Music historians have proposed various explanations for the many re-arrangements Renaissance composers made of popular songs. Well-known chansons such as Hayne van Ghizeghem's De tous biens playne and Allez, regretz, Gilles Binchois' Comme femme desconfortée, and Johannes Ockeghem's D'ung aultre amer and Fors seulement each spawned dozens of derivative pieces in other instrumental and vocal configurations. In every case, voices of the original lie at the heart of the new piece, inviting the listener to recognize the model and admire the new setting. Homage to and competition among composers might have inspired these groups of works; they may also have been responding to updated musical fashions at court, or the need to provide instrumentalists with new repertory. Some of the settings could have even originated as compositional exercises. Alexander Agricola wrote at least three settings of Binchois' Comme femme, each different setting suggesting a different genesis from this list. Agricola's setting for four voices flaunts his compositional panache. His skill is evident from the opening measures, where he surrounds Binchois' original tenor voice with an elegant Point of Imitation. Artful bursts of imitative writing permeate the busy textures throughout; in one notable moment near the conclusion, all three voices circle in syncopated sequential melismas around a long-held tenor pedal note. Syncopation also abounds, yet clear cadences pierce the rhythmic density. The scribe of one German manuscript adapted Agricola's polished counterpoint for a motet, copying it with an exultant Latin text in praise of the Virgin Mary. (Other composers saw Comme femme's applicability to the Virgin; Desprez used it as cantus firmus for his Stabat Mater.) Many of the same manuscripts and printed anthologies that preserve Agricola's four-voiced setting pair it with a much less-adept setting for three voices. In this setting, the wide vocal spacing clearly exposes the meandering quality of the melodic writing; repetitions of identical melodic figures, punctuated by clumsy octave and fifth leaps, characterize the melodic lines. Dissonances are more frequent and the cadences are less well prepared. The one exception to this character, a series of well-constructed sequential motives, ornaments the same late tenor pedal note that has sequential writing in the four-voiced version. Thus, Agricola's three-voiced setting could represent an earlier compositional exercise that led to the more-polished, four-voiced one. A two-voiced setting unique to the Segovia Choirbook displays a different, more improvisatory style. A single new voice produces extended melismas above the Binchois tenor, much as an instrumentalist may have improvised for courtly entertainment. Yet the artful hand of the composer is still evident in the two dancelike shifts into triple meter, the carefully planned cadences, and the adroit use of syncopation in the upper voice. This third setting most likely does not represent an actual improvisation, but rather a reification of the style as figured music to be left for posterity.

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