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The Church Music of Pelham Humfrey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Peter Dennison
Peter Dennison*
Affiliation:
Cambridge University and Clare College
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Extract

Writing in the second half of the eighteenth century, William Boyce described Pelham Humfrey's church music as ‘peculiarly expressive and affecting, the evident Productions of a masterly Genius’. It was this emotional immediacy, the desire ‘to move the affections or excite passion’, as Roger North put it, that was fundamental to the spirit of the Baroque. This spirit represents an exaggeration of the Renaissance humanists' desire for directness of expression; there are ways in which it can be said to have literally vulgarised the aristocratic humanism of the Renaissance. The contrast is aptly illustrated by comparing Tallis's most familiar ‘Salvator mundi’, a setting of lofty beauty, with Blow's more immediately passionate setting of the same text. The English Baroque cannot really be said to come of age in music until the generation immediately after the Restoration in 1660, but from that time composition in the new style flourished in all mediums. Spanning the years 1663 to 1674 Humfrey's output represents, perhaps more influentially than that of any other member of his generation, the consolidation of a distinctively English Baroque style.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 98 , 1971 , pp. 65 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © 1972 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

1 Pelham Humfrey: Complete Church Music, ed. Peter Dennison (Musica Britannica, xxxiv-xxxv), London, 1972.Google Scholar

2 Cathedral Music, 2nd edn., London, 1788, ii, p. viii.Google Scholar

3 The Musicall Gramarian, ed. H. Andrews, London, 1925, p. 15.Google Scholar

4 Musica Britannica, xxxv. 21.Google Scholar

5 Ibid, xxxiv. 82 ff.; cf. bars 37–38 and 19–20.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., xxxiv. 101.Google Scholar

7 E.g. in the solo ‘Ne proiicias me’ from Lully's Miserere of 1664 (a work that in all likelihood Humfrey knew), where the whole verse is made up of declamatory phrases broken up by rests.Google Scholar

8 Musica Britannica, xxxv. 22.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., xxxiv. 17–18.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., xxxv. 11.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., xxxiv. 45.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., xxxiv. 78.Google Scholar

13 Charles Burney, A General History of Music, 4 vols., London, 1776–89, iii. 445n.Google Scholar

14 Musica Britannica, xxxv. 29.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., xxxv. 30.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., xxxiv. 11.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., xxxiv. 21.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., xxxv. 30.Google Scholar

19 E.g. in bars 46–48 of ‘Like as the hart’ (Musica Britannica, xxxiv. 110).Google Scholar

20 Musica Britannica, xxxiv. 12–13.Google Scholar

The passages discussed in the paper were illustrated by the author at the piano, and by recorded examples sung by Anthony Edwards. The recordings were made by John Rutter.Google Scholar