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Binchois and beyond

Allan W. Atlas is stimulated and provoked by studies of the fifteenth-century Burgundian master

Dufay and Binchois – how easily the names run together in our textbook-conditioned minds, and always, it seems, in the same order. Not that anyone would seriously think of reversing that order, for Dufay is unarguably the greater composer. Yet as Binchois studies makes abundantly clear, it is time that we begin to pronounce the name Binchois as something other than an afterthought and stop thinking of him only – even primarily – as a composer of secular miniatures, for he was also a major composer of sacred music. An outgrowth of the ‘First International Conference on Gilles de Bins, dit Binchois’, held at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, 31 October–1 November 1995, [1] Binchois studies consists of thirteen articles (some of the papers read at the conference were not included in the collection, while others are new, either in part or in their entirety), which it divides into four sections, each of which focuses on Binchois from its own, intelligently-organised point of view. And since there is no single, over-arching theme that winds through the collection as a whole (other than the constant reminder – both stated and unstated – of Binchois’s importance), it is probably best to consider each article in turn.

Part I: Binchois in context: liturgy, style, culture

In ‘Binchois and sacred music at the Burgundian Court’, Barbara Haggh offers a lucid explanation of the so-called ‘Usage of Paris’ and its relationship to both Binchois and the Court of Burgundy. As she notes, however, only a small portion of Binchois’s sacred music conforms to that rite (a surprising finding), thus raising the obvious question: for what institution(s) did he compose the rest of his sacred output? At present, there is no clear answer, though she suggests that it might have been destined for some of the churches with which and persons with whom Binchois was associated. If Haggh’s article deals with the ‘liturgy’ of Part I’s subtitle, Sean Gallagher’s ‘After Burgundy: rethinking Binchois’s years in Soignies’ addresses the ‘style’, and argues – after an extremely informative discussion of Binchois’s duties as provost at the Cathedral of Saint-Vincent – that the presence there during the 1450s of both Binchois and Johannes Regis left stylistic traces in the younger composer’s music. Gallagher also finds allusions to Binchois in a number of songs by both Johannes Pullois and Ockeghem. Yet as he admits, it is a ‘delicate operation’, since the melodic/rhythmic figure that he singles out in order to identify the presumed allusions – a three-note pattern of semibreve–dotted semibreve–minim in tempus perfectum with an ascending fourth–descending second melodic contour – was not unique to Binchois (and has a long history in the literature on the composer). Finally, Part I is rounded out by Philip Weller’s contribution, to which I shall return later.

Part II: The sacred music: style, context, and the Binchois canon

In ‘Binchois and England: some questions of style, influence, and attribution in his sacred works’, Peter Wright draws upon evidence both stylistic and ‘bibliographic’ (he notes that Binchois leads all other Continental composers in terms of both conflicting attributions with English composers and the tendency for his sacred music to appear next to English pieces in Continental manuscripts) to both tighten and broaden the Binchois-English music connection, show that it was very much a two-way process, and suggest that Binchois’s relationship to England might have gone beyond the well-known encounter with William de la Pole in 1424. Andrew Kirkman’s ‘Binchois the borrower’ compares three pairs of pieces as a stepping stone to a series of questions that, while focused on the ‘nature and range of borrowing’, end up going to the very heart of fifteenth-century compositional practice in general and Binchois’s in particular. Along the way, he seconds Wright’s broadening of the Binchois-English relationship, asks us to consider ‘[that] the function of the composer’s name in the early fifteenth century [...] is contingent on the culture in which it is situated’, and speculates about the chronological position of Binchois’s sacred works (to which, perhaps, we may add the secular works as well): ‘few of the ascribed pieces [...] can have been composed after 1440’. (Perhaps, then, we have another instance of Busnoys- and Ockeghem-like ‘early retirement’, a situation quite different from that of Dufay, at least as far as that composer’s crowning sacred works are concerned.) Part II concludes with Marco Gozzi’s ‘Wiser’s codices and the absconditus Binchois’, which offers yet another chapter in what has become a favorite pastime among some circa 1420–1520 specialists: attaching the name of this or that composer to a piece that survives without it. Here it is a question of assigning to Binchois a number of sacred works in those of the Trent codices (MSS 88, 89, 90, and 91) copied mainly by Johannes Wiser, which contain not a single attribution to Binchois. Thus Gozzi credits Binchois with a Sanctus (which he considers as forming a pair with a securely ascribed Agnus Dei) and three Kyrie settings, and seems to support a group of attributions once made by Laurence Feininger. Now, while I am not in a position to take sides in connection with most of these attributions – though the ascription of the Sanctus seems rock solid – I would simply call for caution, since today’s attribution has been known to become tomorrow’s retraction. (A note about ex.6.5: add an ‘8’ beneath the treble clefs of both the tenor and contratenor.)

Part III: The songs

The ‘game’ in Dennis Slavin’s ‘The Binchois game: style and tonal coherence in some songs from the mid-fifteenth century’ can be played as follows: show a fifteenth-century-wise audience some rondeaux by various composers, covering up anywhere from the last two or three bars to half or more of each song (and wiping out the words to add to the disorientation); then ask them to predict the ‘final’ on which each piece will end. Likely as not, they will occasionally have trouble, even if they follow Tinctoris’s observation – stretching it to include both superius and tenor – that such songs generally end on one of the notes on which one of those voices began; and they will likely have serious trouble in connection with Binchois, whose rondeaux display agreement between opening note(s) and final only slightly more than half the time (53% of the time, as compared with 86%, 79%, and 61% for Ockeghem, Busnoys, and Dufay, respectively). Often, Binchois seems to set up two possible finals, the ‘tonal’ issue being settled only at the last moment. And it is this tonal tension that Slavin aptly calls ‘Binchois’s game’, a game that, as he notes, raises questions about our notions of tonal coherence in the music of the period.

