Portative organ in the context of Francesco Landini

The Trecento was a period of vigorous activity in Italy in the arts, including painting, architecture, literature, and music. The music of the Trecento paralleled the achievements in the other arts in many ways, for example, in pioneering new forms of expression, especially in secular song in the vernacular language, Italian. In these regards, the music of the Trecento may seem more to be a Renaissance phenomenon; however, the predominant musical language was more closely related to that of the late Middle Ages, and musicologists generally classify the Trecento as the end of the medieval era. Trecento means "three hundred" in Italian but is usually used to refer to the 1300s. However, the greatest flowering of music in the Trecento happened late in the century, and the period is usually extended to include music up to around 1420.

Guillaume Du Fay (/djuːˈfaɪ/ dyoo-FEYE, French: [ɡijom dy fa(j)i]; also Dufay, Du Fayt; 5 August 1397 – 27 November 1474) was a composer and music theorist of early Renaissance music, who is variously described as French or Franco-Flemish. Considered the leading European composer of his time, his music was widely performed and reproduced. Du Fay was well-associated with composers of the Burgundian School, particularly his colleague Gilles Binchois, but was never a regular member of the Burgundian chapel himself.

While he is among the best-documented composers of his time, Du Fay's birth and family is shrouded with uncertainty, though he was probably the illegitimate child of a priest. He was educated at Cambrai Cathedral, where his teachers included Nicolas Grenon and Richard Loqueville, among others. For the next decade, Du Fay worked throughout Europe: as a subdeacon in Cambrai, under Carlo I Malatesta in Rimini, for the House of Malatesta in Pesaro, and under Louis Aleman in Bologna, where he was ordained priest. As his fame began to spread, he settled in Rome in 1428 as musician of the prestigious papal choir, first under Pope Martin V and then Pope Eugene IV, where he wrote the motets Balsamus et munda cera, Ecclesie militantis and Supremum est mortalibus. Amid Rome's financial and political disorder in the 1430s, Du Fay took a leave of absence from the choir to serve Amadeus VIII, Duke of Savoy.

Gilles de Bins dit Binchois (also Binchoys; c. 1400 – 20 September 1460) was a Franco-Flemish composer and singer of early Renaissance music. A central figure of the Burgundian School, Binchois is renowned a melodist and miniaturist; he generally avoided large scale works, and is most admired for his shorter secular chansons. Contemporary musicologists generally rank his importance below his colleague Guillaume Du Fay and the English composer John Dunstaple, but together the three were the most celebrated composers of the early European Renaissance.

Binchois was born in Mons (modern-day Belgium) to an upper-class family from Binche. His youth is largely unknown, although early chorister training is likely; by late 1419 he had obtained a local organist post. By 1423 he was in Lille and probably a soldier under the Englishman William de la Pole, eventually in Paris and Hainaut. Sometime during the 1420s, Binchois settled in the culturally thriving court of Burgundy under Philip the Good, where he became a subdeacon and was awarded numerous prebends. He retired to Soignies in 1453 amid a substantial courtly pension, dying in 1460.