The supreme miniaturist of the courtly song — a former soldier turned chaplain whose tender rondeaux gave the fifteenth-century love lyric its most perfect and graceful melodies.
History of Early Music · No. 08 — The Burgundian Songsmith
Gilles de Bins, called Binchois (c. 1400–1460), was — with Guillaume Du Fay — one of the two leading composers of the Burgundian School, the brilliant musical culture of the court of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. A former soldier who later took holy orders as a chaplain, he became the age's supreme master of the secular chanson.
He is thought to have served as a soldier in his youth before turning to a life in the Church and in music.
He took holy orders and served in the ducal chapel of Burgundy, holding church benefices.
His fame rests on his exquisite chansons — above all the rondeau, the courtly love-song par excellence.
Where Du Fay was grand and cosmopolitan, Binchois was the poet of the intimate, perfectly-shaped small form.
His name comes from Binche, in modern Belgium; "Gilles de Bins dit Binchois" is how the sources record him.
The Dukes of Burgundy ruled one of the richest and most cultured courts in fifteenth-century Europe, stretching across parts of eastern France and the Low Countries. Under Philip the Good (reigned 1419–1467), the court became a magnet for painters, poets and musicians — a world of chivalry, pageantry and refined fin'amor in which Binchois's chansons were exactly at home.
The dukes maintained a lavish musical chapel; its singers and composers were prized ornaments of court life.
The same court that fostered Netherlandish painting (the world of Jan van Eyck) fostered its music.
Elegant French poetry of longing and devotion gave the chanson its texts and its tender emotional world.
The Burgundian style — sweet, graceful, treble-dominated song — set the tone for the whole mid-century.
The documentary record of Binchois's life is sparse, as it is for most musicians of his time. What survives sketches a career that moved from arms to the altar, and into the service of the Burgundian dukes.
Dates are given with "c." where the sources are uncertain; much of the biography is reconstructed from court and church records.
The Burgundian School is usually spoken of through its two great names. They were near-contemporaries and admired one another, yet their gifts pointed in different directions.
Cosmopolitan and grand: he travelled to Italy and served the papal chapel, and wrote large ceremonial motets and unified cyclic Masses as well as chansons.
The public, architectural imagination of the age.
The intimate miniaturist: his genius was for the small, perfect secular song — melodies of tenderness and grace, shaped to the courtly love lyric.
The private, lyric voice of the age.
Both were held up as models of the new "sweet" style — full of thirds and sixths — that swept mid-century Europe.
Binchois's songs set the polished French verse of courtly love — the poetry of the devoted lover, of longing, faithfulness, and gentle sorrow. The music does not shout its feeling; it distils it. A single graceful cantus line carries the whole emotional weight, and every turn of the melody answers a turn of the words.
The lover's constancy and service to the beloved — the central theme inherited from the troubadours.
Absence, distance and hope: emotions perfectly suited to a tender, arching melodic line.
Elegance and restraint prized above display — the courtly ideal of measured, graceful feeling.
The chanson was chamber music of the court: sung by a soloist, often with instruments taking the lower parts.
The polyphonic chanson of Binchois's day used the formes fixes — the "fixed forms" of French poetry, each with its own pattern of refrain and stanza. Binchois wrote in all of them, but the rondeau was his supreme vehicle.
A single stanza framed by a returning refrain, built on just two musical phrases. Binchois's speciality.
A grander, more expansive form of several stanzas, each ending with the same refrain line.
A dance-derived form with a refrain that returns between the verses, lighter in character.
The "fixed" in formes fixes means the pattern of repeats and refrain is prescribed — the composer's art lies in filling it with grace.
The rondeau is a marvel of economy: the whole poem is carried by only two musical phrases (call them A and B), arranged so that the opening refrain keeps returning. A common eight-line scheme runs A B a A a b A B — capitals mark the refrain.
A tender cantus line in gentle triple time, arching up and settling softly on the final — synthesised voice
A rondeau, and perhaps his most celebrated song: "more and more" — a lover's growing devotion, set to a melody of exquisite poise.
A farewell to the beloved — tender, restrained sorrow distilled into a single graceful vocal line.
