Johannes Ockeghem

Johannes Ockeghem was born around 1410 at Saint-Ghislain in the County of Hainaut, a region now in Belgium. Nothing is known of his childhood, but he probably received the usual choirboy training in the churches of that land of musicians. The first certain record shows him in 1443 as a singer at the cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp. He was famed for his magnificent, very deep bass voice, which may have shaped his taste for low lines in his music.

Around 1446 he entered the service of Charles I, Duke of Bourbon, at Moulins. Then, around 1451, he joined the chapel of King Charles VII of France, which he never left: he served three successive kings, Charles VII, Louis XI and Charles VIII, for more than forty years. He became first chaplain and then master of the royal chapel. These years coincided with the end of the Hundred Years’ War in 1453 and the rebuilding of the kingdom.

Royal favour brought him a large income. In 1459 Charles VII appointed him treasurer of the abbey of Saint-Martin de Tours, one of the richest religious institutions in the country, of which the king himself was abbot. From then on Ockeghem lived mainly in Tours, near the royal residences of the Loire Valley. Louis XI also entrusted him with missions: in 1470 he travelled to Spain, probably on diplomatic business. He met Du Fay in Cambrai in 1462 and 1464, and the two masters held each other in deep esteem.

His output is smaller than that of some contemporaries — about fifteen masses, a dozen motets, some twenty songs — but extraordinarily original. Ockeghem loved long melodic lines that seem never to stop, dense textures in which voices intertwine without obvious cadences, and low registers that give his music a dark, deep colour. He extended the range of polyphony downwards, writing for basses of unprecedented depth.

He was also a master of musical puzzles. His Missa prolationum is a true tour de force: each movement is a double canon in which the voices sing the same melody at different speeds. In the Missa cuiusvis toni, the “mass in any mode”, the music can be sung in several different modes depending on the clefs the singers choose. His Requiem is the oldest surviving polyphonic mass for the dead. He is even credited with a Deo gratias in thirty-six voices, though the attribution is doubtful.

His French songs, such as Fors seulement and Ma bouche rit, were known all over Europe. On the death of his friend Gilles Binchois in 1460 he composed the lament Mort, tu as navré de ton dart, starting a tradition: composers would now write musical laments to mourn their masters. Ockeghem also trained, directly or indirectly, a generation of musicians, and theorists constantly cite his name as a model.

He died in Tours on 6 February 1497 at a great age. His death prompted a wave of tributes: Josquin des Prez wrote the famous Lament on the Death of Johannes Ockeghem, on a poem by Jean Molinet calling his pupils to mourn. The poet Guillaume Crétin also wrote a long complaint. Long judged too learned or too abstract, Ockeghem is now recognised as one of the greatest polyphonists in history, and his spellbinding music moves many listeners.