Ockeghem Today, for 3 Trumpet, 4 Horn, 3 Trombone, 1 Tuba, SCORE

Brass Ensemble (3 Trumpet, 4 Horn, 3 Trombone, 1 Tuba)

3:45

Ockeghem Today was originally the first of three movements but is now freestanding. It was inspired by a lovely description in an early edition of Grout's The History of Western Music: "Ockeghem gives us a dense texture, without any clear phrase breaks, where all the free voices weave complex arabesques of sound around the cantus firmus and around each other. The music becomes an endless flow of melodies, seamless and seemingly beyond rational analysis reinforced by the character of Ockeghem's melodic lines, which are spun out in long-breathed phrases, in an extremely flexible rhythmic flow much like that of melismatic plainchant, with infrequent cadences and few rests." I wrote a kind of music which seemed to fit Grout's description of the music, without attempting to replicate Ockeghem's pitch or rhythmic procedures. Commissioned and premiered by the Walker Chapel Brass in Evanston, Illinois, Don Lovejoy, conductor.