Seventeenth-Century British Keyboard Sources.(Book Review)

By Candace Bailey. (Detroit Studies in Music Bibliography, 83.) Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2003. [xiii, 151 p. ISBN 0-89990-113-1. $42.50.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

This volume is a welcome addition to the available literature on British keyboard music of the later Renaissance/early baroque eras. It is a synthetic study, summarizing in a single reference volume the present state of scholarship, attempting an overview of the music itself as well as of the primary sources in which this varied and fascinating repertoire is found. As much of the literature on the output of the English Virginalists and their successors is now quite old, and especially as much recent work on it has appeared in Ph.D. theses and specialist articles (some of the latter in out-of-the-way publications), it is good to have a text that provides essential orientation and references the up-to-date literature in which more detailed treatment of particular issues may be found. The structure of the present volume falls into two parts: "A General Survey of British Keyboard Music and Its Sources" (pp. 3-43); and "Manuscript Sources" (pp. 47-127). This is rounded off by an extensive and helpful bibliography and generally accurate index.

Clearly the most immediate challenge in the former section is to cover the ground sufficiently while resisting the temptation to dart off into all sorts of fascinating alleyways. It is a temptation that needs to be resisted if the structure of such a survey is not to become unbalanced, and Bailey manages this well in succinct prose that only occasionally becomes a bit labored but generally informs and simultaneously stirs the reader to investigate the secondary literature further via the clearly designed footnote referencing system. One might occasionally have welcomed a little more contextualization here and there, for instance, in respect of keyboard settings of the plainsong, Clarifica me Pater, for which there are seven surviving settings (three each by Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, and one by Thomas Tomkins, not one of which is correctly titled in any contemporary source), and which clearly have some sort of pedigree. There are procedural, structural, and motivic resemblances of one kind or another between the Tallis and Byrd settings (Byrd was Tallis's pupil), and again between the Byrd and Tomkins settings (Tomkins was Byrd's pupil). Bailey's book is not, of course, a work of critical interpretation, so a full-scale investigation of what these morsels of information might disclose about patterns of stylistic transmission and development is not really appropriate; yet there is a tangible link here, and given the occasional digressions elsewhere in the first part of her volume, it might have been discussed somehow (as indeed it was for the In nomine on pp. 25-27). Her handling of the contrasting genres of keyboard music at this stage in its development is efficient and turns out to be quite revealing with respect to the various strands of the fantasia at different points along its seventeenth-century trajectory. The section on Misereres might have mentioned that settings were occasionally linked together to form what are in effect sets of variations on the brief plainchant (by Tomkins, for instance).

The most substantial part of Bailey's study concerns the sources of this repertoire. There is much to admire here. The treatment of each source is thorough in the main, beginning with a concise summary in tabular form of the physical data (including also provenance, contents, composers where known, any named scribes, and references to scholarly literature). There follows a discursive prose description of the ...