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BINCHOIS AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
The
Spirits of
England
and
France
3
- -
GOTHIC
VOICES
directed by
CHRISTOPHER
PAGE
I
N THE LAST DECADES of the fourteenth century, composers
working in the French tradition were sometimes musicians
of profligate imagination. In addition to polyrhythms,
extravagant melodic sequences and sudden dissonances, they
sometimes created a sense of forward momentum in their
compositions by sheer crowding of the texture, a legacy
reaching back to the leading composer of the French Ars
nova, Guillaume de Machaut (d1377). The music of Machaut,
represented here by the exotic four-part ballade,
Il m’est avis,
was still being enjoyed in Italy around 1430 according to the
theorist Ugolino of Orvieto, and even the most flamboyant
aspects of late fourteenth-century style, fostered by Machaut’s
successors, did not perish entirely in the 1400s. A composer
might still return to them for a showpiece such as the ballade
Laissiés ester.
Here Gilet Velut, a choirman at Cambrai
Cathedral from 1409 to 1411, laments the death of a composer
(or singer). The grandiloquent poem, cast in ceremonious
decasyllables, is set to music whose duple rhythms fight so
determinedly against triple rhythms that the listener’s sense of
contrapunctus
is all but obliterated: in some passages we no
longer sense that a tactical note-against-note counterpoint
between cantus and tenor is the basic rationale of the piece.
Such textures—designed to pack the moment with effects,
overwhelming the ear and sweeping it onwards toward admir-
ation—could still be regarded as a guarantee of a composer’s
craftsmanship in the early fifteenth century as they had been
three decades earlier. Velut uses polyrhythms to create his
effect; the
Gloria
by Leonel Power (d1445) shows an English
composer in his youth enjoying the French aesthetic of an
almost furious texture crowded with events; to hear the five-
part section which closes this
Gloria
is like plunging one’s head
into a hive of bees.
The challenge facing French and Franco-Netherlandish
composers between 1400 and 1430 was to find a lucid and
mellifluous musical style, both for sacred and secular works,
which could replace the idioms of the French tradition as they
had become by the later fourteenth century. Many sacred
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works of the period 1400–1425 show with particular clarity
how some musicians were severely challenged by the task of
creating compositions with purposeful lower parts, and with
melodious top parts, when they could not use the song forms
of rondeau and ballade. The sacred works of Johannes de
Lymburgia and Johannes Brassart, for example, often have
lower voices that simply meander or bob up and down beneath
top parts that wander from cadence to cadence. Johannes
de Lymburgia’s
Descendi in ortum meum
is an outstanding
exception. This setting of extracts from
The Song of Songs
(a
text which often brought out the best in fifteenth-century
composers) is notated in an uncharacteristically low register,
cut loose from the F-c’ compass which is used for some of the
weakest music of the decades after 1400.
The songs of Gilles Binchois (d1460), and the best songs
of his contemporaries, such as Pierre Fontaine (J’ayme
bien
celui qui s’en va),
reveal a wonderful melodic gift and an
accomplished harmonic sense. Binchois was a singer in the
Burgundian court chapel for much of his life, deriving
additional income from various prebends held
in absentia.
As
a composer of songs, Binchois is so versatile that it is difficult
to know where one should look for his most characteristic
voice. The songs chosen here, all in three parts, are perhaps
particularly apt to show how Binchois touches the centre of the
medieval love-lyric tradition in the High Style. We miss the
point of
Amoreux suy,
for example, if we sense that there is a
quality of anguish in the music that seems unsuited to the
text (‘I am in love, and all my joy comes from hoping that
your goodness may send me one single look’). Here, as in
many of Binchois’ songs, the music has the power to suggest
that everything which a lover experiences is touched with
nostalgia—with a note of poignant and rueful memory—even
as he experiences it. (If the most ‘classical’ and nostalgic of
the twelfth-century trouvères, Gace Brulé, has a descendant
amongst the polyphonists of the fifteenth century, it is surely
Binchois.) The lover in
Amoreux suy
declares to his lady that
she is his ‘happy memory
now
and for ever’: she is already in
the realm of
souvenir.
