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Evidence of Things Past

THE Gyffard partbooks London, British Library (hereafter Lbl), Add. MSS 17802 5 are a precious document of sixteenth-century English polyphony. Almost all the music they contain would have been irretrievably lost if the books had not survived. Of the 94 pieces in the manuscript, 88 are unique. We can thank the Gyffard scribes for virtually all the extant four-voice Latin works of Taverner, Tallis, Sheppard, Tye and William Mundy. They also preserve evidence of what appears to be the young William Byrd’s collaboration with London colleagues, along with a variety of music by lesser-known and anonymous composers. The only piece with a full and straightforward concordance in another source is Taverner’s ‘Western Wind’ Mass, copied by the Elizabethan scribe John Sadler; a motet by Philip van Wilder resurfaces, with some signs of recomposition, in one of Susato’s anthologies; a few other works, but only a few, are found elsewhere in fragmentary or variant forms. This edition does not include the Gyffard pieces (almost a third of the total) already edited in single-composer volumes of Early English Church Music, so most of the substantial twovolume set is taken up by music largely unknown and unperformed until now. Over the past few decades, recordings of Tudor music have built up a compelling sound-world which has become familiar to many listeners: elaborate and highly varied textures, soaring treble parts, wide vocal compasses. The Gyffard books offer an alternative view of the soundscape. The reason for this is simple: there are only four partbooks in the set. All the comparable English sources of Latin-texted polyphony have five or six books (or did before one or more went missing), which produces an entirely different crosssection of the repertory. Theodor Dumitrescu has suggested that what we think of as the archetypal ‘festal’ style of Tudor polyphony may be to some extent an anomaly, even a historical fiction cultivated by twentieth-century scholars with a nationalist axe to grind. This can be argued convincingly both ways. What we have here, in any case, is a rich and