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English–texted chant before Merbecke

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

John Milsom
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Extract

The first Book of Common Prayer, published in 1549, contains no music. This is not to say that many of the liturgical texts it contains were not intended to be sung or intoned, as they had been for centuries before the Reformation. That singing as well as speaking was permissible is made clear by the rubrics,1 but notation was not supplied, an omission that can only have perplexed English priests and choirs at a time of radical and inadequately prescribed liturgical reform. As E. H. Fellowes commented in 1941, ‘very little attention has been drawn to the problems that must have confronted precentors, organists, choirmasters and composers, when the Latin liturgy was replaced by the Book of Common Prayer issued in the vernacular tongue’.2 To that list he might have added celebrants; and however great these problems may have appeared at choral foundations which maintained close contact with the principal reformers, they must have seemed almost insuperable to the priests at remote parish churches throughout the country.

Type
Articles
Information
Plainsong & Medieval Music , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , April 1992 , pp. 77 - 92
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 For a convenient summary of rubrics in the 1549 Communion service, see le Huray, Peter, Music and the Reformation in England 1549-1660 (London, 1967), p. 27.Google Scholar

2 Fellowes, Edmund H., English Cathedral Music (London, 1941), p. 1.Google Scholar

3 Evidence of London purchases of Merbecke is given in The booke of Common praier noted, facsimile with introduction by Leaver, Robin A., Courtenay Facsimile 3 (Cogges Priory and Oxford, 1980), pp. 35–6.Google Scholar

4 For a bibliographical description and discussion of surviving copies of Merbecke, see Leaver, ibid., pp. 32–4 and 41–53.

5 Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, ed. Robinson, Hastings (London: Parker Society, 1846), p. 72.Google Scholar

6 A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, from A. D. 1485 to 1559. By Charles Wriothesley, Windsor Herald, ed. Hamilton, William Douglas: vol. 1 (Camden Society, 2nd Series, 11; London, 1875), p. 187; vol. 2 (Camden Society, 2nd Series, 20; London, 1875), pp. 2, 23.Google Scholar

7 Maskell, William, Monumenta Ritualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, I (London, 1846), p. xxi.Google Scholar

8 Some of the texts used for the earliest English-texted liturgical polyphony evidently date from before the publication of the 1549 prayer book; see Frere, W. H., ‘Edwardine Vernacular Services before the First Prayer Book’, Alcuin Club Collections, 35 (1940), pp. 5–21.Google Scholar The use of plainchant in Edwardine church polyphony has been studied in various articles by John Aplin: see in particular ‘A Group of Magnificats “Upon the Faburden”’, Soundings, 7 (1987), pp. 85–100Google Scholar, and ‘The Survival of Plainsong in Anglican Music: Some Early English Te Deum Settings’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 32 (1979), pp. 247–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Milsom, John, ‘Songs, Carols and Contrafacta in the Early History of the Tudor Anthem’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 107 (1980–1981), p. 35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 A rare example of what is unequivocally an English-texted chant – though a setting of apparently unauthorized words – is the setting of ‘Remember your promys made yn baptysm’ added to a blank page (f. 147r) of London, British Library, Additional MS 32427, a fifteenth-century noted Sarum breviary.

10 Doran's, edition was published as Missa Simplex: Being the Earliest Known Adaptation of Plain-Chant to the English Liturgy (Wantage, 1899).Google Scholar As recently as Temperley's, Nicholas The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, 1979), vol. 1, p. 15Google Scholar, the English service music of Lbl Add. 34191 has been described as monophonic. For a facsimile reproduction of the music on fols. 39v-43, see Hunt, J. Eric, Cranmer's First Litany, 1544 and Merbecke's Book of Common Prayer Noted, 1550 (London, 1939), pp. 52–9.Google Scholar The ensuing Kyrie on f. 43v, also possibly part of the cycle, is marked ‘iii parts’. I am grateful to Jeremy Summerly for sharing his thoughts on the music of Lbl Add. 34191, subsequently developed in his ‘British Library, Additional 34191: its Background, an Index and Commentary’, unpublished M. Mus. dissertation, University of London (1989).Google Scholar

11 John Marbeck, The Booke of Common Praier Noted (1550), facsimile with introduction by Stevens, John (London, 1979). See also Leaver (n. 3) pp.[233–4].Google Scholar

12 The early history of Och e.6.3 is unknown. It bears the following inscriptions: ‘John Disney. May: 19: 1703’; ‘Francis Wrangham 1816 The gift of Miss Fanny Shepherd’. It was presented to Christ Church by E. Lincoln in 1887. Transcriptions and photographic reproductions from this book are made by permission of the Governing Body of Christ Church.

13 The Plainchant of the Ordinary of the Mass Adapted from the Sarum Gradual to the English Text, 10th edn (London, 1937) has been consulted for this articleGoogle Scholar. Sarum chants quoted in the examples are taken from The Use of Salisbury. The Ordinary of the Mass, ed. Sandon, Nick (Newton Abbot, 1984).Google Scholar

14 The principal catalyst in the Merbecke revival was Dyce's, William The Order of Daily Service, the Litany, and Order of the Administration of the Holy Communion, with Plain-Tune… (London, 1843).Google Scholar