Josquin’s lament for Ockeghem is both poignant and personal, arcane and transparent, retrospective and prophetic. The notation of the motet in the Medici Codex of 1518, the earliest to include Jean Molinet’s French text, presents only black notes and no clefs, no signatures, and no voice designations. It must be the original notation. The black notes signify death and mourning; the absence of clefs and mensural signs is reminiscent of Ockeghem’s musical puzzles. The use of a pre-existing chant, Requiem aeternam , the Introit of the Mass for the Dead, deceptively heralds a traditional structural tenor, but it does not control Josquin’s conception. Indeed, Josquin notates it in the tenor at its well-known pitch on F (Mode VI) but thrusts it downward by a semitone to a mournful Hypophrygian mode on E by his verbal direction: “To avoid quarrel and strife, take [it] a semitone lower.” And Josquin modifies the chant rhythmically to fit into his harmonic framework. It may be no coincidence that the resulting mode is the same as Ockeghem’s Missa Mi mi and Intemerata Dei mater. Josquin may also have added a personal note about Ockeghem since the following line does not appear in Molinet’s published poem or in Susato’s later print of the motet: Doct, elegant de corps et non point trappe (“Learned, elegant in stature and not at all stout”).

The conception is essentially homophonic with restrained and dignified melodic phrases and clear textual declamation, all supported by a succession of simultaneous sonorities, later called harmony. This texture is enriched by imitation and repetition, most notably with exquisite elegance in the interlocking sequences of descending thirds where leading composers of the new generation are called to mourn the loss of their “good father.” The repeated musical section leads to a plagal cadence and final on E, avoiding a definitive Phrygian cadence and, perhaps, extending the resolution into eternity. EH