Johannes Ockeghem (d. 1497) was the greatest
musician of the late 15th century On this judgment both the modern historian and the composer's contemporaries concur, for no one enjoyed greater prestige among practitioners, patrons and students of music in the Renaissance. To Desiderius Erasmus, the greatest of the northern humanists, Ockeghem was "Prince of Music. '" To Antoine Busnois, foremost composer at the court of Burgundy, he was to be compared only with Pythagoras, the legendary inventor of the art. To a whole generation of Netherlandish
musicians--Josquin, Brumel La Rue, Compere, Agricola, Ghiselin, Prioris and Gaspar van Weerbecke--he was the 'Maistre et bon Pere, ' perhaps in some cases actually their teacher, certainly to all of them a model. To three successive French kings of the house of Valois-Charles VII, Louis XI, Charles VII--he gave over forty years' service not only as choirmaster but as chaplain, and for 35 of those years he was concurrently treasurer of the Abbey of St Martin at Tours. Ockeghem may have been the pupil of the Burgundian court musician Gilles Binchois (d. 1460), upon whose death he composed a deploration, or lament. He knew and may even have influenced his senior, the great Guillaume Dufay (d 1474) And in a spirit of friendly rivalry with Busnois, he may have been the initiator of the centuries-long tradition of composing Masses on the French popular tune L 'Homme Armné
This brilliant career and glowing lifetime reputation are more than matched by the quality of Ockeghem's survíving compositions. These exhibit not only transcendent technical mastery, but also an inventive fantasy, an originality and a sometimes grandiose, sometimes whimsical virtuosity that set Ockeghem entirely apart from his contemporaries, and what is more, from his immediate successors. Perhaps his most impressive achievement was the unprecedented feat of creating extended polyphonic compositions that were based on no discernible pre-existent scaffold, whether Gregorian chant or secular song The absence in some of his works of
so universally relied-upon a structural device as a cantus firmus has made Ockeghem's music difficult to analyze and has carned him a reputation for 'mysticism'" among certain modern historians
Actually, to compose music so "free" and "inspirational'" is a task of baffling difficulty, requiring at once an inexhaustible richness of invention, an unerring sense of formal proportion, and sufficient technical control to temper the former with the latter These Ockeghem possessed in abundance, and the result was a music uniquely and inimitably his, which seems by turns to hover uncannily Suspended in time and to bristle with rhythmic energy as it surges inexorably to the cadence.
Ockeghem's abandonment of the traditional use of a cantus firmus also enabled him to achieve a uniquely integrated texture in a few of his mature compositions. In these, all the voices are of equal structural importance and of equal melodic beauty: none merely accompanies or furnishes harmonic support. A work like the Missa Prolationum is a real sonic tapestry, a play of irridescent surfaces that offers the listener an endless fascination, for new relationships among the interweaving parts reveal themselves on every hearing.
These beauties, however, were lost for centuries while Ockeghem's music languished unpublished and unperformed and his historical position was distorted by generations of historians who had little contact with his art. Ironically, the greatest damage
to Ockeghem's reputation was done by an ardent
admirer, the Swiss theorist Glareanus, who included a discussion of "Okenheim'' in his encyclopedic treatise of 1547, the Dodekachordon Wishing to impress his readers with the master's unequalled technical ingenuity, Glareanus ignored the main body of Ockeghem's work and drew attention exclusively to a handful of compositions in which Ockeghem had exercised his virtuosity in a rather bizarrely ostentatious fashion These included puzzle canons, a Mass so contrived as to be singable in any mode and which was therefore written down without clefs, and a mysterious piece Glareanus confessed he knew only by rumor, and which he called "a certain thirty-six voice twittering, " identified by recent research as a huge canon for four nine-part choruses on the words "Deo gratias."
After the dubious homage Glareanus paid him, Ockeghem's reputation was dashed. He became a theorist's plaything and, in the eyes of historians of a later age, the prime embodiment of "Netherlandish artifice'" and bloodless cerebration in music Glareanus's account was dutifully parroted for centuries: the same few atypical compositions cited. the same puzzle canons displayed (usually solved incorrectly, which did not help matters), and ever more moralizing embroidery on the dangers of "Gothic'" overintellectualization Charles Burney, the great English music historian whose four volume
General History of Music began appearing in 1776, quoted the puzzle canon "Prenez sur moi votre
exemple, '" along with a couple of excerpts from the
"Mass in any mode'" (Missa cuiusvis toni), and then delivered himself of the following pronouncement, which as well as any, sums up not only the
'enlightened’ attitude toward Ockeghem in particular, but the smug condescension with which writers of the 18th century tended to regard the past in general: "These compositions are given rather as specimens of a determined spirit of patient perseverance, than as models of imitation. In music, different from all other arts, learning and labour seem to have preceded taste and invention, from both which the times under consideration are still very remote. ” It remained for the music historians of the nineteenth century, beginning with August Wilhelm Ambros, who went back to the original source instead of relying on handed-down traditions, to rediscover Ockeghem's true worth. It is a job which remains in progress, for sad to say, Ockeghem's music remains in part unpublished to this day. And as it is brought gradually to light, an even sadder fact emerges: only a scant fraction of Ockeghem's output survives. All we have is fifteen Masses ( including one Requiem Mass), some two dozen courtly chansons and a handful of motets, of which several are of uncertain authenticity. These are slim remains indeed of a creative career that--to judge both from the composer's biography and the evolving style of his known output--must have spanned half a century at least. Of the Masses, the lion's share of the Ockeghem legacy, all but two
are found in a single manuscript, the so-called "Chigi Codex'" now in the collection of the Biblioteca Apostolica in Vatican City, and four are found only there. One can guess how many such manuscripts have vanished. In any case we know of at least four more Ockeghem Masses by name-thanks to chance mentions in treatises and letters-which are irrevocably lost.
Cappella Nova
Wendy Erslev, Sally Hamby, Imogen Howe, Christine
Hunter, Jessie Ann Owens, Caroline Rockwood - sopranos
Peter Becker, Marian Hyun, Patricia Petersen, Hugh
Robertson - altos
Peter Bannon, Robert Eisenstein, Edward Stevensontenors
Thomas Baker, Richard Bodig, Paul deSimone, Louis Flaim, Robert Myers - basses
Richard Taruskin, director
