Introduction

Abstract Though most of it had long been available in various old editions, the bringing together of Binchois’s complete sacred music was the source of many surprises. First among these was the sheer bulk of the composer’s sacred oeuvre, which, as now became obvious, considerably outweighed that of his surviving secular output. The emphasis hitherto accorded to Binchois the composer of songs suddenly seemed disproportionate. But the surprises only multiplied through awareness of the wide diversity of styles and idioms encompassed by the various genres, sacred and secular, in which he worked. On its own, Binchois’s oeuvre presents an image which to modern perceptions—particularly when compared with the surviving output of his most celebrated contemporary, Dufay—appears paradoxical. If Binchois had a musical ‘personality’, that personality was split, it would appear, in different and unrelated directions. The familiar modern process whereby an image of the ‘author’ is constructed as it were in retrospect from a notional consistency in his or her surviving products seems in his case closed for us.