(Royal Musical Association Monographs 14) Rebecca Herissone - To Fill, Forbear, or Adorne - The Organ Accompaniment of Restoration Sacred Music-Routledge (2016)

NJ455 - 01prelims 8/11/05 10:28 am Page i
‘To fill, forbear, or adorne’
This is the first study to provide a systematic and thorough

investigation of continuo realization styles appropriate to Restoration
sacred music, an area of performance practice that has never previously
been properly assessed. Rebecca Herissone undertakes detailed
analysis of a group of organ books closely associated with the major
Restoration composers Purcell, Blow and Humfrey, and the London
institutions where they spent their professional lives. By investigating
the relationship between the organ books’ two-stave arrangements and
full scores of the same pieces, Herissone demonstrates that the books
are subtle sources of information to the accompanist, not just short or
skeleton scores. Using this evidence, she formulates a model for
continuo realization of this repertory based on the doubling of vocal
parts, an approach that differs significantly from that adopted by most
modern editors, and which throws into question much of the accepted
continuo practice in modern performance of this repertory.
NJ455 - 01prelims 8/11/05 10:28 am Page ii
ROYAL MUSICAL ASSOCIATION MONOGRAPHS
General Editor: Mark Everist
This series is supported by funds made available to the Royal Musical

Association from the estate of Thurston Dart, former King Edward
Professor of Music at the University of London. The editorial board is
the Publications Committee of the Association.
No. 1: Playing on Words: A Guide to Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (1985)

by David Osmond-Smith
No. 2: The Oratorio in Venice (1986) by Denis and Elsie Arnold
No. 3: Music for Treviso Cathedral in the Late Sixteenth Century: A
Reconstruction of the Lost Manuscripts 29 and 30 (1987) by
Bonnie J. Blackburn
No. 4: The Breath of the Symphonist: Shostakovitch’s Tenth (1988) by
David Fanning
No. 5: The Song of the Soul: Understanding Poppea (1991) by Iain
Fenlon and Peter Miller
No. 6: The Impresario’s Ten Commandments: Continental Recruit-
ment for Italian Opera in London 1763–64 (1992) by Curtis
Price, Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume
No. 7: Institutional Patronage in Post-Tridentine Rome: Music at
Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini 1550–1650 (1995) by Noel
O’Regan
No. 8: Latin Poetry and Conductus in Medieval France (1997) by
Christopher Page
No. 9: Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish Music (2000)
by Matthew Head
No. 10: ‘Composing with Tones’: A Musical Analysis of Schoenberg’s
Op. 23 Pieces for Piano (2001) by Kathryn Bailey
No. 11: Szymanowski, Eroticism and the Voices of Mythology (2003)
by Stephen Downes
No. 12: Salomon and the Burneys: Private Patronage and a Public
Career (2003) by Ian Woodfield
No. 13: Repetition in Music: Theoretical and Metatheoretical
Perspectives (2004) by Adam Ockelford
No. 14: ‘To fill, forbear, or adorne’: The Organ Accompaniment of
Restoration Sacred Music (2006) by Rebecca Herissone
NJ455 - 01prelims 8/11/05 10:28 am Page iii
ROYAL MUSICAL ASSOCIATION

MONOGRAPHS
14
‘To fill, forbear, or

adorne’
The Organ Accompaniment of
Restoration Sacred Music
REBECCA HERISSONE
NJ455 - 01prelims 8/11/05 10:28 am Page iv
First published 2006 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2006 Rebecca Herissone
Rebecca Herissone has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Herissone, Rebecca
‘To fill, forbear, or adorne’: the organ accompaniment of Restoration sacred
music. – (Royal Musical Association monographs)
1. Organ music, Arranged – England – 17th century – History and criticism
2. Church music – England – 17th century 3. Musical accompaniment –
England – 17th century
I. Title II. Royal Musical Association
786.5'143'1713
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Herissone, Rebecca.
‘To fill, forbear, or adorne’: the organ accompaniment of Restoration sacred
music / Rebecca Herissone.
p. cm. – (Royal Musical Association monographs ; 14)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN 0-7546-4150-3 (alk. paper)
1. Church music – England – 17th century. 2. Musical accompaniment –
England – 17th century. 3. Organ music, Arranged – England – 17th century –
History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Royal Musical Association
monographs ; no. 14.
ML3131.2.H37 2005
781.71'3'0094209032–dc22
2005005885
ISBN 9780754641506 (hbk)

NJ455 - 02contents etc 8/11/05 10:29 am Page v
Contents
List of Figures and Tables vi
List of Musical Examples vii
Preface x
A Note on the Transcriptions xiv
Abbreviations xv
Introduction 1
The comments of Roger North 9
Organ books associated with London sacred institutions 12
A note about anthems with strings 15
1 The Principal Characteristics of Restoration Organ Books 19

Doubling the inner parts 22
Figuring 32
Number of voices played 41
2 Alteration and Addition of Material 48

Adaptation of doubled vocal lines 48
Independent material added to vocal sections 53
3 Distinctions between Different Genres and Sections 60

Service settings, full anthems and verse anthems 60
Choruses, ensemble verses and solos 61
Ritornelli 67
4 Incomplete Right-Hand Parts and Figured-Bass Parts 70
5 The Unusual Case of Matthew Locke 76

‘How doth the city sit solitary’ 76
Locke’s style of accompaniment in context 85
Conclusions 111
Appendix: Matthew Locke’s ‘How doth the city sit solitary’ 122
Bibliography 132
Index 136
NJ455 - 02contents etc 8/11/05 10:29 am Page vi
List of Figures and Tables

figures
1 Extract from Blow’s autograph organ part for ‘Lord,

remember David’, Mp 35, f. 2r–v. Reproduced by permission
of the Henry Watson Music Library, Manchester 24
2 Opening of Church’s organ part for Clarke’s anthem ‘I will

love thee’, Cfm 152, f. 15v. Reproduced by permission of
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 74
3 First page of Locke’s organ part for ‘How doth the city’,
Och 1219(D). Reproduced by permission of The Governing
Body of Christ Church, Oxford 77
tables
1 List of stops included in the specification for St Paul’s

Cathedral organ completed in 1697 by Bernard Smith 45
2 Structure of Locke’s anthem ‘How doth the city’ 78
3 Structure of Rogers’s anthem ‘Bow down thine ear, O Lord’ 102

NJ455 - 02contents etc 8/11/05 10:29 am Page vii
List of Musical Examples

1 Extract from the Te deum from the Service in A by John Blow:
(a) autograph organ part, Cfm 116, p. 18; (b) full score, Lbl
K.9.b.9 (5), ff. 19v–20 20
2 Extract from Purcell’s ‘It is a good thing to give thanks’:
(a) organ part, in the hand of John Blow, Mp 35, f. 8v; (b) full
score, in the hand of John Gostling, AUS 85, p. 68 (front end
of MS) 21
3 Extract from Blow’s ‘Bring unto the Lord’: (a) autograph organ
part, GB-Mp 35, f. 10, showing omission of parallel thirds;
(b) full score in Gostling’s hand in AUS 85, p. 185 (front end) 23
4 Extract from Humfrey’s ‘Hear my crying’: (a) organ part in
Gostling’s hand, Ob T 1180, p. 89, showing parallel thirds;
(b) full score in Blow’s hand, Och 628, p. 72 26
5 Humfrey’s Nunc dimittis, from Service in E minor: (a) opening
of the autograph organ part, Cfm 152, p. 127; (b) full score, in
the hand of William Isaack, Cfm 117, p. 224 (reverse end) 27
6 Extract from Purcell’s Funeral Sentences: (a) copied by Blow
in Mp 35, f. 5; (b) full score copied by Gostling in AUS 85,
p. 188 (reverse end) 28
7 Extract from Blow’s full anthem ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’:
(a) autograph organ part, Cfm 116, p. 155; (b) vocal parts, in
the hand of Gostling, Ob T 1176–9, pp. 34 (Medius Decani), 35
(Contratenor Cantoris), 33 (Tenor Cantoris) and 35 (Bassus
Cantoris) 30
8 Extract from Blow’s ‘Bring unto the Lord’: (a) autograph organ
part in Mp 35, f. 10v; (b) full score in Gostling’s hand in AUS
85, p. 188 (front end) 32
9 Extract from Blow’s ‘Thy mercy, O Lord’: (a) autograph organ
part, Mp 35, f. 12v; (b) full score, in the hand of Gostling,
AUS 85, p. 63 (front end) 35
10 Extract from Blow’s ‘Lift up your heads’: (a) Gostling’s organ
part, Ob T 1180, p. 6; (b) autograph full score, Bu 5001, f. 111 36
11 Extract from Purcell’s ‘It is a good thing to give thanks’:
(a) Blow’s organ part, Mp 35, f. 8v; (b) full score, in the hand of
Gostling, AUS 85, p. 69 (front end) 37
12 Extract from Blow’s ‘Lift up your heads’: (a) Gostling’s organ
part, Ob T 1180, p. 5; (b) autograph score, GB-Bu 5001, f. 110 40
13 Extract from Blow’s ‘God is our hope and strength’: (a) the
opening of Purcell’s organ part, Och 554, f. 3; (b) full score, in
the hand of Gostling, AUS 85, p. 17 (reverse end) 42
NJ455 - 02contents etc 8/11/05 10:29 am Page viii
14 Extract from Blow’s ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’: (a) autograph

organ part, Cfm 116, p. 155; (b) vocal parts, in the hand of
Gostling, Ob T 1176–9, pp. 34 (Medius Decani), 35
(Contratenor Cantoris), 34 (Tenor Cantoris) and 35 (Bassus
Cantoris) 44
15 Extract from Blow’s anthem ‘O God, wherefore art thou
absent’: (a) Gostling’s organ part, Cfm 669, p. 14; (b)
Gostling’s full score, AUS 85, p. 15 (reverse end) 50
16 Extract from Blow’s ‘Lord, how are they increased’:
(a) autograph organ part, Cfm 152, f. 19; (b) full score, in
the hand of John Gostling, AUS 85, pp. 46–7 (reverse end) 51
17 Extract from Turner’s ‘O praise the Lord’: (a) Gostling’s organ
part, Ob T 1180, p. 388; (b) full score of the first version, in the
hand of James Hawkins, Lbl Add. 31445, f. 95v 52
18 Extract from Purcell’s ‘The way of God’: (a) Blow’s organ
part, Mp 35, f. 3v; (b) full score, in the hand of Gostling,
AUS 85, p. 96 (reverse end) 55
19 Extract from Purcell’s ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’: (a) Blow’s
organ part, Mp 35, f. 7v; (b) full score, in the hand of Gostling,
AUS 85, p. 112 (front end) 56
20 Extract from Blow’s full anthem ‘My God, my God’:
(a) Gostling’s organ part, Cfm 669, p. 8; (b) Blow’s autograph
full score, Lbl Add. 30932, p. 462; (c) Blow’s autograph organ
part, Cfm 116, p. 220 57
21 Extract from Humfrey’s ‘Hear my crying, O God’: (a)
Gostling’s organ part, Ob T 1180, p. 86; (b) Blow’s full score,
Och 628, pp. 64–5 58
22 Extract from Purcell’s ‘The way of God’: Gostling’s full score,
AUS 85, p. 97 (reverse end) shown on top system; Blow’s organ
part, Mp 35, ff. 3v–4 shown in middle system; editorial realization
based on Blow’s organ part shown on bottom system 64
23 Purcell’s ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’: (a) ritornello from Blow’s
arrangement, Mp 35, f. 7 v; (b) extract from full score, in the
hand of Gostling, AUS 85, p. 113 (front end) 68
24 Extract from Gostling’s organ part for (a) Blow’s ‘Blessed be
the Lord’, showing three- and four-part ritornello; Ob T 1180,
p. 24; (b) Blow’s ‘I will hearken’, showing two-part ritornello
with figures, Ob T 1180, p. 98 69
25 Opening verse of Locke’s anthem ‘Lord, let me know mine
end’: AUS 85, p. 5 (reverse end) shown on top system; Lbl
27.a.13, p. 92 shown below 89
26 Alto and bass section of ‘And now, Lord’ from Locke’s anthem
‘Lord, let me know mine end’: AUS 85, p. 6 (reverse end)
shown on top system; Lbl 27.a.13, p. 92 shown below 92
27 Verse ‘Wherefore shall the heathen say’ from Locke’s anthem
‘Not unto us, O Lord’: AUS 85, p. 154 (reverse end) shown on
top system; Lbl 27.a.13, p. 42 shown below 93
viii
NJ455 - 02contents etc 8/11/05 10:29 am Page ix
List of Musical Examples
28 Verse ‘The dead shall not praise thee, O Lord’ from Locke’s
anthem ‘Not unto us, O Lord’: AUS 85, p. 157 (reverse end)
shown on top system; Lbl 27.a.13, p. 43 shown below 95
29 Solo bass verse section, ‘For thou, Lord, art good and gracious’,
from Benjamin Rogers’s ‘Bow down thine ear, O Lord’:
(a) organ part, Lbl Add. 30834, f. 15v; (b) autograph full score,
Och 21, p. 168 103
30 Solo treble verse section, ‘Give ear, O Lord’, from Rogers’s
‘Bow down thine ear, O Lord’: (a) organ part, Lbl Add. 30834,
f. 15v; (b) autograph full score, Och 21, p. 168 104
31 Opening two-part verse from Rogers’s organ part for ‘Bow
down thine ear, O Lord’: Och 21, p. 166 shown on top system;
Lbl Add. 30834, f. 16v shown below 105
ix
NJ455 - 02contents etc 8/11/05 10:29 am Page x
Preface
My interests in the accompaniment of Restoration sacred music date
back to my student days in Cambridge and London, and ultimately
derive from the frustration I experienced when acquainting myself with
scholarly editions of music by my favourite composers. While the
quality and academic pedigree of the editions could not be faulted, I
found it impossible to draw conclusions about how the organ
accompaniment should relate to the vocal parts, because each editor’s
view was different, if sometimes subtly so. I was encouraged in my
attempts to make my own assessment of the primary sources when I
studied several autograph organ books during research for my Ph.D. in
1993–6, and realized what a complex picture they painted. It was thus
with some enthusiasm that I took the opportunity to carry out detailed
analyses of the most important organ books from late seventeenth-
century England during a period of sabbatical leave from my post at
Lancaster University in 2002. My intention had been simply to produce
a journal-length article of my findings, but the evidence proved too
complicated and interesting for a single paper, and I therefore took
advantage of the format of the Royal Musical Association monograph
to lay out my findings in a more comprehensive manner.
Restoration organ books are fascinating sources for scholars
interested in notation. The basic question one has to ask about many
other types of manuscript – for what purpose or purposes they were
copied – has a ready-made answer in the case of these sources: we know
they were entirely practical, the organist’s equivalent of a partbook.
What is very much less obvious (and here the comparison with the
partbook falls down) is what the function of the notation was: did the
organists actually play all the notes given in these two-stave parts, or
did they use the right-hand staves as a means of inferring information
about the vocal parts so that they could improvise their own chordal
accompaniment above the bass line? Could the answer lie somewhere
between these two extremes? It is on the fundamental issue of how
contemporary organists would have ‘read’ the notation that I have
chosen to focus in this study. I begin by describing the most commonly
found features of the organ books’ notation, as a means of establishing
the way in which the books relate to contemporary full scores of the
same pieces and of assessing what organists who played from the books
could and could not have included in their accompaniments. In
Chapter 2, I examine the way in which vocal parts doubled in the organ
parts are adapted, analyse why these alterations may have been made,
and consider what they tell us about the intended use of the books.
NJ455 - 02contents etc 8/11/05 10:29 am Page xi
Preface
Particularly significant in this respect is the way in which material

