Johannes Ockeghem - Missa Caput

Sounds approximately a minor third higher than score

Missa Caput
Composer: Johannes Ockeghem (ca. 1410 - 1497)
Performers: Laudantes Consort, dir. Guy Janssens

0:00 Kyrie
3:43 Gloria
10:15 Credo
18:08 Sanctus
25:41 Agnus Dei
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" [...] in his part-writing, [Ockeghem] abandoned the usual practice of privileging one of the voices, traditionally the tenor which, in the Catholic liturgy, symbolized the word of God. This is probably the reason why, in listening to Ockeghem’s music, our impression is less that of a precise religious context than that of a wider mystical experience.

Everything in Ockeghem’s music contributes to this end. Whereas his predecessors had introduced frequent cadences3 in their writing, Ockeghem does away with them, all the better to develop long
melodic lines, apparently self-generated, progressively unfurling their rapturous arabesques like the flowing waves of an endless stream, tranquil and yet forceful, infinite and profound. All monotony is artfully avoided through subtle variations of the vocal texture and rhythmic structures. Indeed, these characteristics make Ockeghem’s polyphony one of the most difficult to interpret adequately.

The Missa “Caput” is a good example of these characteristics. Composed on an existing cantus firmus which Ockeghem uses as head-motif for its different sections (thus the term “caput”: head), the music flows naturally, in a shimmer of sparkling vowels sustained by “soaring rhythms which carry the soul into the highest spheres of prayer, contemplation and adoration” (according to the Belgian musicologist, Charles Van den Borren).

[...]

In the works he composed in the latter part of his life, Ockeghem abandoned all stereotypes such as the gregorian chant or pre-existing popular melodies and created his own musical themes. Here again, we have the manifestation of the growing sense of the individual which pervades the general evolution of XVth century society.

Last but not least, it is fitting to emphasize what is probably Ockeghem’s greatest contribution to the future of European music: he was the first composer - or perhaps one of the first, but certainly the most renowned - to introduce a new expressive process which was to become universal in the centuries to come: the musical illustration of the text. For example: he writes a succession of ascending notes on the words “Et ascendit in coelum”, descending notes on “Sedet” and places
the words “Pleni sunt coeli” in the higher register of each type of voice.

This expressive process - as naïve as it may seem - was to become one of the most important factors in the profound musical revolution when European composers largely abandoned the liturgical stereotypes to adopt the far more subjective profane texts of the great lyrical poets at the turn of the XVIth and XVIIth centuries."

Source: CD booklet
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