Martin Peerson - Music

Music

Peerson's powerful patrons enabled him to print and publish a considerable quantity of his music, although little remains today. The only four extant keyboard pieces – "Alman", "The Fall of the Leafe", "Piper's Paven" and "The Primerose" – appear in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (c. 1609 – c. 1619), one of the most important sources of early keyboard music containing more than 300 pieces from the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. He also set to music some of William Leighton's verses, written by the latter while in prison for debt. Together with works by other composers, these were published as The Teares and Lamentatacions of a Sorrowfull Soule in 1614. This was followed two years later by Tristiae Remedium, with texts assembled by the Reverend Thomas Myriell mainly using psalm texts in the English language.

In 1620 Peerson's collection Private Musicke was published. It contained secular music, including madrigals and consort songs, for one or two voices accompanied by viols or virginals. He published some metrical psalter tunes in Thomas Ravenscroft's 1621 work The Whole Booke of Psalmes with the Hymnes Evangelicall and Songs Spirituall, and then a group of Motets or Grave Chamber Musique in 1630 with English texts and the then-fashionable keyboard continuo; the latter work contains two very fine songs of mourning.

Thereafter, despite changing musical trends, Peerson's music showed significant roots in Renaissance polyphony. However, he was adept in the use of then-modern compositional procedures; this is evident in his often daring use of chromaticism, especially seen in word painting. Some of his finest music is contained in his set of 15 Latin motets, which was probably composed around the turn of the century. Existing only in a single copy, it originally consisted of five part-books but the Cantus book is lost. Richard Rastall, professor of historical musicology at the University of Leeds, spent 12 years reconstructing the missing part. The complete Latin motets have been published by Antico Edition, and a recording of their performance by Ex Cathedra entitled Peerson: Latin Motets was produced by Hyperion Records in 2005.