THE GENESIS OF BOYCE'S ‘CATHEDRAL MUSIC’

Abstract

I973 MARKED the 200th anniversary of the completion of Boyce's great three-volume collection of 'Cathedral Music'. Whatever else may be said, of Boyce's editorial methods particular, the work remains a landmark the history of musicology, and a fitting monument to his industry and scholarly enterprise. The idea behind 'Cathedral Music', as is generally well known, originated not with Boyce but with his friend and erstwhile teacher, Maurice Greene. According to Hawkins,' it the year I 750 that a bastard cousin died leaving Greene estate Essex of about seven hundred pounds a year, and that in the state of affluence to which Dr. Greene raised by this event, he meditated on the corruptions of our church-music, occasioned by the multiplication of copies, and the ignorance and carelessness of transcribers; and resolved to correct, and also secure it against such injuries for the future. The cousin died fact January I752. The widely-held but erroneous notion that Greene, by his will, remitted the farther prosecution of the work to Boyce also stems from Hawkins,2 and is the more curious that Boyce himself then (I 776) still alive, and had been acknowledged by Hawkins as one of his chief helpers the preparation of the 'History'.3 Though Greene had, it is true, bequeathed the whole of his valuable library of manuscript and printed music to Boyce, the latter under no obligation either to complete or to publish his master's projected collection of cathedral music, and the preface to Volume I merely remarks that he was induced to undertake this work from the general opinion of its extensive usefulness. 4 Oddly enough, the historical background to Boyce's 'Cathedral Music' seems never before to have been explored, except a somewhat cursory fashion by John S. Bumpus, who, though he sets aside an entire chapter for the consideration of this subject, spends rather more time on a generalized account of the publication, contents and