Before
Byrd: the birth pangs of Anglican church music
Let
us cast our minds back 417 years to another Saturday, in September
1588. Having successfully disembarked in Kent the
previous month, the Duke of Parma’s great Armada has marched on London. The timely death of Queen Elizabeth (she died
in her sleep – allegedly) has extinguished both the Tudor dynasty and the
future of English Protestantism, now bereft of its supreme figurehead. It has taken only a week or two for the conquistadors
to subdue the demoralised provincial militia. During the great Mass of thanksgiving, held
at St Paul’s, the combined choirs of the chapel royal and the cappella réal sing a fine commemorative
motet by William Byrd. The composer
and his colleagues can now prepare for the coronation of Philip II’s daughter
Isabella as queen, which will usher in the Golden Age of Isabelline church
music. These glories will later be
revived in the landmark series, Hapsburg
Church Music, published in the 1920s under the editorship of Monsignor
Edmund Ignatius Fellowes (a canon of St James’s Chapel, Windsor).
None
of this happened, of course: the wind blew in the wrong direction, dispersing
the Armada and allowing Gloriana to reign for another 15 years, thus ensuring
the survival of the Church of England and the Anglican choral tradition. The scenario of a successful Armada, from which
my fictitious overture was drawn, was elucidated by Anne Somerset for a collection
of essays recently published under the editorship of the right-wing historian,
Andrew Roberts. Other essays in the
same collection see a successful Gunpowder Plot, Charles I winning the Civil
War, George III’s armies vanquishing those of George Washington, and other
historical ‘what-ifs’. Counter-factual
or ‘virtual’ history was for many years condemned as speculative, futile and
self-indulgent; but it has recently appealed to a generation of historians
eager to deconstruct events as they happened. If we can identify a single moment, they say
– a turning point at which the course of events switches decisively from one
direction to another – so our understanding of historical processes will be
the greater. It also compels us to
look more closely at the choices, opportunities and limitations facing historical
actors at any given moment, to confront unpredictable events without the wisdom
of hindsight and, implicitly, to recognise that we ourselves may well have
made the same mistakes as, say, Louis XVI or the leaders of the Weimar Republic.
We can, it is argued, view stale narratives with fresh eyes, and admit
to the blind spots engendered by our knowledge of what actually did
happen.
Few
musicians and music historians attempting counter-factual history would be
able to make such life-and-death decisions.
Can the bullet which killed the serialist composer Anton Webern in
1945 compare in historical significance with the one that missed the Bolshevik
Vladimir Lenin in Helsinki in 1917? Probably
not. If Richard Wagner had written
flute sonatas and string quartets rather than operas, perhaps the seductive,
mythological bombast of the Bayreuth operas might not have awakened the Teutonic-supremacist
ideology of the young Adolf Hitler. This would seem unlikely. But the kinds of close readings of historical
contexts espoused by counter-factual historians can help us to hear familiar pieces and repertories, as if for the
first time. To illustrate this point,
I should like to indulge in a shamelessly autobiographical digression.
Back
in 1977, Silver Jubilee year, I joined the choir of Westminster Abbey as a
ten-year-old fresh from the Midlands. The
abbey in those days seemed a bedrock of old, dependable certainties in a world
of rising prices, industrial strife, and heavy metal: an oasis of continuity
in its traditions, ceremonial, liturgy and music. Here was an institution which could trace its
roots back to 1065 (perhaps earlier), which enjoyed an equally enduring relationship
with the crown, and whose ancient physical fabric bespoke permanence.
Little by little, however, the abbey revealed itself as a palimpsest.
In the song school a whitewashed Romanesque doorway (which didn’t appear
to lead anywhere) seemed to belong to an earlier age than rest of the place.
The twin towers, so symbolic of the abbey itself, weren’t gothic at
all, but Baroque fantasies; the north transept was a Victorian restoration
(and a pretty ugly one at that); and the abbey’s seemingly timeless ceremonies
and vestments were in fact a twentieth-century confection by a former precentor,
the fastidious ritualist Jocelyn Perkins.
In fact, most of the abbey’s physical and ritual fabric seemed to be
an addition or a restoration of one time or another.
But somewhere, underneath the accretions of later ages (the pompous
Hanoverian monuments and frilly Victoriana) there lay another, half-forgotten
abbey – a real, Benedictine abbey – whose inhabitants had worn tonsures, not
starched ruffs.
