carried the original chant (transposed up an octave), as if reverting to the vox principalis/vos organalis
texture of old. But that resemblance is fortuitous. By the fifteenth century, nobody remembered the Musica
enchiriadis or any other treatise of its ilk. Their rediscovery had to await the zealous antiquarians of the
modern age. Rather, the chant-bearing cantus was adapted by embellishment and rhythmic adjustment to
the conventions of the contemporary “top-down” genre, the cantilena or chanson. The chant, in short, was
disguised (or “paraphrased,” as we now usually say) as a contemporary secular song.
Du Fay’s ersatz-English Communion setting carries a label as well as a rubric. The setting is
designated fauxbourdon, and the term became a standard one, sufficient in itself to take the place of the
rubric. Singers seeing the word would know that the cantus part of the piece so labeled had to be doubled
at the lower fourth, and that the tenor was so fashioned that a voluptuous array of parallel imperfect
consonances à l’anglaise would emerge against the doubled line. The technique became understandably
popular—faddish, in fact.
Just what the word fauxbourdon meant etymologically, or why it was coined (whether by Du Fay or
some other French-speaking musician) to designate this particular manner of composing or arranging,
remain enigmas. With only a handful of exceptions, the 171 surviving pieces so labeled are all based on
chants that have been transposed and embellished like the one in Du Fay’s Communion. If fauxbourdon
literally meant faux bourdon (“false bass,” from the French bourdonner, to drone or sing in an
undertone), then it might have referred to this transposition, leaving in the bottom voice what was usually
found above (that is, a discant to a cantus firmus). If that seems a farfetched etymology, so are all the
others that have been proposed from time to time. One explanation associates the bourdon in
fauxbourdon, which can mean a pilgrim’s staff, with St. James, who carried one, and who is depicted,
staff in hand, in a miniature at the head of Du Fay’s Missa Sancti Jacobi (Fig. 11-5).
FIG. 11-5 Saint James with his pilgrim’s staff, depicted in an illumination from the single extant complete source of Du Fay’s
Missa Sancti Jacobi, in which is the earliest fauxbourdon setting (Bologna, Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale, MS Q 15, fol.
121, copied in Padua in the 1420 s).
The enigma is compounded by the existence of a near-cognate English term, faburden, which denotes
something comparable to fauxbourdon but not identical with it. How (or indeed whether) the two terms
and practices are related has been a matter of considerable speculation and debate.
To begin with, the term faburden is not associated with individual written compositions but with an
English technique of harmonizing chants at sight (super librum, roughly “off the book,” or “off the page”
in contemporary parlance). According to a treatise called The Sight of Faburdon, copied around 1450
and the sole surviving theoretical description of the method, two singers would accompany the singer of
the chant with unwritten counterpoints, one (called the “deschaunte”) above the written part and the other
(called the “counter note”) below. The “counterer” would sing thirds and fifths below the plainchant and