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English Song Repertories of the Mid-fifteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1976

David Fallows
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Extract

Writing a year before Mozart died, Joseph Ritson prefaced the earliest attempt to summarize the history of medieval English song with the comment:

To pretend to frame a History, or any thing resembling one, from the scanty gleanings it is possible to collect upon the subject of our Ancient Songs and vulgar music, would be vain and ridiculous.

Nearly two hundred years later it is still necessary to begin any such survey on a note of extreme caution and with a declaration that the picture must be built on a series of widely separated stepping-stones—or more precisely, on a scattered group of stones peeping up from the river and perhaps never intended to pave a way across. Perhaps I may continue the river metaphor for a moment by saying that a landing place is now fairly solidly established on the far bank thanks to the recent publication by John Stevens of the Fayrfax Manuscript (GB-Lbm Add. 5465), dating from around 1500, and of the English songs in the Ritson Manuscript (Add. 5665), some of which must have been copied around 1470. Further, a little way up the river, there is a more or less continuous path across provided by the English carol tradition, also fully published by John Stevens and surviving in a series of five manuscripts that are miraculously fairly even in their chronological and stylistic spacing over the years from 1430 to 1500.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 103 , 1976 , pp. 61 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

1 (Joseph Ritson], Ancient Songs, from the Time of King Henry the Third, to the Revolution (London, 1790), xxvii.Google Scholar

2 Early Tudor Songs and Carols, ed. John Stevens, Musica Britannica, xxxvi (London, 1975).Google Scholar

3 Mediaeval Carols, ed. John Stevens, Musica Britannica, iv (London, 1952, rev. 2nd edn., 1958); the later generation of carols is represented in Early Tudor Songs and Carols (see fn.2 above) and in Music at the Court of Henry VIII, ed. John Stevens, Musica Britannica, xviii (London, 1962, rev. and edn, 1969).Google Scholar

4 Rossell Hope Robbins, Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (Oxford, 1952, rev. 2nd edn. 1955). xlvii; one might add that the three manuscripts he mentions (CB-Cu Ff.1.6., Ob Lat. misc.c.66 and Oh Rawl.C.813) were all probably written in the early sixteenth century.Google Scholar

5 John Stainer, ed., with E. W. B. Nicholson, J. F. R. Stainer and C. Staier Early Bodleian Music: Sacred & Secular Songs Together with Other MS. Compositions in the Bodleian Library, Oxford Ranging from about A.D. 1185 to about A.D. 1505 (London, 1901, repr. 1967), vol. i, plates xxx-xxxvi and xcvi-xcvii (facsimile), vol. ii, pp. 66–74 and 177–80 (edition).Google Scholar

6 I-TRmn 88, ff.209v-210; see Rudolf von Ficker, ‘Agwillare: a Piece of Late Gothic Minstrelsy’, The Musical Quarterly, xxii (1936), 131–9, including a transcription that supplants the heavily ‘emended’ one in Sechs Trienter Codices … Zweite Auswahl, ed. G. Adler and O. Koller, Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, xxii, Jg. xi (Vienna, 1904), 12of; for an attempt to give the song a tentative stylistic context, see Fallows, David, ‘The Fayrfax Manuscript’, The Musical Times, cxvii (1976), 127–30; with a facsimile of the Discantus of the song on the cover of thatGoogle Scholar

7 John Stevens, Music & Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London, 1961), passim, a book which is the indispensable basis for any study of English song in the fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries. Stevens uses the terms ‘rhyming melismas’ (sc fairly extended) and ‘rhyming cadences’ (sc. a bar or less), but the distinction between them is purely a verbal convenience: in the repertory being discussed here there seems to be no particular significance in the difference.Google Scholar

8 E-E IV.a.24, ff. 114v-116; see Fallows, David, ‘Words and Music in Two English Songs of the Mid-15 th Century: Charles d'Orléans and John Lydgate’, Early Music, v (1977), 38–43. The music was first published in Manfred F. Bukofzer, “The First English Chanson on the Continent', Music & Letters, xix (1938), 119–31.Google Scholar

9 US-NHu 91, ff.61 v-63, 65 v-67 and 77 v-79; all three are published in Water Frye: Collected Works, ed. Sylvia W. Kenney, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, xix (American Institute of Musicology, 1960), 3–8. On the dating of the manuscript see Leeman L. Perkins, ‘Concerning the Provenance of the Mellon Chansonnier’, Abstracts of Papers Read at the Thirty-sixth Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society: Toronto (1970), 22–3; on the interpretation of the English texts see Robert J. Meaner, “Three Fragmentary English Ballades in the Mellon Chansonnier', Modern Language Quarterly, vi (1945), 381–7.Google Scholar