So is the lady in
Adieu mon amoreuse
joye
for she is addressed by the poet as ‘my most pleasing
remembrance’:
mon plus plaisant souvenir.
Reading such
poetry, we may feel that even if the famous Van Eyck portrait
in the National Gallery does not show Binchois, the legend
which appears there,
Leal Souvenir,
is perfect for him. A
similar note of nostalgia, essential to the High-Style tradition of
love-lyric from Gace Brulé onwards, is sounded in
Adieu mon
amoreuse joye,
with its exquisitely formed cantus part, and
perhaps also in
Se la belle,
a song which demands the kind of
objective, almost disengaged performance which many songs
of the earlier fifteenth century require. It is no wonder that
the upper lines of these songs were sometimes performed by
less innocens—by
choirboys from the ducal chapel or other
foundations; the purity and candour of a child’s voice singing
songs of love, guaranteeing a style without affectation and
an interpretation without irony, appealed to court listeners
throughout the later Middle Ages. In some songs by Binchois,
however, the tone is much too dark for any such performance.
What can one say of
Ay! doloureux?
This song, surely one of the
composer’s finest, is a protracted experience of despair and a
marvel of sustained expression.
Many of Binchois’ songs are constructed with an extra-
ordinary economy of means; they epitomize the decision of
fifteenth-century musicians to control the expansive and
profligate imagination of the decades before 1400. The
beguiling melody of
Amoreux suy,
for example, is constructed
almost entirely by moving stepwise through six notes, while the
underlying harmony, cast in solemn A minor (to use modern
concepts and terminology) is seasoned by C sharps in the
cantus, where they appear as leading notes, and by more C
sharps in the tenor and contratenor where they appear an
octave lower, lingering to create sonorous A major triads. The
effect is bitter-sweet, and perhaps related to one of Binchois’
most characteristic effects: a kind of delayed false relation.
Until a new critical edition of Binchois songs is available it will
be unwise to press such observations too far, but one song,
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Adieu mon amoreuse joye,
has a highly conspicuous F/F sharp
false relation, not softened by delay. The delayed examples
are numerous, and are most striking perhaps in the early
measures of
Ay! doloureux,
where the three voices begin in a
low tessitura with numerous E flats made particularly
conspicuous by an imitative figure which falls to the E flat
through the augmented fourth A–G–E flat. When the
declamation of the text begins, however, the cantus rises
upwards to sound an extraordinarily poignant high E natural on
the word
doloureux.
For a relatively short period, perhaps 1420 to 1440, music
by English composers was influential on the Continent. It has
often been said that Martin le Franc, in his poem
Le Champion
des Dames
of about 1440, says Dufay and Binchois ‘have
adopted the English manner’, or something similar. This is not
quite correct, however, for Martin le Franc’s words are ‘[Dufay
et Binchois] ont pris de la contenance Angloise’, where the ‘de’
is partitive; the meaning is that ‘[Dufay and Binchois] have
adopted
some
of the English demeanour’. The quiet but utterly
secure confidence of a piece such as John Dunstable’s
Beata
Dei genitrix,
which also has an ascription (surely false) to
Binchois, represents one source of influence upon the two
great Frenchmen and their contemporaries, but only one, and
not an influence that is likely to have exerted any sudden
effect.
English music of the earlier fifteenth century will be
explored in forthcoming volumes of
The Spirits of England and
France
so we have confined our choice here to Dunstable’s
Beata Dei genitrix,
to two carols, and to Byttering’s exuberant
and ceremonious motet
En Katerina solennia/Virginalis concio/
SPONSUS AMAT SPONSUM.
The two-part carol
Exultavit cor
in Domino
is of special interest as a neglected Agincourt carol,
much less well known than the famous
Deo gracias Anglia
(recorded by Gothic Voices on Hyperion CDS44251/3), while
the three-part carol
Abide, I hope it be the best
catches
the tone of many fifteenth-century English carols and indeed
of contemporary English civilization: it is morally earnest,
technically assured but unambitious. Byttering’s
En Katerina
solennia / Virginalis concio / SPONSUS AMAT SPONSUM,
probably composed significantly before the marriage of Henry V
of England to Catherine of Valois in 1420, is a different matter.
