The end of the ars subtilior

Autor(en): Fallows, David

Objekttyp: Article

Zeitschrift: Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis : eine

Veröffentlichung der Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, Lehr- und
Forschungsinstitut für Alte Musik an der Musik-Akademie der
Stadt Basel

Band (Jahr): 20 (1996)

PDF erstellt am: 30.09.2023

Persistenter Link: https://doi.org/10.5169/seals-869063

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 THE END OF THE ARS SUBTILIOR

by David Fallows

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Tom Binkley, who had very clear
ideas on virtuosity in medieval music. Those ideas were about professionalism
and they were ultimately connected with his views on the Studio der
Frühen Musik as being in the late 1960s the only fully professional early
music group in the world. What he meant by that was that nobody in the
Studio earned their living by any other means: no part-time teaching position
to make financial ends meet (this was of course before their years here
at the Schola Cantorum) and almost no outside professional engagements.
To justify that claim of unique professionalism it seemed necessary
constantly to face new challenges. That is part of the reason why they always
performed from memory, part of the reason for their occasional extremes
of tempo, and most particularly part of the reason for a certain concentration
on the music of the ars subtilior. After all, the music of this late-
fourteenth-century tradition is in many ways more intricate and harder to
perform than any other music before the twentieth century. There is other
music that can be used to display speed and agility, other music that can
far more easily astonish and dazzle a large audience, but nothing else that
quite so consistently draws the admiration of other professionals.
It is easy enough to suggest that the music of the ars subtilior arose itself
from that same drive: a need for professional musicians to assert their
superiority over a growing body of skilled musical amateurs. Machaut, in
his Voir dit, expects his love Toutebelle to be able to sing his songs; the
Paradiso degli Alberti reports three courtiers performing a song by Landini
in the composer's presence; and 11 saporetto reports how a young nobleman
sang all kinds of music. These are fictional accounts, but they were surely
intended to express at least a plausible reality of musical life in the late
fourteenth century. There were now plenty of amateurs apparently able to
perform sophisticated polyphony, and there was at the same time a growing
tradition of fully professional performing musicians. There seems wide
agreement that part of the reason for the more complex notational style
known as the ars subtilior was that this was music that could be read and
performed only by those with a thoroughly professional grounding.
There are six main features of exclusivity in this music. The first is quite
specifically in the way it was written down. Quite often there are simpler
ways of notating the music: the written symbol was to some extent
a puzzle and a challenge. Perhaps the classic cases of this are the
three diagrammatic pieces: Baude Cordier's heart-shaped Belle, bonne, sage,
Cordier's circle-shaped Tout par compas and Senleches' La harpe de mélodie

21
written in the shape of a harp. There are more straightforward ways of
notating all three.
The second feature concerns the extremely complicated cross-rhythms of
the repertory. Not just elaborate proportions, but densely complicated
syncopations of a kind that can be performed only as a result of the most
intensive rehearsal. Here the most famous examples are Ciconia's Sus un'
fontaine, perhaps composed around 1390, Zachara da Teramo's Sumite
karissimi, and Matteo da Perugia's Le greygnour bien perhaps from around
1410. It was, incidentally, Sumite karissimi that Apel described as „the
acme of rhythmic intricacy in the entire history of music".1 He published
that remark in 1942, when the world was yet to see the complexity of early
Stockhausen and Boulez, let alone that of a Brian Ferneyhough; but it was
true at the time.
A third feature of this repertory is the inclusion of sudden startling runs
moving at astonishing speed that contrast with the relatively slow music
around; again, one of the most famous examples is in La harpe de mélodie
by Senleches, though it was to be a more prominent feature of the probably
later music in the French repertory known only from the manuscript copied
in Cyprus.
A fourth matter is in the use of strange and perplexing chromaticism, as
in the most famous of all late-fourteenth-century songs, Solage's Fumeux
fume.
Related to that is the fifth feature, the use of poetic texts that are
symbolic, allusive, descriptive or entirely incomprehensible. Again Fumeux

fume could stand as an example of the text that is hard to understand. Of

the descriptive texts, one might mention the way Baude Cordier's Tout par
compas describes itself or how the text of Guido's ballade Or voit tout en
aventure stands as a manifesto for the entire first generation of ars subtilior
composers.
Finally, a sixth feature of these works is that in many cases the text
seems entirely smothered in the music. It is hard to imagine any singer
managing to convey even the words, let alone the form or the grammar, of
a song like Sus un' fontaine. This presents an enormous challenge; but
even in the most skilled performance the listener will need to return to the
written music to get any clear sense of what is happening. As in much
other music of the fourteenth century, the written document is an important
part of its cultural resonance. That is, only the musically literate
listener can gather more than a glimmer of what is happening.
And it is this last feature that seems particularly important for the next
generation of songwriters in the early fifteenth century. It would be too
simplistic to say that the Binchois generation was reacting specifically