independent of the voice parts is incorporated into some organ parts.
These observations allow us to draw some preliminary conclusions
about the function of the notation.
The basic principles are refined in Chapter 3, where I explore the
evidence the organ books present about styles of accompaniment
appropriate for different genres of sacred music in the Restoration
period, and for stylistic differentiation between full sections, ensemble
verses (those with two or more singers) and solos in verse anthems and
service settings. The final two chapters are intended as something of a
counterbalance, in which organ parts that appear to contradict the
accompaniment styles suggested by the mainstream books are
considered. This helps to establish the context in which we can
understand the majority of the books, providing an indication of
changing approaches to accompaniment, and of a style that appears to
be associated primarily with Matthew Locke, but that may also suggest
some regional variations in continuo playing. The broader picture is
examined further in the Conclusions, where I attempt to situate the
accompaniment styles I believe were used in Restoration England
within the context of continuo playing in the seventeenth century more
generally.
This monograph is not intended as a polemic aimed at modern
performers of the repertory on which I concentrate: I do not seek to tell
today’s organists how they should accompany Restoration sacred
music. What I have tried to do is to inform the reader about how, in my
opinion, late seventeenth-century English organists would have used
the organ books from which they played. I hope that performers
interested in historically informed approaches will want to consider the
evidence presented here and the conclusions I draw from it, and that the
book will also be of interest to scholars of musical performance practice
in the Baroque period, particularly those engaged in producing critical
editions. I believe the research has implications for future editorial
realizations and performances of this repertory, and that it raises
significant questions about the accompaniment of music before the turn
of the eighteenth century more generally. I hope it will form a
worthwhile addition to the small but growing number of publications
that set out to question modern assumptions about the prevalence of
improvised chordal accompaniment during the seventeenth century.
The interruptions of other academic commitments have meant that the

book has had an unusually long gestation period. While such delays are
always frustrating, in this case there was a felicitous side effect, in that I
was able to take advantage of the advice and comments of a large
number of colleagues, often repeatedly, while I developed my ideas
about how the organ books might have been used in practice. Dr
Geoffrey Webber, of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Dr
Keri Dexter have both been particularly willing to share their practical
xi
NJ455 - 02contents etc 8/11/05 10:29 am Page xii
and theoretical expertise in the field, and our correspondence spans

some two years: their help, partly derived from their own con-
temporaneous experiences of editing two sets of Restoration anthems
for Oxford University Press, has been invaluable, as has their
knowledge of some of the provincial sources on which I draw in
Chapter 5. In addition, Dr Webber kindly undertook a visit to the Rowe
Library, King’s College, Cambridge on my behalf in order to check in
person some details of an autograph organ part by Richard Ayleward of
Norwich. Dr Peter Holman of Leeds University has, as always, been a
constant source of encouragement, and has provided helpful advice
about evidence supporting his long-held belief that accompaniment
based on part doubling was widespread during the seventeenth
century, both in England and in mainland Europe. Dr Bruce Wood has
also been very generous in providing comments on the first draft of the
book and in pointing out a number of stylistic inconsistencies in the
typescript.
I presented papers based on parts of Chapters 1 and 2 of the book at
the Recent Research Conference of the British Institute of Organ Studies
at the University of Birmingham in February 2003, and at the Eleventh
Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music hosted by the
Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester in July 2004. I am
grateful to a large number of scholars both for their positive responses
to the papers, and for their useful comments. Professor Barry Cooper of
Manchester University pointed out an obvious explanation of the
figuring in Example 9.1, and I also benefited from discussions arising
from the papers with Professor Donald Burrows of the Open
University; Andrew Johnstone of Trinity College, Dublin; Dr Stephen
Rose of Magdalene College, Cambridge; Dr Christopher Field of
Edinburgh University; Professor Linda Austern of Northwestern
University; Dr David Chung of Hong Kong Baptist University; and
Professor Jessie Ann Owens of Brandeis University. Professor Roger
Bray of Lancaster University generously allowed free access to his
complete set of Primary Source Microfilm’s Music Manuscripts from the
Great English Collections. Dr Tony Trowles, Librarian of Westminster
Abbey, kindly provided details of organ books held in the Abbey’s
collection, and Dr Jenny Brine of Lancaster University Library
Interlending Department succeeded in acquiring a large number of
secondary sources for me during 2003 and 2004. Thanks are also due to
Professor Mark Everist of Southampton University, the General Editor
of the RMA Monographs, who gave early encouragement and
graciously accommodated my failure to meet deadlines; Heidi May at
Ashgate also provided helpful technical advice. I am grateful to the
Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Lancaster University for a grant to
cover the cost of acquiring photographic reproductions and the rights
to include them in the book. I was also fortunate to be awarded a grant
from the AHRB Small Grants in the Creative and Performing Arts
scheme in July 2004, which allowed me temporarily to employ a
xii
NJ455 - 02contents etc 8/11/05 10:29 am Page xiii
Preface
technical assistant to help prepare the extensive musical examples

required. Without this grant, the time-consuming nature of processing
the examples would undoubtedly have delayed completion of the
project considerably. Dr Charles Tebbs, who provided the assistance,
withstood my pedantry admirably. As always, my husband Peter and
our two children, Rob and Rosie, have been endlessly patient; to them
this book is dedicated.
xiii
NJ455 - 02contents etc 8/11/05 10:29 am Page xiv
A Note on the Transcriptions

The transcriptions are literal translations of the original sources, as far
as possible: original clefs have been retained, as have stave signatures,
time signatures (where used), barring and the stem direction of each
note. Most seventeenth-century scribes did not use the natural sign, and
sharps and flats have been converted to naturals where appropriate to
conform with modern convention; accidentals repeated within the bar
have also been omitted. Six-line staves have been reduced to five-line
staves by removing the lowest line of the right-hand stave and the
highest of the left-hand stave. Editorial accidentals have been placed
above the stave where the note to which they are intended to apply can
be shown unambiguously, but are otherwise placed on the stave in
square brackets. Editorial slurs are marked with a slash; all other
editorial markings are shown in square brackets. Original spellings and
capitalizations are retained, but abbreviations have been silently
expanded; additional punctuation has also been added, sparingly, to
clarify meaning; editorial text is given in square brackets.
Throughout this book, extracts from the organ books are compared
against contemporary full scores. Because the organ books are
arrangements, it is virtually impossible to identify exact concordances.
Nevertheless, care has been taken to ensure that the chosen scores are
reliable, representative sources, and that they correspond as closely as
possible with the respective organ books. Differences of detail are very
common in sources of this period, and care has been taken throughout
not to regard as significant those disparities between sources that could
derive simply from variant readings. Some preference has been shown
for Gostling’s manuscript AUS 85, not only because of the general
accuracy of its readings, but also because it appears to have been
intended to record the repertory of the Chapel Royal (see description
under Ob T 1180–2 in the Introduction), and therefore contains a good
proportion of the music under consideration in this study. For the
majority of examples, which are relatively short, comparisons are given
side by side. For a small number of examples exceeding about 15 bars in
length, including the Appendix, organ parts and full scores are
presented in immediate juxtaposition (the organ part below the full
score), to facilitate comparison.
NJ455 - 02contents etc 8/11/05 10:29 am Page xv
Abbreviations
library sigla
AUS 85 Austin, University of Texas at Austin, The Harry

Ransom Humanities Research Center, MS Pre-1700
85
Bu 5001 Birmingham, Birmingham University, MS 5001
Cfm 116 Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, Mu MS 116
Ckc 9 Cambridge, King’s College, Rowe MS 9
Cu 2 and 4 Cambridge, University Library, EL MSS 2 and 4
Lbl 27.a.1–8 London, British Library, R.M. MSS 27.a.1–8
Lbl 27.a.13–15 London, British Library, R.M. MSS 27.a.13–15
Lbl Add. 17801 London, British Library, Add. MS 17801
Lbl K.9.b.9 London, British Library, K.9.b.9
Lsp A2 London, St Paul’s Cathedral Library, MS A2
Mp 35 Manchester, Central Library, Henry Watson Music
Library, MS BRm370Bp35
Ob Mus.c.23 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Mus.c.23
Ob Mus.Sch.C.44 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Mus.Sch.C.44
Ob T 1176–82 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Tenbury 1176–82
Ob T 1180–2 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Tenbury 1180–2
Och 14 Oxford, Christ Church, MS Mus. 14
NJ455 - 02contents etc 8/11/05 10:29 am Page xvi

Och 1219(D) Oxford, Christ Church, MS Mus. 1219(D)
Ojc 315 Oxford, St John’s College, MS 315
other abbreviations
New Grove The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed.
Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London, 1980)
New Grove II The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed.
Stanley Sadie, 29 vols. (2nd edn, London, 2001)
xvi
NJ455 - 03Introduction 8/11/05 10:31 am Page 1
Introduction
Our knowledge and understanding of keyboard accompaniment styles
in the Baroque can best be described as patchy.1 While there are some
rich sources of theoretical and notated information on continuo
realization for German and Italian music in the High Baroque, for
example,2 stylistic details are much harder to determine for many
seventeenth-century repertories. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that
textbooks such as F.T. Arnold’s The Art of Accompaniment from a Thorough-
Bass and Robert Donington’s sections on continuo in A Performer’s Guide
to Baroque Music and The Interpretation of Early Music concentrate
principally on eighteenth-century sources.3 While other publications,
such as Peter Williams’s Figured Bass Accompaniment (1970), are more
balanced in their coverage (in particular, Williams takes care to
distinguish between styles appropriate to different periods, national
traditions, instruments and genres), they are inevitably unable to devote
much space to individual approaches to accompaniment.4
The title quotation is taken from Robert North, Comments on Francois de Prencourt’s
Tract of the Continued or thro-base, Lbl Add. 32531, f. 29.
1 In this book, the terms ‘continuo’, ‘basso continuo’ and ‘thoroughbass’ are used in a
broad sense, when applied to the keyboard, to denote any sort of continuous
accompaniment. This sense is slightly different, therefore, from that adopted by F.T.
Arnold, who associates the three terms primarily with single-stave parts and (therefore)
with improvised accompaniment, though not necessarily with figured bass. ‘Realization’
is reserved here for types of accompaniment in which the player improvises (or the editor
provides) at least some of the material, as distinct from accompaniment from a fully
notated part. Arnold’s definitions are outlined in F. T. Arnold, The Art of Accompaniment
from a Thorough-Bass as Practised in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries (Oxford, 1931; repr. in 2
vols., New York, 1965), 6 and 9 (pagination is continuous across the two volumes).
2 Principal among these is C.P.E. Bach’s Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen,
2 vols. (Berlin, 1753, 1762). G.M. Telemann wrote in the Preface to his Unterricht im
Generalbass-Spielen (Hamburg, 1773) that this book ‘does not aim (like other text-books)
merely at the making of one who can play a plain accompaniment from a Thorough-Bass,
but endeavours, rather, to mould an accompanist adorned with taste, subtlety [Feinheit],
and discretion; something more, in fact, than a mere everyday accompanist’. The passage
is translated in Arnold, The Art of Accompaniment, 291.
3 See ibid.; Robert Donington, A Performer’s Guide to Baroque Music (London, 1973),
207–39; and id., The Interpretation of Early Music (new edn, London, 1974), 288–372. Arnold
does, of course, include treatises from both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
taken from Italy, Germany, France and England, in his first two chapters, but the main
body of the book – his analysis of chords, progressions and style – is taken almost
exclusively from eighteenth-century German treatises, particularly Johann David
Heinichen’s Der Generalbass in der Komposition (Dresden, 1728) and C.P.E. Bach’s Versuch.
4 Peter Williams, Figured Bass Accompaniment, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1970), esp. i, 52–95.
Much of Williams’s material in this section of the book is derived from his earlier article
‘Basso Continuo on the Organ’, Music & Letters, 50 (1969), 136–52, 230–45. Although rather
too brief, Mary Cyr’s account of continuo playing also makes some distinctions according
to national tradition; see Mary Cyr, Performing Baroque Music (Aldershot, 1992), 71–85.
There has been a number of detailed studies on particular national

characteristics in continuo playing, including those of Italy (by Tharald
Borgir) and France (by Robert Zappulla, Paulette Grundeen and Jean-
Yves Hayboz); and investigation of specific repertories by, for example,
Imogen Horsley (Italian sacred music in the early Baroque) and Peter
Holman (organ accompaniment within the early and mid-seventeenth-
century consort repertory in England).5 Yet there remain many genres
that are yet to receive such attention, leaving continuo players unable to
be confident about the appropriateness of their accompaniment styles
for this music.6 Restoration sacred music is one such genre.
In some respects, the situation is rather odd, not only because this
repertory is regularly performed in modern times, but also because
some important sources of information on keyboard continuo styles for
this music survive. For, while contemporary theoretical writings are
disappointingly lacking in advice about matters of style,7 as – perhaps
5 Tharald Borgir, The Performance of the Basso Continuo in Italian Baroque Music, Studies
in Musicology, 90 (Ann Arbor, 1987); Robert Zappulla, Figured Bass Accompaniment in
France, Speculum Musicae, 6 (Turnhout, 2000); Paulette Grundeen, ‘French Baroque
Organ Accompaniment, 1689–1782’ (DM doctoral dissertation, University of Indiana,
1989); and Jean-Yves Haymoz, ‘French Thorough-bass Methods from Delair to Rameau’,
Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis, 19 (1995), 33–54; Imogen Horsley, ‘Full and
Short Scores in the Accompaniment of Italian Church Music in the Early Baroque’, Journal
of the American Musicological Society, 30 (1977), 466–99; and Peter Holman, ‘“Evenly, Softly,
and Sweetly Acchording to All”: The Organ Accompaniment of English Consort Music’,
John Jenkins and his Time: Studies in English Consort Music, ed. Andrew Ashbee and Peter
Holman (Oxford, 1996), 353–82.
6 Nevertheless, it is encouraging that musicologists and, to a certain extent, performers
are increasingly acknowledging the fact that there was no one, uniform approach to
continuo playing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See, for example, the
comments of Lars Ulrik Mortensen in ‘“Unerringly tasteful”?: Harpsichord Continuo in
Corelli’s Op. 5 Sonatas’, Early Music, 24 (1996), 665–79 (p. 666); and of Gregory S. Johnston
in ‘Polyphonic Keyboard Accompaniment in the Early Baroque: An Alternative to Basso
Continuo’, Early Music, 26 (1998), 51–64 (p. 51).
7 All the thoroughbass treatises published during this period in England were aimed at
the domestic amateur market, and works preserved in manuscript form are also of a very
basic nature. They concentrate almost exclusively on rules of harmonization and work on
the assumption that the player will have reference only to a bass line (that is, they give
information on how to harmonize a bass part with or without figures; as we shall see,
most organ parts for this repertory include both left- and right-hand staves); matters of
style are mentioned rarely, and are never discussed in detail. Thus, although one of the
treatises was written by Blow, and could conceivably have been intended for his pupils at
the Chapel Royal (where he was Master of the Choristers), these theoretical works seem to
have very limited relevance to the current study. The principal works surviving in
England from this period are Matthew Locke, Melothesia: Or, Certain General Rules for
Playing upon a Continued-Bass (London, 1673); John Blow, Rules for playing of a Through Bass
upon Organ & Harpsicon (Lbl Add. 34072, ff. 1–5); the anonymous ‘Rules for Playing a
Through Bass’, included in A Collection of Lessons and Aires ([London, 1702]) and deriving
from Gottfried Keller’s Compleat Method for Attaining to Play a Thorough Bass (London,
1707); and Captain Prencourt’s Tract of the Continued or thro-base, from around 1710, copied
and annotated by Roger North in Add. 32531, ff. 29–41v. On the relationship between
Keller’s treatise and the anonymous ‘Rules’, see Rebecca Herissone, Music Theory in
Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 2000), 20–1.
2
Introduction
significantly – are normally rich sources of anecdote such as Pepys and

