BINCHOIS STUDIES edited by Andrew Kirkman & Dennis Slavin Oxford University Press, December 2000 ISBN: 0-19-816668-0 £70

Four portraits of Binchois may survive, but only that in Martin le Franc's Le champion des dames, where he stands beneath his name and alongside a small harp, is incontestably the fifteenth-century composer. A colour reproduction graces the cover of this book, but it is, quite literally, only half the picture. On his right stands his great and now more familiar contemporary, Guillaume Du Fay, accompanied by a little organ. Traditionally, much, too much, has been read into the symbolic association of these instruments with these men. The more widely-travelled Du Fay has been regarded as especially significant on the strength of his church music; Binchois, working largely within the more limited environs of the Burgundian court, has been admired almost entirely for his exquisite secular songs. As an attempt both to redress the imbalance in our perspective and to reassert the importance of Binchois more widely, this new and handsomely produced book represents a third important chapter in recent developments. Chapter One opened in 1992 with the appearance of the composer's complete sacred music for the first time between two covers, edited by Philip Kaye for OUP. This brought into focus a considerable and varied corpus, in quantity some five or six times the amount of music in the songs, the latter long available (since 1957) in an edition by Wolfgang Rehm. Kaye's edition prompted one reviewer to write: "The music is ready to be performed; and perhaps there is a chance that we shall soon be able to hear some of the reasons why Binchois should not be relegated to the sidelines". Nearly ten years on, one has to say that sadly this did not happen. What it did encourage was Chapter Two, the organisation of a Binchois conference held in New York in 1995. Chapter Three, the book under review here, is largely an outgrowth of that event, although the material has been expanded with more recently written papers.

Binchois Studies is organised under four main headings, firstly the composer's context, secondly his sacred music, thirdly the songs, and finally more specific aspects such as problems encountered in preparing editions of the repertoire. But before all this there is a brief seven-page introduction by the joint editors. At the 1995 conference, the keynote speech was by David Fallows. Ostensibly, his main contribution to these Studies appears in Part III, investigating some of the poets set by Binchois in his chansons. But reading the book one senses the presence of Fallows much more ubiquitously: there are countless footnote references to him, and it is he who probably created the liveliest discussion at the conference by instigating the Binchois Game. This involved the distribution of songs by the composer shorn of their endings, for which the audience was challenged to predict the pitch of the final cadence (that this is more difficult for Binchois than his contemporaries raises important implications, subsequently pursued by Dennis Slavin in Chapter 7 in the new book). Burying the content of Fallows' initial address in Chapter 9 strikes me as one of the few miscalculations of the book; its twenty pages reveal a caesura around page 204, almost like a medial cadence in a Binchois rondeau itself. The B section, modifying the 'distressingly neat picture' of one song by each of the three major then-active poets, Christine de Pizan, Charles d'Orléans and Alain Chartier, is fine where it stands. The A section is of more general relevance, and might have been better elsewhere.

Inevitably, with such a diversity of contributors (over a dozen) and topics, some chapters make more of an immediate impression than others. Part I presents two which fly in the face of obvious chronological logic. Chapter 3 by Philip Weller steers towards a detailed description of a sadly incomplete motet of 1431 (Nove cantum melodie), having established a meaningful context for the piece in its earlier paragraphs. Chapter 2 by Sean Gallagher, entitled 'After Burgundy: Rethinking Binchois' Years in Soignies', deals with the composer's 'retirement' years from 1453, proposing some fascinating influences on a younger generation including Pullois, Ockeghem and Regis. If some are conjectural, others can be more definitively posited (one remembers that the most illustrious of this trio, Ockeghem, was inspired by Binchois in at least two different directions, in the use of the older man's De plus en plus as the starting point for one of his own Masses, and by penning Mort tu as navré, his déploration or lament on the death of Binchois in 1460).

