The first visit, in May 1469, was a mission to arrange a marriage between Louis XI’s brother, Charles, duke of Guyenne, and Isabella, the half-sister of Enrique IV of Castile. The mission, fortunately, failed. The second visit, in June 1470, was a mission to arrange a marriage of Charles to the young daughter born to Enrique’s queen, a mission that was successful but ineffectual, since Charles died in 1472.

This event would not figure much in the life of the composer if he had not discovered Johannes Cornago’s canción, Qu’es mi vida preguntays, during his visit. Ockeghem added two more voice parts to the two that Cornago had composed, and the resulting arrangement is published among the chansons of Ockeghem.

During the Renaissance musicians were hired for their voices, and Ockeghem’s voice was a magnificent basso profundo. Incidental to their employment in cathedrals and chapels, the singers also composed new music. Ockeghem provided rich bass parts in his Masses, as, for example, in the Missa Prolationum.

The composer, as we have learned recently, was born in the village of St. Ghislain (near Mons, Belgium) in the diocese of Cambrai, but his date of birth is unknown. Long ago Fétis thought he was born around 1430, assuming that he was a choirboy in Antwerp in 1443; Plamenac suggested 1425, then later agreed with Riemann and Van den Borren, who picked 1420; Leeman Perkins wrote in 1980 that he must have been born closer to 1410, since he was thought to have lived about 90 or 100 years.

The first appearance of Johannes Ockeghem in the surviving records is the year (1443-1444) that he spent as a vicaire-chanteur (an adult singer in the cathedral choir) at Notre Dame in Antwerp. Two years later he was singing in the chapel of Charles I, duke of Bourbon, whose wife was the sister of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy. It is possible that he had gone there directly from Antwerp. He remained at least two years until he moved to his next known position, the chapel of Charles VII, king of France, where he is named in the list of singers in 1451. Among the chaplains (singers in the chapel) who are not priests, he is already listed first by 1453.

At this time the royal court spent much of its time in Tours, a city near the chateaux of the Loire valley. The king held the office of titular abbot of St. Martin, like every king of France since Hughes Capet in 987, so he was able to confer a signal honor on Ockeghem by naming him treasurer of the church in 1459. (Despite the title of abbot, St. Martin ceased to be a monastic foundation in 846, when Charles the Bald turned the basilica into a collegiate church staffed by secular canons, who sang the Office daily.) The Gothic basilica that Ockeghem knew was destroyed during the French Revolution, but a smaller church was built over the tomb of St. Martin in the middle of the 19th century.

Ockeghem remained at the royal court after Charles VII died, serving Louis XI after 1461 and Charles VIII after 1483. In spite of his residence in Tours, Ockeghem was a canon of Notre Dame in Paris from 1463 to 1470. Sometime before 1472 he was ordained a priest, apparently at Cambrai during a visit to Guillaume Dufay. He is still mentioned in court documents in 1488, when he was present for the foot-washing ceremony of Holy Thursday. Because of his great age, he probably spent his last years in retirement. He died on February 6, 1497.

Many testimonies prove the high esteem in which his contemporaries held him. Guillaume Crétin wrote a lament on his death, in which he called it a great pity that such a man should die before reaching the age of 100. Jean Molinet also wrote a lament, Nymphes des bois, which Josquin des Prez set to music. Erasmus wrote an elegy, Ergone conticuit, that was set to music by Johannes Lupi. Much earlier, in 1467, the younger composer Antoine Busnois, probably his pupil, composed an homage to Ockeghem, In hydraulis. David Howlett has written an illuminating reconstruction and analysis of the text of this piece in Plainsong and Medieval Music (volume 4, 1995, number 2).

Tinctoris, Florio and Molinet all described him as the greatest composer of his time. In the following century, attention was focused more on his contrapuntal skill. Glareanus, in his Dodecachordon (1547), and others pointed to the clever techniques demonstrated in the Missa Prolationum, the Missa Cujusvis toni, and the canonic chanson Prenez sur moi vostre exemple, and his music was considered more clever than beautiful. In truth, it possessed both qualities, but the latter was overlooked.

Thus established, however, Ockeghem’s reputation as a composer who was simply clever was perpetuated. Not until after 1940 did musicologists begin to go back to the music, ignoring what everyone had written about him since his own time.

The Masses

The Missa Prolationum, one of these remarkable Masses, is a series of canons in which pairs of voices sing the same music in different meters at different melodic intervals. In the Chigi Codex (where all but two of Ockeghem’s surviving Masses are preserved), only two voices are notated. The other two voices sing the same music in a double canon. The canons widen progressively: Kyrie I is a canon at the unison, Christe a canon at the second (a full tone apart), Kyrie II a canon at the third, the Gloria a canon at the fourth, the Credo a canon at the fifth, the Sanctus a canon at the sixth, and the Pleni sunt caeli a canon at the seventh. At the first Hosanna, at the moment of the consecration of the Body and Blood of Christ, a canon at the octave is sung. The remaining sections of the Mass are canons at the fourth or the fifth.

