Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, Vol. 4 Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, Vol
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MUSIC FROM THE PETERHOUSE PARTBOOKS, VOL. 4 Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, vol. 4 Ave cujus conceptio, Missa Spes nostra & Stabat mater edited and restored by restored by Nick Sandon Nick Sandon (Antico Edition RCM127, RCM118, and RCM103). Kyrie Deus creator (c. 1490-1557) omnium edited by Nick Sandon (Antico Nicholas Ludford Edition LCM1). Used with permission 1 Ave cujus conceptio (8:51) from Antico Edition (www.anticoedition. co.uk). Sarum plainchant Recorded October 14-15 & 21-26, 2013, 2 Kyrie Deus creator omnium (2:27) at the Church of the Redeemer, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts Robert Jones (fl. 1520-35) Engineering & mastering Joel Gordon Producer Eric Milnes Missa Spes nostra Editing Eric Milnes & Joel Gordon 3 Gloria (8:31) 4 Credo (9:07) Cover photo 5 Sanctus (10:26) 6 Agnus dei (8:37) Trillium erectum, Wake Robin. Image © Georgianna Lane / Robert Hunt (early 16th century) Garden Photo World / Corbis 7 Stabat mater (17:51) All other photos Liz Linder (www.lizlinder.com) Total time 65:51 Graphic design Blue Heron Melanie Germond treble Jessica Petrus (1, 5–6), © 2015 Blue Heron. Notes © 2015 by Scott Metcalfe. Julia Steinbok, Sonja Tengblad, 3 4 7 Translations of Ave cujus conceptio Shari Wilson ( – , ) and Stabat mater © 1993 and 2013 mean Jennifer Ashe, Pamela Dellal, by Nick Sandon. All rights reserved. Martin Near contratenor Owen McIntosh, Jason McStoots tenor Michael Barrett, Mark Sprinkle, Sumner Thompson (1–6) bass Paul Guttry, Steven Hrycelak, David McFerrin Scott Metcalfe, director The Peterhouse partbooks the king, who had recently declared himself head of the Church of England. Now, monks This CD is the fourth in Blue Heron’s series sang mostly plainchant and did not generally of recordings of long-unsung music from attempt virtuosic polyphonic music, but the the so-called Henrician set of partbooks now new foundation cathedrals aspired to more residing at Peterhouse, Cambridge. The part- pomp and circumstance, and so by the late books, originally five in number, contain a summer of 1540 Canterbury Cathedral had large collection of music: nineteen Masses, assembled a roster of ten “queresters” (choris- seven Magnificats, and forty-six antiphons ters, “quire” being the normal sixteenth-century (mostly votive antiphons addressed to the spelling of the word), their master, and twelve Virgin Mary). They were copied by the singer vicars-choral, the professional singing-men. and scribe Thomas Bull at Magdalen College, Thomas Tallis is listed first of the “vyccars”; Oxford, in the latter years of the reign of Henry Thomas Bull is sixth. In addition to singers, the VIII, just before Bull left Oxford to take up a new refounded cathedral required an entire library position in the choir of Canterbury Cathedral. of up-to-date polyphonic repertory: this Bull supplied, bringing more than seventy works Bull wrote down, within a very short time, with him from Oxford. a great quantity of music in plain, carefully checked, and highly legible copies intend- The brilliant new choral institution at ed for liturgical use, rather than for study Canterbury would not last long, however. or for presentation to a wealthy patron as Henry died in 1547 and the Protestant reform- a gift. (A presentation manuscript would ers who came to power upon the accession of demand decoration and fancy trimmings.) his young son, Edward, took a dim view of such He appears to have been commissioned to popish decorations as professional choirs and supply a complete repertoire of polyphonic the sophisticated Latin music they sang. The music for Canterbury Cathedral. The monastic elaborate polyphonic music of late medieval foundation at Canterbury had been dissolved English Catholicism became, at best, obsolete; by Henry VIII in April 1540, one of nearly a at worst it was seen as a gaudy ornament dozen monastic cathedrals dissolved in the to a despicable ritual. Many musical manu- years 1539-41. Most were refounded in short scripts were lost and many destroyed, and if order as secular (i.e. non-monastic) institu- a manuscript escaped deliberate destruction tions, which were subject not to an abbot—a by zealots, it might yet be subjected to other member of a religious order who answered indignities: to the pope—but to a bishop and thence to 3 great nombre of them Very few collections of church music survived whych purchased those the upheaval. The main sources extant from superstycyouse mansyons the entire first half of the sixteenth century are A a mere three choirbooks, four sets of partbooks, [the former monasteries], reserved and one organ manuscript. (Compare this pau- of those librarye bokes, some to city to, for example, the sixteen choirbooks serve theyr jakes [privies], some owned in 1524 by Magdalen College, Oxford.) to scoure theyr candelstyckes, We do not know what happened to Bull’s five and some to rubbe their bootes. partbooks between 1547 and the early years Some they solde to the grossers of the next century, but by the 1630s they had and sope-sellers, & some they sent made their way to the library of Peterhouse, over see to the bokebynders, not where they would survive yet another cat- in small nombre, but at tymes aclysm of destruction, that wrought by the whole shyppes full, to the won- Puritans in the 1640s. derynge of the foren nacyons.