Early English Church Music

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EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH MUSIC

Early English Church Music is published by Stainer & Bell on behalf of The British Academy. The aim of the series is to make available church music by British composers from the Norman Conquest to the Commonwealth, in a form both scholarly and practical. The present General Editor is Magnus Williamson.

Most Recent Volume: John Sheppard, III: Hymns, Psalms, Antiphons and Latin Polyphony. January 2013
Next Volume: Fifteenth-Century Liturgical Music, VIII:Settings of the Gloria and Credo. Spring 2013

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Volume 1 - Early Tudor Masses: I
Edited by John D. Bergsagel
The first volume of the series draws on the Forrest-Heyther partbooks, preserved in Oxford's Bodleian Library. They are the source of a 6-part Festal Mass by Richard Alwood, written to an unknown cantus firmus and most unusually in duple notation throughout, and a Festal Mass, also in 6 parts and using the Advent antiphon Ave Maria as cantus, by Thomas Ashewell.

Volume 2 - Mundy: Latin Antiphons and Psalms
Edited by Frank Ll. Harrison
Mundy was among the youngest of a group of significant composers whose lives bridged the turbulent times of the Reformation. Though preserved in Elizabethan sources, his Latin antiphons most likely date from the reign of Mary. They are the last examples of a genre cultivated by English composers for two centuries.

Volume 3 - Gibbons: I - Verse Anthems
Edited by David Wulstan
The form and style of the verse anthem were anticipated in the work of a number of 16th-century composers. However, it was only in the hands of Orlando Gibbons, one of the earliest musicians to write exclusively for the English rite, that it achieved new flexibility with the use of declamatory style in the verse sections. This first volume of his music contains 16 anthems, including See, see, the Word is incarnate and This is the record of John.

Volume 4 - Early Tudor Magnificats: I
Edited by Paul Doe
The importance attached to the worship of the Virgin Mary in late-Medieval England is reflected in elaborate treatments of the Magnificat, of which only some 22 intact settings survive. This volume contains six 5-part Magnificats - two anonymous, one each by Fayrfax, Cornysh, Turges and Prentyce - and one 6-part Magnificat Benedicta by Ludford.

Volume 5 - Tomkins: Musica Deo Sacra: I
Edited by Bernard Rose
Published posthumously in 1668, probably by the composer’s son Nathaniel, Musica Deo Sacra is a monumental collection of the work of Thomas Tomkins, pupil of William Byrd and a major contributor to the wealth of Anglican music produced in the half-century before the Commonwealth. The first volume contains the 11 verse anthems written for special occasions.

Volume 6 - Early Tudor Organ Music: I: Music for the Office
Edited by John Caldwell
The history of liturgical organ music in England begins with the first recorded source, dating from 1500, and ends abruptly with the Act of Uniformity of 1559. In addition to the written sources, it is likely that there existed a strong tradition of improvised polyphony, though little direct evidence for this has survived. The 65 pieces in this collection were intended for performance at Matins, Lauds, Vespers and Compline.

Volume 7 - Ramsey: I - English Sacred Music
Edited by Edward Thompson
Robert Ramsay was organist of Trinity College, Cambridge. He left a 4-part service worthy of Orlando Gibbons, eight anthems of 5 and 6 parts, (including an impressive setting of When David heard that Absalon was slain which approaches the style of the Restoration full anthem), and a remarkable dialogue, In guilty night, setting a paraphrase of I Samuel 28, 8-20.

Volume 8- 15th-Century Liturgical Music: I - Antiphons and Music for Holy Week & Easter
Edited by Andrew Hughes
The majority of pieces in this volume show a strong melodic and rhythmic independence of voice, close in style to the contemporary French chanson; but there are also examples of pieces in the simpler, homorhythmic idiom of English descant. Votive antiphon and votive mass, or lady mass, were the main forms employed in the important early 15th-century repertoire of devotional and liturgical music for household use.

