Excavating the performing practice of Renaissance instrumental music can baffle music historians; little notated music survives from this age when minstrels and instrumental bands largely played from memory or by improvisation. Anecdotes and artifacts of professional musicians give some hints: a Venetian trombonist, for instance, left a "fakebook" containing tenors of secular chansons and folk tunes, upon which he would improvise with his colleagues. Some courtly manuscripts, as well, preserve art song arrangements written by favorite composers. When a composer such as Alexander Agricola has left multiple settings of the same song, this can yield precious evidence for the manifold variety of elaborations and embellishments of instrumental performance. Agricola, in fact, left such clusters of settings for three popular songs of his day: Comme femme (three settings), De tous biens playne (five), and D'ung aultre amer (four). A single songbook copied for a Sienese family early in the sixteenth century contains three different Agricola settings of Johannes Ockeghem's D'ung aultre amer. Two of them, grouped together by the scribe, both use the tenor of Ockeghem's chanson (in slightly different renditions); both are for four voices. The three new voices Agricola wrote for the first setting tend to aurally crowd one another, with overlapping ranges and very active rhythms. The melody of Ockeghem's tenor, well-known to any contemporary listener, barely emerges from the dense textures and often dissonant harmonic clusters. Immediately following this setting in the manuscript, however, is a second four-voiced arrangement of the same tenor. In this case, the composer uses more rests to craft a much thinner texture; it is less dissonant but still harmonically rich in its use of the flat accidentals. An elegant, two-voiced supplementum prolongs the final cadence. In complete contrast to this pair, a third setting later in the same manuscript completely abandons Ockeghem's tenor. Instead, the middle of its three voices begins with a quotation of the upper voice of Ockeghem's D'ung aultre amer, which then vanishes in "free" composition. Agricola still mirrors the phrase structure of the original, however, and uses subtle echoes of his melodies (note the threefold imitation of a medial tenor incipit halfway through the setting). But his fruitful imagination does not conclude with this setting; a Spanish choirbook preserves yet a fourth contrasting arrangement. Once again, the piece is based upon Ockeghem's tenor, but this time surrounded by a halo of two virtuosic outer voices. Agricola's instrumental melismas extend over more than two octaves, as if appropriating the technique of the early keyboard fantasia for wind players. Once near the end, he even sets the two running melismas in contrary motion, a feat for the counterpoint of his time.

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