10 The pattern was first outlined in Manfred F. Bukofzer, ‘An Unknown Chansonnier of the 15th Century (The Mellon Chansonnier)’, The Musical Quarterly, xxviii (1942), 14–49, on pp-25f; it was further elaborated in Sylvia W. Kenney, ‘Contrafacta in the Works of Walter Frye’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, viii (1955), 182–202.Google Scholar

11 Registered by John Stevens, Music & Poetry (1961), 453, but otherwise omitted from the literature.Google Scholar

12 See Manfred F. Bukofzer,‘Popular and Secular Music in England (to c. 1470)’,. Ars Nova and the Renaissance, 1300–1540, ed. Dom Anselm Hughes and Gerald Abraham, New Oxford History of Music, iii (London, 1960), 107–33, on p.132.Google Scholar

13 The only published edition is in Edward L. Kottick, ‘Flats, Modality, and Musica Ficta in Some Early Renaissance Chansons’, Journal of Music Theory, xii (1968), 264–80, on pp.268f; the fullest list of sources for the song is in Eileen Southern, ‘El Escorial, Monastery Library, Ms. IV.a.24’, Musica disciplina, xxiii (1969), 41–79, on p.73 to which must now be added D—Mbs 5023, ff.8v-9r (2W only with text ‘Fortune Domine miserere’) and CS-HK II A 7 (Codex Speálnik), pp.402 and 404f, where it appears with two additional voices.Google Scholar

14 Both Brigitte Kultzen, Der Codex Escorial IV.a.24: Ubertragung, Katolog, historische Einordung einer Chansonsammlung aus der zweiten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts (diss., University of Hamburg, 1956), 112, and Margaret Bent, ‘The Transmission of English Music 1300–1500: Some Aspects of Repertory and Preservation’, Studien zur Tradition in der Musik: Kurt von Fischer zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. H. H. Eggebrecht and M. Lutolf (Munich, 1973), 65–83, on p.69, observed that this must be a text incipit, but Kultzen inexplicably went on to associate it with a French quatrain of the sixteenth century and Bent passed on to the next topic without following up her comment that this was obviously the incipit of an English text; the Italian text is discussed and partly printed (‘limitata per forza di cose alla sola prima stanza’) in Nino Pirrotta, ‘Ricercare e variazioni su “O rosa bella”’, Studi musicali, i (1972), 59–77, on pp.6gf.Google Scholar

15 GB-Lbm Harley 7333, f.30 v; two further sources (with a slightly different opening) are listed in Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins, The Index of Middle English Verse (New York, 1943), no. 860; the poem is edited in Eleanor Prescott Hammond, ‘Lament of a Prisoner Against Fortune’, Anglia, xxxii (1909), 481–90.Google Scholar

16 Heinrich Besseler, ‘Bedingham, Johannes’, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, i (1949–51), coll. 1493f.Google Scholar

17 See fn. 3 above.Google Scholar

18 I-T Rmm 87, f. 118 (no. 91); see Hamm, Charles, ‘A Group of Anonymous English Pieces in Trent 87’, Music & Letters xli (1960), 211–5; a long letter from Brian Trowell commenting on the article is in Music & Letters, xlii (1961), 96f.Google Scholar

19 The piece appears as an illustration to a recent paper presented to this association: Mark Lindley, ‘Pythagorean Intonation and the Rise of the Triad’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, cii (1975–6) (forthcoming).Google Scholar

20 D-Mbs Cim.352b, f.93 (no. 175); modern edition in Das Buxheimer Orgelbuch, ed. Bertha Antonia Wallner, Das Erbe deutscher Musik, xxxvii-xxxix (Kassel, 1958–9), 226f.Google Scholar

21 For the complete English poems in carol form, organized according to occasion and content, see Greene, RichardLeighton, The Early English Carols (Oxford, 1935), and Greene, A Selection of English Carols (Oxford, 1962). But in any case the German poem most probably treats Shrove Tuesday not as a religious feast but as an occasion for dancing and merrymaking, as does the text of the musically unrelated song ‘Die Vasnacht thut her nahen’ in the Schedeisches Liederbuch (D-Mbs Cgm 810), ff.53 v-54, ascribed to Wal[therus] Seam.Google Scholar

