Blue Heron’s Project to Record Ockeghem Songs

courtesy of Naxos of America

At the beginning of this past November, the Blue Heron vocal ensemble, based in the Boston area and directed by Scott Metcalfe, released the first volume in its project to record the complete songs (chansons) of Johannes Ockeghem. That entire collection is relatively modest, suggesting that only two CDs will be required to cover the canon; and, according to the accompanying booklet, the project will be completed with the release of a second CD in 2022.

The author of Ockeghem’s Wikipedia page describes him as “the most famous composer of the Franco-Flemish School in the last half of the 15th century.” That author situates him in the middle of a “holy trinity” of composers of early Renaissance counterpoint, preceded by Guillaume Dufay and followed by Josquin des Prez. As is the case with all three of these composers, the compositions of sacred music occupied far more time than that allocated for secular chansons. I was therefore somewhat surprised to discover that this was my first recording devoted entirely to Ockeghem’s music; and, unless I am mistaken, my only recording with any Ockeghem on it is the Brilliant Classics Requiem anthology.

While the Blue Heron terminology refers to the selections on this album as “songs,” my personal scholarship inclines me to prefer the noun “chanson.” This is not so much because the texts being set are in French as it is that, among early music scholars, the noun “chanson” tends to be used to refer to songs in the French language that are usually polyphonic and secular. “Song,” on the other hand, is more likely to connote a single voice, possibly with instrumental accompaniment.

Thus, the “progress” of music history across that “trinity” of Dufay, Ockeghem, and Josquin may best be traced in the advance of more and more elaborate approaches to the composition of polyphony. From that point of view, having recordings that cover the entire canon of Ockeghem’s chansons plays a valuable role in orienting the listener to a particular Renaissance style, just as listening to a complete collection of one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s pedagogical collections (such as The Well-Tempered Clavier) orients the listener to keyboard practices during the early eighteenth century.

During the late Sixties and early Seventies, much of my collecting of vinyl records drew me to music of both the Medieval and Renaissance periods (due, in no small part, to the Musical Heritage Society). Repeated listening oriented me to the ways in which different practices defined different periods in music history. In addition, however, the more familiar I was with a particular track, the more I began to appreciate the relationship between music and verbal rhetoric in secular vocal compositions.

This would be my long-winded answer to a question that I suspect has occurred to at least some readers: “Why should I devote much time listening to music that I may never hear in performance?” The shorter answer is that appreciative listening has less to do with any specific piece of music and more with how our approaches to listening adjust to compositions from different historic periods. From that point of view, Ockeghem is representative of a specific period in the Renaissance era that appeals to its own set of “listening strategies.” In that contextual perspective, Blue Heron has provided a valuable resource for cultivating those strategies.