Monday, 6th June The Cardinall's Musick/Carwood 7.30 R3

[decantor]

I know all that, thanks. But:

If I hadn't, I'd have assumed it was just a stray typo.

But look at all these:

http://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy&hl=en&rlz=1R2SUNC_enGB375&source=hp&q=adoloscentulus+sum+ego&rlz=1R2SUNC_enGB375&aq=&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=1931079e644ef47a&biw=880&bih=559

That's what I was hoping for an explanation for.

I crave your forgiveness for explaining what you knew all along. I would have thought that the explanation you seek was all too obvious, but it is clearly not my place to offer it.

[jean]

I would have thought that the explanation you seek was all too obvious, but it is clearly not my place to offer it.

I'm sorry, I did not mean to sound cross.

But if you know why so many different and apparently unrelated sources have come up with this spelling, please do say.

[french frank]

I'm sorry, I did not mean to sound cross.

But if you know why so many different and apparently unrelated sources have come up with this spelling, please do say.

Just coming in on the end of this (so, sorry if I've got the wrong point). One solution for the 'o' rather than 'e' is that if you take more or less any misspelling and google it, you'll be surprised at how many 'hits' you get. However, where people are using/pronouncing the adol- form rather than adul- don't you think there is a tendency to (blast! what's the technical word? jean, you know this) repeat the same vowel. They spell how they're saying it.


Harmonic assimilation.

[jean]

if you take more or less any misspelling and google it, you'll be surprised at how many 'hits' you get.

That is true - though the less well-known the word is, the more the people who do use it are likely to know how spell it correctly - perhaps?

But of course musicians aren't necessarily Classicists. One of the perpetrators here, Peter Phillips, has allowed the most excruciating mistranslations of some texts to be printed and reprinted in concert programmes.

I'm reminded of the tendency for choirs to sing et exultavit spiritus meus... at the start of the Magnificat and later on pronounce ...et exaltavit humiles... in exactly the same way, though it's a quite different word.

However, where people are using/pronouncing the adol- form rather than adul- don't you think there is a tendency to repeat the same vowel. They spell how they're saying it.

But wouldn't the fact that 'adolescent' is such a common English word tend to override that?

[decantor]

I'm sorry, I did not mean to sound cross.

But if you know why so many different and apparently unrelated sources have come up with this spelling, please do say.

Rem non aegre fero: iam meae ipsius iracundiae me poenitet. Accipe quaeso excusationem meam.

My explanation amounts only to what you and FF have already discussed. Latin is not widely understood today, and those who type programme schedules, liner-notes, web-pages and the like are capable of error; even when there is proof-reading, it may not be well informed.. The internet in particular - though not exclusively - perpetuates the error through the ease of copy-and-paste.

It's happened to me in the real world. About eight years ago, one charity typoed my name ridiculously - I became, in effect, Mr SMTIH. As that charity sold on its donor list, so I have been inundated over the years with begging mail-shots addressed to Mr SMTIH. The senders either do not care or do not dare to effect a simple transposition of letters. It gives me the excuse to ignore them - usually. But such solecisms are surely more understandable in an ancient foreign language.

[DracoM]

Well, to my surprise and sadness, and I never thought I'd ever write this, but I found that concert dully sung, drily inaccessible, and I took some exception to Andrew Carwood's deeply suspect and what I took to be very defensive remarks about the superiority of women led-ensembles over boy-led choirs in Renaissance liturgical repertoire and the all-male ensembles' ability to sing stuff that - please note Mr Carwood - was actually written for boy / alto led-ensembles. Didn't think St John's Cambridge was a terribly tactful place to utter them either. Wonder what his boy choristers / their parents at St P's would have thought of his dismissal of their ability to respond to such?

The actual singing was professional, accurate enough - some intonation problems in the basses - tenors and altos the best, but all in all it utterly lacked drama, much variety of approach in tempi/ feeling. It was a brand doing its thing, making its noise.

