the “discanter” would double it at the upper fourth. A didactic example of faburden that happened to be
written in a Scottish treatise of the mid-sixteenth century shows the result (Ex. 11-21). It is based on
Salvator mundi Domine (“O Lord, Savior of the World”), a frequent English contrafact of the Pentecost
hymn Veni creator spiritus (already encountered as Ex. 2-7c). The original chant is carried by the middle
voice—the one voice, ironically enough, that was not notated at all in fauxbourdon settings.
The result, so far as the listener is concerned, differs from the fauxbourdon settings of Du Fay and his
continental contemporaries only in pitch range, if it differs at all. In the case of faburden the chant is
thought of as the “meane” or middle voice and the doubling part as the “tryble” above it. In the case of
fauxbourdon the chant is thought of as the “cantus” and the doubling part as the contratenor below it. But
it is a distinction that makes no audible difference, just as it makes no difference whether the lowest voice
is thought of as making fifths and thirds against the middle or octaves and sixths against the top.
The reasonable and simple assumption would be that fauxbourdon was just the continental written-
down imitation of the English oral practice. But the actual evidence does not fit that easy explanation. For
one thing, The Sight of Faburdon (or at least its extant source) is a good deal later than the probable date
of Du Fay’s Missa Sancti Jacobi, in which the first use of the term fauxbourdon occurs. And for another,
the word faburden is much more easily construed as a corruption of fauxbourdon than the other way
around. (We can easily imagine etymologies for fauxbourdon, however flimsy; explaining faburden as
“the bass that sings fa” (because it uses a lot of B-flats) is a rather desperate contrivance.) So what
happened? Did the English borrow back a continental cookbook recipe for imitating the English? To
believe that is neither simple nor particularly reasonable. What is likelier is that the term faburden,
adapted from fauxbourdon, was applied retroactively by some English writers to one of many varieties of
“sighting,” or ad hoc chant harmonization, which had been practiced by the English all through the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This particular one happened to resemble, in a relatively crude and
unembellished way, the very elegant written compositions from abroad that began to travel back to
England, with their deft and graceful chant-paraphrases in the manner of the courtly chanson.
But faburden was and remained a “sight,” an older English practice and an oral one. It can be
documented in principle as far back as Anonymus IV, the first treatise that mentions sights. Thus it differed
in kind, despite its belated similarity in nomenclature, from fauxbourdon, a later continental practice and
an elegantly embellished, written one. Later, the technique became the property of organists, who used
faburden “counters” or bass lines (like the bottom voice in Ex. 11-21) as grounds for improvisation, and,
beginning in the early sixteenth century, kept little books of them handy. You can almost always tell a
“faburden,” as organists informally called the bottom line of a chant harmonization, by its initial rising
fourth, the inevitable product of the “sight” technique. Since the “counter” had to begin at the fifth below
the chant and proceed to the third below the chant, and since perhaps nine chants out of ten begin with a
rising step progression, nine “faburdens” out of ten will begin with the rising fourth.
Lots of questions regarding the reciprocal early histories of fauxbourdon and faburden remain
unanswered. For instance, did the inventors of fauxbourdon actually hear English choirs (at Constance,
say, or in Paris) singing super librum—i.e., singing what eventually became known as faburden? Or did
they hear something much more impressive, found a simple way of counterfeiting it, and gave the author of
The Sight of Faburdon an idea for simplifying the technique of “sighting”? This last possibility, with its
intriguing suggestion of a true cross-fertilization of cultures, is supported by a sentence in The Sight of
Faburdon that calls the practice so designated only the lowliest and most commonplace of sight
techniques.
EX. 11-21 Salvator mundi Domine in faburden