John Milsom

A century of English song

well blended, and acoustically ample reading from Ex Cathedra. Given the possibility (suggested in his sleeve notes by Richard Rastall) that the motets were written for liturgical performance at Westminster Abbey in the 1620s, Ex Cathedra’s relatively large-scale a cappella treatment is apposite, although a more intimate chamber-style conception is arguably more appropriate to the motets’ expressive madrigalian idiom. The post-Reformation abbey, which has lately been attracting some interest among historians (see, inter alia, Westminster Abbey reformed: nine studies, 1540–1640, ed. C. S. Knighton and R. Mortimer (Aldershot, 2002)), was a royal peculiar, a seat of learning, and a centre of High Church theology. Given the doctrinal neutrality of their texts, it is theoretically possible that Peerson’s motets were sung in the abbey’s services, although the abbey’s high political profile would have made this rather thorny. Chronologically, Peerson belongs squarely to the postByrd generation, although the motets seem to hark back to the madrigal rather than forwards, unlike the overtly Catholic Italianate continuo motets of his direct contemporary, Richard Dering. Nor, despite Peerson’s evident competence as a contrapuntist, does imitative counterpoint pervade the entire musical fabric in the manner of the previous generation: his main interest seems to have been in the subtle manipulation of dense chords, surprise changes of mode, passing dissonances, these often underpinning some memorable gestures of text-setting. For vintage Peerson, Laboravi in gemitu meo (track 13) has it all: a suitably lachrymose text, a concatenation of English cadences, expressively paired soprano parts (as reconstructed by Rastall), and a final cadence which would not be out of place in Hubert Parry’s Songs of farewell.

The arcane colours of Fayrfax

One of Tudor England’s most eminent composers, Robert Fayrfax (1464–1521), is at last fully emerging from the shadows, thanks to a variety of recent enterprises. First came a series of recordings of his complete works, sung by The Cardinall’s Musick and issued on the ASV label during the later 1990s. In 2003 the Roxburghe Club published a luxurious full-colour facsimile of The Arundel Choirbook (better known as the ‘Lambeth Choirbook’; London, Lambeth Palace Library, Ms.1), in which most of Fayrfax’s sacred music is to be found. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Roger Bray has long been at work on these same pieces, editing them for the series Early English Church Music. Volume 1 of his edition was welcomed in this journal last year (see Roger Bowers’s review in EM, xxxii/3 (Aug 2004), pp.471–3), and volume 2 must now be greeted with equal warmth—not only for its own sake, but also for the way it complements the other enterprises. With recordings, facsimile and editions all now readily to hand, the resources needed to explore Fayrfax’s music could hardly be bettered. There are two Masses in Bray’s second volume: the Christmastide Missa Tecum principium, and the Missa O quam glorifica, which Fayrfax submitted to Oxford University in 1511 as his exercise for the degree of Doctor of Music. Tecum principium, which is superficially the more attractive and accessible work of the two, needs only passing mention here, since the issues that arise in it barely differ from those faced by Bray when editing Fayrfax volume 1. O quam glorifica is quite another matter. Indeed, this Mass probably makes greater demands on the editor, on the typesetter of the volume, on the silent reader of the book, and on the singer, than any other work that has ever been published or will ever appear in the pages of Early English Church Music. By its very nature, the piece virtually defies representation in a notated score, and compromises are inevitable. The following remarks set out to explain (1) why this situation arises, (2) how Bray’s edition tackles the problem, and (3) what might still be done to communicate the essence of this strange and elusive work. First, a few words of context. In Fayrfax’s day, composers supplicating for a music degree from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford were required to submit a notated composition that showed off their skills, not only through the invention of sound itself, but also through the handling of more arcane matters, such as mathematical plans underpinning the music, demonstration of the less-trodden notational byways of the mensural system, and the use of erudite verbal instructions (or ‘canons’), through which riddles in the written notes might be solved. Only one of these exercises survives in its original notated state, the anonymous Missa O quam suavis (Cambridge, University Library, Ms. Nn. vi. 46), and it is certainly a fine display of notational learnedness, no matter how tedious the music itself may be to the listening ear. Roger Bray now convincingly shows that Fayrfax’s Missa O quam glorifica—a much more satisfying piece in sound—also once existed in ‘academic’ garb as a dazzling display of notational trickery, held together by a clever mathematical plan. But the notation and canons of the original degree-submission state of the work are lost, and instead the piece survives only in 16th-century copies that ‘translate’ its arcane notation and canonic instructions into a simplified form that any competent musician could read. Hence Bray’s dilemma. On the one hand, he has to imagine a lost archetype that was full of puzzles and (literally) multicoloured notation. On the other hand, he has to convey the sense of the work in a form that will communicate to readers today. Compromises are legion. According to Bray’s hypothesis, the copy of the Mass submitted to Oxford by Fayrfax, in choirbook format, probably used full-black notation as its base, supplemented by three levels of coloration: full-red, full-blue and full-green. Bray’s edition, however, has to be in score layout; and because all EECM editions now use void-black notation as their base, the hypothetical fullblack of Fayrfax’s original has been reversed positive-intonegative. Normally EECM would then represent coloration as full-black, but here that principle has to be abandoned, since there are three levels of coloration to show, not one. So instead, everything is notated in void-black, with visual qualifications added above and below the stave: symbols placed above notes indicate the ones denoted by red, blue or green coloration; and arabic numbers below those notes Music reviews