Johannes Ockeghem frequently participated in the late fifteenth century vogue for chanson rearrangements. He revised, for instance, his own three-voiced rondeau, Je n'ay dueil que je ne suis morte, into a new four-voiced setting. Alexander Agricola, in turn, showed his awareness of the elder composer's work. Agricola paid Ockeghem homage by quoting the revised rondeau at the beginning of a new chanson, setting a text with the same incipit. Agricola's Je n'ay dueil que de vous ne viengne opens with all four voices singing Ockeghem's first bassus melody in imitation. The thickness and depth of Agricola's vocal textures and his rhythmic fluidity may also echo Ockeghem's style. The similarities, however, end there. The choice of four voices and the opening four-voiced imitation for Agricola's Je n'ay dueil mark the chanson as the product of a later style (the imitation, though, only extends into the second phrase). The French text is in the popular fixed form of the bergerette: one stanza alone of the earlier virelai form ABBaA. The melismatic character of all four (equal) voices extends the piece, however, to tremendous lengths. The somewhat conventional verses praise a distant yet perfect Beloved; the poetic speaker claims faithfulness to her despite the ills, pain, and sorrow that will befall him because of his love. Agricola evokes this text by means of a characteristically rich harmonic language, often exploiting contrasts between sonorities containing B flat and B natural. Once he even travels to the very distant harmony of an E flat chord, as the speaker declares his choice "to live"; the harmony is immediately wrenched back to an A minor chord as the text continues "to live in pain." The high number of deceptive cadences and a number of jarring serial suspensions further reinforce the depressive character of the poetic text.

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