Luogo e data di registrazione		Chapel Knole, Kent (Inghilterra) - settembre 1980
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Colin Tilney / Martin Renshaw / Adam Skeaping
	Prima Edizione LP		EMI Electrola "Reflexe" - 1C 066-46 403 - (1 lp) - durata 49' 50" - (p) 1982 - Analogico
	Prima Edizione CD		EMI "Classics" - 8 26525 2 - (1 cd) - durata 49' 50" - (c) 2000 - ADD
	Note		-

ENGLISH ORGAN MUSIC On this record you will hear eight settings of In Nomine, two fantasies, two grounds, a voluntary and a hymn. The music, written between about 1550 and 1620, falls neither into the main repertory called “virginalist” nor into the stock of usable church material, and so tends to be shunned by organists and harpsichordists alike. Yet this body of writing includes some of the greatest exercises in contrapuntal ingenuity in the history of English keyboard music, notably the In Nomines of Blithman and Bull, the two immense Felix Namque settings of Tallis (not recorded here) and the fantasies of Orlando Gibbons; such intellectual feats are surely needed, for wholeness’ sake, beside the familiar dances and variations of the later Elisabethan and early Jacobean composers, if we wish to have a true understanding of the esteem generally accorded to English music at the time. Attempts to explore the strange, radiant beauty of these pieces have been seriously discouraged by unreliable texts and by a complete absence of information about penformance practice in the earlier period; questions of musica ficta, tempo and the techniques of fingering and articulation are particularly troublesome and still more or less unresolved. On the other hand, there ist sufficient documentation on the kind of instruments prized and played by keyboard performers in the reigns of Henry, Edward, Mary and Elizabeth for us to be reasonably confident about matching appropiate sounds to the music. Henry VIII not only composed, played, sang and danced himself, but also brought to Court the outstanding virtuosi of the day, a policy that was continued in varying degrees by succeeding members of his familiy. An inventory drawn up in 1547, listing the contents of the many royal palaces, illustrates the range of instruments available to a powerful Renaissance prince who wished to offer his guests - and his musicians - the best that money could buy. As might be expected, \Westminster had more numerous, impressive and sumptuously decorated instruments than anywhere else: five “double regals” and thirteen “single”; eight “double virginals” and ten “single”; two claviorgana and two clavichords. (The clavichords do not merit a special heading, but are thrown in with “instruments of sundry kinds”, such as five bagpipes, nineteen viols, twenty-four lutes, seventy-one flutes and seventy-six recorders.) The regals were small positive organs with a bass compass to c or G (single) or to the octave below (double) and three or four ranks of wooden or metal pipes; occasionally they had a reed stop - the “regal” itself. (We can be sure the word “regal” carried both meanings, because a 1536 contract for an organ in Exeter holds the builder responsible for the maintenance of all registers except “the stop of Regals in the same instrument which must be tuned by the player thereof...” - then, as now, the reeds would not hold their tuning and had to be retuned before every performance.) The reeds were made of paper, the metal pipes of brass or tin, and many of the organs had divided registers (“half stops”). The grandest showpieces had cases covered with velvet or silver gilt and bore the royal arms. A “virginal” could be any plucked keyboard, not only the rectangular or polygonal shape we now associate with the word, as is proved by one of the entries in the inventory: “Item. Two fair pair of new long virginals made harp fashion of Cypress with keys of Ivoiy, having the King’s arms crowned and supported by his grace’s beasts, with two cases to them covered with black leather, the inner parts of the lids to the said cases being of walnut, with sundry antics of white wood wrought in the same”, i. e. two Italian harpsichords, their outer protective or travelling cases covered with black leather and their lids elaborately inlaid. The cypress and boxwood of the virginals and the painted organ cases with their arabesgue work point to imports from Italy, whereas the organ and harpsichord combinations may have been a Flemish speciality, if we can judge by the only surviving sixteenth-century keyboard instrument made in England, the claviorganum built in London in 1579 by the Fleming, Lodewijk Theeuwes. Constructional details typical of both schools of building can be seen in the few seventeenth-century harpsichords that bear English names. and it seems likely that an eclectic native tradition was developing slowly alongside the copying of foreign models. It is possible, for instance, that the use of oak for the pipes of the Knole organ may represent English preference. King Henry’s collection was one of the richest in Europe, but even his instruments did not boast more than one keyboard (unless we take a reference in the accounts for 1530 to “two pair of Virginals in one coffer with four stops” to mean an early example of a Flemish transposing double harpsichord); and the three or four ranks of pipes and the odd reed stop in his organs seem to have satisfied both visiting entertainers and the musicians of the Chapel Royal. By the beginning of the next century, after the post-Reformation stabilization of the Anglican rite