MUSIC FROM THE PETERHOUSE PARTBOOKS, VOL. 3 Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, vol. 3 Missa Inclina cor meum THE PETERHOUSE PARTBOOKS sors, and so they sought to hire large choirs of and Ave fuit prima salus restored by Nick Sandon edited and restored by Nick Sandon professional singers as well as recruit choirboys (Antico Edition RCM132 & RCM108). This CD is the third installment in Blue Heron’s for training. Canterbury Cathedral’s new choir John Mason (c. 1480-1548) Kyrie Cunctipotens genitor series of recordings of music from the so-called included ten “queresters” (choristers, “quire” edited by Nick Sandon Henrician set of partbooks now residing at being the normal 16th-century spelling of the 1 (Antico Edition LCM1). Ave fuit prima salus (19:17) 1 Used with permission Peterhouse, Cambridge. The partbooks, origi- word), their master, and twelve vicars-choral, from Antico Edition nally five in number, contain a large collection among them Thomas Tallis and Thomas Bull. Sarum plainchant (www.anticoedition.co.uk). of Masses, Magnificats, and votive antiphons. The new choir required an entirely new library 2 Kyrie Cunctipotens genitor (3:07) They were copied at Magdalen College, Oxford, of up-to-date polyphonic repertory, for monks in the latter years of the reign of Henry VIII, typically did not attempt virtuosic polyphonic Nicholas Ludford (c. 1490-1557) by the professional singer and music scribe music: this Bull supplied, bringing about 70 Missa Inclina cor meum Thomas Bull, just before Bull left Oxford in works with him from Oxford. 1540 to take up a new position in the choir of 3 Gloria (8:09) 4 Credo (10:20) Recorded September 21-22 and October 22-23 and 25-26, 2012 Canterbury Cathedral. But the brilliant choral institution at Canterbury 5 Sanctus (11:25) 6 Agnus dei (7:37) at the Church of the Redeemer, would not last long. Henry died in 1547 and the Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts Bull wrote down, within a very short time, a Protestant Reformation that ensued took a dim Total time 59:58 great quantity of music in carefully checked, view of such popish decorations as professional Engineering & mastering Joel Gordon highly legible but plain copies. Lacking any choirs and the highly sophisticated Latin music Producer Eric Milnes decoration, the partbooks were clearly aimed they sang. All the elaborate polyphonic music Blue Heron Editing Eric Milnes & Joel Gordon at performance in church services, rather than of late medieval English Catholicism became, at treble Julia Steinbok, Sonja Tengblad, Shari Wilson for study or for presentation to a noble as best, obsolete; at worst it was viewed as gaudy Cover photo a gift.2 Why did Bull copy so much music, ornament to a despicable ritual. Many musical Close-up of white lamb's wool mean so quickly? He appears to have been acting sources were destroyed, and if a manuscript Jennifer Ashe, Pamela Dellal, Martin Near © Bjorn Forsberg / Getty Images on commission. The monastic foundation at escaped deliberate destruction by zealots, it contratenor All other photos Canterbury was dissolved by Henry VIII in April might yet be subjected to other indignities: Owen McIntosh, Jason McStoots Liz Linder (www.lizlinder.com) 1540, one of nearly a dozen great monastic tenor Graphic design cathedrals dissolved in the years 1539-41. Most A greate nombre of them whych Michael Barrett, Mark Sprinkle (Ludford), Pete Goldust & Melanie Germond were refounded in short order as secular (i.e., purchased those superstysyouse Sumner Thompson (Mason) non-monastic) institutions, subject not to an mansyons [former monasteries], bass abbot—a member of a religious order—but reserved of those librarye bokes, Cameron Beauchamp, Paul Guttry, to a bishop and thus to the king as head of some to serve their jakes [priv- Dashon Burton (Ludford), David McFerrin (Mason) © 2013 Blue Heron Renaissance Choir the Church of England. The refounded cathe- ies], some to scoure their candel- Notes © 2013 by Scott Metcalfe drals aspired to considerably more pomp and styckes, and some to rubbe their Translations © 2012 by Nick Sandon Scott Metcalfe, director All rights reserved circumstance than their monastic predeces- bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and sope-sellers…. Yea the Or, at least, some of Bull’s five partbooks sur- the years since he has been refining his resto- Palace of Westminster.5 The fourth source is the universytees of thys realm are not vived. At some point the tenor book disap- rations and publishing them in Antico Edition. Peterhouse partbooks, which were copied, as all clere in this detestable fact…. peared, along with several pages of the treble. This disc presents world-premiere recordings we have seen, at Oxford around 1540. I know a merchaunt man, whych Of the 72 pieces in the partbooks, 39 are trans- of