394 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Binchois Studies, edited by Andrew Kirkman and Dennis Slavin. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2000. xviii, 353 pp.

Modern historians often pair the composers Guillaume Du Fay and Gilles
Binchois, just as Martin le Franc did in the famous reference in Le champion
des dames.1 But the two preeminent Franco-Burgundian musicians of the early
fifteenth century were, in fact, treated very differently in twentieth-century
scholarship. Although the essentials of Binchois’s biography were laid out in

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the 1930s by Jeanne Marix, and his songs were edited in the 1950s by Wolf-
gang Rehm, he did not generally receive the kind of scholarly attention ac-
corded Du Fay.2 By contrast, Du Fay’s complete works were published by the
1960s, and he was the subject of innumerable articles and several dissertations
and book-length works, culminating in David Fallows’s 1982 biography.3
A turning point in the study of Binchois was the publication of Philip
Kaye’s edition of Binchois’s sacred music in 1992.4 Although most of the sa-
cred pieces were available in various transcriptions, the availability of nearly
sixty compositions in a standardized modern edition began to change our pic-
ture of the composer. Because Kaye’s edition suddenly cast light on a signifi-
cant and less well known part of Binchois’s oeuvre—effectively doubling the
number of compositions readily accessible for study—the composer and his
music seemed ripe for scholarly reconsideration. In 1995, Andrew Kirkman
and Dennis Slavin convened in New York City the “First International Con-
ference on Gilles de Bins, dit Binchois.” Most of the papers in Binchois Studies
come from that conference, though the volume also includes a few additional
essays solicited by the editors. Assembling highly varied approaches and con-
clusions into a coherent whole is a challenge that Kirkman and Slavin have met
by grouping the papers into four distinct sections by broadly defined subject
matter. There are three essays on biographical issues, three on the sacred
music, and four on the songs; a final group of three essays is a kind of miscel-
lany. In general, the first three groupings are well unified; that on the sacred
music is particularly so.
1. There are innumerable citations of this passage from le Franc’s poem, the most influential
in Gustave Reese’s Music in the Renaissance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959), 12–13.
2. For the biography of Binchois, see Jeanne Marix, Histoire de la musique et des musiciens
de la cour de Bourgogne sous le règne de Philippe le Bon (1420–1467) (Strasbourg: Heitz, 1939;
reprint, Baden-Baden: Verlag Valentin Koerner, 1974); and Gilles Binchois, Die Chansons von
Gilles Binchois, ed. Wolfgang Rehm, Musikalische Denkmäler 2 (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne,
1957). There were also two notable dissertations and a monograph published prior to 1990:
Arthur Parris, “The Sacred Works of Gilles Binchois” (Ph.D. diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1965);
Dennis Slavin, “Binchois’ Songs, the Binchois Fragment and the Two Layers of Escorial A”
(Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1987); and Walter H. Kemp, Burgundian Court Song in the
Time of Binchois: The Anonymous “Chansons” of El Escorial, MS V.III.24 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990).
3. David Fallows, Dufay (1982; rev. ed., London: Dent, 1987).
4. Gilles Binchois, The Sacred Music of Gilles Binchois, ed. Philip Kaye (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992).
 Reviews 395

Part 1, “Binchois in Context: Liturgy, Style, Culture,” brings together

articles by Barbara Haggh, Sean Gallagher, and Philip Weller. Taken together,
these essays represent a significant contribution to our knowledge of
Binchois’s biography and the context and influence of his musical works.
Haggh’s “Binchois and Sacred Music at the Burgundian Court” is a painstak-
ing clarification of the liturgical sources used in the sacred music composed for
Philip the Good. In recent years, the close study of plainchant sources for
polyphony has been a promising approach, yielding valuable insights into mu-

