Unless policed (by churchmen, by schoolmen, by snobs, and by “theorists” of all kinds) they tend to
merge and fecundate one another.
INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC BECOMES LITERATE AT LAST
The elegantly crafted J’ay pris amours seems the perfect late fifteenth-century chanson, and so it was
evidently regarded at the time. Its popularity was something phenomenal, to judge by the usual standards
of wide dissemination and emblematic or emulatory recycling in later music—so phenomenal, in fact, that
its present-day status as an anonymous composition is something of a phenomenon in itself. Its nearest
rival for favor was De tous biens plaine (“Full of all good things”), by the Burgundian court composer
Hayne van Ghizeghem, whose surviving output consists entirely of rondeaux. Like J’ay pris amours,
Hayne’s song was appropriated as a Marian emblem for cantus-firmus Masses and motets, including a
famous motet by Compère that translated the opening words into Latin (omnium bonorum plena),
addressed them directly to the Virgin, and called down her blessings on a whole honor roll of French and
Flemish musicians.
EX. 13-14J’ay pris amours (anonymous rondeau)