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  • Works with Texts in the Vernacularby Antoine Busnoys
  • Peter Woetmann Christoffersen
Antoine Busnoys. Works with Texts in the Vernacular. Edited by Leeman L. Perkins. (Antoine Busnoys, Collected Works, volume 1.) (Masters and Monuments of the Renaissance, volume 5.) New York: The Broude Trust, 2018. [Part 1A, Music: contents, p. vii-xi; publisher's preface, p. xv; acknowledgments, p. xvii-xviii; editorial principles, p. xxi-xxiii; sigla, p. xxv-xxviii; score, p. 1-251; poems with attributions, p. 253-57. Part 1B, Commentary: contents, p. x-xiii; historical introduction, p. 1-10; sources and sigla, p. 13-79; commentary, p. 81-417; appendices, p. 421-29; bibliog., p. 433-53. ISBN 0-8540-7307-9. $150 (inclusive of both parts).]

Antoine Busnois (ca. 1435-1492, "Busnoys" in this edition) was one of the most influential composers of French chansons among the musicians whose fame began to flourish around 1460. As far as we know, his career was based in central France and Burgundy where he worked in Tours and Poitiers as a singer and master of the choirboys until he entered the chapel of the future Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, in 1467. After the duke's death in 1477 he stayed on in the chapel of Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian of Austria. His last post seems to have been that of cantor at St. Saveur in Bruges. Perhaps he did not have the same knack for catchy tunes as his contemporaries at the Burgundian court, Hayne van Ghizeghem and Robert Morton, but his strong musical personality, his originality, and his will to seek new ways made him a dominating figure in the last third of the century.

Busnois is the composer best represented beside the chapel master of the French kings, Johannes Ockeghem, in the so-called Loire valley chansonniers, all of which were created during the 1470s. They are a group of six small-format song collections that have been named after a mixture of former owners and their present locations: the Nivelle, Dijon, Laborde, Wolfenbüttel, Copenhagen, and Leuven chansonniers. Their sizes vary. We find big collections of songs that were expanded several times (Dijon and Laborde), and smaller books with more concentrated repertories. It was not customary to include names of composers or poets with the songs. In three of the smaller collections (Copenhagen, Wolfen-büttel, and Leuven) such ascriptions are missing entirely, and in the others, the names of composers appear only sporadically. Therefore, a great many of the songs remain anonymous, and we can connect some of them with individual composers only because they appear in later sources with ascriptions. A few of these sources of the following decades originated in France, but the majority were copied in far-away Italy, mostly after Busnois's main period of creativity, and some of them contain [End Page 694]many songs bearing his name, thereby testifying to his renown as a composer. The sources do not always agree on the names that are placed above the songs, and the conflicting attributions make the job of the modern editor only more difficult. Everyone who has researched this repertory will maintain a personal list of anonymous songs that might have been composed by Busnois, songs of striking originality and beauty, which in later sources, however, have not been furnished with ascriptions. No one will probably ever agree on which ones ought to be included in a Busnois canon, so they must of course be excluded from the present edition of his secular music.

Leeman L. Perkins's edition of Busnois's secular works supplements the volumes of his Latin-texted works, mostly sacred, which were edited by Richard Taruskin in 1990 as Masters and Monuments of the Renaissance, vols. 5 part 2 (music) and 5 part 3 (commentary). Perkins's volumes encompass seventy-eight numbers, which include three poems without music (nos. 76–78), two songs of uncertain attribution (nos. 74–75), and seventy-three songs attributed to Busnois in at least one source; some numbers appear with variant versions, contrafacta, or an intabulation appended. Perkins has simply chosen to publish every single piece of secular music that has been preserved with an...

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