Gilles Binchois
Gilles de Binchois or
Bins (c.
1400 –
September 20,
1460), was a
Franco-Flemish composer, one of the earliest members of the
Burgundian School, and one of the three most famous composers of the early
15th century. While often ranked behind his contemporaries
Guillaume Dufay and
John Dunstable, at least by contemporary scholars, his influence was arguably greater than either, since his works were cited, borrowed and used as source material more often than those by any other composer of the time.
He was probably from
Mons, the son of Jean and Johanna de Binche, who may have been from the nearby town of
Binche. His father was a councillor to Duke Guillaume IV of Hainault, and also had a position in a church in Mons. Nothing is known about Gilles until
1419, when he became organist at the church of Ste. Waudru in Mons. In
1423 went to live in
Lille. Around this time he may have been a soldier in the service of the Burgundians, or perhaps the English
Earl of Suffolk, as indicated by a line in the memorial motet written on his death by
Ockeghem.
Sometime near the end of the 1420s he joined the court chapel of Burgundy, and by the time of his motet
Nove cantum melodie (1431) he was evidently a singer there, since the text of the motet itself lists all 19 singers.
He retired to
Soignes, evidently with a substantial pension for his long years of excellent service to the Burgundian court.
Binchois is often considered to be the finest melodist of the
15th century, writing carefully shaped lines which are easy to sing, and utterly memorable; his tunes continued to appear in copies decades later, and were often used as sources for
mass composition by later composers. Most of his music, even his sacred music, is simple and clear in outline, sometimes even ascetic; a greater contrast between Binchois and the extreme complexity of the
ars subtilior of the previous century would be hard to imagine. Most of his secular songs are
rondeaux, which had become the commonest song form of the century; but Binchois rarely writes simple
strophic form, instead shaping his melody almost independent of the rhyme scheme of the verse.
Binchois wrote music for the court, secular songs of love and
chivalry, music that was expected by the Dukes of
Burgundy and that was evidently loved by them.
* David Fallows, "Gilles Binchois,"
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1561591742
*
Gustave Reese,
Music in the Renaissance. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0393095304
* "Binchois Studies", Edited by Andrew Kirkman and Dennis Slavin. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 1995.
