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Authors: Donald Greig

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Ockeghem Gems
, Beyond Compère, cond. Emma Mitchell; 2 CDs EMI 3507, 121 minutes;
Prenez sur moi
, Kyrie and Agnus from
Missa Prolationum
,
Presque Transi
,
Ave maria
,
Petite camusette/S'elle m'amera
,
Intemerata Dei
,
Tant fuz gentement
, Kyrie and Agnus from
Missa cuiusvis toni
,
Resjouy toi
,
terre de France
,
Mort tu as navré de ton dart
,
Requiem
, Josquin des Pres
, Nymphes des bois.

1997 marks the five-hundredth anniversary of the death of Johannes Ockeghem, the great Franco-Flemish composer and the
bon père
to the generation of Josquin, De La Rue, Compère and Brumel. Unlike recent debates about his younger colleague, Josquin des Pres (a composer whose name was used as a designer label, slapped on second-rate material by opportunistic publishers, thereby presenting serious problems for Josquin scholars) the Ockeghem canon is fixed and finite. There have been no new additions to the repertoire for a while now – no missing masterpieces reclaimed, no hidden treasures brought to light. And Ockeghem's music, because of this, has been much recorded; already this year we have seen three versions of his
Missa De plus en plus
(by The Tallis Scholars, The Orlando Consort and The Clerks Group – see Jan. 1997 pp.123–125). How, then, does a group successfully capture the old man? The answer is brilliantly given here. This is a living, breathing portrait of someone who was, by all accounts, revered and loved throughout his long life.

Following the now usual format of Beyond Compère's recordings, this double CD collection is in every respect elegantly designed. In addition to the thorough texts and translations provided in the beautiful 128-page booklet (the hardback covers of which house each CD), we are given incisive essays on the editions used (by Jaap van Benthem), a portrait of the composer himself complete with new biographical information (David Fallows), and a carefully argued presentation of the music by the indefatigable leader of the group, Emma Mitchell. It is she who is ultimately responsible for this musical portrait and, as she explains, the programme aims to give a sense of the man and his contribution to music history.

To that end, the first CD interleaves the more personal chansons (if any love song that works within the conventions of courtly love can be described as personal); the motets (amongst them a brilliant interpretation of
Intemerata Dei mater
that captures both its derivation from some of Ockeghem's own chansons and its more solemn, liturgical function); and movements from the
Missa Prolationum
and
Missa Cuiusvis toni
. These last demonstrate Ockeghem's ludic bent, a fascination with musical puzzles and their solutions that is manifest throughout his
oeuvre
. That theme is picked up and expanded with each disc's multimedia component. Place the CD in your computer and, while the music plays through the speakers, you can see the original notation and its modern translation side by side. This is not only a brilliant educational tool, but also great fun and I would strongly urge everyone to avail themselves of this feature. 

We have come to expect from Mitchell's singers a dramatic flair which combines the benefits of the cool efficiency of the English choral tradition with an embrace of a more flamboyant continental sound, and both aspects are appropriately used throughout the recording with music sung mainly one-to-a-part. The recording quality is equal to the exceptionally high vocal standards and it too reflects something of the imagination shown in live performance (listen to
Prenez sur moi
where the stereo separation is dazzlingly extreme, a device which brilliantly illustrates the strict canon).

The second disc is a moving meditation upon death and loss. Central to the disc is Ockeghem's Requiem, the first extant polyphonic setting of the Requiem Mass (Dufay's, which pre-dates it, is lost to history), probably written for the funeral of Charles VII in 1461. Mitchell, perhaps sensing the inadequacy of that historical context to illustrate the music's emotional core, chooses to make it a requiem for three fifteenth-century composers – Binchois, Ockeghem and Josquin. The disc begins with Ockeghem's
Déploration
on the death of Binchois –
Mort tu as navré de ton dart
– and ends with Josquin's lament on the death of the Ockeghem himself,
Nymphes des bois,
and thereby reveals the development of the expressive potential in music across forty years (Binchois died in 1460). Mitchell and her group have brought Ockeghem to life in a musical essay about death: it is an essential addition to any musical collection. I must also urge the listener to explore the other fine discs that this group have produced, in particular the award-winning
Josquin Can
.