John Evelyn, the notated music itself turns out to be surprisingly
revealing.
The most valuable sources of Restoration sacred music in this
context are organ books. Often copied with sets of partbooks, their
particular importance is that we can be confident that they were copied
for the exclusive purpose of being played by the organist(s) in each
institution. They do not belong to the rare category of fully written-out
accompaniments, which can only really be regarded as exceptions to
the norm: rather, they were standard copies used on an everyday basis
at all the major sacred establishments in the country. While they are
often considered as little more than short or skeleton scores, close
analysis reveals them to be much more subtle sources of information to
the accompanist. A careful consideration of their relationship with the
full scores can therefore be very useful as a method of determining the
styles of accompaniment used by organists working in English sacred
institutions in the latter half of the seventeenth century.
It would be unfair to suggest that the significance of the organ
books has been entirely overlooked. On the contrary, their character-
istics form the basis of Williams’s advice about realizations for this
repertory, and have also been investigated briefly by Ian Spink.8
Moreover, they have been the main source of realization policies in a
number of modern editions, such as Peter Dennison’s two-volume
edition of Humfrey’s church music,9 Peter le Huray’s edition of Locke’s
sacred works10 and Bruce Wood’s volumes of anthems by Blow.11 Yet
none of these scholars appears to have carried out a really detailed
study of the organ books – they rely instead on general overviews of
this extensive collection of sources. One result of this is that their
decisions about appropriate styles of realization sometimes conflict
with one another. More importantly, however, I believe that they have
failed to identify some crucial characteristics of the organ parts that
suggest a rather different style of accompaniment than is given in their
realizations.
8 Williams, ‘Basso Continuo on the Organ’, 142 and 143–4; Ian Spink, Restoration
Cathedral Music, 1660–1714, Oxford Studies in British Church Music (Oxford, 1995), 64–5.
9 Pelham Humfrey, Complete Church Music: I, ed. Peter Dennison, Musica Britannica, 34
(London, 1972), p. xvi. (The same commentary also appears in Pelham Humfrey, Complete
Church Music: II, ed. Peter Dennison, Musica Britannica, 35 (London, 1972), p. xvi.)
10 Matthew Locke, Anthems and Motets, ed. Peter le Huray, Musica Britannica, 38
(London, 1976), p. xviii.
11 John Blow, Anthems II: Anthems with Orchestra, ed. Bruce Wood, Musica Britannica, 50
(London, 1984), p. xxi; John Blow, Anthems III: Anthems with Strings, ed. Bruce Wood,
Musica Britannica, 64 (London, 1993), pp. xxix–xxx. See also favourable comments on
Wood’s realizations in the 1993 edition in the review by Peter Walls in Music & Letters, 77
(1996), 485–7 (p. 486). The seven volumes of sacred music included in the Purcell Society
Complete Edition of the Works of Henry Purcell (vols. 13, 14, 17, 28, 29, 30 and 32) do not
contribute significantly to the debate about continuo styles, since there is no real attempt
to justify the variety of policies that is adopted. Some inferences are drawn below from the
limited explanations that are given.
3
Spink gives the best generalized description of the organ books’

predominant features:
The music in front of [the organist] was a more or less complete short score of
what was being sung, arranged on two six-line staves with regular bars. The
text was not underlaid, but the opening words of each section were entered as a
guide with indications of ‘Full’ or ‘Vers[e]’, C [= cantoris], or D [= decani].
Increasingly the texture was likely to be reduced to the top and bottom part
with significant entries sketched in and perhaps a few figures in the bass.
Sometimes a figured bass alone sufficed. John Ferrabosco’s organ-books at Ely
(the earlier parts of Cu Ely MSS 1 and 4) are like this, as is John Reading’s section
of the Berkeley Organ Book (US-BE 751), which hails from Winchester. Moving
away from a full towards a more skeletal texture are Daniel Henstridge’s
Gloucester organ-books (MSS 111 and 112), while John Jackson’s from Wells
(Lcm 673) is basically all ‘top and bottom’ supplemented with figuring. The
same is true of the Ely organ-books in the hand of James Hawkins (parts of MSS
1–3). By this time five-line staves had become the norm.12
While he does go on to discuss some practical considerations – issues of

registration and connected dynamic contrasts, and use of
ornamentation – Spink does not suggest how he believes the notes
written in the organ books relate to what was actually played by
organists. Williams, however, does, and – although his account is not
entirely clear – he seems to imply that the notation should be followed
quite precisely, with limited filling in of chords in full sections of verse
anthems:
The two- to three-part organ score of such pieces as Blow’s Services [in Cfm Mu
MS 116] only occasionally needs additions. A standard three- to four-part
accompaniment, with the organist careful to double each imitative entry no
matter which voice sings it, is most suitable for full anthems, though in verse
anthems richer chords for full sections might highlight the change of texture
between the solo and full section, as in [Orlando] Gibbons’s carefully written
accompaniments.13
Le Huray and Wood, meanwhile, concentrate principally on the

‘predominantly three-part texture’ given in the organ books.14 They
also draw on other important features: Wood points out that ‘the
harmonic content occasionally goes beyond that disclosed by voices
and instruments’; while le Huray notes that the organ ‘calls for textures
of a relatively simple and sustained kind’.15 What neither states
12 Spink, Restoration Cathedral Music, 64.
13 Williams, ‘Basso Continuo on the Organ’, 142. The doubling of imitative entries in full
anthems (especially when preceded by the comment on Blow’s services) does suggest
following notated organ books, since, as will be demonstrated below, such entries were
fairly consistently included in organ books of the period; many were also included in
verse anthems.
14 Wood, Introduction to John Blow: Anthems III, p. xxx, also occurring in John Blow:
Anthems II, p. xxx. See also le Huray, Introduction to Matthew Locke: Anthems and Motets, p.
xviii.
15 Wood, Introduction to John Blow: Anthems III, p. xxx, also occurring in John Blow:
Anthems II; le Huray, Introduction to Matthew Locke: Anthems and Motets, p. xviii.
4
Introduction
explicitly is that, in their editorial realizations, they choose not to follow

the organ books’ habit of consistently doubling at least the topmost of
the vocal lines throughout. They both present choruses as a reduction of
the most harmonically significant parts, with some melodic
simplification, and with the topmost part at the top of the texture
(though there are some exceptions for le Huray).16 Their continuo parts
for solo sections, however, are almost entirely independent. The
majority of le Huray’s ensemble verses also have a separate continuo
part,17 while Wood’s realizations of verses seem to be determined by
tessitura: where the topmost vocal part is relatively low (some alto
lines, all but the highest tenor and all bass parts), an independent
continuo part is provided, albeit with some doubling often included
within the inner parts of the editorial part; higher parts at the top of the
texture, however, are doubled (in simplified form where necessary) at
the top of the right-hand part.18 Obviously this enables Wood to avoid
extreme changes of tessitura within the continuo.
Dennison adopts an approach to doubling similar to le Huray’s in
his edition of Humfrey, and describes it more openly in his
introduction, where he writes: ‘a continuo part has been provided for
string and verse sections, but according to what appears to have been
contemporary practice, choruses are accompanied by a reduction of the
parts with some rhythmic simplification, and the addition of necessary
16 Only some of the Grand Chorus of ‘Be thou exalted’ is doubled, and le Huray does not
always place the topmost vocal line at the top of the texture in the right-hand part; this
may result from the unusually large forces in this anthem, which includes three four-part
choirs. In ‘The Lord hear thee’, the topmost right-hand part generally follows the alto
rather than treble in chorus sections, maintaining a consistently low tessitura in the organ
part. See le Huray, ibid., 52–7, 118–19 and 124.
17 The term ‘ensemble verses’ is intended throughout this book to include all verse
sections involving more than one singer. Le Huray is less consistent here than for other
types of section, and his practice seems to vary from piece to piece. While the topmost
vocal line in verse sections generally is doubled in ‘I will hear what the Lord will say’ and
‘When the Son of Man’, doubling is generally avoided in ‘Be thou exalted’, ‘O be joyful’,
‘The Lord hear thee’ (though some doubling of lower parts occurs, as for the choruses in
this anthem) and ‘Who shall separate us’. As might be expected, le Huray uses organ parts
taken from contemporary organ books where possible – in this case, for ‘How doth the
city sit solitary’, ‘Lord, let me know mine end’, ‘Not unto us, O Lord’, and ‘Turn thy
face from my sins’. As is described in Chapter 5, these parts show a certain amount of
stylistic variation between themselves (particularly John Gostling’s copy of ‘Turn thy
face from my sins’, when compared with Locke’s autograph organ part for ‘How doth
the city’, which is exceptional in the volume and contrapuntal complexity of its
independent material). They also, however, have a strong basis in part doubling, typical
of organ books from the period. The juxtaposition between these accompaniments and le
Huray’s own editorial parts, in which doubling is very restricted, is perhaps a little
uncomfortable.
18 A good example of changes between the two types of accompaniment occurs in the
opening verse of ‘Arise, O Lord’; see John Blow, Anthems III, ed. Wood, 2–3. Where the
parts are particularly complex and fast-moving, Wood sometimes avoids doubling, such
as in ‘O let your songs be of him’, a four-part verse for treble, alto, tenor and bass, in ‘O
give thanks unto the Lord, and call upon his name’; see ibid., 58–9.
5
thirds’.19 This is curiously at odds with the advice in his almost

contemporaneous revised edition of volume 14 of the Purcell Society
Complete Edition.20 Here he explains, apparently with some regret, that
the organ part ‘has had to be largely retained from the first edition’, and
that, ‘where it is merely a reduction of the parts, it is suggested that
performers should devise their own continuo part by adding two or
three parts of simple texture in the right hand above the bass line’.21 To
be fair, many of the 1904 reductions are entirely literal, with no
simplification or omission of parts, which results in fussy and over-rich
textures, and at times renders the continuo realization unplayable
(certainly on an organ without pedals): one can understand Dennison’s
reluctance to recommend them.22 Nevertheless, there seems to be an
assumption here, and in the only other revised Purcell Society edition of
sacred music in which realization policy is discussed at all, volume 17,
that reduction of the vocal parts is positively inappropriate. Nigel
Fortune writes in the Introduction to the latter volume: ‘it has not been
thought necessary for the purposes of this revised edition to insist upon
two features that would have been incorporated into a newly edited volume:
the use of modern clefs for the voices; and the provision of a new
independent continuo part for passages of chorus and ensemble, where
in the present volume the continuo part is simply a reduction of the
vocal and/or instrumental parts’ (my emphasis).23 It is notable that, in
the new edition of volume 14, the editor Lionel Pike takes the
opportunity to remove Dennison’s undesirable part reductions,
replacing them with independent realizations throughout each of the
anthems in the collection and explaining in the Preface: ‘I have taken the
opportunity denied to the previous editor [i.e. Dennison] of writing a
fresh continuo part in an authentic style (performers are, of course, at
liberty to ignore my workings and supply their own – indeed, it would
be even more authentic to improvise the part)’.24
19 Dennison, Pelham Humfrey: Complete Church Music I, p. xvi, also occurring in Pelham
Humfrey: Complete Church Music II, p. xvi. He does not, unfortunately, state how he knows
what contemporary practice was.
20 Like the Humfrey edition, volume 14 contains anthems written for accompaniment
with strings, which one might expect to require a different style of accompaniment from
anthems accompanied by organ alone. That this is apparently not the case is outlined
below, under ‘A Note about Anthems with Strings’.
21 Henry Purcell, Sacred Music, Part II: Nine Anthems with Orchestral Accompaniment, ed.
Peter Dennison, Purcell Society Complete Edition of the Works of Henry Purcell, 14 (rev.
edn, London, 1973), p. xi.
22 See, for example, the fistfuls of notes the organist is apparently supposed to play in
the instrumental sections of ‘Rejoice in the Lord alway’, ibid., 155–69.

23 Henry Purcell, Sacred Music, Part III: Seven Anthems with Orchestral Accompaniment, ed.
Nigel Fortune, Purcell Society Complete Edition of the Works of Henry Purcell, 17 (rev.
edn, London, 1964), p. xi.
24 See Henry Purcell, Sacred Music, Part II: Nine Anthems with Strings, ed. Lionel Pike,
Purcell Society Complete Edition of the Works of Henry Purcell, 14 (new edn, London,
2003), p. x.
6
Introduction
Williams, then, seems to advocate doubling, but le Huray and

Wood provide accompaniments that double only in choruses and, to a
limited extent, in some verses; Dennison seems to feel that doubling is
appropriate for choruses in Humfrey, but not for Purcell (at least not
literally); Fortune also indicates that modern editions (or those from
around 1964) should not include doubling, and in 2003 Pike updates
Dennison’s edition by providing a completely independent continuo
part. Yet the most predominant feature of contemporary organ books –
that is, in terms of the notes given on the page – is that they double at
least the topmost vocal part throughout, and in ensemble verses and
choruses often some of the inner parts as well. The crucial question that
anyone using these sources surely has to ask is whether the part
doublings were intended to be descriptive or prescriptive: that is, whether
they were there just to give information about the vocal parts to the
organist, or whether the notation was actually supposed to be played.25
One cannot help but be surprised that this fundamental issue has never
been addressed before now, let alone the lack of consensus in
approaches to realization taken by the most respected editors in the
field. It is my belief that close analysis of the books identifies significant
and problematical contradictions relating to doubling, which suggests
that the issue cannot be dismissed out of hand.
The following assessment of Restoration organ books has been
based on close study of all the major organ books associated with the
principal London sacred institutions from 1660 to about 1715, as
described below. Although some organ books associated with Oxford
have been considered in Chapter 5 because of Locke’s associations with
the city, organ books copied for regional cathedrals and collegiate
institutions have otherwise been excluded. This is partly due to lack of
space, but also because the London books can be linked most closely
with the major composers of Restoration sacred music – Blow, Purcell
and Humfrey.26 Not only are there several autograph organ parts by
these composers (a good many by Blow), we also know that Blow and
Purcell would have played many of the accompaniments in their
capacities as organists of the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey;
although Blow was officially Master of the Choristers at St Paul’s (the
post of organist being held by Isaac Blackwell, then Jeremiah Clarke), it
does not seem unlikely that he would have played the organ there at
25 I am grateful to Peter Holman for suggesting the use of these terms.

26 Keyboard continuo was largely irrelevant to ordinary parish churches at this time,
since very few possessed an organ. Where one was available, the instrument’s role was
restricted to the accompaniment of voices in metrical psalms. Several written-out simple
harmonizations have survived – for example in Playford’s Whole Book of Psalms of 1677,
where two of the three parts are presented in score, which Playford hoped would ‘also be
useful for the Organist’ – but it is not clear to what extent improvised harmonization of
given melodic lines (that is, a primitive form of realization) would have occurred. See
Nicholas Temperley, ‘Organ Music in Parish Churches, 1660–1730’, BIOS: Journal of the
British Institute of Organ Studies, 5 (1981), 33–45, esp. p. 36.
7
least from time to time.27 Particularly since there is evidence to suggest

that regional institutions made their own organ book arrangements,28
relying on the London sources seems the best way to ensure that any
conclusions reached are as close as possible to accompaniment styles
that would have been practised by Blow and Purcell.
Of course, any detailed assessment of the organ books is
complicated by the large number of factors that may have influenced
the way in which any particular piece was notated: different organ-part
arrangers, for example, might have had individual styles; their habits
might have changed over the course of their careers; they might have
tailored their accompaniments to the organist’s knowledge of the piece
(a composer writing his own arrangement of a piece he was to
accompany might produce something quite different from a part
written for a player with little or no knowledge of the music);
accompaniments might have varied between institutions (though,
given the free movement of organists around the London sacred
establishments, this seems unlikely); copyists like Gostling who (as far
as we know) were not also organists may have compiled their books
from a range of different sources; it is even possible that some
composers might have prescribed or preferred particular styles.29 On
top of this, it would be dangerous to expect complete consistency from
any organist: as we shall see, the organ books are not fully written-out
accompaniments – they do contain figures and require at least some
realization – and the whole nature of such improvisation entails a
certain amount of variability. Considered as a whole, however, the
sources do not suggest much variance in the basic materials from which
organists created their accompaniments during this period, and it
therefore does seem possible to use the books collectively to find out
more about continuo realization styles in Restoration sacred music.
27 See Watkins Shaw, The Succession of Organists of the Chapel Royal and the Cathedrals of
England and Wales from c. 1538, also of the Organists of the Collegiate Churches of Westminster
and Windsor, Certain Academic Choral Foundations, and the Cathedrals of Armagh and Dublin
(Oxford, 1991), 174–5.
28 This is the convincing conclusion reached by Keri Dexter in his study of the ways in
which the instrumental sections of Restoration symphony anthems were rearranged for
organ alone; see Keri Dexter, ‘The Restoration “Symphony” Anthem in Organ
Transcription: Contemporary Techniques and Transmission’ (MMus dissertation,
University of Reading, 1996), esp. p. 19.
29 I have found little evidence to support this idea, with the exception of organ
accompaniments for music by Matthew Locke who, as organist of the Catholic Chapel of
Catherine of Braganza at Somerset House, stood somewhat apart from mainstream
Anglican composers such as Blow, Humfrey and Purcell, who were employed at the
Chapel Royal. Because organ parts for his English anthems are entirely distinctive, they
have been omitted from the main part of the current study and are considered separately
in Chapter 5. The apparent lack of stylistic differences between most composers of
Restoration sacred music is in contrast to the variations in approaches to accompaniment
identified by Peter Holman in ‘“Evenly, Softly, and Sweetly Acchording to All”’,
373–80.
8
Introduction
the comments of roger north

