Correspondence

Richard Dering's Concertato Motets

A number of seventeenth-century manuscripts have been overlooked in Jonathan Wainwright's intriguing article 'Richard Dering's Few-Voice Concertato Motets', Music & Letters, 89 (2008), 165-94 (which lists known sources), and in his forthcoming edition Richard Dering: Motets for One, Two or Three Voices and Basso Continuo (Musica Britannica, 87; London, 2008). Also, the motet with Italianate virtuoso ornamentation, Angelus ad pastores, which Wainwright attributes to Dering and edits in both publications, was in actual fact composed by someone else.

In the 1970s I edited, and realized the continuo parts of, all of Dering's few-voice motets, and although publishers were uninterested in them at the time, two pieces were eventually printed by Novello in 1990. While undertaking the original work, I studied the sources in overseas collections and uncovered some seventeenth-century manuscripts that had escaped the attention of the Dering expert, the late Professor Sir Peter Platt, a long-standing and treasured colleague. In 1978 I published details about two of these sources, both copied by the same hand: University of California at Los Angeles, Williams Andrews Clark Memorial Library, MS C6967M4 and MS C6968M4, matching the last to the set's Bass partbook King's College, Cambridge, Rowe MS 321 (see my 'Four Caroline Part-Books', Music & Letters, 59 (1978), 49-51; Wainwright covers the latter items). It was some years before I published information about another of these manuscripts, New York Public Library, Drexel 4300; see my 'Thomas Bever and Rediscovered Sources in the Staats- und Universitaätsbibliothek, Hamburg', Music & Letters, 81 (2000), 177-209, esp. 205.¹ While I did not itemize Drexel 4300's pieces, I named its three partbooks and indicated that they included sacred vocal works by Dering. This source is not mentioned by Wainwright. In detail, the overlooked manuscripts comprise:

1. New York Public Library, Drexel 4300 contains twenty of Dering's few-voice motets and is complete, though no basso continuo part is specified or provided. This manuscript will be invaluable if the Musica Britannica volume is revised because it is the earliest known source of fifteen of Dering's few-voice motets; the other five also appeared in another early, though incomplete, manuscript, British Library, Add. MS 78416 B.² These Dering motets otherwise survive in later manuscripts dating from the 1640s and beyond, and it was not until 1662, more than thirty years after Dering's death, that seventeen of them first appeared in print, in John Playford's collection Cantica sacra published in London. (Some of the copies in Drexel 4300 differ in places from those in later sources.)

The partbooks at Drexel 4300 are labelled Cantus, Tenor, and Bassus. On one of the front flyleaves in each partbook, the original owner inscribed 'James Clifford of Mag. Coll. in Oxon, | is the Owner of this Book | Anno Domini 1633'. James Clifford (1622-98) was a chorister at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1632 until 1642, and became a minor canon at St Paul's Cathedral, London, in 1661, eventually holding the position of senior cardinal. He was the author of The Divine Services and Anthems (London, 1663), which appeared in an expanded edition in 1664. Five music hands appear in the Drexel partbooks; one of the hands belongs to Clifford. Later owners of the partbooks include William Gostling, Thomas Bever, and Joseph Drexel (d. 1888), who bequeathed them to the Lenox Library, a predecessor of the New York Public Library.

Since little seems to be known about Drexel 4300, a list of its pieces follows:

No.	Composer	Work
1-25	Thomas Weelkes	[Thomas Weelkes, Ayres or Phantasticke Spirites for Three Voices (London, 1608), nos. 1-25;3 in some partbooks, a few pieces below appear out of order]
26.	[Anon.]	[1.p.] Sweet Phillis is the shepherd's queen (a 3) [2.p.]
		Sweet Philomell (a 3)
27.	[Anon.]	Over these brooks (a 3)
28.	[Thomas] Brewer	Gloria tribuatur Deo (a 3)
29.	William Pysing	Come follow me (a 3)
30.	[Anon.]	Come will you come (a 3)
31.	[Anon.]	To pitch our toils (a 3)
[32.]	Richard Dering	Ego dormio (a 2)
[33...