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• Cornysh & others: 4 Instrumental Pieces

Cornysh & others: 4 Instrumental Pieces

for 3 instruments.

These four pieces are taken from the Henry VIII Manuscript (British Library, Add. MS 31922). The two Cornysh pieces are the most substantial of the purely abstract numbers in the collection. Fa la sol, with its tendency to let the cantus soar high above the tenor at times, is the strongest surviving English piece of its kind., full of variety and caprice. For the second piece we have used the term catholicon, meaning a piece that will work in more titan one mode. The thing that suggests most strongly that our piece falls into this category is the impossible ending, where the bass falls the forbidden tritone; to allow a performance that stays in the basic Phrygian tonal area, I have provided an alternative ending, which is not entirely satisfactory. Two other alternatives would be (a) to add a key-signature of three flats, which does, however, run into serious problems in the last five bars, (b) to treat the piece as an example of so-called Secret Chromatic Art, in which by devious application of musica ficta the piece modulates in effect from B to B flat.
The short piece attributed to Dunstable has to be treated with some suspicion, because of the long time-interval between composition. and notation, but as it is a well-written little number, the true identity of the composer is to some extent irrelevant. The tenor part simply has the basic five-note phrase written out once, with a Latin instruction to indicate it should be repeated on successive degrees of the scale.
In this edition the original note values have been halved, except in no, 3, written around 60-70 years previously, in which they have been quartered. Editorial accidentals are shown in the usual way, printed small above the stave, applying to the one note only.