Although, as stated above, most English theoretical writings on
thoroughbass are of little relevance to accompaniments created from
two-stave organ books by professional organists, two incidental
comments made by Roger North in his annotated copy of Prencourt’s
Tract of the Continued or thro-base are worth considering before we turn to
the organ books themselves, because they comprise the only explicit
suggestions about styles of accompaniment made by an English author
active during the Restoration. The first passage is as follows:
altho a man may attain the art to strike the accords true to a thro-base prescribed
him, according as it is figured, yet he may not pretend to be master of his part,
without being a master of Composition In generall; ffor there is occasion of so
much management In the manner of play, sometimes striking onely the accords,
sometimes arpeggiando, sometimes touching the air, and perpetually observing
the emphatick places, to fill, forbear, or adorne, with a just favour, that [one who
is only] a thro-base master, & not an ayerist, is but an abcedarian.30
In North’s belief, then, the continuo player needs fully to understand the
rules of composition in order to be able to create good realizations because
he has to make judgments about what to play where. Sometimes he might
simply play chords; he might arpeggiate them; he might double the
melodic part (‘touch the air’); and he must judge where to add material
(‘fill’), where to omit it (‘forbear’), and where to decorate (‘adorne’).
In the second comment, North gives more details about where
certain styles of accompaniment might be used:
A score is certainly the best thro base part, and a master will serve himself of it,
on many occasion’s, to Embellish his play, but the figures added also, have no
Inconvenience, tho In such case the use of them is onely to learners, that cannot
observe the Composition, as they goe along, from the score. It is not allowd a
thro-base part to break, and adorne while he accompanys but to touch the
accord’s onely as may be figured, or [as] the Composition requires, yet there is a
difference In the management when the upper parts move slow, & when they
devide or when they are full, or paus; In that latter case, somewhat more airey
may be putt in, and often there is occasion to fill more or less. [S]o that whether
figured or not It is certain, a thro base part may best be played from the Score;
and If there were Nothing Els to recommend it but the capacity of a nicer
30 Prencourt, Tract, f. 29; also quoted in John Wilson (ed.), Roger North on Music (London,
1959), 249. A similar passage occurs later: ‘It appears by the Examples here & before given,
that the art of a Composer of Musick is requisite to make a very good thro-base player.
Ffor It is manifest that he hath the charg upon him of marshalling of 4 parts In consort, so
as Each part takes his share in the accord and no consecutions happen that are
unjustifyable. [B]esides the filling and breaking the Notes, sometimes arpeggiando, and
sometimes making proper transits of the parts, & In fanfaring of notes, as give a great
elegance, and air to the play, and being judiciously done, recommend the artist. [B]ut I
enter Not Into the particulars of these, but leav them to observation, & discovery’; see
Prencourt, Tract, f. 38. In this and subsequent quotations from manuscript sources, italics
are used to indicate letters omitted in the source through the use of abbreviations or
contractions.
9
waiting on the parts then displayed, by seing their movement, It’s enough. [B]ut
for the sake of Scollars, & low performers the figures as I said are usefull.31
Here North advocates formulating an accompaniment from the score,
rather than from a figured-bass part, because it is important for the
player to follow the parts. He needs to do this because, in North’s belief,
the style of accompaniment changes according to the disposition of the
upper parts: where the continuo player is purely accompanying – that
is, where the other parts are singing or playing – elaboration is not
permitted (indeed the suggestion is that only chords may be played);
even here, however, the player should define the accompaniment’s
style according to how active the other parts are. When they rest
(‘paus’), ‘somewhat more airey’ may be added, by which North in this
case means material of a more melodic nature.32
North’s insistence that musically sensitive accompaniment can
only be created if the player is using a score is emphasized by his belief
that figures are necessary only for beginners and ‘Scollars’ (presumably
those who wish to study a composition).33 This comment brings to
mind a note North made in his Memoires of Musick (1728), explaining
why consort-music composers in the early Restoration period also
avoided figured bass:
In some familyes organs were used to accompany consorts, but the old masters
would not allow the liberty of playing from a thro base figured, as harpsichords
of late have universally practised, but they formed the organ part express;
becaus the holding out the sound required exact concord, els the consort would
suffer; or perhaps the organists had not then the skill as since, for now they
desire onely figures.34
31 Ibid., f. 35r–v; also quoted in part in Wilson (ed.), Roger North on Music, 249. North’s draft
of this paragraph, crossed through in the manuscript, read as follows: ‘a score is the best
thro base part that can be presented, and the figures set, where the parts are displayed, is
done for the sake of Novices who cannot goe from their lines to observe the Composition,
which certainly helps those that understand it, to a Neater & more proper applycation of
the hand then figures will direct; as for Instance there is a very different conduct in the play,
when the superior is slow & long Notes then when it is short & broken. And then In the
pauses of the upper part the base may take a liberty to touch with more air, then Is allowed
In accompaning. And many like occasion’s are taken to manage from the score, which
without the half as from meer figures cannot be ventured’; Prencourt, Tract, f. 35.
32 For North’s complex and multiple usage of the term ‘ayre’, see Mary Chan and Jamie
C. Kassler (eds.), Roger North’s The Musicall Grammarian, 1728 (Cambridge, 1990), 73–5;
and, for quotations from a variety of North’s writings relating to ‘ayre’, Wilson (ed.), Roger
North on Music, 67–92.
33 Figured bass was, indeed, remarkably similar to the numerical system used to
identify intervals in many composition manuals of the period. See, for example,
Christopher Simpson, A Compendium of Practical Musick (London, 1667), 38–9, where he
writes ‘If you set a Figure under each Note as you Prick it, to signifie what Concord it is to
the Bass, as you see in the following Examples, it will be some ease to your Eye and
Memory.’
34 Roger North, Memoires of Musick, f. 136, quoted in Chan and Kassler (eds.), Roger
North’s The Musicall Grammarian, 263. The quotation is also given in Wilson (ed.), Roger
North on Music, 351; and in Holman, ‘“Evenly, Softly, and Sweetly Acchording to All”’,
354.
10
Introduction
What is remarkable here is that, whereas in 1728 North could write that
organists ‘desire onely figures’ (in contrast to the practice of the 1660s),
when he made his annotations to Prencourt’s Tract – around 1710
according to Wilson35 – he still believed that figured bass was really
useful only to beginners who were not able to read a full score. There is
an element of defensiveness in North’s tone in this extract, but the
implication, nevertheless, is that in the first decade of the eighteenth
century figured bass was not yet firmly established in England as the
standard notation for continuo accompaniments.
The two annotations of Prencourt’s Tracts quoted above are
probably the most tantalizing written by any English author of the
period on the subject of thoroughbass. If they could be applied
specifically to the professional sacred repertory, they would provide, if
not a basis, a clear framework for modern accompaniment techniques
and styles. But North does not make clear what, if any, particular
musical genres he has in mind. The reference to arpeggiation in the first
passage is surely appropriate only to the harpsichord, though his other
comments seem to be open to quite broad application.36 The second
extract occurs in the context of a sentence by Prencourt criticizing
absent figuring in solo song, ‘where the base is under the treble’, but
since North describes upper parts in the plural, he presumably does not
mean scores of this sort; his reference to the other parts ‘dividing’
perhaps points more towards instrumental consort music than it does
to sacred vocal (a subject on which North, in any case, was not
especially forthcoming).37
Even if we need to exercise considerable caution before applying
the different styles suggested by North to sacred music, his strong
advocacy of score-based accompaniments remains significant. But to
what extent is it relevant to institutional sacred music, which, as we
have seen, was accompanied from organ books? First, the existence of
organ books does not preclude the possibility that full scores were also
used by some organists. Peter Holman has put forward a convincing
argument that seventeenth-century English consort music was
sometimes accompanied by a keyboardist playing from a full score,38
and there seems no good reason to assume the same technique could
not have been used for sacred music – especially since many of the
composer-organists Holman suspects to have undertaken score-based
accompaniment were also organists in sacred institutions: Orlando
35 See Wilson (ed.), Roger North on Music, 362.
36 McGuinness assumes the extract to apply only to harpsichord accompaniment,
although she does not explain her interpretation; see Rosamond McGuinness, ‘Writings
about Music’, The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, iii: The Seventeenth Century, ed. Ian
Spink (Oxford, 1992), 406–20 at 415.
37 He did include a passage on church music in his Memoires of Musick, but the only part
which relates to organ accompaniment concerns its use to keep the choir ‘upright’ in the
chanting of psalms; see Chan and Kassler (eds.), Roger North’s The Musicall Grammarian,
210.
38 Peter Holman, ‘“Evenly, Softly, and Sweetly Acchording to All”’, 354 and 368–72.
11
Gibbons, Thomas Tomkins, Christopher Gibbons, Matthew Locke and

possibly Henry Purcell.39 While it is beyond the scope of this book to
consider in any detail accompaniment from full scores in sacred music,
the principle on which such continuo playing is based – to repeat
North’s words, ‘the capacity of a nicer waiting on the parts then
displayed, by seing their movement’ – may well be directly relevant to
the organ books, which double some or all voice parts.
organ books associated with london sacred institutions

The following suggestions about styles of accompaniment for sacred
music from the Restoration period result from close analysis of full
anthems, verse anthems and service settings preserved in the
manuscripts listed below, all of which have been linked with the Chapel
Royal, St Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey.40
Cfm 116
Copyist: John Blow
This is an organ book almost entirely in the hand of John Blow. It
survives incomplete, since the pagination begins at p. 49, on the final
page of Byrd’s ‘Bow down thine ear’. Shaw notes that the book’s
opening pages must already have been missing when it was acquired
by Viscount Fitzwilliam in 1768, since he signed what is now the first
page.41 Shaw also suggests the book may once have belonged to the
Chapel Royal, though there is no specific evidence that this was the
case. The ascription ‘Finis 1707’ at the end of Blow’s Evening Service in
D sol re # on p. 235 indicates that the book was finished towards the end
39 Ibid., 368–72. As mentioned in n. 29 above, it may not be appropriate to include Locke,
as organist of Catherine of Braganza’s Catholic Chapel, together with organists who
played within Anglican institutions. There is evidence that at least some scores may have
been played by organists: Cfm 240, for example, contains scores of three anthems in
Blow’s autograph which include indications for the organist such as ‘sexquialter’ and
‘chear organ’ [sic]; on this manuscript see the entry under ‘“Griffin” MS, shelfmark 31-H’,
in Watkins Shaw, ‘The Autographs of John Blow (1649–1708)’, Music Review, 25 (1964),
85–95 (p. 91).
40 Although several partbooks survive from Westminster Abbey – notably Lwa
Triforium Sets I and II and, in all probability, the York Minster partbooks MSS M1(S) –
organ books seem to have fared rather less well. Records of payment indicate that several
books were copied for the Abbey in the Restoration period, including two for which
Purcell received payment and one apparently copied by Christopher Gibbons. Although,
as noted below, there is an outside chance that a fragment of one of Purcell’s organ books
may have survived (in Och 554), all the complete books seem to have been lost; the earliest
surviving organ book held by Westminster Abbey, in the hand of John Church, relates to
Triforium Set III, the earliest portions of which date from c. 1712. For the Abbey records of
payment, see Robert Shay and Robert Thompson, Purcell Manuscripts: The Principal
Musical Sources (Cambridge, 2000), 197–9, and for details of Triforium Sets I and II and the
York Minster partbooks, see ibid., 193–6 and 199–206. I am grateful to Dr Tony Trowles,
Librarian of Westminster Abbey, for providing details of the surviving organ books held
in the Abbey’s collection.
41 Shaw, ‘The Autographs of John Blow’, 86–7.
12
Introduction
of Blow’s life, and this may explain the slight shakiness of his hand in
‘My God, my God’ on p. 220. Croft seems to have added a make-good
folio to replace pp. 63–4, and Shaw also suggests he was the copyist of
Batten’s ‘O praise the Lord, all ye heathen’ (p. 141).42 Weldon’s ‘O Lord
rebuke me not’ (p. 96) and Farrant’s ‘Hide not thy face’ (p. 219) are also
not in Blow’s autograph, nor are the final two entries (from p. 240). Page
corners are frequently absent, suggesting that the manuscript was used
in practice frequently.
Cfm 152
Copyists: John Blow, Edward Braddock, John Church, William Croft,
Pelham Humfrey, Henry Purcell, William Tucker
As originally described by Shaw,43 and corroborated by Laurie,44 this
manuscript contains the remains of a Chapel Royal organ book. Shay
and Thompson plausibly suggest that its pages were brought together
by a collector wishing to preserve composers’ autographs. They date
the earliest layers to c. 1670; the next layer to around 1693 (the date of
composition of Purcell’s ‘O give thanks’); and the final layers to around
1705.45 Laurie has pointed out that ff. 100–2 of Cfm 671 belong to Cfm
152, completing Church’s copy of Purcell’s ‘My Song shall be alway’ in
‘Fragment A’.46
Cfm 669, pp. 85–91 (front end) and pp. 1–19 (reverse end)
Copyist: John Gostling
Shay and Thompson identify this as an organ book from St Paul’s
Cathedral, mainly copied during the eighteenth century, but with
fragments of an earlier book which formed part of a set copied by
Gostling; the other remnants survive as Lsp A2 (countertenor, tenor and
bass decani books, and bass cantoris).47 Gostling seems to have been
paid for the set in 1699.48 The pages in Gostling’s hand (pp. 85–91 at the
verse anthems end and pp. 1–19 at the full anthems end) are mainly
stained and difficult to read; those at the verse anthems end have also
been struck through and/or are of incomplete pieces.
42 Ibid.
43 Watkins Shaw, ‘A Cambridge Manuscript from the English Chapel Royal’, Music &
Letters, 42 (1961), 263–7.
44 See Margaret Laurie, ‘The Chapel Royal Partbooks’, Music and Bibliography: Essays in
Honour of Alec Hyatt King, ed. Oliver Neighbour (New York, London and Munich, 1980),
28–50 (pp. 38–9 and n. 20).
45 Shay and Thompson, Purcell Manuscripts, 190–2.
46 Laurie, ‘The Chapel Royal Partbooks’, n. 20.
47 Shay and Thompson, Purcell Manuscripts, 207.
48 Ibid., 206.
13
Lbl 27.a.13–15
Copyist: John Church
These are organ books copied for the Chapel Royal by John Church,
probably started after 1704 and finished in the 1720s.49 Although the
books are rather late copies for our purposes, Church’s activities in
selecting and making good parts of earlier Chapel Royal partbooks,
now Lbl 27.a.1–8,50 together with the fact that the old Chapel Royal
organ book preserving Purcell’s anthem ‘O give thanks’ survives with a
make-good page in Church’s hand in Cfm 152, suggest that Church
may have had access to earlier Chapel Royal organ books – possibly
fragments surviving from the Whitehall fire of 1698 – and could have
made at least some of his copies of pieces by Restoration composers
from those books.
Mp 35
Copyist: John Blow
Shaw refers to this as an ‘organ short score’,51 although it does not differ
significantly in style from other Blow organ books; Shay and Thompson
give the description ‘organ parts’, presumably because the sheets seem
to have been left unbound.52 The sheets are copied stratigraphically,53
and Blow joins the staves across the centre margin. Gostling dates one
anthem 1698 in AUS 85,54 and another is dated 1699 elsewhere;55 Wood
presumably follows this evidence when he adopts a dating of 1699 or
later in his thesis,56 although in his later editions of Blow’s anthems he
simply dates it ‘in the 1690s’.57 Shay and Thompson suggest that the
collection may have been copied for the reopening of St Paul’s
Cathedral in December 1697, and it was certainly used as a source for
John Gostling’s set of partbooks Ob T 1176–82, also linked to St Paul’s.58
49 See Laurie, ‘The Chapel Royal Partbooks’, 36–9.
50 See Watkins Shaw, ‘A Contemporary Source of English Music of the Purcellian
Period’, Acta Musicologica, 31 (1959), 38–44; Laurie, ‘The Chapel Royal Partbooks’, 28–37,
esp. 36; and Shay and Thompson, Purcell Manuscripts, 177–90.
51 Shaw, ‘The Autographs of John Blow’, 87.
53 A term used ibid. to denote the copying of music across a whole opening.
54 Ibid., 210; and Shaw, ‘The Autographs of John Blow’, 87. The anthem in question is
‘Lord remember David’, f. 2.

