Latin Church Music 1

EECM 64 (EECM’s first all-Tallis volume since the English sacred music was published as Volumes 12 and 13) focuses on Latin polyphony that is either demonstrably Henrician or can plausibly be dated to before 1547.

In the latter case, a Henrician dating of Gaude gloriosa hinges upon the motet’s adaptation with a vernacular text in the mid-1540s: David Skinner’s reconstruction of the contrafact Se lord and behold (with words by Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr) is published for the first time here.

This English adaptation was a precocious example of the kind of recycling and repurposing of Latin polyphony that would become so prevalent among Elizabethan musicians and music-lovers. The Mass Salve intemerata is found in the Henrician Peterhouse partbooks, but otherwise only in one orphaned Bassus book dating from the 1560s.

In contrast, the Latin antiphons travelled prolifically along several posthumous transmission routes: via Elizabethan Catholic gentry networks, within the collections of professional singers, in the household of the Norwich merchant John Sadler, and in arrangements for keyboard, lute and other instruments.