Antoine BUSNOIS. Missa O Crux lignum
Motets · Chansons
Orlando Consort

orlandoconsort.com
medieval.org
muziekweb.nl

2005
Harmonia Mundi USA HMU 907333

november, 1993
St. Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington

1 – Motet Gaude caelestis Domina (ТUTTІ)   [6:16]
2 – Chanson A une damme j'ay fait veu (RH-J, MD, DG)   [3:26]
3 – Chanson Amours nous traitte honnestement / Je m'en voy (TUTTI)   [1:32]
4 – Chanson-Motet Resjois-toy, terre de France / Rex pacificus (ТUTTІ)   [2:06]
5 – Hymn Conditor alme siderum (ТUTTІ)     [3:03]


Мissa O Crux lignum
(TUTTI)
6 – Kyrie   [2:47]
7 – Gloria   [6:13]
8 – Credo   [7:04]
9 – Sanctus   [4:41]
10 – Benedictus   [2:38]
11 - Agnus Dei   [5:30]


12 - Chanson Ja que li ne s'i attende (RH-J, MD, DG)   [3:30]
13 - Chanson Vostre beauté / Vous marchez du bout du pié (ТUTTI)   [1:09]
14 - Chanson Est-il merchy de quoy on pueut finer ? (RH-J, AS, DG)   [4:09]
15 - Motet Incomprehensibilia / Praeter rerum ordinem (TUTTI)   [8:35]






Orlando Consort

Robert Harre-Jones • countertenor
Mark Dobell • tenor
Angus Smith • tenor
Donald Greig • baritone









Antoine Busnois

FEW late medieval composers have generated an intensity of scholarly and musicalinterest comparable to that surrounding Antoine Busnois (c. 1430-1492) in the past fifteen years. The Orlando Consort, which made its American debut in 1992 at an international conference devoted to Busnois, has been at the forefront of this recent development and has programmed his music in numerous performance venues throughout the world. The pieces offered on this recording represent an excellent sampling of Busnois's securely attributed pieces in virtually all the musical genres in which he composed - Mass (Missa O Crux lignum, one of his two cantus firmus Masses); Latin-texted motet (the hymn Conditor alme siderum); French chanson in the fixed forms of late medieval courtly poetry - rondeau (Est-il merchy), ballade (Amours nous traitte /Je m'en voy), and virelai (A une damme, Ja que li ne s’i attende); and double-texted combinative song based on popular tunes (Vostre beauté / Vous marchez). Also included are three anonymous works that scholars have conjecturally attributed to Busnois on the basis of their striking stylistic resemblances to other of his securely attributed works: the two Latin motets Gaude caelestis Domina (identified by Rob Wegman after a citation in theorist Johannes Tinctoris's Proportionate musices) and Incomprehensibilia firme / Praeter rerum ordinem, both employing mensural procedures remarkably similar to those in the Missa O Crux lignum; and the song-motet, Resjois-toy, terre de France / Rex pacificus magnificatus est, with a French text pitted against a Latin-texted contratenor altus.

Antoine de Busnes dit Busnoys (the spellings Busnois' and Busnoys' are found interchangeably in fifteenth-century sources) presumably hailed from the tiny hamlet of Busnes, in northern France. The earliest known biographical record, dating from 1461, identifies him as a chaplain in the cathedral of St-Gatien in the Loire Valley city of Tours, and, more sensationally, as the ringleader of a gang that beat a certain priest on five separate occasions "to the point of bloodshed", actions for which he was excommunicated. Subsequently pardoned by Pope Pius II, Busnois was by 1465 affiliated with the collegiate church of St-Martin of Tours, whose titular abbot was the King of France. By September of that year, Busnois had moved 6o miles south to the church of St-Hilaire-le-Grand in Poitiers, which had ancient ecclesiastical and political ties to St-Martin of Tours. A remarkable document recounts the deliberations of the search committee which hired Busnois as master of the choirboys, wherein he is described as "exceptionally expert in music and poetry," and as a "very serious and famous man." Over the objection of nearly half the canons, who preferred to retain the lackluster and barely competent incumbent, Busnois was hired as master and served the church until July 1466, after which time his name disappears from the records.

