# What is contenance angloise?



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

I think it's a way of singing polyphonic music where they flatten some notes slightly, though I'm not sure whether it's to create dissonance or avoid dissonance or what.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

I believe it was a tendency to use major thirds and sixths, which at the time were considered dissonant for what seem to me to have been purely theological reasons.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

OP: Sorry. I dropped out of med school.


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

Mandryka said:


> I think it's a way of singing polyphonic music where they flatten some notes slightly, though I'm not sure whether it's to create dissonance or avoid dissonance or what.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contenance_angloise

:tiphat:


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Nereffid said:


> I believe it was a tendency to use major thirds and sixths, which at the time were considered dissonant for what seem to me to have been purely theological reasons.


Does this mean that Frye and Dunstable are particularly dissonant? Or that when you sing them, you have to find a way to avoid the dissonances? Or when you sing them you allow the dissonances sometimes? Or what? And what are the consequences for Dufay's music?


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## brianvds (May 1, 2013)

Mandryka said:


> And what are the consequences for Dufay's music?


Dufay no longer suffered from incontenance... 

On a more serious side note, I wonder just how accurately music could be written down at the time, and to what extent almost all medieval music has to be reconstructed.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Mandryka said:


> Does this mean that Frye and Dunstable are particularly dissonant? Or that when you sing them, you have to find a way to avoid the dissonances? Or when you sing them you allow the dissonances sometimes? Or what? And what are the consequences for Dufay's music?


Dissonance in Dunstable is a relatively rare thing. The piece usually cited in this regard is his _Quam pulchra es_, which has something like 9 or 10 dissonant notes total. The novelty of his style, though, was that when dissonance happened, it was under very controlled circumstances: as passing tones, neighbor tones, appoggiaturas… basically via the devices we know today as the standard ways to "prepare" a dissonance. This was no small feat considering how harmonically dense his music was owing to his pervasively triadic harmony: the more pitches one has at any given moment, the trickier it is to control the dissonance in so strict and consistent a manner. This triadic harmony in turn influenced Dufay, so that's where he comes in.

Whether this is what "contenance angloise" refers to, however, is anyone's guess. The term was coined by a poet, not a musician. It comes from Martin le Franc's multi-volume poem _Le champion des dames_, written around 1440, and though the passage in which "contenance angloise" appears does mention Dunstable's influence on Dufay (and Binchois), no specifically musical details or techniques are mentioned. Le Franc speaks about music only in the most general terms. (The musical discussion in _Le champion des dames_ is just six stanzas out of the poem's tens of thousands total verses.)

Since Johannes Tinctoris famously described Dunstable's harmony as the "wellspring and origin" of a "new style" (what we now call the Renaissance), it used to be assumed that what Tinctoris was describing was also what le Franc meant by "contenance angloise": a new approach to harmony and dissonance treatment. But this assumption has recently been called into question. About three decades separate le Franc's comment from Tinctoris, so there's little reason to assume they were talking about the same thing. If anything, Le Franc seems to have been describing a style of performance, not composition, since the poem refers to Dufay and Binchois as singers, not writers of music.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Eschbeg said:


> Dissonance in Dunstable is a relatively rare thing. The piece usually cited in this regard is his _Quam pulchra es_, which has something like 9 or 10 dissonant notes total. The novelty of his style, though, was that when dissonance happened, it was under very controlled circumstances: as passing tones, neighbor tones, appoggiaturas… basically via the devices we know today as the standard ways to "prepare" a dissonance. This was no small feat considering how harmonically dense his music was owing to his pervasively triadic harmony: the more pitches one has at any given moment, the trickier it is to control the dissonance in so strict and consistent a manner. This triadic harmony in turn influenced Dufay, so that's where he comes in.
> 
> Whether this is what "contenance angloise" refers to, however, is anyone's guess. The term was coined by a poet, not a musician. It comes from Martin le Franc's multi-volume poem _Le champion des dames_, written around 1440, and though the passage in which "contenance angloise" appears does mention Dunstable's influence on Dufay (and Binchois), no specifically musical details or techniques are mentioned. Le Franc speaks about music only in the most general terms. (The musical discussion in _Le champion des dames_ is just six stanzas out of the poem's tens of thousands total verses.)
> 
> Since Johannes Tinctoris famously described Dunstable's harmony as the "wellspring and origin" of a "new style" (what we now call the Renaissance), it used to be assumed that what Tinctoris was describing was also what le Franc meant by "contenance angloise": a new approach to harmony and dissonance treatment. But this assumption has recently been called into question. About three decades separate le Franc's comment from Tinctoris, so there's little reason to assume they were talking about the same thing. If anything, Le Franc seems to have been describing a style of performance, not composition, since the poem refers to Dufay and Binchois as singers, not writers of music.


Thanks for taking the trouble to write this. It's quite hard to get this sort of information if you're not part of an academic world - music forums are often invaluable!

What you say about Dunstable is interesting just because I find the way he's sung by Hilliard to be dissonant - as I type I'm listening to them sing Alma Redemptoris Mater. Maybe I'm hearing dissonance where non exists!!! Or maybe they're introducing it.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

In earlier music, Machaut and Ars subtilior, strong beats tended to have consonances and the rule in between was anything goes. As long as the upper two voices were consonant with the tenor, any dissonance between them was acceptable. The contenance angloise has traditionally been interpreted to mean counterpoint using a greater prevalence of thirds and sixths than was then common on the continent, the significance being that it foreshadowed a general move toward normalizing the sound of what we would call triads. So it refers to a more consistently consonant style.

