Music stands among the "noble" pursuits in the rarefied courtly culture of the fifteenth-century French-speaking lands. The Dukes of Burgundy (and their poorer colleagues, the Kings of France) sponsored large numbers of singers to glorify the worship in their personal chapels, and collected poets and musicians to grace their courts with secular compositions. These chansons, following the stylized patterns and forms of an earlier age, were collected in numerous manuscript anthologies, as a status symbol and perhaps even for the nobles' recreational use. The popular chanson D'un autre amer by Johannes Ockeghem appears in a large number of these collections, and was further subject to numerous adaptations by other composers, as well as adaptations by Josquin into the motets Victimae pascali laudes and Tu solus, qui facis mirabilia, and the Missa d'ung aultre amer. The earliest surviving source, apparently, is the Chansonnier Nivelle, copied by the early to middle 1460s.

D'un autre amer follows the Rondeau form, one of the fixed poetic forms codified by Guillaume de Machaut in the fourteenth century. This elegant but complicated form has a two-part refrain, with interspersed versets set to the same music as the refrain sections. The overall form, with capital letters indicating the refrain text and lower case the verses, is AbaAabAB. Both text and music thus must be written such that they may be interwoven by sections. Ockeghem's chosen text in D'un autre amer proclaims the Lover's unswerving fidelity to the Beloved. This upbeat, if conventional, message allows for a strong refrain line: "By loving another, my heart would demean itself." (The refrain, incidentally, is cleverly recast by Josquin in his Mass and motets to describe the fidelity of faith.) Using a conservative style, Ockeghem sets the song for a treble melody and two supporting voices (without text). However, despite the tendency for the two lower parts in this style merely to fill in harmonic notes, all three voice parts in D'un autre amer partake of a greater elegance of line.

© All Music Guide