Mazene -- Manuskripte -- Modi: Untersuchungen zu My Ladye Nevells Booke. By Tihomir Popovi

Abstract

This publication is presented in two parts, the main text in book form, the appendices only online. The latter contain all illustrations, facsimiles, music examples, and genealogical tables, with a complete list of all corrections in the manuscript and a modal analysis of every piece. As the author makes plain at the outset, the work is his doctoral dissertation for the Humboldt University in Berlin. For that purpose his subject needed to be very precisely defined. The existence of the manuscript at the centre of his study has been known ever since its mention in the histories of Hawkins and Burney, but for the next hundred years the fact that it contained exclusively keyboard music by Byrd tempted few scholars to look beyond its exceptionally fine binding and calligraphy. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century an increasing interest in the music of earlier times, in this country as in others with a strong national bias, brought about a change, and in 1926 Hilda Andrews was able to publish a reliable edition of the complete manuscript (though now superseded by the comparative texts in Alan Brown’s complete edition of Byrd’s keyboard music in Musica Britannica, 27–8 (3rd edn., London, 1999, 2004)).