Unfortunately, no documentary evidence survives to prove a direct master-pupil link between Gilles de Bins (dit Binchois) and Johannes Ockeghem: Ockeghem wrote a lament Mort, tu as navré on the elder Binchois' death, and beyond that, all is tantalizing hypothesis. The stamp of Binchois' flowing melodic contours and supple rhythms, however, shows in some of the younger man's chansons. The Bergerette Presque transi exemplifies this influence in melodic ethos, but also shows the force of Ockeghem's personality in its harmonic daring. The chanson was probably composed in the late 1450s or 1460s, being preserved in two important manuscript sources of the Franco-Burgundian "Autumn of the Middle Ages" (to use an expression coined by the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga), the chansonnier Laborde and the Dijon chansonnier. Its use as the hidden model for the Missa Mi-Mi and also as a store for quotation in the late motet Intemerata Dei mater show its personal importance to the composer.

The downright depressing text of Presque transi bewails the state of unrequited love, the lover tormented and devoured by unhappiness. The imagery partakes of much that is stereotypical, but also infuses within common concepts a certain morbid strength and vivacity:

"Nearly overcome, only a bit less than dead..."

"Alas, I am in life against my will..."

"I am not able to die, and yet always am invited..."

The poetic form is a bergerette, vestige of the fourteenth century's formes fixes refrain forms. A refrain of five lines begins the poem, two versets of three lines (set to contrasting music) and one of five (set to the music of the refrain) follow, and a final refrain concludes the piece.

Musically, the dominant voice is the upper melody, the only texted voice; two lower parts, somewhat more angular, provide the harmonic support. However, all three move at roughly the same pace; this allows the lower voices often to elide cadences in the discantus. Ockeghem selects the most severe of modes available to him, the Phrygian, for this setting. However, as in the text itself, a conventional key choice is dazzlingly vibrant in execution. E-based and C-based harmonies are juxtaposed throughout the setting, often using an F-B tritone (the dissonant "Devil's Interval") in transition. The bassus' opening gesture of a falling fifth interval not only sets up a leap into the depths in the opening moments, but also provides a recurrent motif through the chanson; this characteristic gesture also anchors Ockeghem's later quotations from his own piece in this memorable and evocative sound.



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