1
Willi Apel, The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900-1600 (Cambridge MA, 1942), p. 432

22
against the ars subtilior - too simplistic both because the chronology is
more complex than that and because there was a tradition of extremely
simple and more or less syllabic songs that runs through the full second
half of the fourteenth century. But it is true that Binchois, Dufay and their
contemporaries knew this music of the ars subtilior; and they knew all its
notational techniques from the theory treatises; but in general they
carefully avoided all six of the features I have just mentioned. Even from the

manuscripts it is easy to see the new care with which words are matched
to notes, the way every effort is made to project clearly the sense of the
words, their grammar and their poetic form.
Features like this go in cycles. By the late fifteenth century composers
were once again moving towards a far more melismatic setting of the
words, returning more to a kind of song in which the music had an existence
of its own. Obviously generalizations need to overlook specific cases.
But most songs that seem to have been composed in the years between
1410 and 1440 have features that explicitly reject the style of the ars
subtilior. They aim at clarity, elegance and lightness of touch.
My subject, however, is those few pieces that do not; the small tradition
of works that carry on the ars subtilior through the whole fifteenth century
and beyond. My title, ,The End of the Ars Subtilior', is obviously an allusion
to Ursula Günther's famous article of 1963, ,Das Ende der ars nova',
the article in which she proposed the term ,ars subtilior' for the music
previously known just as ,mannerist'.2 But my use of the word ,end' is
different from hers. Professor Günther used it as a way of saying that the
ars nova style had come to an end and was replaced by something else, the
ars subtilior. On the contrary, I am saying that the techniques and style of
the ars subtilior had a far longer history that continued for another hundred
years and more.
First in that trickle is a piece by Hugo de Lantins, Je suy exent, which
opens the last-copied fascicle of the Bodleian Library manuscript Canon.
Misc. 213, copied probably in the early 1430s.3 Starting with all voices
marked cut-0, it has several mensuration changes in all voices (3, 0, re-
versed-C, C-dot, reversed-cut-C and 2), it has cross-rhythms (3-2, 4-3 of
various kinds); and each line of the music has its own individual character.
From a transcription it is easier to see other features. It has sudden changes
of pace, and it has fast runs as well as jagged outlines: notational complexity,
vocal virtuosity and expressive mannerism go hand in hand here. It is
a most remarkable piece to find in the 1420s.

2
Ursula Günther, „Das Ende der ars nova", Die Musikforschung 16 (1963), pp. 105-20.
3
The song is famous through the publication of a facsimile in Apel, op. cit., p. 177, but
a better facsimile of the entire manuscript is now available, ed. David Fallows (Chicago,
1995); the piece is published in C. van den Borren, Pièces polyphoniques profanes de
provenance Liégeoise (Brussels, 1950), p. 53.

23
 The recent discovery that Hugo spent much of the 1420s at the Malatesta
court in Rimini4 prompts one to put Je suy exent alongside Dufay's ballade
Resvelliés vous, composed for a Malatesta wedding at Rimini in 1423.
Taken by itself, Resvelliés vous could be seen as hinting gently back to the
ars subtilior: rhythmic changes, but no more than many „grandes ballades"
of the early fifteenth century, short passages of extreme virtuosity, passing
cross-rhythms. It is a dazzlingly resourceful work, but its most striking
feature from an aesthetic point of view is that each line of the text seems
to carry a new set of musical ideas. That is in some ways a feature that is
harder to find in the true ars subtilior generation, but it is just as surely
something that represents a bold and irrational approach to musical
composition. It refreshingly challenges the notion that a work needs uniformity
of style and economy of material to be satisfactory.
A few years ago I drew attention to several works that seem to show
Dufay and Hugo working together either as colleagues or in direct competition:
works by both marking Cleofe Malatesta's departure for Byzantium
in 1419; motets by both celebrating St Nicholas of Bari; and, most
strikingly, a Gloria by Hugo paired with a Credo on similar materials by Dufay,

giving the strongest evidence of collaboration or even rivalry.5 I now

believe that the similarities between Je suy exent and Resvelliés vous can be
added tentatively to that list: direct contact between the two pieces may
go no further than their voice-ranges; but both refer back to the techniques
of the ars subtilior in ways that are most unusual for their time.6
With Dufay and Hugo de Lantins working apparently together in Rimini
and adopting elements of the ars subtilior style, the figure of Ugolino of
Orvieto becomes interesting. A mere thirty miles from Rimini lies Forli,
where Ugolino lived from 1411 until political circumstances forced him to
flee in 1430. He was a man of considerable local importance: he had
represented the
city of Forli at the Council of Constance in 1415 (though it
would be stretching a point to suggest that he could have encountered the

