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Prenez sur moy: Okeghem's tonal pun

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

David Fallows
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Extract

Just fifty years after Okeghem died, apparently as a very old man, Glareanus published a massive treatise entitled Dodecachordon (1547). In the last chapter, which Glareanus describes as an afterthought, he discusses the skill of certain composers, using mostly canonic works as his examples. Among them is Okeghem's three-out-of-one canon Prenez sur moy, which Glareanus describes as a ‘catholicon’. It is a song that has caught the imagination of many commentators over the centuries. Composed before c. 1470, it was presented and discussed by five music theorists of the sixteenth century and reprinted as late as 1594 – a matter that gives it a longer continuous career than any other polyphonic song of the fifteenth century. But therein lies the problem. Later writers added details that they thought would clarify the music but which only confused the issue.

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Articles
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Plainsong & Medieval Music , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , April 1992 , pp. 63 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 Levitan, J., ‘Ockeghem's Clefless Compositions’, The Musical Quarterly, 23 (1937), pp. 440–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with an admirably full listing of earlier references, to which the reader can refer for the publications mentioned earlier in this paragraph. Dahlhaus, C., ‘Ockeghems “Fuga trium vocum”’, Die Musikforschung, 13 (1960), pp. 307–10.Google Scholar Reese, G., ‘Musical Compositions in Renaissance Intarsia’, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2 (Durham, NC, 1968), pp. 74–97.Google Scholar Besseler, H. and Gülke, P., Schriftbild der mehrstimmigen Musik, Musikgeschichte in Bildern 3/5 (Leipzig, 1973), pp. 126–7.Google Scholar See also Urquhart, P. W., ‘Canon, Partial Signatures, and “Musica Ficta” in Works by Josquin Des Prez and his Contemporaries’, Ph.D dissertation, Harvard University (1988), pp. 93–8.Google Scholar My comments have further benefited from the generosity of Leeman L. Perkins in sending his as yet unpublished paper ‘Okeghem's Prenez sur moi: Reflections on Canons, Catholica, and Solmization’, and that of Richard Wexler in sending the relevant section from his forthcoming edition of Okeghem's songs and motets – along with extensive comments on my own first draft. I must also thank Lawrence Bernstein for some thoughtful observations and Jaap van Benthem, who gave me a copy of his own transcription of the piece and shared his ideas about its structure.

2 Copenhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, MS Thott 291, 8°, f. 39v: facsimiles of the page are published in Besseler and Gülke, Schriftbild, and in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 9, col. 1829. Ottaviano Petrucci, Canti C numero cento cinquanta (Venice, 1504[NS]), f. 167v; there is a published facsimile of the entire book (New York, 1978), and one of just this piece in Trois chansonniers français du XVe siècle, ed. Droz, E. et al. (Paris, 1927), p. 115.Google Scholar The Mantua intarsia, dated c. 1506-8, is in Isabella d'Este's grotta nuova in the Palazzo Ducale: facsimiles in Droz, Trois chansonniers, pl. 2, Reese, ‘Musical Compositions’, pl. 4, and (much better) in Scherliess, V., Musikalische Noten auf Kunstwerken der italienischen Renaissance (Hamburg, 1972), pl. 65–6.Google Scholar

3 Its text is a more cavalier conflation of the three available sources: the single stanza in Copenhagen and the full texts in the Chansonnier de Rohan (ed. in Löpelmann, Martin, Die Liederhandschrift des Cardinals de Rohan (Göttingen, 1923), p. 359)Google Scholar and the British Library manuscript Lansdowne 380 (ed. in Wallis, N. Hardy, Anonymous French Verse (London, 1929), p. 124).Google Scholar It would go well beyond the scope of this paper to explore the text and its underlay problems (fascinating and intricate though they are); I merely mention that the disposition of the text here is determined not by the single underlaid source (Copenhagen) but by the phrase structure of the line, as viewed in the context of other songs of the time.

