Compared to this, fauxbourdon (to say nothing of simple faburden) might seem like child’s play. But
the point of fauxbourdon, as practiced by the continental composers, was not so much the contrapuntal
amplification of the chant as it was the transformation and elaboration of “plainsong” into “fancy song”
(or, to use contemporary terminology, cantus figuralis, “figured” or patterned song). The raw material of
plainchant was processed in this way into the highly refined style of the courtly “art song.”
DU FAY AND BINCHOIS
It seems no accident, then, that Du Fay and Binchois (Fig. 11-6), the two most prolific masters of
fauxbourdon were also the leading song composers of their generation. Nor is it a coincidence that the
liturgical genre most characteristically treated in the fauxbourdon manner was the hymn, the most songlike
of chant types.
Gilles de Bins, called Binchois (d. 1460) spent virtually his entire career as a court and chapel
musician to Philip the Good, the long-reigning Duke of Burgundy, whose court was widely acknowledged
to be the most magnificent in Western Europe at a time when art consumption was a prime measure of
courtly magnificence. His fauxbourdon setting of Veni Creator Spiritus (Ex. 11-23) was written for
Philip’s chapel. Compare it with Ex. 11-21 to see how fauxbourdon and faburden relate to one another. It
is not just that the settings are pitched differently because of the differing placement of the cantus firmus.
Binchois’s cantus part, while modest as such things go, is nevertheless an elegant paraphrase of the
transposed chant melody. The embellishments occur mainly at cadences, where they invoke the typical
formulas of the chanson style: the 7–6 suspension at the end of the first phrase (on Creator), the “Landini
sixth” at the end of the second (on spiritus), and so on.
FIG. 11-6 Guillaume Du Fay and Gilles Binchois, French followers of Dunstable and the contenance angloise, as depicted in a
manuscript of Martin le Franc’s epic Le champion des dames copied in Arras in 1451.
EX. 11-23 Gilles Binchois, Veni Creator Spiritus