Bass Parts to an Unknown Purcell Suite at Yale

The thirty-seven music manuscripts comprising the Filmer Collection at Yale University, nearly all of English provenance, suggest that a lively musical culture existed in the homes of the Filmers of Kent, England, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In a 1978 study in Notes, Robert Ford provided an overview of the collection, ¹ and various Filmer manuscripts have subsequently been studied by Curtis Price, ² Carl Schmidt, ³ Peter Holman, ⁴ and Ford himself. ⁵ My own interest in this collection developed in the process of writing a book with Robert Thompson about the manuscript sources for Henry Purcell's music. ⁶ I was especially drawn to some intriguing phrases in Ford's original study: for instance, in describing Filmer 21, a fragment from a Canterbury Cathedral partbook, Ford mentions the presence of a "seldom-encountered Purcell anthem" (this later proving to be only the second extant source for The Lord is King and Hath Put on Glorious Apparel), ⁷ and he notes that Filmer 8, an instrumental bass partbook, includes a "suite of theater music by Henry Purcell. Aside from the Overture, these Purcell pieces are not known elsewhere." ⁸ This suite, which includes five unique basses not previously published or evaluated for their authenticity, is the focus of the present essay, but some general comments on the Filmer Collection are in order before proceeding to a description of the individual source and the music.

The Filmer Collection at Yale University

The booksellers Mellor & Balley of Anglesey, Wales, offered the Filmer music collection to Yale University in 1945, nearly thirty years after the death, in 1916, of Sir Robert Filmer, the last of a line of baronets. ⁹ Hugh Mellor records something of the recent history of the collection in his second letter to Donald Wing, then associate university librarian and head of accessions at Yale:

Sir Robert Filmer--the last I understand of his line, died some little time ago and his Trustees sent the family library . . . to Sotheby's where [it was] sold on Oct. 1st [1945]. There was no music sold there. His family deeds &c. he had left to Maidstone Public Library, near where the family lived for many generations. On going through the boxes, the librarian found one box not containing deeds, but this music. The trustees, wishing to settle affairs quickly, did not send it to Sotheby's but offered it to a dealer in London. Although out of his line, he bought it at the beginning of Oct.

Not knowing much about it, he first called in someone from the British Museum and asked them £2,000 for the collection. Naturally, with their enormous collection it was of no interest to them but they wanted to buy two items. The dealer would not "split" the items and wrote to me--as one interested, as he knew, in old music. I sent a friend to make a preliminary examination and the rest you know. ¹⁰

The "rest" is that Mellor must have purchased the collection almost immediately for substantially less than £2000, because by the end of October he offered it to Yale for £900, a seemingly reasonable price considering that the collection included not only the thirty-seven manuscript items but several early madrigal prints as well. ¹¹ The transaction was concluded in April 1946.

Several inscriptions in the manuscripts can be connected with individual members of the Filmer family (see appendix 1), ¹² and the serious pursuit of music seems to have been a long-standing Filmer tradition, going back at least to the time of Sir Edward Filmer, who was Sheriff of Kent, founder of the Filmer estate in East Sutton, Kent (acquiring it by marriage), and translator of French Court-Aires: With their Ditties Englished, published in 1629, ¹³ the year of his death. Several of the earliest items in the Filmer Collection, as it now stands, probably reflect the musical activities of Sir...