Francis Porter

Francis Porter: it would be him. His name seemed to pop up everywhere like a bad penny, and one of the most irritating things was that he was a difficult person to dislike. They'd bumped into each other on several occasions at conferences over the years and Porter was always annoyingly pleasant, encouraging, witty and personable. He wouldn't be coming to Tours, not because he hadn't been invited, but because he was currently on sabbatical at the University of Sydney, a ridiculously glamorous venue where Andrew enviously imagined his rival adorned with Hawaiian Leis, the kind of incongruously geographical manifestations of success with which his career seemed to be forever garlanded. As if Porter's contribution to the world of musicology wasn't enough, he had also effortlessly entered the elite world of the English choral tradition, which was otherwise barred to anyone who was not a United Kingdom passport holder. Active at Yale as a singer and conductor, when at Oxford he had sung with several of the college choirs and got to know many of the same singers who appeared regularly in the line-ups of early-music groups like Beyond Compère. These days he provided performance editions and programme notes and regularly appeared in the ‘Thanks to' section of CD liner notes. At least with Porter some thirteen thousand miles away, Andrew now stood a chance of being regarded as the resident expert on reception theory at the conference.

Porter's review had reheated Andrew's old enmity. He resented the condescending tone of the review, deliberately repressing for a moment the obvious fact that a musicologist such as himself was hardly the average reader. He knew all the pieces well and understood the design of the programme with its montage of contrasting idioms and moods, the secular chansons alternating with the lengthier, intense sacred motets; he didn't need someone to point that out to him. There was no doubting the credentials of the authors of the notes for the disc – David Fallows knew everything there was to know about fifteenth-century music and Jaap van Benthem was a highly respected editor – but the suggestion of ‘new biographical material' was disingenuous: nothing new about the life of Ockeghem had emerged in the past twenty years.

What annoyed Andrew in particular, though, was the argument of the second disc which, it seemed to him, Porter had deliberately amplified so as to point the listener away from Ockeghem and towards the more expressive later generation, specifically to Josquin. That was typical, thought Andrew: Josquin again. It was like his Medieval and Renaissance music course. Here he was trying to champion Ockeghem, and all people wanted to talk about was Josquin. The first piece,
Mort tu as navré de ton dart
, was Ockeghem's lament on the death of Binchois. That was fine as far as it went; it was a piece that should be on the disc, not just because it was a great piece but because it showed Ockeghem's musical debt to Binchois. Then came Ockeghem's Requiem Mass. So far, so good. But then came a piece by Josquin, his
Nymphes des bois
, the lament on the death of Ockeghem
.
That damn piece! If it wasn't so beautiful, then maybe Ockeghem would be remembered in his own right and not because someone else wrote a piece about him. If Ockeghem year was going to be hijacked by Josquin, then Andrew might as well give up now.

He looked up from his magazine to see Emma and her group picking up their bags. The plane was boarding. In the light of
Ockeghem Gems,
his original plan looked misconceived. If Emma Mitchell could do this to Ockeghem, then maybe she wasn't to be trusted with the
Miserere mei
? She'd probably want him to prove that it was by Josquin. Perhaps he should offer the motet to someone else?

He finished his coffee and slid his magazine and paper into his briefcase, careful not to crease any of the pages of the transcription he'd made during the night. It was all there, carefully protected in its blue folder. For the third time in less than eighteen hours he handed his boarding pass to an attendant and stepped into an aluminium tube. The colour scheme was depressingly recognisable: antiseptic white with red-and-blue trim, the practised ‘Welcome on board, sir' as stale as the recycled air. His spirits were low. Suddenly he felt tired and very alone, full of doubt, and he wished he'd apologised to Karen. He needed her.

It was the same tortuous progress to his seat that he'd experienced on the first flight, with each person trying to cram too much luggage into the overhead lockers. He sighed and then realised he was standing next to Emma Mitchell who was seated in an aisle seat. He looked down just as she looked up and she smiled slightly at him. Without intending to, his face registered recognition. Panicked, he held out his hand. ‘Andrew Eiger. We're meeting later.'

She looked confused, then laughed. Her hand was small, the handshake quite definite, so much so that it hurt him. He remembered the lacerations in the palm of his hand, which was now throbbing slightly.

‘Oh, yes,' she said, smiling. ‘At the conference. I'm sorry. Of course. You're on the same flight then?'

‘Yes.' It was all he could think to say. ‘Um, later then? At the conference? Or after the concert, as we said?'

‘Yes. After the concert. We'll all be going out for a meal, so do join us. The concert's in the Cathedral, but I'll see you at the conference, won't I?'

‘Yes, I know,' he said. He hadn't meant to be so forceful or defensive and realised that for some reason he wanted to impress her. He was, much to his surprise, a little star-struck, or maybe just unprepared for a meeting that seemed to have begun without him knowing it.

‘I'm looking forward to seeing what you have for us, by the way,' she said. ‘It sounds very intriguing, whatever “it” is. Will you be talking about it at the conference?'

‘Er, no. Just talking about the reception of Ockeghem's music at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The usual stuff, you know? The way that people see Ockeghem as mathematically inclined – more of an intellectual than an artist. It's a myth we need to destroy.'

