MUSIC from the PETERHOUSE PARTBOOKS, VOL. 5 | BLUE HERON Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, Vol
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MUSIC FROM THE PETERHOUSE PARTBOOKS, VOL. 5 | BLUE HERON Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, vol. 5 restored by Nick Sandon Hugh Sturmy Blue Heron Scott Metcalfe, director 1 Exultet in hac die (3:31) Missa sine nomine 5-8 & Hunt 2 Robert Hunt treble mean 2 Jolle Greenleaf Jennifer Ashe Ave Maria mater dei (4:40) Sonja Tengblad Tere- Pamela Dellal John Mason sa Wakim Martin Near 3 contratenor tenor Ve nobis miseris (12:46) Owen McIntosh Jonas Budris Jason McStoots 2 Jason McStoots 5-8 Sarum plainchant Mark Sprinkle 5-8 Mark Sprinkle 2 4 Kyrie Orbis factor (2:10) bass Anonymous Paul Guttry, Steven Hrycelak, Paul Max Tipton Missa sine nomine Sturmy 1 Mason 3 5 Gloria (7:42) 6 Credo (7:34) 7 8 treble tenor I Sanctus (9:05) Agnus dei (8:02) Margot Rood Owen McIntosh Sonja Tengblad Aaron Sheehan Shari Wilson tenor II Missa sine nomine, Exultet in hac die, Ave Maria, and Ve nobis miseris edit- mean Jason McStoots ed and restored by Nick Sandon (Antico Edition RCM126, 117, 111, and 113). Kyrie Orbis factor edited by Nick Sandon (Antico Edition LCM1). Jennifer Ashe Alexander Nishibun Used with permission from Antico Edition (www.anticoedition.co.uk). Pamela Dellal tenor III Martin Near Recorded October 19-20 & 24-25, 2014 (Missa sine nomine, Hunt) Michael Barrett and September 18-20, 2016 (Mason, Sturmy) at the Church of the contratenor Mark Sprinkle Redeemer, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts Jason McStoots bass I Aaron Sheehan Engineering & mastering Joel Gordon Paul Guttry Producer Eric Milnes / Additional session producer Brad Milnes tenor Sumner Thompson Editing Eric Milnes & Joel Gordon Michael Barrett bass II Cover photo David Astins / westcoastbirdwatching.co.uk Sumner Thompson Steven Hrycelak All other photos Liz Linder (www.lizlinder.com) bass John Taylor Ward Graphic design Melanie Germond Paul Guttry © 2017 Blue Heron. Notes © 2017 Scott Metcalfe. Steven Hrycelak Translations © 2017 Nick Sandon. All rights reserved. John Taylor Ward 2 Music by the anonymous subject not to an abbot—a member of a reli- gious order—but to a bishop and thence to and the unknown the king, who had declared himself head of Blue Heron Scott Metcalfe, director the Church of England. Monks sang mostly This disc is the fifth in a set of five, of music Missa sine nomine 5-8 & Hunt 2 plainchant and did not generally attempt vir- from the so-called Henrician set of partbooks tuosic polyphonic music, but the new foun- 1 now residing at Peterhouse, Cambridge. The dation cathedrals aspired to more pomp and partbooks, which contain a large collection circumstance and so they needed to hire a of Masses, Magnificats, and votive antiphons, choir of professional singers and to recruit and were copied in the latter years of the reign of train choirboys. By the late summer of 1540 Henry VIII at Magdalen College, Oxford, by the Canterbury Cathedral had assembled a roster professional singer and music scribe Thomas of ten “queresters” (choristers, “quire” being Bull, just before Bull left Oxford to take up a the normal sixteenth-century spelling of the bass new position at Canterbury Cathedral. word), their master, and twelve vicars-choral or Paul Guttry, Steven Hrycelak, Paul Max Tipton professional singing-men. Thomas Tallis is list- Bull wrote down, within a very short time, ed first of the “vyccars,” Bull sixth. But in addi- a great quantity of music in plain, carefully tion to singers, the new choral establishment checked, and highly legible copies that were required an entire library of up-to-date poly- evidently intended to be used for liturgical phonic repertory. This Bull supplied, bringing performance, rather than for study or for about 70 works with him from Oxford. presentation to a noble as a gift. (A presenta- tion manuscript would demand decoration The music Bull copied includes works by the and fancy trimmings.) He appears to have most famous masters of the early sixteenth been commissioned to supply Canterbury century, such as Robert Fayrfax, John Taverner, Cathedral with a complete repertoire of poly- and Thomas Tallis, and by less celebrated phonic music. The monastic foundation at but nonetheless first-class composers such as Canterbury had been dissolved by Henry VIII in Nicholas Ludford and Hugh Aston, as well as April 1540, one of nearly a dozen great monas- a number of wonderful pieces by musicians tic cathedrals dissolved in the years 1539-41. whose careers are less well documented and Most were refounded in short order as secular who have been virtually forgotten for the sim- (i.e. non-monastic) institutions, which were ple reason that so little of their work survives: Richard Pygott, John Mason, Robert Jones, 1 Called “Henrician” to distinguish