Johannes Ockeghem: Missa Prolationum Kyrie ()

Although it is not certain when Ockeghem composed the Missa Prolationum, it likely appeared around the time that he was canon at the Notre Dame de Paris. The work was cleverly conceived as a so called mensural canon (or prolation canon) in which pairs of voices sing identical (or very similar) note sequences at different tempi. It was beautifully rendered and perfectly preserved in a richly illustrated manuscript known as the Chigi Codex (C. VIII 234) in the Vatican Collection. There are very few repetitions of the phrase Kyrie eleison and Christe eleison. Instead, Ockeghem uses very long melismas to stretch out the words over a long line. There is a certain obsessive insistence on the phrase Christe eleison, which is repeated 4 times in contrast to Kyrie I and Kyrie II which are sung once each at the beginning and end. The singing parts were entered using the MAIKA, CLARA and BRUNO Spanish voice encoders in the Yamaha program for PC VOCALOID 4. The electronic noise was filtered out using Audacity, an