FIG. 11-7 Christine de Pisane at her writing desk (London, British Library, MS Harley 4431, fol. 4).
Binchois’s Deuil angoisseux can tell us an enormous amount about the esthetics of fifteenth-century
courtly art. It is a marvelously effective, even hair-raising outpouring of emotion, and yet it scarcely
conforms to our own conventional notions of what makes music sound “sad.” Our present-day musical
“instincts” demand that laments be set to extra slow, extra low music, harmonically dark (“minor”) or
dissonant. (We also expect such music to be sung and played with covered timbre and a greater than
ordinary range of dynamic and tempo fluctuation.) Binchois’s setting flatly contradicts these assumptions
with its bright F-majorish (English) tonality, its high tessitura (especially in the tenor), and its very wide
vocal ranges. Even the tempo contradicts our normal assumptions: the time signature carries a slash
through it comparable to the slash in our familiar “cut time,” which places the tactus on the breve, not the
semibreve, causing all the note values to be shorter (hence, to go by quicker) than normal.
What is conveyed, in short, is not private anguish but a public proclamation of grief, as suggested in
the poem itself with an envoi addressed to an assembled audience of “princes.” The mood is one of
elevation (hauteur in French): elevation in tone, in diction, in delivery, all reflecting the elevated social
setting in which the performance took place. Hauteur had two specifically musical meanings as well,
which relate metaphorically to the general concept: highness of pitch and loudness of sonority, both of
which are exaggerated in Binchois’s setting of Christine’s lament. And rightly so, for fifteenth century
musicians still quoted Isidore of Seville, Pope Gregory’s contemporary, on the qualities of a good singing
voice: “high, sweet and loud.”
EX. 11-27 Gilles Binchois, Deuil angoisseux