… I Or, at least, some of Bull’s five partbooks sur- knowe a merchaunt man, whych vived. At some point the tenor book disap- shall at thys tyme be namelesse, peared, along with several pages of the treble. that boughte the contentes of two Now, of the 72 pieces in the set, 39 are trans- noble lybraryes for .xl. shyllynges mitted uniquely, while another dozen or so are pryce, a shame it is to be spoken. incomplete in their other sources. The result is Thys stuffe hath he occupyed in that some fifty pieces of music—a significant the stede of graye paper [wrap- portion of what remains to us of pre-Reforma- ping-paper] by the space of more tion sacred music—now lack their tenor, and some of these are also missing all or part of than these .x. yeares, & yet he hath their treble. The Peterhouse repertoire includes store ynough for as many yeares to music by the most famous masters of the early come. sixteenth century, such as Robert Fayrfax, John Taverner, and Thomas Tallis, alongside music The Preface, “Johan Bale to the by less celebrated but nonetheless first-class Reader,” The laboryouse Journey & serche of Johan Leylande for composers such as Hugh Aston and Nicholas Englandes Antiquitees (1549) Ludford, and a number of wonderful pieces by musicians whose careers are less well docu- mented and who have been virtually forgotten 4 for the simple reason that so few of their works velous composer, but that any one today has still exist: Richard Pygott, John Mason, Robert any sense of his accomplishment is due largely Jones, Robert Hunt, and others. Some of these to the accident of his music being preserved men cannot be identified with certainty, and, in some quantity. His music—large-scale festal although Bull was quite scrupulous in provid- Masses, small-scale Lady Masses, antiphons, ing ascriptions for the music he copied, two of and one Magnificat—survives in four of the the unique Peterhouse works are anonymous. seven choral sources mentioned above; three, that is, in addition to the Peterhouse part- We are able to sing the Peterhouse music today books, which were copied, as we have seen, at thanks to the extraordinarily skilled recomposi- Oxford around 1540. The other three sources tion of the missing parts by the English musi- were copied between the late 1510s and the cologist Nick Sandon.1 Sandon completed his mid-1520s and can all be connected in some dissertation on the Peterhouse partbooks in way to Ludford’s employer for most of his 1983, including in it recompositions of most career, the Royal Free Chapel of St. Stephen in of the missing lines; in the years since he has the Palace of Westminster. been refining his work and issuing it in Antico Edition. For Robert Jones’s Missa Spes nostra Ave cujus conceptio sets five stanzas on the Five and Nicholas Ludford’s Ave cujus conceptio Corporal Joys of Our Lady: her Conception, Sandon recomposed the entire tenor line. In Nativity, Annunciation, Purification, and the case of Robert Hunt’s Stabat mater, both Assumption. The text was a popular one, print- tenor and treble parts are lost, so fully two- ed in many Books of Hours and set by several fifths of the polyphonic texture you will hear in other English composers. Ludford’s music is this piece have been restored by Sandon in a genial and ebullient, filled with cascades of brilliant feat of reimagination. melisma. Ludford’s Ave cujus conceptio Jones’s Missa Spes nostra Of the three composers on this recording, Virtually nothing is known about Robert only Nicholas Ludford has won any measure Jones except that he was a singer in the of latterday fame, and his name is hardly a Royal Household Chapel from at least sum- household word. Ludford was certainly a mar- mer 1520 until about 1534. His Missa Spes nostra and Magnificat (recorded on volume 1 1 Sandon also pieced together the story of the genesis of the part- books that I have related above. 5 of this series) survive only in the Peterhouse Some surprising harmonies in the Missa Spes partbooks; these pieces, plus the bass part nostra derive, like the treble’s opening melody, of a three-voice song, are all that remain from features of the plainchant cantus firmus.