Aspects of Early English Keyboard Music before c.1630

David Smith, David J. Smith, David Smith, David J. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351613873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

English keyboard music reached an unsurpassed level of sophistication in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as organists such as William Byrd and his students took a genre associated with domestic, amateur performance and treated it as seriously as vocal music. This book draws together important research on the music, its sources and the instruments on which it was played. There are two chapters on instruments: John Koster on the use of harpsichord during the period, and Dominic Gwynn on the construction of Tudor-style organs based on the surviving evidence we have for them. This leads to a section devoted to organ performance practice in a liturgical context, in which John Harper discusses what the use of organs pitched in F may imply about their use in alternation with vocal polyphony, and Magnus Williamson explores improvisational practice in the Tudor period. The next section is on sources and repertoire, beginning with Frauke Jürgensen and Rachelle Taylor's chapter on Clarifica me Pater settings, which grows naturally out of the consideration of improvisation in the previous chapter. The next two contributions focus on two of the most important individual manuscript sources: Tihomir Popovi? challenges assumptions about My Ladye Nevells Booke by reflecting on what the manuscript can tell us about aristocratic culture, and David J. Smith provides a detailed study of the famous Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. The discussion then broadens out into Pieter Dirksen's consideration of a wider selection of sources relating to John Bull, which in turn connects closely to David Leadbetter's work on Gibbons, lute sources and questions of style.

Part I

Introduction

1 Changing approaches to the study of English keyboard music before c.1630

David J. Smith

This book draws together revised versions of selected papers delivered at the Festival of Virginals, Delft (2004), the Symposium of Early English Keyboards, Aberdeen (2005) and the Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association, Aberdeen (2008). Plans to publish papers from these conferences at the time did not come to fruition, leaving valuable research and insights into early English keyboard music inaccessible. Other chapters in the book have been specially commissioned to broaden the scope.

In this chapter, the intention is not so much to give a chronological narrative, which is readily available elsewhere, or to write an extensive historiographic account of early English keyboard music, but rather to offer some reflections on the evolving approaches taken to the study of composers, their music and the instruments on which it was played.

Establishing the canon

Some of the earliest accounts of early English keyboard music in the modern era were written by continental scholars, such as Charles Van den Borren’s Les origines de la musique de clavier en Angleterre of 1912.¹ The publication of Willi Apel’s Geschichte der Orgel- und Klaviermusik bis 1700 in 1967,² an English translation of which appeared in 1972,³ offered a narrative of early keyboard music which was similar in scope to post-war studies of musical periods, such as Gustav Reese’s Music in the Renaissance and Manfred Bukofzer’s Music of the Baroque Era.⁴ Apel’s approach was to focus on composers and forms, and to use style analysis to trace musical influences of one generation on the next. The story of the English virginalists was set within a bigger picture of continental keyboard composition. In the year after the translation appeared, John Caldwell published his seminal history of English keyboard music before the nineteenth century.⁵ These books played a pivotal role in establishing a chronological narrative without which other, later approaches to the topic would have floundered. In the early 1990s, this story of British keyboard music was refined in two book chapters. Alan Brown made a contribution on England to Alexander Silbiger’s Keyboard Music before 1700, a book which perhaps consciously referred back in its title to Apel’s monumental work, although it called on the expertise of several authors rather than being the work of one.⁶ Whereas Brown’s work on England was situated in the context of continental keyboard music, as had been the case with Apel’s book, Barry Cooper’s chapter in a volume of the Blackwell History of Music in Britain mirrored Caldwell in its national context.⁷ Meanwhile, John Harley published a two-volume study of British harpsichord music in which the focus was as much on the sources as on composers and their music, although the subject matter necessarily excluded the organ; Virginia Brookes published her thematic index of the sources at around the same time.⁸