55 Shaw, ‘The Autographs of John Blow’, 87, the anthem being ‘Bring unto the Lord, ye
mighty’ (f. 10), dated in London, Gresham College, MS V.3.35.

56 Bruce Wood, ‘John Blow’s Anthems with Orchestra’ (Ph.D. dissertation. University of
Cambridge, 1977), i, 358 and n. 24.

57 Blow, Anthems II, ed. Wood, 175; and id., in John Blow: Anthems III, p. 174.
58 Shay and Thompson, Purcell Manuscripts, 210 and 209. Ten of the thirteen anthems in
Mp 35 also occur in the Tenbury partbooks, and they are copied consecutively by Gostling
(though not all in the same order as in Blow’s copy). Gostling’s texts follow Blow’s closely,
and this is especially notable for the arrangements of symphony anthems for organ and
choir alone. The fact that Gostling used Blow’s organ book as a source for Ob T 1176–82
might suggest that there were originally partbooks to go with Mp 35. The concordance
14
Introduction
A number of the works contained in the manuscript are rearrangements

for accompaniment by organ alone of Chapel Royal anthems originally
intended to include stringed instruments.
Ob T 1180–2
Copyist: John Gostling
Three organ books copied together with four partbooks by John
Gostling to form the set Ob T 1176–82. Shay and Thompson describe the
books as a set of fair file copies, dating from c. 1705 to c. 1715.59 The
books use as sources a number of Gostling’s earlier manuscripts,
including AUS 85, which Shay and Thompson convincingly argue dates
from c. 1679 to 1705,60 and which Wood has demonstrated was clearly
intended to record the repertory of the Chapel Royal.61 Since Gostling
‘consistently avoided transcribing works in the Tenbury set which he
had already copied in [the St Paul’s partbooks] Lsp A2’,62 the Tenbury
books may originally have been intended for St Paul’s.
Och 554, f. 3
Copyist: Henry Purcell
An autograph organ part for Blow’s ‘God is my hope and strength’,
copied stratigraphically on a single opening of this guardbook. On the
basis of Purcell’s handwriting, especially his use of a hook-shaped bass
clef, Shay and Thompson date this copy to before the end of 1677,
placing it among Purcell’s earliest autographs.63 Although there is no
clear evidence that this organ part was copied for one of the London
institutions, they also suggest tentatively that it could have been
‘somehow a stray’ from the organ books Purcell was paid for copying
for Westminster Abbey in 1676.64
a note about anthems with strings

Restoration sacred music is probably most strongly characterized by
the genre known as the ‘symphony’ anthem – that is, the verse anthem
composed for accompaniment by strings as well as keyboard continuo.
between Mp 35 and T 1176–82 has also been noted in Lionel Pike, ‘Alternative Versions of
Purcell’s Praise the Lord, O my soul: O Lord my God’, The Maynooth International
Musicological Conference 1995: Selected Proceedings, Part II, ed. Patrick F. Devine and Harry
White, Irish Musical Studies, 5 (Dublin, 1996), 272–80 (pp. 273–5); and Dexter, ‘The
Restoration “Symphony” Anthem in Organ Transcription’, 11.
60 Ibid., 64–78, esp. 66 and 71–3.
61 Bruce Wood, Review of The Gostling Manuscript, Early Music, 9 (1981), 117–20 (p. 118);
cited in Shay and Thompson, Purcell Manuscripts, 66.

62 Ibid., 209.
63 Ibid., 213 and 216; see also 2.
64 Ibid., 201.
15
Although the history of the use of instruments other than organ in

church in seventeenth-century England is a complex one,65 these
particular sacred pieces are explicitly connected with the Chapel Royal
from about 1662 to 1691.66 During this period, members of the Twenty-
four Violins were required to play when the King (Princess Anne in
James’s reign) attended the Chapel. Intuitively, one would expect the
presence of instruments in addition to organ to have a significant
impact on the style(s) of continuo accompaniment used, which implies
that sources associated with the Chapel Royal might need to be
considered apart from those linked with St Paul’s or Westminster
Abbey. In practice, however, the issue is strangely redundant within
this study. This is partly because of the way in which strings were
typically employed in symphony anthems. As Peter Holman has
written, ‘in Restoration anthems the instruments [i.e. the strings]
mostly have an antiphonal relationship with the soloists, who are
accompanied separately by the continuo’ (my emphasis):67 the strings
play separate ritornelli and an opening symphony, but there is no
suggestion that they accompanied vocal sections as a matter of course.
Holman convincingly argues that the different groups were, indeed,
physically positioned so as to maximize the antiphonal effect, the
strings in the ‘music room’, forming part of the first-floor gallery, the
solo singers in the organ loft, and the choir downstairs in the choir
stalls.68
There are some exceptions to this general rule of separation, since,
on occasion, there are obbligati parts, usually for two violins
accompanying a verse section. Significantly – frustratingly, perhaps –
the surviving organ books do not tell us what the organist might have
played in these circumstances. The only examples of which I am aware
in the sources listed above occur in Blow’s manuscript Mp 35, where the
65 See Peter Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court, 1540–1690
(Oxford, 1993), 393–9, and also Dexter, ‘The Restoration “Symphony” Anthem in Organ
Transcription’, 3.
66 Pepys wrote on 14 September 1662, ‘this is the first day of having Vialls and other
Instruments to play a Symphony between every verse of the Anthem’, although he also
commented a week earlier, on 7 September, that he heard ‘a most excellent Anthem (with
Symphony’s between) sung by Captain Cooke’; see The Diary of Samuel Pepys, A New and
Complete Transcription, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (London,
1970–83), iii, 197 and 190. Holman points out in the light of Pepys’s diary entries the
probable inaccuracy of John Evelyn’s much-quoted remark dating the introduction of
strings to 21 December 1662; see Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers, 395–6. It is well known
that the use of instruments in the Chapel Royal declined after the death of Charles II, but
symphony anthems certainly continued to be written and performed during the reign of
James (see ibid., 411–13), and it was only in 1691 that William issued an order that the
‘King’s Chappell shall be all the year through kept both morning and evening with
solemn musick like a collegiate church’ (quoted ibid., 413–14, where it is also noted that
there exists an earlier decree issued by Queen Mary in February 1689 excluding
instruments in chapel).
67 Ibid., 398–9.
68 Ibid., 399; see also Pike’s comments in the Preface to Purcell, Sacred Music, Part II, p. ix.
16
Introduction
string parts are rearranged throughout for organ alone.69 In fact it is

striking that none of the surviving organ books associated with the
Chapel Royal appears to contain symphony anthems. They are absent,
for example, from Cfm 116, which, in any case, is not strongly linked
with the Chapel, and is also dominated by service settings and full or
full-with-verse anthems. The only possible candidate for inclusion of
strings in Cfm 152 is Purcell’s ‘O give thanks’, but, in his Chapel Royal
collection AUS 85, Gostling copies the anthem at the opposite end of the
manuscript from that containing symphony anthems and writes out the
ritornelli on only two staves, so it is quite clear that this anthem is for
accompaniment by organ only.70 The Chapel Royal organ books copied
by Church (Lbl 27.a.13–15) obviously date from well after the time
when strings ceased to be employed in the Chapel, but it has also been
argued that the earlier parts to which they are related, Lbl 27.a.1–8, do
not preserve symphony anthems either. Lionel Pike quotes Robert
Thompson thus:
I suspect that the 27.a.1–8 set was never intended to be a set for symphony
anthems proper: there is no indication that strings were involved in the Purcell;
many contemporary symphony anthems are missing; later Purcell works added
by Braddock are accompanied by organ only; many other works were not
symphony anthems at all but reflect the more mundane repertory of the chapel
represented by the 1676 bill quoted in RECM I, 162–4.71
The absence of symphony anthems in their original forms in the organ

parts perhaps serves to underline the exceptional nature of this genre:
even in the Chapel Royal, anthems with strings ‘were not part of the
daily repertoire of the institution’.72 Perhaps it should not surprise us,
then, that it is the rearrangements of symphony anthems for
69 For more comments on these arrangements, see Chapter 4, and also Dexter, ‘The
Restoration “Symphony” Anthem in Organ Transcription’.
70 This is also the conclusion reached by Dexter, ibid., 30–1, for stylistic reasons
(especially the lack of an opening symphony) and on the basis of the fact that ‘O give
thanks’ dates from 1693, some two years after William’s decree. In vol. 29 of the Purcell
Society Complete Edition ‘O give thanks’ is nevertheless published with string parts,
despite the editors’ admission that ‘there is no specific indication’ that the ritornelli are for
strings; see Henry Purcell, Sacred Music, Part V: Anthems, ed. Anthony Lewis and Nigel
Fortune, Purcell Society Complete Edition of the Works of Henry Purcell, 29 (rev. edn,
London, 1967), 88–107 and 196–8. Dexter also notes that Zimmerman classes ‘O give
thanks’ as a verse anthem with strings, as does Westrup in the 1980 New Grove article; see
Dexter, ‘The Restoration “Symphony” Anthem in Organ Transcription’, 30, and also
Franklin B. Zimmerman, Henry Purcell 1659–1695: An Analytical Catalogue of his Works
(London, 1963), 31; and Jack Westrup, ‘Henry Purcell’, in New Grove, xv, 470. The more
recent New Grove entry revises this categorization, defining ‘O give thanks’ as a verse
anthem; see Peter Holman and Robert Thompson, ‘Purcell: (3) Henry Purcell (ii)’, New
Grove II, xx, 604–30 (p. 620).
71 Purcell, Sacred Music, Part II, p. xvi, presumably a quotation from personal
correspondence. Thompson’s reference is to the Chapel Royal ‘Catalogue of Severall
Services & Anthems’, which is reproduced in Andrew Ashbee (ed.), Records of English
Court Music, 5 vols. (Snodland and Aldershot, 1986–92), i, 162–4.
72 Purcell, Sacred Music, Part II, p. ix (from Pike’s preface).
17
accompaniment by organ alone that are transmitted in organ books

such as Blow’s Mp 35, and, of course, in a good many books copied for
provincial institutions.73
73 Some of these are listed in Dexter, ‘The Restoration ‘‘Symphony’’ Anthem in Organ
Transcription’, 35–6.
18
NJ455 - 04Chapter 01 8/11/05 10:36 am Page 19
1
The Principal Characteristics
of Restoration Organ Books
Ian Spink’s description of the typical content of Restoration organ
books, quoted above, is a useful summary of the books’ main
characteristics, but, if we are to arrive at some conclusions about how
these books were used in practice, it is worth considering in more detail
how they relate to the surviving full scores of the pieces they transmit.
Obviously this can help to improve our understanding of how much
information about the music he was accompanying the organist would
have had in front of him; but it is also crucial if we are to try to
determine how much the organist might have added to – or taken away
from – the notation in the organ books.
Virtually all the music in the organ books is notated with both right-
and left-hand staves.1 In their most basic form, they transmit the two
outermost parts of the piece at any given moment (‘top and bottom’, as
Spink describes it).2 The left hand usually comprises the instrumental
bass line, which, in chorus and verse sections, often doubles (or slightly
simplifies) the bass voice part. Where the bass voice rests, the left hand
reverts to the next lowest part. Similarly, the right-hand part follows the
highest voice part in verse and chorus sections.3 Where a change
between different voices occurs, one or two notes’ overlap may be
given, particularly where the parts are imitative. A typical instance of
this pattern is shown in Example 1, taken from Blow’s autograph organ
part to the Te deum from his Service in A in Cfm 116.
1 There is a small number of figured-bass parts (that is, those in which the bass line alone
is notated, together with figuring) mostly included in the late collections such as Ob T
1180–2 and Lbl 27.a.13–15 – but also in the Chapel Royal fragment Cfm 152 – for which
copying extended well into the eighteenth century. Obviously there are major differences
between continuo-playing styles possible when accompanying from a figured-bass part
rather than a two-stave part, and these implications are considered separately in Chapter 4.
2 Spink, Restoration Cathedral Music, 64.
3 There are one or two examples where, although the highest part is generally shown in
the right hand, episodes of part-crossing are not taken into account. For example,
Humfrey sometimes maintains the treble in the right hand of his autograph organ part of
the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis in Cfm 152, even where the alto rises above it in the first
verse (and despite the uppermost part being given in passages of part-crossing elsewhere
in the piece). Similar examples occur in Gostling’s copy of Blow’s ‘O God, wherefore art
thou absent?’ in Cfm 669, and the Chapel Royal organ book copy of Purcell’s ‘I was glad’
(Lbl 27.a.13). Since these examples appear to be exceptional, the most obvious explanation
is that they resulted from the arranger of the organ part overlooking part-crossing at these
points. Of course, this is most likely to occur where the arranger is working from
individual parts, but is also entirely possible when reading a full score.
(a)
(b)
Example 1. Extract from the Te deum from the Service in A by John Blow: (a)
autograph organ part, Cfm 116, p. 18; (b) full score, Lbl K.9.b.9 (5), ff. 19v–20.
In this case, the change of clef between the verse section ‘To thee
Cherubin’ and the chorus ‘Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth’ helps to indicate
to the player the shift from alto to treble in the right hand, as, obviously,
does the change in register. It is perhaps significant, however, that,
although changes of clef are not infrequent in either stave in these organ
books as a whole, no copyist consistently seems to try to relate clef
changes to particular voice parts (either in terms of the clef used, or the
positioning of clef changes). In his copy of Purcell’s ‘It is a good thing’ in
20
The Principal Characteristics of Restoration Organ Books
Mp 35, for instance, Blow places the opening entries for tenor and alto
in C4 and C3 clefs, as would be expected, but then continues with C3
when the bass enters (Example 2). The rapid change between alto, tenor
and bass in the left hand at ‘Heaven and earth’ in Example 1(a), and the
(a)
(b)
Example 2. Extract from Purcell’s ‘It is a good thing to give thanks’: (a) organ
part, in the hand of John Blow, Mp 35, f. 8v; (b) full score, in the hand of John
Gostling, AUS 85, p. 68 (front end of MS).
21
shift from bass, to tenor, to alto in bars 5–6 of Example 2(a) are both
characteristic of the sort of movement between parts where clef changes
are, of course, both impractical and unnecessary. The significance for
our understanding of continuo accompaniment is that clefs do not, on
the whole, help the player to determine from the organ part alone
which part is singing when.
Similarly, while different stem directions are often used to distinguish
between two or more melodic lines shown on the same stave, upward
and downward pointing stems tend merely to identify the highest and
lowest parts on each stave. They do not, therefore, correspond with
each of the vocal lines being doubled, and, in this respect, the organ
books differ significantly from genuine short scores. While this would
appear to render organ books a less useful means of ‘waiting on the
parts’ than a full score (to return to North’s statement), it is the very fact
that the vocal parts are transmitted in stylized form that allows us to
draw conclusions about the nature of organ accompaniment within this
repertory.
doubling the inner parts