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sical institutions, biography, and the context of individual works. In taking this
approach, Haggh refines earlier arguments regarding the Burgundian chapel’s
adoption of the usage of Paris, first defining the use of Paris itself: that body of
plainchant largely derived from the liturgy at Notre-Dame. She also clarifies
the relationship between this use and those of the royal Sainte-Chapelle and
the Sainte-Chapelle of the Burgundian dukes. Haggh discusses a surprisingly
small body of sacred polyphony by Binchois that directly reflects Parisian
usage in setting a chant cantus firmus. The majority of Binchois’s sacred works
cannot be connected to Burgundy or Paris in this way—there are works based
on English chants and a number of unidentified melodies, as well as settings
that do not incorporate plainchant at all. Though Haggh does not specifically
suggest biographical connections for these works, her study raises the possibil-
ity that like Du Fay, Binchois had a rather complicated career as a sacred com-
poser, creating works for a variety of musical establishments outside the
Burgundian chapel.
In 1452 or 1453, Binchois retired to a comfortable post as provost of St.
Vincent in Soignies, where he remained until his death in 1461. Gallagher’s
“After Burgundy: Rethinking Binchois’s Years in Soignies” deals first and
foremost with the musical establishment at the church of St. Vincent during
Binchois’s last decade. He shows that, while it was not a musical establishment
on a par with the cathedral of Cambrai or the chapel of Philip the Good,
St. Vincent was, during Binchois’s tenure, a well-respected musical center with
a few established composers and a well-funded choir. Gallagher then traces
Binchois’s influence on the next generation of composers, specifically Pullois,
Ockeghem, and Regis. For example, he discusses Binchois’s Pour prison and a
quotation from it that has already been noticed in Pullois’s setting of the same
text—evidence, apparently, of a general interest in Binchois’s music among
Franco-Burgundian composers, since Pullois and Binchois do not seem to
have been professionally connected.5 Ockeghem’s tribute to Binchois in Mort
tu as navré—a déploration written on the elder composer’s death—is well
known, but Gallagher also discusses a previously unnoticed quotation of Pour

5. The Pullois quotation was noted by David Fallows in “Binchois, Gilles de Bins dit,” in The
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), 2:719. On Pullois’s biography, see Pamela
F. Starr, “Pullois, Johannes,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online, ed. Laura Macey,
http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed 22 March 2002).
396 Journal of the American Musicological Society

prison in an early rondeau by Ockeghem, La despourvue. It is logical to draw

this sort of musical connection, given that Ockeghem and Binchois were per-
sonally and professionally connected.6 But Gallagher’s discussion of the musi-
cal relationship between Binchois and Regis—who spent most of the 1450s
together at St. Vincent—is less convincing. He suggests that the chanson-style
melodic writing that makes Regis’s motets distinctive derives in part from
Binchois.
Weller’s “Rites of Passage: Nove cantum melodie, the Burgundian Court,

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and Binchois’s Early Career” is in part an expansion of ideas presented in an
extended review of Kaye’s edition by Kirkman and Weller.7 One of the most
remarkable pieces in Binchois’s oeuvre, the incomplete Nove cantum melodie
is an enormous isorhythmic motet—his only surviving essay in this form—
written for one of the central events of Philip the Good’s reign, the baptism of
his short-lived firstborn son Antoine in 1431. Weller offers a minutely detailed
exploration of the historical circumstances leading to its creation. He examines
the dynastic ambitions of Philip the Good and the phase of Burgundian con-
solidation that reached its peak in 1431, connecting this history to the known
details of Binchois’s early career. Capping this historical exegesis is Weller’s de-
tailed analysis of the motet, which takes its cue from Umberto Eco’s theories
on medieval aesthetics. This analysis is captivating, but some of the features
Weller identifies as apparently remarkable are in fact general points of style in
the early fifteenth-century motet, particularly in the works of Dunstaple and
his English contemporaries.
Because the publication of Kaye’s edition served to spur reconsideration
of Binchois’s sacred music, it is not surprising that a significant portion of
Binchois Studies is devoted to essays on sacred works. Part 2, “The Sacred
Music: Style, Context, and the Binchois Canon,” includes articles by Peter
Wright, Kirkman, and Marco Gozzi. One thread that runs through all three
essays is the revision of Binchois’s work-list—from Wright’s carefully reasoned
proposal regarding a Kyrie with a doubtful ascription to Du Fay, through
Kirkman’s clarification of the origins of the two related Asperges me settings,
to Gozzi’s wholesale speculation on a large body of anonymous works.
Wright’s essay starts from the historical commonplace that Binchois imitated
English style, adopting the contenance angloise. “Binchois and England: Some
Questions of Style, Influence, and Attribution in His Sacred Works,” which
focuses on the early sacred music, brings together manuscript evidence and
careful analysis to clarify the two-way musical relationship between the com-
poser and his English contemporaries. In particular, Wright enumerates a host
of melodic connections between Binchois’s securely attributed works and con-

