a postscript to volume ii of the "collected works" of johannes ockeghem

A Postscript to Volume II of the "Collected Works" of Johannes OckeghemAuthor(s): Dragan PlamenacSource: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring, 1950), pp. 33-40Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/829847 .

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A Postscript to Volume II of the Collected Works of Johannes Ockeghem

BY DRAGAN PLAMENAC

THE steady progress of musicological research necessitates revising

and improving upon statements and findings even in publications of re- cent date. The purpose of these lines is to point out a few instances in which newly acquired knowledge can be brought to bear on statements made in the second volume of Ockeghem's Collected Works, edited by this writer and published in 1947 by the American Musicological Society.

One of the instances in question is that of the identification of the cantus firmus forming the basis of the various 15th-century Missae Caput, including the one by Oc- keghem. This problem had eluded many a historian until Manfred Bukofzer hit upon the solution and disclosed the results of his investiga- tions in a paper read last summer at the Congress of the International Society for Musicology at Basel.

Another case of belatedly acquired knowledge concerns the first of the two chanson settings of the Au travail suis melody, published in 1927 in Volume I of Ockeghem's works, as a supplement to the composer's Mass of the same name.' The setting was printed there under the name of Barbinguant (Barbireau), to whom it is ascribed in the Dijon Chansonnier. In publishing it I failed to refer to a second source, the Wolfenbiittel Chansonnier (Ms. Extravag. 287), in which the setting is anonymous. This oversight was

corrected by a note added to the introduction of Volume II (p. xl), in which the variants found in the Wolfenbiittel source were supplied. A description in an auction catalogue of the London firm of Sotheby & Co., issued a few months before the war broke out in Europe,2 drew my attention to a manuscript previously unrecorded in musicological literature, the Nivelle de La Chauss6e Chansonnier, and to the fact that the

manuscript contained a chanson set-

ting of Au travail suis ascribed to

Ockeghem himself. But as the manu-

script vanished during the war years and its whereabouts was unknown, I was unable to ascertain the extent of

relationship between the Nivelle version and the one in Dijon and Wolfenbiittel. During a trip to

Europe on a Guggenheim Fellow-

ship in the summer of 1948, I suc- ceeded in tracking down the elusive chansonnier and was able to establish that the setting of Au travail suis in the Nivelle manuscript, although bearing an attribution different from that in Dijon, is identical with the setting found in the two sources al- ready known. When preparing Vol- ume III of the Ockeghem edition- for publication it will therefore be necessary to account for this new source, in which the piece appears as the work of the composer who wrote the Mass that is built on the same melody and in illustration of which I published the chanson in Volume I

1No. 3a, P. 42. 2Sale of March 7, 1939, Lot 358A, Cat. pp. 49-50.

33



34 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

as the work of another man.3 With- out prejudice to the question whether this particular setting is the work of Ockeghem or Barbireau, it should be noted that Ockeghem on occasion composed polyphonic chansons on melodies that he used also as cantus firmi in polyphonic masses. Thus he wrote both polyphonic chanson settings and masses on csntus firmi such as Fors seulement and Ma maistresse.

At the end of the Editorial Notes to the Ockeghem masses published in Volume II are listed, on pp. xxxviii-xl, several Mass compositions that "have not been preserved, and of the ex- istence of which we know only from quotations in theoretical works and other reports." Among the works listed is included, under No. 5 on page xl, a Patrem De Village by Ockeghem, reported by Fetis to have been copied in I475.4 There are strong indications, however, that the piece survives and is actually the in- dependent Credo Sine nomine published in the same volume under No. 12. The various Credos designated by the name "De Village (Vilayge)"-- in the first place, those contained in Petrucci's Fragmenta Missarum of 1g5oS-are all composed on Gregorian Credo I,5 and this peculiarity seems to account for their common designation. The reason for this designation remains obscure. To be sure, while all Credos De Village seem to be composed on Gregorian Credo I, by no means all polyphonic Credos based on Gregorian Credo I are referred

to in the sources as Credos De Village. As has been noted on p. xxx of Vol- ume II, Ockeghem's Credo Sine nomine is based on the Gregorian melody in question. Should it prove true that it is identical with the Pat- rem reported copied in 1475, this fact would give us an important clue in attempting to establish the chronol- ogy of Ockeghem's works, with a view to reaching further conclusions concerning the evolution of his style. This clue would be all the more val- uable as it has hitherto been possible to date works by Ockeghem only in the rarest instances.

One of the most interesting compositions in the volume-although very dubious so far as Ockeghem's authorship is concerned-is the Missa Pour quelque paine, published under No. 16. As stated in the Editorial Notes, p. xxxiv, the Mass appears in Brussels Ms. 5557 with an extremely questionable and apparently spurious ascription to Ockeghem, whereas in Codex Sist. 51 of the Vatican Li- brary the author's name is given as "Cornelius Heyns." Furthermore, whereas in the Brussels source the Mass is found under the title Pour quelque paine-a title corroborated by an anonymous three-part chanson setting with complete text in Paris, Bibl. Nationale, Ms. nouv. acq. fr. 4379-it appears in the Sistine codex as Missa Pour quoy.

