 motet function of, 377 subgenres of, 351–353, 367, 392, 394 motu proprio, 108–109 Mouton, Jehan, 146, 316–317 Moux, parish church of, 105, 106–107 Mueglitz, Jacobus Nicolaus de, 70 Muguet, Gérard, 231 Münster, Bistumarchivs 269, 625 Musée des Beaux Arts, Lille, 298 music, as exact science, 6–7 musica ficta, 336 musicus, 47, 237, 331–333, 341–342, 345 Mutte, Henri-Denis, 298 Nádas, John, 11, 14, 376, 388, 426, 428 Namps, Jehan de, 192, 194 Namur, Musée diocésain 395, 625 Naples, 628 Narni, Lodovico Bernardi da, 16 Nettelet, Guibert, 94–95 Nicholas (of St-Géry), 353 Nicholas V (pope), 229, 231, 238–239, 242, 244, 246 Nicolaus (of St-Géry), 44 Nicole, Grégoire, 29, 85–86, 183, 266, 278, 286–287, 288, 289, 303, 306, 308, 312–313 Nicole, Jehan, 86, 286–287 Nicoli, Niccolò, 365 Nieppe, Guillaume de, 151, 198 Nitschke, Wolfgang, 326, 514, 607 Norme, Lucido Giovanni da, 15 Nosow, Robert, 381–382, 593 Notre-Dame, Condé, 106, 206 Notre Dame, Paris, clercs de matines, 7 Notre-Dame de Grace (icon), 234–235 Nouvion-les-Vineux, Laon, 74, 80, 88, 99 Nucius, 320 number symbolism, 137, 273, 370–371, 593, 595, 661 Nys, Ludovic, 36, 300

Obrecht, Jacob, 316, 317, 332–333, 552 M. Maria zart, 595 Ockeghem, Jehan de, 47, 239–240, 256, 273, 280, 281–282, 284, 317n13, 332–333, 349, 497, 552, 594–595, 603, 609, 665, 683, 684, 685 L’autre d’antan, 274 M. Caput, 259, 274, 409, 584, 590–591, 591x15.3, 598–599 M. D’ung aultre amer, 601 M. Ecce ancilla, 282, 417, 418, 603–605 M. L’homme armé, 274–275, 594, 598, 661 M. pro defunctis, 467, 627 M. Prolationum, 334 Ma bouche rit, 653 Petite Camusette, 664 O decus Hispaniae – O sidus Hispaniae, 523 office, modally ordered, 460 O quanta est exsultatio, 252–254, 253x5.1 Order of Saint Maurice, 148, 202, 230 Order of the Golden Fleece, 170, 205, 216, 235, 261, 272–273, 291, 309, 319, 320, 344, 350, 426, 467, 504, 506, 515, 516, 517, 594, 595, 605, 626, 661, 662 Order of the Golden Fleece, votive Masses for, 189, 205, 216, 218, 224, 380, 434, 451, 458, 497, 509–511, 512–513, 515, 522–523, 524–532, 538 Or sus or sus par dessus, 257 O sidus Hispaniae, 409 Ouden, Nicolas, 74n122 Our Lady, Antwerp, 259 Our Lady of Snows, feast of, 293 Overal, Ghiselbert, 113, 114 Owens, Jessie Ann, 334 Palais Rihour, Lille, 299 Panet, Guillaume, 249 papal chapel, 13–16, 45n151, 83, 87, 94–95, 96, 97, 98–100, 105, 111–116, 121–123, 133, 134, 135n175, 144–146, 211, 234, 244, 251, 321, 341, 342, 345, 427, 428–429, 439, 468, 470, 482, 483, 486, 517, 540 Papin, Nicolas, 101 Paradisi, Roberto, 109, 141 Pardieu, Clementia, 32 Pardieu, Josquin, 32 Parent, Philippe, 43 Parentucelli, Tommaso. See Nicholas V (pope) Partner, Peter, 81 Pastoor, Andreas, 163 Patras, 76–79

