CE Holy Trinity Church, Stratford upon Avon April 20th, 2016

[ardcarp]

How sharp did the Gibbons go, as a matter of fact?

Exactly halfway between A flat and A. A quarter-tone might not sound much, but if it were one of those pieces where the organ crashes in after a few mins of unaccompanied singing it would hurt! I found the sopranos' constantly edging up the pitch uncomfortable...but maybe that's my problem.

Back to Stratford. Any views on the music and the CE content....anyone?

[DracoM]

Nothing wrong with my syntax. Try again.

Heavens above, jean! Thx for the help.

[Gabriel Jackson]

Nothing wrong with my syntax. Try again.

It was perfectly clear to me.

As to those who claim great sensitivity to pitch, who cares if something has gone a bit sharp (or flat) if it is in tune with itself?

[mopsus]

Listening (quite attentively) at home I didn't notice the pitch rising. Had I been singing in the performance, I almost certainly would have done, but I'd just have made the necessary adjustments to the new pitch, as it's nowhere near the top of my range and there was no organ or other instrument to stay in tune with.

As to the use of plainchant: I don't think this service was billed as a strict liturgical reconstruction of evening prayer as it would have been in Shakespeare's time. (For one thing, it used adult sopranos!) It just used music and spoken words of the period in question. While the plainchant psalms might not be Anglican, maybe they weren't so inappropriate to the occasion as there is evidence that the young Shakespeare moved in recusant Catholic circles. Although there were some early single Anglican chants in use already by that time? (I'm not an expert on Tudor music, but I've seen them in chant books, though I'm never sure whether they were adapted by later composers from other pieces by Tallis et al.)

[jean]

The tradition of chorister-actors pre-dates Shakespeare and is a huge topic with some fascinating literature. If you're interested, try E K Chambers’ The Elizabethan Stage or Michael Shapiro’s Children of the Revels.

Shakespeare's Cleopatra killed herself rather than live to see 'some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness.'

It happened anyway of course - if not in Rome, as she feared, then on the London stage, as she could not imagine.

(Whether the boy squeaked the more because he was also a singer, we do not know.)

[DracoM]

One of the early Shakespeare day boy Lady Macbeths died suddenly, as did an adult actor in a suspicious dagger episode each in quick time one after the other thus giving the play a name of being unlucky that even to this day actors will not utter its name on theatre precincts.

Never mind that it deals with witches / spells / apparitions / daggers of the mind.....!!

Boys did appear of course, and there were specifically Boy Actor companies much in fashion at the turn of the 16/17th centuries.

e.g. Ben Jonson's epitaph on the boy actor Solomon Pavy. Pavy - presumably one of Hamlet's ‘little eyases’ at Blackfriars - was born in 1588, and was between 12 and 14 when he performed with the Children of the Chapel; he died in 1602 at the age of 14.

Henry Jackson of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who saw the King's Men perform Othello there in September 1610, recorded his impressions. Of Desdemona, he wrote: “ In truth, that famous Desdemona who was killed in front of us by her husband, acted her whole part supremely well, but surpassed herself when she was actually killed, being yet more moving, for when she fell back upon the bed she implored pity from the spectators by her very face."

[light_calibre_baritone]

As to those who claim great sensitivity to pitch, who cares if something has gone a bit sharp (or flat) if it is in tune with itself?

Agreed. I just don't see the point in pointing out things like that other than to fuel an ego, show off, or try and laud it over us. Big whoop, it went up a bit; why not focus on positive instead of the constant drive for negative critique?

I've sung in numerous pro-consort gigs were the pitch has gone up or down a bit... But guess what, we just got on with it and gave a great performance.

[ardcarp]

Mopsus wrote:

As to the use of plainchant: I don't think this service was billed as a strict liturgical reconstruction of evening prayer as it would have been in Shakespeare's time. (For one thing, it used adult sopranos!) It just used music and spoken words of the period in question. While the plainchant psalms might not be Anglican, maybe they weren't so inappropriate to the occasion as there is evidence that the young Shakespeare moved in recusant Catholic circles. Although there were some early single Anglican chants in use already by that time? (I'm not an expert on Tudor music, but I've seen them in chant books, though I'm never sure whether they were adapted by later composers from other pieces by Tallis et al.)

From what I've been reading, metrical psalms came into use in the Protestant church... i.e. versified paraphrases of the psalms set to hymn-like tunes. I agree, the CE was never billed as a reconstruction.