The aim of these studies was in part to establish a canon, and this was facilitated by the publication of early English keyboard music in Musica Britannica, a post-war initiative by the Royal Musical Association to make British music available in modern, scholarly editions. The very first volume was an edition of a keyboard manuscript, The Mulliner Book (MB 1), which sat neatly alongside transcriptions of seminal manuscripts such as the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (FVB) and My Ladye Nevlles Booke (MLNB) that had been published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁹ However, by and large the Musica Britannica project has reflected a concern with establishing a canon of works based around significant composers: complete editions have appeared of Thomas Tomkins (MB 5), John Bull (MB 14; MB 19), Orlando Gibbons (MB 20), Giles and Richard Farnaby (MB 24), William Byrd (MB 27; MB 28) and Peter Philips (MB 75). Inevitably, some composers did not produce enough to warrant a volume all to themselves, so there have been a number of volumes that have mopped up the rest, organised by period: Alan Brown published a volume which included intabulations as well as original works from the Elizabethan age (MB 55); similarly, John Caldwell included keyboard versions of vocal works in his volume of music from earlier Tudor times (MB 66); at the other end of the period, Alan Brown drew together a variety of keyboard music from c.1600 to 1625 (MB 96). Interestingly, the latest volume of keyboard music before c.1630 centres on repertoire contained in manuscripts from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge that has not appeared elsewhere in the series (MB 102), so there is a sense of returning to the source-centred first volume.

The only printed volumes of keyboard music to appear during the period were Parthenia in about 1613 and Parthenia In-Violata the following year (or possibly later).¹⁰ There was a manuscript culture in the transmission of keyboard works, creating a high degree of variation between sources. The editorial approach of Musica Britannica followed a model offered by textual criticism in fields such as literature and biblical studies by collating the surviving texts to create a composite which took into consideration all the surviving material. Such an approach has fallen out of favour in some quarters, with editors preferring to use one ‘best text’ at the expense of others. In some cases, there is a degree of dogmatism which discounts Musica Britannica editions entirely: in the notes accompanying Siegbert Rampe’s 2005 recording of keyboard music by John Bull, it is astonishing to read that, ‘since there is no modern edition of Bull’s works, the present performances are each based on one of the numerous sources which have survived from both time and sphere of influence’;¹¹ Rampe thus dismisses entirely the Musica Britannica edition, the first volume of which appeared as early as 1960. In fact, of course, the matter is not cut-and-dried, and there are as many problems surrounding the ‘best text’ approach as its proponents find in editions which collate sources. Also, the reality is that most collated editions are based around a core, primary text, and most ‘best text’ editions draw upon other sources to correct obvious errors; thus, the approach to editing this repertoire may be seen more as a continuum, with most editions occupying a middle ground.¹² The choice of overall approach perhaps should rest on whether the focus is to be on composer or source.

Alongside general histories and modern editions there have appeared books on composers which include material on their keyboard music.¹³ Edmund Fellowes produced his seminal work on William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons in the 1920s and 30s,¹⁴ and the more recent editions of these books are still valuable today alongside those by John Harley and Kerry McCarthy.¹⁵ Similarly, Denis Stevens included material on keyboard music in his book about Thomas Tomkins from 1957,¹⁶ and more recently John Harley considers each of Tallis’s keyboard works in his monograph on the composer.¹⁷ Some have focused on instrumental music, such as Oliver Neighbour’s book on Byrd’s consort and keyboard music in which the main focus is on establishing the chronology of works in different forms.¹⁸ Other studies are doctoral theses, some of which have been published; between them, they cover most of the main figures, including John Bull, Thomas Tomkins, Benjamin Cosyn and Peter Philips.¹⁹

A focus on composer necessitates the creation of a canon of works since the boundary of what is being studied is determined by authorship. Where a work has been attributed to two composers in different sources, the question asked is who wrote it – in order to determine whether or not it should be included – rather than what the conflicting ascriptions tell us about the nature of the sources, modes of dissemination and keyboard culture in England more generally. When considering matters of authorship, a useful distinction can be made between ascription – writing occurring in a source which contains a name that may or may not be that of the composer – and attribution, in which various evidence is brought to bear on the identification of a composer.²⁰

In his book on Bull, Cunningham employs the same identification of pieces by genre and final as used by Neighbour for Byrd’s oeuvre; this concern for classification by genre is closely related to the broader picture of developments in English keyboard music painted in the general histories where the focus is on forms and stylistic analysis, and the influence of one composer on another. Stylistic analysis is used also to place English keyboard music in a continental context: Alan Curtis was among the first to claim English influence on the Dutch, particularly Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck,²¹ and Pieter Dirksen’s monumental study of the composer contains a great deal of material on the English school.²²

Work on establishing a canon of early English keyboard music is still ongoing, which is reflected in the title of Pieter Dirksen’s work on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables and Catalogue
• List of Music Examples
• Manuscript Sigla and Bibliographic Abbreviations
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Instruments
• Part III Keyboard Music and Liturgy
• Part IV Sources and Repertoire
• Index