This event would not figure much in the life of the composer if he had not discovered Johannes Cornago’s canción, Qu’es mi vida preguntays, during his visit. Ockeghem added two more voice parts to the two that Cornago had composed, and the resulting arrangement is published among the chansons of Ockeghem.

During the Renaissance musicians were hired for their voices, and Ockeghem’s voice was a magnificent basso profundo. Incidental to their employment in cathedrals and chapels, the singers also composed new music. Ockeghem provided rich bass parts in his Masses, as, for example, in the Missa Prolationum.

The composer, as we have learned recently, was born in the village of St. Ghislain (near Mons, Belgium) in the diocese of Cambrai, but his date of birth is unknown. Long ago Fétis thought he was born around 1430, assuming that he was a choirboy in Antwerp in 1443; Plamenac suggested 1425, then later agreed with Riemann and Van den Borren, who picked 1420; Leeman Perkins wrote in 1980 that he must have been born closer to 1410, since he was thought to have lived about 90 or 100 years.

The first appearance of Johannes Ockeghem in the surviving records is the year (1443-1444) that he spent as a vicaire-chanteur (an adult singer in the cathedral choir) at Notre Dame in Antwerp. Two years later he was singing in the chapel of Charles I, duke of Bourbon, whose wife was the sister of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy. It is possible that he had gone there directly from Antwerp. He remained at least two years until he moved to his next known position, the chapel of Charles VII, king of France, where he is named in the list of singers in 1451. Among the chaplains (singers in the chapel) who are not priests, he is already listed first by 1453.

At this time the royal court spent much of its time in Tours, a city near the chateaux of the Loire valley. The king held the office of titular abbot of St. Martin, like every king of France since Hughes Capet in 987, so he was able to confer a signal honor on Ockeghem by naming him treasurer of the church in 1459. (Despite the title of abbot, St. Martin ceased to be a monastic foundation in 846, when Charles the Bald turned the basilica into a collegiate church staffed by secular canons, who sang the Office daily.) The Gothic basilica that Ockeghem knew was destroyed during the French Revolution, but a smaller church was built over the tomb of St. Martin in the middle of the 19th century.