to what he knew and we don’t, namely the earlier author’s identity.
They show dragons—dragons galore. In the bottom panel at left there is a huge dragon fighting with a
centaur. At right there are two more dragons, one of which sports a grotesquely elongated neck that draws
extra attention to its strangely maned head. A fourth dragon, in the lower right margin, is reduced to just a
head emerging from a hellish cauldron.
Dragons’ heads—what do they mean? Any fifteenth-century astrologer or navigator would have
known. The Dragon’s Head (Caput Draconis, now called Alpha Draconis), the topmost star of the
constellation Draco, was the ancient polestar. The actual term “Caput Draconis” mysteriously appears at
the head of the first appearance of the cantus firmus of the original Caput Mass in its most recently
discovered source, a Dutch manuscript now in Italy, unknown to scholars until 1968. This manuscript, or
one with a similar label on the cantus firmus, must have served the scribe who copied (or more to the
point, the artist who decorated) the Vatican manuscript as his exemplar or copy-text. That scribe or artist
seems to have interpreted the phrase “dragon’s head” literally.
Or maybe not: the big dragon at bottom left is fighting with a centaur, and Centaurus, containing Alpha
Centauri, the closest star to earth and one of the brightest in the sky, is another major constellation. For
those in the know, what better way could there be than this—a visual pun linking the cantus firmus of this
magnificent Mass with a bright heavenly orb—for evoking the great figure known to his contemporaries
as “an astrologian, a mathematician, a musitian, and what not”? On the basis of the astrological reference,
scholarly suspicion has begun to fall on none other than John Dunstable (who, as it happens, did
habitually use the term “Tenor secundus” for what later composers called “Contratenor bassus”) as the
author of the original Caput Mass.^2
FIG. 12-6 An old sidereal map of the constellation Draco. Andrea Cellarius, Harmonia Macrocosmica (Amsterdam, 1708), plate
24: Hemisphaerium stellatum boreale antiquum (The Ancient Constellations of the Northern Hemisphere).THE COMPOSER AS VIRTUOSO
Ockeghem’s emulation of the original Caput Mass, whoever its author may have been, certainly shows
him to have been inclined toward tours de force, for which the French, as we know, had a longstanding
predilection. The most famous tours de force in all of fifteenth-century music, in fact, are a couple of