Johannes Tinctoris famously divided early Renaissance compositions into three genres—Mass, motet, and song—by their length and the amount of Varietas (variety) each could contain. Yet a mind such as Alexander Agricola's could embed a flourishing variety even in the smallest song forms. He composed at least five contrasting settings, for instance, of Hayne van Ghizeghem's popular chanson De tous biens playne, contributing to the rich repertory of over 50 reworkings of the same tune. Some composers (among them Desprez and Obrecht) worked De tous biens playne into Mass settings, several (including Desprez and Compère) adopted it in motets, and many secular arrangements "cover" the song. Though all five of Agricola's settings are similar three-voiced instrumental arrangements on a smaller scale, each bears rich contrasts in both texture and technique. In each of his five settings, Agricola takes the tenor of Ghizeghem's chanson as cantus firmus and allots its melody to his tenor. Around the pre-existing voice (differing from setting to setting), he writes two new virtuosic and wide-spanned melodies, almost certainly for instrumental performance. The "first" of the settings shows the most variety within its setting: short, motivic exchanges between the outer voices characterize the first half and more continuous counterpoint the second. In the second half, the contrapuntal relationship between the voices becomes more subtle, with short internal imitations and voice exchanges common. For variety's sake, this setting even had an optional ("si placet") fourth voice added when Ottaviano Petrucci printed it in 1501. A charming songbook copied for a noble Tuscan family (the Basevi Codex) contains two more Agricola De tous biens playne settings, each quite different in form. One mimics the texture of the "first" setting, with close and often imitative counterpoint between the outer voices; the imitative motifs which he writes between phrases of the long-note tenor cantus firmus echo melodies of Ghizeghem's original. In this setting, however, Agricola places the voices in contrasting meters and loads them with intricate syncopation. In the other "Basevi" setting, Agricola's two new outer voices move in unswervingly regular rhythms, driving the piece in "perpetual motion." If not for the often irregular intervals (arpeggiated sevenths, for instance) and cross-relations, the setting could pass for a "walking bass" composition of Bach. A large choirbook now in Spain (where Agricola died during his travels with the Burgundian court) contains two more of his De tous biens playne settings. Both of these use new instrumental voices that are highly melismatic and often sequential in their melodic construction, though the melodies of the first are somewhat more capricious (even flying into a dancelike triple meter at one point). Both mark the tenor's phrases with strongly profiled cadences. Fascinatingly, this pair in their similarity could preserve hints of the processes of instrumental improvisation. The underlying harmonic framework for both the Segovia settings is identical, down to a deceptive cadence halfway through, and both respond to the melodic crest of the tenor's final phrase with similarly syncopated sequential climaxes.

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