There is even more ingenuity in this work. The title, Mass of prolations, refers to the time signatures used in mensural notation, which was predominant from the 13th to the 17th centuries. There were four prolations, derived from four combinations of tempus and prolatio. The breve could be divided into two semibreves (tempus imperfectum) or three semibreves (tempus perfectum), and the semibreve could be divided into two minims (prolatio imperfecta) or three minims (prolatio perfecta). In modern notation, a whole note is normally divided only into two half notes, and a half note only into two quarter notes. Each of the four voices in the Mass sings a different meter, or prolation. If all of this sounds forbidding, we must remember that because of Ockeghem’s genius the result is of surpassing beauty, and it requires no effort of comprehension on the part of the listener.

Another freely composed Mass that demonstrates Ockeghem’s technique is the Missa Mi-Mi. It is generally considered that the name is derived from two notes that are sung at the beginning of the bass part in each movement. They comprise a falling fifth, e to A. In the system of Guido of Arezzo, e is mi in the natural hexachord, while A is mi in the soft hexachord. Guido described three six-note scales, or hexachords. The hard hexachord begins on G, requiring a B flat; the natural hexachord begins on C, omitting B entirely; and the soft hexachord begins on F, requiring a B natural.

More recently Leeman Perkins has asserted that the falling fifth cannot be the source of the title, for the A cannot belong to the soft hexachord. He states that the name is based on the repetition of e in the superius, or highest part.

Last year Gayle Kirkwood proposed that the Missa Mi-Mi is a musical witness to the mystical theology of Jean Charlier de Gerson, with Gerson’s understanding of Christ illustrated in the melodic and structural details of the Agnus Dei.

The third of these ingenious Masses is the Missa cuiusvis toni, the “Mass in whatever mode”, the least familiar of the three in performance and on records. Ockeghem wrote the parts without clefs; hence, depending on where the clefs are placed on the staff, the half-steps would occur in different places, and the music might be sung in different modes. In a recent edition of the Mass (1992), the entire work is printed four times, once in each of the medieval pairs of modes. According to the editor, George Houle, the Phrygian mode (modes 3 and 4) and the Mixolydian mode (modes 7 and 8) sound well, but the Dorian mode (1 and 2) and the Lydian mode (5 and 6) require so much musica ficta (accidentals added by the singers) that it is hard to imagine performers resourceful enough to sing them at sight.

After two previous recordings had omitted one or two movements, Siegfried Heinrich recorded the complete Mass, issued in 1979. On one side of the record the Mass is sung by solo voices in the Phrygian mode, and on the other side it is sung by a choir in the Mixolydian mode. The record is filled out with the Kyrie played in the Lydian mode and the Agnus Dei played in the Dorian mode. Clearly he took the same view toward the various modes as Houle does. The disc was a problem for all but experts, for the labels were reversed, confusing most listeners.

Peter Urquhart puts a different interpretation on “any mode”, since Glareanus suggests that “the tenor can begin on ut, re or mi”. Rather than choosing one of four medieval modes, Glareanus uses solmization to assign ut (do), re or mi to the first note of the Mass. This permits three different performances of the music, each of which is said to work satisfactorily (Houle would not agree that the mode on re, the Dorian, sounds well). Urquhart has recorded the Mass on ut, that is, in the Ionian mode, a mode that was unknown in the Middle Ages.

“Ockeghem is definitely the composer of his age, the towering figure. If you’re going to love Ockeghem above all other composers then you’ve got to love mathematical music. But, although I say this with some trepidation, he’s cleverer than Bach!” Peter Phillips, Classic CD, February 1997

Two other Masses are based on liturgical cantus firmi, a familiar technique in the Renaissance. A chant melody (the cantus firmus) is sung, usually in the tenor, invariably in long notes producing slow melodic movement compared to the other parts. A Mass on a cantus firmus taken from a Marian antiphon might then be sung on feasts of the Blessed Virgin. Ockeghem’s Missa Ecce ancilla Domini does not use the antiphon for the feast of the Annunciation, as Guillaume Dufay had done in one of his later Masses, but rather a melody set to the same words that occur at the end of a processional antiphon for Advent, Missus est Angelus Gabriel, still to be found in a modern edition, the Processionale Monasticum (page 246).

Ockeghem composed another Mass on a liturgical cantus firmus. This used the melisma (or extended melody) on the first syllable of the word caput, the final word in the Holy Thursday antiphon Venit ad Petrum. The first Mass constructed on this melody, composed in England, was long considered to belong to Guillaume Dufay, but it is now known to be anonymous. Ockeghem and Jacob Obrecht also composed Masses on the same cantus firmus, but Ockeghem places the cantus firmus in the lowest voice.

