Collected Works, vol. 3, Motets and Chansons.

Johannes Ockeghem. Ed. Richard Wexler with Dragan Plamenac. (American Musicological Society Studies and Documents, 7.) Boston: E. C. Schirmer, 1992. II pls. + cxii + 107 pp. $85.

Hailed by contemporaries as "the true image of Orpheus" and one of the best composers of his day, Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1420-1497) headed the royal chapels of three successive kings of France while wielding seigneurial control over the baronies he held as tresorier of the ancient and powerful royal abbey of St-Martin of Tours. The profusion of formal elegies by jean Molinet, Josquin des Pres, Guillaume Cretin, jean Lemaire de Belges, Erasmus of Rotterdam and others lamenting Ockeghem's death in 1497 reflect the extent of renown he attained during his lifetime. Swelling to mythic proportions thereafter, posthumous legend credited Ockeghem with "reinventing" music, as Donatelto had done for sculpture, and embraced him as the "father" of modern counterpoint.

After nearly 70 years in the making, the complete works of this epical figure of Renalssance music are at last available to scholars and performers. Considering Ockeghem's relatively modest output, the edition has had an unusually protracted publication history. The volume under review, originating as musicologist Dragan Plamenac's 1925 University of Vienna dissertation on Ockeghem's motets and chansons, provided the initial impetus for the complete edition but ceded precedence of publication to two volumes of polyphonic Masses (issued in 1927 and 1947 and subsequently republished in 1959 and 1966 as "second, corrected editions"). After Plamenac's death in 1983, Richard Wexler assumed the task of completing the third and final volume, which includes ten Latin-texted motets, twenty-six secular songs, and an edition of Erasmus of Rotterdam's Naenia for Ockeghem, set to music by Johannes Lupi.

Virtually indistinguishable in appearance from its aging siblings, the third tome has been reproduced in identical folio format, typefaces, and stiff gray covers. The 112-page critical apparatus includes a master list with sigla of all the musical, literary and theoretical source of the motets and chansons, transcriptions and English translations of the texts, lists of musical variants, and short commentaries on each piece. The use of modern clefs, the reduction of the original note values by half, the barring of measures between staves, and the use of a single main source (rather than a conflation of readings) as the basis for each work, mark significant departures from Plamenac's earlier editorial procedure.

A heavy residue of scholarly mustiness clings to the critical commentary, symptomatic perhaps of its origins in a bygone musicological era. One suspects that Wexler felt constrained to reproduce Plamenac's largely completed work with as little intervention as possible. I say "suspects" because Wexler leaves us entirely in the dark about his role in the posthumous publication of the edition, a matter that he could have clarified either in the inexplicably terse, page-and-a-half preface, or in the rather lean editorial notes. A general introduction to the volume summarizing the exceedingly rich work of recent decades on the composer's life and cultural context would have been not only desirable and useful, but especially timely in anticipation of the five-hundredth anniversary of Ockeghem's death in 1997. Lengthier discussions of individual works might have been more valuable than the vertiginous arrays of undifferentiated manuscript variants, which, in the case of the bergerette Ma bouche rit (one of the hit tunes of the fifteenth century with no fewer than seventeen musical sources), fill two double-column, folio-size pages. Surely one could at least segregate crucial errors in the main source (such as the missing semi-breve rest in the superius of the same piece) from the more trivial discrepancies between manuscripts. Helpful too would have been systematic references to related musical settings based on Ockeghem's models and to the numerous citations of his music in contemporaneous poems by Molinet, Cretin and others, some of which bear on matters of chronology, intertextuality, and cultural history. The bibliography of primary and secondary sources seems, with a handful of exceptions, to stop at about 1986 and omits several germane studies and editions published in the last six years, most notably Andrea Lindmayr's Quellenstudien zu den Motetten von Johannes Ockeghem (Heidelberg, 1990). Ultimately though, the inadequacies of the volume as a state-of-the-art scholarly edition pale by comparison to the significant achievement that its long-awaited completion represents.