6. See Leeman L. Perkins, “Ockeghem, Jean de,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music
Online, http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed 22 March 2002).
7. Andrew Kirkman and Philip Weller, “Binchois’s Texts,” Music and Letters 77 (1996):
589–93.
 Reviews 397

temporary English music. He concludes with detailed discussion of seven

works—each of which has been proposed as English—that survive with con-
flicting, changed, or challenged ascriptions to Binchois. While Wright does
not explicitly solve any of these disputed cases, his speculation on the back-
ground of these attributions contains a wealth of information regarding both
Binchois’s style and its relationship to contemporary English music.
In his “Binchois the Borrower,” Kirkman speculates on the nature of musi-
cal borrowing in this period, noting the “freeware” approach to borrowing

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practiced by many composers—an apt metaphor, since many fifteenth-century
compositions appear to contain borrowed and reworked material that traveled
with the same relative ease as downloaded software. He focuses on three cases,
showing first that the two Asperges me settings (nos. 29 and 30 in Kaye’s edi-
tion) are in essence two successive versions of the same piece. He then expands
on two previously noted cases of borrowing. The Sanctus/Agnus pair (Kaye
no. 6) shares material with an anonymous English mass cycle,8 and Credo
no. 18 borrows a lengthy passage from an English carol, Pray for us thow
prince of pesse.9 From these cases Kirkman develops a number of points, no-
tably the emulation of English style in the works, the apparent need for rather
humble service music produced on short order, and the tremendous breadth
of Binchois’s musical style. In the end, his speculation focuses on the nature
of fifteenth-century borrowing and how little we actually know about it,
and calls for more careful consideration of cultural and biographical factors in
these cases.
Gozzi’s “Wiser’s Codices and the Absconditus Binchois” deals with music
of the later Trent Codices. The earliest of these, Trent 87 and Trent 92, con-
tain a wealth of Binchois attributions, but the repertory of the later manu-
scripts, copied by Johannes Wiser or his assistants, is largely anonymous. Gozzi
works with fourteen anonymous pieces that may possibly be by Binchois.
His most persuasive case is the Sanctus “Marie filius” that appears in Trent 93
and Trent 90. Here Gozzi shows that it was half of a Sanctus/Agnus pair with
Binchois’s Agnus no. 21. The two works share significant connections—
formal plan, cantus firmus treatment, and scoring—that make an attribution
to Binchois perfectly reasonable. Gozzi has less to go on in the other cases, in-
herited from Laurence Feininger and others, and in the end he mostly revisits
old arguments, leaving the question of the works’ authorship to further
study.10

8. Noted in Manfred F. Bukofzer, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1950), 142.
9. Noted in Robert James Mitchell, “The Paleography and Repertory of Trent Codices 89
and 91, Together with Analyses and Editions of Six Mass Cycles by Franco-Flemish Composers
from Trent Codex 89” (Ph.D. diss., University of Exeter, 1989), 223.
10. Gozzi summarizes the thirteen works in question in his table 6.1 (p. 142). Most of the
attributions come from Laurence Feininger’s unpublished transcriptions of Trent mass music;
additional proposed attributions are drawn from Mitchell, “The Paleography”; Edward George
398 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Part 3, “The Songs,” is a collection of four articles by Slavin, John Andrew

