Consort of Four Parts (review)

A special gracefulness defines the contribution by John Ward (c.1589–1638) to the early Stuart instrumental repertory. Its greater availability has enhanced his reputation to equal those of his more prominent contemporaries, no small thanks to the editor of these fantasias and previously of Ward's manuscript madrigals and verse anthems. In his preface to this completing instalment, Ian Payne highlights for comparison a composer some six years his senior, and overall briefer-lived by as much: Orlando Gibbons. Not the obvious juxtaposition, it is suggestive in context for Ward, often pigeonholed as a second-string madrigalist, a prosier John Wilbye. He does fit between those two on the spectrum, but he also speaks for himself and is at his most characterful when verbally unshackled.

A group of keyboard-accompanied bass-viol duos concludes the edition, with cognates for virginals, lyra viol (solo or duet), or dance quartet with implied continuo. Only one circulated much, and that through a single advocate who may have seen service with Ward. Three out of four versions as a masquing dance bear the name Simon Ives, a London wait commissioned by Bulstrode Whitelocke to compose for James Shirley's masque The Triumph of Peace (1634–5), who was also a conduit to virginalists. Anne Cromwell's Book has this dance, a high rate of concordance with the Ives-related partbooks for its four-part version (British Library, Add. MSS 18940–4), and a fair component of Ives's own composition.

The main contents divide into series named 'Paris' and 'Oxford' by present location, somewhat inverting their origins. The Paris Conservatoire acquired the sole extant source for the first: an eclectic, early Restoration string score copied on a London axis, mixing both these four-part series with fantasia-suites by William Lawes and part of Matthew Locke's Broken Consort. Contrarily, the fullest exemplars of the second wider-spread but shorter group of six pieces, now at Christ Church, Oxford, have a chance of part-assemblage in Paris, slightly earlier. A subgroup of three of them occurs as far afield as Sweden—where it was recopied, Payne concludes. Given his patronage of Ives, it could be that they were shipped with Whitelocke, who led a Protectoral embassy there in 1653–4. Both copy-texts postdate the composer slightly; both in different ways demand an act of faith in their credentials. Suspicions of dual authorship are dismissable, but the stylistic diversity that prompted them admittedly leaves problems in translating internal and contextual evidence into source assessment. That intermediate level of valuation also has potential for dating, boosting the meagre life records of the composer and his patrons; here if nowhere else, Ward could be brought into sharper focus.

Ward entered the service of the gentry, presumably by virtue of a cathedral chorister's training. His master Sir Henry Fanshawe was a favourite of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, elder son of James I and VI, assured of future high office as secretary of state, according to his daughter-in-law's memoir. However, the prince's death in late 1612 robbed a whole administration-in-waiting of its due, as the brooding king despatched his deceased heir's faction into country retirement. A broken chain of patronage hamstrung Ward too, and may partly explain why his First Set of English Madrigals for three to six voices (1613), dedicated to Fanshawe, grander than that by Gibbons of the previous year, was his last. By virtue of style and source evidence, madrigals in manuscript occupy much the same terrain: 'antedate', Payne's word, does not exclude a prospective 'Second Set'.

Still, Ward had arrived in a way. For his verse anthems, the most elegant source is Thomas Myriell's anthology Tristitiae remedium (British Library, Add. MSS 29372–7), dated 1616 on (or nearing) completion. It is odd to find Myriell's consensus taste called 'forward-looking'. It included little by Gibbons; instead, anthems by Thomas East published in 1610, by John Bull pre...