them from two later sets of partbooks, Robert Hunt, and others. Several of these the “Caroline” sets, which were compiled in the 1630s during the reign of Charles I. 3 men cannot be identified with certainty. And, those superstycyouse mansyons although Bull was quite scrupulous in provid- [the former monasteries], reserved ing ascriptions for the music he copied, two of of those librarye bokes, some to the unique Peterhouse works are anonymous, serve theyr jakes [privies], some including the Missa sine nomine recorded here. to scoure theyr candelstyckes, and some to rubbe their bootes. The new choral institution at Canterbury would Some they solde to the gross- not last long. Henry died in 1547 and the ers and sope-sellers, & some they Protestant reformers who came to power upon sent over see to the bokebyn- the ascension of his young son, Edward, took a ders, not in small nombre, but at dim view of such popish decorations as profes- tymes whole shyppes full, to the sional choirs and the highly sophisticated Latin wonderynge of the foren nacyons. music they sang. All the elaborate polyphonic Yea, the universytees of thys realm, music of late medieval English Catholicism are not all clere in this detestable became, at best, obsolete; at worst it was fact…. I knowe a merchaunt man, viewed as a gaudy ornament to a despicable whych shall at thys tyme be name- ritual. Many musical manuscripts were lost and lesse, that boughte the contentes many destroyed, and if a manuscript escaped of two noble lybraryes for .xl. shy- deliberate destruction by zealots, it might yet llynges pryce, a shame it is to be be subjected to other indignities: spoken. Thys stuffe hath he occu- pyed in the stede of graye paper Neither had we been offended for [wrapping-paper] by the space of the losse of our lybraryes, beynge more than these .x. yeares, & yet so many in nombre, and in so he hath store ynough for as many desolate places for the more parte, yeares to come. yf the chiefe monumentes and moste notable workes of our excel- The Preface, “Johan Bale to the Reader,” The laboryouse Journey & serche of Johan Leylande lent wryters, had been reserved.… for Englandes Antiquitees (1549) But to destroye all without con- syderacyon, is and wyll be unto Very few collections of church music survived Englande for ever, a moste hor- the upheaval. The main sources extant from ryble infamy amonge the grave the entire first half of the sixteenth century senyours of other nacyons. A great are a mere three choirbooks, four sets of part nombre of them whych purchased 4 books, and one organ manuscript. (Compare work and issued it in Antico Edition, complet- this paucity to, for example, the sixteen choir- ing the entire, monumental project in 2015. Dr. books owned in 1524 by a single establish- Sandon recomposed the entire tenor line of all ment, Magdalen College, Oxford.) We do not four polyphonic works included on this disc. know what happened to Bull’s five partbooks (one each for the standard five parts of early sixteenth-century English polyphony: treble, Hugh Sturmy, Exultet in hac die mean, contratenor, tenor, and bass) between 1547 and the early years of the next century, Exultet in hac die celebrates St. Augustine of but by the 1630s they had made their way to Canterbury, the Apostle to the English or, as the library of Peterhouse, where they would a late fifteenth-century English source has it, survive yet another cataclysm of destruction, “Saynt Austyn that brought crystendom in to that wrought by the Puritans in the 1640s. Englond.” In the Benedictine rite, Exultet in hac die is the antiphon to the Magnificat at First Or, rather, most of Bull’s five partbooks sur- Vespers on the the feast of St. Augustine, May vived. At some point the tenor book disap- 26. This antiphon and the anonymous Missa peared, along with several pages of the treble. sine nomine are the only two pieces in the Now, of the 72 pieces in the set, 39 are trans- Peterhouse partbooks that might have been mitted uniquely, while another dozen or so are taken over from the repertoire of the dissolved incomplete in their other sources. The result is Benedictine abbey (which Augustine founded) that some fifty pieces of music—a significant into that of the refounded cathedral (of which portion of what survives from pre-Reformation he was the first archbishop in the years 597- England—now lack their tenor, and some of 604). The tenor of Sturmy’s exuberant setting these are also missing all or part of their tre- sings the plainchant melody in plain long ble. We are able to sing the Peterhouse music notes throughout. nowadays thanks to the extraordinarily skilled recomposition of the missing parts by the Exultet in hac die is the only surviving work English musicologist Nick Sandon. (Sandon ascribed to Hugh Sturmy, about whom noth- also pieced together the story of the part- ing whatever is known.