Jacob Obrecht

Obrecht stands in historical estimation as second only to Josquin Desprez among composers of the late fifteenth century. He may indeed rank as the leading practitioner of compositional techniques to emerge from northern Europe. In Utrecht he held the post of master of song, while in Bergen op Zoom he served as choirmaster at Notre Dame; he later spent two years as singing master at Cambrai and subsequently took the position of master of the chapel in Bruges. From 1494 until his retirement he worked at Notre Dame in Antwerp. As early as 1475 Tinctoris already counted him among the foremost musicians of the era. His output encompassed twenty-eight masses, twenty-eight motets, and a substantial body of additional sacred music. Within these works he maintained the customary practices of imitation and cantus-firmus borrowing, deploying melodic fragments both literally and through transformation. He redistributed the voices carrying the cantus firmus, extracted opening motives from earlier compositions and repositioned them within the interiors of new pieces, and altered thematic material from one movement to the next inside his masses. The breadth of his cantus-firmus procedures is mirrored in the scope of his contrapuntal writing, which ranged from measured, serene textures to rapidly shifting polyphonic lines. Although he seldom extended contrapuntal passages at length, his textures consistently produced radiantly consonant sonorities, whether through the use of parallel tenths between outer voices or through the placement of chord roots in the bass.