Prenez sur moy: Okeghem's tonal pun

Abstract

Just fifty years after Okeghem died, apparently as a very old man, Glareanus published a massive treatise entitled Dodecachordon (1547). In the last chapter, which Glareanus describes as an afterthought, he discusses the skill of certain composers, using mostly canonic works as his examples. Among them is Okeghem's three-out-of-one canon Prenez sur moy, which Glareanus describes as a ‘catholicon’. It is a song that has caught the imagination of many commentators over the centuries. Composed before c. 1470, it was presented and discussed by five music theorists of the sixteenth century and reprinted as late as 1594 – a matter that gives it a longer continuous career than any other polyphonic song of the fifteenth century. But therein lies the problem. Later writers added details that they thought would clarify the music but which only confused the issue.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.