4 Dahlhaus, C., ‘Zu einer Chanson von Binchois’, Die Musikforschung, 17 (1964), pp. 398–9.Google Scholar Caldwell, J., Medieval Music (London, 1978), pp. 236–8.Google Scholar Slavin, D., ‘Binchois’ Songs, the Binchois Fragment, and the Two Layers of Escorial A', Ph.D dissertation, Princeton University (1988), pp. 178–82.Google Scholar Jeppesen, K., La Frottola, II, Acta Jutlandica 41/1 (Aarhus and Copenhagen, 1969), pp. 14–16.Google Scholar

5 Fallows, D., ‘Johannes Ockeghem: the Changing Image, the Songs and a New Source’, Early Music, 12 (1984), pp. 218–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar: see pp. 223–5; see also Montagna, G., ‘Johannes Pullois in Context of his Era’, Revue beige de musicologie, 42 (1988), pp. 83–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar: on pp. 103–4. On the contrary ascription of L'omme banny to Fede, see my comments in Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu, ed. Thibault, G. and Fallows, D. (Paris, 1991), pp. CIII–V.Google Scholar

6 Clefless composition continued long after Prenez sur moy: among the most famous later examples in Josquin's lament for Okeghem, Nymphes des bois, as it appears in the Medici Codex, see The Medici Codex of 1518, ed. Lowinsky, E. E., Monuments of Renaissance Music 3-5 (Chicago, 1968), no. 46Google Scholar; moreover it seems to me that the precedent of Prenez sur moy, as I interpret it here, strongly supports the pitch-level proposed in Jaap van Benthem's edition (apparently on the basis of a hint from Jean-Pierre Ouvrard) in ‘The Scoring of Josquin's Secular Music’, Tijdscrift van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 35 (1985), pp. 67–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar: on pp. 70–72. Others may disagree with my summary of earlier clefless compositions, because it is hard to be sure whether a piece is actually clefless or whether the scribe simply left out the clef when copying it (as, for example, Hartmann Schedel so often did when copying his own song collection). Perhaps the earliest clefless composition is Ciconia's Quod jactatur, which still seems to defy solution: see the edition and commentary in The Works of Johannes Ciconia, ed. Bent, M. and Hallmark, A., Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century 24 (Les Remparts, Monaco, 1985), no. 46Google Scholar: its three sharps, three flats and three clefs could well be direct ancestors of the three sharps, three flats and three implied clefs of Prenez sur moy.

7 Dahlhaus, , ‘Ockeghems “Fuga trium vocum”’, p. 309Google Scholar, seems to have reached the same conclusion, though his argument then moves off in a different direction.

8 It is presented a fourth lower in the two most recent publications: Miller, C. A., Heinrich Glarean, Dodecachordon: Translation, Transcription and Commentary, Musicological Studies and Documents 6 (American Institute of Musicology, 1965), vol. 2, p. 532Google Scholar; and Miller, . Sebald Heyden, De arte canendi: Translation and Transcription, Musicological Studies and Documents 26 (American Institute of Musicology, 1972), p. 52.Google Scholar In the earlier of these Miller gave no key-signature, which is surely wrong and results in some uncomfortable outlines; but in his Heyden edition he gave a signature of one flat to each voice – thereby effectively agreeing with what I propose here.

9 Glareani ΔΩΔEKAXOPΔON (Basle, 1547), p. 454.Google Scholar

10 Miller, , Heinrich Glarean, p. 277.Google Scholar

11 Jeffrey Deane draws my attention to Housman's, A. E. edition of Lucan, Belli civilis libri decem (Oxford, 1926), p. xxxGoogle Scholar, where there is a passing comment on ‘the editors and commentators of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, among whom Sulpitius appears to deserve most respect and Glareanus least’.

12 In Greek the word is an adjective meaning ‘universal’ or ‘general’. The substantival use of the neuter is in accordance with normal Greek practice, and it was adopted in medieval Latin in the sense of ‘dictionary’.

13 Urquhart, , ‘Canon, Partial Signatures, and “Musica Ficta”’, p. 97.Google Scholar

14 The pioneering discussion of this as concerns fifteenth-century music is Treitler, Leo, ‘Tone System in the Secular Works of Guillaume Dufay’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 18 (1965), pp. 131–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Readers of that article might be warned, however, that many of the numerical references to Dufay songs are wrong by one digit, apparently as a consequence of rearranging the list at a late stage in the article's preparation.