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The English Royal Violin Consort in the Sixteenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1982
Extract
In the summer of 1539 Henry VIII was once again preparing for marriage. In June the French ambassador reported that;
The king, who in some former years has been solitary and pensive, now gives himself up to amusement, going to play every night upon the Thames, with harps, chanters and all kinds of music and pastime. He evidently delights now in painting and embroidery, having sent men to France, Flanders Italy and elsewhere for masters of this art, and also for musicians and other ministers of pastime. All his people think this is a sign of his desire to marry if he should find an agreeable match.
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- Copyright © 1984 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors
References
1 Calendar of Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, xiv, vol. 1 (London, 1895), 498.Google Scholar
2 The words ‘consort’ and ‘band’ are used in this paper to mean a group of instruments one to a part and an orchestra respectively. ‘Consort’ was certainly used to describe the four court instrumental ensembles around 1600, as a reference in PRO, L.S. 13/168, 185 of 1605 shows. However, the royal string players were normally just referred to as ‘viols’ or ‘violins’ up to the Restoration, when ‘band’ came into general use to mean the court string orchestra.Google Scholar
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5 They are listed for the first time in British Library, Egerton MS 2604, a chamber account book for 17 Henry VIII [1525–6], but they could have arrived in England at any time in the early 1520s, since no account books survive from that period.Google Scholar
6 See, for instance, PRO, E 101/426/6, f. 30v.Google Scholar
7 The only earlier groups to my knowledge were at the French court and at the Lorraine court in Nancy, which acquired ‘quatre violons’ in 1534; see Boyden, David, The History of Violin Playing from its Origins to 1761 (London, 1965), 24–5; Walter Kolneder, Das Buch der Violine (Zurich, 1972), 270, who gives no source for his reference.Google Scholar
8 British Library, Arundel MS 97, f. 155'.Google Scholar
9 PRO, S.P. 1/153.Google Scholar
10 British Library, Arundel MS 97, f. 131.Google Scholar
11 David Lasocki, ‘Professional Recorder Playing in England 1500–1740, 1:1500–1640’, Early Music, x (1982), 24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 David Boyden, op. cit., 66ff.; Ian Woodfield, ‘The Early History of the Viol’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, ciii (1976–7), 141–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Guildhall Library, MSS 9171/11, f. 73v; 9168/9, f. 223v.Google Scholar
14 Roger Prior, ‘Jewish Musicians at the Tudor Court’, The Musical Quarterly, box (1983), 253–65, particularly 257–8. I am most grateful to Mr Prior and David Lasocki for sharing many discoveries relating to Jewish musicians with me, and for allowing me access to their unpublished writings.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 PRO, E 101/426/5, f. 55v; E 315/439, f. 56.Google Scholar
16 Returns of Aliens in the City and Suburbs of London, Publications of the Huguenot Society of London, x, vol. 2 (Aberdeen, 1902), 316.Google Scholar
17 PRO, S.P. 4/1, no. 57; Guildhall Library MS 9238/8.Google Scholar
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35 Innocent is first heard of in a Chamber document dated 30 September 1552, PRO, E 101/424(9), 136, and must have been appointed some time during the previous two years, for which no documents survive. The sources of information upon which Table 2 is based are too complex from Elizabethan times onwards to be set out here in full. The chief source is the yearly series of accounts audited or ‘declared’ by the Treasury of the Chamber to the Exchequer of Audit. Two copies of these Declared Accounts survive; the incomplete one in the series PRO, A.O.3 was printed in summary form in 'Lists of the King's Musicians, from the Audit Office Declared Accounts in The Musical Antiquary, i-iii (1909–12), but the other copy, in PRO, E 351, is complete from 1558 onwards.Google Scholar
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43 Reproduced in Boyden, op. cit., plate 14, who summarizes the situation on pp. 56–7.Google Scholar
44 Facsimile in ‘L’Épitome musical de Philibert Jambe de Fer (1556)’, ed. Francois Lesure, Annales musicologiques, vi (1956–63), 341–87.Google Scholar
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