Laudantes Constort,
Guy Janssens, director
I wrote one of my best college papers on the music of John Dunstable, I wonder if I could find it and read it now if I'd agree with it. There's something so appealing in the sunshine and shadows, modal-tonal harmony of the "ars nova," the music of Dunstable and Dufay and Binchois and arguably a generation after them. Dunstable was one of the relatively few English composers of indisputable greatness.
That said, in this text, listening to this version makes me wonder at someone like Dunstable, a composer and intellectual under the patronage and employ of very earthly potentates (as I recall one of his patrons with whom he was very likely traveling with as it happened was involved with the framing and judicial murder of Jeanne d'Arc in the interminable wars between those two land masses.
You have to wonder at how many thousands of earthly princes and rulers and their vassals heard the words of the Magnificat, the verses about the powerful being removed from their seats of power, of the humble being raised up, of the hungry being filled with good things and the rich sent away empty when their lives consisted of nothing else but the pursuit of earthly power and wealth and luxury that comes from the kind of oppression that Mary was singing about and which the entire Christian scriptures condemn and warn against. Maybe whatever progress that was made, if there was any, had to accumulate over generations and generations of people hearing that, something which so few hear anymore.
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