Page Category: Composer Biographies
Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda
The spelling you see here is because he's named as such in the New Grove. But he was born in Prague in 1801, making him Czech... and thus capable of being referred to (in brackets in Grove, so optionally) as Jan Křtitel Václav Kalivoda, which is what Wikipedia calls him -without the two middle names. Last.fm has at least 8 variations of his name: some using 'Wenzel', others 'Wenseslaus' and so on ad infinitum. I'm a fan of diacritics, but not if there are reasonable alternatives: I'm stick with Grove's first choice of Germanised spelling!
John Dunstable
His name can be spelled 'Dunstaple' or 'Dunstapell' or even 'Dumstable' -and the New Grove lists all these alternatives in square brackets. However, he's listed in bold (meaning 'approved'!) as 'Dunstable', so that is what he gets catalogued in these parts, regardless of the fact that Wikipedia prefers the 'staple' spelling.
He lived around 1390 to 1453 and was recognised in his own lifetime, across Europe, as beinga somewhat revolutionary pioneer of the contenance angloise, or 'the English Something-or-Other', which was distinctive because it daringly employed harmonies with thirds and sixths (these intervals essentially having been barred from previous use because they sounded dissonant to medieval ears). Johannes Tinctoris wrote, for example, in 1477 that there was no music more than 40 years old that is 'regarded by the learned as worth hearing' and that anything written earlier was 'so ineptly composed that they offended the ear'. He went on to write that 'The English, of whom Dunstable stood forth as chief' was 'the fount and origin of the new art'. [...]