Volume 9 - Tomkins: Musica Deo Sacra: II
Edited by Bernard Rose
In contrast with the 11 verse anthems collected in EC5, which use texts from the Prayerbook collects for special occasions, all but two of the 14 anthems of this volume employ words from the psalms. Many of the verse sections require great virtuosity of execution, and the variety of styles shows the breadth of this composer's expressive range.

Volume 10 - Early Tudor Organ Music: II - Music for the Mass
Edited by Denis Stevens
The second volume devoted to English liturgical organ music contains four pieces of the Ordinary of the Mass, one for the Proper, 23 offertories and one piece for the Communion.

Volume 11 - Leighton: The Tears or Lamentations of a Sorrowful Soul
Edited by Cecil Hill
The contents of this celebrated collection, presented by Leighton to Prince Charles in 1614, encompass most of the noted lutenist and keyboard composers of the day. Eighteen pieces meant for domestic worship are scored either for unaccompanied singing or for solo voice with available instruments of the ‘broken’ consort. The rest of the 55 pieces are for 4- or 5-part choir.

Volume 12 - Tallis: I - English Sacred Music: I - Anthems
Edited by Leonard Ellinwood
Tallis's choral works with English texts were all written for the worship of God in the reformed Church of England, setting either the liturgy of the new Book of Common Prayer of 1549, or Coverdale’s vernacular bible. They testify to his position, undisputed even in his lifetime, as ‘the father of English church music’. This volume contains ten of the 11 anthems that can definitely be attributed to the composer, and five contrafacta anthems with Latin texts, which were published in Tallis and Byrd's Cantiones Sacrae of 1575.

Volume 13 - Tallis: II - English Sacred Music: II - Service Music
Edited by Leonard Ellinwood
Though best known for his Dorian Service, Tallis also set the Preces and Responses, the Litany, and various psalms for service use, as well as providing the so-called ‘tunes’ for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter. In addition to this important corpus of music, EC13 gathers together those fragments by Tallis for which a single part only is extant.

Volume 14 - Tomkins: Musica Deo Sacra: III
Edited by Bernard Rose
The 16 anthems in this volume complete the 41 verse anthems contained in Musica Deo Sacra. Eight anthems take their texts from the psalms, and two each from the collects, the Old Testament, the New Testament and anonymous authors.

Volume 15 - Dering: Cantica Sacra, 1618
Edited by Peter Platt
The Italian 'madrigal' style of this music, unusual for English composers, arose from the special circumstances of Roman Catholic composers who chose to work on the continent. Dering himself was organist to a community of Benedictine nuns in Brussels, whose Abbess was an English noblewoman. These 21 motets for SSATTB were published in Antwerp.

Volume 16 - Early Tudor Masses: II
Edited by John Bergsagel
To the two masses in the first volume of the series, this collection adds three further masses from the Forrest-Heyther partbooks. It contains the 6-part Mass Jesu Christe by Thomas Ashewell, and two 5-part works: the Resurrexit Dominus Mass by John Norman, and the Christe Jesu Mass by William Rasar.

Volume 17 - Sheppard: I - Responsorial Music
Edited by David Chadd
The music of John Sheppard, who was about ten years younger than Tallis, dates from the uncertain times of the Reformation and the reigns of Edward VI and Mary. Perhaps his most impressive work is to be found in his cantus firmus responds, which reflect the considerable musical importance that some choral foundations attached to Matins and Vespers on special feast-days in the last decades of the Sarum rite.

Volume 18 - Sheppard: II - Masses
Edited by Nicholas Sandon
Taverner and Tye are the predominant influences in these works. The 6-part Mass Cantate is taken from the Oxford partbooks. The source for The Western Wind Mass, The Frences Mass, the Mass Be not afraid , and the Plainsong Mass for a Mean, all in four parts, is the so-called 'Gyffard' partbooks (British Library Add. MSS 17802-5), which are now known to have been copied after Elizabeth’s accession for a Catholic patron, Dr Philip Gyffard, Fellow of Merton College, Oxford.