A livelier chanson ("girls of marrying age") — showing that Binchois's art was not only melancholy but could smile.
These songs travelled far beyond Burgundy in the fifteenth-century songbooks, copied and treasured across Europe — proof of how widely his gift for melody was loved.
The typical Burgundian chanson is written in three parts, and they are not equal partners. The top voice — the cantus — carries the tune and the words; the lower two provide a supporting frame.
The highest voice: the melody, the sung poem, the line the ear follows. The heart of the song.
The structural foundation beneath the cantus; with the top voice it forms the essential two-part framework.
A third voice weaving in the same range as the tenor, filling out the harmony — often given to an instrument.
In performance the cantus was usually sung while the tenor and contratenor might be played on instruments such as vielle, lute or harp — though the manuscripts write only the notes, not who plays them.
A Binchois chanson was written in white mensural notation — the notation of the fifteenth century. Note-shapes fix duration, the circle at the start signals perfect (triple) time, and there are no bar-lines. Here is the three-voice layout, cantus on top.
A C-clef names one line; every other pitch is read from it. The staff can sit high or low to fit each voice's range.
Shape fixes duration: longa > breve > semibreve (void diamond) > minim (diamond + stem). "White" means the heads are hollow.
The circle means perfect (triple) mensuration — three beats to the unit. A half-circle would mean duple.
There are no bars and no full score: each voice was copied separately. The metre is felt, not ruled off.
What makes this music sound so sweet is how it approaches its resting points. At a cadence the top voice often makes a little dip to the sixth degree before leaping up to the octave — the graceful melodic turn known as the Landini cadence — while the tenor steps down beneath it into a pure, ringing close.
Listen for the top voice's little dip-and-leap onto the final octave, over the tenor's gentle descent — synthesised voices
This melodic figure, named for the blind Florentine Francesco Landini, pervades late-medieval song; in Binchois's hands it becomes the very signature of tenderness — the sound of a courtly phrase coming softly to rest.
The cantus and tenor form the essential two-voice frame; get their cadence right and the whole song feels finished.
Binchois is remembered above all as a songwriter, but as a chaplain he also composed a substantial body of sacred music for the liturgy — carrying the same gift for graceful, singable melody into the service of the Church.
Settings of the Virgin's canticle for Vespers — a natural home for his lyrical, tender manner.
Liturgical polyphony in the same sweet, treble-led Burgundian idiom that made his chansons famous.
His sacred works share the chanson's textures — three voices, a singing top line, the new consonant sweetness of thirds and sixths.
In 1441/2 the poet Martin le Franc praised Du Fay and Binchois for having taken up the contenance angloise — the "English manner" — associated with the English composer John Dunstaple. Its hallmark was a fuller, sweeter harmony: the pervasive use of thirds and sixths, consonances that earlier theory had treated as imperfect.
Dunstaple's full, triadic harmony gave the Continent a new, warmer sound to admire and absorb.
Du Fay and Binchois made this sweetness their own — the foundation of the whole Burgundian sound.
After centuries of open fourths and fifths, thirds and sixths sounded rich and mellow — genuinely "sweet".
Le Franc's praise is one of the most quoted passages in music history: a rare contemporary verdict on who the great composers were.
Look for ensembles that mix a solo voice with soft instruments on the lower parts — the historically likely sound of the courtly chanson.
Binchois taught the fifteenth century how to write a perfect small song. His tender, treble-led chansons set the model for the courtly love-song for a generation, and his sweetness passed into the mainstream of European music. When he died in 1460, the young Johannes Ockeghem — soon to be the master of the next age — mourned him in a famous déploration, one composer's lament for another.
He perfected the three-voice courtly song, above all the rondeau — a model imitated across Europe.
With Du Fay he carried the contenance angloise into the heart of Continental music.
Ockeghem's lament shows the reverence he commanded from the very composers who would surpass him.
"Mort, tu as navré de ton dart / Le père de joyeuseté" — Death, you have wounded with your dart the father of joyfulness.
— Johannes Ockeghem, opening of his déploration on the death of Binchoisc. 1400 – 1460 · The songsmith of the Burgundian court.