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Songs, Carols and Contrafacta in the Early History of the Tudor Anthem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1980

John Milsom
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Extract

The Tudor anthem in its earliest stages of development has generally been considered in the light of the English Reformation, of which it is both a product and a characteristic form. Many of its most distinctive features result directly from the new theological attitudes of the Protestant reformers: the use of Biblical texts, in English rather than Latin; a less strictly prescribed function than that of the ritual music of the Sarum liturgy; and an emphasis both upon sobriety of musical language and clarity of text-declamation. There can be little doubt that the development of features such as these can be attributed more to the changing attitudes of theologians than of composers; but it is equally possible to view the early history of the anthem within the wider context of the evolution of English musical style, an evolution in which the Reformation, however important, acted only as a catalyst. To achieve a deeper understanding of the anthem as a musical phenomenon, it is necessary to set aside those useful but sometimes unrealistic distinctions generally adopted by historians between secular and sacred, Catholic and Protestant, Henrician, Edwardian and Marian: for composers of the period, the sense of connection and continuity was almost certainly as strong as that of distinction and change.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 107 , 1980 , pp. 34 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

NOTES

1 Edwardian sources contain a few works which are strictly liturgical within the ceremonials of the 1549 and 1552 Prayer Books; items such as Offertories, Postcommunions and the ‘Easter Anthems’, ‘Christ rising again’ and ‘Christ is risen’, only acquired the status of anthems (in the broader, extra-liturgical sense) after the rites to which they belonged had been superseded.Google Scholar

2 Peter le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England 1549–1660 (London, 1967), 135. For a penetrating study of the effects of the Reformation on English music in general, see Stevens, John, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London, 1961), Chapter 5 (‘The Reformation’).Google Scholar

3 Certain aspects of the repertoire are discussed in the following: John Stevens, Music and Poetry; Denis Stevens, ‘A Part-Book in the Public Record Office’, Music Survey, ii (1950), 161–70; idem, The Mulliner Book: a Commentary (London, 1952), 55–64; and idem, ‘Tudor Part-Songs’, The Musical Tones, xcvi (1955), 360–2.Google Scholar

4 See Ralph T. Daniel, ‘Contrafacta and Polyglot Texts in the Early English Anthem’, Essays in Musicology: A Birthday Offering/or Willi Apel, ed. Hans Tischler (Indiana, 1968), 101–6.Google Scholar

5 Occ MS 566, at present kept in Ob; see Milsom, John, ‘A Newly Discovered Tallis Contrafactum’, The Musical Times (forthcoming).Google Scholar

6 A metrical setting of Psalm 8, ‘O Lord, our Lord, how marvellous’, in the ‘Lumley’ partbooks (Lbl Royal Appendix 74–6) appears to be derived from Comysh's song ‘Blow thy horn, hunter’; see Blezzard, Judith, ‘The Lumley Books’, The Musical Times, cxii (1971), 129. Tallis's ‘Purge me, O Lord’ survives in the ‘Mulliner Book’ (Lbl Add. 30513) with the incipit ‘Fond youth is a bubble’, although in this case it seems likely that the secular text is the adaptation: a marginal jotting in T 958 (the text source followed in Thomas Tallis: English Sacred Music: I Anthems, ed. Leonard Ellinwood, rev. Paul Doe, Early English Church Music, xii (London, 1973), 95–7), notes that ‘the words are adapted anew’, presumably by Edward Thomas Warren in c. 1800.Google Scholar

7 Lbl Add. 30480–3.Google Scholar

8 le Huray, Music and the Reformation, 194–5; Paul Doe, Tallis (2nd edn., London, 1976), 54.Google Scholar

9 See for example the ‘Wanley’ and ‘Lumley’ partbooks, Ckc Rowe 316 and SHR Mus. MS 2, all of which preface English-texted music with Latin titles.Google Scholar

10 Ralph T. Daniel and Peter le Huray, The Sources of English Church Music 1549–1660, Early English Church Music, Supplementary Volume 1 (London, 1972).Google Scholar

11 This is suggested by the presence of Sheppard's ‘Of all strange news’ in one of the few surviving liturgical sources of Elizabethan church music, SHR Mus. MS 2. For a description of the contents of this manuscript, see Smith, Alan, ‘Elizabethan Music at Ludlow: a New Source’, Music & Letters, xlix (1968), 117–18.Google Scholar

12 See Bray, Roger, ‘British Library, R.M. 94 d 2 (John Baldwin's Commonplace Book): an Index and Commentary’, R.M.A. Research Chronicle, xii, 145, nos. 200–2.Google Scholar

13 The fragments of Marbeck's carol are published in Tudor Church Music, x (London, 1929), 213–14.Google Scholar

14 A reconstruction of the work is published in Novello's Oriana series (no. 114), ed. Denis Stevens (London, 1955); see also The Mulliner Book, ed. Denis Stevens, Musica Britannica, 1 (2nd edn., London 1954), no. 84. The third verse is missing in Lpro S.P. 1/246.Google Scholar

