When Martin le Franc, in his famous early 1400s poem "Le champion des dames," praised the "English face" of contemporary music, he was probably thinking of John Dunstable. But as the bitterly ironic winds of history would have it, people now know and quote (at least in history classes) le Franc's line by heart, but know almost nothing of the celebrity he cites. Dunstable's biography is an illegible palimpsest upon the more readable pages of the time in which he lived. And while Dunstable's music is now quite well known and oft played (thanks to scholars like Margaret Bent), his place in history still cedes to early Renaissance composers like Guillaume Dufay and Gilles Binchois—both of whom poet le Franc referred to as influenced by Dunstable's new musical face. There are, however, some concretized traces of Dunstable, the big-man-on-the-Renaissance-campus. One materializes in countless versions of his modest little chanson Puisque m'amour. There is perhaps no musical culture closer to popular-song tradition than that of the medieval and early Renaissance song. Here, like there, a good tune goes a long way, and its celebrity becomes synonymous with how many covers it receives, how much it's reworked and arranged. Think of the Beatles' "Come Together"—Dunstable's Puisque m'amour is a distant foil at the top of a more aristocratic hit parade. It exists in four versions that shave off its third voice, the contratenor; it also shows up with newly written contratenors, one of the musical middle ages' favorite ways to complement the original composer: imagination is thanked by being pitted against a new imagination. On top of this selection of vocal reworkings, Puisque m'amour also survives in a number of instrumental arrangements, for organ or possibly for simpler keyboard mechanisms that predate the harpsichord. These revisions tend to take advantage of the instrument's main privilege: since it could not expect to compete with the voice in its flexibility, continuity, and nuance of expressive inflection, it convolutes vocal lines into virtuosic folds of rapid ornament. So why the popularity? Is the song that good? Well, it's hard to listen with back-then ears, against which the hearing of present age is comparable to sight in a completely darkened room. Outlines are barely perceptible, and even then only able to be discerned after a long period of acclimation. Likewise with Dunstable's chanson: it may sound to contemporary ears much like most other three-voice ditties of the early 1400s. But on closer listen, the ears will gradually glean the prized "English face" le Franc so lauded. It can be heard in the sweetness of the thirds and sixths; in the cool, lucid roundness of the harmonic scheme that expands and contracts from bare octaves to concentrated unisons via its iconic passageway of dulcet affections. In addition to this Anglo-earmark, the chanson treats its text in a strikingly idiosyncratic manner; the rondeau form (AbaAabAB) is not structured into individual sections by the music, but treated like prose, around which the music freely courses in its creativity.

© All Music Guide