4
Alejandro Enrique Planchart, „Guillaume Du Fay's Benefices and his Relationship to the
Court of Burgundy", Early Music History 8 (1988), pp. 117-71, on pp. 124-5.
5
David Fallows, Dufay (London, 1982), pp. 175-7, and the biographical entry for Hugo in
the revised editions (London, 1987, and New York, 1988) p. 248.
6
Ursula Günther draws attention to further examples of mannerism and historical awareness
in Dufay, see „Polymetric Rondeaux from Machaut to Dufay", in Eugene K. Wolf and
Edward H. Roesner, eds., Studies in Musical Sources and Style: Essays in Honor of fan
LaRue (Madison WI, 1990), pp. 75-108. In particular she notes that in Dufay's Belle que
vous ay je mesfait the three simultaneous signatures O, C-dot and C appear to reflect the
simultaneous C-dot, O and C in Machaut's Quant ma dame les maus d'amer m'aprent
(which is also partly isorhythmic) as well as perhaps the C-dot, O and C in the secunda
pars of Antonello da Caserta's Dame d'onour c'on ne puet esprixier. Moreover she in fact
notes that Dufay's piece has similarities with his Resvelliés vous and proposes a similar
date.

24
young Dufay among the tens of thousands present); and in 1427 he served
as vicar while the Bishop of Forli was away in Rome. Moreover, the recent
discovery that a large quantity of Ugolino's compositions exists in the
Florence manuscript, San Lorenzo 2211, copied by about 1420,7 places
Ugolino as perhaps one of the most senior and eminent composers in the
decade after the death of Ciconia (1412), Matteo da Perugia (by 1418),
Bartolino da Padova (after 1405), Zacara da Teramo (c 1413) and Andrea da
Firenze (c 1415). San Lorenzo 2211 effectively contains the last examples of
the Italian trecento style. Whether Dufay and Hugo actually met Ugolino
is neither here nor there: what is important is that they were living so
close to this distinguished figure and can hardly have been unaware of the
fact. I am suggesting, in short, that their knowledge of Ugolino's proximity
may have been one of the factors in their apparently joint decision to write
music in this older and more florid style.
Unfortunately the Ugolino songs in San Lorenzo 2211 have been scratched
away so that the parchment could be reused: they cannot be read. The only
legible compositions by him are three two-voice songs that appear in an
apparently later manuscript, Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, 2151, at the
end of a copy of his true claim to distinction, the extensive treatise Declaiatio
musice discipline. These three songs actually pose reading problems of
their own: for one of them only the discantus line survives; for all three
there are blotches on the paper that render large passages effectively un-
transcribable (the opening of his Latin song has been variously given as Et
videar, Si videar and Si et videai by a single author); and at least one of
them leaves reason to think that there should probably be a third voice
deduced canonically (though I have not managed to find it). However, what
can be said with confidence about all three pieces is that they use the most
elaborate and complex rhythms.8
Three features of Ugolino's pieces are relevant here. The first is that their
style hints back to the first quarter of the century: long and almost lazy
phrases, an apparently open texture reminiscent of the late trecento,
expansive opening melismas; all this along with the cross-rhythms and
proportions that include constantly changing mensurations and the exploitation
of four-against-three rhythms. The second, to which I shall return, is
the use of a very rare mensuration sign, a circle with three dots inside. And
the third feature is that in this apparently late fifteenth-century source
- the theory treatise it contains was not finished before 1430 - the music
is copied in full-black notation with red coloration. The only other conti-

7
John Nâdas, „Manuscript San Lorenzo 2211: some further observations", L'ars nova del
trecento 6 (Certaldo, 1992), pp. 145-168.
8
The only full discussion of them is in Albert Seay, „Ugolino of Orvieto: theorist and
composer", Musica disciplina 9 (1955), pp. 111-66.

25
nental source from the second half of the century to use full-black and red
is the manuscript now in Oporto, Biblioteca Publica Municipal, 714. I have
proposed elsewhere that the notation of the Oporto manuscript, perhaps
from the early 1460s, relates to the strong English influence in the large
proportion of works there by English composers,-9 but I now feel inclined to
think that there may also be some significance in the fact that it was
almost certainly copied in Ferrara, where Ugolino was resident from 1430
until his death in 1457.
There is, however, an English composer who must have had some contact
with Ugolino and may therefore have spent some time in Ferrara.10 This is
John Hothby, perhaps the strangest music theorist of the century. One of
Hothby's treatises is a digest of Ugolino's Declaratio. The known compositions
of Hothby now survive only in the Faenza codex, among the many
additions made in 1473-4 by Johannes Bonadies. Although no archival
documentation on Bonadies has been found, there are two hints: one is that
he describes himself as a Carmelite; and the other is that the Faenza codex
ended up in the Carmelite Abbey of St Paul in Ferrara. Nor is there any
clear indication of Hothby's whereabouts before he was in Lucca as
choirmaster, though he states that he travelled widely and studied at Pavia.11

Hothby was also a Carmelite; and Albert Seay has noted that there seems
a chance that Bonadies had actually studied with Hothby: his additions to
Faenza include not only nine pieces that he ascribes to Hothby but also
five short theoretical passages by Hothby.12 Briefly, then, there is a chance
that Hothby was in Ferrara, that he in some sense studied with Ugolino,
and that in turn he instructed the apparently younger Bonadies.13

