This four-voice work is among the few of Ockeghem's secular works for more than three voices; a three-voice texture was the norm in fifteenth century song composition. More unusual is that it combines a courtly rondeau with a folk melody. The cantus (top voice) sings a court rondeau, while the tenor sings a melody drawn from a folk repertoire.

Such a startling kind of internal contrast gives rise to almost literary, or sociological interpretations, suggesting that Ockeghem maintained some affinities with medieval composers and their love of cleverness and extra-musical content. Another song among many in which Ockeghem can be heard playing such games is L'aultre d'antan. It wasn't uncommon for him to fill his chansons with many surprising little details that can lead one down various paths of speculation.

Ockeghem often borrowed material for use in his secular pieces, as here, usually leaving it unchanged, no matter how divergent in style from his own music. The difference between Ockeghem's florid, flowing line and the simpler, more ungainly, heavy-footed folk melody is great. Together they pleasantly stretch the imagination between the two points, evoking much thought, but mostly an awareness of the different social or class milieus each "half" of the music stems from. In that sense, Petite camusette, "Little pug-nosed girl," is a beautiful piece for savoring an imagined atmosphere of life as it was in the Renaissance.

Another interesting feature is the registral range of the piece: the lower voices dominate, demonstrating Ockeghem's tendency to privilege the lower range. Himself a singer, a bass, he is said to have had a voice of remarkable beauty, which may account for the special attention he often lavishes upon the lower lines. In this case, with the rhythmic dance implications in the folk tune, the low register works to give the piece a strangely primal power, its sensibility seeming to lie uneasily between that of a love song and the music of war.

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