Earlier
in the twentieth century, the abbey choir had sung daily at both Mattins and
Evensong. By 1977 choral Mattins was
sung only twice a week – on Sundays (to a full house) and on Tuesdays (to
a congregation of one, plus the occasional tourists who, having wandered unwarily
beyond the choir-screen, were trapped in unintended worship for the next 45
minutes, trying desperately to effect a furtive escape but pinned to their
pew by the accusing glare of the Cantoris Tenors).
Mention ‘Tuesday morning Mattins’ to any abbey chorister of my generation,
and you’ll probably provoke a shudder, for on Tuesday mornings we sang the
Litany (invariably Tallis, Byrd or Morley) on painful, bended knee, having
rattled off the canticles. Invariably,
it seemed, these were the short services by Farrant, Hooper, Tallis, Byrd,
Batten, Gibbons and Tomkins. To a ten-year-old,
these plain Tudor Te Deums presented a diet of unremitting austerity.
At the fashionable weekend services, of course, we sang proper, loud, music: Howells, Stanford, Leighton, Britten, Vaughan
Williams and the more elaborate English services and anthems by Tallis, Byrd,
Gibbons and their contemporaries: the Great Service, Sing Joyfully, Gibbons
Second, O clap your hands, Weelkes Trebles, and so on. We also performed a smattering of Byrd’s Latin
motets (Ave verum corpus, Justorum animae and Haec dies spring to mind). But
the pre-Reformation glories of John Taverner, John Sheppard, Thomas Tallis
and the Eton Choirbook were strangers to us. Only later did I come face to face with that
wonderful music, an encounter which also changed my perspective on the whole
Tudor repertory – including those dreaded short services.
It
came as something of a shock to realise that much of the Tudor music we had
sung as children had been composed during one of the most traumatic upheavals
in English history, and that it displaced a musical culture of exceptional
brilliance. And thus began a paradoxical
journey, in which the kind of music we had found most boring as children –
exemplified perhaps by Thomas Tallis’s Dorian Service – began to assume greater
interest the more one heard it in context: its musical plainness quite at
odds with its historical significance. On
paper, the music itself treads a predictable path, and seems a predictable,
if not inevitable, result of the processes which transformed English worship
in the mid-sixteenth-century; but transport ourselves to the moment at which
it was written (perhaps 1550, maybe 1560), and we enter a journey, not of
predictable straight lines, but of bewildering zigzags – fertile ground for
the counter-factual historian, perhaps.
The
story of the Reformation is a well-known one, it has been intensively picked
apart by revisionist historians, and it needs no introduction here. Instead, I should like to recount the religious
crises of the mid sixteenth century through the eyes of the composer, John
Sheppard, a composer whose working life straddled two decades of rapid change,
whose music is a witness to both doctrinal changes and rapid stylistic developments,
but whose biography falls silent at key moments within his career.
In order to understand Sheppard’s compositions, particularly his vernacular
music for the Anglican liturgy, it is necessary to dwell at length upon the
circumstances in which he worked. This will take the form of a detailed biographical
narrative, during which I shall consider three case studies.
Although
one of the great Tudor composers, Sheppard was twice unlucky: firstly because
his extraordinarily productive career was prematurely cut off when he died
in a ‘flu epidemic, and secondly because he didn’t make it into the first
(and, in the event, only) 10-volume series of Tudor
Church Music published in the 1920s. As
a result, only a fraction of his music has made it into the bread-and-butter
repertories of English cathedral choirs, despite the high reputation he enjoyed
among his contemporaries: 'A good songe excellent good song fyne' wrote one
Elizabethan copyist about his piece Haec dies, 'the best songe in England’. David Wulstan pioneered Sheppard’s rehabilitation
back in the 1970s, but the composer is still a long way from enjoying the
recognition his music deserves. Having
recently prepared an edition of his Second Service for the CMS, I should like
to take this opportunity to examine his career and trumpet his achievements.
We
don’t know when Sheppard was born. In later life he claimed to have begun
composing music around 1534, from which a birth date of around 1515 has been
conjectured. We do not know where he grew up, although the London area would
seem the best bet: a John Sheppard was listed among the lowest-paid taxpayers
retained in Thomas Wolsey’s household (based at Whitehall and Hampton Court)
in 1524, and this may have been the composer (at that point a nine-year-old
boy chorister). Service in the Cardinal’s
chapel would have brought Sheppard into contact with the leading musicians
at work in Henrician England. Wolsey,
at the zenith of his career in the king’s service, maintained a choir at least as good as Henry’s itself – indeed,
the king is known to have cast reproachfully envious glances at Wolsey’s establishment.
