Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

was experienced as a reward. To which it only need be added that like any trobar clus, the Masses of
Ockeghem, chaplain to the French royal court under three successive kings of the Valois dynasty, were
expected suitably to adorn, and in a sense to create, elite occasions. Intricacy of design and facture
(“makery,” as the French untranslatably put it) was one means of fulfilling this expectation.

Yet ever since the sixteenth century, when the Swiss music theorist Henricus Glareanus (Burney’s
chief source of knowledge about “Okenheim”) illustrated the composer’s work exclusively with these
bizarre technical tours de force, Ockeghem has had a reputation for cold calculation that has rubbed off,
until quite recently, on his whole era. “These compositions,” Burney sniffed, “are given rather as
specimens of a determined spirit of patient perseverance, than as models [worthy] of imitation. In music,
different from all other arts, learning and labor seem to have preceded taste and invention, from both
which the times under consideration are still very remote.” As long as Ockeghem and his contemporaries
were judged by an impressive but unrepresentative sample of their work, the verdict stood. Implicit in
that condescending (mis) appraisal is a caution for anyone who would attempt to understand, let alone
judge, the past on the basis of its fragmentary remains.

FARTHER ALONG THE EMULATION CHAIN

Obrecht’s Missa Caput continues the emulatory line begun by Ockeghem and does so in a way that
demonstrates with special clarity the composer’s high consciousness of the tradition in which he was
participating. He pays tribute to the founder of the dynasty by citing, at the beginning of his Gloria (Ex.
12-9a), the phrase that begins every movement of the original English Caput Mass (compare the
beginnings of Ex. 12-9a and Ex. 12-9b). Such phrases, called “headmotives” or “mottos,” were one of the
most conspicuous devices through which composers spotlighted the formal unity of their music, a unity
that was meant to rub off propitiously on the elite ritual occasions their music adorned.

EX. 12-9A   Jacobus Obrecht,    Missa   Caput,  Gloria, mm. 1–5

EX. 12-9B   Original    Missa   Caput,  opening phrase

Obrecht also    shows   his awareness   of  Ockeghem’s  Mass    by  carrying    farther the special technical