Burgundian School

A 15th-century musical tradition centered on the courts of the dukes of Burgundy. Its composers, including Guillaume Du Fay and Gilles Binchois, helped shape the transition from medieval to Renaissance music.

Contenance angloise: A 15th-century musical style associated with English composers, marked by consonant harmonies and prominent thirds and sixths. Its sonorous thirds and sixths influenced the Burgundian sound.
Guillaume Du Fay: A Franco-Flemish composer whose long career helped define European music in the 15th century. His Masses, motets, and chansons are central works of the tradition.
Burgundian court: The political and cultural household of the dukes of Burgundy, centered in the Low Countries during the 15th century. Its chapel and festivities gave composers settings for their work.
Renaissance music: European music from roughly the 15th and 16th centuries, marked by expanding polyphony and changing approaches to melody and harmony. The school helped shape musical practices that became characteristic of the Renaissance.
Cantus firmus: A pre-existing melody used as the structural basis for a polyphonic composition. Burgundian composers used inherited melodies to organize large sacred works.
Gilles Binchois: A Franco-Flemish composer and singer, renowned for his chansons and service at the Burgundian court. His courtly songs exemplify the school’s secular repertory.
Burgundian chapel: The household chapel maintained by the dukes of Burgundy for worship and musical service. Its singers performed the school’s sacred repertory at court and in church.
Franco-Flemish School: A group of composers from the Low Countries who shaped European polyphonic music from the 15th through the 16th centuries. Later composers from the region extended techniques cultivated at Burgundian courts.
Isorhythm: A compositional technique that repeats a rhythmic pattern, often alongside a related melodic pattern, in a voice of a polyphonic work. Earlier composers used this technique in motets that shaped the tradition’s inheritance.
Antoine Busnois: A Franco-Flemish composer and poet active in the later 15th century, associated with the Burgundian court. His chansons and sacred works carried the tradition into a later generation.

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