22 F. 1v (no. 4), ed. Wallner, p.3. Above the title appears an unexplained series of letters: ‘W.J. b. d. d. V.’ Even though three major dissertations have been devoted to the manuscript in recent years (by Robert S. Lord, Yale, Hans Rudolf Zöbeley, Munich, and Eileen Southern, New York) the only modern published inventory is that in Eileen Southern, The Buxheim Organ Book, Musicological Studies, vi (Brooklyn, 1963).Google Scholar

23 Sylvia W. Kenney, Walter Frye and the Contenance Angloise (New Haven and London, 1964), 62ff; for Kultzen and Bent references see fn. 14 above; there is also an excellent summary by Brian Trowell in the round-table discussion “The English Carol', Report of the Tenth Congress of the International Musicological Society: Ljubljana 1967 (Kassel, 1970), 288–92.Google Scholar

24 On the poetic form see Helen L. Cohen, The Ballade (New York, 1915).Google Scholar

25 I borrow the term ‘in balade’ from E. G. Stanley, ‘Stanza and Ictus: Chaucer's Emphasis in “Troilus and Criseyde”’, Chaucer und seine Zeit: Symposium für Walter F. Schirmer, ed. Arno Esch (Tübingen, 1968), 123–48. Documentation for its use in the fifteenth century appears in Middle English Dictionary, ed. H. Kurath, S. M. Kuhn and others (Ann Arbor, 1952-), s.v. ‘balad(e’. The seven-line stanza ‘in balade’ is normally described as in ‘Rhyme royal’, but there seems to be no authority for this earlier than Gascoigne (1575), who called it ‘rithme royall’, see O.E.D., s.v. ‘Rhythm, sb.I, l, b’; the name, which evidently derives from the form's use in The Kyngis Quair, reputedly by James I of Scotland (1423), is, however, to some extent implied by the copyist John Shirley who labelled some Lydgate poems as being ‘Balade ryal’, see Middle English Dictionary, loc cit.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 ‘Resioy toy terre de France’ in F-Pn fr.15123, ff.43 v-45 and I-MC 871, p.375.Google Scholar

27 Facsimile and edition in Dragan Plamenac, ‘Browsing through a Little-known Manuscript (Prague, Strahov Monastery, D.G.IV.47)’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, xiii (1960), 102–11; unfortunately the piece was discovered too late to be included in Sylvia Kenney's complete edition of Frye (i960), though she did refer to it in her subsequent study of the composer (1964).Google Scholar

28 Stevens, Music & Poetry (1961), 341.Google Scholar

29 See especially Sylvia W. Kenney, Walter Frye and the Contenance Angloise (New Haven and London, 1964), 67ff.Google Scholar

30 Both were mentioned by Margaret Bent in a paper read to the Dufay Conference at Cambridge in 1974; ‘Or me veult’ is further discussed in Leeman L. Perkins, ‘Toward a Rational Approach to Text Placement in the Secular Music of Dufay's Time’, Dufay Quincentenary Conference, ed. Allan W. Atlas (Brooklyn, 1976), 102–14, on pp. 108f.Google Scholar

31 I-Fn Magl.XIX, 176, ff.134 v-136; I-Fr 2356, ff.18 v-19; the two versions are portrayed on facing pages in Joshua Rifkin, ‘Scribal Concordances for some Renaissance Manuscripts in Florentine Libraries’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, xxvi (1973), 305–28, on pp. 320f.Google Scholar

32 E-E IV.a.24, ff.112 v-114, immediately preceding ‘Pryncesse of youthe’. English origin was first suggested by Brigitte Kultzen, see fn. 14 above.Google Scholar

33 D-Sl HB VIII, Philol.9, f.lv; facsimile and edition in Clytus Gottwald, ‘Das Konstanzer Fragment: Untersuchung zu einem Handschriften-Bruchstück des 15. Jahrhunderts’, Acta musuologtca, xxxiv (1962), 155–61, where he suggests 1476 as the date of copying and Constance as the place. Schedel (D-Mbs Cgm 810), ff.16v-18, with a fuller Latin text beginning ‘O intemerata castitatis’. Buxheim (D-Mbs Cim.352b), f.122 (no. 225), ed. Wallner, p.283.Google Scholar

