Works and Style
The contemporary reputation of Busnois was immense; he was probably the best-known musician in Europe between the time of Guillaume Dufay and Johannes Ockeghem.
Busnois wrote sacred and secular music. Of his sacred music, two cantus firmus masses and eight motets survive (most likely many others are lost). He wrote several settings of the Marian antiphon Regina coeli. Stylistically, his music can be heard as a midpoint between the simplicity and homophonic textures of Dufay and Binchois, and the pervading imitation of Josquin and Gombert. He uses imitation skillfully but occasionally, writes smooth and singable melodic lines, and has a strong feeling for triadic sonorities, anticipating 16th-century practice.
According to Pietro Aron, Busnois may have been the composer of the famous tune L'homme armé, one of the most widely distributed melodies of the Renaissance, and the one more often used than any other as a cantus firmus for mass composition. Whether or not he wrote the first mass based on L'homme armé, his was by far the most influential; Obrecht's mass, for example, closely parallels the setting by Busnois and even the mass by Dufay quotes from it directly. Busnois may even be the composer of a cycle of six masses all based on the same tune, found in Naples, based on stylistic comparison.
Busnois also wrote chansons, French secular songs, and these are the work on which his reputation mainly rests. Most are rondeaux, but they include some bergerettes as well; many of these compositions became popular songs, and some were perhaps based on popular songs, now lost. He probably wrote his own texts for almost every one. Some of his tunes were used as source material for cantus firmus mass composition more than a generation after he died, for instance Fortuna desperata (which was used both by Obrecht and Josquin). An unusual chanson is Terrible dame, which not only is an antiphonal dialogue, unique in the chanson literature, but has an Old French title which requires no specialized skill to translate.
While most of Busnois's secular songs are based on French texts, there are also at least two on Italian texts and one on a Flemish text. Most are for three voices, although there are a few for four.
Read more about this topic: Antoine Busnois
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