The Eton Choirbook - standing at the crossroads of the Renaissance

There is a proverb contemporary with the Eton Choirbook which might have been directly inspired by the spectacular sounds locked up in its colourful pages: “Galli cantant, Italiae capriant, Germani ululant, Anglici jubilant”. English musicians had loved successions of joyful-sounding thirds (C+E, D+F etc.) for generations before the Eton Choirbook, as can be heard in the first complete – and anonymous – setting of the Passion (recorded by TONUS PEREGRINUS on Naxos 8.555861). By experimenting with full triads (C+E+G etc.) John Dunstaple [Dunstable] – the first truly great English composer – was able to lift this musical elation to a new level, such that in 1475 the musicologist Tinctoris could claim that music had been transformed during his own lifetime into a “new art” (recorded by TONUS PEREGRINUS on Naxos 8.557341). Dunstaple’s sweet harmony is the primary source of the flowing glories of the Eton Choirbook and remained a quintessentially English characteristic through the extremes of Tallis’s forty-part motet Spem in alium and Gibbons’s ravishing Hymnes and Songs of the Church (recorded by TONUS PEREGRINUS on Naxos 8.557681) to English composers of the 20^th century and today. And it’s in the Eton Choirbook itself that some unsurpassed heights of musical ecstasy were reached, mirroring the lofty perpendicular style of the architecture of its time.

Founded along with King’s College, Cambridge in the early 1440s by Henry VI, Eton College was to be a haven of education, devotion and charity in the middle of political turbulence that included the final stages of the Hundred Years’ War with France, the so-called ‘Wars of the Roses’, and the religious reforms and counter-reforms of Henry VIII and his children. That turbulence devastated many libraries (including the Chapel Royal library) and makes the surviving 126 of the original 224 leaves in Eton College Manuscript 178 all the more precious, for it’s just one of a few representatives of several generations of English music in a period of rapid and impressive development. Eton’s chapel library itself had survived a forced removal in 1465 to Edward IV’s St George’s Chapel – a stone’s throw away in Windsor – not returning until a reprieve from the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1476. But it was under the rule of Henry VII, who had claimed the monarchy for the Tudors in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth, that the repertoire of the Eton Choirbook not only flourished but was collected and copied, probably in London, for use in Eton College Chapel.

However magnificent, the music of the Eton Choirbook is just the tip of a titanic schedule of devotions and supplications which took place in the College Chapel. Each day seven masses were said or sung, and in addition there were the various observances which had sprung up over many centuries around the person of the mother of Jesus (later to be silenced at the strokes of pen and sword of Protestant Reformers); feastdays, of which there were many, required yet more celebration, with a particular emphasis on the events of Passiontide and Holy Week. The College’s statutes of 1444 made provision for, among others, 16 choristers and 10 clerks, who were to have good voices and be skilled in reading, psalmody and polyphony.

The collection of polyphony which we now call the Eton Choirbook is described in a 1531 inventory as “a grete ledger of prick song tum cuncta”. The original index lists 61 antiphons – all votive antiphons designed for daily extraliturgical use and fulfilling Mary’s prophecy that “From henceforth all generations shall call me blessed”. The Magnificat is Mary’s song of praise and joy in response to her cousin Elizabeth’s own prophetic salutation: “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the Fruit of thy womb”; and at some point 24 versions of the Magnificat were added to the Choirbook, including – last but not least – the extraordinary four-part setting by William Stratford. A further addition is a single setting, and the first by a named composer – Richard Davy – of the St Matthew Passion (of which the opening has been damaged). After which a main index was compiled; the only two pieces not listed in this index are by Robert Wylkynson and were presumably added between 1500-1515 during his time as Master of the Choristers at Eton.

The final page of the manuscript contains what John Milsom describes as its “most bizarre” item, Wylkynson’s Jesus autem transiens / Credo in Deum – a canonic setting, for 13 voices, of the Apostles’ Creed. The names of the twelve apostles are inscribed above successive phrases of the Creed in the manuscript, and the opening chant “But Jesus passing through them” can be heard passing from one voice to another. Although unique and musically idiosyncratic, Jesus autem transiens does demonstrate several obvious aspects of the Eton style. The harmony is based on simple triads, in either root position or first inversion, decorated with numerous passing-notes and only briefly disturbed by a couple of accented dissonances. The melodic line of Jesus autem transiens is characterized by syncopation and irregularity in both rhythm and phrasing, while its range of 13 notes is very wide for a single voice; similarly, the overall compass of many of the other works of 22 or 23 notes was exceptional for its time.

Out of the 25 composers represented in the Eton Choirbook, several had strong links with Eton College itself: Walter Lambe and John Browne were almost certainly there in the late 1460s as boys. John Browne, composer of the heart-rending six-part setting of Stabat mater dolorosa and a related English-texted carol from the Fayrfax Manuscript Jesu, mercy, how may this be?, seems to have gone on to New College, Oxford, while Richard Davy was Master of the Choristers at Magdalen College, Oxford in the 1490s. We can imagine them and their fellow-singers grouped around a huge choirbook on a lectern – seven or so men, and in front, ten boys who with eyesight still undimmed could read from the top of the very large pages. The size of the pages meant they had to be parchment and, in order to be legible in the uncertain candlelight, the music was solidly inscribed on staves 2cm high.

It’s the notation of the Eton Choirbook which is the key to understanding the style: how it was composed and how it was performed. Each voice-part is written out by itself (without barlines) on one part of the open double-page spread: unlike a modern score there is no vertical alignment between the parts and there is little to show the existence of the tactus – or beat – apart from the groupings of the noteheads. There is also not much indication as to the kind of voices best-suited to the agility clearly required. The noteheads used practically throughout are in “black-full” notation (i.e. filled-in semibreves and minims) which survived later in England than on the Continent, although ironically it may have been in England that the more familiar “black-void” notation was pioneered. Red ink, too, provided a way of conveying further instructions to the performer: red text is used in sections for reduced numbers of voices and probably implies one voice per part, while red noteheads introduce the notion of binary ‘imperfection’ into a mensural world grounded on the Trinitarian foundation of the mediaeval theorists. The ligatures (joined-together notes), already old-fashioned in the late 15^th century, could usually be relied upon to help with the underlay, and from the composer’s point of view often provided the structural support for larger-scale durational relationships and their harmonic implications. Having worked with this music in its original notation, leading performances from a facsimile of the Choirbook, director Antony Pitts is convinced that there is still much to be discovered today behind the score, and future TONUS PEREGRINUS plans include a deeper exploration of this repertory in live performance and in the studio.