Binchois and beyond

Musical Times, Autumn 2001 by Atlas, Allan W

Review-article

ALLAN W. ATLAS is stimulated and provoked by studies of the fifteenth-century Burgundian master

Binchois studies Edited by Andrew Kirkman & Dennis Slavin Oxford UP (Oxford, 2000); xviii, 353pp; L70. ISBN 0 19 816668 0.

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 semibreveminim 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): Iew of the ascribed pieces [...] can have been composed after 1440'. (Perhaps, then, we have another instance of Busnoysand 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.)