Particularly interesting in this respect is the way in which each organ
book’s ‘skeleton’ doubling of the two outermost parts is augmented by
selective doubling of one or more of the inner parts in full sections and
ensemble verses. The extent to which third, fourth, or even more parts
are included in the organ books varies significantly from piece to piece.
Although there is occasional inconsistency, these added parts have
distinctive characteristics, or combine with other given parts in
particular ways; moreover, differences in the frequency with which
these characteristics occur within a piece largely determine the extent to
which inner parts are given. There appear to be four main reasons for
adding inner parts in organ books:
1. By far the most commonly found inner parts are imitative entries,
and organ-part arrangers seem to have considered it important to
include imitation more generally within the pieces they transcribed.
For this reason, organ parts of contrapuntal music by pre-
Restoration composers – pieces such as Tallis’s ‘Wipe away my
sins’, Orlando Gibbons’s ‘Behold, thou hast made’, and Tomkins’s
‘Thou art my King’, copied by Gostling in Ob T 1180–2 – tend to
resemble keyboard reductions, although they often do not maintain
each vocal part strictly throughout. Similarly, passages of canon
often reduce at least most of each part, as can be seen in Blow’s
autograph of the Gloria ending the Magnificat of his Service in F in
Cfm 116 (p. 167). In less intensely contrapuntal pieces, imitation –
and particularly imitative entries – are usually marked consistently.
Indeed, the difference in style between organ parts of non-imitative
and imitative sections is often visually quite obvious: in Blow’s
autograph of ‘Lord, remember David’ in Mp 35, for example, ‘top
22
and bottom’ texture predominates until the four-part verse ‘We will
go into his Tabernacle’, which maintains a single imitative point
throughout, and which results in at least three-part texture in the
organ part (Figure 1, pp. 24–5).
2. Passages of parallel thirds or (less frequently) sixths, or their

compounds, between one of the outer parts and an inner part are
often shown in organ books. It is by no means the case that all, or
even most, passages of parallel thirds or sixths are doubled; rather,
copyists seem to have seen parallel intervals as notable features,
and they often chose to highlight them. Paradoxically, in his
(a)
(b)
Example 3. Extract from Blow’s ‘Bring unto the Lord’: (a) autograph organ
part, GB-Mp 35, f. 10, showing omision of parallel thirds; (b) full score in
Gostling’s hand in AUS 85, p. 185 (front end).
23
24
NJ455 - 04Chapter 01
8/11/05
10:36 am
Page 25
25
Figure 1. Extract from Blow’s autograph organ part for ‘Lord, remember David’, Mp 35, f. 2r–v.
autograph of ‘Bring unto the Lord’ in Mp 35, Blow, while doubling

much of both treble parts in the opening verse, chose to omit a
conspicuous passage of parallel thirds, and one cannot help but
wonder whether the omission itself made the thirds obvious: the
organist – having been given a few notes and a direct as a cue –
could reasonably be expected to extrapolate that the rest of the
phrase was also in thirds (Example 3).
A similar example may occur in Gostling’s copy of Humfrey’s
‘Hear my crying’ in Ob T 1180: a passage of thirds between treble
and alto is included the first time the phrase ‘that I may daily
perform my vows’ occurs in the verse ‘So will I always sing praises’,
but omitted in the petite reprise (Example 4).4
(a)
(b)
Example 4. Extract from Humfrey’s ‘Hear my crying’: (a) organ part in

Gostling’s hand, Ob T 1180, p. 89, showing parallel thirds; (b) full score in
Blow’s hand, Och 628, p. 72.
4 There is a similar tendency in many organ books for inner-part phrases to cease a note
or two before the end of the phrase. It is always obvious from the voice-leading of these
melodic lines what the missing notes should be, so it would have been entirely
straightforward for the organist to have added them, if he was playing the doubled lines.
26
(a)
(b)
Example 5. Humfrey’s Nunc dimittis, from Service in E minor: (a) opening of

the autograph organ part, Cfm 152, p. 127; (b) full score, in the hand of William
Isaack, Cfm 117, p. 224 (reverse end).
3. Inner parts are sometimes included in organ parts as an alternative
to figures: that is, they communicate information about unusual
harmonic features which could otherwise have been figured. Such
features – mainly suspensions, modulations and chromaticism –
tend to result in inner parts being added either as single notes, or as
27
short note groups, rather than in complete or nearly complete

phrases. In the opening of the autograph organ part for his Nunc
dimittis in Cfm 152 (Example 5), Humfrey includes inner parts both
to show parallel thirds and to write out suspensions.5 In pieces such
as Purcell’s Funeral Sentences (copied by Blow in Mp 35), there can
be relatively extended passages of complex chromatic progressions
for which inner parts are given throughout, which contrast
noticeably with more harmonically straightforward sections in
which the organ part reverts to outermost parts only. There does not
seem to be any obvious distinction between chromaticism indicated
(a)
(b)
5 It is notable here that the alto’s suspension is transposed down an octave. Registral
change such as this is not uncommon in Restoration organ books; its possible significance
is discussed below in Chapter 2. In this case, however, it is possible that the apparent
transposition instead represents a revision on Humfrey’s part. Several notable variants
exist between Humfrey’s autograph and Isaack’s full score – not least the underlay of the
treble at the end of the extract – and the presence of parallel octaves in bar 5 of the organ
part might suggest an early version of the piece later superseded by that transmitted in
Cfm 117.
28
Example 6. Extract from Purcell’s Funeral Sentences: (a) copied by Blow in

Mp 35, f. 5; (b) full score copied by Gostling in AUS 85, p. 188 (reverse end).
through figures (in the first phrase of ‘Yet, O Lord’, for example)
and that shown with added inner parts (Example 6; see also under
‘Figuring’ below).
4. Inner parts are also included where one or both of the outer parts
has a sustained note lasting a bar or more. In this context, the extra
parts can often fill in the harmonic canvas around the pedal note,
and also give the possibility of sustaining momentum. A good
example of this type of inner-part doubling occurs in Blow’s full
anthem ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’: in his autograph organ part
(Cfm 116), Blow provides extra doubling in the opening section
almost exclusively where the treble or bass parts sustain long notes
(Example 7).
How much can these characteristics of inner-part doublings tell us

about what organists actually played in their accompaniments?
Considered on their own, they are somewhat limited: obviously, the
presence of doublings does not necessarily indicate that all the notes in
the organ part would have been played. Doublings which appear
to be substitute figures – and which, as we shall see, are largely
29
(a)
(b)
Example 7. Extract from Blow’s full anthem ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’: (a)
autograph organ part, Cfm 116, p. 155; (b) vocal parts, in the hand of Gostling,
Ob T 1176–9, pp. 34 (Medius Decani), 35 (Contratenor Cantoris), 33 (Tenor
Cantoris) and 35 (Bassus Cantoris).
30
interchangeable with them – merely reinforce our perception of

thoroughbass as primarily harmonic; while one could argue that they
are included so that the organist can support the singers by doubling
their notes (especially in complex passages), it is certainly not
implausible to suggest that their presence told the player what he need
not play. Likewise the addition of inner parts moving in parallel thirds
or sixths and at places where one or more of the inner parts is inactive
might suggest a style of accompaniment, but equally such passages
could be included merely to inform the organist about the voices’ part
movement at these points.
The inclusion of imitation, however, is more significant. For one
thing, it indicates firmly that organists were not uniquely interested in
harmonization – indeed, in contrapuntal pieces or sections it is the
melodic character of the imitative points that dominates in organ books.
While one cannot state categorically from this evidence alone that
imitative entries and imitation generally would have been played by
organists, it is difficult to find a good reason for it to have been included
so consistently within these books if it was not. A set of new entries does
carry important textural information for the organist, since it often
signifies a reduction in texture, each entering part adding a new voice.
A good organist would surely adapt the fullness of his realization
accordingly. But new entries such as this are often difficult to
distinguish on the page from imitative points which simply occur
within a phrase and where the number of voices singing is unaffected.
The logical conclusion is that imitation included in the organ part was
played as part of the accompaniment.
The suggestion that organists might have played imitation when
doubled in the organ books is further supported by an apparently
deliberate attempt by Blow to emphasize a pair of entries in his anthem
‘Bring unto the Lord’ (Example 8): much of the verse ‘It is the Lord that
commandeth the waters’ comprises dialogue between the two treble
soloists, and Blow reproduces this dialogue in the right-hand of his
organ part in Mp 35. The imitation on ‘The voice of the Lord’ that begins
in bar 6 of Example 8(b) starts in Treble 2 while Treble 1 is still singing
the end of the previous phrase (also based on the same melodic
material), and Treble 1’s entry on the point follows immediately,
without a break. In the organ-part version in Example 8(a), however,
Blow explicitly writes two crotchet rests before the new entry in Treble
1, omitting the minim at the start of bar 7, despite including the two
previous notes of this phrase. The only sensible interpretation of this
passage is surely for the organist to play exactly what is written.6
6 Another suggestion that imitation was included within realizations occurs in Blow’s
organ part for Aldrich’s ‘Call to remembrance’ in Cfm 116, p. 83: an unidentified hand has
added in the annotation ‘Lead’ against one set of imitative entries. However, the marking
appears to be in an eighteenth-century hand, so it is perhaps dangerous to assume that we
can use it as evidence of Restoration accompaniment practice.
31
(a)
(b)
Example 8. Extract from Blow’s ‘Bring unto the Lord’: (a) autograph organ
part in Mp 35, f. 10v; (b) full score in Gostling’s hand in AUS 85, p. 188 (front
end).
figuring
Theorists’ comments about figuring leave us in no doubt that – while
players might reasonably expect some figures to be included in organ
parts – figuring was to be considered more as an ‘added extra’ than as
an indispensable tool to the thoroughbass player in this period.7 It
remains very sparse in most late seventeenth-century sources,8 and we
can safely assume that professional organists such as those employed at
the major London sacred establishments would have been entirely
7 In his Conclusion to Melothesia Locke states that ‘to teach Number and Distance only
. . . is a down-right Cheat’, and makes clear that the player needs ‘a th[o]rough knowledge
of the Scale of Musick’; see Locke, Melothesia, ed. Hogwood, p. xiii. Prencourt states that the
player is ‘to know that the accord [i.e. the 5–3 chord] is allwais played to the Note of the
base, Except you see it otherwise directed by some figure or other’, but North comments
‘a player must be capable to know his accords tollerably well with help of his Ear, or a
score, ffor It will not allwais happen that his work is throly figured for him, & then he will
be at a shamefull loss’; see Prencourt, Tract, f. 36v. A similar concentration on teaching
realization of an unfigured bass is also common to Italian treatises of this period; see
Borgir, The Performance of the Basso Continuo, 133–4 and 137.
8 Parrott makes the same point, as does Borgir with respect to Italian music. See
Andrew Parrott, ‘Performing Purcell’, The Purcell Companion, ed. Michael Burden
(London, 1995), 387–444 (p. 400); and Borgir, The Performance of the Basso Continuo, 126.
32
competent at harmonizing without figures.9 As is well known, there is

often much inconsistency in the density of figuring even within a single
piece in sources from this period, while two copies of the same piece
(even two autographs of the same piece) often contain entirely different
figuring.10 It is clearly inappropriate to think of figuring in Restoration
sources as a fundamental part of the notation; seen in this context, one
might wonder to what extent figuring in organ books might help us to
establish styles of continuo accompaniment. Yet detailed analysis of
how figures relate to the notes included in each piece, and to the full
score of each piece, reveals some interesting and useful anomalies.
The sorts of figures included in sacred organ books do not differ
significantly from those in other English sources of the period:11 the
basic principle is for figures to clarify unusual harmonies and
progressions, and/or those that cannot reasonably be predicted. These
might include chromatic notes, modulations not otherwise suggested in
9 Nevertheless, there are some organ parts – especially those notated with bass line
only – where apparently crucial figures are omitted, and it is difficult to imagine that an
accurate realization could have been achieved without at least some trial and error.
Comments by both Prencourt and North in the former’s Tract of the Continued or through-
base (c. 1710) suggest that, at least by that date, insufficient figuring (of 6s in particular)
was a recognized problem. Prencourt first writes ‘Of the Sixt. This Intervall is never
played, Except it be marked above the Note in the base’; he then adds ‘The Sixt is now a
days allwais set above the Note in the base where it must be played. In former days the
Composers would have the organist or he that played the thro base allwais play the sixt to
the Note, that in respect to the foregoing or following Note was an half key as If the E
precedes or follows the F. Which In the Mean time is lyable to severall exceptions, besides
that severall times according to that rule the sixt should be playd when the Composer sets
the fifth, and by this means severall Gross Mistakes would happen. [T]he wiser and sober
sort of masters dow [sic] set now allwais the 6th above that Note where it must be playd.’
North seems to believe that figures are now used as a precaution: ‘It will appear that some
rules take place by which a player may know, without figures, when the sixt & when the
fifth is to be touched, but becaus there are so many occasions of humour to Introduce
variety, that the best players may, without help of a most attentive & ready Ear miss &
play one for the other; therefore as abundant caution the Masters allwais put the 6 over the
Note, however obvious it is; and altho he must be a very sot that Baulke it.’ The respective
passages occur in Prencourt, Tract, ff. 34, 34v–35 and 34.
10 That is, they contain figures on different notes, as well as figures given above the same
bass notes expressed differently. This can be seen, for instance, if we compare figuring in
the organ books against that in full scores of the same pieces. In sections where the organ
books lack some of the information in the full scores – that is, in choruses and ensemble
verses where not all the inner parts are reproduced in the organ parts – the organ books
predictably tend to have fuller figuring, the extra figures being used to fill in sections of
the missing parts. However, in solo verses where the right-hand organ part simply
reproduces the solo vocal part, and where full score and organ part are essentially the
same, figuring still does not correspond between the two sources. Examples include
Blow’s autograph organ part to ‘Lord, remember David’ in Mp 35, when compared with
Gostling’s AUS 85; and Blow’s anthems ‘Blessed be the Lord’ and ‘Turn us again’, both
copied by Gostling in T 1180–2, but with figures for solo sections not corresponding with
those copied by Gostling in AUS 85.
11 Details of these characteristics are outlined in Rebecca Herissone, ‘The Theory and
Practice of Composition in the English Restoration Period’, Ph.D. dissertation (University

of Cambridge, 1996), 89–97.
33
the organ part, suspensions (which sometimes include even clichéd

progressions),12 and unexpected major or minor thirds. They can also be
used to contradict expectations: for instance, a 5 may be given above
what would normally have been expected to be a 6–3 chord; similarly,
where a modulation is implied by apparent movement from dominant
to tonic in the left hand, figures may be used to clarify that a change of
key does not take place.13 Predictably, the greatest quantity of figures
occurs where the player has the least information about harmonization
from what is notated in the organ part: parts where only the left hand is
notated are usually quite densely figured (these are discussed in more
detail below), and, in two-stave organ parts, figuring is often most
detailed in solo verses – especially those for bass where the solo part is
reproduced in the right hand. We can infer from this that, in two-stave
parts where there are two genuinely different outer parts in right- and
left-hand staves, the organist was expected to derive most of his
information about harmonization from these given parts.
We have already established that some inner parts doubled in organ
books act as substitute figures (see point 3 above), and these sorts of
doublings seem to be largely interchangeable with figures. It is common,
indeed, for an added inner part to begin in notes on the stave, but end
with figures. This often occurs where, for instance, a new, higher,
entering part takes over in the right-hand stave, but elsewhere there does
not seem to be any musical explanation for notes to give way to figures.
For example, in the ATB verse ‘For in thee is the well of life’ in Blow’s
‘Thy mercy, O Lord’ in Mp 35, the series of suspensions in the tenor at
‘and in thy light’ is written in the stave when it occurs for the first time,
but shown in figures on the repeat (Example 9). While one could suggest
that it is the very presence of the repeat that led to Blow using the ‘short-
cut’ of figuring, in fact the more likely explanation for this passage is that
he miscopied the alto part with downward-facing stems, and was left
with no option but to notate the suspensions as figures.14
Although many figures do occur in isolation, and obviously have
only a harmonic function, there are also sequences of figures that
reproduce almost entire vocal phrases in a part not otherwise doubled.
They usually include features such as suspensions, which one might
12 In North’s view the inclusion of a 4–3 at a perfect cadence was principally to identify
the cadence, since the 4–3 suspension was more or less compulsory in this context. He
wrote: ‘[T]his is an accord so constantly used, that the figures 43. become a signe, not
onely of the accord, but also of a close, & consequently calls for the other proper accords &
Graces that belong to a close’; see Prencourt, Tract, f. 39.
13 A good example of this occurs in Humfrey’s autograph Magnificat in Cfm 152, p. 125:
in the second bar of the second system, during the phrase ‘He hath scattered the proud’,
the bass suggests there could be a modulation to D (the dominant of the relative major), so
Humfrey includes a flat sign above the a; a similar progression in the second bar of the
second system of p. 124 also includes a flat above A, but this is more surprising, since the
right-hand part (taken from the Treble part) has a C n at this point in any case.
14 I am grateful to Professor Barry Cooper for pointing out this solution to me, and for
Bruce Wood for his helpful comments on this extract.
34
(a)
(b)
Example 9. Extract from Blow’s ‘Thy mercy, O Lord’: (a) autograph organ
part, Mp 35, f. 12v; (b) full score, in the hand of Gostling, AUS 85, p. 63 (front
end).
have expected to have been figured in any case, but – whether

