Ockeghem: Prince of Music
It is generally agreed that Johannes Ockeghem (accent on the 0, as in hope) was the most important composer between Guillaume Dufay and Josquin des Prez (both of whom he probably knew in some degree). But. apart from the fact that he served three French kings (Charleses VII and VIII and Louis Xl) as choirmaster and chaplain, and was treasurer of the richest abbey in France (the abbot being King Louis himself), we know maddeningly little about him, including when and where he was born, when he died, and how to spell his name.
The thesis of Barbara Tuchman's book A Distant Mirror is that there is a likeness between the "calamitous" 13th century and our own. Despite the reviewers, who find Mrs. Tuchman out of her depth and our wars, nuclear accidents, pollution, rampant crime, cultism, and so on, perfectly healthy and even hopeful, it strikes me as an acceptable argument. The chief trouble with it is that one can find--given the limitations of human nature and of this planet--parallels between our century and virtually any other. In music, for example, it is easy to see a parallel with the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: both are centuries in which intellectualism played a large role in composition.
The primary difference here, however, (if I may adopt a reactionary pose) is that then the intellectual gimmicks arose out of the acoustical laws that determine the difference between music and the dumping of beer-cans into a rock-quarry. The performer could marvel at the intricacies of what was going on; the hearer could appreciate the work as music without being aware of the pawls and ratchets that made it go. Contrast, if you will the following bit of arrogance from a contemporary "intuhleckshul": "Those who wish to understand what I have written. must read the score. Those who wish to understand how the players interpret my score must know the score and compare performances. Those who simply wish to hear it without understanding need only listen. What is left to explain?" (One is tempted to add "You filthy peasants!"). Unfortunately, lacking the score or a photographic memory of previous performances, the listener in this instance is likely to be quite baffled, whereas Ockeghem's almost certainly were not. For, all its complexity, the Missa prolationem is clearly beautiful music.
It is generally agreed that Johannes Ockeghem (accent on the 0, as in hope) was the most important composer between Guillaume Dufay and Josquin des Prez (both of whom he probably knew in some degree). But. apart from the fact that he served three French kings (Charleses VII and VIII and Louis Xl) as choirmaster and chaplain, and was treasurer of the richest abbey in France (the abbot being King Louis himself), we know maddeningly little about him, including when and where he was born, when he died, and how to spell his name.
There were some Ockeghems (or however they spelled it) in the Belgian city now called Dendermonde around 1400, and there is a village of similar name in East Flanders. (There is also one called Silly, in Hainaut.) He studied with Barbireau or Binchois or Dufay or someone-no one knows for sure. The first account of him has him as a left-side choirsinger at Antwerp Cathedral in 1443. (Left-siders sang composed music; right-siders sang plainsong.) In 1496 someone else was handling the treasury of Saint-Martin de Tours, so it is assumed that Ockeghem had either died or was too incapacitated to carry on. Whatever he may have written, not much has been preserved--about twenty chansons, some motets (many of them to the Virgin, and some of doubtful authenticity) and fifteen Masses, including the first known "composed" Requiem, about cover it.
Some of Ockeghem's Masses are of the cantus firmus variety, based on a plainsong theme. The Missa prolationem is not; it is "freely composed," in that the material is (apparently) original, but the structure is stunningly--even frighteningly--formal. Written for four voices (i.e. voice-parts), it appears to be scored for only two. Each part, however, is actually for two voices in canon. (That is. one imitates the other, coming in later and often at a different pitch--as, more simply, in rounds, like Row, row, row your boat.) In Ockeghem's Mass, the key to when and where and at what speed voice No. 2 comes in is in the initial time-signatures or prolations. In the opening number the imitating voice begins on the same note as the imitatee (if there is such a word), but with each successive section of the Mass the voices move farther apart until they are at a distance of a whole octave.
The record concludes with the lament for Ockeghem set to the text of Erasmus of Rotterdam (he of The Praise of Folly and friend to Thomas More) by Joannes Lupi or Lupus or Johann Wolf. A rather mysterious figure is Lupi--the woods seem to have been full of his namesakes--but he is probably the one from Cambrai who died in 1539 and whose real name seems to have been Jennet LeLeu.
