J’ay pris amours is conceivably another song by Hayne, or one by his Burgundian colleague Busnoys,
but any of the leading French-speaking composers of their generation would be a plausible candidate.
Despite the song’s anonymous status, its quality leaves little doubt that its composer was a major figure.
The opening phrase, in a manner that became increasingly popular (possibly as a result of this very song’s
success), starts with a motto or devise, just as the text says: a five-note phrase, very strongly profiled in
rhythm and contour, that is set off from what follows by a short rest.
It is set off in another way as well, since it is held immune from the systematic “structural imitation”
that unifies the rest of the song. Starting with the second phrase, the superius and tenor move in pretty
strict imitation at the octave, with occasional freer imitation at the fifth (as in mm. 8–10—the kind of thing
one calls a “tonal answer” in a fugue), and with one ingenious spot where the tenor recalls a prior motif
from the superius (compare mm. 20–23 with mm. 3–4). Structural imitation briefly becomes pervasive in
the final “point”: the phrase initiated by the superius in m. 23 is matched not only by the tenor, as
expected, but also by the contratenor (end of m. 25).
The paramount historical significance of favorite songs like J’ay pris amours and De tous biens
plaine lay in the later work they inspired, which led to a new genre, born in the late fifteenth century
without precedent in the literate tradition, but probably reflecting the longstanding practice of virtuoso
improvisers. In his treatise called “On the invention and use of music” (De inventione et usu musicae),
Tinctoris described the work of “two blind Flemings,” obviously barred by their handicap from
involvement in literate repertories, who nevertheless put their learned colleagues to shame with their
flamboyant improvisations on standard tunes, reminiscent in Tinctoris’s description of jazz solos: “At
Bruges I heard Charles take the treble and Jean the tenor in many songs, playing the fiddle (vielle) so
expertly and with such charm that the fiddle has never pleased me so well.”^5
That would have been in the writer’s youth, before he went south to serve the king of Naples. Could
these blind brothers have been the same blind fiddlers that, according to Martin le Franc in Le champion
des dames, astonished and abashed the court musicians of Burgundy, including Binchois and Du Fay, with
their amazing virtuosity? Probably not; the one description relates to the 1430 s, the other to the 1460 s;
but that only strengthens our impression that virtuoso fiddling on the trebles and tenors of familiar
chansons had a long history before its earliest reflections in the written sources.
Three such early reflections are found in a manuscript now kept at the municipal library of Perugia in