OCKEGHEM, JOHANNES
(ca. 1420–1497). FrancoFlemish composer, active mainly in France. According to
recently discovered documents, he was born in SaintGhislain, a village near Mons in the
Belgian province of Hainaut. His career is first traced in Antwerp, where he was a singer
at the church of Notre-Dame in 1443/44. From 1446 to 1448, he was singer in the chapel
of Charles I, duke of Bourbon, at Moulins. He became a member of the French royal
chapel under Charles VII ca. 1450 and continued to serve that institution under Louis XI
and Charles VIII. Named as first chaplain in 1454, he was subsequently cited as master of
the chapel (1464) and counselor to the king (1477). In 1459, Charles VII, who was
hereditary abbot of Saint-Martin of Tours, appointed Ockeghem to the important post of
treasurer of SaintMartin. Sometime before 1472, possibly in 1464, he was ordained a
priest at Cambrai. The only journey he is known to have undertaken outside France and
the Low Countries is one to Spain in 1470. In 1484, he revisited his native country when
he and other members of the royal chapel traveled to Damme and Bruges in Flanders. He
eventually retired to Tours, where he died on February 6, 1497.
Among his pupils may have been Antoine Busnoys, a cleric at Saint-Martin of Tours
in 1465 and subsequently singer in the chapel of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy.
Busnoys honored Ockeghem in his motet In hydraulis, calling him the “true image of
Orpheus.” At Cambrai, Ockeghem met Guillaume Dufay, his greatest musical
contemporary, who in 1464 entertained him at his house. The Flemish music theorist
Johannes Tinctoris dedicated his treatise on the modes (1476) jointly to Ockeghem and
Busnoys, and in his treatises on proportions and counterpoint he cited Ockeghem as “the
most excellent of all the composers I have ever heard.” In his last treatise, De inventione
et usu musicae (ca. 1481), Tinctoris describes him not only as a distinguished composer
but as the finest bass singer known to him.
Ockeghem’s personal appearance and manner, as well as his musicianship, were often
praised by his contemporaries. Guillaume Crétin wrote a Déploration sur le trespas de
feu Okergan, praising his “subtlety” and calling on his mourning colleagues, led by
Dufay and Busnoys, to sing his music, including his “exquisite and most perfect Requiem
Mass.” The poet Jean Molinet also wrote a déploration on his death, which was set to
music by Josquin des Prez, the great master of the next generation of French composers.
An epitaphium for Ockeghem by Erasmus of Rotterdam was set by Johannes Lupi in the
16th century.
Ockeghem composed in all genres, but his most important works are his fourteen
Masses. A single Credo and only five motets by him are known, but they are each highly
individual works. Twenty-two secular songs, all but one in French, come down to us. The
exception is a Spanish song, probably a memento of his visit to Spain.
In his time and throughout subsequent centuries, Ockeghem was renowned for his
contrapuntal skill, especially in canonic writing. His masterpiece in this technique is his
Missa prolationum, consisting almost entirely of double canons at all intervals within the
octave, and in four different “prolations” (meters) simultaneously. Almost legendary in
his time was a thirty-six-voice canon mentioned by Crétin and others, the identity of
which remains controversial. His Requiem Mass, which may have been written on the
death of Charles VII (1461), is the earliest surviving example of its kind.
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