Astonsihingly, I had to turn it off after the two Peccantem settings, the Parsons version being more interesting and better sung than the Byrd, ran the prog forward for bits of the 4-part mass, and then sat saddened by Carver's responses to Lousie Fryer.

[Miles Coverdale]

… the all-male ensembles' ability to sing stuff that - please note Mr Carwood - was actually written for boy / alto led-ensembles.

Not necessarily. I think it is extremely doubtful that any all-male choir (by which I mean one including boys) sang Byrd's Mass for four voices (for example) in his lifetime, or for some time after.

[DracoM]

OK, so who did sing it?

[Miles Coverdale]

Mixed-voice groups of whoever was available at clandestine celebrations of mass in country houses, most probably. A number of years ago I had the good fortune to be present at a recording for Radio 3 of his three-part mass in Ingatesone Hall, ancestral home of the Petre family, who were Byrd's patrons. Hearing that piece sung one to a part by a mixed-voice group in a beautiful oak-panelled room in that house was a revelation. The idea that an 'authentic' performance of music of this nature involves an all-male choir in a nice resonant cathedral is something of a romantic fiction, I think.

One has to ask the question, who was singing Latin-texted music in the latter part of the 16th century? It can't all have been written during Mary's reign, when it was possible to sing it liturgically. An examination of the sources shows that a very large proportion of what survives is in secular or domestic sources, and was collected by amateur (often but not always Catholic) musicians for private recreation and study, when the fact that it was in Latin was not a barrier to performance. There is very little music in Latin in liturgical sources from this period.

Who did Byrd write his Gradualia for? It certainly wasn't with a cathedral choir in mind.

[DracoM]

So you are saying that Byrd wrote the mass settings with ........well, what forces in mind? Private OTAP perfs only?

Surely, his whole pro / public experience / activity was in writing for male ensembles, and my suggestion is that such timbres must have been pretty prominent in his mind, no matter what ensembles actually sang the settings. Quite apart from the fact that some parts of the 4 - 5 - part settings are pretty testing for amateur OTAP, wouldn; you say? The 3-part is a very different story of course and does feel 'chamber' in execution, and like you, I have heard that in a similar situation, but not the bigger settings.

[Miles Coverdale]

Firstly, I'm not suggesting that private performances would necessarily have been one to a part - quite possibly not. As I said before, it was probably whoever was at hand to sing, or could be organised at short notice. Bearing in mind the (often fatal) consequences of celebrating mass in secret, it won't have been widely publicised.

The sound world Byrd had in his head is unknowable, I'd have thought. But he must surely have known that that no professional liturgical choir would be singing his mass settings in the 1590s and early 1600s. It's no more likely, I'd have thought, that they would been singing Gradualia motets. Yes, some of them are pretty difficult, and it would be fascinating to know what they sounded like then.

What I am pretty certain of is that Latin-texted music cannot have been the exclusive preserve of all-male liturgical choirs in the later 16th/early 17th centuries.

[jean]

Mixed-voice groups of whoever was available at clandestine celebrations of mass in country houses, most probably.

I have heard Andrew Carwood say that he thought it most likely that Byrd's settings of the Latin rite would have been sung by the sort of mixed group that would have sung madrigals - and that no-one would have dared sing the stuff during an actual celebration of the Mass, as the danger of discovery would be so much greater.

He didn't go quite that far on Monday, though.

[jean]

...such timbres...

What timbres, though? We know that boys' voices in the sixteenth centuty broke much later than they do now.

[Miles Coverdale]

I have heard Andrew Carwood say that he thought it most likely that Byrd's settings of the Latin rite would have been sung by the sort of mixed group that would have sung madrigals - and that no-one would have dared sing the stuff during an actual celebration of the Mass, as the danger of discovery would be so much greater.

I don't quite see the logic in that argument, I have to say. True, if you were heard singing a mass setting, it might of course mean that mass was actually being celebrated. But even if it wasn't being celebrated, the fact that that you were singing a mass setting at all would give away your Catholic sympathies. I don't suppose many Protestants were singing masses for fun. The mere act of singing it would be dangerous, whether or not an actual celebration was going on at the same time.