The name of Cornelius Heyns does not recur in any other musical source. The technical perfection of the work, however, arouses our curiosity about the identity of its author. M. Charles Van den Borren, in discussing this Mass," reports finding, in the historical literature, men- tion of a Cornelius Heyns as suc- centor at the Church of St. Donatian

8That this setting of Au travail suis is attri- buted in Nivelle to Ockeghem is all the more interesting, since the manuscript contains two other chansons ascribed elsewhere to Bar- bireau. Of these two pieces, one (Esperant que) appears in Nivelle under the name of "Barbingant", while the other (L'omme banny) is anonymous. ',Biographie universelle, 2nd edition, VI, p. 364. 5Liber usualis, Desclee edition (I947), p. 64.

*Etudes sur le 15e sidcle musical (Antwerp, 1941), p. 200.



Collected Works OF JOHANNES OCKEGHEM 35 at Bruges in the course of the period I452-65.7 On the other hand, it has been privately suggested to this writer that the Cornelius Heyns of Cod. Sist. 5I may have been identical with a singer by the name of Corne- lius referred to in a letter addressed on March 24, 1484 by Duke Hercules of Ferrara to his ambassador to the Florentine court and mentioned in L. N. Cittadella's work on the history of Ferrara.8 In this letter, the Duke orders the ambassador to find "Corne- lius, who used to be our singer and now resides there [i.e., in Florence]," and enjoins him to have Cornelius send immediately to the Duke "Philip- pon's9 new Mass upon L'honrme arm3." Cittadella then cites another letter, dated August 27 of the same year and addressed "ad Cornelium Laurenti cantorem." Cittadella inter- prets these words as giving the singer's family name; however, it seems to this writer that they mean, instead, "to Cornelius, singer [in the service] of Lorenzo [de' Medici, il Magnifico]," who, as is well known, had surrounded himself at that time with an impressive array of Italian and foreign artists of every description. In this second letter, the Duke extends his thanks to Cornelius for having sent him an unidentified Mass by Jacob Obrecht. And in 1489, again according to Cittadella, Corne- lius sent to the Duke a new batch of presumably Franco-Flemish masses and chansons.

In all this evidence there is nothing to indicate that Cittadella's Corne- lius was not only a singer and pur- veyor of foreign musical works to

Duke Hercules, but also a composer in his own right. Compositions by "Cornelius" and "Cornelius Gallus," respectively, appear in the MSS Greifswald, Universitits-Bibliothek, Et I33, and Leipzig, Thomaskirche, 49 (L i), along with pieces by Isaac, Obrecht, Josquin, and younger com- posers.'- There is nothing, however, that would compel us to link these compositions with Cittadella's Corne- lius rather than, say, with "Cornelius de Veye" of Mus. Ms. 3154 of the Munich Staatsbibliothek, or some other composer with the same given name who might be known to us from musical or literary sources. I am inclined to maintain, therefore, that any attempt to identify Corne- lius Heyns with Cittadella's "singer Cornelius" must remain a matter of pure conjecture as long as our knowledge of archival sources continues to be as scanty and contradictory as it is at present.

But let us return to the discrepancy found in the title of the Mass in the two sources. Since the work is un- questionably built on the same tenor that forms the basis of the Paris chanson cited above, the discrepancy has been bound to appear extremely puzzling. Referring to it in -his Etudes, M. Van den Borren for- mulated the question, "As for the incipit Pour quoy found in the codex belonging to the Vatican Library, was it the result of an error or of travesty?" without, however, finding an answer to it. Beset by similar doubts, I suggested, in publishing the work, that the interval of a rising fourth, which appears at the beginning of the tenor of the Mass as well as of Pierre de la Rue's chanson Pour quoy non, may have "induced the copyist of the Cappella Sistina manu-

'A. C. de Schrevel, Histoire du Seminaire de Bruges (Bruges, 1895), I, pp. 155ff. 8Notizie amministrative, storiche, artistiche re- lative a Ferrara (Ferrara, 1868), I, p. 716. OProbably identical with Philippe Basiron. Philippon's Mass was published recently by Dr. Laurence Feininger in the series Monu- menta Polyphoniae Liturgicae.

"oJ. Wolf, Handbuch der Notationskunde, I, Pp. 451-52.




script to consider both tenors identical."ll This was tantamount to as- suming an error on the part of the scribe. Discarding my earlier sugges- tion, I now believe that I have found at least a partial solution of this little problem, a solution that eliminates both "error" and "travesty."