He'd clicked into academic mode, now more relaxed and in control. He wanted to know where Emma stood on Ockeghem and had deliberately thrown in the final line as a challenge. She made some small gesture to him, a flick of the finger towards the back of the aircraft. Was she suggesting they go to the back of the plane and talk about it? He looked in the direction she was pointing and realised that she was trying to tell him that the aisle was now clear and he was holding up his fellow passengers.

‘Oh. Yes. See you later then,' he said, taking his cue and moving forward.

‘Are you being picked up at the airport?' asked Emma quickly.

‘No. Getting the train.'

‘We might be able to give you a lift. The organisers are picking us up in a minibus. If there's room, you can come with us if you like?'

By now the pressure of people behind him had propelled him three rows forward and he nodded to her as he was herded towards the back of the plane. She seemed nice enough, he thought, even attractive. But, as a performer she was probably used to smiling for the camera and putting on her best face; he wasn't going to fall so easily for her charms and surrender control of the manuscript until he was certain he could trust her. Still, a lift to the conference would save him a lot of time and energy. It would be door-to-door and would avoid the complications of getting into Paris, onto a train, then from the train station at Tours to the conference. He was prepared to sit on the floor of the van if necessary.

He tucked his briefcase under the seat in front of him. He wanted his new transcription to be within sight at all times and didn't want to surrender it to the chaos of the overhead bins. In many ways this most recent result of his labours, an edition from which modern singers could easily perform, was surplus to requirements and it made him nervous. His guiding principle had been to cover his tracks with each new version, immediately consigning the earlier model to the shredder. Now three copies of the motet existed, which meant three times the possibility that someone else could stumble on his treasure. At his feet lay two and at home, in the safe-box bought from Staples expressly for the purpose
,
lay the first transcription he'd made in the library six months ago. The real manuscript, of course, still lay in the library in Amiens. He would destroy one of the copies in his briefcase when he got to Tours; he couldn't take the risk.

He closed his eyes and thought back to that glorious moment six months ago. He'd been alone at the time, conducting archival research, something he hadn't done since the first year of his Ph.D. when he'd spent a summer foraging through documents in the Bibliothèque Nationale, a comparatively simple pursuit in that it required of him only a working knowledge of modern French, his main realm of enquiry being microfiched reviews of concerts and the private papers of various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musicologists. Last year's archival research in Amiens was considerably more difficult and demanded knowledge of Latin, medieval French, and a great deal of patience. It was prompted by intellectual fashion rather than a spirit of unquenchable historical enquiry. Several important discoveries had recently been made about the singer-composers of the fifteenth century, in particular work on Ockeghem, Busnois and, of course, Josquin, and primary research had made a comeback, replacing fashionable theorising that had for a while occupied centre stage. Andrew had little time for the arcane posturing of poststructuralism, which he deemed to be about as useful as sticking a model of Chartres Cathedral in a wind tunnel to test its aerodynamic properties. In his opinion, such theoretical agendas were shrill, repetitious, incomprehensible and ultimately self-defeating. If you were going to deconstruct music and make the author explode in a cloud of critical smoke, then what was there left to talk about? So he had welcomed the revival of first-hand research and decided that he should do some himself. The trouble was that he didn't know how to do it or where to begin.

That hole in his education raised the spectre of ridicule by his peers. He couldn't exactly go to, say, Leeman Perkins at Columbia and ask him how you got to read through the records of Chapter meetings at the Cathedral of St Gatien at Tours. Besides which, Perkins had already done it. And he couldn't ring up, say, Craig Wright at Yale and ask him on which shelf he could find the documents that described Dufay's order for wine, made when Ockeghem had stayed with him.

The second problem was choosing the focus of his enquiries. The obvious place was Tours, but he'd heard that a young French researcher had spent five years working on the archives there under the sponsorship of the Centre d'Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (Université François-Rabelais, Tours) – a typically long-winded and typically French soubriquet, thought Andrew. He had picked the composer Jean Mouton and spent his time in Amiens in much the same way as he'd submitted his vague application for research funding, ticking a series of boxes whilst framing a loose and hopeful description of his project's aims. That Amiens had no Ockeghemian connections was a good thing; it showed that he was moving beyond his narrow realm of specialisation. And focusing on a composer from a slightly later generation was a logical progression. He'd always liked Mouton's music and would base his research around the period when he had been master of the choirboys in 1500. Some three years after Ockeghem's death, he knew the immediate historical background and thus saved himself time and effort. And, he discovered, Amiens had good rail links to Paris, so, if the place turned out to be a dump, he could easily return to France's political and cultural capital.

