The Original Version and Adaptation of Okeghem’s <i>Je n’ay dueil</i>

Johannes Okeghem’s song Je n’ay dueil is transmitted in two distinct versions. Seven sources, including two manuscripts from central France in the mid to late 1480s, contain a version for four voices occupying four different ranges, with an unusually wide compass of twenty-two notes. An eighth source, a Florentine manuscript copied after Okeghem’s death and generally believed to be intended for instrumental use, transmits a version in which the two lower voices are written an octave higher, reducing the compass to seventeen notes. Rejecting the obvious explanation for the source situation—that the Italian version represents an instrumentalist’s adaptation of an extraordinary song—earlier scholars have proposed that Okeghem’s original was for three voices; that the next step was the four-voice version transmitted by the Italian manuscript; and that the version found in the French manuscripts represents Okeghem’s bold revision of that reading. A close reexamination of the musical evidence, however, shows that the story told by the sources is almost certainly correct: Okeghem conceived Je n’ay dueil for four voices, as it is transmitted by no less than seven sources, including two from his immediate orbit, while the unique version of the Florentine manuscript is most parsimoniously interpreted as exactly what it seems to be: an adaptation made by a younger musician whose style departs somewhat from Okeghem’s.