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Article Excerpt
Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the
nearest to us, for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning towards error. But most of all they resemble us in their precarious hold on life. --Joseph Conrad
As material objects of immediate and lasting cultural significance, the extant music books of an Elizabethan edition, like the fictional red violin of a popular motion picture, open wide-ranging narratives of musical and cultural history. Their stories begin at a point of conception in the early modern era, when print-capitalism was in its early phases. (1) They then progress through various owners over a course that extends into our own times, when audio recording and digital technologies threaten to cast a permanent shadow over the prominence of print as the prime medium of musical transmission. Traversing the era of so-called print culture, their accounts help us to understand the roles therein played by the authors, printers, publishers, distributors, collectors, and students of the printed music book. (2) In this article I tell the story of two particular music books from the five-edition set of Psalmes, Sonets and Songs by William Byrd. (3)
The catalyst for this investigation was a bibliographical discovery, one that arose when in the course of collating the extant original printed copies of this source I detected a distinct version in the Knowsley collection at the University of Liverpool. (4) At the time of this discovery the copy itself seemed so oddly dissimilar from all others as to be a true anomaly. But it turned out that it represented an otherwise unnoticed edition that was further represented in a copy that is now part of the Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears Library in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England. The unexpected appearance of a new source of Byrd's music immediately raised a number of questions pertaining to late-Elizabethan music history: Why was it reproduced? For whom? Was Byrd, the author, at all involved in the publication or distribution? Were the texts significantly altered? And--because the imprint does not furnish a date of publication--at what time was the printing completed and the copies distributed? In this particular case, however, questions also emerged that reached much further across time.
These bibliographical questions--first inspired by the rarity of the edition itself, then spurred on by the chance to shed light on a hitherto unrecognized link between Byrd and various music collectors that reached all the way to Pears and Britten--focused on the issue of provenance and concerned the history of these music books themselves: How did they end up in certain collections? Where had they been before? Who were their owners? And how were they treated over the course of their history? Once investigated, these two copies ultimately presented very different stories of provenance and survival, but on two occasions they stood together. The first instance occurred at the end of their story, at the point when they were determined to be two copies of the same edition. The second was at the time when they were first produced together as part of that newly discovered set. My story will begin by recounting the first instance of their shared history and then progress backwards, treating each copy separately to a point in time when the publication of an edition that included these two books was first envisioned.
THE DISCOVERY OF A 'NEW' BYRD EDITION
In a seminal article of music bibliography of 1963 H. K. Andrews had listed the Knowsley copy of the Psalmes as part of the set he titled the B edition. (5) In common with the many other copies he labeled B, it is quite different, typographically, from "A" press-settings of an earlier vintage. In 1963, the A editions formed a set of three that had generally proven to be much more intrinsically interesting. The A1 edition enjoyed a special claim as the very first music book produced by Thomas East, Byrd's main printer. The others, A2 and A3, were two long-hidden editions by the same printer that Andrews had himself brought to light. (6) Thus Andrews established precisely the situation that East had produced this particular collection on more occasions than had hitherto been known. In pioneering a "New (Music) Bibliography" of a rigor to match that of the richly developed literary field, Andrews provided facsimiles of relevant title-page imprints that revealed just how minor the typographical variants among East's editions could be and, as a godsend to the editor, he included an impressive segregated list of the entire set of Psalmes copies that were known to him. (7)
A quick glance at Andrews's list helps to explain why such a thorough bibliographical scholar had overlooked one of the five different editions of Byrd's Psalmes to emanate from East's presses. Among the 104 different partbooks in this inventory, the Knowsley copy is nearly the most unassuming of them all. It stood then, and now stands, as the last item in a long tract volume full of poetry, letters, and plays, where Byrd's five-part music is represented by just a single superius partbook that has itself been shorn of a title leaf.
If hidden well by its unprepossessing status among the extant copies of the entire set of Byrd's Psalmes, the Knowsley item was apparently even further disguised by its general conformity to all the other B copies. Although missing a title page and imprint--the evidence bibliographers usually turn to first for determining edition status--the Knowsley copy of the Psalmes does share basic typographical features with the rest of B. For instance, it too presents a C mensuration sign at the beginning of each piece in duple meter, whereas all A editions have a cut-C in this place. (8) Only after a careful side-by-side comparison of pages with a B copy does it become clear that the two in question represent completely different settings of type at the press. Thus of all the items in Andrews's list it turns out that this one modest partbook enjoyed for a time the historical prestige of the unique source. Not only was it the only example of a different B edition among the copies of Byrd's Psalmes in circulation in 1963, but it was also the only partbook among the 104 that Andrews studied that he did not properly identify.
Over the past forty years, a few more copies of the Psalmes have come to light. One of these is a set of superius and medius partbooks that is now held in the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Another two copies form part of the aforementioned Britten-Pears collection. (9) Of these two Britten-Pears copies, one contains only a contratenor book; the other has the five partbooks of a complete set (superius, medius, contratenor, tenor, and bassus books). Once the partbooks of all these copies were examined, it turned out that some of them could be quickly identified, as both of the New South Wales partbooks corresponded in all essentials to other examples from East's very first edition (A1), and the two contratenor books in the Britten-Pears collection had so much in common with the well-known B edition that they could both be safely counted as further examples of that copiously extant set.
The remaining four books of one of the Britten-Pears copies, however, were not so easily categorized. These books had not been publicly available until recently, but they had been mentioned in print. In a short notice, John Banks and Richard Turbet listed the Byrd copies of the newly opened library in Aldeburgh. (10) Unaware of the possibility of a further hidden edition, however, they identified both of the copies as part of Andrews's undifferentiated B set, presumably based on the telltale C mensuration signs they consistently found throughout the books there. Like Andrews, these scholars, too, had had their hands full with other matters at the time, for these copies were by no means isolated from other music books of interest to their particular audience. Instead, they form an "all-Byrd" tract volume. Unlike the contratenor books (that were probably bound in the late nineteenth century), the rest of the Psalmes partbooks were bound at an early date along with the partbooks of another three of Byrd's printed collections, his Cantiones sacrae I and II of 1589 and 1591, respectively, and his Songs of Sundrie Natures of 1589.
A closer examination of the more complete Britten-Pears copy, one I fortuitously completed after a visit to Liverpool University, led to a series of new findings. Firstly, it turned out that the superius partbook was in fact a fellow member of the newly established edition. Unlike the Knowsley copy, however, this example had its title page intact, and thus, secondly, a new imprint was discovered, providing the item normally so useful in determining edition status (see figure 1). Finally, further comparisons with the aid of this imprint revealed that those three other parts of that copy (the medius, tenor and bassus books) conformed not to the copies of the well-known set but to their own superius part--with nearly identical title pages, similar typography throughout, and consistent watermarks signaling a single paper stock--all of which confirmed that these books may be confidently listed as part of the same newly discovered edition to which the Knowsley copy belongs.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
PROVENANCE
Provenance studies are so often stimulated by the bookseller, auctioneer, and ardent book collector, all of whom tend to view the fleshing out of an individual history of any rare book as an exercise likely to add to its value, that they tend now to be associated with commercial rather than scholarly pursuits. Lately, however, students of various aspects of print culture have found that methods and results of provenance study provide evidence useful to illuminate wider histories of readership and literacy and to establish a better understanding of...
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