Volume 19 - Tye: I - English Sacred Music
Edited by John Morehen
There are particular problems of establishing authentic sources for much of Tye’s music. Nonetheless, its high quality places him, with Taverner and Tallis, at the forefront of English 16th-century church music. This first volume of his work contains 15 full anthems, evening canticles, and his famous setting of texts from The Acts of the Apostles, dedicated to Edward VI.

Volume 20 - Taverner: I - Six-Part Masses
Edited by Hugh Benham
This volume, the first of five devoted to Taverner’s music, contains the three surviving 6-part masses: Gloria tibi Trinitas, Corona spinea, and O Michael. Elaborate festal works intended for use on major feasts or patronal festivals, they are printed here in the order followed in the Forrest-Heyther partbooks.

Volume 21 - Gibbons: II - Full Anthems, Hymns and Fragmentary Verse Anthems
Edited by David Wulstan
Full anthems, fragmentary verse anthems, and 'The Hymns and Songs of the Church', a collection of religious verse and tunes compiled by George Wither and published in 1623, are to be found in this volume. It shows the variety of music written by a composer best known for the anthem Hosanna to the Son of David.

Volume 22 - 15th-Century Liturgical Music: II - Four Anonymous Masses
Edited by Margaret Bent
English composers in the first half of the 15th-century created the unified mass cycle, and even though most of the repertoire is anonymous, a distinctly ‘national’ style can be recognised. The four works in this volume were probably composed between 1420 and 1440, and each possesses a long, troped Kyrie of a kind not found in continental sources.

Volume 23 - Giles: Anthems
Edited by J. Bunker Clark
A Worcester man, Nathaniel Giles (or Gyles) held posts at St George’s, Windsor, and at the Chapel Royal until his death in 1633. His anthems were widely circulated during his lifetime, but largely forgotten thereafter. Their texts are taken from the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible and psalms, and from the metrical translations of Sternhold and Hopkins.

Volume 24 - Tye: II - Masses
Edited by Paul Doe
Although one of the more active early composers for the Anglican rite, Tye also wrote vocal works on Latin texts, including choral hymns and responds, and some settings of the Ordinary of the Mass. His Western Wind Mass and Mean Mass probably date from before 1540, but the Mass Euge bone belongs stylistically to a later date, and was possibly written with some special purpose in mind after the death of Henry VIII.

Volume 25 - Taverner: II - Votive Antiphons
Edited by Hugh Benham
Taverner’s votive antiphons represent the largest and most varied contribution to the genre of any early 16th-century composer. They are here presented alphabetically, in two distinct groups of large-works, presumably associated with major feasts, and shorter and simpler pieces. Two fragments, Virgo pura and Prudens virgo and the textless Quemadmodum are also included.

Volume 26 - Manuscripts of 14th-Century English Polyphony (Facsimiles)
Edited by Frank Ll. Harrison & Roger Wibberley
This handsome volume of 212 plates is an important work of reference for all concerned with the notation of early music. Major sources represented include those of the British Library, the Bodleian Library Oxford, and the University of Cambridge.

Volume 27 - Tomkins: Musica Deo Sacra: IV
Edited by Bernard Rose
All of Tomkins's 3- and 4-voice full anthems from Musica Deo Sacra are included, with the seven penitential psalms, for alto, tenor and bass. The composer's powers of word-painting and drama are strongly in evidence.

Volume 28 - White: I - Five-Part Latin Psalms
Edited by David Mateer
Robert White, Christopher Tye’s successor at Ely Cathedral, composed sacred settings that fairly reflect the religious and political upheavals of mid 16th-century England. In his polyphonic psalm motets, especially, he matched in excellence his contemporaries such as Byrd and Mundy, and absorbed many elements from the various psalm-setting styles of the time.

Volume 29 - White: II - Six-Part Latin Psalms
Edited by David Mateer
To Robert White’s 5-part Latin psalms collected in the previous volume, this collection adds the 6-part Latin psalms, including three settings of Domine, quis habitabit, the 5-part votive antiphon Regina caeli and the 6-part Tota pulchra es, amica mea.

