Philips and Dering : Consort Music
- Submitting institution
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University of Aberdeen
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 100305630
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Stainer & Bell
- ISBN
- 9780852499481
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- November
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This is a substantial piece of work, over a decade in the making. It involved first-hand study of 36 sources containing texts with multiple variants of 49 pieces. Texts were transcribed, then edited with an intricate, extensive critical commentary, including a reconstructed piece by Philips. Composition of 'tune' and bass for dances where only inner parts survive is an argument for double weighting since there is a compositional element as well as a musicological one. The introduction includes original material on sources and centres of viol-playing; modal classification; mensuration, metre and barring; and on what accidentals tell us about tuning.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This is the first complete edition of Philips’s and Dering’s consort music and the first to take all sources into consideration. It comprises 49 pieces preserved in 36 sources. The research involved identifying sources, their first-hand physical examination, and evaluating their value for the edition, determining which should be the primary source(s) for each piece. This is the first edition of such repertory to use manuscripts no longer extant by reference to a source containing annotations recording their divergence from its texts.
There are no autographs; the nature of manuscript musical culture means that the texts vary considerably between sources. The research involved transcription and editing of texts with an intricate, extensive critical commentary. One of the moderators for the volume wrote ‘the textual commentary for the 5-part Dering fantasias is remarkable’.
Most sources are partbooks; not all have survived so the editor composed outer parts for dances by Dering. A reconstruction of a hypothetical original for a pavan by Philips is based on the earliest surviving arrangements; the original had been assumed to be five-part, but the editor argues for four.
An extensive introduction includes new, original research, such as an assessment of sources in relation to centres of viol playing in seventeenth-century England, and observations on modal classification. Original work on mensuration, metre and barring has far-reaching consequences for how music of the period should be edited. Observations on the use of accidentals tell us about how viols were tuned. The general editor wrote that ‘having re-read … most of the Introduction, that wonderfully detailed commentary on the sources, and done a spot check of the Textual Commentary, I am once again hugely impressed by the scholarship involved’, and stated that the edition ‘must be the last word in how best to deal with repertory of this sort’.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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