The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 56 of 125
Discovering Ockeghem's Requiem
During the trip when I caught my first glimpse of the sacred, I had been listening to a CD of Hildegard of Bingen. The music must have touched me more deeply than I realized, because when I returned the CD to the library I borrowed two further discs of late medieval/ early Renaissance music. I took them home and listened, though more dutifully than anything else, for they lacked the pristine clarity of St. Hildegard; and, if anything, sounded predictably churchy. However, one evening I’d had a smoke before I started to cook supper, and I put one of the discs, Ockeghem’s fifteenth-century Requiem, on the stereo as background music. I was doing something at the stove when all of a sudden I heard it. It was as though my ears had been unblocked. I took the pan off the gas and walked back into the living room to listen. At first I was just amazed by the intricacy and richness of the counterpoint, the aesthetics of the voices dancing in and out of one another; then as I continued to listen, I became increasingly fascinated by the nature of the emotion the music was expressing. I couldn’t find any adjective to describe it . . . but whatever it was, the lugubrious ecclesiastical quality had vanished. Abstruse liner notes sketched in some background. Historically Ockeghem was considered the first true master of Western polyphony. Early in the Renaissance the old medieval plainsong (where everybody sang in unison, and which I’d always called Gregorian) began to give way to new approaches to sacred music. A small number of voices, generally between four and eight, sang individual parts in counterpoint. Instruments were never used, just voices, a style that became known as a cappella. Despite the Italian, such sacred music had not originated in Italy, but in Northern Europe, in the old Low Countries, most of its first masters being Dutch, French, or Belgian.