In bringing together straightforward separate liturgical pieces from the first half of the 15th century and a sophisticated Mass composition from the period around 1475, the present record demonstrates historical trends in composition and different facets of the “functional” music of this time. It also affords an insight into the liturgical work of two masters famous principally as composers of chansons, who appear to us today as the chief representatives of “Burgundian” music in the strict sense.
The Burgundian court was in its political and cultural heyday, from the beginning of Philip the Good’s reign in 1419 to the death of Charles the Bold in 1477, also a centre of late-Middle-Ages musical life. The musical establishment of the Dukes of Burgundy was one of the largest and most productive of the period: it travelled with the court between Dijon and the secondary residences in the Flemish part of the state, and during military campaigns even into the camps, providing the court with secular music (principally chansons) for festive occasions and for entertainment, and with liturgical music for the court’s divine service. The members of the establishment - among them many of the major composers of the time - were recruited mainly from France, so long as the court’s politics and culture were French-orientated; not until the reign of Charles the Bold (1467-77), whose ambitious power politics brought him into conflict with France, did Burgundian court culture, and with it the constitution of the musical establishment, turn towards the northern provinces of the dukedom itself - Brabant, Hainault and Flanders. Because of this, Charles’s short reign, although overshadowed by constant wars, became the real golden age of a specifically Burgundian court culture in which French traditions, profiting by the court’s immense wealth, its northern provinces, its bishoprics and its large commercial towns, witnessed a last and extraordinary refinement. This culture, which was considered the subtlest, most brilliant and most “modern” of the Western world, influenced the courts of France and Italy, the Papal court in Rome as well as the Hapsburg court, even after Charles’s political catastrophe at the Battle of Nancy in 1477. It lived on until far in the 16th century in the Burgundian royal households of the Hapsburg rulers of the Netherlands, Maria of Burgundy and Margaret of Austria.
Binchois and Busnois, the most important of its composers, who were in immediate and close contact with the Burgundian court, represent the two areas of development of this
culture.
Gilles Binchois, born about 1400 in Mons, in Hainault, changed from a soldier to a priest, as Ockeghem tells us in his Déploration sur la mort de Binchois: “En sa jonesse fut soudart / De honnorable mondanité / Puis a esleu la milleur part / Servant Dieu en humilité”. In 1424-25 he was already a composer in the service of the Duke of Suffolk in Paris; here he certainly became acquainted with English liturgical music of the early 15th century, which had a considerable influence on him, as on the most celebrated composer of the period, Guilleaume Dufay. From 1430 to 1456 Binchois is known to have been chaplain in the Burgundian court’s musical establishment, and it is likely that he wrote the greater part of his works for it. On 20 September 1460 he died at Soignies in Hainault. Contemporaries like the poet Martin le Franc and the music theoretician Johannes Tinctoris considered him one of the greatest composers of the period, alongside Dufay and Dunstable, especially in the sphere of the French chanson.
Antoine Busnois was a generation younger than Binchois. Even before Charles the Bold came to the throne he was in his service; later he appears to have been permanently in Charles’s entourage as singer and composer, even if not as an official member of the court musicians. In 1476 he was in the service of the Duchess Margaret (of York); after the disaster at Nancy he was taken into the employ of Maria of Burgundy and, through her marriage, into that of the Archduke Maximilian. He died in Bruges in 1492. The few biographical details we have of him, but especially his compositions - and here again, mainly chansons - show him as a typical representative of the late phase of Burgundian culture, as a musician not only of sovereign craftsmanship, but accomplished in rhetoric and the classics, who exchanged letters in verse with Charles the Bold’s court poet Jean Molinet, and who was looked up to as an authority by the composers and theoreticians of the following generation: Tinctoris placed him on a level with Ockeghem.
The liturgical pieces by Binchois presented on this disc have been preserved together in the Trent Codices, a collection of extensive manuscripts, apparently compiled between 1440 and 1480 for the cathedral and episcopal court of Trent, which offer a cross-section of the English, French and Burgundian repertoire of music for liturgical use between 1420 and 1480. The extent and the wide geographical and temporal framework of this repertoire strikingly reveal how rapidly and how far music for the liturgy spread on the Continent in the first half of the 15th century - farreaching under English influence and Stemming from English models - and how clearly, nevertheless, it became differentiated in style from the most sophisticated genre of the period, the setting of the Ordinary of the Mass. The four pieces by Binchois are also functional music, though of great finesse: from their position in the older part of the Trent Codices they were probably composed before and around 1440.
Veni Creator Spiritus is a setting of the Whitsuntide hymn in fauxbourdon, which Dufay and his contemporaries developed from English impulses and adopted specially for liturgical use (Binchois’s piece also reveals English influence inasmuch as the version used of the hymn melody is English). The Chorale melody, slightly embellished and divided into elegantly moulded chanson-like phrases, lies in the upper part; the middle voice (not written down, but in accordance with the instruction “a fauxbourdon” to be filled out in performance) accompanies it at the interval of a fourth below; the lower voice supports the two higher parts in such a way that the lines (internally made up essentially of chords of the sixth) end by producing the notes of the fifth and octave. The result is a simple movement of refinement, which tonally, with its chords of the sixth (in this generation obviously perceived as “discoveries”), rhythmically, melodically and in its transparent structure as well as in the intimate character of the whole, is decidedly in the spirit of the chanson. The performance of the hymn is conceived with the odd-numbered lines for three voices, alternating with the even-numbered in unison plainsong.
Gloria, laus et honor is a hymn for the Palm Sunday procession, likewise for three voices, but somewhat more ambitiously laid out. The chorale melody again lies in the upper voice, slightly decorated and divided like a chanson, but the refrain is composed for three voices, while the succeeding strophe in all three cases is to be sung in two parts, though on one and the same setting; thus the form appears as A b A b A b A.
