FIG. 12-3 Autograph copy of Busnoys’s self-referential motet Anthoni usque limina (Brussels, Bibliothèque Royal Albert I, MS
5557, fol. 48 v). The first pair of words in the first line of the text (ANTHONI USque limina ...—“Anthony, you who to the
furthest bounds... ”)—and the last pair of words in the last line (Fiat in omni BUS NOYS—“that understanding may come to
all”) contain a rebus of the composer’s name.
Busnoys also put his formidable linguistic, musical, and architectonic skills to work in praise of his
great contemporary and mentor. The motet In hydraulis (“On the Water organs”), written sometime
between his stay at Tours and his patron’s accession to the ducal throne in 1467, compares Ockeghem
with Pythagoras and Orpheus, musicians of mythological stature. The motet is built over a pes, a
repetitive tenor phrase in three notes (OC-KE-GHEM?) that is put through a series of transpositions that
collectively sum up all the Pythagorean consonances (Ex. 12-1a). This whole complex of repetitions,
moreover, which may be regarded as the color of the motet, is put through four complete repetitions, each
of them under a different mensuration sign; the resulting speeds are calibrated to reproduce the same
Pythagorean proportions—in another musical dimension, so to speak.
Ockeghem is actually named at the beginning of the second major section of the motet, and the phrase
containing his name is turned into a musical emblem through a series of canonic entries (Ex. 12-1b). With
its pes and its significant use of imitation and voice exchange, In hydraulis might be looked upon as a
distant, university-educated descendant of the old Sumer Canon.
EX. 12-1A Antoine Busnoys, In hydraulis, tenor layoutEX. 12-1B Antoine Busnoys, In hydraulis, beginning of secunda pars (point of imitation on “haec Ockeghem”)Ockeghem returned the compliment in the form of an even more elaborate motet called Ut heremita
solus (“Lonely as a hermit”), of which the text has been lost, but whose incipit seems to combine a
reference to Busnoys’s hermit patron saint with an encomium, loneliness often being a trope for eminence