by Elizabeth, church organs were reaching a more imposing size. The famous Dallam organ in Worcester Cathedral, built in 1613-4 and installed while Thomas Tomkins was organist, had two keyboards and thirteen stops, although it was without pedals. Outside the church, however, one keyboard and a handful of stops was probably the rule rather than the exception. When John Bull played the organ for James the First in 1607, at a feast given in honour of the king by the Merchant Taylors Guild, a simple positive would have given the composer of Walsingham all the colour and sparkle he needed. And Bull’s programme for the evening is unlikely to have included any strict “organ” music, either: dance tunes, medleys and variations would have been more to the royal taste at a banquet than the most skilled In Nomine. We sometimes forget how suited the organ is to much “virginal" music, and that, in those days, occasion mattered far more than instrument. God and Caesar were kept clearly distinct, but each might be praised in various ways. Only for a long-note cantus firmus did the organ have an idiomatic advantage over the plucked instruments. The embroidery of a plainsong tune underlies almost all sixteenth-century liturgical writing for keyboard and much secular music as well; in addition, it was one of the basic techniques used in the training of contemporary composers and singers. As a structural method it has had its critics. In 1597 Thomas Morley wrote in his Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music: “But I see not what passions or motions it can stir up being sung as most men do commonly sing it, that is leaving out the ditty and singing only the bare note, as it were a music made only for instruments, which will indeed show the nature of the music but never carry the spirit and, as it were, that lively soul which the ditty giveth.” Several hundred years later, Charles van den Borren is in full agreement with Morley: “From the moment when the inspiration of the musician is led by the long Ariadne thread of the Gregorian melody, stripped of its inner rhythm and of the words which give it life, a heavy constraint seems to rest on the melodic and harmonic progress of the two melodies.” Morley and van den Borren put their finger squarely on a fundamental hazard in undistinguished hands, but lifeless counterpoint did not begin nor end in the sixteenth century, and an imaginative writer will show a cantus firmus for the scaffolding it is, no more deserving of blame than the chaconne or the symphony are for all the bad music poured into their moulds. One of the longest Ariadne threads - and one of the longest lasting and more popular - was the In Nomine, a name for years attributed to various conflicting sources but now correctly identified as the In Nomine Domine section of the Benedictus from Taverner’s mass on the antiphon, Gloria tibi Trinitas. Divorced from its proper place in the Mass, though still sometimes called by its proper name, the plainsong melody took on new life as the framework of countless “In Nomines” for keyboard or viol consort; outstanding among the string settings are those of Alfonso Ferrabosco, Byrd, William Lawes and Henry Purcell, and among the keyboard versions, those of William Blitheman, Bull and Tomkins. Blitheman’s six treatments of Gloria tibi Trinitas come from the “Mulliner Book" (British Library Add. Ms. 30513), one of the most valuable stores of mid-century keyboard music, and seem designed to make a cumulative effect. In the earlier variations, the mostly three-part texture allows tvvo virtuoso lines to dance round the cantus firmus in ever greater rhythmic and figurative complexity; the final statement is in four voices and has the calm of a hymn. Blitheman died in 1591, but many of his skills he passed on to his “scholar”, John Bull; we see them clearly in Bull’s own set of twelve versions of the In Nomine tune. Number 6 runs quietly in three parts with all the sweetness of Blitheman’s first setting, while Blitheman’s modest summing up of the plainsong is transformed into a masterpiece: in Nummer 9 Bull lays out each note of the melody in the bass as a foundation for eleven crotchets (4 + 4 + 3), changing these twenty-two quavers proportionally to thirty-three for the final section. It is a stunning concept, but the structure never masks the music. Thomas Tallis’ two great settings of Felix Namque (1562 and 1564 in the Fitzvvilliam Virginal Book) are proof that plainsongs other than Gloria tibi Trinitas could sometimes act as a challenge and inspiration, but by 1600 composers were turning away from wordless sacred melodies altogether and either using harmonic basses (passamezzo, folia etc.) for their large-scale works, or inventing their own material. The passamezzo and Quadran pavans and galliards of Byrd and Bull are instances of the first procedure, the many Elizabethan fantasies of the second. For Thomas Morley, the fantasy takes unquestioned pride of place after vocal music: “The most principal and chiefest kind of music which is made without a ditty is the Fantasy, that is when a musician taketh a point at his pleasure and wresteth and turneth it as he list, making either much or little of it according as shall seem best in his own conceit. In this may more art be shown than in any other music because the composer is tied to nothing, but that he may add, diminish and alter at his pleasure.” The freedom that Morley mentions clearly attracted many of the great musical minds of the time, but none returned so