The international face of Tudor music

Abstract

Canterbury, Kent, sometime around 1513: two great monasteries play host to the greatest European Humanist of the day. He sees their treasures, attends their elaborate services (padded out with mind-numbing quantities of polyphony and organ music), and forms a decidedly low opinion of their spiritual health. This encounter with English Benedictine monasticism will later provide Erasmus with a polemical case study in the dangers of ecclesiastical materialism: representative of a universal malaise, perhaps, but at a peculiarly insular extreme. At the time of Erasmus's visit, a monk of St Augustine's Abbey, aged around 30, has recently supplicated for his Oxford B.Mus. John Dygon will later become prior of St Augustine’s, after periods of study in Paris and Leuven, one of many English students in foreign universities; he may already have read the Practica musice of Franchinus Gaffurius at the time of Erasmus's visit. Which of these represents the true face of early Tudor England? The southward-facing, cosmopolitan John Dygon? Or the monks of Erasmus's recollections: spiritually recondite, materially pampered and musically inward-looking? Was England a full and willing participant in the musical culture of Renaissance Europe? Or was it inherently conservative, resistant to (and ignorant of) the continental mainstream and therefore, according to Rob Wegman's Crisis of music in early modern Europe (New York, 2005), ‘a special case’? Much published scholarship, drawing upon comments by Tinctoris and grounded in studies of the large-scale antiphons and Masses contained in the Eton, Lambeth and Caius choirbooks, has leaned towards the insular-conservative interpretation. An inward turn has been perceived in English musical culture in the later 15th century, caused by the dynastic conflicts of the 1450s–1480s. Theodor Dumitrescu rejects this hypothesis.