FIG. 12-2 Ockeghem and his choir, depicted ca. 1523 in a manuscript from Rouen (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Fonds
Français 1537, fol. 58 v).
A famous manuscript illumination from around 1523 (Fig. 12-2) perhaps fancifully depicts Ockeghem
(by then dead a quarter century) and his chapel choir. The great composer—famous for his deep voice and
so advanced in age when he died that his official court eulogist, the poet Guillaume Crétin, lamented his
not reaching a round hundred years—must surely be the burly, bespectacled figure in the right foreground.
The most valuable historical evidence in this picture is the placement of the choristers’ hands, visibly on
the music rack and palpably on one another’s shoulders. The singers are not touching one another out of
camaraderie alone: as contemporary writers confirm, their hands were busily employed in physically
transmitting the tactus beat. As we will see, Ockeghem wrote some music that kept his singers’ hands
quite full.
Busnoys (d. 1492), whose name suggests that he may have come from the town of Busnes in northern
France, was Ockeghem’s counterpart (and Binchois’s successor) at the court of Burgundy, where he
served as “first singer” to Charles the Bold (d. 1477), the last of the Burgundian dukes. As Ockeghem may
have been a pupil of Binchois, so Busnoys may have received instruction from Ockeghem at Tours, where
Busnoys served briefly during the 1460 s, before joining the household of the future Duke of Burgundy.
(Charles the Bold and Louis XI, Ockeghem’s patron, were bitter enemies; between 1467 and 1477, one
may say with confidence, the two composers had few opportunities to meet.) After Charles’s death,
Busnoys remained in service to his patron’s daughter Mary of Burgundy (who was also the niece of the
English King Edward IV). Her death in 1484 extinguished the Burgundian dynasty. There is evidence that
Busnoys now retired to the Belgian city of Bruges, becoming cantor at a parish church that was
occasionally patronized by the Archduke (later Holy Roman Emperor) Maximilian, Mary’s widower.
Busnoysis perhaps the earliest major composer from whom autograph manuscripts survive, so that we
know how he personally spelled his surname (often routinely modernized in the scholarly literature to
Busnois). In a motet to his patron saint and namesake, the fourth-century Egyptian recluse St. Anthony
Abbot, Busnoys worked his name into an elaborate multilingual pun that depends on the spelling with y to
make (Greek) sense (see Fig. 12-3). Having received a master’s degree (possibly at the University of
Paris), Busnoys loved to show off his erudition—in particular, his familiarity with Greek—in little ways
like this. And he was by no means exceptional in this quirk; the fifteenth century was one of those times
when intellectual attainments and cerebral virtuosity were considered appropriate in an artist.