By Ross W. Duffin
Lost music—thwarting the performance of something that otherwise is obviously worth hearing—has long been a fascination of mine, and I’m drawn to projects with some missing feature that I might supply. My first A-R editions were Cantiones Sacrae: Madrigalian Motets from Jacobean England (R142) and Richard Davy, St. Matthew Passion, Reconstructed from the Eton Choirbook with Lyrics in Latin and English (Y2-017). The former edition reconstructed Latin sacred works by English madrigal composers, supplying missing voice parts for several of the pieces. The latter reconstructed the earliest known polyphonic passion setting, providing music for missing sections of the piece and setting the music to the period English translation by William Tyndale, whose background resembled the composer’s.
Since retiring from university teaching in 2018, I have often found myself on the trail of music for poetry collections that were originally intended to be sung, but for which little or no evidence has survived of their tunes. The roots of that interest extend back into my work on songs in early modern English plays, including those of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. And it was while tracing further theatrical tunes that I ran across Gude & Godlie Ballatis (first published 1565), the first of three poetic collections I noticed that were crying out for musical attention, serendipitously surviving in its first complete edition only a few blocks from my home.
I had been working with English metrical psalms, first introduced from Geneva into England when Elizabeth reestablished Protestantism after the reign of Mary Tudor. Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins are famous today as the primary authors of the Whole Booke of Psalmes (1562), but one author who contributed over thirty of the one hundred and fifty English metrical psalms in the collection was Thomas Norton, who was also the co-author of the pioneering Elizabethan tragedy Gorboduc (1561/2). I discovered that the choruses in that play, and those in other tragedies from the Inns of Court, were almost certainly intended to be sung to the tunes of the emerging repertoire of metrical psalmody. At the same time, the Genevan tradition of tunes, slightly varied for the Whole Booke of Psalmes, was continued in the so-called Scottish Psalter, the Forme of Prayers, published in Edinburgh in 1564. The next year, also in Edinburgh, Gude & Godlie Ballatis appeared—a collection of sacred poems in Scots that was described as intended for singing but lacked a single note of music, not only in that first edition but also in all its other editions into the seventeenth century.
Stumbling across Gude & Godlie Ballatis while looking at period psalm settings, I realized that some of its poems were parodies of psalms in the Anglo-Genevan tradition, inspired by the new Scottish Psalter. Others, it emerged, were based on hymns by Luther and his colleagues, or on Miles Coverdale’s banned Goostly Psalmes (1535); still others were parodies of secular songs. So, in spite of long-held doubts about its musical potential, it became possible to create my edition Gude & Godlie Ballatis Noted (R174), a musical edition of the hundred-plus poems, starting from the standpoint that they were often written as translations or parodies of existing pieces.
Learning about the background to metrical psalms had required me to read a lot of writings by the late Nicholas Temperley, and, guided by a brief note in his study The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, 1979), the next poetic collection I ran across in need of music was Psalmes, or Songs of Sion (1631), by the English clergyman, poet, and historian William Slatyer. This was an anthology of forty-five new poetic psalm paraphrases by Slatyer, with which he included a helpful list of the popular tunes to which he intended his psalms to be sung. The fact that some of those tunes had previously set profane ballads was regarded as “scandalous,” however, and the High Commission of the Church of England arrested Slatyer, forced him to apologize and repudiate his work, banned the book, recalled all copies, and ordered them to be burned—poof! Never mind that Elizabethan metrical psalms were originally based on popular tunes of their own day!
Up to the time of his transgression, Slatyer had been a successful clergyman and poet, serving as chaplain to both Prince Charles and Queen Anna, writing poems in their honor, and penning a complete History of Great Britanie (1621) entirely in verse. But this 1631 collection rankled church authorities who, when Slatyer stood before them, even recorded a complaint about his flamboyantly ruffled sleeves! His “scandalous” table, in fact, consisted of the same wonderful tunes that keyboard and lute composers of his time were using as bases for variation sets, and which I had proposed as used for songs in period plays, and it seems clear that Slatyer simply thought it would be an enjoyable (and, indeed, pious) recreation for people to sing his new psalms to such popular melodies. Two copies of his collection survived the pyre and the centuries, however, and since no one else had attempted to match his psalms to the stated tunes, it seemed to me worth trying.
Most of Slatyer’s specified tunes were known from various musical sources, but a few psalms with unknown tune titles had to be set to conjectural melodies that matched the versification of the poems. For some decades, I’ve been compiling databases of songs in various repertoires, so matching lyrics and tunes, for me, typically starts with a search for other lyrics with the same versification. The questions I ask are these: What poems match this one in terms of stanza structure, metrical structure, and rhyme? What tunes are known to set those other poems? Are there external factors (keywords, rhyming words, subject matter, availability) that suggest the use of one tune over another? Voilà!—the best choice of conjectural tune! The result, in this case, was Psalmes, or Songs of Sion (1631): William Slatyer’s Scandalous Collection (B234).
The third poetic collection I found in need of musical treatment was Anthony Munday’s A Banquet of Daintie Conceits (1588). Munday was a journeyman writer who had a varied career, and he seems to have been held in high regard during his lifetime. His Banquet has been known in modern times; although it survives in just a single copy, now in the British Library, it was edited and published in a miscellany of 1812 (though not since then). Almost no one, furthermore, seems to have paid attention to the fact that Munday specified the tunes for each of his poems, and although they are mostly not the typical ballad tunes, two-thirds of them are known from manuscripts for solo lute, solo keyboard, or instrumental consort. Most are dance tunes, in fact—sometimes long and complex dance tunes—and Munday seems to have carefully written his poetry to be set to them, often using changes of versification to match the different sections of the melodies. As with Slatyer, Munday’s collection includes some poems for which the tunes have not survived, at least under the titles he supplied, so I have conjecturally reconstructed them. The end result is A Musicall Banquet of Daintie Conceits (R177), another complete collection of historical poetry, originally intended for singing and now made singable for the first time in almost 450 years!
My efforts in finding lost tunes earned me a treasured epithet—“tune detective”—from the late John M. Ward, whose work on Elizabethan songs and lute music from the early 1950s to the early 1990s laid the foundation for further studies in those areas—mine included. I hope my own work will prove useful to future generations of scholars and musicians; in the meantime, I’ll be on the lookout for lyrics whose tunes remain a mystery!
A native of London, Canada, now dividing his time between Pasadena, CA, and Washington, D.C., Ross W. Duffin is Distinguished University Professor and Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music Emeritus at Case Western Reserve University. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Western Ontario (now Western University) and his master’s and doctorate from Stanford. A winner of the Thomas A. Binkley and Howard Mayer Brown Awards from Early Music America, and the Noah Greenberg and Claude V. Palisca Awards from the American Musicological Society, his scholarship on early modern English songs is best known from his Shakespeare’s Songbook (W.W. Norton, 2004) and Some Other Note: The Lost Songs of English Renaissance Comedy (Oxford University Press, 2018). He has also published widely in historical performance practice, including on musical iconography, historical pronunciation, theory, notation, improvisation, and tuning—the latter most notably with his monograph How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) (W. W. Norton, 2007). To an earlier generation, Duffin may be best known for his radio series Micrologus: Exploring the World of Early Music, broadcast on NPR from 1981 to 1985 and in reruns until 1998. In 2022, the entire series became permanently available as part of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Duffin was also Founding Artistic Director of Quire Cleveland (2008–18), where he produced more than two hundred concert videos of (mostly) early choral repertoire.