Bailey and Beth Anne Lee–De Amici, Fallows, and Robert Nosow. These
essays approach the songs from four widely divergent perspectives. Slavin’s ar-
ticle, “The Binchois Game: Style and Tonal Coherence in Some Songs from
the Mid-Fifteenth Century,” takes its title from a Gedankenexperiment staged
by Fallows at the 1995 Binchois conference. Fallows’s “Binchois Game” in-
volved passing around a song by Binchois that had its last few measures
removed. When audience members were asked to determine the final, few

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players could do so. Slavin continued the game over the next year, approach-
ing the problem by using rondeaux of Busnoys, Ockeghem, Du Fay, and
Binchois in an effort to identify various factors that indicate “predictability” of
the final. In Ockeghem, for example, the final nearly always matches the open-
ing pitch class of the superius. Slavin explores a few organizing factors that
work for some of Binchois’s songs, but he does not establish a predictable
system. He ends this provocative article by questioning the application of
modern ideas of tonal coherence to this music. Binchois, he suggests, may
have valued this type of tonal unpredictability.
“Bridging the Medial Caesura: The Wraparound Rondeau,” by Bailey and
Lee–De Amici, deals with how rondeaux, and specifically their cadences,
should be performed. Conventionally, singers will come to a full stop at the
caesura, often a cadence marked by a signum congruentiae. The authors begin
with Binchois’s Seule esgaree and the anonymous chanson Loing de vo tres-
doulce presence, showing in each case that enjambment—a musical link that
avoids the full stop between A and B phrases, or between repeated A
phrases—makes perfect sense. Bailey and Lee–De Amici conclude with a list of
some eighty rondeaux by Binchois and his contemporaries in which an en-
jambed solution is indicated, suggesting that this performance practice was in
fact widespread.
Fallows, whose “Binchois and the Poets” was originally the keynote ad-
dress at the Binchois conference, begins by calling for further work in several
areas: a complete and long-overdue biographical study, continued reevalua-
tion of the sacred music, analysis of Binchois’s treatment of dissonance, and
close study of the sources of songs and their poetry. This last item is the sub-
ject of his essay. Fallows’s uniquely encyclopedic control of the sources of
fifteenth-century songs and lyric poetry allows him to clarify the relationship
between Binchois’s songs and the poetry of Christine de Pizan, Charles
d’Orléans, and Alain Chartier.11 In particular, Fallows shows that there is no

Kovarik, “Mid Fifteenth-Century Polyphonic Elaborations of the Plainchant Ordinarium Missae”

(Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1973); Reinhard Strohm, The Rise of European Music, 1380–
1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Gozzi, Il manuscritto Trento, Museo
Provinciale d’arte, cod. 1377 (Tr 90): Con un’analisi del repertorio non derivato da Tr 93
(Cremona: Turris, 1992).
11. See in particular his remarkable volume A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415–1480
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
 Reviews 399

strong evidence for crediting the lyric Mon cuer chante to d’Orléans; he does,
however, identify two different, previously unknown d’Orléans settings
among Binchois’s songs: Adieu ma tres belle maistresse and Va toste mon
amoureux desir. He also makes a convincing case for Chartier’s authorship of
four of the lyric poems, all rondeaux, set by Binchois.
Nosow’s essay, “Binchois’s Songs in the Feo Belcari Manuscript,” is only
marginally related to Binchois, though it does provide additional evidence for
the composer’s reputation in Italy, particularly in Florence. The tie that binds