Eschbeg indicates that this interpretation has been called into question. I'm out of the loop on that.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

The story of the term "contenance angloise" is a pretty fascinating one. It's tied up with the broader story of the term "Renaissance" and the ongoing debates about how accurate or useful that term is for music. Everyone knows the word "Renaissance" refers to ancient Greek ideas (primarily ideas about "humanism") that supposedly disappeared during the Medieval period but were "reborn" in the 1300s. That notion was more or less invented by the historian Jacob Burkhardt in the 1860s (so, many centuries after the actual time period itself), who applied the term "Renaissance" specifically to the culture and visual art of 14th-century Italy.

There are several problems when we try to apply this to music. If we look at what was happening musically in 14th-century Italy, we find that the new kind of music that emerged at that time, trecento madrigals, had little to do with concepts of humanism and the rebirth of ancient Greece. Granted, many of these madrigal texts do make reference to Greek mythology, but as far as inspiration goes most madrigal composers seem to have thought they were reviving the music of 13th-century France, not ancient Greece. In any case, trecento madrigals are not really the repertory that the term "Renaissance music" is thought to refer to.

Meanwhile, the repertory that we _do_ associate with the Renaissance, sacred polyphony, does arguably exhibit "humanist" characteristics: Josquin's preference for chordal homophony, and the tendency for his rhythm to mimic the actual spoken pronunciation of the texts he's setting, are often cited as examples of humanism because they supposedly show that he wanted the words to be discernible to the human ear. (Contrast that with medieval organum, for example, where syllables are stretched out over so many notes that the text all but disappears.) The problem is that this repertory comes in the 15th century, 100+ years after the purported beginning of the Renaissance, and it doesn't (yet) happen anywhere near Italy.

So if we want to include music at all in the concept of the Renaissance as art historians understand it, we have two equally unsatisfying options: we can apply it to the same century and place that art historians do even though the music has little to do with the visual arts of the time, or we can apply it to music that _does_ have some resemblance to Renaissance visual art but in the wrong century and the wrong place.

The reason this has to do with "contenance angloise" is that Le Franc's use of the term is a rare instance of someone describing a "new style" relatively close (closer than Josquin, anyway) to the actual time period the word Renaissance is supposed to apply to. Add to this Tinctoris's later claim that Dunstable was the origin of a new era of music, as I mentioned earlier, and it seems like the "contenance angloise" is the answer to the above dilemma: Dunstable is reasonably close to the 14th century (give or take a few decades), his music does exhibit many of the same humanistic characteristics that Josquin's does, and we have documented evidence (however scant) that someone at the time heard him as the start of a new style. That's why historians used to be so eager to define "contenance angloise" in terms of fairly specific musical features-all that stuff about 3rds and 6ths-that Le Franc himself never mentioned.

As I said, more recent historians have begun to question this whole affair. The biggest problem, in addition to the ones I mentioned in my previous post, is that the desire to attribute specific musical features to the term "contenance angloise" is motivated by a desire validate the concept of the "Renaissance," which almost inevitably distorts Le Franc's actual intended meaning. What historians of the 20th and 21st century have done is read _their_ definition into Le Franc's term. Really, the only reason we care at all about the term "contenance angloise" and its fleeting appearance in an otherwise musically irrelevant 24,000-line poem is that it confirms what we already (used to) believe about music.


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## classfolkphile (Jun 25, 2017)

An impressive exposition. Thank you.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Very much enjoying this, not least because I've got a better transfer than the one on Spotify - the Spotify sound is crap.









In a recent concert The Orlando Consort talked about Contenance Angloise at length before one of their songs, and I was prompted to go to this excellent CD after listening to some of the songs on the Dufay CD they released today.

English late medieval music is clearly a hugely exciting area, with new ideas around from Paul van Nevel and Bjorn Schmelzer and no doubt others.


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## classical yorkist (Jun 29, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> Very much enjoying this, not least because I've got a better transfer than the one on Spotify - the Spotify sound is crap.
> 
> View attachment 117655
> 
> ...


I'm very grateful and all but I wish you'd stop recommending fascinating CDs that I have to buy, it's hell on my wallet! But seriously, I bought the Monastic Chant album you suggested in the Congaudent Catholici thread and it is superb. I just wish I could grasp the technicalities of what you're talking about. I usually prefer placing music within it's artistic and social context but your always raising interesting issues. Anyway, I'm miles off topic here and I apologise for my brief diversion.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Well, you know, we're talking about 1000 years of music now, so it's not surprising that there's an awful lot to hear.

By the way, if you enjoyed Paul Hillier's Monastic Chant CD you really should try to hear this too


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## classical yorkist (Jun 29, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> Well, you know, weâ€™re talking about 1000 years of music now, so itâ€™s not surprising that thereâ€™s an awful lot to hear.
> 
> By the way, if you enjoyed Paul Hillierâ€™s Monastic Chant CD you really should try to hear this too
> 
> View attachment 117688


Yeah, bought that too í ½í¸�


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