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

Edited by Paula Higgins. Oxford: Glarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. [xxii, 599 p. ISBN 0-19-316406-8. $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, anti 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, anti 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 arme tradition, and the various settings of Fortuna desperata, will make it very attractive to scholars, graduate students, anti 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 arme Mass tradition, anti the historical, theological, and cultural environments that influenced anti 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 arme Masses with a new series of crusades against the Tur ks 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 arme 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 van Benthem, explore mensural intertextuality, the complexity of Busnoys's contrapuntal writing, and his relationship to Ockeghem. In part 5, "Busnoys' Legacy," various authors examine the relationship between Busnoys and the next generation. Atlas suggests that the less well known composer Jean Japart may have studied composition with Busnoys. Picker contributes to an understanding of the po pular Renaissance compositional technique of borrowing or imitatio, examining both Busnoys and Isaac through a study of one of the most frequently copied and widely disseminated works of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Italian song Fortuna desperata; attributed to Busnoys in the earliest of its eighteen surviving sources, this song spawned one of the largest genealogies of any composition written during the Renaissance. Meconi examines the text of the poem for evidence linking it to Busnoys, and Rifkin seizes the opportunity to honor Fallows on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday by using some clues supplied by the honoree to establish a case for Busnoys's presence in Italy.

How do these essays, individually and as a group, change the face of what we know about Busnoys? Here is a musician who was praised by the ...