History
It was given no title by its copyist and the ownership of the manuscript before the eighteenth century is unclear. At the time the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book was put together most collections of keyboard music were compiled by performers: other examples include Will Forster's Virginal Book, Clement Matchett's Virginal Book, and Anne Cromwell's Virginal Book. Until Parthenia was printed in about 1612, there was no keyboard music published as such in England.
It was once called Queen Elizabeth's Virginal Book, a title that has been abandoned because it has been determined that she never owned it, Another hypothesis, which still has supporters, is it belonged to Francis Tregian the Younger, a recusant and amateur musician. It has been argued that Tregian may have copied the entire collection while imprisoned in the period leading up to his death in 1618. The nature of Tregian's contribution to the book, if any, has been disputed. Recent scholarship suggests that even if Tregian is the compiler, it is unlikely that he was imprisoned long enough to do the copying involved.
It includes music dating from approximately 1562 to 1612 by John Bull, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Giles Farnaby (51 of whose 52 known pieces are included), Martin Peerson, Peter Philips and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, as well as many others. There are 297 separate pieces (actually, 298: one piece is numbered, but is blank. Strangely, the Maitland Squire edition numbers No. 182 twice). As with many keyboard manuscripts of the time, the pieces were not written for a specific instrument, and most sound happily on all contemporary keyboard instruments, including virginals, harpsichord, clavichord and chamber organ. Many of the pieces in the book are short, and many of them are character pieces with droll and memorable titles, including "Put Up Thy Dagger, Jemy", "The New Sa-Hoo", and "Quodlings Delight" by Giles Farnaby; "Nobody's Gigge", by Richard Farnaby; "Pakington's Pownde" and "The Irishe Dumpe" (anonymous); "The Ghost" and "The Earle of Oxford's Marche" by William Byrd; "Worster Braules" by Thomas Tomkins; and the famous "Lachrymae Pavan" by John Dowland, as arranged by Giles Farnaby and by William Byrd.
In 1899, Breitkopf & Härtel published an edition in two volumes (the Maitland Squire edition, see the Sources below) with only a basic critical commentary, which has been reprinted by Dover Publications and is available inexpensively. A microfilm facsimile of the manuscript is included in The music collections of the Cambridge libraries (Woodbridge, Conn. : Research Publications, 1991). Musica Britannica is preparing a volume dedicated to the "Keyboard Music from Fitzwilliam Manuscripts" .
The Italian piano teacher Claudio Colombo has recorded the complete Fitzwilliam Virginal Book on a Yamaha digital piano (with harpsichord sound). The 297 pieces are freely downloadable as 48 kbit/s mp3s, or can be purchased at higher quality from many commercial sites.
The Dutch harpsichordist Pieter-Jan Belder is also recording the complete Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. The first double CD has been published in February 2012 by Brilliant Classics.
A complete performance series has been underway since 2005 by Francis Knights of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, on virginals, harpsichord, clavichord and organ.
Read more about this topic: Fitzwilliam Virginal Book
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)