9
David Fallows, „Robertus de Anglia and the Oporto song collection", in Ian Bent, ed.,
Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: a Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart
(London, 1981), pp. 99-128.
10
The hypothesis of Hothby having lived in Ferrara was originally proposed precisely on the
basis of his prominence in the Faenza codex; it has been doubted (e.g. in Reaney's excellent
MGG article on the composer), but seems worth reconsidering in the present context.
11
The statement in NG and earlier editions of Grove that he had taught in Oxford is
without foundation, as noted by Reaney in MGG and as confirmed in A. B. Emden, A
Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A. D. 1500 (Oxford, 1957), p. 969. In
fact a far more promising identification of the composer would be with the John Otteby,
Carmelite Friar of the Oxford convent, who was ordained subdeacon on 18 December
1451, see Emden, op. cit., p. 1409.
12
Though not bearing directly on my argument here, it is intriguing to recall that Hothby's
Amor (also in the Faenza codex) is one of the most subtle of all identified parodies based
on Bedyngham's (I believe) O rosa bella.
13
Unfortunately it remains hard to identify either Hothby or Bedyngham with the two
English musicians at Ferrara called Johannes. Hothby appears to have been ordained
deacon as late as 1451. Bedyngham could just be one of them: I am happy to concede that
the biography of him I sketched out in NG (s.v.) hangs on a very thin thread indeed; but
the likelihood that Bedyngham was in Ferrara and the fact that there were two Englishmen
there with the commonest of all fifteenth-century first names hardly provide enough to
break that thread.

26
 One of Hothby's nine Faenza pieces also belongs in the mannerist tradition
I have been discussing: Oia pro nobis.14 Its notation is in fact void.
The tenor line is notated on the top of the right-hand page initially in
quadrupled note values with the signature 022; and at the bottom of the
page is a renotation of that tenor in normal note-values to help the reader.
This is plainly to some extent an example of notational complexity for its
own sake. The discantus line begins fairly tamely, with some relatively
simple proportions; and in general I would suggest that the work is
hardly a masterpiece of riveting musical invention. But towards the
end it includes 3-against-4, 4-against-6, 5-against-4, 9-against-4 and even
7-against-8.

ex. 1: John Hothby, end of „Ora pro nobis."

14
Albert Seay, ed., John Hothby: Collected Musical Works, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae,
ser. 33 (1964), no. 2; there is a facsimile of the piece in MGG, s.v. „Hothby".

27
 At this point the story must move on to a manuscript copied just before
1600, the commonplace book of the singing-man John Baldwin, now in the
British Library, R.M. 24.d.2.15 It is entirely in the hand of John Baldwin,
famous also for having copied three other important manuscript
collections:16 first,
,My lady Nevell's Book' (still in private hands), containing
most of William Byrd's early keyboard music, apparently copied under the
composer's own direction; second, a set of partbooks, Christ Church mss.
979-983, containing a wide range of English motets, particularly work by
Byrd and John Sheppard; third, though, and strangest, he is the copyist of
one partbook in the famous Forrest-Heyther partbooks, apparently from
around 1530 - evidently Baldwin recopied a much earlier partbook that had
fallen apart. That in itself shows that he had an unusual interest in music
from the first half of his own century.
Baldwin's commonplace book contains three complex mensural pieces
ascribed to ,Mr: Jo: Bedyngeham'; and the question to be confronted
is whether this could be the famous fifteenth-century composer John
Bedyngham, composer of some of the most successful songs of the years
around 1450, among them, as I have recently tried to prove, the most
famous of all fifteenth-century songs, the setting of O rosa bella often
thought of as by John Dunstable.17 At first glance a source of the 1590s may
not seem a very likely place to find music by a composer who died in 1460;
after all, three-quarters of the book is taken up with music by Baldwin's
contemporaries, among them Byrd, Tallis, Monte and Marenzio. But a second
glance shows that this collection contains an extraordinarily wide
range of music. It contains music by composers from the very earliest years
of the sixteenth century, among them Taverner, Fayrfax and Dygon; and it
also includes the only known motet of King Henry VIII, his Quam pulchra
es. Stranger still, it ends with a piece that must have been copied directly
from the Eton Choirbook of around 1500, in which it was also the last
piece. Since Baldwin was a lay-clerk of St George's Windsor, just across the
road from Eton College, it is easy to see how he gained access to the
manuscript; what is strange is that he chose to copy the piece at all if it
was ninety years old. This is the thirteen-voice canon Jesus autem transiens
by Robert Wilkinson (fig. 1); and it seems likely that his reason for copying
it - among all the pieces in the Eton Choirbook - was precisely because it
was a thirteen-voice canon of some complexity. Now there are two more
remarkable features about that copy. First, that Baldwin has copied it in

15
This endlessly fascinating volume is now available in facsimile, ed. Jessie Ann Owens, in
the series Renaissance Music in Facsimile, vol.8 (New York, 1987).
16
See NG, s.v. „Baldwin", by Norman Josephs.
17
David Fallows, „Dunstable, Bedyngham and O rosa bella", Journal of Musicology 12 (1994),
pp. 281-305.

