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• 4 Pieces from the Mulliner Book

4 Pieces from the Mulliner Book

for 4 instruments.

The Mulliner Book is a manuscript collection preserved in the British Library(Add. MS 35013) that was compiled by Thomas Mulliner sometime between 1550 and 1575. It contains mostly sacred keyboard pieces by Redford, Blitheman and others, but there are also straightforward intabulations of vocal pieces by Tye, Tallis and others.
The first three pieces printed here, probably French in origin, show all the signs of being dance music, with regular, mostly four-bar phrases, and repeated sections. La doune cella - presumably a corruption of the word common to several Romance languages for a young girl (“donzella” in Italian) has a melody that appears in some later sources, including van Eyck's Der Fluyten Lust-Hof, where it has the text “O slaep, o zoete slaep”.
La shy myze (presumably a corruption of "La chemise”) is probably a dance of the type that appears in 1550s dance-books as “Allemande courant"; it could well be based on a chanson, which would explain the title.
In all three of these pieces the manuscript gives top and bottom parts only; the two inner parts are editorial. No. 4 appears in three parts in the original; here the tenor part has been supplied by myself. This fourth piece is quite different, and is almost certainly not a dance piece, not even a pavane. It may well be a vocal piece originally, most likely with a sacred text.
The original note values have been halved throughout. Editorial accidentals are printed small above the stave, applying to one note only. The original accidentals are taken as applying to the whole bar for the sake of simplicity.
These pieces can be performed on consorts of recorders, viols or on louder wind instruments such as cornetts, shawms and sackbuts. However, since nos. 1-3 are very much tune plus harmony, it is quite permissible to use a single treble instrument with chordal accompaniment.