Part II on the sacred music contains three chapters. Least arresting is Marco Gozzi's 'Wiser's Codices and the absconditus Binchois'; although it encapsulates a wealth of useful data it does so largely in tabulated form at the expense of readable prose. While concentrating on a four-voice anonymous Sanctus which may form a pair with an Agnus Dei setting by Binchois, it more widely argues that the later Trent Codices, in which ascriptions, are rare may indeed transmit rather more works by our composer. Chapter 4 revisits a topic much discussed in earlier literature, the possible links between Binchois and England; Peter Wright sheds new light on the two-way processes of exchange between the cultures, with some fascinating examples en route. But best in this section is Chapter 5, 'Binchois the Borrower' by Andrew Kirkman. This offers a model of writing, a beautifully-structured and -proportioned chapter whose stylish outer sections flank central analytical material where the links are sufficiently persuasive to repay the closest attention.

The chansons at the heart of Part III yield a rather more mixed crop. As implied above, Slavin's chapter is a fruitful outcome of the Binchois Game, for which Fallows was prime catalyst, and which one now looks forward to inflicting on any student of the fifteenth century! The next chapter (8) directly impinges on the manner of performing Binchois' rondeaux, specifically addressing the formal shortcuts or elisions between sections that may be implicit or desirable. The important concept of circularity in the poetic form is fascinating, and we are referred in a footnote to Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France (OUP 1997) by Christopher Page who, with his Gothic Voices, has performed more music by Binchois than most. If chapter 10 is less satisfactory, it may be because its agenda is altogether tougher, more elusive. Here, Robert Nosow pursues the complex relationships between three Binchois songs in the Feo Belcari Manuscript, Florence, and the generally unwritten traditions widespread in fifteenth-century Italy.

Issues of performance practice surfacing intermittently hitherto might be expected to predominate in Part IV: 'From Manuscript to Edition: Issues of Theory and Editing'. They do, but chapters on accidentals in the songs and the use of cut signatures in the sacred music require dedicated staying power to do them justice. In the case of the latter, a detailed study of tempo relationships and proportions, Margaret Bent's conclusions offer gratifyingly honest words but perhaps not the ones we would wish to hear, effectively that Binchois' use of the relevant notational details covered a wide spectrum of possibilities which fail to clarify performance decisions. More rewarding is the final chapter, 'Towards a Theory of Text-Music Relations in the Music of the Renaissance' by Leeman Perkins. Its inclusion might however raise a few eyebrows. Embracing the fifteenth century generally, it draws on Binchois only for selected examples, and the parameters involved (declamation, form, syntax, rhetoric, mimetic gestures, and affective consequences) are commonly supposed to obtain only later in the Renaissance. In the case of the last, the 'problematic' level of text to music relations, the affective or emotional, this would seem to be true: Perkins offers no references prior to Vicentino in the mid-sixteenth century. But it is an interesting and clearly-organised chapter, offering much food for thought.

If Kaye's 1992 edition of the sacred music failed to broaden the profile of the composer in a manner worthy of him, it is to be hoped that Binchois Studies might effect a timely rehabilitation. But one should be realistic. Plentiful though his church music is, Binchois had little occasion to write complete Mass Ordinaries or vast architecturally-conceived isorhythmic motets such as we have from Du Fay. And while the subject matter of Du Fay's songs may welcome the New Year, the return of May, the joys of wine (or the sorrows of quitting it), those of Binchois, exquisitely crafted though they unquestionably are, appear relatively monothematic, their recurring mood of nostalgia and bitter-sweet regret the perfect mirror of Burgundian court life. It is essentially their differing geographical contexts which resulted in different emphases in their music. There is interesting evidence to suggest that in the 1420s and 1430s Binchois was more highly regarded than Du Fay. While the reverse is likely to remain true for the foreseeable future, this book is to be warmly welcomed for the opportunity it offers to reappraise the situation and to reassess a major if enigmatic figure of the earlier Renaissance.

Peter Syrus