Antoine Busnoys

Abstract

Abstract This volume brings together twenty original essays by distinguished scholars of late medieval music on the life, works, and cultural context of the composer Antoine Busnoys (c.1430-1492), musician to Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and one of the most celebrated composers of the fifteenth century. The essays present the results of much new research on music, ceremony, and ritual in the late Middle Ages; intertextual, contextual, and hermeneutic approaches to the music of Busnoys and his contemporaries; methods for assessing issues of authorship and anonymity; readings of theorists on compositional procedures and the performance of fifteenth-century music; and assessments of Busnoys’s legacy to the musical culture of the late Middle Ages. Particularly noteworthy are the studies providing new light on the origins of L’homme armé mass tradition; unpublished documents on Busnoys’s activity in churches in Poitiers and Brussels; previously unidentified liturgical sources for his plainchant cantus firmi; and studies and complete editions of several anonymous works newly attributed to Busnoys. These widely ranging essays offer a wealth of novel approaches to the study of musical culture in the late Middle Ages that is of interest not only to medievalists, but to students of all fields of music historical inquiry.