Volume 30 - Taverner: III - Ritual Music and Secular Songs
Edited by Hugh Benham
Ritual music for the Office and for associated non-liturgical devotions appears in no comparable body of work by an earlier English composer - and from later composers, only in the surviving output of Tallis and Sheppard. Typically, these pieces alternate polyphony and plainsong, not recorded in the sources, but here supplied from the Salisbury Antiphonal, Gradual or Processional. Four of Taverner’s secular songs are also included. Quemadmodum are also included.

Volume 31 - Ramsey: II - Latin Sacred Music
Edited by Edward Thompson
The contents of this volume include both liturgical and domestic music. The 'Commencement Song', Inclina Domine, was an exercise for the composer’s Mus.B degree. The Te Deum settings and a setting of the Litany were probably written for use in the chapel of Peterhouse, Cambridge, a centre of high church observance at the time.

Volume 32 - White: III - Ritual Music and Lamentations
Edited by David Mateer
Included are Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna, the ninth respond at Matins in the Office of the Dead, and White’s only surviving essay in respond form. There are also four hymn settings with Sarum texts, and two Lamentation settings. They hold an important place in the ranks of a genre that briefly flourished during the Elizabethan period, despite a lack of indigenous precedent for the form.

Volume 33 - Tye: III - Ritual Music and Motets
Edited by Nigel Davison
The substantial quantity of incomplete pieces in this volume (9 out of 20) reflects the problematic nature of reliable sources for Tye’s music. Of the complete examples, there are liturgical compositions, psalm and prayer motets, a single votive antiphon and one work of doubtful authorship.

Volume 34 - 15th-Century Liturgical Music: III - The Brussels Masses
Edited by Gareth Curtis
In a composite manuscript ascribed to the Burgundian court, a mass each by Richard Cox and John Plummer, with three such works by Walter Frye, survive alongside a pair of Dufay masses and all but one of the surviving motets of Busnois. The strong political and cultural association between England and Burgundy at the time explains their presence, as does the varied and masterful style - held in high regard by continental contemporaries.

Volume 35 - Taverner: IV - Four- and Five-Part Masses
Edited by Hugh Benham
Taverner’s 4- and 5-part masses are shorter and simpler than his elaborately festal 6-part settings of the Ordinary. The 4-part Plainsong Mass is, for its time, unusually limited in its range of note values. The 5-part Mean Mass shows a continental unity of texture, rather than the marked differentiation between melody and rhythm that is more typical of early Tudor style. The Mass The Western Wind employs a secular cantus firmus and a resourceful variation technique. Quemadmodum are also included.

Volume 36 - Taverner: V - Five-Part Masses
Edited by Hugh Benham
This volume contains the two 5-part Parody Masses, Mater Christi and Small Devotion, and four fragments that despite their unproven authenticity have not yet been attributed to another composer. Quemadmodum are also included.

Volume 37 - Tomkins: Musica Deo Sacra: V
Edited by Bernard Rose
Tomkins employs the psalter for the texts of eight of these anthems, one of which has an alternative Latin text of unknown origin. Four anthems set biblical passages, two are settings of prayers, and one, originally a secular song, is a setting of Sanctus and alleluias.

Volume 38 - Morley: I - English Anthems; Liturgical Music
Edited by John Morehen
Thomas Morley wrote verse and full anthems, preces and responses, a setting of the Burial Service (though of disputed authenticity), festal psalms and metrical psalm-tune harmonisations. This substantial and varied corpus of church music is a fascinating record of a most influential composer of the Elizabethan period.

Volume 39 - Tomkins: Musica Deo Sacra: VI
Edited by Bernard Rose
Completing the publication of the 94 anthems collected in Musica Deo Sacra, this volume contains seven full anthems in more than five voice parts. The only one that can be accurately dated is the 7-part Be strong and of good courage, composed in 1603 for the coronation of James I.