28
the rhomboid-shaped note-heads of the years around 1500; and second that
he also added a calligraphic initial at the beginning of the piece, again
copying a style not used for nearly a century.

fig. 1: Robert Wilkinson, „Jhesus autem transiens"""

cum bormnu voffTru cjuiccnceptuß <0 beJptritu JUncto mtuß

jr^-

crrcuru'rirgmr p4jßißßul'poncio piUtc cructßixußmortuuß Crfcpiltujl bcfenbil

LJ I .-ru JL. j-
*3*

ib mferrni tercu bit rcfurrexit amcrtuiß jifccnbit 4b ccloß fcbit ,ib bcitnm
»
>•
«fr«» «fr

ici p-Rr^y ommtcn tté mbeucnhiruß c0 rubicdre vniof/ er-mortuod crcbon

^•f N'
adefu
Y'ill.%^^-551- |f"
~r
fr
— r^~
J—
LT
JpiritûJinctüJivchrn^cjilpham Jitichrcm cotnmvm'oncrn rcrmjj'/imcrri^pcccjhrcm^

*$&,;? 13
armjj refvrrijcione/ervihm ctcrntm Jx men:—

M v..

r/m
bi0md0 muß totßßuunto yârtc^>-
nuirßrnc cjuotlß par no now 0pU vibefl t- t
29
 There is only one other calligraphic initial of this kind in Baldwin's
manuscript, and this is on the perplexing puzzle piece Holde faste.
fig. 2: John Hothby, „Holde faste" (London, BL, R.M.24.d,2., fol. 104).

"fôéitor:—

$Tc tenorcantctrretortu^-pcrbcmoll( ^"Mtmtiucnîo:

vlrrfl:-
per ff &cauafiy dcyMifacionibj hyvmnjjj no I

30
I cannot offer a plausible transcription of the piece; and I repeat my old
offer of a year's subscription to Early Music for anybody who can provide
a convincing interpretation. Two features jump to the eye, though. First,
the melodic style of the two transcribable voices is very much that of the
mid-fifteenth century. Second, the puzzling tenor is plainly concerned with
hexachords on unusual pitches. One of the oddest details in John Flothby's
theoretical writings is the passage in his Calliopea legale where he
proposes hexachords on A, B-flat, D, E-flat, F-sharp, A-flat, B, D-flat and E.18

It is tempting to think that Holde faste is either by Hothby or intended as

an exemplification of what he was describing. It is in any case clear that,
apart from its baffling notation, this piece follows the ars subtilior tradition
in having some very strange chromaticism.
Now the context of Holde faste within Baldwin's manuscript is important.
On the very next page he copied the first of the three pieces ascribed
to Bedyngham. The other two Bedyngham pieces appear on the next two
openings,- and, to judge from style, it looks very much as though all the
music on folios 103v to 107 is from the mid-fifteenth century. Among the
reasons are not only the melodic and contrapuntal style, the use of
characteristic fifteenth-century mensural signs (including, on folio 103v the circle

with three dots found earlier in the piece by Ugolino), but also the
manner of the only other three-voice piece here, Bedyngham's Salva Jesu,
in which the two lower voices occupy the same range, as happens in most
music before about 1450 (including all the Bedyngham music in fifteenth-
century sources) but very little music of the sixteenth century. Moreover
the discantus and the tenor function precisely as in all mid-fifteenth-cen-
tury music, making a complete contrapuntal unit between themselves and
approaching cadences by step whereas the contratenor has more angular
movement, bridging the gaps between phrases in the other voices and even
including an octave-leap cadence.19 Every detail of the musical syntax here
points towards the middle years of the fifteenth century. And the secunda
pars opens with one of those overlapping-triad moments that are so
characteristic of Bedyngham's style. There is no question in my mind that all
seven pieces on folios 103v-107 of the Baldwin manuscript are from the
mid-fifteenth century and that the three ascribed to John Bedyngham are
indeed by the fifteenth-century composer of that name.
A slightly broader context explains why they are here. The first 89 folios
of the manuscript are filled with music in score. Then comes a group of
two-voice pieces (fols. 89v-100), the last two of which are extremely florid:
a textless piece by Baldwin himself and John Taverner's In women is rest,
some seventy years old at the time. Then begins a group of four highly
18
NG, s.v. „Hothby".
" This voice is specifically marked „Contratenor", a word found only once otherwise in the
manuscript: for King Henry VIII's Quam pulchia es, where the label is attached somewhat
halfheartedly: „Secundus: Contratenor".

