The Compilation of the Gyffard Partbooks

Extract

The ‘Gyffard’ partbooks (British Library, Add. MSS 17802–5) are perhaps the most important source of Tudor sacred music of the mid-sixteenth century, for unlike the only other collection that could reasonably lay claim to that title—the Henrician partbooks at Peterhouse, Cambridge—they have survived intact. Just six of Gyffard's 94 pieces have contemporary concordances, and only three of these are wholly straightforward. Taverner's Western Wind Mass (no. 24) turns up again in John Sadler's partbooks; two voices only of Redford's Christus resurgens (no. 58) are found in Tenbury MS 389 and its companion, the James part-book; and Van Wilder's Pater noster (no. 6) is printed in Susato's Liber quartus ecclesiasticarum cantionum quatuor vocum (Antwerp, 1554). Two of the three problematic items appear to be four-part reworkings of what were originally five-voice pieces. Taverner's Dum transisset (no. 61) appears a5 in both the Dow and Baldwin partbooks; Johnson's Gaude Maria Virgo (no. 85) is found in its five-part version, though textless, in British Library, Add. MS 31390; finally, a fragment of Tye's Western Wind Mass resurfaces in British Library, Add. MSS 18936–9, attributed to ‘Alphonsus’. There are therefore at least 88 unica in Gyffard—a significantly higher proportion than in any other contemporary source of comparable size. Our knowledge of the state of English sacred polyphony on the eve of the Reformation is heavily dependent on these partbooks, for they preserve a representative cross-section of liturgical genres by a wide range of composers encompassing the great and the obscure.