Binchois and Sacred Music at the Burgundian Court

Abstract

Abstract Burgundian court statutes and book lists give ample evidence that the itinerant court chapel followed the ‘usage of Paris’ in its daily sacred ritual, which included the singing of discant as well as of chant. How the use of Paris was realized at the court and how composers followed its prescriptions have never been thoroughly investigated, however. Victor Leroquais does address the historical importance of the use of Paris to the Burgundian dukes in the lengthy introduction to his edition of the mid-fifteenth-century breviary of Philip the Good (Brussels, BR 95n and 9026), and Mary Jennifer Bloxam reveals Parisian variants in the cantus firmi of three polyphonic hymns by Binchois and a polyphonic alleluia by Busnoys. Yet music lies outside Leroquais’s plan and Bloxam analyses only selected works, leaving aside, for example, the individual mass movements and Magnificats by Burgundian composers.