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this chapter to the rest of Binchois Studies is the appearance of Binchois’s song
titles as cantasi come (i.e., “sing to the tune of ”) references in the manuscript
of Feo Belcari, which is devoted primarily to laude. After an informative study
of the scribe Belcari, Nosow returns briefly to the three Binchois cantasi come
songs. He shows that at least one of them, Ben venga Jesù, borrows not only
the music of its model, Bien vegnant ma tres reboubtée, but also a partial trans-
lation and sacred contrafact of Binchois’s chanson text.
Part 4, “From Manuscript to Edition: Issues of Theory and Editing,”
brings together articles on three relatively disparate topics by Thomas
Brothers, Margaret Bent, and Leeman L. Perkins. In his “Accidentals in
Binchois’s Songs,” Brothers presents a rigorously systematic and statistically
based catalogue of some 264 manuscript accidentals found in copies of
Binchois’s songs. He categorizes the accidentals by function and analyzes the
transmission of the various types in the sources. This approach, covering all
manuscript sources for a single composer, reveals a distinct change in scribal
practice in the later copies, which tend to “lose” accidentals as they move fur-
ther away from the central sources of the 1430s, probably reflecting a change
in scribal practice rather than performance practice. Because of the careful ty-
pology of functions laid out here, Brothers is able to determine the extent to
which various types of manuscript accidentals were retained. This article is
clearly only the very first step in a much larger survey: despite Binchois’s
prominence and the relatively wide distribution of his works, he is only one
composer, and only his secular songs are studied here. It remains to be seen
whether similar consistencies of transmission are to be found in Du Fay—a
stylistically more diverse composer—or in the fifteenth-century repertory as a
whole, but this is a hopeful beginning.
Bent’s essay, “The Use of Cut Signatures in Sacred Music by Binchois,” is
a continuation of her recent work on the use of the sign o| . Bent has argued
that, in the early fifteenth century, o| was not always a mensuration sign indi-
cating an acceleration or strict tempus perfectum diminutum, but served in
many cases as a kind of all-purpose musical signal.12 She surveys all of the

12. Bent presented this hypothesis at the Binchois conference in 1995 and at the Sixty-
Second Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Baltimore, November 1996. See
her articles “The Early Use of the Sign o| ,” Early Music 24 (1996): 199–225; and “The Use of
Cut Signatures in Sacred Music by Ockeghem and His Contemporaries,” in Johannes Ockeghem:
Actes du XL e Colloque international d’études humanistes, Tours, 3–8 février 1997, ed. Philippe
400 Journal of the American Musicological Society

appearances of cut signatures in Binchois’s sacred music, the majority of which

appear in mass settings, and shows persuasively that in most cases the sign
seems to indicate a change of scoring, from trio to duet, although occasionally
it serves to signal a repeated section. In the most complicated example, Nove
cantum melodie, simultaneous use of cut and uncut signatures in upper voices
and tenor conforms to the traditional interpretation—a 2:1 relationship be-
tween uncut and cut note-lengths. Bent argues that in this case, while the si-
multaneous relationship may be unambiguous, there is no reason to assume

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that the cut signatures prescribed a proportional relationship between adjacent
sections of the motet. Her reasoning is complex but impeccable. This is a fairly
startling conclusion—one that upsets much of what is commonly understood
about the isorhythmic motet. Indeed, contesting our notions about isorhyth-
mic construction seems to be part of the intent here: Bent has already issued a
challenge to the usual understanding of the late medieval motet, and we can
undoubtedly look forward to more on this subject.13
The final essay in the volume, Perkins’s “Towards a Theory of Text-Music
Relations in the Music of the Renaissance,” is also the one with the broadest
reach. His purpose, the author declares, “is to draw upon the traditions of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for dealing with text in the compositional
process . . . and to derive from them a critical and analytical method for exam-
ining systematically the ways in which . . . the relations between them can be
defined” (p. 313). He defines and illustrates six levels on which text and music
can relate—declamatory, formal, syntactical, rhetorical, mimetic, and affective
—and demonstrates most of these levels with examples by Binchois. While not
really a hierarchy, the relationships discussed by Perkins do proceed from
the relatively simple (distribution of syllabic and melismatic passages) to the
rhetorical and subtle (effective expression of an affect or emotion). He ac-
knowledges the difficulty of applying his more complex levels to the music of
Binchois and his generation, and most of his theoretical sources (particularly
those by Vicentino, Zarlino, and Galilei)14 were written a century or more
after Binchois’s death. But Perkins’s discussion clearly goes beyond Binchois
to embrace the broader and more complex issue of how Renaissance com-
posers set a text to music. His article is a clear and commonsense approach to a
complex problem.