Volume 40 - Parsons: Latin Sacred Music
Edited by Paul Doe
The Latin church music of Robert Parsons, Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, dates from the reigns of Mary and of her half-sister, Elizabeth who, although she insisted on her chapel services being in English, allowed the use of Latin for introits, anthems, and other peripheral choral music. Parsons, like William Byrd a Roman Catholic, showed the influence of the psalm motet and votive antiphon in his work.

Volume 41 - Morley: II - Services
Edited by John Morehen
This volume completes the publication in a scholarly edition of Thomas Morley’s Anglican sacred music, and initiates a new, larger format for the EECM series. Hardback.

Volume 42 - 15th-Century Liturgical Music: IV Early Masses and Mass Pairs
Edited by Gareth Curtis
Movements from incomplete cycles and pairings both scribal and scholarly constitute a volume of English Mass music from the period after the Old Hall Manuscript. The repertory is presented in a style of transcription new to the series and intended to convey the essential nature of this freely flowing yet mensurally disciplined music. Works by John Benet, Bloym, Driffelde, Leonel Power and Anon are included.

Volume 43 - Fayrfax: I Magnificat, Mass and Antiphon (O bone Jesu)
Edited by Roger Bray
The first volume of several to be devoted to Latin church music by composers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, EC43 contains all that survives of Fayrfax's O bone Iesu trilogy. From the material shared between the Mass and antiphon (an early example of English parody technique) it has been possible to reconstruct part of the latter, of which only the mean survives. In addition, the Appendix contains the conclusion of a fragmentary composition from the Jena Choirbook, which may also be the work of Fayrfax.

Volume 44 - Ludford: I Mass 'Inclina Cor Meum Deus' and Antiphons
Edited by David Skinner
Surviving incomplete and published here for the first time, the mass Inclina cor meum deus includes an editorial tenor part. In three of the six surviving antiphons editorial additions likewise substitute for missing material, though three others are too incomplete for reconstruction. A detailed biographical note updates our knowledge of the composer's career in the light of recently discovered documentation from the churchwardens' accounts of St Margaret's, Westminster.

Volume 45 - Fayrfax: II Two Masses: 'Tecum principium' and 'O quam glorifica'
Edited by Roger Bray
Both large-scale masses by Robert Fayrfax included in this volume are believed to be late works. O quam glorifica, in particular, was composed in 1511 for his supplication for the degree of Doctor of Music at Oxford, and in it the composer comprehensively explores the possibilities of extended structural planning. A feature of this edition is the restoration of the metrical character of the original, distorted in all surviving copies. Probably predating O quam glorifica, Tecum principium exhibits a simpler form, and is remarkable for the stylistic feature of unprepared dissonant fourths in the final section of the Agnus dei.

Volume 46 - Ludford: Five- and six-part Masses and Magnificat
Edited by David Skinner
A further addition to our growing perception of Ludford as amongst the most contrapuntally skilled and lyrically gifted of early 16th-century English composers, this volume contains four Masses, plus a Magnificat belonging to the Mass Benedicta. Also included is a partial reconstruction of the Mass Regnum mundi, from which the whole of the tenor part and much of the top part are now missing.

Volume 47 - 15th-Century Liturgical Music: V. Settings of the Sanctus & Agnus Dei
Edited by Peter Wright
This is a collection of over thirty early 15th-century Sanctus and Agnus dei settings not otherwise available in
modern critical editions. The volume is complementary to EC42, and part of an ongoing subseries to include settings of the Gloria and Credo, and of the Kyrie, 'squares' and music from fragmentary choirbooks.

Volume 48 - The Gyffard Partbooks: I
Transcribed and Edited by David Mateer
The first of two volumes containing repertoire from this crucial document for our understanding of the Salisbury Use in 16th-century England, EC48 contains music by key figures such as Tallis and Sheppard not elsewhere collected in the series, as well as works by unnamed composers. The editor has established a provenance for this collection later than that previously assumed by scholars, and from authoritative sources has provided plainchant for those sections required to complete the performance of most of the music.

