Chapter 2 - The Autograph Manuscripts

Summary

WILLIAM Lawes’s consort music largely survives in manuscript sources; none of it was published during his lifetime. Eight autograph sources have survived. A comprehensive survey of Lawes’s hand is lacking, although useful comments on many of the autograph sources can be gleaned from various monographs, articles, essays and modern editions. The autographs mostly contain instrumental music, which is usually more difficult to date than vocal music that one can often link to specific events such as masques or plays. The sources vary in material, function, date, and states of completeness (complete inventories in Appendix 1):

• 1 GB-Lbl, Add. MS 17798: bass partbook from a set of six

• 2 GB-Lbl, Add. MS 31432: songbook

• 3 GB-Lbl, Add. MSS 40657–61 (the Shirley partbooks): five partbooks from a set of six

• 4 GB-Ob, MS Mus. Sch. B.2: scorebook

• 5 GB-Ob, MS Mus. Sch. B.3: scorebook

• 6 GB-Ob, MS Mus. Sch. D.229: organbook

• 7 GB-Ob, MSS Mus. Sch. D.238–40: set of threestring partbooks

• 8 US-CAh, MS Mus. 70: lyra-viol partbook from a set of three

Several other manuscripts have also been attributed to Lawes: GB-Och, Mus. MSS 725–7, GB-Lbl, MS R.M.24.k.3 and GB-Ob, Tenbury MS 302; they have not been included in the present discussion as I challenge the attributions in Chapter 3.

Murray Lefkowitz was the first musicologist to examine the Lawes autographs in detail. Although his pioneering work is to be commended, he also made several rash and misleading statements. For example, Lefkowitz noted that all of the autograph volumes are ‘bound exactly alike, in brown calf, with the Royal Arms of Charles I stamped in gold on the covers, and on either side of the design an initial, first W. and then L. [except B.3, which has H. L.]’ . Whilst conceding that the manuscripts offer little assistance in determining their chronology, he further suggested that

all of the volumes appear to be part of one large set which was meticulously arranged and guarded. …

An examination and identification of the watermarks of the various autographs supports the claim that they were for the most part all of the same set, as well as the suggestion that the set was compiled in Oxford, c. 1642–3.