Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-04T10:15:45.829Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Performance of Ensemble Music in Elizabethan England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1970

Warwick A. Edwards
Get access

Extract

This well-known passage by Francis Bacon might be regarded as an appeal for common sense in the instrumentation of Elizabethan and Jacobean music. The principle of avoiding combinations which do not blend may still be applied today, but, as Bacon goes on to say, ‘for the Melioration of Musicke, there is yet much left (in this Point of Exquisite Consorts) to try and enquire’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 97 , 1970 , pp. 113 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Sylva Sylvarum, London, 1627, p. 72.Google Scholar

2 From the Custom Book of St. Omer by Fr. Giles Schondonch (rector 1600–1617). A nineteenth-century transcript by Fr. L. Willaert is at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, MS Arch.C.II.19. W. H. McCabe's translation from the original Latin in ‘Music and Dance on a 17th-century College Stage’, The Musical Quarterly, xxiv (1938), 313–22 is misleading in parts.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 ‘Musica’, in the original document, must be interpreted in the sense common in the 16th/17th century, i.e. the actual sounds produced; the meaning ‘compositions awaiting realisation in sound’ is more recent.Google Scholar

4 Cf. F. W. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, London, 1963, esp. pp. 195–249. For symbolism and instruments on the Continent see Weaver, R. L., ‘Sixteenth-Century Instrumentation’, The Musical Quarterly, xlvii (1961), 363–78. E. Winternitz's Musical Instruments and their Symbolism in Western Art, London, 1967, covers a wider span of time and refers mainly to the Continent.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Princeton, 1953, pp. 201–39.Google Scholar

6 Elizabethan music for mixed consort, such as Morley's Consort Lessons, forms a quite separate tradition in which much information about instrumentation is explicit anyway.Google Scholar

7 On the origins and background of the In nomine see R. Donington and T. Dart, ‘The Origin of the In nomine’, Music & Letters, xxx (1949), 101–6; G. Reese, ‘The Origins of the English “In nomine”’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, ii (1949), 7–22; D. Stevens, ‘The Background of the “In nomine”’, The Monthly Musical Record, lxxxiv (1954), 199–205.Google Scholar

8 Exceptionally, British Museum, Add. MS 30513, containing keyboard arrangements of some In nomines, may be earlier. See Ward, J., ‘Les Sources de la musique pour le clavier en Angleterre’, La Musique instrumentale de la Renaissance, ed. J. Jacquot, Pans, 1955, pp. 227–30, 234–6.Google Scholar

9 Earlier layer of Bodleian Library, Mus. Sch. D. 212–6, devoted entirely to In nomines.Google Scholar

10 Roger North on Music, ed. J. Wilson, London, 1959, p. 340.Google Scholar

11 Brett, P., ‘Edward Paston (1550–1630): a Norfolk Gentleman and his Musical Collection’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, iv (1964–8), 51–69.Google Scholar

12 Described, with a list of contents, in J. Noble, ‘Le Répertoire instrumental anglais: 1550–1585’, La Musique instrumentale de la Renaissance, pp. 91–114.Google Scholar

13 ‘Byrd's Motets: Chronology and Canon’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, xiv (1961), 361. Later additions on ff. 123v-4, 125v-7 are excepted as well as, probably, ‘The leaves be grene’ by Byrd on ff. 124v-5.Google Scholar

14 f. 57.Google Scholar

15 Add. MS 22597, f. 34. The other manuscript is Add. MS 32377.Google Scholar

16 Ed. R. A. Harman, London, 1952, p. 293.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., p. 292.Google Scholar

18 Add. MS 30481, f. 64; Add. MS 30483, f. 66v.Google Scholar

19 Signature M2.Google Scholar

20 Christopher Tye, The Instrumental Music, ed. R. W. Weidner, New Haven, 1967, pp. 25,54.Google Scholar

21 Trinity College, Dublin, Press B.1.32 (a copy of Tallis and Byrd, Cantiones Sacrae, 1575 with manuscript additions), Discantus signature G1v &c. The words begin ‘Lamente O wreched Babilon I say …’Google Scholar

22 Noble, La Musique instrumentale de la Renaissance, p. 105.Google Scholar

23 Kerman, ‘Byrd's Motets’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, xiv (1961), 361.Google Scholar

24 Signature C1.Google Scholar

25 Cf. J. Kerman, The Elizabethan Madrigal, New York, 1962, pp. 159 ff.Google Scholar

26 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Mus.Sch.E.423 and Christ Church, Mus. 984–8.Google Scholar

27 Brett, P., The Songs of William Byrd, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge, 1965, i. 19–24. Brett shows that Robert Dow's father (1523–1612) is less likely to be the man associated with these part-books, contrary to M. C. Boyd's assumption in Elizabethan Music and Musical Criticism, Philadelphia, 1940, p. 74.Google Scholar

28 Ed. W. Raleigh, London, 1900, p. 118.Google Scholar

29 Ed. J. E. Spingarn, London and Boston, 1914, p. 114. Cf. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 226–35.Google Scholar

30 See Woodfill, Musicians in English Society, esp. Appendices A, C and E, and the Index s.v. ‘Viol’.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., p. 224.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., pp. 256, 267–8, 272, 276.Google Scholar

33 Reproduced in Woodfill, op. cit., and elsewhere.Google Scholar

34 Woodfill, op. cit., pp. 253–4, 278; The Diary of the Lady Anne Clifford, ed. V. Sackville-West, London, 1923, p. 16.Google Scholar

35 III. ix. 80; Works of Benjamin Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and P. Simpson, Oxford, 1925–52, iii. 526.Google Scholar

36 III. iv and IV. iii resp.Google Scholar

37 Twelfth Night, I. iii. 26–27.Google Scholar

38 p. 100.Google Scholar