Time Will Tell

by Donald Greig

  I could quite easily imagine little Loys and little Jos meeting at St Quentin, the former already renowned and respected for having composed a piece that the choir performed occasionally, even though he was but thirteen years old, and little Jos, ambitious even at the tender age of eight, immediately jealous. Put the unaware older boy in charge of the arrogant younger one, and conflict would be the consequence.

  For anyone else, the resentments of youth have been forgotten when they became men. But Desprez never forgot. And Desprez never forgave. I never saw Desprez smile, nor did I know the sound of his laugh. If I ask myself now to describe him, all I can summon are images of darkness and anger – those piercing small eyes, his shaded complexion, and the constant concentration expressed as a scowl. He was not a happy man. In contrast, Compère was always smiling, the expression of one who does not fully understand, like a child who does not comprehend the conversation of adults. And he laughed a lot as well, like the braying of a donkey. For all that, and for all his lack of social grace, he was a man full of joy and without guile.

  Compère was to Desprez as Esau was to Jacob, the elder in possession of a birthright that the younger felt was rightfully his but which he could only gain through deception. And, even in later life, when Desprez had become the more celebrated of the two, he must have believed he had achieved fame by guile, not because of his own ability.

  There was never to be a reconciliation between them. Undoubtedly Compère would have said to Desprez, had he been asked, the same words that Esau said to Jacob: et ille habeo ait plurima, frater, mi sint tua tibi [And he said: I have plenty, my brother, keep what is thine for thyself]. But even if Compère had said it, Desprez would never have been able to accept it for thereby he would have had to acknowledge to himself his own true nature. Such wilful blindness was similarly evident in the younger’s opinion of the elder’s music: Desprez believed that Compère was the better composer. It was an opinion that only Desprez held, one that he sustained throughout his life against the force of his own reputation. He formed that view as a child, when it was undoubtedly true, but to believe it as an adult was possible only for a man who could never admit he was wrong. Thus Desprez hated himself, and his anger turned into hatred of Compère, a man who remained happily oblivious.

  Desprez was a great composer, perhaps even greater than Jehan, yet he himself never believed it. When he looked at Compère or heard his name, all he saw was an older, more celebrated figure. Yet Compère remained a child throughout his life, from his days as a choirboy to his elevated state as a composer. Little Jos? Well, he became a monster. A monster with talent.

  CHAPTER 8

  The deep, intense sleep that had overwhelmed him after breakfast was broken by the bump of the plane onto the tarmac. For a moment Andrew thought he was back at home, that perhaps he’d fallen out of bed or John had jumped on top of him. The announcement from the captain to remain seated until the seat belt signs had been turned off returned him to his prosaic surroundings; he was still on an aeroplane, the second of his three flights. His eyes were glued shut and his body felt too weary to have experienced real sleep. God, why had he done this? He could have broken the trip here in London, maybe stayed near the British Library, drunk a pint of beer and eaten fish and chips. Budget was the main reason, that and the argument he’d had with Karen when he’d announced that he would be attending the conference in Tours ‘and might fit in a trip to Paris at the same time’.

  It had come out the wrong way, as things always seemed to. What he should have said was that he would take advantage of flying all that way to do some research. A couple of days in the Bibliothèque Nationale might provide him with circumstantial evidence to prove authorship of the motet, and further biographical detail about Geoffroy Chiron whose letter accompanied it. If he’d framed his plan in terms vague enough to suggest his pursuit was a dull and necessary chore, holding little interest for him, then he might have stood a chance, but the veiled implication that he was hiding the real reason had raised Karen’s suspicions. Almost immediately he’d found himself in the middle of one of their familiar rows with its well-visited themes: his selfishness, her sacrifices, and their shared responsibility for John. The subsequent price of his lack of forethought was forty-eight hours of the silent treatment, broken only by the occasional terse instruction and heavy sighs when he failed to fulfil simple domestic tasks. He had responded in kind, conducting a loud conversation with his travel agent. ‘You’re sure I can make that connection?’ he’d asked, frowning and shaking his head. ‘Well,’ he added, sucking his teeth, ‘I suppose it will have to be like that.’ Now, halfway through his arduous journey, he felt a stab of pure hatred for his wife, which softened only slightly into angry jealousy as he thought of her sleeping soundly in their bed.