Beyond the customary round of plainsong masses and offices, we do not
know exactly what was sung in Wolsey’s chapel, although the evidence hints
at an unusually cosmopolitan polyphonic repertory: an inventory of liturgical
books compiled in May 1523 listed a ‘priksongebooke in printe’.
Venice provides the most convincing (indeed, the only convincing) place of publication for a printed choirbook at this
time.
All
this is conjecture, of course. The
first concrete biographical evidence we have is Sheppard’s appointment as
choirmaster of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1543, in the later years of Henry
VIII’s reign. Although several years
short of his putative 30th birthday, he must surely have been an
experienced church musician by the time of his appointment.
Oxford’s cityscape in 1543 was dotted with the detritus of religious
upheaval. The great Augustinian Abbey
at Osney was dissolved in 1539, and with it went
Oxford’s friaries and monastic colleges, providing a melancholy backdrop
to Sheppard’s arrival at Magdalen. Although Osney Abbey had been re-founded
as Oxford’s diocesan cathedral shortly before Sheppard’s arrival, Henry VIII
was already eyeing up the wealthier collegiate foundations, among them the
colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. A second round of spoliation was about to
begin: how long before Magdalen was selected for dissolution?
On
entering Magdalen College chapel for the first time, however, Sheppard would
probably have sensed a re-assuring familiarity.
Although the 10 articles of 1536 and royal injunctions of 1538 had
nibbled away at the florid extremities of late-medieval devotion, the props
of traditional religion remained unchanged.
Magdalen’s choir of sixteen boys, eight clerks and four chaplains continued
its uninterrupted cycle of Masses and Offices, from Matins through to Compline;
the full repertory of Latin plainsong, of antiphons, responds, hymns offertories,
was sung from the chapel’s extensive collection of service books; organs were
played during Lady Mass, and the choir sang some of the finest liturgical
polyphony in England. Its repertory
of masses, Magnificats and motets had recently been adapted for use at the
newly-founded cathedral at Canterbury, and Magdalen was among the first English
choirs to incorporate the new imitative style of polyphony which had become
current in Continental Europe - a new, pared-down sonority quite distinct
from the elaborately florid style traditionally cultivated among English composers
(a style which, it has to be admitted, had begun to grow as flabby as Henry
VIII himself). We can be sure that
some of Sheppard’s surviving Latin polyphony was written for this choir, exploiting
to the full the resources he had to hand, and exploring the techniques of
the Franco-Flemish style (Sheppard is among the first English composers to
rely upon imitative counterpoint as the mainstay of their compositional technique).
Representative
of Sheppard’s work at this time are the two settings of the Trinity antiphon,
Libera nos, which he composed while at
Magdalen. Both settings exploit the college’s abundance of boy trebles and
means, and both bear the hallmarks of Sheppard’s style: a cantus firmus in
equal notes is set against concise imitative points; behind this imitative
technique lurks a barely-concealed delight in the richness of seven-part scoring.
Sheppard: Libera nos
Sheppard’s
career as a composer of Latin church music, however, was soon to be rudely
interrupted. Since his arrival at Magdalen in 1543, he would no doubt have
got wind of developments at court. In
its twilight years, Henry VIII’s court was riven by factional politics, as
conservative and evangelical parties competed for the king’s ear. This factionalism grew more intense and more
dangerous as the old king drew closer to death: whoever held the upper hand
when he died would hold the reins of power during the ensuing minority of
his son, Edward, who was only six years old when Sheppard arrived at Magdalen. The stakes were high – whoever controlled the
new king would have full exercise of the royal supremacy, and hence could
impose their agenda upon the church in England: for evangelicals, led by Thomas Cranmer, this would be the long-awaited
opportunity to purify the English church; for conservatives, the decisive chance to expunge, once and for all, the
threat of such reforms –
reforms
which Henry VIII had scrupled neither to promote nor to proscribe).
Henry’s
death in January 1547 would probably have been greeted with a sigh of relief
at Magdalen. The chantries act of 1546,
which had threatened the existence of all collegiate foundations including the academic colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, elapsed on
the king’s death. But for conservatives, the news from court was very bad,
as it was the evangelicals, led
by the earl of Hertford, Edward Seymour, who emerged from the dead king’s
bedchamber as the dominant party at court.
