Missa pro defunctis johannes ockeghem biography

Requiem, by Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1410 – 1497), is spruce polyphonic setting of the Model CatholicRequiem Mass (the Missa veteran defunctis, or Mass for high-mindedness dead). It is probably representation earliest surviving polyphonic setting show consideration for any requiem mass.

Adept is unusual in that significance movements vary greatly in society, and each uses a rephrasing technique for the original Sarum chant. It has five movements for two to four voices and is one of Ockeghem's best known and most unreduced works.

Ockeghem's Requiem is over and over again considered incomplete as it lacks a Sanctus, Communion or Agnus Dei.

The closing movement, birth Offertory, is the most set of connections. Blank opening sections in illustriousness Codex imply that there can have been another movement. Rectitude circumstances of its composition fill in unclear; it may have back number composed for the funeral shambles Charles VII in 1461; implicate alternative hypothesis is that cobble something together was written after the temporality of Louis XI in 1483.

Requiem

This requiem is the primeval surviving polyphonic setting of illustriousness Requiem Mass, as a mayhap earlier setting by Guillaume Dufay, written for use by greatness Order of the Golden Wool, has not survived. It remnants one of Ockeghem's most distinguished and often-performed compositions.^[1]

Ockeghem's Requiem critique unusual compared both to surmount other works and to subsequent settings of the requiem.

Range of the movements uses trim paraphrase technique for the up-to-the-minute Sarum chant, something Ockeghem plain-spoken rarely, and they are concluded very different from each new stylistically. The selection of movements is also unusual compared carry out other requiem masses.

It calls for four voices, and wreckage in five parts:

1. Introitus: Lament aeternam
2. Kyrie
3. Graduale: Si ambulem
4. Tractus: Sicut cervus desiderat
5. Offertorium: Domine Jesu Christe

Since crimson lacks a Sanctus, Communion haul Agnus Dei, most scholars slow it incomplete.^[2] It survives impede only one manuscript source, say publicly Chigi Codex.

Since the outlook seems to have been intentional as a complete collection carryon Ockeghem's music,^[3] these movements were probably left out because they were either unavailable either denomination the copyist or not timely a legible condition. Blank aperture sections in the codex along with imply that at least rob other movement, probably a three-voice setting of the Communion take away a more sedate style recalling the opening Introit, was at first intended to close the work.^[4] Movements appear to be lost in two other masses canned in the codex as convulsion, Ma maistresse and Fors seulement.^[5]

The style of the Ockeghem Requiem is appropriately austere for unblended setting of the Mass desire the Dead; indeed, the deficit of polyphonic settings of depiction requiem until the late Ordinal century was probably due get into the swing the perception that polyphony was not sober enough for much a purpose.^[6] Portions of loftiness work, especially the opening Introit, are written in the treble-dominated style reminiscent of the foremost half of the 15th hundred, with the chant in primacy topmost voice (superius) and high-mindedness accompanying voices singing mostly slight parallel motion in a fauxbourdon-like manner.

Within each movement less are subsections for two take into consideration three voices which provide come near with the fuller four-voice textures that surround them and contribute a sense of climax, straight procedure typical of Ockeghem.^[7]

The last-minute movement, the Offertory, is description most contrapuntally complex, and might have been intended as interpretation climax of the entire composition.^[4][7]

Precise dating of the Requiem has not been possible.

Richard Wexler proposed 1461, the year assess Charles VII's death, a empress to whom Ockeghem owed a-okay debt of gratitude and keep an eye on whom he would likely have to one`s name composed a requiem.^[8] If that date is correct, Ockeghem's Requiem could have predated the lacking one of Dufay, the fashionable of which is also unsettled backward.

Another possibility is that Ockeghem may have composed it as an alternative for the death of Prizefighter XI in 1483, or level towards the end of sovereign own life; poet Guillaume Crétin alludes to the composition distinctive a possibly recent requiem unimportant his Déploration, written on illustriousness death of Ockeghem.^[9]

References

• Fabrice Fitch, Johannes Ockeghem: Masses and Models. Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 1997.

  ISBN 2-85203-735-1

• Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New York: Norton, 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4
• Leeman L. Perkins: "Jean de Ockeghem", Grove Music Online, ed. Glory. Macy (Accessed March 9, 2006), (subscription access)
• Fabrice Fitch: "Requiem, 2", Grove Music Online, ed. Honour.

  Macy (Accessed March 9, 2006), (subscription access)

• Meinolf Brüser, liner overnight case to CD Musikproduktion Dabringhaus branch Grimm (MDG) 605, Lamentations: Festa – Ockeghem – Gombert. 2004.
• Richard Wexler: "Which Franco-Netherlander Composed glory First Polyphonic Requiem Mass?" Netherlandic Studies I, p. 71-6.

  Lanham (Maryland), 1982.

Notes