31
complex works: two by Baldwin and the others by his contemporaries
Thomas Woodson and Nathaniel Giles, master of the children also at the
chapel of St George's, Windsor; three of these are based on the hexachord
sounded in long notes; the last is Giles's ,A lesson of descant of thirtie
eighte proporcions of sundrie kindes', and it is a piece of baffling complexity
and floridity. Then follows the group of fifteenth-century music, after
which come further florid and proportional pieces, this time in three voices,
by Baldwin and Giles; and the section closes with Thomas Tye's famous
proportional exercise Sit fast. Apart from Woodson and Tye, all these
sixteenth-century contributions are by Giles and by Baldwin himself; and
their contrapuntal style is entirely different from that of the fifteenth-
century group, in their use of imitation, in their contrapuntal techniques,
in their linear movement, even though they all use the most outrageous
proportions. It seems legitimate to suggest that Giles and Baldwin, while
colleagues at St George's, Windsor, had a kind of friendly rivalry in writing
such complex proportional music,- and it is equally likely that an interest
in these problems prompted Baldwin to copy out these fascinating examples
from the fifteenth century. Perhaps, like Wilkinson's Jesus autem
tiansiens, they were in the Eton College collection; if so, nobody has found
them there today.
A closer look at Bedyngham's Vide domine (ex. 2; fig. 3) can help confirm
the early date, albeit with a problematic twist. While the proportions and
floridity are all in the upper voice, it is the lower voice, the tenor, that
spells out the pattern. This has a perfectly standard ballade structure for
the early years of the fifteenth century: three roughly equal sections, opening
in major prolation, C-dot, then moving into duple time for a middle
section before returning to the original mensuration to close. The main
cadences are on B-flat (bars 17 and the end); the main subsidiary cadence is
a half close on A and C (bar 35). Like so many songs of the early fifteenth
century its first cadence is not on the final but a weak cadence on F (in bar
5); but the general tonality is endorsed by B-flat cadences in bars 10, 27 and
44; and the penultimate cadence is a step away from the final, on C in bar
53. Like most ballades, it has a musical rhyme: in both voices, bars 13-17
are the same as bars 54 to the end.
In fact, it may be unwise to exclude the possibility that the music was
actually intended to carry text: there are plenty of ballades in the Turin
repertory that are just as florid. An early fifteenth-century ballade would
normally repeat back to the beginning shortly before the end of the first
section, and that could easily be done from the middle of bar 12. Moreover,
it is noticeable how many phrases have a rest soon after they start, as
characteristically happens in early fifteenth-century songs with a ten-syllable
line, which always has a caesura after the fourth syllable: see not just
bars 1-3, but also 18-19 and 36-38. That would suggest that the ballade
would have a normal first section of four ten-syllable lines, rhyming ABAB;

32
fig. 3: John Bedyngham „Vide domine" (London, BL, R.M.24.d.2., fol. 104'—105).
ex. 2: John Bedyngham, „Vide domine."

34
c 3

35
the next section would carry a further two lines; and the final section
perhaps three.
If so, the last line of the stanza, repeated in all three stanzas and perhaps
containing some kind of a motto, would have been in the phrase that starts
in bar 48. This is musically an impressive moment. The discantus line
reaches the high A for the first time apart from bar 20, when its appearance
had been very brief and almost decorative. And the voice then falls in a
slow conjunct line in even notes, constrasting strongly with everything
else in the piece. Moreover, the tenor does the same: it reaches its high C
for the only time after its brief appearance at the end of bar 46; and it too
falls conjunctly in even note-values, approximately imitating the discantus
in augmented values.
What this all says is that the design of the piece is that of a ballade from
the first quarter of the century, rather earlier than Bedyngham is likely to
have been active - since I believe he was probably born in the early 1420s.
Two possibilities follow from that: either the song is not by Bedyngham at
all, but by some even earlier English composer (and in any case this analysis
confirms that the piece copied just before 1600 by John Baldwin was
indeed at least a century and a half old at the time); or, in my view more
plausibly, John Bedyngham was consciously modelling himself on the style
of the early fifteenth-century ars subtilior composers. But what lies beyond
question, I suggest, is that all of these seven pieces are from no later than
1450 and that their survival in the much later Baldwin commonplace book
gives important clues about the survival of the ars subtilior tradition.
Bedyngham was apparently rather older than John Hothby; and all his
pieces in the Baldwin manuscript look earlier than Hothby's Ora pro
nobis. That could mean that Bedyngham was also in Italy and influenced
by Ugolino of Orvieto or that the florid and proportional style had a rather
wider distribution than present sources now suggest. In any case, the very
existence of these pieces in the Baldwin manuscript more than doubles the
size of the late ars subtilior repertory between 1415 and 1480.
But Hothby's Ora pro nobis brings the story around to five pieces apparently
by Johannes Tinctoris included in his Liber de arte contrapuncti of
1477. Most of his illustrative examples are in two voices and based on a
borrowed chant. But there is a group of five three-voice pieces, all with
devotional metrical Latin texts but showing no evidence of a chant basis
and running to the characteristic length of a rondeau setting. In the event,
they turn out to be fairly simple pieces, merely made to look difficult by
the use of changing proportions. They have nothing in common with the
general run of devotional pieces from those years: apart from their relative
simplicity, they fit happily alongside the Latin song of Ugolino, the three
Latin-titled pieces of Bedyngham, and that of Hothby. I suggest that they
are all works that merit deeper knowledge and should not be left in the
limbo of mere illustrations to a counterpoint treatise.