34 Particularly striking cases include a textless ballade appearing after several ‘O rosa bella’ settings in I-T Rmn 90, ff.363v-364 (no. 1076), and the song with the incomprehensible text opening ‘Voy da plas’ in the Schedeisches Liederbuch (D-Mbs Cgm 810), ff.76v-77, in ballade form and musically reminiscent of the Ritson ballades though without rhyming cadences; a further song in ballade from in Schedel on ff.97v-98 with only the ascription ‘Xilobalsamus’ has long rhyming melismas and is strangely close in style to the Escorial ‘Pryncesse of youthe’ mentioned below.Google Scholar

35 The Musical Works of John Hothby, ed. Albert Seay, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, xxxiii (American Institute of Musicology, 1964), 22f.Google Scholar

36 Sechs Trienter Codices… Erste Auswahl, ed. G. Adler and O. Koller, Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, xiv-xv, Jg. vii (Vienna, 1900), 239f; the attempt there to underlay the rondeau ‘Le serviteur hault guerdonné’ to the music seems unconvincing, if only because part of the first half of the rondeau stanza is thereby underlaid to the second half of the music, after the mid-point cadence indicated by a corona at bar 20 (omitted in the edition); but at the same time the context in which I am placing the music here is provisional, to say the least.Google Scholar

37 The Musical Works of John Hothby (1964), 24–6.Google Scholar

38 Walter Frve: Collected Works, ed. Sylvia W. Kenney, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, xix (American Institute of Musicology, 1960), 14–16.Google Scholar

39 So far as I know the earliest through-setting of a stanza ‘in balade’ is the monophonic ‘My hert vs so plungyt yn greffe’, in EIRE-Dtc 158, f.92, edited in Stevens, Music & Poetry (1961), 124.Google Scholar

40 The few surviving examples are listed in Rossell Hope Robbins, Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (Oxford, 1952, rev. 2nd edn. 1955), 278, note to poem no. 170 (which is itself surely not a rondeau at all).Google Scholar

41 An interesting reconstruction appears in David Wulstan, An Anthology of Carols (London, 1968), 47f; further discussion is announced in the notes as forthcoming in an article by Wulstan, ‘Middle English Lyric Refrain Forms and their Origins’, to appear in Medium aevum.Google Scholar

42 See the article cited in fn. 8 above.Google Scholar

43 GB-Lbm Loan 29/333, f.70. The leaf is mounted backwards, that is to say the side here called the verso is the front of the sheet as it now appears in the Portland volume which is a collection of fragments mostly mounted. The leaf is of paper, about 10½′ × 7′; I was unable to find any watermark. I am grateful to Francis Needham, the Duke of Portland's librarian, for permission to photograph and discuss the leaf.Google Scholar

44 Rossell Hope Robbins and John L. Cutler, Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse (Lexington, Kentucky, 1965), nos. 270, 317.5.Google Scholar

45 See particularly Heinrich Baseler, Bourdon und Fauxbourdon: Studien zum Ursprung der niederländischen Musik (Leipzig, 1951, rev. 2nd edn., 1974) and Charles E. Hamm, A Chronology of the Works of Guillaume Dufay Based on a Study of Mensural Practice (Princeton, 1964).Google Scholar

46 John Dunstable: Complete Works, ed. Manfred F. Bukofzer, Musica Britannica, viii (London, 1953, rev. 2nd edn., 1970, by Margaret Bent, Ian Bent and Brian Trowell), 136 (‘Puisque m'amour’) and 156 (‘Durer ne puis’). The latter appears among the opera dubia, and most writers agree that it is by Bedyngham, just as the Charles d'Orléans setting ‘Mon seul plaisir’ (‘Mi verry joy’) is accepted as a work of Bedyngham in spite of a contrary ascription to Dufay.Google Scholar

47 Sechs Trienter Codices … Erste Auswahl, ed. G. Adler and O. Koller, Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, xiv-xv, Jg. vii (Vienna, 1900), 62 (no. 999); Sieben Tnenter Codices… V. Auswahl, ed. R. Ficker, Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Osterreich, lxi, Jg. xxxi (Vienna, 1924), x (no. 1841).Google Scholar

48 D-Mbs Cim.352b, f.91 v (no. 171), ed. Wallner, op cit (fn. 20), 224.Google Scholar

49 See Hanham, Alison, ‘The Musical Studies of a Fifteenth-Century Wool Merchant’, The Review of English Studies, new series, viii (1957), 270–74; further information on the Celys and their background is in The Cely Letters 1472–1488, ed. Alison Hanham, The Early English Text Society, cclxxiii (London, 1975).Google Scholar

