Du Fay: The Motet as Mystical Summa : Music from the Earliest No... http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780...

Oxford History of Western Music: Richard Taruskin

See also from Grove Music Online
Guillaume Du Fay
Motet: Middle Ages

DU FAY: THE MOTET AS MYSTICAL SUMMA

Chapter: CHAPTER 8 Business Math, Politics, and Paradise: The Ars Nova
Source: MUSIC FROM THE EARLIEST NOTATIONS TO THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Author(s): Richard Taruskin

Guillaume Du Fay (ca. 1397–1474) lived almost exactly a century later than his namesake Guillaume de
Machaut, and like Machaut he will be reintroduced in a later chapter. It is very important to consider at least
one of his works right here, however, in order to appreciate the direct generic and stylistic continuity that
linked Du Fay’s creative output with that of his fourteenth-century precursors.

The reason for speaking in such urgent terms is that the beginning of “The Renaissance,” for music, is
often—though, as we will see, arbitrarily—placed around the beginning of the fifteenth century, and major
historiographical divisions like that can act as barriers, sealing off from one another figures and works that
happen to fall on opposite sides of that fancied line, no matter how significant their similarities. Not only
that, but (as already observed in a somewhat different context) an appearance of stylistic backwardness or
anachronism—inevitable when sweeping categories like “Medieval” and “Renaissance” are too literally
believed in—can easily blind us to the value of supreme artistic achievements such as Du Fay’s isorhythmic
motets. They are not vestigial survivals or evidence of regressive tendencies, but a zenith.

The fact is, Du Fay’s career was very much like Philippe de Vitry’s a century earlier. He was a university-
educated ordained cleric—in short, a literatus—whose musical horizons had been shaped by Boethius, by
Guido … and by Philippe de Vitry. Like his predecessors, he thought in scholastic terms about his craft but in
Platonic terms about the world. For him, no less than for the founders of the Ars Nova, the world was
materialized number, and the highest purpose of music was to dematerialize it back to its essence.

Born in French-speaking Cambrai, near the border with the low countries, Du Fay followed in Ciconia’s
footsteps to early employment in Italy. He may have first gone down there as a choirboy in the entourage of
the local bishop, who attended the Council of Constance, where Francesco Zabarella, Ciconia’s patron, had
shone. By 1420, when he was about 23, Du Fay was employed by the Pesaro branch of the notorious
Malatesta family, the despots of the Adriatic coastal cities of east-central Italy. He joined the papal choir in
1428, and evidently formed a close relationship with Gabriele Cardinal Condulmer, who in 1431 became
Eugene IV, the second pope to reign over the reunited postschismatic church.

Du Fay wrote three grandiose motets in honor of Pope Eugene. The first, Ecclesie militantis Roma sedes
(“Rome, seat of the Church militant”), was composed shortly after the pope’s election, at a very precarious
moment for the papacy. That motet, expressive of the political conflicts that beset the new pope, is a riot of
discord, with a complement of five polyphonic parts (three of them texted), and a sequence of no fewer than
six mensuration changes. The second motet for Eugene, Supremum est mortalibus bonum (“For mortals the
greatest good”) is a celebration of a peace treaty between the pope and Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor.
It is an epitome of concord, employing only one text and using a novel, sugar-sweet harmonic idiom of which
(as we will see in chapter 11) Du Fay may have been the inventor. Near the end the names of the protagonists
of the peace are declaimed in long-sustained consonant chords—concord concretized.

The third motet Du Fay composed for Eugene, Nuper rosarum flores (“Garlands of roses,” of which the
dazzling close is shown in Ex. 8-8), is the most famous one because of the way it manipulates symbolic
numbers. In 1434, the pope, exiled from Rome by a rebellion, had set up court in Florence. In 1436, the

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Florence cathedral, under construction since 1294, was finally ready for dedication. A magnificent
neoclassical edifice, crowned by a dome designed in 1420 by the great architect Filippo Brunelleschi, it was
dedicated, under the denomination Santa Maria del Fiore, to the Virgin Mary. Pope Eugene IV, resident by
force of circumstances in Florence, performed the dedication ceremony himself, and commissioned a
commemorative motet for the occasion from Du Fay. This was to be the musical show of shows.

Nuper Rosarum Flores is cast in four large musical sections, plus an “Amen” in the form of a melismatic
cauda. The layout is remarkable for its symmetry. The first and longest section begins with an introitus for
the upper (texted) voices lasting twenty-eight tempora. The Gregorian cantus firmus, the fourteen-note
incipit of the introit antiphon for the dedication of a church (Terribilis est locus iste, “Awesome is this
place”), now enters, carried by a pair of tenors that present it in two seven-note groups, answering each to
each as in biblical antiphonal psalmody.