intentionally or not – they also double melodic lines. Example 10, from
Gostling’s copy of Blow’s ‘Lift up your heads’, has a typical cadential
formula, and figures are used here to reproduce the alto part. Example
11 has more disjunct sets of figures, spread over a longer phrase, but it
takes only limited extrapolation – particularly when the figures are
combined with the inner parts written on the stave across bars 2–3 of
the extract – to work out that the part accompanying the given right-
hand line (that is, the tenor vocal line accompanying the alto) is in
parallel thirds with it throughout. It is perhaps not overstating the case
to suggest that the figures in this extract can be compared to passages of
parallel thirds written on the stave as described in point 2 above, or at
least to those such as Examples 3 and 4, where a certain amount is left to
the player’s imagination.
These observations suggest that, while we should not forget that
the very nature of figuring ensures that its function remains primarily
35
(a)
(b)
Example 10. Extract from Blow’s ‘Lift up your heads’: (a) Gostling’s organ
part, Ob T 1180, p. 6; (b) autograph full score, Bu 5001, f. 111.
36
(a)
(b)
Example 11. Extract from Purcell’s ‘It is a good thing to give thanks’: (a) Blow’s
organ part, Mp 35, f. 8v; (b) full score, in the hand of Gostling, AUS 85, p. 69
(front end).
harmonic, figuring in these organ books can also inform the player
about inner melodic lines; for this reason, we can perceive a certain
amount of overlap and interchangeability between inner parts notated
on the stave and those represented in figures. Further evidence of a
close relationship between the melodic lines of inner parts and figuring
can be seen in the habit of some scribes – particularly Gostling among
those whose work has been analysed here – of writing figures in what
we would consider to be non-standard order. Where Gostling writes,
say, 4–6 in place of 6–4, it is usually the case that placing the 4 above the
6 better reflects the disposition of the inner parts in that chord: in his
copy of Blow’s ‘Turn us again’ in Ob T 1180, twelve out of fifteen such
‘inverted’ figures relate to the order of notes in the inner parts.15
15 Although there are isolated examples of inverted figures in Blow’s autographs (such as
in Example 19(a) below), Blow does not seem to have shared this approach to figuring in
general: where Gostling uses ‘inverted’ figuring in pieces for which organ parts also
survive in Blow’s hand, Blow maintains what we would consider the standard format of
placing the larger interval above the smaller. This is true even in pieces such as the Mp 35
set, which is generally acknowledged to have been Gostling’s source for some of the
material in the Tenbury organ books, implying that Gostling must purposefully have
inverted the figures during copying. If he had been copying the organ parts uniquely from
Mp 35, this would make it unlikely that he inverted the figures to try to represent the parts
more accurately. However, there is evidence that he also had a set of vocal parts belonging
with Mp 35 available to him – not least because the Tenbury books themselves include
partbooks, but also because there are occasional extra text incipits included in Gostling’s
copies (for example, in Purcell’s ‘The Lord is King’, ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’ and ‘O sing
unto the Lord’). It must be conceded, however, that Gostling could conceivably have
included such incipits from his own memory of performing the anthems.
37
In exactly the same way as for parts written on the stave, figuring
that doubles voice parts – whether to inform the player about the
harmonic language of the piece or melodic lines or both – cannot
provide direct evidence of the notes that organists actually played.
While it might be easy to assume that figures were designed to be
realized, this was not necessarily the case: indeed, as Williams points
out, Werckmeister in 1698 specifically indicates that some figures are
intended to tell the organist what not to play.16 Arnold translates the
relevant passage from the undated second edition of Die nothwendigsten
Anmerckungen und Regeln wie der Bassus continuus oder General-Bass
wohl könne tractiert werden:
It is also not advisable that one should always just blindly play, together with
the vocalists and instrumentalists, the dissonances which are indicated in the
Thorough-Bass, and double them: for when the singer expresses a pleasing
emotion by means of the dissonance written, a thoughtless accompanist may, if
he walk not warily, spoil all the beauty with the same dissonance: therefore the
figures and dissonances are not always put in in order that one should just
blindly join in with them; but one who understands composition can see by
them what the composer’s intention is, and how to avoid countering them with
anything whereby the harmony might be injured.17
It is not entirely clear whether Werckmeister intends this comment to

apply to thoroughbass accompaniment of solo music or ensembles, or
both: at first he cautions against always playing with vocalists and
instrumentalists in the plural; but then he describes the detrimental
effect of doubling a dissonance sung by the singer. In any case, it would
be dangerous to assume that comments made by a German theorist
about an apparently unspecified genre at the very end of the
seventeenth century should apply to English sacred music throughout
the previous forty years. But is it possible that at least some figures in
the organ books on which we are concentrating functioned in this way?
There seems to be one very good reason to question this thesis:
16 Williams, Figured Bass Accompaniment, i, 72.
17 Quoted in Arnold, The Art of Accompaniment, 210. Arnold gives the original text as
follows: ‘Es ist auch nicht rathsam, dass man allemahl die Dissonantien, so im General-
Bass angedeutet werden, mit den Vocalisten und Instrumenten so crasse hinmache und
verdoppele: Denn wenn durch die gesezte Dissonanz der Sänger einen anmuthigen
affectum exprimiret: so kann ein unbesonnener General-Bassiste, wenn er nicht behutsam
gehet, alle Lieblichkeit verderben: darum sind die Signaturen und Dissonantien nicht
allemahl gesezet dass man sie so crasse mitmache, sondern ein Composition-Verständiger
kan sehen, was des Autoris Meynung sey, und wie er nichts dagegen bringe, wodurch die
Harmonia verlezet werde.’ Wulstan makes a not dissimilar comment about figures in some
passages of Purcell’s sonatas, which, he says, ‘are there to tell the continuo player what is
happening in the upper parts: so they might be descriptive rather than necessarily being
prescriptive’. See David Wulstan, ‘Purcell in Performance: I’, Leading Notes, 5/2 (1995),
10–13 (p. 11). Nevertheless, the figuring in Purcell’s autograph of the Ten Sonatas in Four
Parts (Lbl Add. MS 30930) is complex and contradictory (some sonatas containing very
full figuring, and others hardly any), so it is perhaps inappropriate to judge its function in
such a summary manner. For comments on the figuring in the autograph sonatas, see
Herissone, ‘The Theory and Practice of Composition’, 102.
38
while many of the figures included in the organ books represent

missing vocal parts, others do not; instead, they provide additional
harmonies, and sometimes even new melodic lines. Of course, one
could argue that players could have reacted to figures that double other
parts in a way different from independent figures. Where non-doubling
figures occur in distinct sections this would certainly be possible, and it
is significant in this respect that the most extensive passages of
independent figuring occur in solo verses, where they clearly have an
important function in providing additional melodic and harmonic
material. Copyists were generally very careful to include markings
distinguishing choruses from verses, and (often) ensemble verses from
solos, so one could suggest that, on the whole, players would have been
able to realize figures in solo verses while using those in choruses and
ensemble verses for information only.
In theory, then, it does not seem impossible that an organist could
have realized figures in solo sections but avoided those in choruses and
ensemble verses, at least after a certain amount of rehearsal. But this
idea works on the assumption that all figures in choruses and ensemble
verses double the voice parts and that realizing them would be
superfluous, or even, if we follow Werckmeister, undesirable. In
practice, however, this is not the case. Some figures occurring in
choruses and ensemble verses in these organ books are independent of
the parts, and express additional harmonies: often they enrich the
harmony with extra suspensions. These figures are entirely
indistinguishable from those that double the parts: indeed, they often
occur side by side as in Example 12. It is certainly possible to create a
correct harmonization without realizing the figures, but there is
obviously no point in the copyist including the figures if they are not to
be played in the organ part. The only reasonable assumption to make is
that these independent figures are there to be played; since there is no
distinction between these sorts of figures and those which double the
parts, it surely follows that all the figures included in the organ part are
there to be played.
In fact, when one considers the character of these organ books as a
whole, including both figuring and notated inner parts, it seems
abundantly obvious that they are designed to give as clear an outline as
possible of the harmonic and melodic framework of the piece, and that
organists would simply have used the given figures and notes to create
a correct realization. There is nothing like the consistency of figuring
that would be required if figures were intended to show the organist
what should not be played. This is emphasized by the fact that, as
mentioned above, different copies of the same piece do not retain the
same figures, and by the fluid interchangeability between notated and
figured inner parts. While it is probably an overstatement to suggest
that organists would always have realized every passage of figuring, I
39
(a)
(b)
Example 12. Extract from Blow’s ‘Lift up your heads’: (a) Gostling’s organ
part, Ob T 1180, p. 5; (b) autograph score, GB-Bu 5001, f. 110.
40
believe we can state confidently that figuring, within the context of

contributing to the harmonic and melodic profile of the music, was, on
the whole, included in accompaniments of this repertory.
number of voices played

We have established that inner-part doublings filling out the ‘top and
bottom’ skeleton of organ books can be included for several different
reasons in choruses and ensemble verses, particularly to show imitation
and passages of parallel thirds or sixths; figures, while concentrating
more on harmonic features, often share many of the same character-
istics. One result of this tendency is that the number of parts given on
the stave is usually inconsistent in these books: where imitation occurs,
for example, an extra part or two might be added, but will cease at the
end of the imitative passage or entry. It seems reasonable to assume that
it was part of the organist’s job to create consistency of texture in his
realization – and variations in the number of parts played would have
had a significant effect on the volume of sound produced by the
instrument – but it is often very difficult to tell from the notation alone
how many parts a typical realization might include, so how many notes
might have been added by the organist to any particular chord. Matters
are made more complex because there is very little surviving evidence
about registration for this repertory, so we do not know to what extent
stop changes might have been used to create contrasts of volume.
Nevertheless, if we assume for a moment that the organist did play the
notated right-hand part in at least most sections, there are some textural
characteristics suggested by the standard and maximum number of
parts included in the organ books.
The examples given above help to demonstrate that, while a small
minority of choruses and ensemble verses are notated with only outer
parts almost throughout, most contain a mixture of two and three parts,
with four being added not infrequently. In Examples 3(a), 8(a) and
12(a), two parts predominate, but three are more prevalent in Examples
4(a), 5(a), 6(a), 9(a), 10(a) and 11(a). Clearly there are some contexts in
which three parts is the maximum playable (still assuming the right-
hand part is played as written): in the sequences of suspensions in
Example 9(a), for instance, it is not possible to maintain a consistent
fourth part added to the given three; and in bars 23–3 and 9–112 in
Example 12(a) only one extra part can be fitted between the notated
outer parts. Elsewhere, however, there is plenty of evidence from the
notation to suggest that four-part texture was sometimes used: it is
frequent in Example 7(a), stands out in a single chord in Example 11(a),
and also occurs when figures are realized alongside inner parts in
Example 4(a). Even where doublings and figures themselves produce
only three parts, four are sometimes implied. In Example 6(a), for
instance, the sequence of figures can only be realized musically if four
parts are used: the first figure 7 in bar 3 requires preparation with a g’ in
41
bar 24, which has to be added above the E b indicated by the figure 6;
similarly, the figure 4 in bar 4 must be prepared with a Bb on beat 2,
played in addition to the Gb indicated by the figuring. It is hardly
surprising that this should be the case, since the figures are drawn from
both the alto and tenor parts on the score (shown in Example 6(b)).18
The implication, then, is that most chorus and ensemble verses
were probably realized in three and four parts. The best evidence that
this was indeed the normal texture is provided by Purcell’s realization
(a)
(b)
18 We cannot, of course, be absolutely certain that organists would have paid attention to
the niceties of voice-leading and dissonance preparation in their realizations; however,
we can be reasonably confident that they knew the rules for preparation, since they are
ubiquitous in contemporary theory – at this time in England mainly aimed at amateurs –
which suggests that those with professional training would also have been taught them.
On theoretical accounts of dissonance and suspensions in English theory from this period,
see Herissone, Music Theory, 155 and 157–64.
42
Example 13. Extract from Blow’s ‘God is our hope and strength’: (a) the
opening of Purcell’s organ part, Och 554, f. 3; (b) full score, in the hand of
Gostling, AUS 85, p. 17 (reverse end).
of Blow’s eight-part full anthem ‘God is our hope and strength’, which
survives in an isolated copy in Och 554; the opening is given in Example
13(a),19 with the doublings in Purcell’s copy marked on the extract from
the full score in Example 13(b). Purcell’s organ part carefully follows the
entries of all eight parts, but – presumably because he wanted to make
sure his part was playable – he retains only three or four parts at a time.
At first this means dropping one part to make way for another’s entry,
but once all eight voices are singing, from bar 7 of the example, he
extracts significant bars and phrases from each part, never exceeding
four at a time.
Although three and four parts seem to have been the norm for most
realizations, there are one or two examples in which more voices are
given in organ parts. In Blow’s full-with-verse anthem ‘Praise the Lord,
O my soul’, for example, five parts are given in a single chord at ‘I will
sing praises’ (Example 14). Musically, this phrase is a climactic point in
the first full section of the anthem, coinciding with the registral peak on
f ” in the medius part, and it seems likely that Blow decided to thicken
19 This extract is almost identical to the part given by Church in the Chapel Royal organ
book Lbl 27.a.13, p. 129, which may suggest that Purcell’s part was Church’s source, and
certainly supports the argument for no more than four-voice texture in this piece.
43
the texture at this point in order further to strengthen the music.