A cantus firmus might also be taken from a secular song. Ockeghem composed five Masses using such material, two of them based on his own songs. Missa Ma maistresse consisted of only a Kyrie and Gloria, while Missa Fors seulement (based on his chanson Fors seulement l’attente) had only Kyrie, Gloria and Credo. Another Mass, Missa Au travail suis, is based on a song that may have been written by either Ockeghem or his contemporary, Barbingant. Missa De plus en plus, the last of his Masses to appear on records but recently recorded three times, is based on a song by Gilles Binchois.

Missa L’homme armé is based on an anonymous song that furnished the cantus firmus for over thirty Masses by many notable composers from the 15th to the 17th centuries. Ockeghem and Dufay were the first to use it, perhaps in 1455. Last year Craig Wright showed that, at least in Dufay’s Mass, the “armed man” symbolized not the enemy but Christ, who in the Agnus Dei is both sacrificial lamb and victorious warrior.

Four other Masses are based on no pre-existing tune. One is the early Missa quinti toni (“in the fifth mode”) for three voices. Another early three-voice Mass is a Missa sine nomine. Another Missa sine nomine for five voices has only the first three movements, while a Credo sine nomine for four voices is an isolated movement based on Credo I, sometimes called Credo de village.

Two Masses have been much better represented on discs than the rest, the Missa Mi-Mi and the Requiem. While we know that Dufay composed a polyphonic setting of the Mass for the Dead, it has not survived, so the oldest known polyphonic Requiem is Ockeghem’s. It is not a complete setting of the texts. He set the familiar introit, Kyrie and Offertory, but for the gradual he used Si ambulem and for the tract he used Sicut cervus, two alternative texts common at the time in Franco-Flemish lands. The texts of Masses for the Dead were made uniform around the time of the Council of Trent, but in 1974 these were restored to the Graduale Romanum after centuries of disuse. The rest of the Mass would have been sung in chant, as is usually done on records.

Motets and chansons

When the published volume of motets and chansons finally appeared in Ockeghem’s Collected Works in 1992, his authorship of six motets was called undisputed, while four other motets were included as doubtful works. In fact, only four motets are entirely undisputed: Alma Redemptoris mater, Ave Maria, Intemerata Dei mater and Salve Regina I. Even the editors admit that Ut heremita solus and Vivit Dominus are grouped with them with some hesitation, and it’s worth noting that Vivit Dominus has not yet been recorded. The other pieces are Cæleste beneficium, Deo gratias, Gaude Maria and Salve Regina II, all of which have been recorded as Ockeghem’s (Deo gratias, the canon for 36 voices, has only recently been recorded by Paul van Nevel).

Ut heremita solus is a problem because only the first three words of the text exist. Who was the hermit? Several scholars have recently suggested that the hermit was St. Anthony, an abbot who lived in Egypt in the early Christian era. Anthony, of course, was the baptismal name of Antoine Busnois, who honored Ockeghem with the motet, In hydraulis, and may have been honored in return by this piece.

The final volume of Ockeghem’s Collected Works also contains, in addition to the motets, 22 undisputed chansons and four more that are doubtful. The most popular chansons in modern performance are Ma maistresse and Ma bouche rit. The most interesting of all chansons by Ockeghem is certainly Prenez sur moy, also titled Fuga trium vocum (fugue for three voices). Along with Missa cuiusvis toni and Missa Prolationum, it is one of several works that Glareanus analyzed in his treatise of 1547. David Fallows published a detailed commentary on this canon in Plainsong and Medieval Music, (volume 1, 1992, number 1). He points out that Glareanus was incorrect in calling this song a catholicon, that is, a work that could be performed in any mode. Fallows instead calls the song “a three-out-of-one canon” because the manuscript gives only one line of music, which is sung in canon by three voices in a manner that is unmistakable. At the end of the piece, Fallows says, “there is only one way to make the three cadential figures combine into an acceptable close.” Referring to the oldest surviving manuscript source of the chanson, Fallows writes: “The unambiguous economy of the Copenhagen notation is the first index of the work’s intellectual beauty.” That is to say, the notation is economical—it uses the most concise possible layout—without being ambiguous about its meaning.

The volume of the Collected Works mentioned already was the last part of a lifelong endeavor. A Croatian musicologist, Dragan Plamenac (1895–1983), wrote his doctoral dissertation on the motets and chansons of Ockeghem in 1925. He then set out to publish an edition of the works. He brought out half of the 15 Masses in 1927. The great depression and the Second World War intervened, so the rest of the Masses appeared only in 1947.