Chapter 4 - The Royall Consort

Summary

THE Royall Consort is a large and diffuse collection, the parameters of which are difficult to define. Perhaps begun as early as the 1620s, the collection was apparently well received by contemporaries. Playford also published some dances from the collection in Court-Ayres (1655) and Courtly Masquing Ayres (1662), and parts of the collection are found in manuscript sources until the 1680s. Murray Lefkowitz was first to recognize that the Royall Consort survives in two versions, known today as the ‘new’ (Tr–Tr–B–B with continuo) and the ‘old’ (Tr–Tr–T–B with continuo). Since then David Pinto has edited both versions, and has discussed the collection in several articles and in his monograph.

Apart from the high quality of the music, the Royall Consort represents an important stage in the development of the suite and in the development of a twotreble scoring for dance music in England. Although Peter Holman has addressed both of these issues previously, a brief recapitulation will provide necessary background. According to Holman, both developments received much of their impetus from Germany. Common to the early seventeenth-century collections of the English expatriates William Brade and Thomas Simpson, and of Germans such as Paul Puerl and Johann Hermann Schein, was organization of movements grouped by key and the progression therein from the serious to the lighter dances. Several English manuscripts from the 1630s record the gradual emergence of the consort suite: GB-Lbl, Add. MS 36993 (a bass viol partbook in French tablature); and GB-Och, Mus. MSS 367–70 and 379–81 (two sets of partbooks owned by John Browne). The four groups of dances in MSS 367–70 and 379–81 by Charles Coleman and William Drew ‘are probably the earliest surviving English consort suites by single composers, but they still look as if they were assembled rather than planned’ . The Royall Consort represents the next stage in the development of the consort suite, with the emergence of the Alman–Corant–Saraband (A–C–S) sequence at its core. Nevertheless, no single form of the consort suite dominated. Fantasia-suites continued to be composed, and Lawes’s suites for five and six viols and organ follow a different format (see Chapter 5).