The Cyclic Mass by Cook James;

Author:Cook, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

(Monson 1975)

As noted earlier, these aspects of English style are perhaps the most noticeable upon audition, both for the modern listener and, presumably, the contemporary one. Such indicators should therefore be treated cautiously since they are relatively easy to reproduce by those wishing to imprint an element of English style on their works without recourse to altering their compositional practice significantly. English works will contain these kinds of melodic and motivic features, and their absence in an apparently English work should certainly be questioned, but continental works will also often borrow these kinds of traits too. An excellent example may be given by the discussion surrounding a single Kyrie movement ascribed to Du Fay. Craig Monson made a convincing case,61 using just the kinds of melodic and motivic arguments outlined earlier, that this cycle was misattributed and that it was in fact of English provenance. More recently, Peter Wright’s brilliant revisiting of this problem noted that, whilst there were indeed many convincingly English motifs to be found within the work, there was much that did not easily fit the profile of an English work of the period.62 His intriguing answer to this conundrum sought instead for a continental composer whose melodic style shows many traits of English practice, namely the Burgundian composer Binchois, noting this composer’s other incidences of English influence and potential points of contact with England or English patrons. Precisely this approach should be considered in cognate cases, looking for potential contexts that cross national boundaries for those works that convincingly display elements of both English and continental style. On its own, it seems dangerous to make the case for English provenance based on melodic and motivic style alone, though it may well give support to an argument based on an accumulation of other features and, in its own right, suggest a desire to imprint ‘Englishness’ onto a work.

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