 Most melodies of a binchois chanson start syllabically, and end with a melisma near the

end of the phrase of text.

 Doesn’t really offer a solution on attaching words to the notes.
 His early chansons have a superius moving in eighth notes, which doesn’t conflict with
the 6/8 time signature. The tenor is the lowest, and combined with the contratenor, do
little to add any melodic interest. They just support the top voice.
 Many chansons that begin with defined tonal language usually have unpredictable
cadences (on different notes) and finals. Didn’t have to be “tonal” all the way through.
 Most chansons written for three voices.
 Vast majority of his chansons are in rondeaux form.
 He wrote three chansons, including, Mon cuer chante, on texts of the three great poets of
his day, which suggests his highly developed literary taste, more developed than his
fellow musicians.

Prizer-
 Bianca performing organ for the Pope and his entourage in Florence.
 Shows the elite class was very musically trained.
 Women performed as spectacles.
 Women performed the songs that were available to the amateur at the time, courtly songs
of France and Italy. Binchois was big.
 They also performed devotional pieces and popular settings.

Bryce-

 Women, like a city's monuments and other resources, are fundamental components of its honor or prestige,
and, like them, can be pressed into the service of the state and the promotion and enhancement ofcivic
identity as, for example, does Gregorio Dati: "Florence has girls and women ofsuch refinement and
manners, so respectable, virtuous, and marvelously beautiful as to appear angels descended from heaven" p
11-12
 Furthermore, as well as constituting objects of real exchange between men in the Florentine marriage
market, women function as capital for symbolic exchange in the wider context of the perennial Florentine
anxiety about the negotiation of relationships with non-Florentine social superiors.
 The dance symbolizes the Republic's temporary gift of its women to high-ranking visitors, not only for
visual consumption (the female body is more visually available in dance than in other forms of activity),
but also to touch, something which is licit only through the conventions of dance (arousal but not
satisfaction of desire), or through the forms of salutation
 The fact that the area around the Mercato Vecchio, a few minutes' walk away. was associated with truly
public women (donne pubbliche) displaying their bodies for sale reminds us of another use of the female
body in the patriarchal economy of exchange. and also that prostitution was a business run by some of the
city's major families,~ 15
 As has already been suggested in relation to the fauda repertoire, much solo vocal music performed by
both sexes would have depended on oral transmission rather than on a more sophisticated musical literacy.
For polyphonic vocal music, however, and particularly for instruments such as the organ, the lute, and the
viola, training was required and consequently some outlay of money. As with dancing, this was an expense
which some Florentine men, at least, were prepared to countenance in relation to the women in their
household. 26