15 Ckc Rowe 316.Google Scholar

16 Sources: Y MS M. 91 (S); Lbl Add. 15166.Google Scholar

17 Sources: Lbl Add. 30480–3 and Lbl Harley 7578.Google Scholar

18 Source: Och Mus. MS 371, f. 3v.Google Scholar

19 No. 28, ‘Prefer not great beauty’; no. 29, ‘It hath been proved both ev'n and morrow’; no. 30, ‘I have ere this time heard many one say’. All are for four voices. I am grateful to Mr Robert McQuillan for information concerning Whythorne's songs.Google Scholar

20 Texts from this source are reprinted in E. Flügel, ‘Liedersammlungen des 16. Jahrhunderts’, Anglia, xii (1889), 589–97. The collection also includes four religious carols.Google Scholar

21 Lpro S.P. 1/246; texts from this songbook are published in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, Addenda (London, 1932), no. 1880.Google Scholar

22 For another source (with aditional verses) of this lyric, see Hughey, Ruth, The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry (Columbus, Ohio, 1960), i, 368–9.Google Scholar

23 I am grateful to Mr James Wrightson for this suggestion; see also le Huray, Music and the Reformation, 176–7.Google Scholar

24 Daniel and le Huray, The Sources; for Tallis's song, see Early English Church Music, xii, 40–2; for van Wilder's Psalm, see An Anthology of English Church Music, ed. David Wulstan (London, [1971]), 141–8.Google Scholar

25 Contents published in Music at the Court of Henry VIII, ed. John Stevens, Musica Britannica, xviii (2nd edn., London, 1968), and studied in John Stevens, Music and Poetry.Google Scholar

26 The musical style of songs from these sources has never been discussed in detail. For bibliography regarding their contents and texts, see Stevens, John, Music and Poetry.Google Scholar

27 Described with a thematic catalogue in Denis Stevens, ‘A Part-Book’.Google Scholar

28 Contents edited in The Mulliner Book (Musica Britannica, i); see also Denis Stevens, The Mulliner Book: a Commentary.Google Scholar

29 Music at the Court of Henry VIII (Musica Britannica, xviii), nos. 15, 16, 22, 23, 24, etc. In the song Time to pass with goodly sport' (no. 9A), from the printed play-text A New Interlude … (1539?), the instruction to repeat the second half is explicit.Google Scholar

30 See Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool, 1969), 183–4 (no. CLXXII), which follows the ‘Blage’ and ‘Devonshire’ manuscripts (EIRE Dtc, Blage MS and Lbl Add. 17492); these offer a variant opening, ‘The knot which first …’, Wyatt's authorship is rejected by Richard Harrier in his study The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 45–9 and 68.Google Scholar

31 Sheppard's large-scale cycle of metrical psalms also makes extensive use of ABB structure. Single voice-parts survive in Lbl Add. 15166 and Lbl Harley 7578; one can be reconstructed, using a keyboard reduction in the ‘Mulliner Book’ (no. 82).Google Scholar

32 See Thompson, John, The Founding of English Metre (London, 1961).Google Scholar

33 The date of this song is very uncertain; Early English Church Music, xii (131), suggests ‘c. 1570’, but its place in the ‘Mulliner Book’ (in close proximity to two songs with concordances in Lpro S.P. 1/246, and a section from Tye's The Actes of the Apostles) may suggest an earlier date. Lpro contains settings of Poulter's measure and ‘short metre’ (6.6.8.6) in a similarly syllabic idiom, as well as songs which emphasize the rhythmic rather than metrical contents of their texts (as in no. so, ‘Marvel must I why death is hated’). There would seem to be no reason why ‘Like as the doleful dove’ should not have been written before (or at least, by) the 15505.Google Scholar

34 Music at the Court of Henry VIII, nos. 7 and 35.Google Scholar

35 See (for example) Hugh Benham, Latin Church Music in England c. 1460–1575 (London, 1977), 140–3.Google Scholar

36 The most important manuscripts presented to the early Tudor court were Lbl Royal 11. e. xi, Lbl Royal 8. g. vii, Lbl Royal 20. a. xvi, Lbl Add. 35087, Cmc Pepys 1760, Lcm 1070 and US-Cn Case MS-VM 1578. M91 (‘Newberry partbooks’).Google Scholar

37 See Stevens, John, Music at the Court of Henry VIII; also John Ward, ‘The Lute Music of MS Royal Appendix 58’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, xiii (1960), 117–25, and Kenton Parton, ‘On Two Early Tudor Manuscripts of Keyboard Music’, ibid., xvii (1964), 81–3.Google Scholar

38 Elizabethan secular sources of anthems are listed in le Huray, Music and the Reformation, 98–100.Google Scholar

39 See Doe, Paul, ‘Latin Polyphony under Henry VIII’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, xcv (1968–69), 81–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar