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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1968
It is inevitable that any branch of historiography should in its early stages submit itself to the discipline of severe objectivity. Nineteenth-century political historians saw it as their duty to present ascertainable fact; and it is only in this century that their successors have begun to take the facts for granted, and have gone on to make inferences, to express opinion on unanswered questions, and, to some extent, to use their imagination. Musicology, being a much younger branch of the art, is still at a relatively objective stage. There are such formidable gaps in our knowledge of music before 1600 that scholars have shown a natural caution about filling those gaps with anything in the nature of speculation or guesswork. The standard work on English music before the Reformation is, of course, Frank Harrison's Music in Medieval Britain, a brilliant presentation of archival material and of liturgical and musical analysis. It is precisely that objectivity and caution that make the book so valuable. However, I am prepared to argue that, once a book of that kind has been written, it is perhaps justifiable to go beyond it and make inferences which, though they could well be proved wrong, may stimulate argument and so help to arrive at right answers. Much of this paper, therefore, is frankly discursive and conjectural, deficient in corroborative detail, and clearly open to the Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’.
1 London, 1958.Google Scholar
2 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 667.Google Scholar
3 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Mus. Sch. e. 376–381.Google Scholar
4 Cambridge, Peterhouse, MSS 40, 41, 31, 32.Google Scholar
5 See Paul Doe (ed.), Early Tudor Magnificats (Early English Church Music, iv), London, n.d., p. viii.Google Scholar
6 Those of William Cornysh, Edmund Turges, and Henry Prentyce, ibid., pp. 49–109.Google Scholar
7 Early Tudor Masses (Early English Church Music, i), London, n.d., pp. viii–ix.Google Scholar
8 Some further Masses were apparently added later, possibly by Forrest when he was chaplain to Mary Tudor (ibid., p. ix).Google Scholar
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10 Lewis Lockwood, ‘A Continental Mass and Motet in a Tudor Manuscript’, Music & Letters, xlii (1961), 336–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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13 Tudor Church Music, vi. 169.Google Scholar
14 One of the latest is Marbeck's ‘Per arma iustitiae’, printed in Tudor Church Music, x. 165.Google Scholar
15 Both forms were of course revived in the reign of Mary Tudor; see below.Google Scholar
16 The most recent and detailed account is in Peter Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England 1549–1660, London, 1967.Google Scholar
17 The New Oxford History of Music, iv (London, 1968), 465.Google Scholar
18 Froude, J. A., Life and Letters of Erasmus, London, 1894, p. 115.Google Scholar
19 Jasper Ridley, Thomas Cranmer, Oxford, 1962, p. 20.Google Scholar
20 Ibid., p. 159.Google Scholar
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22 See Smyth, C. H., Cranmer and the Reformation, Cambridge, 1926, p. 34.Google Scholar
23 British Museum MS Royal 11 E. xi contains compositions attributed to him; one of them, the setting of ‘Quam pulchra es’, is an astonishingly fluent essay in the Flemish style.Google Scholar
24 Stopes, C. C., ‘William Hunnis and the Revels of the Chapel Royal’, Materialien zur Kunde dee älteren Englischen Dramas, Louvain, 1910, pp. 21–22.Google Scholar
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26 Alan Smith, The Practice of Music … during the Reign of Elizabeth I, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1967.Google Scholar
27 H. C. de Lafontaine, The King's Musick, London, 1909, p. 7.Google Scholar
28 Actes and Monuments, 4th. rev. edn., London, 1583, ii. 1032 (the comment is not in the earlier editions).Google Scholar
29 Tudor Church Music, vol. I, p. lii; and Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Cassel & c. 1949—, art. ‘Taverner’.Google Scholar
30 Tudor Church Music, i. 126–225.Google Scholar
31 Ibid., iii. 78.Google Scholar
32 Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain, pp. 168 and 341; see also his letter in Music & Letters, xlvi (1965), 382, where he ingeniously suggests that the Mass-title ‘Small devotion’ may be a scribe's misreading of ‘S[ancte] Wil[helme] devotion’ or some similar form of abbreviation.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
33 Tudor Church Music, i. 3.Google Scholar
34 Reprinted in Das Erbe deutscher Musik, xx (1942), 149.Google Scholar
35 Praefatio D. M. Lutheri in Harmonias de Passione Christi; quoted from Buszin, ‘Luther on Music’, p. 82.Google Scholar
36 British Museum, Add. MSS 17802–5.Google Scholar
37 Taverner had earlier written a Mary antiphon, ‘Mater Christi’, in a markedly syllabic style, though this also has the long cadential melismas which I suggested were still characteristic of about 1530. His other antiphon in this sort of style, ‘Christe Jesu pastor bone’ (with text adapted from an antiphon of St. William of York) is without the melismas and therefore probably later. This piece, and also the five-part ‘Sine Nomine’ Mass, must be among the latest compositions in the Peterhouse partbooks.Google Scholar
38 Tudor Church Music, vi. 31.Google Scholar
39 Ibid., i. 30.Google Scholar
40 There is evidence that, in those establishments whose statutes or endowments required a Mary antiphon, a Jesus antiphon such as ‘Sancte Deus’ was generally substituted.Google Scholar
41 See Music of Scotland, ed. K. Elliott & H. M. Shire (Musica Britannica, xv), London, 1957, pp. 202, 205.Google Scholar
42 Buszin, op. cit., p. 90.Google Scholar
43 Tallis's ‘Candidi facti sunt Nazarei’ (printed in Tudor Church Music, vi. 186). The Sarum Breviary seems to indicate that this Responsory was used for four feasts: St. Mark (25 April), St. Philip and St. James (1 May), St. John ante portam Latinam (6 May), and St. Barnabas (11 June). Joseph Kerman considers that it was confined to feasts of the Apostles in Paschal time; but even with this unusually severe limitation, some possible years were 1538, 1546, and 1557, when Easter Sunday fell respectively on 21 April, 25 April and 18 April.Google Scholar
44 Sheppard's ‘Christi virgo dilectissima’.Google Scholar
45 Sheppard's ‘Gaude gaude gaude virgo cunctas haereses’ and Tallis's ‘Videte miraculum’.Google Scholar
46 Tudor Proclamations I: The Early Tudors, 1485–1553, ed. P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin, Yale and London, 1964, p. 301.Google Scholar
47 Ibid., pp. 270, 278.Google Scholar
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49 Not always consistently equal: for example, a quilisma in the chant is generally given double value.Google Scholar
50 Tudor Church Music, vi. 257.Google Scholar
51 Ibid., iii. 37.Google Scholar
52 Tallis, London, 1968, p. 34.Google Scholar
53 William Mundy, Latin Antiphons and Psalms, ed. F. Ll. Harrison (Early English Church Music, ii), London, n.d., pp. 1, 33.Google Scholar
54 Tudor Church Music, vi. 123.Google Scholar
55 E.g. Sheppard's ‘Beati omnes’, possibly written for Mary's wedding.Google Scholar
56 Doe, Tallis, pp. 20–21.Google Scholar
57 Tenbury, St. Michael's College, MSS 807–811, f. 28 (in all books).Google Scholar
58 For an important survey of the post-Reformation Latin repertory, See Kerman, J., ‘The Elizabethan Motet: a Study of Texts for Music’, Studies in the Renaissance, ix (1962), 273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
