ABSTRACT
Editor’s Preface: In the article translated below, Besseler applies his extensive knowledge of the manuscript sources of early fifteenth-century music to the task of establishing a chronology of fauxbourdon pieces, and singles out the Postcommunio movement of Dufay’s Missa Sancti Jacobi as the earliest surviving fauxbourdon piece. On the strength of this identification, Besseler claims that fauxbourdon was a Continental innovation, one that “began its life as the creation of a leading master [Dufay] shortly before 1430.” Subsequently Besseler offers a theory for the derivation of the term “fauxbourdon” by positing the existence of “a genuine or true ‘bourdon,’” which “presumably … was a contratenor with the character of a low voice.” The suggested compositional importance of this “bourdon-low voice” fits into the author’s more general arguments regarding the genesis of so-called “tonal-dominant harmony” in the compositions of the early fifteenth century, which, according to Besseler, was also pioneered by Dufay.
