Renaissance performance history, though largely shrouded in the mists of time, has left some scanty documentation. Eyewitness reports, for instance, credit two blind brothers, Johannes and Karolus Fernandes, with a stunning virtuoisty on the viol and other "soft" instruments. No less a musician than Johannes Tinctoris praised the playing of the pair (who also served as professors at the University of Paris). At least one piece of music that was likely in their repertory also survives to this day: this mysterious and lengthy instrumental fanstasia of Alexander Agricola's. As musicologist Reinhard Strohm has noted, several sources for the piece give attributions to "the blind," and one Spanish manuscript considers it the property of Ferdinandus et frater eius (Ferdinand and his brother). The same manuscript provides a proverb-like Latin title Cecus non judicat coloribus (The Blind Do Not Distinguish Colors). The title could be a joke, for the two blind brothers were certainly capable of a rich tonal spectrum in their playing; Agricola's composition, too, presents a vivid and prismatic sonic array. No discernible cantus firmus forms the basis for Cecus non judicat; neither does Agricola create any large-scale stucture of formal repetition. Instead, the three independent and freely composed melodic lines spin out a musical tapestry from shorter motives, quasi fantasia. Agricola constructs his tenor voice (hidden in the middle of the texture) very often from motivic repetitions; somewhat less often, the other voices sequence and repeat similar melodic cells. The melodic fragments so subjected to colorful repetition and elaboration include a three-note, ostinato-like scale; a simple suspension figure; a descending fourth; and even (in the tenor of the second part) an insistent single note. Quite often, the tenor voice employs an additive repetition (presaging the music of Arvo Pärt): serial phrases in this voice may each add one note in the scale to the previous one: C-D, C-D-E, C-D-E-F, and so on. In the second half of the piece, the composer further colors these additive repetitions by manipulating their rhythmic character, presenting them in "hocket" and in climactic syncopation. This very rhythmic complexity helps solidify the attribution of the piece to Agricola in the first place, as one manuscript gives a conflicting attribution to Heinrich Isaac, and a group of East European sources contain different versions of it as a motet. The heavily Marian texts (one an adaptation of the Orthodox Akathistos hymn) added to it suit the time's devotion, but the piece's style suits neither a solemn devotional moment, nor the more sober temperament of Isaac. The melodic unpredictability, the dense rhythmic complexity, the deliberate harmonic cross-relations, and even the joke of the title fit the florid personality of Alexander Ackermann, known as Agricola.

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