Volume 49 - 15h-Century Liturgical Music: VI. Mass Settings from the Lucca Choirbook
Transcribed and Edited by Reinhard Strohm
Complemented by Professor Strohm’s facsimile edition of the entire source by the University of Chicago Press, the publication of eight Mass settings from the Lucca Choirbook is a signal contribution to our understanding of the dissemination of English music in fifteenth-century Europe. Only two are ascribed, to Walter Frye and Henricus Tik, but the insular provenance of the music is confirmed on grounds of style, repertoire and performance procedure. None of the Masses is preserved complete, but three are unica, and three others have been completed from concordances reflecting the significant influence of native-born composers on European music at this time.

Volume 50 - The Winchester Troper
Facsimile edition and introduction by Susan Rankin
A seminal text in the study of Anglo-Saxon musical and liturgical practice, compiled in the early eleventh century and added to until the early twelfth, the Winchester Troper is published in a colour facsimile of the manuscript. The introduction explains how and why the book was made, and how its liturgical contents were designed. Studies of the hands of over fifty text scribes are accompanied by the first full account of Anglo-Saxon musical notation, and a study of the most innovative element of the collection, a series of 174 organa, representing a musical practice not recorded elsewhere in Europe before the thirteenth century.

Volume 51 - The Gyffard Partbooks: II
Transcribed and Edited by David Mateer
This volume, the second of two devoted to the 16th-century 'Gyffard' partbooks, typifies the collection as a whole in the wide variety of liturgical types and compositional procedures on display. There are Jesus Mass propers built on plainsong cantus firmi, Mass ordinaries based on 'squares', Magnificat settings freely composed or using the canticle tone or its faburden, antiphons in honour of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, the setting of a tract (virtually unprecedented in the history of English polyphony), prayers, and even office responds masquerading as votive antiphons. The composers include Alcock, Bramston, Hoskins, Johnson, Knyght, Mundy, Sheppard, Henry? Stoning, Tallis, Whytbroke, Van Wilder, Wright and Anon.

Volume 52 - 15th-Century Liturgical Music: VII. The York Masses
Edited by Theodore Dumitrescu
The publication of the fragments known as the 'York Masses' offers a prime opportunity for re-evaluating the wider context of English polyphonic Mass composition in the final decades of the fifteenth century. This source stands out as the only extended collection devoted entirely to music for the Mass Ordinary, and as such it provides a significant example of developments after the Brussels Masses. It can also suggest important correctives to the traditional historiographical idea of insular conservatism in Mass composition. The volume contains four Kyries, including Horwod's O rex clemens, two each of Gloria-Credo and Sanctus-Agnus pairs, the Missa Venit dilectus meus attributed to Johannes Cuk, and a Gloria-Credo a 3.

Volume 53 - Fayrfax: Regali, Albanus and Sponsus amat sponsam
Edited by Roger Bray
This volume brings to a conclusion a series devoted to Masses and associated pieces composed by Robert Fayrfax, also featured in EECM volumes 43 and 45. It includes Fayrfax’s well-known Masses Regali and Albanus, as well as a reconstruction of his fragmentary, possibly nuptial, Mass Sponsus amat sponsam. Although some of the manuscript sources were copied many years later, these works date collectively from the years immediately preceding and following the turn of the sixteenth century, and as the editor demonstrates in his introduction, they show the composer’s mastery of largescale proportional planning.
Hardback.

Volume 54 - Sheppard: III - Hymns, Psalms, Antiphons and other Latin Polyphony
Edited by Magnus Williamson
This is an important addition to the pair of consecutive EECM volumes of John Sheppard's Latin compositions for the Use of Salisbury published in the 1970s. Although he had evidently mastered the forms of Mass and votive antiphon, the composer is at his most characteristic in his settings of the plainsong melodies which form the bedrock of the Sarum liturgy. These account for most of the contents of this volume, together with free-composed settings of Biblical texts and a small corpus of devotional polphony, most of it fragmentary. In general, textural richness is cultivated in preference to long arcs of melisma, and perfect time is favoured over imperfect, creating a directness of expression that seems to typify mid-Tudor polyphony. The format of this volume follows EECM's house style for post-Reformation composers.
Hardback.

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