36
 These examples in their turn provide the connection with the next
of manneristic pieces, the elaborate duos that seem to find their
generation
first coherent collection in the Segovia Cathedral manuscript copied in the
years around 1500.20 Folios 200-205 (in a separate gathering that lacks its
first and last leaves) contain a group of twelve pieces that meld together
the proportional style with the florid .instrumental' style of the time. All
the pieces in this fascicle are in two voices; most of them are based on one
voice of a well known polyphonic chanson; and all are surely from after
1480. In the list that follows I have not reported other sources for the
pieces: several are found elsewhere, but the point here is that they appear
together as a group.

f.200 [Gaudeamus ] Omnes in Domino: Agricola

f.200v Regina celi letare: Obrecht
f.201 De tous biens plaine: Adam
f.201v Comme femme desconfortee: Agricola
f.202 De tous biens plaine: Tinctoris
f.202v-203 De tous biens plaine: Roellkin
f.203v Le souvenir: Tinctoris
f.204 D'ung aultre amer: Tinctoris
f.204 ,Duo': Tinctoris
f.204v-205 Tout a par moy: Tinctoris
f.205 Fecit potentiam (not mensural): anon.
f.205v Comme femme desconfortee: Tinctoris
Six of them are by Tinctoris, who had described and briefly illustrated a
large range of proportions in his Proportionale: whether he gained his
interest in such exploits from Bonadies's pupil Gafori, who spent 1478-80
in Naples and met Tinctoris at the time, must remain an open question,
though the Segovia pieces are all likely to date from the 1480s.
Like all the mannerist works mentioned so far, these merit investigation
far beyond the mere outline offered here. But three points could be made
as an indication of their historical position. First, most of them show a
kind of notational complexity that goes beyond the needs of the actual
music - that is to say that there are usually much easier ways of writing
them,- they are games. Second, the piece by Obrecht - one of the most
complex of all - may just be related to his visit to Ferrara in 1487-8,
though the experiments with mensuration found in the apparently north-

20
For a description, see Census-Catalogue of Manuscript Sources of Polyphonic Music
1400-1550, American Institute of Musicology: Renaissance Manuscript Studies, ser.l, 5
vols. (Neuhausen, 1979-88), 3, pp. 137-8, and iv, p. 475; see also Victor de Lama de la
Cruz, Cancionero musical de la Catedral de Segovia (Salamanca, 1994). There is a
facsimile, ed. Ramön Perales de la Cal (Segovia, 1977).

37
ern xxiusic of Domarto and Busnoys have normally been considered the
main influence on that aspect of Obrecht's work. Third, however, there
may be some connection with Florence in the presence here not only of
Agricola but of Roellkin - his famous De tous biens plaine setting in which
the added voice has a range of three full octaves, a piece also found in two
other sources of the time. ,Roellkin' could easily be ,Raulin' named as the
composer of three songs in the Florentine manuscript, Biblioteca Nazionale
Centrale, Magi. XIX 176.
A further stage in this development appears mainly in the Perugia manuscript
1013, dated 1507 by its copyist Johannes Materanensis and in the
slightly later manuscript Bologna A 71.21 Both manuscripts contain a large
number of the mensural examples from Tinctoris's Liber de arte contrapuncti
alongside many other works of extreme complexity, the most complex of
which is Tinctoris's own Difficiles alios. Sadly the piece by Gaffurius,
Nunc eat et veteres, appears not to survive among them.22 Since many of
these pieces have been discussed extensively by both Albert Seay and Bonnie
Blackburn23 it is perhaps enough here to note that there is now a substantial
number of such pieces in three voices and that - as in much of this
repertory - there are many passages that could easily be notated much
more simply than they are here. Like most of the pieces mentioned so far,
they lack text but may well have been for singing. The only four-voice
piece, the setting of Conditor alme siderum by Busnoys, easily carries its
text, as can be seen from Richard Taruskin's recent edition.24 Even so, their
prime function was perhaps as notational exercises.
Yet the tradition continued in the sacred music of the early sixteenth
century, most notably in the Choralis constantinus of Heinrich Isaac and
in the Mass Ave Maria of the English composer Thomas Ashwell: both
famously contain the most hair-raising proportions. It is important to
recognize that these were not in any sense innovations. They grew out of a
context and an apparently rich tradition. Moreover, in England at least, the
tradition continued right through to the end of the sixteenth century. The
complex pieces by Baldwin and Giles in Baldwin's commonplace book are
not without context: there is a large group of them by Elway Bevin in
another British Library manuscript; and perhaps the most famous example