Although a new chantries act, passed in December 1547, specifically
exempted the Oxbridge colleges, it spelt the destruction of almost every other
collegiate church, chantry and religious guild in England and Wales. Where Henry’s chantries act had been a cynical
smash-and-grab raid on church assets, Edward’s act struck at the roots, as
well as the fruits, of the Catholic faith.
Salvation now flowed from grace through faith, not through good works,
pilgrimages and masses for the dead – intercessory institutions were now redundant.
What would be abolished next?
Only
one man new for sure, and that was Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury,
an increasingly committed convert to Calvinist predestination theology. Cranmer had prudently kept his counsel until
the old king was safely dead, and even now moved in cautious steps. But radical evangelicals among Magdalen’s fellowship,
knowing which way the winds were beginning to blow and frustrated by the college’s
conservative leadership, took matters into their own hands.
In the summer of 1547 these radicals disrupted high mass, stole the
communion wafer, snatched the thurible from the priest’s hands, and hacked
to pieces some £40-worth of service books – all of this before the eyes of
John Sheppard and his colleagues (indeed, one of these iconoclasts was a singer
in the choir).
Although
Sheppard’s reaction to these outrages is not recorded, the fact that he left
Magdalen the following March, in 1548, is suggestive.
His immediate destination is not known for sure, although it was almost
certainly the household of Edward VI: his name is in a list of the gentlemen
of the chapel royal drawn up in 1552, the first of such lists to have survived
since 1547. Perhaps the most prestigious
and professionally advantageous appointment for an ambitious church musician,
membership of the chapel royal afforded the best possible escape from a college
in which his career prospects had taken a decisive turn for the worst. And Sheppard was to retain his membership, during
three successive reigns, until his death at Christmas 1558.
If
Magdalen had been a fractious outpost of the Edwardian reform programme (albeit
a well-connected one), the chapel royal was its crucible. Shortly before Sheppard’s arrival, the first
major step had been taken towards replacing the Latin Mass and Offices with
a vernacular liturgy, with the nationwide issue of a new Order of Communion
in February 1548. More a supplement
to the Mass than a substitute for it, the Order of Communion was less ambitious
than it sounded. Although it introduced vernacular Bible readings within the
Latin Mass, it left the core of the Latin liturgy intact. This was a pilot study for more ambitious changes
to come – a testing of the water, perhaps. The Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536 had dramatically
underlined the extent of hostility to religious reforms, even under a feared
sovereign in full exercise of royal power; how far, and how quickly, could
the reform agenda be pursued during a royal minority? The closure of the chantries, whose impact was
felt in almost every parish church, had revealed the government’s intentions
(it had also curtailed the flourishing musical traditions of many town churches
where chantry priests had served as choirmen). Following this attack upon their material resources,
would the king’s subjects also stomach the abolition of long-cherished forms
of worship?
Against
this background of uncertainty, Cranmer moved cautiously towards the introduction
of a new vernacular prayer book, whose contents he had been busy drafting
during the intervening months. First
Convocation and then Parliament debated the new liturgy throughout the autumn
and winter of 1548; after Christmas, in January 1549, the passage of the Act
of Uniformity authorised the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer, proofs
of which went to the printers in preparation for its introduction by Whit
Sunday. This was reform through stealth.
Throughout 1547 and 1548, a string of injunctions and episcopal visitations
had successively eroded the old forms of traditional religion: processions,
images and devotional cults (particularly that of the Virgin Mary, a crucial
spur to musical composition during the later middle ages).
At the same time, the government continued to use Henry VIII’s well-worn
ploy of giving off mixed messages, claiming that the new changes were measured
reforms designed to forestall the worst excesses of uncontrolled iconoclasm.
Before
its general launch, the new vernacular liturgy was adopted at the chapel royal
in September 1548, and then foisted upon the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge.
This was many months in advance of its general introduction, and can
probably be interpreted as another of the government’s testing of the waters.
Several musical settings of the 1549 prayer book text seem to be anomalously
elaborate, and quite at odds with the plain style favoured by the reformers.
