Keyboard Music c.1600-1625

This volume is the first of two intended to extend the coverage of keyboard music in Musica Britannica comprehensively into the first quarter of the 17th century. (The other, MB102, includes material from the two virginal books in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.) The present edition contains music by anonymous and a dozen or so named composers, including the complete keyboard works of Nicholas Carleton, the surviving twenty ‘Miserere’ canons by Thomas Woodson, and the anonymous ‘Pretty ways for young beginners to look on’. The 77 complete pieces are organised by genre, including preludes, plainsong settings, voluntaries, dances and character pieces. Drawing on 22 manuscripts which mostly also transmit music by Byrd and other noted virginalists, this residue of music from these sources shows great diversity and a pleasing level of technical skill and musical interest, sufficient to enhance our wider view of English Renaissance music.