Alejandro Enrique Planchart, Guillaume Du Fay: The Life and Works. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 2 vols. xxv + 926 pp. £160. ISBN 978 1 107 16615 8.

Abstract

We sometimes think that Alejandro Planchart’s association with Du Fay goes back to 1972, when he published his Musical Quarterly article repositioning the Mass cycles. That, at any rate, could be seen as the official start of his preoccupationwithDu Fay, witnessed by significant publications almost every year since (though at the same time he was no less prolific in his publications about Beneventan chant). He actually signed the contract for this book in 1976: so forty-two years to delivery, and forty-six years of publications leading up to it. But Planchart and Du Fay go back a lot further, not just fifty-two years to 1967, when he issued his first LP of Du Fay with Capella Cordina on Lyrichord, but fifty-four years to his edition of the three Caput Masses, one of which everybody at the time thought was by Du Fay. Anyway, now aged 83, he has eventually published the long-awaited book in two elegant volumes. And it was absolutely worth waiting for. The broad outlines of the story will be familiar to anybody who has been following his publications over the years. But there is now so much more detail, so much more texture. This is the result of years going through and through the archival material. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he sat every day in the Vatican archives between when teaching ended at Santa Barbara and when the Vatican closed for the summer in the middle of July. Presumably he then went on to Lille, where the Cambrai Cathedral documents received similar treatment. In any case, the first appendix here (nearly a hundred pages of archival details, almost all published for the first time) lists all the known petits vicaires at Cambrai Cathedral in the long fifteenth century; the next (pp. 784–91) lists the magistri puerorum there for the same years, a totally absorbing document since most of the people concerned had a substantial role in the history of fifteenth-century music, and Planchart has large quantities of new information about nearly all of them; then (pp. 792–7) he gives all the known grammar teachers in the cathedral. The kind of new detail offered here contributes a lot to the texture of the body of the book: he has innumerable footnotes and comments fleshing out the bald details of the life. Oh, and