JOHANNES OCKEGHEM – Missae cuiusvis toni & prolationum

Both as composer and person, Johannes Ockeghem remains an enigmatic figure to us today. His surname refers to a small village, Okegem, in eastern Flanders, where the name appears as early as the 13th century. Yet payment documents from St. Martin’s church in Saint-Ghislain in Henegauen near Mons, some 25 kilometres from Okegem, show that our composer was born there and that a mass was endowed to his memory, celebrated up until the French revolution of 1789.
We do not know when Ockeghem was born, but the fact that he wrote a mass ­based on the tenor of a chanson by the famous composer Gilles de Binche, ­‘Binchoys’, together with an impressive Lamento in remembrance of him, may suggest that ­Ockeghem received his musical education in Mons (in today’s Belgium), where ­Binchoys held the post of organist of Ste Waudru from 1419 to 1423 and with which he remained in contact until his death.