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.
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