On fol. LVIIII'-LX of Codex B. 2439 of the Florence Conservatory of Music-the well-known "Basevi manuscript" frequently cited by Am- bros in Volume III of his History and described in detail by de Burbure in I882-we find a three-part chanson ascribed to "Allexander," in which the Superius has the text incipit Pour quoy tant, whereas the two lower parts, called "Superon" and "Bassus," have the incipits Pource quel paine and Pour quel paine, respectively. It will be clear at first glance that the opening phrase of this setting by Alexander Agricola closely resembles that of the tenor of the Mass and of the anonymous chanson Pour quelque paine in Paris, n.a.f. 4379, although the melody is altered, in the Agricola setting, by the sub- stitution of diminished duple time for the original triple time. How- ever, the similarity cannot be traced beyond a few of the opening meas- ures. In the further course of the composition, the melody, if present at all, is treated so freely that it ceases to be recognizable. Interesting, on the other hand, is the fact that all three voices begin in imitation with a statement of the slightly modified Pour quelque paine melody, no matter whether the text is "Pour(ce) quel paine," as it is found in the two lower parts, or "Pour quoy tant," as it reads in the Superius.

This brings us to the subject of so- called "double chansons." In his

article on the Mellon Chansonnier,12 Manfred Bukofzer refers to such pieces and points out the difference between a real "double chanson," which "makes use of the melodies and words of two entire chansons simultaneously," and a quodlibet, which "strings together fragments of many compositions successively." Agricola's chanson under discussion does not fall into either of these two categories, but combines an inte- grated polyphonic organism in imitative style, built upon one single melody, with two different texts, one in the two lower parts of the composition, the other in the Superius. It is not a real double chanson, for it does not make use of two distinct pre-existing melodies; but it is a bi- textual one [see example].s3

nJ. Ockeghem, Collected Works, II, p. xxxiv, footnote 38.

12"An Unknown Chansonnier of the 5sth Cen- tury," in The Musical Quarterly, XXVIII (1942), p. 20. 11in Ockeghem's Petite camusette we find an example of still another variety of the double chanson, which stands somewhere midway between the real double chanson and the bi- textual chanson as exemplified in Agricola's composition. In Ockeghem's piece the music begins with an imitative statement of the Petite camusette melody in all four parts, while in three of the most authoritative sources giving the full text-the Dijon, Wolf- enbiittel and Nivelle Chansonniers-the Super- ius has different words, beginning with "S'elle m'amera je ne scay." After stating the initial notes of the Petite camusette tune, however, the music of the Superius abandons any further close relation to the other voices and em- barks on a course of its own. Thus, it is very likely that the Superius in the Ockeghem piece was added to a pre-existing organism consisting of the three lower voices and that the initial quotation of the Petite camusette melody was introduced into the Superius with the sole purpose of achieving a semblance of integration. This view receives support from the fact that in the three chansonniers giving the full "S'elle m'amera" text in the Superius the initial breve of the melody, which in the lower voices accommodates the first syllable "Pe" (in "Petite"), is split in the Superius into two semibreves, in order to accommodate the extra syllable in "S'elle." In the Mellon Chan- sonnier. the text of all four parts opens with the words "Petite camusette," their proper continuation, however, being promptly aban- doned in the Superius, the words shifting to the



Collected Works OF JOHANNES OCKEGHEM 37 S'elle m'amera text. Since the initial words "Petite camusette" were retained in the Super- ius in this particular source, there was no need here to split the initial breve. This disposition might have been an expedient adopted by the copyist of the Mellon Chansonnier in order to link the Petite camusette tune, even in the

Superius, with its rightful initial words, while switching to "S'elle m'amera" when the music ceases to warrant such a combination. As will be gathered from what has been said, Bukof- zer's statement about the Mellon version of Petite camusette (op. cit., p. 47) is not en- tirely correct and requires some amendment.

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Collected Works OF JOHANNES OCKEGHEM 39

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Agricola's chanson with double text, in our opinion, furnishes a clue to the correct solution of the puzzling discrepancy between the titles of the Missa Pour quelque paine in the two sources. As has been said, the work is undoubtedly built on the tenor that is faithfully preserved in the Paris chanson, and there is only a remote relationship between the form in which the tenor melody appears in the Mass, on the one hand, and in the Agricola setting, on the other. Nevertheless, Agricola's chanson testifies to the simultaneous ex- istence of both texts in the same composition. It is probable, therefore, that the Missa Pour quelque

paine appears in Codex Sist. 51 under the guise of a Missa Pour quoy simply because in Agricola's chanson -or possibly in some other setting still unknown to us and conforming more closely to the original shape of the tenor melody-the Superius is found with a different text, "Pour quoy tant." It is like finding a work under the name Missa Petite camusette in one source, and under the title Missa S'elle m'amera in another, because the latter text is substituted for the former in the Superius of Ockeghem's chanson setting of that popular melody.

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a postscript to volume ii of the "collected works" of johannes ockeghem

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