  In the musty air of Heathrow’s Terminal Four, he eased the stiffness out of his body with a gentle walk and followed the directions provided by the prim British Airways ground staff to his gate. As his final destination was Paris, the indignities

  of immigration and customs were mercifully few; he’d face more at Charles de Gaulle airport.

  To sit down would be to risk being overcome by sleep and missing his flight, so he bought a coffee and a chocolate bar then browsed the newsagents where he bought The Times and The Gramophone. Normally he wouldn’t consider looking at such a magazine, but its cover promised an article on Ockeghem and, on further investigation, he found it contained an interview with Emma Mitchell of Beyond Compère. Given that he was meeting her later that day, it seemed propitious, yet when he reached the boarding area and saw Emma Mitchell sitting there, the coincidence was less easy to dismiss. For a split second he wondered, had she come to meet him? In his tired state he was unable to immediately accept the obvious explanation: that she and her group were simply on the same plane to the conference.

  He was tempted to introduce himself, but reasoned that he was in no fit state. The ground had been shifting beneath his feet since he’d landed as if it was made from the same rubberised walkway as the travelators that had aided his journey across the terminal, and he was hardly at his best. His clothes were rumpled, his teeth un-brushed and his body limp with fatigue. He took a seat, set down his coffee, and picked up his purchases. The Times provided cover and, like a teenager hiding a pornographic magazine inside something more respectable, he opened up The Gramophone behind the newspaper. The real Emma Mitchell was sitting just twenty feet away with several other people, all of them dressed casually in jeans, jumpers and sweat-shirts. These must be the members of her group, and the photograph accompanying the interview provided the key: Susan Moore, Claire Slingsby, and Peter Merrill were sitting together, and Emma Mitchell herself was sitting next to a man whom the photo identified as Oliver Martin. Emma was smaller than Andrew had expected, gamine as the French would have it, with her short hair and elfin features. He saw her nudge Oliver Martin and point out something in her newspaper at which they both laughed. Andrew wondered if they were a couple. There was something about their body language that suggested they were, though he had no faith in his powers of observation and knew that he lacked a simple understanding of others’ motivations and behaviour. Gossip and innuendo provided most people with an appreciation of the human condition rendered in complex hues of diverse colours, yet to Andrew the emotional world was sketched in black and white. Affairs between colleagues had usually run the entire course, from desperate secret assignations to bitter dénouement, before he found out. Rivalries and long-held resentments between academics that he read as hyperbole or irrelevant diversions turned out to be evidence of intense, immature, territorial skirmishes. And tensions in his own marriage always took him by surprise. He certainly couldn’t assume, then, that Emma and Oliver Martin were a couple. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he realised this was probably the kind of easy relationship that actors and performers usually enjoyed. It was all ‘darling’ this and ‘darling’ that, wasn’t it? Perhaps this Oliver was actua
lly gay or even bisexual? He wouldn’t be surprised if they’d all slept with each other.

  He scanned the interview. It began, predictably enough, with the announcement of the Ockeghem anniversary. Suddenly he was fully awake. This was the day! This was the day and he’d forgotten it! It was the travel of course, the jetlag and the resultant confusion of time. But, yes, it was February 6th, 1997, exactly five hundred years since the death of Johannes Ockeghem. Andrew felt as if he’d betrayed the composer; today, of all days, his first waking thought should have been for him. Ironically, obsession with Ockeghem was exactly what Karen had once bitterly accused him of, and now, here he was, on his own, free to enjoy the moment and he’d forgotten. It was as if one of his parents had died and he’d forgotten to commemorate the day. He reached for a further example with which to berate himself, but all he could come up with was forgetting his wedding anniversary, something he’d done twice in five years. He made a small embarrassed noise in his throat as he remembered Karen’s reactions: the first time she’d been angry; the second, upset as she was, she had been unnervingly calm, as though she had expected it. He looked back at the article to push the thought away. There was little here that he didn’t know. It traced the original theatrical production of Beyond Compère, the transition from a stage show to a concert-giving group, and the subsequent recordings. A CD of Ockeghem would be out next month, a review of which appeared elsewhere in the magazine.

