Ayres, or Fa La's for Three Voyces (1627) (review)

A place is assured in even brief accounts of  English seventeenth-century music for the younger John Hilton, compiler of Catch that Catch Can (1652 and numerous augmented edns.), on occasion taking in mention of its spawning-ground, a catch club in London's Old Jewry. This dual service to the Zeitgeist and the promotion of good cheer may have been due to enforced leisure in the Interregnum: abolition of Anglican services reduced him to a parish clerk, after twenty years' service from 1628 as organist at St Margaret's Westminster. Hindsight sees here an entrepreneurial riposte to the blighting of a career; but was it just a sudden change of direction? His background as son of a cathedral or chapel composer does tend to suggest a normal working life up to then; but by his time, and outside a High Church context, things were in flux. It has to be conceded that style alone serves to disentangle his output from his father's, in default of surer guides, and to assume continuity or its reverse begs questions. Either way gives no tidy slice to the joint: too little of the work attributable with certainty to the son is liturgical, and the more its context becomes known, the more 'modern' he may look. Not the least clue to his progress is in the contents of his manuscript songbook. Sacred continuo dialogues unique to it, some well-nigh cantatas, must weigh here, even if they are largely to be redated from earlier to the 1640s or on, as suggested in a valuable redefinition by Mary Chan ('John Hilton's Manuscript British Library Add. MS 11608', Music & Letters, 60 (1979), 440–9).

His debut in print, though, is viewable as traditional: Ayres (1627), ballets in 'trio-sonata' scoring with a tenor-range third voice. With a fairly cautious harmonic palette, they make a polished envoi to a vogue popularized by his father's acquaintance Thomas Morley (whose disesteem of ballets in A Plaine and Easie Introduction did not deter him from turning his hand to them with zest). As mentioned in the present edition by John Morehen, there is no sign of a need for continuo stiffening, if equally there is no call to debar it: in the 1620s the declamatory English style was past its infancy, and Hilton's songs, solid examples of it, may be in part of this date or very little later, like John Donne's 'Wilt thou forgive that sinn' (the original setting?). The verse for the Ayres has previously been available in English Madrigal Verse; but it makes thin gruel without the music, hitherto reprinted complete only by Joseph Warren, for the Musical Antiquarian Society (in 1844). The cause of a stay so long outdoors is an understandable reluctance by Edmund H. Fellowes to add to his load in his English Madrigal School. But loss there is our eventual gain, of an editor and publishers capable of fastidious handling: collating exemplars for press variants and hand corrections, with surmise on printing-house methods in coping with immethodical copy. Prefatory material is given twice, in facsimile and transcription (modernized, as is the underlay throughout, and annotated); authors of commendatory verse and the standing of the printer as handler of music are discussed; attention is paid to typefaces down to printing flowers. A single mistranscribed pitch in the music is the one witness to frailty (piece no. 20, bars 6 and 19 in the third voice, e′ for the correct original f ′). Of quite a different order is an omission on both cover and title page of a bonus, of three four-part songs from manuscript (one to a text set by William Byrd, one by John Bennet and Michael East), ascribed to a John Hilton and fitting his post-madrigalian stylistic profile. They occupy an appendix with its own commentary on the texts and the source...