923

924

Index

patronage, 12–13. See also ecclesiastical benefices and preferment Paul II (pope), 661 Paulus de Monte Sancto, 56 Pauman, Conrad, 4 peace of 3 May 1438, 152, 373 peace of 26 April 1433, 126, 640 Peace of Viterbo, 365 performance practice, modern, 327 Perotin, 9 Petach, Simon, 35 Peter of Luxembourg, 30 Petit Jehan, 214 Petrarch, 629 Petronibus de Bernadigis, Ambrosius de (“Gualdaniga”), 70 Petrus Frater (dictus de Palma Ociosa), 47, 386, 518 Phelps, Michael, 376, 428 Philip (count of Geneva), 152 Philippe de Luxembourg, 65 Philip the Bold, 5, 23, 623 Philip the Good, 125–126, 170, 181, 199, 201–202, 203, 205, 211–212, 240, 242, 272–274, 281, 344, 350, 505, 506, 515, 594 Picard, André, 242 Piccolomini, Enea Silvio. See Pius II (pope) Piéronne (wife of Jehan Du Fayt), 35 Pierre, Jehan de la, 319 Pigouche, Jehan, 17, 113, 427 Pinerolo, 152–153, 155 Piquet, Jehan, 269 Pirro, André, 323, 326, 355, 365, 479–480, 631 Pirrotta, Nino, 633 Pistoia, Cino da, “La dolce vista,” 632 Pius II (pope), 272, 594 Pizan, Christine de, 683 plainchant tradition, 3–4 Plamenac, Dragan, 203, 657 Plonchet, Nicolas, 42, 231, 265, 278, 289 Pochon, Jehan, 184 Poele, Baudouin de la, 32 Poignare, Barthélemy, 18, 94–95, 113, 114, 123, 150, 182, 187, 209, 337, 492 Polon, Jehan, 151 polyphonic music, in nonecclesiastical contexts, 18 Poree, Guillaume, 305 Portinari, Tomasso, 283 Power, Lionel, 54, 259, 375, 394 Powers, Harold, 462 Prokofiev, Sergei, 475

proportional structure and symbolism, 369–371, 593 Puch, Pierre du (son of), 306, 310 Pullaerm, Louis van, 337 Quadris, 424 Radulphus, Johannes, 70 Ragot, Jacques, 123, 134 Ramillies, Thomas de, 286n131 Ranchicourt, Pierre de, 207, 266, 278, 280, 296, 305, 381, 382 Raoul le Prestre, 24, 55 Recollectio omnium festorum BMV, 248–250, 265, 349, 459 Redoys, Jehan, 105, 106 Regis, Jehan [Johannes], 26, 41, 276–277, 278, 594, 595 M. Ecce ancilla, 605 Rehm, Wolfgang, 669 Reid, John, 374, 387 Reimer, Erich, 331 Reson, Jehan, M. Sine nomine, 551 Restehen. Jehan de, 212 Rex saeculorum (Power/Dunstaple), 259, 584 Reyner, Adriaan, 17 Richental, Ulrich von, 53 Rietz, Jehan de, 207 Rifkin, Joshua, 286 rime équivoquée, 646 Rimini, 65–66, 339, 356, 639 Rimini, Filippo da, 145 ritual narrative, in musical structure, 610 Robaille, Jacques, 48, 98, 113, 337 Robert, Guillaume, 201 Robert (duke of Bar), 46 Robertson, Anne Walters, 246–248, 645 Robinet se veult marier – Se tu te marie – Helas pour quoy se marie on, 257 Rochefort, Charles de, 199 Rodolph, Jan, 236, 238, 265, 282 Rogier, Jehan Rogier de Hesdin, 19, 20–21n12, 20, 27, 33, 38, 43, 59 Rolin, Jehan, 141 Le Roman de la Rose, 686 Rome, 94–95, 97, 340, 356. See also papal chapel Rome, Archivio di Stato, 322 Romedenne, Jehan de, 17 Rongh, Jehan, 94–95 Rosario, Airola Giovanni da, 113, 114 Rosut, Jehan de, 269, 296, 297