  Other than that, there was little of interest to Andrew beside Emma’s assertion that she wouldn’t necessarily devote her entire career to early music: she was still young and still developing as a musician. The only other thing that caught his eye was a constant refusal to call it ‘her group’, a refrain to which the interviewer drew attention. The group, she said, was a collection of talented individuals, not a pack of which she was the leader. They certainly didn’t need her on stage to conduct a chanson, for example. Her role, she emphasised, was very much as a programmer and researcher and, to use the term in the theatrical sense, director. Looking across at her now, her hand gently stroking Oliver’s arm, she certainly didn’t look autocratic.

  He turned to the review.

  Ockeghem Gems, Beyond Compère, cond. Emma Mitchell; 2 CDs EMI 3507, 121 minutes; Prenez sur moi, Kyrie and Agnus from Missa Prolationum, Presque Transi, Ave maria, Petite camusette/S’elle m’amera, Intemerata Dei, Tant fuz gentement, Kyrie and Agnus from Missa cuiusvis toni, Resjouy toi, terre de France, Mort tu as navré de ton dart, Requiem, Josquin des Pres, Nymphes des bois.

  1997 marks the five-hundredth anniversary of the death of Johannes Ockeghem, the great Franco-Flemish composer and the bon père to the generation of Josquin, De La Rue, Compère and Brumel. Unlike recent debates about his younger colleague, Josquin des Pres (a composer whose name was used as a designer label, slapped on second-rate material by opportunistic publishers, thereby presenting serious problems for Josquin scholars) the Ockeghem canon is fixed and finite. There have been no new additions to the repertoire for a while now – no missing masterpieces reclaimed, no hidden treasures brought to light. And Ockeghem’s music, because of this, has been much recorded; already this year we have seen three versions of his Missa De plus en plus (by The Tallis Scholars, The Orlando Consort and The Clerks Group – see Jan. 1997 pp.123–125). How, then, does a group successfully capture the old man? The answer is brilliantly given here. This is a living, breathing portrait of someone who was, by all accounts, revered and loved throughout his long life.

  Following the now usual format of Beyond Compère’s recordings, this double CD collection is in every respect elegantly designed. In addition to the thorough texts and translations provided in the beautiful 128-page booklet (the hardback covers of which house each CD), we are given incisive essays on the editions used (by Jaap van Benthem), a portrait of the composer himself complete with new biographical information (David Fallows), and a carefully argued presentation of the music by the indefatigable leader of the group, Emma Mitchell. It is she who is ultimately responsible for this musical portrait and, as she explains, the programme aims to give a sense of the man and his contribution to music history.

  To that end, the first CD interleaves the more personal chansons (if any love song that works within the conventions of courtly love can be described as personal); the motets (amongst them a brilliant interpretation of Intemerata Dei mater that captures both its derivation from some of Ockeghem’s own chansons and its more solemn, liturgical function); and movements from the Missa Prolationum and Missa Cuiusvis toni. These last demonstrate Ockeghem’s ludic bent, a fascination with musical puzzles and their solutions that is manifest throughout his oeuvre. That theme is picked up and expanded with each disc’s multimedia component. Place the CD in your computer and, while the music plays through the speakers, you can see the original notation and its modern translation side by side. This is not only a brilliant educational tool, but also great fun and I would strongly urge everyone to avail themselves of this feature.

