5 English Songs

for 3 voices or instruments.

These English songs from around the middle of the fifteenth century come from three sources: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Selden B 26 (Tappster, dryngker), same library, MS Ashmole 191 (Go hert hurt with adversite), and British library, Add. MS 5665 - the so-called Ritson MS (the remaining songs). As David Fallows has pointed out in his article on this music ("English Song Repertoires of the mid-fifteenth century” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 1976, p, 61), the rather fragmentary repertoire that has survived shows rather more variety of form than its continental counterpart. My wofull hert is pretty well a ballade; like many French pieces in this form, it has a final melisma that is common to the ends of both sections, something that is found also in Now help, fortune. We only have additional verses for nos. 3 and 4, but it is reasonable to suppose that the remaining songs, which seem more straightforwardly strophic, also would have been repeated to subsequent stanzas; this seems especially likely with the two shorter pieces (1 and 5).
While the two longer songs (2-3) here have the mellifluous elegance characteristic of the rather beautiful songs attributed variously to John Bedyngham and Walter Frye (for instance, So ys emprinted;, or Alas, alas. It is possible that our two songs here were composed by an English musician working in France or Burgundy), Tappster, dryngker, with its slightly cruder partwriting, seems to belong to a different tradition.
In this edition the original note values have been halved throughout. Editorial accidentals are printed small above the stave, applying to the one note only; original accidentals, printed on the stave, are taken as applying to the whole bar until contradicted. The texts are printed essentially in their original form: an edition of the Ritson pieces (nos. 2-4) with modernised texts can be found in Musica Britannica XXXVI, Early Tudor Songs and Carols, ed. John Stevens, and a similar one of no. 5 is in Stainer, Early Bodleian Music. A commentary on the texts of the Ritson pieces can be found in Stevens' Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court - especially useful in the rather obscure Be pes. In nos. 3 and 4 the text is incomplete in the contratenor, and no attempt has been made here to underlay it; in no. 2 both tenor and contratenor are only partially underlaid in the original, but here an attempt has been made to fit the text to the music, though with only partial success. We have printed the additional verses of Be pes, but considerable alteration in the music is required to make them fit. Go hert has a fermata in bar 10 the significance of which is not clear, especially as it occurs in the middle of a line of the verse.

Produkt-ID: LPM-EML167

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6,50 EUR

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