Ockeghem, Johannes

 (? 1420-1496)

Franco-Flemish composer, the most important composer of his generation in the Netherlands school that dominated early Renaissance music.

 Possibly a pupil of the eminent Netherlands-school composer Gilles Binchois, Ockeghem served as composer and choirmaster to three French kings: Charles VII, Louis XI, and Charles VIII. At his death, a Déploration (lament) was composed by his pupil (according to tradition), Josquin Desprez, and a lament by the philosopher Erasmus was set to music by the French composer Johannes Lupi.

 Ockeghem's masses, motets, and chansons (secular part-songs) show great skill at counterpoint based on melodic imitation. One of his 14 surviving masses, the Missa Prolationum, is intricately constructed from canons—the most exacting form of imitation—throughout. Another, the Missa cuiusvis toni, is written on staves without clefs—it is capable of being transposed to any mode.

He is said to have written a motet for 36 voices, although this is now lost, but his setting of the Missa pro defunctis, the Requiem Mass, is the first setting of that text to have survived (an earlier one by Dufay is lost).

 About 10 of his motets and 20 of his chansons are still extant, probably only a small part of the output that made him the most internationally renowned composer of his generation.