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• 6 Dances from the court of Henry VIII

6 Dances from the court of Henry VIII

for 4 instruments.

These six dances are taken from British Library MS Royal App., 58, a collection of music written in keyboard tablature. Three of the pieces found in it are idiomatic keyboard works, by now quite well-known in the repertoire, but the remaining numbers are straightforward unadorned intabulations of dances, written in three parts.
Although the pieces printed here have English titles, and certain details of the settings have an English sound to them, all six are probably originally from France and Italy. Three pieces occur in other sources: The Emperor´s Pavyn appears in Jean d´Estrées´ Tiers Livre de Danceries of 1559 (subsequently pirated in Phalèse´s Liber Primus Leviorum Carminum of 1571); The Kyng´s Maske crops up in a completely undecorated form in a Spanish manuscript collection now in Utrecht, and the final galliard is found in a 5-part version in one of the Hessen collections of 1555. The Crocke may well be a French branle (or a pair of branles), as the third section has something in common with the Gervaise branle made famous in our own century by Francis Poulenc.
These dances are written in three parts in the original, and in most cases it is the altus that has been added. The original note values have been halved throughout. Editorial accidentals, are printed small above the stave, applying to the one note only. The manuscript is quite corrupt in many ways: in no. 3, which appears to have two bars missing, I have altered the form to fit the d´Estrèes version. In the first piece I have given the scribe the benefit of the doubt, but here again it is possible that each phrase should be repeated.