4 Pieces from the Henry VIII manuscript

for 4 instruments.

These four pieces from the Henry VIII MS (British Library, Add. MS 31922) indicate the variety of musical styles current in England at that time. Madame d´amours is a particularly fine example of a piece that uses some of the elements of the French chanson of the early sixteenth century, but weds them to melodic and harmonic language that could only be English. Perhaps the most unusual piece, however, is no. 1, which is a setting of one of those fifteenth-century basse-danse melodies that survived into the sixteenth century: it appears as a long-note melody in Arena´s somewhat archaic dance treatise of 1529 as “Lo bas despagno”, and there is a vihuela setting in Luys de Narváez´Delphin de Música of 1538, which crops up in an English manuscript source of the 1560s with the title “The base of Spayne”. The present setting has the melody in the tenor, with a little elaboration: each note of the version given by Arena takes two bars. It was John Ward who identified the melody at the heart if this piece: further details can be found in his article “The maner of dauncing” in Early Music, vol. 4 no. 2, April 1976.
All the four surviving versions of the “Base of Spayn” melody are notated in the same key, i.e. starting on G. This is to be expected, given the tradition during the Renaissance of preserving the notated pitch of “given” melodies where possible. However, the bass part of the present setting goes right down to bottom C, and it is hard to know what instrument of the turn of the century would have been capable of playing such low notes at speed. So in this edition the piece has been transposed up a fourth. No. 2 has been transposed up by the same amount.
The original note values have been halved, except in no. 4, in which they have been quartered. Editorial accidentals appear above the stave, applying to one note only.

Produkt-ID: LPM-EML151

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