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ex. 8-8 Guillaume Du Fay, Nuper rosarum flores, mm. 141-70

Each of the succeeding sections presents the same 7 + 7 disposition of the tenor, and the same balanced
alternation of duo and full complement (28 + 28 tempora, or 4 times 7 + 7). As in Ciconia’s motet, the pair of
tenors is written out only once, with directions to repeat. And again as in Ciconia’ s motet, each tenor
statement is cast in a different mensuration: and (the part given in Ex. 8-8) . These mensurations stand in a
significant proportional relationship to one another. A breve or tempus of contains six minims; a breve of
has four. The line through the signature halves the value of the tempus, so that a breve under contains three
minims as sung by the texted parts running above, and a breve under contains two. Comparing these
signatures in the order in which Du Fay presents them, they give the durational proportions 6:4:2:3. As
anyone trained in the quadrivium would instantly recognize, these are Pythagorean proportions. In musical
terms they can easily be translated from durations into pitch, for they describe the harmonic ratios of the
most consonant intervals. Given a fundamental pitch X, Du Fay’s numbers represent the octave (2X), the
compound fifth, or twelfth (3X), the double octave (4X) and the twice-compound fifth (6X), as shown in Ex.
8-9.

ex. 8-9 Proportional

numbers in Nuper
rosarum flores
represented as pitch

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intervals

Perfect concord

Moreover, the complex of durational ratios also contains a symbolic perfect fifth (3:2) and a perfect fourth
(4:3), all of it summed up in the final chord of the piece. Thus Du Fay’s motet embodies a hidden
Pythagorean summa, or comprehensive digest of the ways in which music represents the enduringly valid
harmony of the cosmos. With its four different integers, it is the most complete symbolic summary of its
kind in any isorhythmic motet. (By way of comparison, the proportional ground plan of Ciconia’s motet,
3:2:2, incorporates only two integers, one of them repeated. The only harmonic intervals it can be said to
express are the unison and the fifth.)

But that is by no means all. As Craig Wright has shown in detail (far more of it than we can pursue at the
moment), the number symbolism in Du Fay’s motet, reaching far beyond the specifically musical domain,
makes contact with a venerable tradition of biblical exegesis that bears directly on the circumstances that
inspired the work and the occasion that it adorned.11 As we read in the second book of Kings, where the
building of the great temple of Jerusalem is described, “the house which king Solomon built to the Lord, was
three-score cubits in length, and twenty cubits in width, and thirty cubits in heigh t” (2 Kings 6:2); that the
inner sanctum, the “Holy of Holies,” was forty cubits from the doors of the temple (2 Kings 6:18); and that
the feast of dedication lasted “seven days and seven days, that is, fourteen days” (2 Kings 8:65). These, of
course, are precisely the numbers that have figured in our structural analysis of Du Fay’s motet. The
durational proportions of the tenor taleae are precisely those governing the dimensions of Solomon’s temple
(60:40:20:30 cubits:: 6:4:2:3 minims to a breve); and the length and layout of the chant fragment chosen as
color correspond to the days of the dedication feast (7 + 7 = 14). The relationship of all of this to the
dedication feast for the Florence cathedral could hardly be more evident—or more propitious, in view of the
Christian tradition that cast Rome as the new Jerusalem and the Catholic church as the new temple of God.

And yet there is more. The Florence cathedral was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, as the motet text affirms.
That text is cast in a rare poetic meter with seven syllables per line. The introitus before the tenor entrance in
each stanza lasts 28 (4 × 7) tempora, and the section following the tenor entrance likewise lasts 4 × 7. Seven
is the number that mystically represented the Virgin in Christian symbolism, through her sevenfold
attributes (her seven sorrows, seven joys, seven acts of mercy, seven virginal companions, and seven years of
exile in Egypt). Four is the number that represented the temple, with its four cornerstones, four walls, four
corners of the altar, and—when translated into Christian cruciform terms—four points on the cross, the
shape of the cathedral floor plan. Four times seven mystically unites the temple with Mary, who through her
womb that bore the son of God was also a symbol of Christian sanctuary.

All of this is mystically expressed in the occult substructure of Du Fay’s motet, while on the sensuous
surface, according to the testimony of the Florentine scholar Giannozzo Manetti, an earwitness,

all the places of the Temple resounded with the sounds of harmonious symphonies as well as the
concords of diverse instruments, so that it seemed not without reason that the angels and the sounds
and singing of divine paradise had been sent from heaven to us on earth to insinuate in our ears a
certain incredible divine sweetness; wherefore at that moment I was so possessed by ecstasy that I
seemed to enjoy the life of the Blessed here on earth.12

What could better serve the church, better spiritually nourish its flock, or better assert its temporal
authority?

Notes:
(11) C. Wright, “Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores, King Solomon’s Temple, and the Veneration of the Virgin,”
JAMS XLVII (1994): 395–441.

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(12) Giannozzo Manetti, quoted in G. Dufay, Opera omnia, ed. Heinrich Besseler, Vol. II (Rome: American
Institute of Musicology, 1966), xxvii.

Citation (MLA): Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 8 Business Math, Politics, and Paradise: The Ars Nova." The
Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 26 Jan. 2011.
<http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780195384819-div1-008015.xml>.
Citation (APA): Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 8 Business Math, Politics, and Paradise: The Ars Nova. In
Oxford University Press, Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century. New York, USA.
Retrieved 26 Jan. 2011, from http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780195384819-
div1-008015.xml
Citation (Chicago): Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 8 Business Math, Politics, and Paradise: The Ars Nova." In
Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.).
Retrieved 26 Jan. 2011, from http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780195384819-
div1-008015.xml

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