Vendrix (Paris: Klincksieck, 1998), 641–80. Rob Wegman challenged her findings in “Different
Strokes for Different Folks? On Tempo and Diminution in Fifteenth-Century Music,” this
Journal 53 (2000): 461–505. See also Bent’s response to Wegman in the same issue,
pp. 597–612.
13. See her “Isorhythm,” sec. 5, “Generic status; limits of the term,” in The New Grove Dic-
tionary of Music Online, http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed 23 March 2002).
14. Nicola Vicentino, L’antica musica ridotta a la moderna prattica (Rome, 1555); Gioseffo
Zarlino, Le istitutioni harmoniche (Venice, 1558); and Vincenzo Galilei, Dialogo della musica an-
tica della moderna (Florence, 1581).
 Reviews 401

Binchois was hardly the proverbial “shadowy figure” prior to the publica-
tion of Binchois Studies, but he was long overdue for the type of reappraisal
and inquiry that emerges here. Every facet of Binchois and his music has been
reconsidered in this diverse collection, from details of his biography, through
consideration of all elements of his surviving works, toward issues of more uni-
versal concern in fifteenth-century music. If the varied nature of the thirteen
essays reveals their origins as a set of conference papers, there are some striking
consistencies that emerge. I would single out a few promising directions. Prior

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to Kaye’s edition and the publication of these essays, Binchois’s sacred works
had received relatively little scholarly attention, but it is now apparent that
they can be brought to bear upon questions of biography and style. There is
also a welcome reconsideration of both the works-list and the possibility that
more of Binchois’s works remain to be recovered, particularly from within the
vast repertory of the Trent Codices. And the volume contains several impor-
tant contributions to the issue of performance of fifteenth-century music. In
summing up their own enterprise, Kirkman and Slavin note that, “perhaps
inevitably, given the state of play, one of the most enduring impressions left
by this book will be of how much could still be done” (p. 8). Indeed, much
remains to be done, but Binchois Studies promises well for future research.15

J. MICHAEL ALLSEN

The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque, by Annette Richards. New
Perspectives in Music History and Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2001. xiii, 256 pp.

In taking on an admittedly “unruly mixture of themes” (p. 1), Annette

Richards marshals a daunting wealth of texts and discourses to her task of illu-
minating parallel developments in the aesthetics, popularization, and com-
modification of the picturesque in both landscape gardening and instrumental
music in late eighteenth-century England and Germany. Indeed, the itinerary
of this remarkable and very smart book itself offers something of a picturesque
strategy, following seemingly digressive and pleasurably unconventional paths
through the changing terrain of the fantastic in music from C. P. E. Bach’s
early works of the 1760s to Beethoven’s last piano sonatas of the 1820s. If at
times the author seems to have gone rather far afield in addressing such diverse
forms and genres as fantasias, rondos, sonatas, parlor songs, and symphonies,

15. To cite at least one case where Binchois Studies has sparked further research and publica-
tion: Alejandro Planchart’s review of the volume includes a fascinating postscript detailing not
only the appearance of Binchois’s name in papal documents, but also the historical background of
the famous miniature portrait of Binchois and Du Fay included in le Franc’s poem. See his “Out
of the Shadows: Binchois Ascendant,” Early Music 30 (2002): 110–15.