Index

Rouelle, Toussaint de la, 17 Rougemont, Thibaut de, 251 round dance, 620 Royllart, Philippe, 550 Royllart, Rex Karole, 476 Rupare, Étienne, 124 Ryschawy, Hans, 369 St. Cecilia, Trastevere, 91 St. Donatian, 16, 103, 108, 111, 142, 151, 152, 169, 181, 189, 195–199, 217 St. Gudule, Brussels, 623 St. Lawrence, Dudzeele, 200 St. Martin, Liège, 71, 72 St. Mary, Mechelen, 212 St. Rombaut, Mechelen, 212 St-Antoine de Vienne, 623 St-Aubert, Abbey of, Cambrai, 158, 159 Sainte-Chapelle, Dijon, 170, 171, 175, 205, 377, 505, 516, 524, 623 Ste-Croix, Cambrai, 7, 159, 312–313 Ste-Waudru, Mons, 200, 206, 254 St-Géry, Cambrai, 52, 98, 159, 267–268, 312–313, 338 chaplaincy of the Salve, 49–52, 62–64, 76, 85–88, 99, 100, 106, 108, 110, 123, 131, 338 Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, Paris, 88, 89, 565 St-Loup de Versoix, 143, 149 St-Maur des Fosses, Paris, 453 St-Omer, 108, 169, 177, 180 St-Paul, Liège, 71 St-Pierre, Lille, 17, 84, 177, 605 St-Pierre, Tournai, 101, 104–105 St-Pourçain, 240, 348 St-Sepulchre, Abbey of, Cambrai, 159, 353 St-Victor, Abbey of, Paris, 9 St-Vincent de Soignies, 211 San Calisto, Trastevere, 123 Sanchez, Alfonso, 15 Sancti Spiritus assit nobis gratia, 150–151 Sanctus – Agnus pair (anon.), 472 Sandewyn, Hendrik, 16 Sandewyn, Robert, 16, 57, 199 Sandrin. See Bouillart, Alexandre San Giacomo il Maggiore, Bologna, 88–89, 91–92, 358, 565–566, 569–570 San Giovanni, chapel of, Florence, 283 San Petronio, Bologna, 91 San Pietro, Bologna, 91 San Pietro in Vaticano, 429 Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, 135 dedication of, 136, 138, 141, 293, 342, 368

polyphonic Vespers at, 428 Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, 293 Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 134 Santiago de Compostela, 569, 571 Santo Spirito, Florence, 135 Sarazac, Raymond de, 41–42 Savoy, court and chapel of, 124, 126, 130, 133–134, 155, 202–203, 229, 232, 234, 239, 242–246, 243t5.1, 255, 342–343, 344, 347, 348, 350, 373, 427, 497, 645 Savoy, political tensions with France, 239–240 Schedel, Hartmann, 645 Schildbach, Martin, 575 Schimmelpfennig, Bernhard, 14 schism, 11, 13, 22–23, 61, 62, 122, 181, 229, 231, 232. See also Council of Basel Schoop, Hans, 126, 356, 471, 640 Schwarz, Brigide, 12 Scoblant, Guillaume, 145 Scoto, Daniele, 144 Scully, Hughes, 151 Seclier, Étienne, 201 Se la face ay pale, 130 Senleches, Jacob de, 4–5, 11, 13 En ce gracïeux tamps, 647 Serra Estellés, Javier, 13 Sherr, Richard, 262, 585 Shroud of Turin, 130, 246–248, 584, 647 Sigismund of Luxemburg, 23, 54, 120, 122, 125, 365 Silenen, Jost von, 118 Silvestri da Fondi, Enrico, 134 Simon de Montfort, 409 Simone (singer), 283 Sinodi, Jehan. See Conseil, Jehan (“Le Jeune”) Sirede, Benoit, 96, 342, 343, 345, 376, 388, 428, 483 Sixtus IV (pope), 102 small antiphon settings, 449–450, 451–452. See also specific works Smits van Breda, Anselm, 108, 236, 342n55 Sohier, Girard, 192 Sohier, Jehan, 453, 454 Solage, 13 solus tenor, 340, 359–360, 364, 478–479 Spataro, Giovanni, 178, 221, 261, 317, 320, 344, 506, 510, 515, 516, 576–577 Tractato de musica, 510–511, 577 Squarcialupi, Antonio, 3, 202, 283, 350, 628 SS. Nicholas and Catherine, chaplaincies of, 267n18 Stäblein, Bruno, 575

