'fitt for the Manicorde': A Seventeenth-Century English Collection of Keyboard Music (review)

This is a very interesting collection of fifty-eight keyboard pieces, most of which were completely unknown until now. They represent the contents of a manuscript apparently copied somewhere in England in the late 1680s, but it is not possible at present to be any more precise. None of the composers is named, and the three copyists are unidentified. The manuscript has always been in private hands and was at one time owned by Thurston Dart, but has more recently been acquired by Christopher Hogwood. Two of the pieces were published by Dart in 1960, but the rest of the music remained out of sight. Now, however, Hogwood has produced an excellent edition of the entire contents, with an extended preface printed in both English and German.

The preface is admirably detailed and scholarly, and tells the reader almost everything one might want to know about the manuscript. A description of the physical aspects of the volume includes information about such matters as its size, pagination, watermark, stave rulings, and ink colour, though more technical bibliographical matters such as the gathering structure and the positioning of the watermark are perhaps wisely omitted. There are also discussions of the music and aspects of performance practice, and an indication of the editorial methods used.

Hogwood has clearly made considerable efforts to identify the music, but he has found fewer than a dozen works in other sources, and with some of these the version here is rather different from those elsewhere. Piece no. 33 in G, for example, which here bears the title 'An Eare [ = Air] or a Courante', appears in Musicks Hand-maide (1663) in D entitled 'Coranto La Chabotte', with a somewhat different melodic line and very different accompaniment.

The only composers identified so far through concordances are Lully, represented by a single arrangement from Atys; Thomas Farmer, whose overture published in 1686 appears here in a keyboard arrangement (Hogwood also includes the original version for strings in an appendix); and the elusive La Barre, whose works can be found in both French and English sources but sometimes with conflicting ascriptions. My own search for further concordances, among my records of numerous English sources, failed to find any missed by Hogwood. And although some of the titles are French, for example 'allemande' rather than 'almand', and the ornamentation is a mixture of English and French symbols (sometimes in the same piece!), hardly any of the music can be found in known French sources either.

Although one might have expected to find more concordances, the shortage is not altogether surprising. Very few sources of English keyboard music survive from the 1680s, compared with the large number, both manuscript and printed, from the following two decades. Those that do survive are somewhat diverse in character and contents, and this one is quite different from any of them. Most of the unknown repertory, however, is similar in style and genre to what can be found in contemporary sources, for it consists mainly of suites of anything from two to five movements, and a number of individual dances and airs. As usual, the suites are not identified in the manuscript as such, but the pieces in each suite tend to follow loosely a standard pattern based around the allemande, courante, and sarabande, like those in Locke's Melothesia (1673). Hogwood has therefore used the term 'suite' in the list of contents, but not in the main body of the volume—a cunning compromise. Each of the two pieces published by Dart is unattached to a suite and is entitled 'An Allemande fitt for the Manicorde'—from which Hogwood has derived a title for the whole volume. None of the other pieces, however, specifies a particular instrument.

The two most extraordinary pieces are the last two—nos. 57 and 58—which are headed not with an ordinary title but with verses 4 and 3 respectively from Psalm 150, in an unfamiliar translation. Each is...