EditioPrinceps

In association with Severinus Press
EARLY-SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH SACRED MUSIC
General Editor: DR IAN PAYNE

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This series makes available for performance editions of sacred compositions by early-17th-Century English composers. Many of these pieces are 'verse' anthems (with soloists, SAATB choir and organ accompaniment), and most were intended to be used liturgically in Church of England choral services. And most, if not all, are first editions: while the musical quality of all the works is high, almost all are fragmentary, and publication may have been delayed (or even prevented) in the past by the amount of editorial reconstruction required to restore them to a performable state.

Key features of the series include:

• Music by John Ward (1590-1638). Three excellent verse anthems by the madrigalist and consort-music composer John Ward. Alleluia. I heard a voice and Unto thee, O Lord are both impressive, large-scale works, with some six-part choral textures; and the former has musical connections with Thomas Weelkes's famous setting of the Revelation text. The smaller-scale Bow down thine ear is simplicity itself: a solo Tenor throughout the verses, contrasted with sonorous five-part choral writing. [See Note 2 below.]
• The works of John Holmes (d.1629). Finally, and perhaps most significant of all in terms of the number of works involved, we present most of the verse anthems by the gifted composer John Holmes, successively organist (c.1599-1621) of Winchester and master of the choristers (1621-9) of Salisbury Cathedrals, and a fluent early exponent of the 'verse' style outside London. Holmes presents a particular challenge of musical recomposition and reconstruction, as all his music is seriously fragmentary, and virtually all is transmitted only in organ scores. Some works (e.g. O how happy a thing it is and O Lord of whom I do depend) hark back to earlier Elizabethan styles, their solo parts strongly influenced by the metrical psalm; while others (e.g. Christ rising again/Christ is risen, I was glad and Lord in thy wrath) are longer, more expansive, more varied in their likely verse scorings, and more up-to-date and 'expressive' in their musical style and declamation.
• A choice selection of high-quality choral pieces (some of them for full choir). These will include music by Thomas Morley; and reconstructions of the verse anthem I heard a voice from heaven by Randolph Jewett (d.1675), and of the simple and attractive four-part Preces and Responses by John Frith (d.1635), Organist of St John's College, Oxford, which will be welcomed by Anglican church choirs.

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