  We have come to expect from Mitchell’s singers a dramatic flair which combines the benefits of the cool efficiency of the English choral tradition with an embrace of a more flamboyant continental sound, and both aspects are appropriately used throughout the recording with music sung mainly one-to-a-part. The recording quality is equal to the exceptionally high vocal standards and it too reflects something of the imagination shown in live performance (listen to Prenez sur moi where the stereo separation is dazzlingly extreme, a device which brilliantly illustrates the strict canon).

  The second disc is a moving meditation upon death and loss. Central to the disc is Ockeghem’s Requiem, the first extant polyphonic setting of the Requiem Mass (Dufay’s, which pre-dates it, is lost to history), probably written for the funeral of Charles VII in 1461. Mitchell, perhaps sensing the inadequacy of that historical context to illustrate the music’s emotional core, chooses to make it a requiem for three fifteenth-century composers – Binchois, Ockeghem and Josquin. The disc begins with Ockeghem’s Déploration on the death of Binchois – Mort tu as navré de ton dart – and ends with Josquin’s lament on the death of the Ockeghem himself, Nymphes des bois, and thereby reveals the development of the expressive potential in music across forty years (Binchois died in 1460). Mitchell and her group have brought Ockeghem to life in a musical essay about death: it is an essential addition to any musical collection. I must also urge the listener to explore the other fine discs that this group have produced, in particular the award-winning Josquin Can.

  Francis Porter

  Francis Porter: it would be him. His name seemed to pop up everywhere like a bad penny, and one of the most irritating things was that he was a difficult person to dislike. They’d bumped into each other on several occasions at conferences over the years and Porter was always annoyingly pleasant, encouraging, witty and personable. He wouldn’t be coming to Tours, not because he hadn’t been invited, but because he was currently on sabbatical at the University of Sydney, a ridiculously glamorous venue where Andrew enviously imagined his rival adorned with Hawaiian Leis, the kind of incongruously geographical manifestations of success with which his career seemed to be forever garlanded. As if Porter’s contribution to the world of musicology wasn’t enough, he had also effortlessly entered the elite world of the English choral tradition, which was otherwise barred to anyone who was not a United Kingdom passport holder. Active at Yale as a singer and conductor, when at Oxford he had sung with several of the college choirs and got to know many of the same singers who appeared regularly in the line-ups of early-music groups like Beyond Compère. These days he provided performance editions and programme notes and regularly appeared in the ‘Thanks to’ section of CD liner notes. At least with Porter some thirteen thousand miles away, Andrew now stood a chance of being regarded as the resident expert on reception theory at the conference.

  Porter’s review had reheated Andrew’s old enmity. He resented the condescending tone of the review, deliberately repressing for
a moment the obvious fact that a musicologist such as himself was hardly the average reader. He knew all the pieces well and understood the design of the programme with its montage of contrasting idioms and moods, the secular chansons alternating with the lengthier, intense sacred motets; he didn’t need someone to point that out to him. There was no doubting the credentials of the authors of the notes for the disc – David Fallows knew everything there was to know about fifteenth-century music and Jaap van Benthem was a highly respected editor – but the suggestion of ‘new biographical material’ was disingenuous: nothing new about the life of Ockeghem had emerged in the past twenty years.

  What annoyed Andrew in particular, though, was the argument of the second disc which, it seemed to him, Porter had deliberately amplified so as to point the listener away from Ockeghem and towards the more expressive later generation, specifically to Josquin. That was typical, thought Andrew: Josquin again. It was like his Medieval and Renaissance music course. Here he was trying to champion Ockeghem, and all people wanted to talk about was Josquin. The first piece, Mort tu as navré de ton dart, was Ockeghem’s lament on the death of Binchois. That was fine as far as it went; it was a piece that should be on the disc, not just because it was a great piece but because it showed Ockeghem’s musical debt to Binchois. Then came Ockeghem’s Requiem Mass. So far, so good. But then came a piece by Josquin, his Nymphes des bois, the lament on the death of Ockeghem. That damn piece! If it wasn’t so beautiful, then maybe Ockeghem would be remembered in his own right and not because someone else wrote a piece about him. If Ockeghem year was going to be hijacked by Josquin, then Andrew might as well give up now.