The ancient courtly genre of the complainte—a French poem conventionally lamenting a death-and the new humanist ethos of praising a forerunner through imitation of his style mingle powerfully in Johannes Ockeghem's lament on the death of the composer Binchois (20 September 1460), Mort, tu as navré de ton dart. Traditionally, Gilles de Bins (dit Binchois) has been thought of as a teacher to the younger Johannes Ockeghem, when Ockeghem was beginning his career in Antwerp and Binchois was serving the Dukes of Burgundy. Unfortunately, this piece and the possibly contemporary Missa De plus en plus (on Binchois' chanson) are the only ones that provide concrete evidence of a mentoring relationship. Whether or not Binchois had been his teacher, Ockeghem, the new star of the French-speaking musical world, left a wonderfully pathetic tribute in text and music to the Burgundian chanson composer extraordinaire. He also, incidentally, began a lengthy tradition of Renaissance and Baroque laments, from Josquin's Nymphes des bois—on Ockeghem's death—to Obrecht and Isaac, to a wealth of later tombeaux.

The French text to the upper voice in Ockeghem's chanson adopts the ballade form, the only of his compositions to borrow this one of the formes fixes. Three stanzas of eight lines each conclude with an identical refrain, "Pray for his soul." The middle verse even yields some biographical detail, claiming that Binchois in his youth was a soldier, but later chose the path of humility, to serve God and his Church. Musically, the setting of this text takes an AAB form, with a time change for the second section; both this format and the rhythmic cast to the melody itself consciously emulate some of the sound of the deceased's own chanson compositions; the emphasis on gentle melodic descents further mimics Binchois.

Beneath the melody, however, instead of the customary two voices which provide the harmonic support in somewhat slower motion, Ockeghem sets a rich trio of low voices. Often, archaic echoes of fauxbourdon sound in their harmonies. The middle (tenor) of these voices bears in one central source from Dijon a text in Latin, a paraphrase of part of the famous sequence from the Missa pro defunctis, Dies irae. The chant melody of the sequence, furthermore, is present at the end of the refrain, as the tenor sings "Pie Jesu, Domine, dona ei requiem." ("Blessed Lord Jesus, grant him peace.") So three times-once for each stanza-the melody closes with a refrain praying for Binchois' soul while the three lower voices dovetail with an actual Latin prayer for him, borrowing the authority of the canonical melody associated with that prayer. Josquin certainly knew this moving piece, and embellished its concept in his own lament for Ockeghem, adding a fifth voice to the dark vocal scoring, emulating Ockeghem's dense textures, and also incorporating a Latin-texted cantus firmus from the Requiem Mass.



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