[jean]

We could have had some of Tallis's tunes from Archbishop Parker's Psalter.

[ardcarp]

We could have had some of Tallis's tunes from Archbishop Parker's Psalter.

Oh yes, they would have been good. I'd forgotten those.

[Don Basilio]

As to the use of plainchant: I don't think this service was billed as a strict liturgical reconstruction of evening prayer as it would have been in Shakespeare's time.

I realise. And it is very uncertain what liturgical practice was in that period. Probably a far sight more Calvinistic in many places than even Middle of the Road Anglicans would be comfortable with nowadays.

While the plainchant psalms might not be Anglican,

They sing it at the church I usually attend Sunday Evensong. Since there were no Anglican chants at the time, plainchant tones were probably what would have been used in the C16 if the psalms were chanted at all - which in parish churches they probably were not.

[Don Basilio]

PS Richard Hooker would not have had to defend liturgical worship at such length if the whole concept and practice had not been under serious threat and widely ignored.

[ardcarp]

They sing it [plainchant psalms] at the church I usually attend Sunday Evensong.

Oh indeed. Some cathedrals use Briggs and Frere when it's a trebles-only or ATB-only service, and a few places do plainchant psalms throughout Lent.
I have no knowledge of how Psalms were done anywhere in the difficult times of Shakespeare; but as you suggested there may have been a rather severe form of Protestantism around, and I suspect anything resembling plainchant would have smacked of Rome.

Does anyone remember 'Merbecke' ? It was used in many Parish Churches to sing the Prayer Book Communion, being considered sufficiently different from plainsong to pass muster for middle-of-the-road Anglicans! This from Wiki, which rather illustrates the difficult times:

Probably a native of Beverley in Yorkshire, [John] Merbecke appears to have been a boy chorister at St. George's Chapel, Windsor, and was employed as an organist there from about 1541. Two years later he was convicted with four others of heresy and sentenced to be burnt at the stake, but received a pardon owing to the intervention of Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester.[1] An English Concordance of the Bible which Merbecke had been preparing at the suggestion of Richard Turner, was however confiscated and destroyed. A later version of this work, the first of its kind in English, was published in 1550 with a dedication to Edward VI.

In the same year, Merbecke published his Booke of Common Praier Noted, intended to provide for musical uniformity in the use of the First Prayer Book of Edward VI. This set the liturgy to semi-rhythmical melodies partly adapted from Gregorian chant; it was rendered obsolete when the Prayer Book was revised in 1552. Merbecke wrote several devotional and controversial works of a strongly Calvinistic character, and a number of his musical compositions are preserved in manuscript in the British Library, and at Oxford and Cambridge. He died, probably while still organist at Windsor, about 1585.

[underthecountertenor]

It was perfectly clear to me.

And to me, though jean did seem to go a bit pirate half-way through ('sharrp').

[Vox Humana]

Although there were some early single Anglican chants in use already by that time? (I'm not an expert on Tudor music, but I've seen them in chant books, though I'm never sure whether they were adapted by later composers from other pieces by Tallis et al.)

These are all bogus. The one by Farrant seems to have been based very loosely indeed on Lord for thy tender mercy's sake and the double chant by Byrd has been traced to one of his choral works (I can't remember which one offhand). I have not tried to trace the others (Tallis, Gibbons et al.) but wouldn't be surprised to find that they are entirely fictitious. In the nineteenth century Tallis's music was held to be the perfect church style (insofar as any of it was known, which IIRC wasn't much beyond the Dorian service, the responses, the litany and the odd anthem) and all sorts of things got foisted upon poor Thomas, even, in one publication, a bog-standard plagal Amen. (It's all in Suzanne Cole's rather interesting book Thomas Tallis and his Music in Victorian England.)

The Tudors did write through-composed psalm settings in a repetitive but free, chant-like form and some of these early settings use plainsong tones in the Tenor. When psalms were not sung polyphonically I think it's quite on the cards that they were sung to the plainsong tones. It is known that in Edward VI's reign some priests made celebrations of Holy Communion as much like the old Mass as they could and that this could include using the traditional plainsong chants - and Elizabeth was rather more tolerant than the Edwardian protestants in matters of ceremonial. I am no expert on metrical psalms, but so far as I am aware they did not displace the daily Coverdale ones in services. But given the pretty poor state of parish church music in Elizabeth's reign I imagine it's quite likely that there was variety in the way psalms were performed. In churches without choirs the psalms must have been said, as was still the tradition in some places in the late nineteenth century.