EditioPrinceps

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

Return to Severinus home page

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 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.]
• Music from Cambridge. A selection of music by pre-Restoration Cambridge composers Robert Ramsey and Henry Loosemore (some it for full choir). These include three five-part collects by Ramsey (for SSATB unaccompanied) written in his typically colourful, Italianate musical language.
• 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 and an Evening Service 'in medio chori' 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.

Return to Severinus home page

Terms of Business

EditioPrinceps
12 St Ethelbert Close, Sutton St Nicholas, Hereford HR1 3BF, UK
Email: sales@severinus.co.uk