GB-Obc III 18/3 [Tenor]

Brasenose College, Oxford, England

printed partbook with MS additions: last third of 16th century

Archive Brasenose College, Oxford, England (GB-Obc)
Shelfmark III 18/3 [Tenor]
Surface Paper
Numbering System Foliation
Format landscape
Notations
  • black void mensural
External Links
External Authorities
Contents Contains 3 compositions, 2 from 2 composers, 1 is anonymous.
General Description

A Tenor partbook from a set of four. Each partbook contains the substantial print RISM 1563/8 (John Day's The whole psalmes in foure parts) and two unknown scribes have added three works in manuscript to the front of the Brasenose copy.

The pages of the printed publication begin after a few more flyleaves. Note that pages 3-6 of the Contra Tenor book are missing, and have been replaced with calligraphic MS facsimiles. The preceding title page and its recto are intact.

The date of the MS additions cannot be before 1552, when the second Prayer Book reformed the Kyrie of the Communion Service to its present form (retained in 1662). The items by Caustun and Stone may have been copied from Day's print of 1565/1560.

Edward Tambling, 2026
DIAMM Note

Notified by Edward Tambling, 2026.

DIAMM, 2026
DIAMM Note

All of the items are anonymous in the MS: the authorship of the Kyrie has not yet been establised.

There is a striking similarity between the opening petition of his Caustun's Litany and that of Stone's piece. Caustun was something of a musical magpie, and may have admired the paraphrase in the opening of Stone's Tenor of the Litany tone (notes C/D : C\A/B/C) and sought to expand its potential into a full setting of the Litany. Stone, however, may himself have been the borrower of Caustun's phrase, unless both composers were drawing on material from a third party.

John Milsom has demonstrated that Caustun drew on French and Italian secular models for English service music in Day's publication that he passed off as his own compositions. However, this may have been in an attempt to establish a familiar-sounding repertoire for the new Anglican liturgy that would have made the new services and anthems accessible to those using them for the first time.

Edward Tambling, 2026
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