Among these pieces is John Sheppard’s first service (for men) and his
splendid Trebles’ Service: although the latter now survives only by way of
a seventeenth-century keyboard reduction, it clearly deployed the full resources
of the chapel royal, including the high trebles’ voice (which was shortly
to disappear). Why should Sheppard have written such elaborate
music after the introduction of
the 1549 prayer book? We know that
polyphonic exuberance was strenuously discouraged, not least by Edward VI
himself. Perhaps the most plausible
explanation is that it was composed before the general introduction of the BCP, during the road-testing
of the new liturgy undertaken at the chapel royal in the autumn of`1548. A reassuringly elaborate polyphonic cladding
would have conveyed a comforting impression stylistic continuity, massaging
the revolutionary impact of this revolutionary change from Latin to English
worship. Suitably mollified, nobility,
senior clergy and other leading opinion-formers were primed to soften up public
opinion at large.
The
1549 Prayer Book was a part of this strategy of dissimulation. It replaced the drama and colour of the old
Latin liturgy with a diet of vernacular psalms, Bible readings and sermons;
but it also left open the door for some
of the accustomed traditions. In 1552,
with the English liturgy safely bedded down, the first prayer book was itself
superseded by a more stringently Calvinistic version, in which little room
was left for either the theology or the panoply of traditional religion –
music included. The 1552 Book of Common Prayer became the liturgical bedrock
of the Church of England and its choral tradition until the 1960s; indeed,
the words ‘choral tradition’ seem almost synonymous with ‘Book of Common Prayer’. But, as Roger Bowers has argued, the compilers
of the 1552 prayer book, not least Cranmer himself, would have been horrified
to think that their liturgy would later become the vehicle for elaborate polyphony.
There is every sign that, by 1550, Cranmer and his allies were set
upon the total eradication of choral singing in the English liturgy.
Cranmer
had made clear his preference for simple, syllabic church music in a correspondence
he conducted with Henry VIII while preparing a vernacular litany back in 1544.
Throughout the later 1540s, just as the ritual frills of the Use of
Salisbury were clipped away, so the style of polyphonic composition was trimmed
down, veneration giving way to comprehension: devotional motets to the saints
were abolished in 1548; melismatic music was discouraged by episcopal visitors
in favour of syllabic homophony (‘a sober and distinct note’); texts must
be Biblical, in English, and clearly audible.
Boys’ voices, both high treble and low mean, had been used in polyphonic
music since the 1460s, adding a brilliant lustre to the choral ensemble; after
1549, composers stopped writing for the treble voice, such a potent signifier
of pre-Reformation ‘artificiality’. The ‘natural’ sonority of the mean voice
was to be preferred.
John
Sheppard’s English anthem, Christ the Paschal Lamb, exemplifies
the no-nonsense style of polyphony cultivated in 1549.
Example: Sheppard, Christ the Paschal Lamb (All Souls, 11)
By
1551, the attack upon all kinds
of choral singing had begun. The choirs
of King’s College, Cambridge, and New College, Oxford, were both disbanded
by order of the Privy Council. The
choir of the chapel royal, itself, was being run down, reflecting the trenchant
Protestantism of Edward VI, now in his teens and approaching his majority. The choral tradition, even in its heartlands,
was on the brink of destruction.
But
Edward never reached his majority. His
death of tuberculosis in July 1553, and the triumphant accession of Mary (his
much older, Catholic, half-sister), brought about a complete and abrupt reversal
of two decades of religious policy. Having adhered stoutly to her Catholic
faith, Mary had looked on with scarcely concealed outrage as her half-brother’s
government dismantled the fabric of English Catholicism. Now was the time for its restoration. Back came the mass and the full theological
and ritual fabric of the old religion: the Mass, the Latin rite and its vast
plainsong repertory, fine vestments, processions, images, saints and choral
polyphony.
For
Sheppard and his colleagues at the chapel royal, Mary’s accession came in
the nick of time. Their futures were
now secure, and they were again permitted – indeed required – to sing and
compose the kinds of music best suited to their training and disposition. It is hardly surprising that the mid-1550s witnessed
a boom in the composition of Latin polyphony: many of the classics of Tudor
music, by Thomas Tallis, William Mundy and Sheppard, himself, were written
in these years. The musical characteristics
of this repertory closely reflect the doctrinal tenets of the reformed, humanistic
brand of Catholicism pioneered by Mary and her Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald
Pole. The most elaborate forms of late-medieval
piety were tempered by a focus on the core principles of Catholic belief.