Nicholas Ludford’s Missa Inclina cor meum shall at thys tyme be namelesse, mitted uniquely, while another dozen or so are and John Mason’s Ave fuit prima salus from The Peterhouse partbooks contain three that boughte the contentes of two incomplete in their other sources. The result is Sandon’s editions. For the Mass Sandon recom- Masses and four antiphons by Ludford. Five noble lybraryes…. Thys stuffe hath that some fifty pieces of music—a significant posed the tenor line. In the case of Mason’s of these works are uniquely transmitted there he occupied in the stede of graye portion of what survives from pre-Reformation antiphon, both tenor and treble parts are and so may have been composed after the paper [wrapping-paper] for the England—now lack their tenor, and some of entirely lost: thus fully two-fifths of the poly- earlier sources were copied.6 The unica are space of more than these x yeares, these are also missing all or part of their treble. phonic texture you will hear in this piece have the Masses Inclina cor meum (recorded here) and yet hath store ynough for as In the Peterhouse repertoire, music by the been restored by Sandon in a brilliant feat of and Regnum mundi (recorded on vol. 2 of many yeares to come. most famous masters of the early sixteenth reimagination. this series) and the antiphons Ave cujus con- century, such as John Taverner and Thomas ceptio, Ave Maria ancilla trinitatis, and Domine Preface to The laboryouse Journey Tallis, sits next to works by less celebrated NICHOLAS LUDFORD Jesu Christe. A fourth antiphon, Salve regina, is & serche of Johann Leylande for but nonetheless first-class composers such found only in Peterhouse (missing its treble England’s Antiquities (1549)3 as Nicholas Ludford and Hugh Aston, and a Of the composers represented so far in this and tenor) and in a single orphaned Mean number of wonderful pieces by musicians series of recordings (Aston, Jones, Ludford, partbook, the lone survivor from another set Very few collections of church music survived. who have been virtually forgotten, for so little Mason, and Pygott), Nicholas Ludford has per- of five which was copied c. 1530.7 The main sources of sacred vocal music remain- of their work survives: Richard Pygott, John haps achieved the most latterday recogni- ing from the entire first half of the sixteenth Mason, Robert Jones, Robert Hunt, and oth- tion, although his name is hardly a household century are a mere three choirbooks and four ers. The few extant works of these latter four word. Ludford was unquestionably a marvel- sets of partbooks. (Compare this paucity to, for composers are transmitted mostly or solely in ous composer, but that anyone today has any example, the sixteen choirbooks owned in 1524 the Peterhouse partbooks and are thus now sense of his accomplishment is due largely to by a single establishment, Magdalen College, incomplete. the happy accident of his music being pre- Oxford.)4 We do not know what happened to served in some quantity. His surviving music Bull’s five partbooks (one each for the standard We are able to sing the Peterhouse music includes seven festal Masses, seven small-scale five parts of early 16th-century English polyph- today thanks to the extraordinarily skilled Lady Masses, four votive antiphons, and one ony: treble, mean, contratenor, tenor, and bass) recomposition of the missing parts by the Magnificat, and it is found in four of the seven between 1547 and the early years of the next English musicologist Nick Sandon. (Sandon principal choral sources mentioned above. century, but by the 1630s they had made their also pieced together the story of the genesis Three of these sources were copied sometime way to the library of Peterhouse, where they of the partbooks that I have related above.) between the mid-1510s and the mid-1520s; would survive yet another cataclysm of destruc- Sandon completed his dissertation on the these three are all connected with Ludford’s tion, that wrought by the Puritans in the 1640s. Peterhouse partbooks in 1983, including in it place of employment for most of his working recompositions of most of the missing lines; in life, the Royal Free Chapel of St. Stephen in the 4 5 MISSA INCLINA COR MEUM What’s more, the chant is not obviously suited then head off on their own paths, melodically is impossible to sort out definitively. The part- to serve as a cantus firmus. It is so melodically and harmonically. The final harmonies of the books transmit four works by Mason, three The Missa Inclina cor meum, like Ludford’s other bland as to be wholly anonymous and unmem- movements also surprise, for Ludford cannot of which are labelled in the index “for men”: extant festal masses, is based on a plainchant orable, and the endings of its phrases do not conclude with a typical cadence on account that is, for the broken voices of adults.