obsessively and repeatedly to the form as Orlando Gibbons, who wrote twenty-seven fantasies for strings and ten for Keyboard. The “Fantazia of foure parts” comes from Parthenia (1612), a joint wedding present to James I’s daughter from Byrd, Bull and Gibbons. As the youngest contributor, Gibbons was allotted only six pieces to Bull’s seven and Byrd’s eignt, but he choses from his best work; the fantasy is the only “learned” music in the whole collection, surely evidence of professional respect. The G minor fantasy has ideas as memorable as any in Parthenia but, with its falling diminished fourth in the opening “point” and its modulations to remote keys, it explores a far stranger world, one perhaps thought unsuitable for royalty. If In Nomine and fantasy represent the fullest flowering of the art of contrapuntal keyboard writing in the period between 1550 and 1620, the other pieces on tne record are hardly less aromatic, but can be described more briefly. The two grounds, although far apart in date of composition, have a common link in Tomkins’ ownersnip of Add. Ms. 29996, the sole source for “Upon La Mi Re”. Possibly by Thomas Preston, this witty little tour de force is the earliest music recorded here: a threenote ostinate in the bass, A-E-D (La Mi Re in the natural hexachord), syncopated at the fifth higner, E-B-A (La Mi Re in the hard hexachord) and used as accompaniment to a long, winding tune. Tomkins uses a longer ground than Preston’s (seven notes), but it can be neard as easily throughout the whole structure, twenty-four variations of increasing brilliance. Allwood’s Voluntary and Tallis’ Iste Confessor both come from the Mulliner Book. The Allwood was printed several times in previous centuries and has always served as an approved example of smooth counterpoint, unlike much of the rest of the manuscript, which was condemned, particularly by the eighteenth century, as “barbarous" and “primitive". The Mulliner Book contains a number of organ verses designed to be played in alternation with sung plainsong - Blitheman sets every other verse of Eterne rerum Conditor, for instance, and a whole Te Deum - but Tallis provides only one version for the hymn, Iste Confessor. It breathes the easy serenity that is the special treasure of this music. Colin Tilney A note on the instrument The Jacobean Chest organ in the private Chapel of Knole House, Sevenoaks Keth, England, is one of the very few musical documents left that dates from the pre-Revolution period in Britain. It is in fact almost certainly the oldest playable English keyboard instrument. Thomas Sackville, first Earl of Dorset, was considerably engaged in building up a musical establishment at Knole between 1604 and 1608 - and he resurbished the Chapel - and it seems likely that the organ was purchased during this period. The “traditional” (orally transmitted) date has been given as 1623, but this may be a confusion with the date (1622) of the acquisition of the now empty harpichord from John Hasard of London. This also still stands in the house. The organ may perhaps have been obtained for use with other instruments in the gallery of the nevv Screen in the Great Hall (made about 1608), but at some time before 1765 it was placed in a room opening to the Chapel next to the west gallery that is still knovvn as the Organ Room, although it is now closed off as a bedroom. There the organ could have fulfilled a dual rôle as a domestic consort continuo instrument and in solo or accompanying use in the Chapel services. It appears that the organ was renovated about 1740 [1], and the present single-rise wedgeshaped reservoir, and its feeder, vvhich recall Snetzler’s work, were probably fitted at this time. In 1871 [2] I, J. W. Walker of London extended the key compass from the original C-c”’ (short octave, 45 notes) to CD - d'" (50 notes) and added an octave of 16’ Bourdon pipes; these last have since been removed. The organ was, perhaps at this time, tuned in equal temperament. However, practically all the original oak pipes have survived otherwise unaltered, as the organ seems to have fallen out of use towards the end of the 19th century. Except for a brief resurrection in the 1920s, it was silent and generally unnoticed until 1975, when it was brought back into playing order by two teachers at the nearby Sevenoaks School. It has since been maintained by Martin Renshaw. The whole original organ is of English Oak, and was originally made without screws. The only metalwork is in the stop action (of forged iron) and the brass of the pallet springs, and key and sticker pins. The registers are: 8’ Stopped Diapason, 50 stopped pipes (45 original) 4’ Principal, 50 open pipes (45 original) 2 2/3’ Twelfth, 50 pipes; the bass octave 11 pipes have at some time been convened to stopped 4’ pitch; the rest are open (43 original pipes) 2’ Fifteenth, 50 open pipes (42 original) The present keyboard (of 1871) is of oak with box natural platings, and ebony sharps. The overall size of the organ is 54” wide by 26” deep by 47” high. The height has been increased by about 2 1/2" during the two earlier renovations. The organ is now tuned in meantone temperament; as a result of the earlier retunings, the pitch is of a little higher than originally - it is now about 1/4 tone sharp of standard pitch (a = 440 Hz). Notes: [1] Some newspaper used to patch pipes appears to date from this time. [2] Evidence of date, builder (and replacement of keyboard) from a letter vvritten that year by F. H. Sutton Martin Renshaw
EMI Electrola "Reflexe"