The writing is fairly unadorned; practically all of the extended (more than three-note) melismatic figures come right before the cadential points. The lower voices use slightly longer values in these cadential gestures, giving the now elaborate discantus something to step off from—Binchois' sense of the lower lines as merely accompaniment to the discantus is obvious here, and with the effectiveness of the music it's also obvious why he composed that way: he achieves a strong, joyous momentum. The whole is always pushing forward to the cadential points where those larger melismatic gestures are supposed to function like climaxes. But our ears are jaded; for us the pitches and harmonic diction, with its heavy use of fifths, can't evoke joy in us as such. We hear the momentum and the melismatic mini-explosions in terms of an early master composer wrestling with a hopelessly limited vocabulary. Yet the music is a great pleasure of a special kind: not to detract from respect for Binchois, but it's rather like those stunning poems one sometimes comes across written by very young children expressing an essential grasp of how new they are to the world.

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