A fascinating aspect of the legend of Gaston Febus, as concerns his patronage of the arts, is that he seems to have been utterly secular in orientation. He built no churches and none of the surviving music from his court is religious in theme. The ars subtilior, the style of music that was mostly composed at Febus' court, is a quintessentially secular musical art that flowered even as news spread of the deep corruption of the clerical elite in Europe, like early twentieth century art. Its stylistic excesses seem to stem from a worldly, fatalistic despair. It is an art of decadence par excellence; an equivalent now might be anthems for aggressive corporations. Fatalistic withdrawal from the world into pleasures is certainly an attitude that proliferates in dark times. Fumeux fume is a remarkably myriad document in that sense. The extremely cryptic, alliterative text seems to refer the piece to the mysterious "society of smokers," a late medieval semi-secret club of men who gathered to smoke tobacco and hashish, and perhaps other substances as well. Not much is known of Solage except that he worked in several of the courts where the ars subtilior was developed. His marginal position in the musical world and his extremely strange music certainly don't contradict the notion that he was one of the mysterious smokers. Fumeux fume is also one of the key examples of the ars subtilior, perhaps the most famous of them all. Discussions of ars subtilior come circling back to Fumeux fume with orbital regularity and inevitability. It is certainly a strange, mysterious piece. The salient and most noticeable feature is its blistering, relentless chromaticism. After the slightly tamed beginning, barely a note passes that isn't rubbing with some kind of evil, burning friction against another. To make it still stranger, the tessitura is all in the low tenor to bass range, causing the piece to dissolves itself into a pure, absolute expression of its edgy, harmonic conditions.

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