50 Suffolk Record Office, 50/9/15.7(1), f.51 v- I am most grateful to Dr Allen at the record office for kindly sending a copy of this leaf at extremely short notice. So far as I know the only references to it are in Stevens, Music & Poetry (1961), 457 and 467.Google Scholar

51 D-Mbs Cim.352b, f.34 v (no. 63), ed. Wallner, op cit (fn. 20), 78.Google Scholar

52 I-PEc 431, no. 84, on which see Allan W. Atlas, The Cappella Giulia Chansonnier (Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, C.G.XIII.27), Musicological Studies, xxvii (Brooklyn, 1975), 253–4; Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 78 C 28, ff.39v-40, on which see Reidemeister, Peter, Die Chanson-Handschrift 78 C 28 des Berliner Kupferstichkabbinetts: Studien zur Form der Chanson im 15. Jahrhundert, mit Faksimile und Erst-Edition der Unica der Handschrift, Berliner musikwissenschaftliche Arbeiten, iv (Munich, 1973).Google Scholar

53 A complete edition of the songs ascribed to Morton, edited by Allan W. Atlas, is shortly to be published by Broudc of New York; my own doctoral thesis examines the ascriptions at some ength.Google Scholar

54 Jeanne Marix, Histoire de la musique et des musiciens de la cour de Bourgogne sous le règne de Philippe le Bon (1430–1467), Sammlung musikwissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen, xxviii (Strasbourg, 1939), aooff.Google Scholar

55 See m. 46 above.Google Scholar

56 Walter Frye, ed. Kenney (1960), 1.Google Scholar

57 See, for instance, Brian Jeffery, Chanson Verse of the Early Renaissance (London, 1971), 49, printing a version in a source Jeffery dates c1515–20, see p.39.Google Scholar

58 Cited in fn. 29 above, pp. 176–87.Google Scholar

59 David Fallows, ‘Robertus de Anglia and the Oporto Song Collection’, Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: a Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart, ed. I. D. Bent and M. Tilmouth (forthcoming).Google Scholar

60 Ed. in David Fallows, Galfridus and Robertus de Anglia: Four Italian Songs for 2 & 3 Voices (Newton Abbot, 1977), if.Google Scholar

61 See Pirrotta, Nino, ‘Two Anglo-Italian Pieces in the Manuscript Porto 714’, Speculum Musicae Artis: Festgabe für Heinrich Husmann zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. H. Becker and R. Gerlach (Munich, 1970), 253–61, where he suggests 1444 or 1446 for the date of the poem; for arguments in favour of the earlier date see Lockwood, Lewis, ‘Dufay and Ferrara’, Dufay Quincentenary Conference, ed. Allan W. Atlas (Brooklyn, 1976), 1–25, on p. 7, and Fallows, Galfridus and Robertus (1977).Google Scholar

62 Ed. in Fallows, Galfridus and Robertus (1977), 5ff; a partial edition by Nino Pirrotta, whose work is as fundamental to this part of my paper as is that of John Stevens to the earlier part, appears in his article ‘Ricercare e variazioni su “O rosa bella”’, Studi musicali, i (197a), 59–77, on p.77, but suffers from being based on a microfilm that did not distinguish red notation.Google Scholar

63 See the commentary to Early Tudor Songs and Carols, ed. John Stevens, Musica Britannica, xxxvi (1975). 156.Google Scholar

64 Ed. in Fallows, Galfridus and Robertus (1977), 3f.Google Scholar

65 Edn. in John Dunstable, ed. Bukofzer (see fn. 46 above), 133ff and in many other places, listed in the commentary to that volume.Google Scholar

66 Edn. in Sechs Trienter Codices … Erste Auswahl, ed. G. Adler and O. Koller, Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, xiv-xv, Jg. vii (Vienna, 1900), 233f; also in Victor Lederer, Über Heimat und Ursprung der mehrstimmigen Tonkunst (Leipzig, 1906), 407ff.Google Scholar

67 ‘Amor’; edn. in John Hothby, ed. Seay (see fn. 35 above), 29ff.Google Scholar

68 ‘O florens rosa’, see fn. 38 above.Google Scholar

69 I must express my gratitude to Margaret Bent and Brian Trowell for their generosity in allowing me to exchange ideas on many of the songs discussed; to Christopher Page for pointing to some embarrassing errors; but particularly to John Stevens whose work obviously lies at the root of almost everything presented here and who much improved this paper by offering some extremely pertinent questions and observations at a time when he was heavily committed with other obligations.Google Scholar