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The
Eton Choirbook
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music
from the Eton Choirbook, including
Davy's St. Matthew Passion, Browne's Stabat Mater and
Wylkynson's Jesus autem transiens a 13;
total duration: variable
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Founded along with King's College, Cambridge in the early 1440s
by Henry VI, Eton College was to be a haven of education, devotion
and charity in the midst of political turbulence that included the
final stages of the Hundred Years' War with France, the so-called
'Wars of the Roses', and the religious 'reforms' and 'counter-reforms'
of Henry VIII and his children. That turbulence destroyed many libraries
(including the Chapel Royal library) and makes the 126 of the original
224 leaves left to us in Eton College Manuscript 178 all the more
precious, for it is one of the few representatives of several generations
of English music in a period of rapid and impressive development.
(Eton's chapel library itself had survived a forced removal in 1465
to Edward IV's St. George's Chapel, just a stone's throw away in
Windsor, not returning until a reprieve from the Archbishop of Canterbury
in 1476.) But it was under the rule of Henry VII, who had claimed
the monarchy for the Tudors in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth, that
the repertoire of the Eton Choirbook not only flourished but was
collected and copied (probably in London) for use in Eton College
Chapel. The music of the Eton Choirbook is, however, just the magnificent tip of a schedule of devotions and supplications of titanic proportions. Each day seven masses were said or sung, and in addition there were the various observances which over many centuries had sprung up around the person of the mother of Jesus (and which were later to be silenced at a stroke by the Protestant reformers). Feastdays, of which there were many, required yet more celebration. The College's statutes of 1444 made provision for, among others, 16 choristers and 10 clerks, who were to have good voices and be skilled in reading, psalmody and polyphony. The collection of polyphony we now call the Eton Choirbook is described in an inventory in 1531 as "a grete ledger of prick song tum cuncta". The original index lists 61 antiphons - all votive antiphons designed for daily extraliturgical use and fulfilling Mary's prophecy that "From henceforth all generations shall call me blessed". 24 settings of the Magnificat itself and one of the St. Matthew Passion (setting the scene for all the various contemplations of Mary at the Crucifixion) were added and a main index compiled; the only two pieces not listed in it are by Robert Wylkynson and were presumably added during his time at Eton as Master of the Choristers (1500-1515). Out of the 25 composers represented, several had strong links with Eton College: Walter Lambe and John Browne were almost certainly there in the late 1460s as boys. We can imagine them and their successors grouped around a choirbook on a lectern - seven or so men and in front, ten boys who with eyesight still undimmed could read from the top of the very large pages. The size of the pages meant they had to be parchment and - in order to be legible in the uncertain candlelight - solidly inscribed on staves 2cm high. As a composer and director of an ensemble for new and early music, I was drawn into the soundworld of the Eton Choirbook by the back door. The final page of the manuscript contains what John Milsom describes as its "most bizarre" item, Wylkynson's Jesus autem transiens/Credo in Deum - a canonic setting for 13 voices of the Apostles' Creed. I first performed it with mixed voices (with inauthentic octave transpositions), and later recorded it with a single tenor overlaying his voice another 12 times (this version has been broadcast several times on BBC Radio 3). Although undeniably idiosyncratic, Jesus autem transiens does demonstrate several obvious aspects of the Eton style. The harmony is based on simple triads, in either root position or first inversion; these are decorated with numerous passing-notes, but with only a couple of accented dissonances briefly disturbing the particularly English sonority which can be traced back to the "frisque concordance" of John Dunstable. The melodic line is characterised by syncopation and irregularity in both rhythm and phrasing. The range of 13 notes is very wide for a single voice; likewise the overall compass of many of the other works of 22 or 23 notes was exceptional for its time. What is more, Jesus autem transiens must have been written specifically for the acoustic of Eton College Chapel, and certainly would have received its first performance there, probably during Lent. The notation of the Eton Choirbook is the key to understanding the style: how it was composed and how it was performed. There was no reliance on vertical alignment, no visual aid pointing to the existence of the tactus apart from the groupings of the noteheads, no indication as to the kind of voices best-suited to such agility. The black-full notation used practically throughout survived later in England than on the Continent, although ironically it may have been in England that the more familiar black-void notation was pioneered. Red ink too provided a way of conveying further subtle instructions to the performer: red text in sections for reduced numbers of voices probably implying one voice per part; red noteheads to introduce 'imperfection' into a mensural world founded on the trinitarian dogma of the mediaeval theorists. The 'old-fashioned' ligatures could usually be relied upon to help with the underlay, and, from the composer's point of view, to provide the structural support of larger-scale durational relationships and their harmonic implications. Faced with questions of tempo, pitch, voice-types, and decisions to make about invisible accidentals and contracted underlay, the last thing one wants is to worry about pronunciation. David Wulstan's recommendations for a generally continental Latin, but with an 's'-sound for 'c' before 'i' or 'e' seem pragmatic, particularly coupled to his emphasis on natural, undistorted vowels with relatively high formants, but not overly nasal. There is a contemporary proverb which could have been inspired by the sound of the Eton Choirbook, "Galli cantant, Italiae capriant, Germani ululant, Anglici jubilant": let's hope that we can find again in this extraordinary music that "overwhelming expression of the ecstasy of the spirit, the joy that goes beyond words". copyright Antony Pitts 25 March 1999 |
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