Ockeghem: Missa Prolationum

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Recommended: Contribution of pythagoras and plato

Through the history of music, everything has changed drastically as the years pass. Music had a complete different structure in its early years to the one we know today. The writing was different, the language was different, the instruments were different, etc. Nevertheless, music has evolved through the different time periods to finally become what we know today. Each historical moment had different beliefs and of course that was reflected in the arts, the sciences and many other things. The Renaissance is a historical moment in which the influence of ancient cultures and therefore early philosophers as Pythagoras and Plato was very important; for that reason, the structure of music, as almost everything else in the moment, took its basis from the mathematical ratios and proportions.

Nevertheless, These proportions had a strong relation to others disciplines as art and architecture, but there was also a strong, evident relation with the planets’ movements as stated by Pythagoras and later developed by other philosophers, mathematicians, and musicians like Plato and, as we have mentioned through the whole essay, Kepler. Therefore, this relation explained before between the ratios of the musical scales and mathematical ratios that can be found in every single aspect of the universe, as Pythagoras said, for example the ones of the movement of the planets, was a valuable inspiration for many composers of the time. Though the musical language as we know it nowadays seems to be very mathematical, that fact that a composition can be build according to specific ratios is quite complex and difficult to achieve; nonetheless, composers as Johannes Ockeghem managed to base their compositions in this.

Johannes Ockeghem was a Belgian musici...

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...exactly the same as the one before but with a completely different melody being sang by the voices. In this section the golden ratio is found in the ratio between the amounts of beets of each section. While one of them has 200, the other one had 120 making a relation of 10:6 being really close to 3:2. Nonetheless, this is not the only way that there is a 3:2 relation in this part. Between the main harmony of each section and the repetition there is also a relation close enough to 3:2.

Though the Missa Prolationum is one the Ockeghem’s composition in which the relation with mathematical ratios is seen, Ockeghem, and the Renaissance composers in general, are famous and known nowadays for having a strong affection towards the use of these ratios when it comes to the different disciplines.

Works Cited

http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/digital/FLURA_2010-13.pdf

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