Early music of the British Isles
Musicians from the British Isles also developed some distinctive forms of music, including Celtic chant, the Contenance Angloise, the rota, polyphonic votive antiphons, and the carol in the medieval era and English madrigals, lute ayres, and masques in the Renaissance era, which would lead to the development of English language opera at the height of the Baroque in the 18th century.
This Sarum Chant became the model for English composers until it was supplanted at the Reformation in the mid-16th century, influencing settings for masses, hymns and Magnificats.
[5] The first notations of Welsh music that survive are from the 14th century, including matins, lauds and vespers for St David's Day.
[6] In the 14th century, the English Franciscan friar Simon Tunsted, usually credited with the authorship of Quatuor Principalia Musicae: a treatise on musical composition, is believed to have been one of the theorists who influenced the 'ars nova', a movement which developed in France and then Italy, replacing the restrictive styles of Gregorian plainchant with complex polyphony.
John Dunstaple (or Dunstable) was the most celebrated composer of the 'Contenance Angloise' (English manner), a distinctive style of polyphony that used full, rich harmonies based on the third and sixth, which was highly influential in the fashionable Burgundian court of Philip the Good.
[10] Nearly all his manuscript music in England was lost during the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-1540), but some of his works have been reconstructed from copies found in continental Europe, particularly in Italy.
[13] Similarly, John Hothby (c. 1410–1487), an English Carmelite friar, who travelled widely and, although leaving little composed music, wrote several theoretical treatises, including La Calliopea legale, and is credited with introducing innovations to the medieval pitch system.
England in particular produced three distinctive secular musical forms in this period: the rota, the polyphonic votive antiphon, and the carol.
[10]Polyphonic votive antiphons emerged in England in the 14th century as a setting of a text honouring the Virgin Mary, but separate from the mass and office, often after compline.
[10] Towards the end of the 15th century they began to be written by English composers as expanded settings for as many as nine parts with increasing complexity and vocal range.
[14] His mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was the major sponsor of music during his reign, commissioning several settings for new liturgical feasts and ordinary of the mass.
[25] In 1501 James IV refounded the Chapel Royal within Stirling Castle, with a new and enlarged choir, it became the focus of Scottish liturgical music.
Burgundian and English influences came north with Henry VII's daughter Margaret Tudor, who married James IV in 1503.
[24] Among the most eminent musicians of Henry VIII's reign was John Taverner (1490–1545), organist of the College founded at Oxford by Thomas Wolsey from 1526–1530.
A talented lute player he introduced French chansons and consorts of viols to his court and was patron to composers such as David Peebles (c.
[31] The Lutheranism that influenced the early Scottish Reformation attempted to accommodate Catholic musical traditions into worship, drawing on Latin hymns and vernacular songs.
The most important product of this tradition in Scotland was The Gude and Godlie Ballatis, which were spiritual satires on popular ballads composed by the brothers James, John and Robert Wedderburn.
[33] There is some evidence that polyphony survived and it was incorporated into editions of the psalter from 1625, but usually with the congregation singing the melody and trained singers the contra-tenor, treble and bass parts.
[24] Around 1520 John Rastell initiated the single-impression method for printing music, in which the staff lines, words, and notes were all part of a single piece of type, making it much easier to produce, although not necessarily clearer.
[42] English madrigals were a cappella, predominantly light in style, and generally began as either copies or direct translations of Italian models, mostly set for three to six verses.
[44] The genre was further developed by Thomas Campion (1567–1620), whose Books of Airs (1601) (co-written with Philip Rosseter) containing over one hundred lute songs and which was reprinted four times in the 1610s.
[47] Many of the major composers of the 16th and 17th centuries produced work for consorts, including William Byrd, Giovanni Coperario, Orlando Gibbons, John Jenkins and Henry Purcell.
[44] These developed out of the medieval tradition of guising in the early Tudor period and became increasingly complex under Elizabeth I, James VI and I and Charles I.
[43] After the closure of the London theatres in 1642 these tendencies developed into sung plays that are recognisable as English Operas, the first usually being thought of as William Davenant's (1606–68) The Siege of Rhodes (1656), originally given in a private performance.
[51] Both James and his son Charles I, king from 1625, continued the Elizabethan patronage of church music, where the focus remained on settings of Anglican services and anthems, employing the long lived Byrd and then following in his footsteps composers such as Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625) and Thomas Tomkins (1572–1656).
[52] The emphasis on the liturgical content of services under Charles I, associated with Archbishop William Laud, meant a need for fuller musical accompaniment.
The loss of the court removed the major source of patronage, the theatres were closed in London in 1642 and certain forms of music, particularly those associated with traditional events or the liturgical calendar (like morris dancing and carols), and certain forms of church music, including collegiate choirs and organs, were discouraged or abolished where parliament was able to enforce its authority.
[55] There was, however, no Puritan ban on secular music and Cromwell had the organ from Magdalen College, Oxford set up at Hampton Court Palace and employed an organist and other musicians.