925

926

Index

Stainer, John, 323 Stoll, Rolf, 369 Stravinsky, Igor, 674 Strohm, Reinhard, 43–44, 199, 293, 297, 413, 541, 558, 569, 605 Sub Arcturo plebs vallata, 370 Sutoire, Gerard, 182n71 Symon de Insula, 258–259 M. O admirabile beati, 257, 259 Tamerel, Jennin, 309 Tempio dell’Onore e delle Vertù, 153 Temple of Solomon, 369 Templeuve, Jacques de, 35 Terasse, Louys, 315 Thannabaur, Peter, 554, 575 Thelliez, Cyrille, 162 Thénard, Pierre-Joseph, 298 Theodoros II Palaiologos, 65–66, 339 Thibault, Geneviève, 682 Thiébaut, Jacques, 163 Thomas, Dylan, 688 Thorote, Mathieu, 17, 57–59, 65n75 Tinctoris, Johannes, 5, 6, 7, 208, 221, 261, 275, 314, 319, 349, 506, 516, 628, 633, 669 Proportionale musices, 276, 576 Tournai, cathedral of, 103, 104–105, 106–108, 132, 142 Tranchant, François-Dominique, 34, 74, 298 Treitler, Leo, 336 troped Marian antiphons, 416 Trouffon, Jehan, 210 Trowell, Brian, 571 Turner, Charles, 378 Turpin, Jehan, 236–237 Urban VI (pope), 115 Urban V (pope), 13 Utino, Johannes Odoricus de, 70 Vaillant, Jehan, 550–551 Vaillant, Jehan, Par maintes foys, 647 Valkenisse, Klaus van, 289, 292–293 Vallain, Jacques, 312 Van den Borren, Charles, 323, 471 Van der Meulen, Adam Frans, 164–167 Vander Straeten, Edmond, 321 Van Eeckhoute, Rogier, 317 Van Ghizeghem, Hayne, 629 Vaughan, Richard, 240–241 Velut, Gillet, 46, 69, 129, 353–354

vernacular music, 4–6. See also minstrels Veronica’s veil, 247 Versoix parish church, Geneva, 105–106, 134, 200–201 Victimae paschali laudes, 599 Villacuria, Desiderius Thiricti de, 70 Villers, Jehanne de, 35 Vinand de Limbourg, Jehan, M. Sine nomine, 551 Vincenet, Jehan, 113 virelai, 647–648 Vitry, Philippe de, 10, 24, 353 Vivien, Jehan, 141–142 Vivienne, Jehan, 108, 109 Volp, Hanns, 496, 517 Vostre, Symon, 459 Vriend, Klaus. See L’Ami [Lami], Nicole Wagner, Peter, 68 Wallet, Nicaise, 207 Walpois, Jehan Walther, 320 Ward, Tom, 154, 413, 426 Warren, Charles, 369 Wastreleet, Gérard, 305, 310 Wauquetin, Barthélemy de, 236 Wegman, Rob, 259, 260, 332, 337, 614, 617–618 Werchin, Jacques de, 305, 310 Werp, Jacop van, 28, 33, 104, 105 Wiener Neustadt, 348, 541 Willequin, Martin, 44n149, 190 Wiser, Hanns, 333, 347–348, 467, 503, 511, 524, 525, 532, 541, 575, 579, 581, 584 Wolkenstein, Oswald von, 54 Wright, Craig, 5, 9, 96, 139, 182, 229, 326, 337, 472, 502, 542 Wright, Peter, 150, 496–497, 499 Wyet, Jehan, 17, 65n75, 94–95, 132 Ximeno de Cornago, Joan, M. Ayo visto la mappamundi, 584 Yolanda of Valois, 247, 285 Zacara, Antonio, 60–61, 67n87, 90, 115–116, 354, 470, 473, 491, 492 Zacharie, Niccolò Pietro, 16, 18, 114–115, 182 Zambeccari family, 96 Zemberch, Jehan, 276, 337