ABSTRACT
Editor’s Preface: As its subtitle clearly indicates, this article represents Besseler’s response to the criticisms expressed by Rudolf von Ficker in the translation presented above. The crux of the issue hinges on whether the technique of fauxbourdon was a long-standing (and rather primitive) improvisatory practice in England, which was taken over by Continental musicians as a res facta, as Ficker maintains, or whether the technique was a Continental innovation invented by Dufay, which subsequently was adopted in England as the so-called faburdon. In marshaling his counterarguments, Besseler brings both philological and stylistic arguments to bear. As philological evidence, the author alleges that the French word fauxbourdon chronologically precedes the English faburdon. Besseler’s stylistic evidence concerns the genesis of what he refers to variously as “dominant tonality” or “tonal harmony” in Western music, which he claims stems from Italy, as opposed to the attribute of “full sonority,” supposedly a signal characteristic of English music from this time. In this article, the parenthetical numbers are page citations to Ficker’s “Schöpfungsgeschichte des Fauxbourdon.”