Asperges me is the Sunday antiphon for the sprinkling of holy water, which is here composed together with its psalm-verse “Miserere mei”, the doxology “Gloria Patri” and the repeat of the “Asperges”. The piece is again substantially three-part, with the decorated Chorale in the upper voice, but the structure is rather more elaborate and differentiated than in the previous piece. Psalm-verse and doxology are, in accordance with the psalmodic character of the hymn, set to be declaimed more simply, less melismatically and stronger chordally than the first “Asperges”, and the second “Asperges”, through a mensural change and richer melismata, has the effect of a concluding intensification as compared with the first.
The Agnus Dei belongs to the tradition, reaching back into the 14th century, of single or double movements from the Ordinary of the Mass which are halfway between simple functional music and the ambitious genre of complete settings of the Ordinary. In compositional technique too this piece occupies an intermediate position. The upper voice is divided like a chanson, the unembellished chorale lies in the first tenor; the piece is no longer in three parts but in four (which in Binchois and his time was still the exception), and through the predominance of full triads particularly splendid in sound; the three lower parts, mostly in the tenor register and frequently crossing each other, form a compact foundation of sound for the expressive and melodically prominent upper voice; finally, the caesuras of the upper voice are partly submerged by the lower voices. The second Agnus, contrasted by being in three parts, is intensified in the upper voice’s wide-ranging, emphatic triplet movement to a splendid ending of almost visionary effect. The third Agnus is sung in the four-voice version of the first.
The L’homme armé Mass of Busnois was probably composed about 1475, rather later than the second Mass attributed to Busnois, O crux lignum triumphale. It employs as cantus firmus one of the most famous songs of the 15th century, which apparently had already originated in the time of Dufay and Binchois but which Pietro Aron (1523) ascribed to Busnois himself. Among the numerous Masses on L'homme armé composed from the mid-15th to the early 17th century, Busnois’s composition was one of the most celebrated - Tinctoris and Ramos de Pareja quoted examples from it in their treatises, and Jacob Obrecht used it as model for his own L’homme armé Mass.
The vogue of the melody is at least partly attributable to its being particularly pregnant and simple, and on that very account specially suitable for demonstrably ingenious polyphonic treatment. Busnois belongs - with Dufay and Ockeghem, whose L’homme armé Masses are recalled in some details - among the first who made extensive use of these possibilities. The melody is at all times in the tonality of the Mass - G minor-Dorian - and, apart from the Agnus Dei, always in the tenor and notated in the same note-values; in the Patrem and the Et incarnatus, however, it is intoned a fourth lower, and moreover through a change in time signature the duration of its note-values in relation to the other voices (except for Tu solus) is permanently changed - symbolising identity, non-identity and their “coincidentia”. Finally, the cantus firmus is divided among the movements of the Mass in different ways:

Kyrie	I sections 1-5
Christe	free, three-part
Kyrie II	sections 6-10
Et in terra	sections 1-6 without the last two notes
Qui tollis	end of section 6 - section 10, in augmentation
Tu solus	complete
Patrem	sections 1-5, a fourth lower
Et incarnatus	sections 6-10, a fourth lower, in augmentation
Confiteor	sections 1-2 and 4-7
Sanctus	sections 1-6
Pleni	free, three-part
Osanna I	sections 7-10, in augmentation
Benedictus	free, three-part
Osanna II	as Osanna I
Agnus Dei I	section 1-5 inverted in the bass
Agnus Dei II	free, three-part
Agnus Dei III	sections 6-10 inverted in the bass, in augmentation

Otherwise the structure of the work largely follows the pattern that Dufay’s Masses had established: the tenor, as the cantus firmus voice, is the central axis of the work, and is framed by the superius and contratenor on one side and by the bass on the other; the bass occasionally crosses the tenor, especially in cadences, but tends to be laid out as the lowest part. Nevertheless it is not a supporting part in the sense of a simplified line merely providing a foundation for chords; on the contrary, special weight is attached to the equality of the three cantus firmus-free voices - exactly as in Dufay. The melodic line of these parts is clearly differentiated from the simple, undecorated course of the cantus firmus in the tenor - intensely rnelismatic and ornamental, but mostly disposed in chanson-like phrases; the text is accordingly sung, not declaimed, as it were absorbed by the melodic line, hardly ever expressed in detail. The sound, so far as is possible in such a generally pronounced linear conception of the voices, is full and triadic; in addition, Busnois likes working with surprising tonal twists (chords of E flat and A flat) which give the whole a special sonority. The endings of movements and sections are shaped in a particularly imaginative way in rhythm, melody and sonority. Finally, cyclic continuity is also emphasised - apart from the unifying cantus firmus, and again after the model of Dufay - by all the five main sections beginning with the same short duet of the upper parts, in which the lower voice quotes the start of the cantus firmus.
But above all it is the detail of the composition which is decisive in establishing the aesthetic rank of the work: the carefully balanced, graceful arches of melody; the ingenious climaxes, achieved by intensifying the melismata, extending the sections and enlivening the rhythm; the tonal effect of the frequent parallel motion of the outer parts in tenths; the accentuation of leaps of a third and changing notes (cambiatae) in a melodic line which they render more elegant. These details of compositional technique, which appealed to the musically informed, cultivated part of court society, reveal themselves less at first hearing than to penetrating study - the concealed diversity of connections of melodic phrases, even of whole sections, and above all the technique (again derived from Dufay) of canonic imitations and interrupted canons which not only permeate the sections for few voices but are also introduced (covertly rather than openly) in the tutti sections, often in the middle of a phrase. Just such artificial features are a constituent of Burgundian art. In its seemingly effortless fusion with the richly sonorous “foreground” of the work lies its special quality.