In musical terms, this encouraged the composition of mass settings
(as before) and of music for Matins, Lauds, Vespers and Compline on the principal
church feasts. At the chapel royal,
these high feasts were days of estate, crown-wearing occasions when the queen
very publicly attended divine worship. Unsurprisingly,
John Sheppard’s oeuvre is dominated by settings of hymns, responds and antiphons,
and not the elaborate and long-winded devotional motets favoured by composers
of the pre-Reformation era.
Example
History
was to take another dramatic turn, however. In November 1558 Mary died childless.
Her lifetime ambition, the restoration of English Catholicism and the
return of England to Papal obedience, so recently accomplished, was to be
undone within a year of her demise. Her half-sister, Elizabeth, re-instituted the
vernacular liturgy of 1552, although she herself would have preferred the
less prescriptive liturgy of 1549. Unlike
her half-brother, Elizabeth shared her father’s penchant for lavish ceremonial:
this ensured the continuation of polyphonic singing at the chapel royal, and
the composition of English anthems and services by Byrd, Tallis, and Robert
Parsons. And the rest, as they say,
is history.
Fatally
for his posthumous reputation, Sheppard died within a month of Elizabeth’s
accession. His great corpus of Latin
polyphony was now obsolete. Unusable
as liturgical music, it was now circulated privately among musicians and cognoscenti
– studied, copied and performed not within the public forum of the church,
but within the privacy of the chamber. Not until four centuries later did
his Latin church music resurface in the public domain.
Sheppard’s
English church music shared much the same fate as the Latin polyphony. He
had written a quantity of English church music ten years before his death,
and this continued to circulate until the Civil War.
But most of this music had been written in the first wave of reform:
although very competent and in parts quite splendid, it is still the work
of a very able composer grappling with the new challenge of setting music
to English liturgical texts. Had Sheppard
lived into the 1560s, he would have enjoyed the opportunity to refine and
adapt his style, to broaden and circulate his portfolio of English compositions,
and so to enhance his reputation and help to shape the future of English church
music.
Soon,
for the first time, we will have a complete edition of Sheppard’s church music.
The series Early English Church Music, which published his Latin masses
and responsorial music nearly thirty years ago, will shortly publish the rest
of his Latin church music, under the editorship of Dr David Skinner. In 2008
EECM will finally honour its longstanding commitment to Sheppard when it publishes
Stefan Scot’s edition of Sheppard’s complete English service music: the First
Service, the Second Service, what remains of the Trebles Service and other
fragments, as well as Sheppard’s anthems and his numerous
metrical psalm settings (nearly all of them fragmentary). In the meantime, the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis
of the Second Service are available from the CMS, as is a similar setting
by Sheppard’s young colleague (and likely pupil), Robert Parsons.
Sheppard
Second will provide us with a fitting recessional in a few moments. Back in
1977, when your speaker wore short pants and long hair, Sheppard was a conspicuous
absentee from Westminster Abbey’s music lists. The composer’s will, discovered only ten years
ago, reveals him to have been a resident of Westminster (he requested burial
in the abbey, at that point a restored Benedictine monastery, but was buried
at St Margaret’s instead). Within a
year of Sheppard’s death the abbey was dissolved for a second time. Like Sheppard,
the abbey had been through two turbulent decades. Since 1540 it had been through
four different manifestations in as many reigns: Benedictine Abbey, secular
cathedral, Benedictine Abbey (again), and, finally, secular collegiate church.
One more royal death, and it may well have resumed for a third time
its age-old monastic routine. Sheppard,
too, had had to accommodate himself to transient policies and unpredictable
religious dispensations. Sometimes
events moved so quickly that his compositions can be assigned a specific week
or month of composition (such is the case with his Second Service, which cannot
plausibly be made to fit any date except December 1558 – unless and until
some decisive new information comes to light).
Each of his compositions, the plainest Edwardian anthem as well as
the most splendid Latin polyphony, is a witness to these troubled years –
a still frame from a moving picture, frozen in time.
I
end with perhaps the last piece John Sheppard wrote, the Nunc dimittis (that
great canticle of leave-taking) from his Second Service. Almost certainly written after the accession
of Elizabeth I, and in response to her express command, the second service
was Sheppard’s legacy to the chapel royal, establishing a model which was
to serve fifteen years later as the template for
William
Byrd’s Great Service. If Sheppard had died a month earlier, this piece would
never have been written, Byrd would have had model for the Great Service,
and the history of music would have taken a different course.
Maybe.
Example: Sheppard, Second Service, Nunc dimittis (Christ Church)