And so, in September of 1996, Andrew had arrived at the Gare d'Amiens and headed directly to the Cathedral of Notre Dame in the centre of the city. It was a hot day so he hadn't wasted any time pondering the lopsided towers, the elaborately sculpted portals or the polychromatic façade, plunging instead into the interior's welcoming chill. He was early for his meeting with the archivist at the West Door and, although architecture was not his real interest, he'd sat down on a chair at the back of the building to take in its shape and proportions. It was a classic Gothic design – the Nave, the Crossing with the Transept, the Choir, and then the Apse, beyond it the Ambulatory – the ceiling sweeping high overhead, the eye guided there by the numerous columns that ranged towards the east end. Tourists were speaking in low voices, the sound of their steps bouncing off the stone floors up into the vaulted arena. To Andrew, such buildings always suggested spaceships, huge vehicles that would carry the faithful upwards to heaven, and in many ways that's exactly what they were, but the uncertainties of human faith were of no interest to him. The sentiments of aspiration and glorification expressed in the architecture, from the shape of the cross described by the Nave and Transept to its leaping vertical articulation, were secondary to his narrow enquiry: the music and its realisation. He didn't notice the intricate inlaid black-and-white tiling in the floor and the daunting maze traced at the centre of the Nave.

The librarian, an elderly stooped man, barrel-chested and wheezy, was right on time. He shook Andrew's hand, immediately launching into an enthusiastic and detailed description of the building. Andrew's heart sank. All he wanted to do was to get his hands on the Cathedral records and establish his own private, leisurely routine. The careful, loving narrative woven by the archivist held no interest for him, and he offered occasional grunts, not so much as an acknowledgement of the procession of interesting facts but more to indicate polite disinterest. The closer they got to the area where the choir would have sung, the more disappointed Andrew became. Instead of stories of the singers and composers, he was regaled with an account of the fire that had destroyed the first cathedral and the subsequent rebuilding in the thirteenth century. At one point, when the old man mentioned the archives, he looked up – but again it was only the historical context that was being sketched, in this case another fire that had destroyed Cathedral records in 1218. Fire, the archivist had said, chuckling: it's as if God was trying to tell us something. When he had finally suggested that his visitor might now want to see the Chapter records, Andrew quickly agreed, but he was further detained when his host, looking upward to the Rose Window in the South Transept, declared that no one should come to Amiens Cathedral without learning its most valuable lesson. There, in the intricate circular design of the stained glass, was a palimpsest of Egyptian, Greek, Roman and medieval European mythology. Described in the image of the wheel, an idea common to all of those cultures, were meditations on the universal themes of fate and fortune. One could not rely on anything, the old man intoned: life was a constant movement from success to failure and back again; what went around came around. Andrew mechanically traced the patterns that the old man outlined with his index finger whilst privately fuming at the delay in his schedule. His ears pricked up only when mention was made of Boethius, a major figure in medieval musical theory, before he realised that the archivist had begun a lengthy exposition on the role of Fortune in
The Consolation of Philosophy
. He switched off again. The old man must have finally sensed his impatience; quite suddenly he announced that he would not show the young musicologist the exterior of the South Transept, before adding that Andrew should not leave Amiens without studying it. There are two sides to every story, the librarian remarked cryptically, and what was shown in the Christian images within the Cathedral was challenged by the exterior design. Andrew nodded eagerly but he could tell from the barely disguised exasperated sigh that the old man had finally understood that Andrew had no interest in the superstitious and irrational medieval mind.

Amiens Cathedral maintained its own archive, unlike almost all other French
départements
where the task of storing valuable, historical documents was the province of regional government. Andrew was shown to a small room and was solemnly advised of the special dispensation that he had been granted, along with its associated responsibilities. At long last, he was left on his own to begin combing the annualised minutes of the Chapter meetings.

Over what remained of that day and the next, he patiently drew up a list of common abbreviations used for payments and quantities, but without a medieval French-English dictionary to hand he stumbled frequently. The handwriting, perhaps neat enough at the time, was haphazard, and for the first few hours all but indecipherable. The mystique of history that the ancient books initially offered soon faded. The white gloves that he was required to wear to protect the parchment became an annoying second skin, and the increasing carelessness with which he handled the heavy books told its own story of his dwindling commitment to the project. At first he obeyed the archivist's instructions and carefully turned over each page with both hands, but soon he began flipping them over as he would a reference book in a library, causing the books to creak and crack in protest like an arthritic great-uncle.

Only the hope of discovering a reference to Mouton, or perhaps the name of a composer who till now had no known associations with Amiens, sustained him in his dull hunt through the records. There were precious few of the former and none of the latter, and he was forced to conclude that the records held no valuable secrets. Having read several articles by other academics that cited amusing infringements of proper behaviour in church, he'd expected more. There was nothing new here, nothing that hadn't been more engagingly and wittily described in similar accounts of behaviour in the Sistine Chapel, and the Cathedrals of Notre Dame in Paris and Cambrai.

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