21
On both manuscripts, see Bonnie J. Blackburn, „A Lost Guide to Tinctoris's Teachings
Recovered", Early Music History 1 (1981), pp. 29-116.
22
Bonnie J. Blackburn, et al., eds., A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians (Oxford,
1991), p. 822.
23
Blackburn, „A Lost Guide"; Albert Seay, „An ,Ave maris Stella' by Johannes Stochern",
Revue belge de musicologie 9 (1957), pp. 93-108; Albert Seay, „The Conditor alme siderum
by Busnois", Quadrivium 12 (1971), pp. 225-33.
24
Richard Taruskin, ed., Antoine Busnoys: Collected Works, Masters and Monuments of
the Renaissance, ser.5, part 2: The Latin-texted Works (New York, 1990), p. 149.

38
of all is Thomas Morley's Christes crosse be my speede, printed in his
A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (London, 1597:
pp. 46-53).
Now the main point that could be made about the tradition of notationally
intricate music is that the two ends of the fifteenth century are
represented by two
sources each. From the years around 1400 our knowledge of
the ars subtilior proper relies almost entirely on the Chantilly Codex and
the one in Modena. Without those two sources there would not be enough
music to suggest the existence of an ars subtilior at all. From the years
around 1500, it is almost entirely the Perugia manuscript 1013 and the
Bologna manuscript A 71, though we have a small fascicle of such pieces
in the Segovia choirbook. It cannot be repeated often enough that the
survival of early manuscripts is random and proportionately very small.
For the florid tradition from the middle years of the fifteenth century we
have only hints in the strangest places: three songs by Ugolino appended to
only one copy of his Declaratio musice discipline; the single piece by
Hothby again appended to a theory treatise, that in Faenza,- and the group
of seven pieces, three of them ascribed to Bedyngham, surviving miraculously
but bizarrely in an English commonplace book copied at the very
end of the sixteenth century, some 150 years after they had been
composed. I suggest therefore that the tradition was more or less unbroken but

that only these little scraps survive - iceberg tips of a repertory that once
existed.
Given their difficulty these are less likely to be teaching pieces than
ways in which one musician would amuse another. Several of them have
a startling wayward beauty and may also have been successful in performance.
But their notational essence is more important than in most works.
It is a good example, nevertheless, of a music that is not courtly. Though
its aim is to charm, though every detail of the repertory turns on graceful
compliment, the core of these pieces is exploration for its own sake,
intellectual titillation
among experts.
There are two further strands to this kind of mannerism in the fifteenth
century. One is associated with the isorhythmic motet and, after about
1450, with the cyclic Mass. Very often in these works complicated mensuration
signs are used or implied, mainly to denote permutations of the
tenor. In general the musical results are relatively simple, despite isolated
moments of complexity, such as Dufay's use of four mensurations
simultaneously for a very brief passage in his Mass L'homme armé.25 Another
trend is in the short musical examples given in proportional treatises,

25
One further example of complex proportions in Dufay comes in his 3-voice Mass for
St Anthony of Padua; could its incorporation there be somehow related to his return to
the land of Ugolino after a twelve-year absence?

39
particularly. None of these lasts more than a few bars or leaves any
evidence for believing that they are other than simply abstract demonstrations

of how a particular proportion works. A final tradition is that of

works that contain some other kind of puzzle: the most famous example is
perhaps Ockeghem's Prenez sur moy, a clefless three-out-of-one canon of
what seems to me quite astonishing intellectual elegance; but others
include works such as Busnoys' Maintes femmes, which has puzzled many a
critic.26 All of these, too, seem to be symptoms of the efforts of musicians
to tease one another.
But even in simplified modern transcriptions - where these are possible
- all this music is extraordinarily difficult to perform. Some, like Ockeghem's
Prenez sur moy, have often been performed in modern times though, in my
experience, rarely at all well. Many of the others appear to have been
ignored almost entirely.
Returning, then, to the theme of virtuosity, it is odd to note that students
and performers of fifteenth-century music seem to have avoided these pieces.
The works in the Baldwin manuscript are all still unpublished, as are
several of those in Segovia and the later sources. So far as I know the only
pieces that have been recorded are Dufay's Resvelliés vous and two of the
Tinctoris pieces; nor have I ever heard of anybody attempting to perform
the others. This is a little perplexing. They present the kind of technical
and musical challenge that musicians need, even today.

my „Prenez sur moy: Okeghem's Tonal Pun", Plainsong and Medieval Music 1 (1992),
26
See
pp. 63-75; Helen Hewitt, „The Two Puzzle Canons in Busnois's Maintes femmes", Journal
of the American Musicological Society 10 (1957), pp. 104-110.

40