(as in “it’s lonely at the top”). The tenor of Ockeghem’s motet is based on a six-note pes (AN-THO-NI-
US BUS-NOYS?), to realize which requires solving an immensely difficult puzzle. (Compliments, at this
rarefied, snooty level, are often hard to distinguish from challenges.) Most telling of all, its opening puts a
variant of the same phrase that had carried Ockeghem’s name in Busnoys’s motet through another series of
imitative voice exchanges (Ex. 12-1c).
EX. 12-1C Johannes Ockeghem returns the compliment to Busnoys in Ut heremita solusBesides Tinctoris’s encomia to them, and their encomia to one another, there is further evidence in the
surviving musical sources of the fantastic prestige that these composers achieved, and the veneration in
which Ockeghem particularly was held. By all odds the most beautiful musical manuscript of the fifteenth
century is a priceless presentation volume that contains Ockeghem’s virtually complete collected sacred
works and some of Busnoys’s as well. It was commissioned in 1498 from the foremost scriptorium in
Europe—the Flanders workshop of Pieter van den Hove, known as Petrus Alamire (“Peter A-above-or-
below-middle-C”)—as a memorial to the just-deceased Ockeghem by a courtier to the French king
Charles VIII, the son and grandson of the composer’s chief patrons. The intended recipient was possibly
Philip I (the Handsome) of Spain, the son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian by Mary of Burgundy,
Busnoys’s former employer. It was purchased by Agostino Chigi (KEE-jee), a great arts patron, for the
collection of the rapacious Spanish pontiff, Pope Alexander VI (father of the notorious Cesare and
Lucrezia Borgia). From there it went into the Vatican library, of which it is now one of the prize holdings.
Fig. 12-4 shows a typically lavish opening from this manuscript, now called the Chigi Codex. The music
shown is by Ockeghem, whose name appears at the upper left.
In addition to the superstars Ockeghem and Busnoys, Tinctoris’s cast of characters included several
other important contemporary Franco-Burgundian or Franco-Flemish composers. Johannes Regis (d.
1496) served as Du Fay’s secretary at Cambrai during the last decade of the older man’s life. Caron,
whose first name is never given in the musical sources and is consequently uncertain (Tinctoris calls him
Firminus, but there are archival references to a Philippe Caron as well), most likely trained at Cambrai
under Du Fay and served the Burgundian court alongside Busnoys. Guillaume Faugues is known mainly by
his works and by Tinctoris’s references to him. Documents suggest that he received his early training at
the cathedral of Bourges, France’s second city under Charles VII and Louis XI, in the early 1460 s.
The composers named thus far are not known to have visited Italy, but only Ockeghem’s career is well
enough documented to preclude the possibility of an Italian sojourn. Even in their physical absence,
though, their music was widely circulated and performed in southern Europe, as Tinctoris’s wide and
deep knowledge of it already attests. Their works, and the works of many lesser French and Flemish
masters, make up the bulk of the repertory preserved in the massive choirbooks that were copied during
the reign of Pope Sixtus IV (1471–84) for use at his newly built and consecrated personal worship hall,
the celebrated Sistine Chapel. These choirbooks survive to this day in the Vatican library. In 1472,
Ockeghem received a personal communication from Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza in Milan requesting
help in recruiting French singers for his chapel. Several important composers of the early sixteenth
century (among them Loyset Compère) who were too young to be noticed by Tinctoris, and who will
therefore figure in a later chapter of this book, had their professional start in the Milanese court chapel
choir around this time, possibly at Ockeghem’s recommendation.