The Marian Consort

Tonight’s program presents a sequence drawn from some of Scotland’s few surviving sixteenth-century manuscripts, intended to show the breadth and quality of music being written and performed in this relatively unknown period of Scottish music history.

A lack of awareness on the part of modern audiences is, perhaps, a testament to the relative success and seriousness of purpose of the Calvinist reformers in their mission in Scotland post-1560, certainly as compared to their Protestant counterparts south of the border: whatever the reason, unlike the many English music manuscripts and prints which exist from both pre- and post-Reformation, only three major sources of sacred music from sixteenth-century Scotland have survived to the present. Among these, the best-explored in modern times is the eponymous Carver Choirbook, named after Robert Carver, a canon at the Augustinian Abbey at Scone at the very beginning of the sixteenth century. Our Magnificat, an alternatim setting—meaning that sections of polyphonic music alternate with chant— is anonymous, like many of the works in the Carver Choirbook, and combines wonderfully dynamic four-voice writing with beautiful and often rhythmically-complex duos in typical pre-Reformation style. Two of the sections also involve that most British of phenomenon, the ‘gemel’ or ‘gymel’ (from the Latin gemellus), where a single voice splits into two to provide a novel variety of texture. The fact that Carver, who for a long time was thought to have been the same person as Robert Arnot, a canon at the Scottish Chapel Royal in Stirling, knew of and had access to works by Guillaume Dufay, Robert Fayrfax, and Walter Lambe among others (these latter also contributors to the Eton Choirbook), speaks to how strong the cultural connections were between Scotland and both England and the Continent at this period (especially given the lack of any privilege afforded by moving in royal circles).

These connections are also very much at the heart of the repertoire contained in a much less well-known Scottish pre-Reformation source, the so-called “Dunkeld Partbooks.” This set of individual partbooks (with each voice part compiled separately in its own book, as opposed to the choirbook format, where all parts are grouped together on the much larger pages, so all the singers could read and perform from the same book) suffers from the same fate as the other surviving Scottish sources in being known by multiple names (the Carver Choirbook also being called the Scone Antiphonary and this set also being known as the “Dunkeld Music Book” and the “Douglas-Fischer partbooks”), a confusion which has perhaps also played a part in stymieing modern performance of this repertoire. Doubly confusing is that the manuscript set has nothing whatsoever to do with Dunkeld: this name stems from a misreading of an abbreviation in the partbooks by nineteenth-century Scottish antiquarian David Laing. The books instead have their origin at Lincluden, a Benedictine monastery near Dumfries not far from the Scottish border: they paint a picture of a rich and internationally-connected musical life, containing mostly Marian polyphonic works for six to eight voices by a range of the most popular Continental composers of the mid-sixteenth century, including Josquin des Prez, Pierre Certon, and Johannes Lupi.

Josquin’s Benedicta es caelorum Regina, the inspiration for both a mass setting by Palestrina and a magnificat by Orlandus Lassus, is as ingenious as it is beautiful, with an almost-canon between Superius and Tenor voices quoting the chant melody while the other four voices weave a texture of vital polyphony around them, building to the moment of direct speech at the close of the first section. What follows is an intimate duet between upper voices for the moment of the incarnation, which opens out again to the full six voices as the prayer becomes intensely personal in the third and final section. Pierre Certon’s Inviolata is a similar combination of the cerebral and the sublime, as he pays homage to Josquin’s earlier setting of this luminous Marian prayer by preserving the canon at its heart (itself based on plainchant), while expanding the texture from five to six voices and clothing it in his own beguiling mid-sixteenth-century counterpoint (another nod to Josquin is found at the beginning of the middle section, where the duet writing between the uppermost voices seems to recall the opening of ‘Benedicta es’). Johannes Lupi’s Salve celeberrima virgo is an astonishing eight-voice tour de force, employing skillful variations of scoring and texture, as well as many colorful ‘false relation’ semitone clashes, across its two sections. The second of these sections breaks into triple time (a conceit also found in both Josquin and Certon’s motets) towards the end, before unifying the two by reusing musical material from the end of the first section to close the second, now given additional finality through repetition.

It’s very likely that Robert Douglas, Provost of Lincluden College, who spent a considerable period of time at the University of Paris in the 1540s, brought back with him several collections issued by the French Royal printer Pierre Attaignant, with the motets found in the Dunkeld Partbooks copied from these into the manuscript collection. Alongside these are several anonymous pieces, including an exquisite mass based on the Marian Felix namque chant which show traces of both English and Continental influence, making it very possibly the work of a local composer. The movements of the Missa Felix namque are linked musically through their use of the same opening motif, a device designed at least partly as a means of unifying them in the mind of the listener, in the knowledge that they would be separated by in some cases considerable spans of time within the liturgy. Sadly, one of the partbooks has been lost (a common pitfall of the format for modern scholars, as you need all of the separate books in order to perform the pieces contained within them), making it necessary to reconstruct the Bass part of this unique work.

The final of the three surviving manuscript collections is the “Wode Partbooks" set, (also known - of course! – as the “St. Andrews Psalter”), which date from after 1560. These were compiled in St. Andrews by Thomas Wode, as part of a project by James Stewart, the 1^st Earl of Moray, to provide simple metrical tunes in four parts for the newly-translated Scottish psalms. Nearly all the 150 tunes, along with several Latin motets, are by David Peebles, a canon of the Augustinian Priory of St. Andrews before the Reformation, described by Wode as "ane of the cheiff musitians into this land." Alongside this compendium of service music, Wode and other, later scribes collected latin motets and songs by composers as diverse as Philip van Wilder, Lassus, and Jean Maillard in the partbooks. All three of these collections speak to flourishing musical traditions in their places of origin and offer a tantalizing glimpse of the unknowable broader musical landscape of Scotland in the sixteenth century, as well as a clear rebuttal to any idea that Scotland was devoid of high-level musical culture in this period.