Antoine Busnoys: Method, Meaning, and Context in Late Medieval Music (review)

Antoine Busnoys: Method, Meaning, and Context in Late Medieval Music. Edited by Paula Higgins. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. [xxii, 599 p. ISBN 0-19-816406-8. $130.]

In 1992, a group of distinguished musicologists met at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, to commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of the death of the fifteenth-century composer Antoine Busnoys (Busnois) with lectures, presentations, and performances of his compositions, some of the music heard for the first time in half a millennium. The conference, supported in part by the music department at Notre Dame with funding from a variety of venerable institutions, including the Alice Tully Endowment for Fine Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, was organized by Paula Higgins. In addition to the presentation of scholarly papers, the hundred or so scholars from several countries were treated during the three days of the conference to live performances by two world-class early-music ensembles, the Orlando Consort and Pomerium.

A primary rationale for the gathering, according to Higgins, the editor of the resulting volume of nineteen essays, was to discuss and reevaluate the music and legacy of Busnoys. In her introduction to the volume, she describes Busnoys as a composer whose reputation has been somewhat overshadowed by his more valorized contemporaries Johannes Ockeghem, Jacob Obrecht, Josquin Desprez, and Heinrich Isaac. In all, this is a fine collection of essays that does just what it sets out to do. Its greatest strength is that it aggregates current thinking on Busnoys in one well-edited source. With essays by Allan Atlas, Alexander Blachly, M. Jennifer Bloxam, the late Howard Mayer Brown, David Fallows, Barbara H. Haggh, Higgins, Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl, Michael Long, Honey Meconi, Mary Natvig, Leeman Perkins, Martin Picker, Joshua Rifkin, Peter Urquhart, Jaap van Benthem, Flynn Warmington, Rob C. Wegman, and Richard Wexler --all but one participants in the conference--this volume could be considered, despite the absence of a couple of noted scholars, a veritable who's who of experts on music of the fifteenth century. The convenience of having, in one volume, the most recent scholarship on Busnoys and related issues, such as his influence on later composers, the L'homme armé tradition, and the various settings of Fortuna desperata, will make it very attractive to scholars, graduate students, and librarians, despite its rather steep price.

The book is divided into five thematic parts, each of which contains three or four essays. These are preceded by Higgins's introduction and an essay by David Fallows, based on his conference plenary address, that outlines past research and defines the pathway for future studies of Busnoys biography and the chronology of some of his eighty-odd compositions. Other essays explore liturgical music at the court of Charles the Bold (some of it composed by Busnoys), the ceremony of the armed man and its relation to the popular L'homme armé Mass tradition, and the historical, theological, and cultural environments that influenced and informed the musical and poetic structures employed by Busnoys and his contemporaries. Higgins cites the "breathtaking interdisciplinary virtuosity" of Long's essay, which "weaves together disparate threads of mathematical, cosmological, literary, liturgical, mythological, and theological evidence" (p. 12) to connect the L'homme armé Masses with a new series of crusades against the Turks in the years following the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Long also presents new information on the Feast of the Pheasant, the Order of the Golden Fleece, and the links between the L'homme armé tradition and Italian laments. His article is followed by Higgins's own fine study, "Musical Politics in Late Medieval Poitiers: A Tale of Two Choirmasters," which focuses on Busnoys's position at Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand as master of the choirboys. In this same section (part 2, "Intertextual, Contextual, and Hermeneutic Approaches to Late Medieval Musical Culture"), two other complementary essays, one by Wegman and the other by...