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Carols and Court Songs of the Early Tudor Period
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
Most of you will already be familiar with the mediaeval idea of the carol as a strict, metrical form. To others it may come as a surprise to discover that the bravely all-embracing definitions of modern editors are, for the late Middle Ages, superflous. To poets and musicians of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries a carol was not ‘a song with a religious impulse, simple, hilarious, popular and modern,’ but simply ‘a song on any subject, composed of uniform stanzas and provided with a burden’; this burden, a distinct formal unit, starts the piece and is repeated after each verse.
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- Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1950
References
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