Busnois next turns up in March 1467 listed as a singer' in the service of Charles, Count of Charolais, who was to become Duke of Burgundy three months later upon the death of his father, Philip the Good. During the period 1467 to 1470, his name appears sporadically in court records and by 1471, he had joined the ranks of the Burgundian court chapel. As chaplain and singer to Charles the Bold, Busnois was present at all the major battles of the Duke's career: Liège and Péronne in 1467-68; Péronne, Beauvais, and the conquest of the Somme towns in 1472-73; and the famous Siege of Neuss, which lasted nearly a year during 1474-75. Upon the Duke's untimely death in 1477, Busnois remained at the court in the service of Charles's daughter Mary, and then entered the service of her consort Maximilian I of Austria from 1478 until mid-1483, when his name disappears definitively from the court records. He ended his days in Bruges, where a now-lost register from the church of St-Sauveur lists him in November 1492 as the recently deceased director of the cantoria at St-Sauveur.

Busnois's musical legacy of some seventy-five secular chansons, some dozen Latin sacred motets, a Magnificat, at least two settings of the polyphonic Mass ordinary (eight other anonymous masses have been conjecturally attributed to him) and a Mass movement survives in more than fifty manuscripts and prints of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries whose provenances extend from England to Hungary. More than half of his secular songs are found only in sources originating in Italy, further attesting to the international scope of his reputation and specifically to his popularity within the musical circles of the Este family in Ferrara, the Medici in Florence, and the Aragonese court of Naples. In a rare description of a performance of a now-lost Busnois motet in Venice in 1494, an Italian musician reported to duke Francesco Gonzaga in Mantua that, "in truth, all of Venice wishes to hear no other."

The testimony of contemporaneous music theorists further corroborates the chronological and geographical scope of Busnois's reputation. Flemish theorist Johannes Tinctoris (c. 1430-1511) dedicated his treatise Liber de natura et proprietate tonorum (Book on the nature and propriety of the modes) to Busnois and Ockeghem as "the most outstanding and most famous professors of the art of music" and elsewhere referred to them as "pre-eminent in Latinity", and among "the most excellent of all the composers I have ever heard." The German theorist Adam of Fulda's chronological list of the most important musical figures of all time singled out only two composers of the fifteenth century: "the most learned (doctissimi) Guillaume Dufay and Antoine Busnoys." The Spaniard Bartolomeo Ramos de Pareia cited several examples from Busnois's works as paradigms of the use of cryptic canons or esoteric inscriptions to conceal the resolutions of their contrapuntal manipulations of a cantus firmus. Twentieth-century perceptions of his work have been no less enthusiastic to judge from the comments of composer George Perle who called "the wonderful subtlety and ingenuity of [Busnois's] rhythmic ideas ... probably unsurpassed in the entire history of music."

If music can be said to leave the imprint of its composer's personality, Busnois's gives the impression of an excessive, flamboyant, brilliant character, exploding with energy, disrupting convention, thwarting expectation, and determined to experiment with his own way of doing things. His works are rife with harmonic surprise, abrupt changes of tempo and texture, musical canons, extensive imitation, melodic sequences, and large-scale repetitions of motivic ideas and even of whole passages. He exceeded conventionally accepted limits in cultivating wide-spanned melodic lines that prefigure those of Josquin and Obrecht. And in extending the outer ranges of the upper and lower voices and enabling individual musical lines to operate unobstructed by interference with crossing parts, Busnois essentially reconfigured the existing boundaries of tonal space. Standing at the crossroads of an era that witnessed the ideological transformation of the composer from an able craftsman to an innately endowed creator, Busnois emerges as a pivotal figure in a critical period of changing styles and one of the most original and powerful musical minds of the fifteenth century.

Paula Higgins

Master of Moulins: Nativity, c. 1480
Musée Rolin Autun France