Interview, Julian Podger on the music of Dufay

The works of the Burgundian school of composers on the cusp between "medieval" and "Renaissance" music - Binchois, Busnois, Dufay - combine an almost mathematical logic with elegant and expressive melismatic lines. Popular all over Western Europe, composers writing in this style could be found working in what are now France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy, and their music was widely circulated.

It's no surprise that Florence, a major centre of gravity for the arts and culture of the time, both attracted such composers and avidly lapped up their music; Dufay in particular developing a connection with the city that is summed up in his composition of an intricate motet for the consecration of the now-iconic Duomo. Last November an album came out from Gothic Voices that celebrates this relationship and the influence of Florentine magnificence on composers and musicians, as preserved in collections of music published and used in the city. I spoke to their director Julian Podger about what makes this music so special.

Encapsulating the ideals of courtly love and longing, refined chansons such as those recorded here would presumably have been popular in aristocratic settings. Do we know how widely they were performed beyond that? Would they have entered the repertoire of folk musicians?

The number of concurrences of musical works in various sources across Europe is usually a good indicator of both how popular a piece was and also where it was performed. I can only speculate as to whether melodic fragments or maybe even whole “tunes” of chansons entered the world of folklore, as the records we have are unlikely to have included information about oral traditions. This was refined art music of the highest degree and only a small fraction of the population would have been educated enough or moved in the “right” circles to be able to appreciate it. It’s always possible though. It is likely that the opposite happened, that folk tunes would have been adopted by literate musicians for use in their works.

Sacred music of this time seems to be strongly governed by mathematical relationships, to an extent hardly equalled until the twentieth-century Serialists. Why are questions of ratios and proportions so important to composers of this period?

That’s probably to do with philosophy and ethos of the neo-classical mind, harmony of the spheres and all that. Artists of all kinds, painters, architects, composers will wish to, or will even be bound by the need to, express themselves according to the current appreciation of the world around them. Beauty in harmony and ratio.

Much debate has centred around a connection between the internal mathematics of Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores and the architectural design of Florence Cathedral, for whose consecration it was written. Do we know how much truth there is in those speculations?

This is a debate that continues. Most scholars agree that the architectural proportions within the rhythmical structure of Nuper are connected to Florence Cathedral, and it used to be widely accepted that these proportions related to the ratios of the dimensions of the dome. Some believe they don’t really correspond well enough and are looking for other features of the Cathedral that fit the formula of proportions set out in the motet.

O tres piteulx is famous as Dufay’s musical response to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. It must have been a catastrophe in the minds of European Christians – were there other musical responses around the same time, either of lamentation from Europe or of jubilation from the Middle East?

Apparently Dufay wrote three other laments to mark this event, but they haven’t survived. He was the only composer of greater notoriety of this period we know of being employed in Italy, so it is unlikely that there any other extant laments. Italy was of course much closer, not only by geography, to Constantinople and the Byzantine world than France or England. There are references to Byzantium in some of Dufay’s other works, such as Vasilissa ergo gaude and Apostolo glorioso, all written in the build-up towards its fall to the Ottoman Empire. There is a lament written by the Greek composer Manuel Chrysaphes, active in the mid-15th century, and there may well be also one or two by his contemporaries, but none of these seemed to have made it to the west. As for rejoicing in triumph, that would be for a specialist in Ottoman music to shed light on, though a quick Google suggests that there still is quite a bit of pop music on the subject today...