This three-part isoryhthmic motet has tremendous rhythmic
zest. Here melody, as a composer of songs would have
understood it, is not an issue; what count (in several senses
of the word) are the exuberant cross rhythms, the often flam-
boyant declamation of the text, and the gradual acceleration of
the tenor part.
Four songs are performed here by a trio of lutes, each one
plucked with a quill plectrum. With the exception of a few
cadential ornaments in the top part, these songs are played
exactly as they stand in the ‘vocal’ sources. The extent to
which fifteenth-century string players performed secular songs
in this way is unknown; the rather different practice of
encrusting an upper line with ornamental figuration and
discarding the contratenor is well attested in the Faenza codex
and elsewhere, and while this method has been given most
attention by modern scholars—because it is a distinctively
instrumental practice—there is no reason to suppose that it
was the only one in use. Even when one sets out to play
the notes ‘as they stand’, a new idiom of performance soon
emerges, taking one away from the idioms of a vocal delivery,
partly because plucked instruments of the fifteenth century will
often welcome a much brisker tempo than might singers.
The rhythmic intricacies of Binchois’
Qui veut mesdire,
for
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example, a piece whose lower
between
8
and
3
, make a fine vehicle, in our parts alternate trio of medieval
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opinion, for a
lutes where rhythmic gestures can so crisply be made.
CHRISTOPHER PAGE © 1995
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2
GILLES BINCHOIS Amoreux suy
Amoreux suy, et me vient toute joye
En esperant que vo bonté m’envoye
Un doulx confort pour mon cuer resjouir
D’un seul regart; aultre rien ne desir
Puisque d’amer m’avés mis en la voye.
C’est trestout ce que demander voudroye;
C’est liesse que querir je savoye
Toutes les fois que je vous puis veir.
Amoreux suy, et me vient toute joye
En esperant que vo bonté m’envoye
Un doulx confort pour mon cuer resjouir.
Car par ma foy, quelque part que je soye,
Autre de vous amer je ne pouroye.
Vous estes celle que adés veul servir;
Vous estes tout mon joyeux souvenir
Hores et tousjours, tres douce, simple et coye.
Amoreux suy, et me vient toute joye
En esperant que vo bonté m’envoye
Un doulx confort pour mon cuer resjouir
D’un seul regart; aultre rien ne desir
Puisque d’amer m’avés mis en la voye.
I am in love, and all my joy comes
from hoping that your goodness may send me
sweet comfort to delight my heart
in one single look; I desire nothing else
since you have set me on the path to love.
That is all I would ask:
I would know how to seek happiness
every time that I may see you.
I am in love, and all my joy comes
from hoping that your goodness may send me
sweet comfort to delight my heart.
For, by my faith, wherever I may be,
I can love no other but you.
You are she whom I wish to serve from now on;
You are my every happy memory
now and for ever, very sweet, candid and discreet lady.
I am in love, and all my joy comes
from hoping that your goodness may send me
sweet comfort to delight my heart
in one single look; I desire nothing else
since you have set me on the path to love.
Farewell, my amorous pleasure
and my most pleasing remembrance;
farewell, finest one and the joy
of my most fortunate arrival;
I do not know any more what will happen,
for I am separated from your beauty,
my lady, by my faithfulness.
For that is all the good that I had
and the summit of my desire,
nor do I have any hope that I may ever see
a lady who may give me joy
save you, whom I wish
to serve with a pure wish,
my lady, by my faithfulness.
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GILLES BINCHOIS Adieu mon amoreuse joye
Adieu mon amoreuse joye
Et mon plus plaisant souvenir;
Adieu l’eslite et la mon joye
De mon tres heureux advenir.
Je ne scay mais que devenir
Puisque j’eslonge vo beaulté,
Ma dame, par ma leaulté.
Car c’est tout le bien que j’avoye
Et l’outrepasse de mon desir,
Ne je n’ai espoir que ja voye
Dame qui me puist esjoir
Si non vous, a qui obeir
Vueil de parfaite volenté
Ma dame, par ma leaulté.
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