In ‘Bridging the medial caesura: the wraparound rondeau’, John Andrew Bailey and Beth Anne Lee-De Amici show how to elide the return from medial cadence to the opening measures in two rondeaux with poetic enjambments between the short strophe and the short refrain, that is, the successive a A panels in the overall A B a A a b A B scheme. Now while I am sympathetic to their cause (having proposed an even more radical approach in connection with a number of Ockeghem rondeaux) and find their solution in Binchois’s Seule esgarée especially convincing, I have two questions: how do we handle enjambments between the long strophe and the final refrain (b A), and how (and where) do we end those short or final refrains that, as a consequence of the enjambment, cry out to end after only a single phrase or even a single word (this, after all, was the problem addressed by Howard Garey and Howard Mayer Brown)? Given their obvious musicality, I hope that Bailey and Lee-De Amici will take up these matters in the future. David Fallows’s ‘Binchois and the poets’, which served as the conference keynote talk, begins by reviewing the state of Binchois research, and then, with a tour of poetry manuscripts that few (if any) musicologists aside from Fallows could conduct, challenges the received wisdom about poems attributed to Charles d’Orléans and Alain Chartier. Along the way, he treats us to two provocative assertions: that contemporaries valued Binchois’s songs more than they did Dufay’s (a conclusion that he draws from the dissemination of the pieces); and that Binchois’s sacred music displays an ‘enormously greater range of techniques’ (this according to Fallows). Part III concludes with Robert Nosow’s ‘Binchois’s songs in the Feo Belcari Manuscript’, a detailed look at Belcari’s laude and the manuscript Florence, BNC, Magl. VII.690, but one in which Binchois’s role is at best tangential.

Part IV: From manuscript to edition: issues of theory and editing

The final three essays use Binchois (to greater or lesser degrees) as a jumping-off point for their authors to continue research projects addressed over the years. In ‘Accidentals in Binchois’s songs’, Thomas Brothers offers an interesting insight into why signed accidentals may appear frequently in some sources for a piece, but sparingly in others; he argues that the ‘variants’ do not necessarily indicate different performance preferences, but may be a function of how long various scribes thought an accidental once entered stayed in effect. Margaret Bent’s ‘The use of cut signatures in sacred music by Binchois’ represents her third article (she implies that there is another in the works) on the devilish Ø signature, and once again piles up evidence to show that, at least as it appears in successive sections of Binchois’s sacred music circa 1430, the cut circle more often than not indicates a change in scoring.[2] (Something seems to have gone wrong with the first sentence on p.310: ‘I stress that I am not here discussing use of the sign...’, yet that is exactly what she is discussing, in contrast to the presumably more wide-ranging ‘theory and practice of so-called tempus perfectum diminutum’, which she promises to address in a forthcoming essay; should the word ‘not’ simply be deleted, or is there more to it than that?) Finally, Leeman Perkins’s ‘Towards a theory of text-music relations in the music of the Renaissance’ provides a useful, systematic approach to the study of music-word relationships by organising the various ways in which music and text can interact into six categories: declamatory, formal, syntactical, rhetorical, mimetic, and affective. And with his sensitivity to the poetry of the fifteenth-century chanson, he offers a text underlay for the opening lines of Binchois’s De plus en plus that improves upon that in Wolfgang Rehm’s edition.

I have saved Philip Weller’s ‘Rites of passage: Nove cantum melodie, the Burgundian Court, and Binchois’s early career’ for last because, frankly, it troubles (even exasperates) me: it wallows in ‘context’, as it takes us through the historical background of ‘persons, actions, occasions, [and] events’ in detail that is numbing and often irrelevant (though it does show an impressive command of the secondary literature in the process); it reinvents the wheel, as it lectures to us on the function and compositional process that underlie a ‘state composition’ as though no one had ever before placed a piece of music in its historical-cultural context; and it often wraps itself in a prose style so impenetrable (and jargon-ridden, though I suppose that, in the grand scheme of things, a Binchois motet is no less an ‘artefact’ than is a flint chip) that it must resort to ‘In other words...’ more than once to make its meaning clear. In other words: it is symptomatic of a style that, while savored in some quarters, leaves many of us quite fed up. Is there an antidote? I recall a story that Gustave Reese often told: when Otto Gombosi arrived in the United States, he headed straight for a little stationery store and bought a 95-cent pocket dictionary; he never used a word that wasn’t in it! From this Reese drew a moral: plain prose, direct discourse, brief is better.

To conclude (somewhat autobiographically): I have three criteria for judging the value of a book: (1) did I learn something? (2) did it make me want to learn more about the topic, even to the extent of undertaking fresh research in it? and (3) did I enjoy it (why shouldn’t I)? With respect to Binchois studies the answer to all three questions is a resounding yes, and we owe the editors – Andrew Kirkman and Dennis Slavin – all the contributors, and Oxford University Press (UK) a round of applause for much that is stimulating and provocative about early fifteenth-century music in general and Binchois in particular.

Allan W. Atlas’s Renaissance music: music in Western Europe, 1400–1600 was published by Norton in 1998.

Notes

1. To nip in the bud any charges of conflict of interest and/or cover-up: at the time the conference was held, I was the Executive Officer of the Music Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, and thus one of the sponsors of the conference (for which I am thanked in the Preface); in addition, one of the editors, Dennis Slavin, and I were – and still are – colleagues in that programme.[back]
2. Recently, Rob C. Wegman has published 'Different strokes for different folks?: on tempo and diminution in fifteenth-century music¹, in Journal of the American Musicological Society 53 (2000), pp.461–505, in which he takes issue with Bent's whole hypothesis. Bent responds in the same issue of the journal, on pp.597–612. [back]