The scintillating Renaissance city of Medicean Florence was Heinrich Isaac's home for much of his adult life. He served Lorenzo il Magnifico from 1484 - 85 until Lorenzo's death in 1492; though he left in 1494 and took up the post of court composer to Emperor Maximilian, Isaac kept returning, and eventually retired and was buried in his beloved Florence. While there, he composed music for the Catholic Mass as it was sung in the Medici-backed chapels of the Cathedral and the SS. Annunziata; he also wrote popular Italian songs and participated in the vibrant Florentine cultivation of French chansons. One facet of this culture was the reworking of well-known pieces, partly as an act of homage and partly one of competition among composers. De tous biens plaine and Fors seulement each sparked long intertextual "families." Isaac left three separate settings of one such extremely popular chanson, J'ay pris amours a ma devise.

The original J'ay pris, for three voices, comes from the pen of an unknown Loire Valley composer a few decades before; this Rondeau spawned at least 27 reworkings in France, Italy, and Germany, including settings by Busnois, Japart, Martini, and Obrecht, in addition to Isaac's three compositions. The most common technique involves taking a single voice, or pair of voices, from the original, and composing new voices of one's own to replace the others. Isaac's three-voiced J'ay pris amours (in a famous Florentine chanson collection from the early 1490s) fits this pattern perfectly. To the borrowed upper voice, in an untroubled long-note style, Isaac composes a new tenor, in faster rhythms and frequent scalar melismas. His similarly new bass voice is cleverly crafted out of motivic repetitions of the first five notes of the superius melody. Though he preserves the Rondeau structure, the virtuosity of his setting could very well imply instrumental performance. This piece alone would assure Isaac's place within the history of this chanson.

Two further settings, however, survive under his name. Ottaviano Petrucci published a four-voiced J'ay pris amours by Isaac in 1502; this setting preserving the tenor voice of the original chanson. Isaac's three new voices dance about the straightforward tenor in dotted rhythms and closely imitative motives. His third setting, also for four voices, survives in another Florentine manuscript collection from the early 1490s. Here Isaac borrows two voices from the original, the superius and tenor, but gradually transforms them. The setting is transposed down a pitch, and not only contains two completely new voices, but quickly sublimates the two borrowed voices into the imitative texture to the point of unrecognizability.

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