Without wishing to place too much significance on a single example, it
is perhaps not unreasonable to assume that five-part realizations were
reserved for isolated chords or short passages such as these, where extra
emphasis was required.20
(a)
(b)
sic
Example 14. Extract from Blow’s ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’: (a) autograph
organ part, Cfm 116, p. 155; (b) vocal parts, in the hand of Gostling, Ob T 1176–9,
pp. 34 (Medius Decani), 35 (Contratenor Cantoris), 34 (Tenor Cantoris) and 35
(Bassus Cantoris).
It is difficult to state with confidence how many voices may have

been used in smaller ensemble verses such as duets, and particularly in
solo verses, where the question of part doubling is, in any case, much
thornier (see Chapter 3 below). Notated part doublings obviously
confine the texture on the score to no more than two or three parts,
depending on the number of singers. While on the one hand it could be
argued that organists would have fleshed out this texture to fill in
missing notes from the chords, it is also possible that they may have
preferred textures thinner than four parts so as to avoid overpowering
20 Nevertheless, it is perhaps significant that Blow specifically recommends four- and
five-part texture in his Rules for playing of a Through Bass, when he gives ‘A rule of playing
in 4 or 5 parts, 3 with the right hand 2 with the left’ (Arnold, The Art of Accompaniment from
a Thorough-Bass, 168 (Rule [15])). Locke, on the other hand, consistently uses three-part
texture in Melothesia, the inner part sometimes occurring in the right hand and sometimes
in the left; and in Keller’s and Prencourt’s treatises bass parts are realized with two or
three parts in the right hand.
44
the singers. The fact that the greatest proportion of independent figures
occurs where the number of voices is fewest (see ‘Figuring’ above)
strongly suggests that extra material was improvised by the organist, so
we can probably make an educated guess that at least three voices may
have been common. Unfortunately, because such figuring is relatively
rare and is certainly not systematic, we cannot determine with any
certainty the maximum number of parts typically used.
One additional factor that needs to be taken into account when
considering possible differences between the textures used by organists
to accompany choruses or large ensemble verses and those used for, say,
duets and solos, is the issue of registration. Changes of manual, or in the
combinations of stops used on an organ, potentially have a strong
impact on the volume produced by the instrument, and players could
have adapted to variations in the vocal forces used by this means as
well as, or instead of, altering the number of voices played in their
accompaniment. There is information surviving about the specific-
ations of some of the organs housed in the major London sacred
establishments for which the organ books being considered in this
study were copied; the more ambitious of them would certainly have
been capable of considerable contrast. Relatively little is known about
the organ built for the chapel at Whitehall by Robert Dallam in 1664, but
it is described in court records as a ‘faire doble organ’, so had two
manuals, and could only be accommodated after the organ loft had
been extended;21 even the relatively modest organ of Westminster
Table 1. List of stops included in the specification for St Paul’s Cathedral
organ completed in 1697 by Bernard Smith.
Great Chayre Echo
Open diapason Quinta Dena Diapason Diapason

Open diapason Stop diapason Principal
Stop diapason Principall Nason
Principall Hol fleut ffifteenth
Hol fleut Great Twelfth Cornet
Great Twelfth Fifteenth Trumpet
ffifteenth Cimball
Small Twelfth Voice Humaine
Cornet Crum horne
Mixture
Sesquialtera
Trumpet
21 After the Whitehall fire of 1698, this organ was replaced by an organ built by Bernard
Smith for the Banqueting House chapel including three manuals, with ten stops on the
great organ, five on the chair and four on the echo. See Andrew Freeman, Father Smith,
otherwise Bernard Schmidt, being an Account of a Seventeenth Century Organ Maker, edited,
annotated and with new material by John Rowntree (first published 1926; rev. edn.,
Oxford, 1977), 13, 38–9 and 113; see also Spink, Restoration Cathedral Music, 104.
45
Abbey had two manuals and a reasonable set of stops, at least by 1694.22
By far the grandest instrument, however, was the new three-manual
organ completed by Bernard Smith for St Paul’s Cathedral in 1697, for
which the list of stops specified in the original contract is given in
Table 1.23
What is much less clear, however, is how such stops would have
been used when accompanying service settings and anthems in the
Restoration period. English organ-book manuscripts from around the
1710s onwards regularly include stop markings and indications of the
manual used. The Ely Cathedral organ books Cu 2 and 4, in the hand of
James Hawkins (1682–1729), for instance, contain instructions such as
‘Eccho’, ‘Diapasons’ and ‘Gt: organ’ marked against specific passages,24
and similar markings are also found in early eighteenth-century organ
books from Windsor and Eton.25 In the later repertories of the Chapel
Royal books copied by Church, stop markings are particularly
associated with obbligato sections for right-hand organ,26 and they are
also used for this purpose in anthems by Clarke and Croft copied by
Gostling in Ob T 1180–2.27 As will be shown in Chapter 4, however,
there is good evidence to suggest that styles of organ accompaniment
were changing in the early eighteenth century, so it seems dangerous to
try to associate indications in manuscripts from this period with
accompaniments designed for an earlier repertory.
Unfortunately, Restoration organ books themselves are virtually
devoid of information relating to registration.28 There are some stop
markings included by Blow in Mp 35 – particularly interesting because
they can be related directly to the stop list for the St Paul’s organ given
above29 – but these tell us relatively little about combinations that might
22 Spink notes that the list of work carried out on the instrument by Bernard Smith in
1694 ‘sounds like the addition (rather than the replacement or enlargement) of a second
manual to the old organ’, so the Westminster organ may have remained single-manual
until towards the end of the period; see ibid., 291.
23 The list is quoted from Freeman, Father Smith, 34.
24 See Cu 2, p. 34 in the anthem ‘O give thanks’, by Hawkins himself. ‘Eccho’ has been
scrubbed out by a later annotator.

25 I am grateful to Dr Keri Dexter for information on the markings in these books, and
for advice on registration in Mp 35 and more generally.

26 One such instance is shown in Example 26, below, from Cfm 152, which includes the
marking ‘Trumpet Stop’.

27 Gostling’s copy of Clarke’s ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’, for example, contains the
marking ‘Organ trumpet’, while the same composer’s ‘I will love thee’ includes ‘Trumpet
stop’; Croft’s ‘Send down thine hand’ also has the marking ‘Trumpet’.
28 There are, for example, no instructions about registrations appropriate for different
combinations of voices comparable to those given in some Italian publications from the
early seventeenth century. For details of some of these, including Monteverdi’s prescribed
registrations for the 1610 Vespers, see Arnaldo Morelli, ‘Basso Continuo on the Organ in
Seventeenth-Century Italian Music’, Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis, 18 (1994),
31–45, esp. 36.
29 That is, assuming Shay and Thompson’s assertion that Mp 35 was copied for the
reopening of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1697 (see Introduction above) is correct.
46
have been used to accompany voices because they all relate to sections
for organ alone. In Purcell’s ‘Blessed are they that fear the Lord’, the
solo bass verse ‘The Lord thy God from out of Sion’, which originally
included an accompaniment for two violins, is set so that the violin
parts are given in organ right hand, with the stop marking ‘Flute
Ecco’.30 A similar rearrangement of parts originally for strings occurs in
Purcell’s ‘O sing unto the Lord’, where the instrumental interpolations
between phrases in the chorus ‘Glory and worship are before him’ are
marked ‘Ecco Organ’ and ‘soft Organ’, while the sections doubling the
chorus are given as ‘Cho.’ and ‘loud’.31 The same effect is notated in
Blow’s ‘Thy mercy, O Lord’ at the chorus ‘O continue forth thy loving
kindness’.32 The markings ‘Organ Cornett’ and ‘Cornett’ in Blow’s own
anthem ‘The Lord is king’ also relate to phrases for organ alone,
occurring between the solo alto’s entries in the verse ‘O ye that love the
Lord’.33 What these markings do tell us is that relatively rapid changes
between manuals were used in Restoration anthems. Blow almost
certainly marks them in the examples listed above because he needs to
make it clear to the organist (presumably Blackwell) that the obbligato
passages should be played on a solo stop, which also means it is
important that these sections are clearly distinguished from
accompanimental passages.34 Obviously the same principles do not
apply directly to chorus and verse sections without independent
accompaniment, but contrast between manuals is strongly implied by
the alternating ‘soft’ and ‘loud’ markings in the three-part ATB
‘alleluias’ and the following organ rearrangement of the string
ritornello in Purcell’s ‘It is a good thing to give thanks’.35 It does not
seem to stretch the point to suggest that such principles may have been
used as a matter of course (therefore without the need for markings
notated on the part) to distinguish between, say, large-scale choruses
and small ensemble verses.36
30 This is presumably the Nason stop on the Echo organ; see Mp 35, f. 6v.
31 See ibid., f. 11. The later chorus, ‘The Lord is king’, contains the same annotations.
32 See ibid., f. 12v.
33 See ibid., ff. 1 and 1v; the same markings also occur in the full score of the anthem in
Gostling’s AUS 85, pp. 112–13, reverse end.

34 One could offer the same interpretation of the markings given in Blow’s autograph
copy of ‘Awake, awake, utter a song’, a full score now preserved as part of Cfm 240. As
well as including some solo-stop markings similar to those in Mp 35, the anthem includes
a bass solo verse, ‘They that are deliv’red from the noise of archers’, which alternates
instructions to play on the ‘Chear’ or ‘Chear Organ’ (occurring where the voice is also
singing), with those for ‘sex[quialter]’, which occur for the left-hand interpolations
between bass phrases; see Cfm 240, p. 30.
35 See Mp 35, f. 9; the dynamic markings also occur in Gostling’s full score AUS 85, pp.
74–5.
36 The clearly distinguished, often brief, alternations between Cantoris and Decani, or
between full and verse sections in service settings of this period, would also seem to lend
themselves to this sort of contrast. In Blow’s autograph of his Morning Service in A minor
in Cfm 116 it is noticeable that, as well as alternating ‘loud’ and ‘soft’ markings, he also
juxtaposes ‘soft’ with ‘Full’ on p. 74.
47
2
Alteration and Addition of
Material
If we accept that figuring included in the organ books is generally
intended to be realized, and that there is often little or no distinction
made between doubled inner parts and figures, it is logical to assume
that the organist also played at least most of the notated inner parts.
And if he played the inner parts it would have been a strange
accompaniment indeed if he had avoided playing the uppermost part
in the right hand, especially since it would often have had the same
imitative points as those notated in the inner parts. So did con-
temporary organists actually include in their accompaniments not only
the notated bass line but also the given right-hand line? If so, it would
represent a significant departure from the realizations created by the
most experienced editors in the field, and it therefore requires careful
justification. While there are some contexts in which exact doubling of
right-hand parts seems unlikely, I believe that there is substantial
evidence to support the principle of including both left- and right-hand
notated parts in keyboard realizations for a good deal of Restoration
sacred music. This evidence falls into two main categories: the way in
which doubled vocal lines are adapted for inclusion in organ parts, and
the way in which independent material is added in the right-hand
stave.
adaptation of doubled vocal lines

While many passages of doubled melodic lines in organ books are
reproduced exactly, it is common for the most florid passages to be
simplified. Several of the examples given in Chapter 1, indeed,
demonstrate this tendency: it is clearest in the melismatic passages for
two trebles in Blow’s ‘Bring unto the Lord’ in Example 8(a) and (to a
lesser extent) in Example 3(a); another example occurs in the initial
tenor entry in Example 2(a), from Purcell’s ‘It is a good thing to give
thanks’. Repeated melodic notes are also often replaced by longer notes
adding up to the same value. This sort of simplification does not occur
consistently – and there are many examples of the same melodic figure
being written out literally on one occasion within a piece, but altered
elsewhere – but it is very frequent in solo, verse and chorus sections;
one instance is given in Example 9.
The resulting organ parts are a kind of melodic reduction of the
voice parts. But why might the lines have been simplified in this way?
Alteration and Addition of Material
There seem to be three obvious possibilities: first, such reduction does

make it easier for the player to grasp the harmonic structure of the
music, so it might have been intended just to make the harmonic outline
clearer (not necessarily suggesting that the reductions would have been
played); this would also tie in with the idea of doubled parts in organ
books simply giving an overview of the vocal parts.1 Second, the
melodic outlines are more idiomatic to the organ, particularly those that
have been adapted to remove repeated notes. Third, the melodic
outlines of melismatic passages in solo sections are significantly less
likely to detract from the virtuosity of the singer than literal doubling:
the simplified doubling of the vocal line in the organ part thus supports
the soloist without upstaging him, and problems of ensemble are
avoided at the same time.2 Both the second and third interpretations
obviously support the argument that the adapted lines are intended to
be played.
There does not seem to be any strong evidence from the organ
books to argue in favour of or against any one of these possible
explanations, and, of course, it is by no means unlikely that melodic
simplification could serve all three purposes; on their own, then, these
kinds of alterations to doubled melodic lines cannot tell us whether or
not organists played the doubled lines. It is worth noting, however, that
continuo bass lines in many Restoration sources are versions of the bass
voice line simplified in exactly the same way as these parts, and we
obviously do know that these are supposed to be played. Moreover, the
possibility that such reduction might be designed to make organ parts
more idiomatic assumes greater significance when we consider other
ways in which organ-book arrangers ensure that their parts fit well
under the hands. They sometimes, for example, avoid doubling parts
where they converge onto a unison. Gostling does this twice in his
organ part to Blow’s full-with-verse anthem ‘O God, wherefore art thou
absent’ in Cfm 669. In the ATB verse ‘Think upon the tribe of thine
inheritance’ he produces a short score, with the alto and tenor parts in
the right hand and bass in the left hand; but where alto and tenor meet
on the pitch d’, Gostling writes only a direct for the tenor; four bars later,
in the ensuing chorus, he prevents the two trebles meeting on g’ by
altering the second treble’s semibreve to a minim (Example 15).
Another type of concession to the keyboard player is the way in
which inner-part doublings are distributed between the hands in
choruses and ensemble verses. Where inner parts are included –
usually, as we have seen, where particular features such as imitation
and passages of parallel thirds occur – care is often (though not always)
taken to avoid difficult or impossible stretches in either hand. In the
final chorus of his anthem ‘Lord, how are they increased’, for instance
1 Of course, it also takes less effort on the part of the organ-book arranger to write out a
simplified line than it does to copy highly decorative parts.

2 I am grateful to Geoffrey Webber for his comments on possible interpretations of the
adaptations.
49
(a)
(b)
Example 15. Extract from Blow’s anthem ‘O God, wherefore art thou absent’:
(a) Gostling’s organ part, Cfm 669, p. 14; (b) Gostling’s full score, AUS 85, p. 15
(reverse end).
(Example 16), Blow not only excludes slightly awkward doublings such
as the quavers in the alto in bar 2 of the extract, he also makes sure that
those doublings he does include fit within the compass of the hand.
Thus, in bar 8 of the extract, rather than including the b of the alto part
on ‘enemies’ in the right hand (where it would entail a stretch of an
eleventh), he places it in the left hand, resuming the alto in the right
hand at the end of the bar, where it can easily be played with the treble.
The note does occur in the tenor at this point also, forming part of the
tenor entry on ‘thou smitest all mine enemies’, but the right-hand part is
nevertheless striking for the omission of this single, unplayable note,
which is simply passed into the left hand, giving the impression to the
listener of a single, uninterrupted alto doubling.
An important related phenomenon is the inclusion of some inner-
part doublings an octave higher or lower than their sung pitch.
Although I have not found especially numerous examples of this
approach to doubling, the habit was one adopted by most of the
London organ-book scribes, including the most significant contributor,
Blow, the prolific Gostling, and more minor figures such as Humfrey
(shown in Example 5). It is very difficult to find a reason why these
50
(a)
(b)
Example 16. Extract from Blow’s ‘Lord, how are they increased’: (a) autograph
organ part, Cfm 152, f. 19; (b) full score, in the hand of John Gostling, AUS 85,
pp. 46–7 (reverse end).
51
(a)
(b)
Example 17. Extract from Turner’s ‘O praise the Lord’: (a) Gostling’s organ
part, Ob T 1180, p. 388; (b) full score of the first version, in the hand of James
Hawkins, Lbl Add. 31445, f. 95v.
52
arrangers would have gone to the trouble of changing the parts’

registers if their organ books merely contained skeleton scores to be
used for reference purposes: if the organist was not playing the doubled
parts, but simply using them to establish the harmonic framework of
the piece (and perhaps to ensure he knew a little about the textural and
melodic context within which he was working), what point could there
have been in transposing a part? Although it is possible that the scribes
simply included the pitches without concern for the register in which
they occur in the vocal parts, this would seem to be contradicted by
Gostling’s copy of Turner’s ‘O praise the Lord’ in Ob T 1180, in which he
twice ensures there is a smooth transition from one register to the other
in the right-hand doubling of the bass voice part by adding new,
independent notes (Example 17).3 It is difficult to see why such
reworking would have been thought necessary had the doublings been
used merely for information about the verse’s harmonization.
independent material added to vocal sections

If the simplification of melodic lines and the careful adaptation of
doublings suggests the doubled parts might have been played, the
inclusion of independent writing unique to the organ part in vocal
sections of the music makes this idea even more probable. It should be
noted that such independent material is not used by all the organ-part
arrangers here under consideration – it is mainly confined to
accompaniments by Blow, especially those in Mp 35 – but he was not
the only scribe to include it: Gostling incorporates independent
passages in several pieces in Ob T 1180–2 (of which two very minor
instances have already been demonstrated in Example 17), and there
are isolated examples in the Chapel Royal books copied by Church as
well.4 It is, of course, generally acknowledged that Gostling used
Blow’s organ parts in Mp 35 as a source for the Tenbury organ books,5
but independent writing in Tenbury is not confined to the pieces it
shares with this manuscript, and differences between Gostling’s and
Blow’s organ parts for some pieces suggest strongly that Gostling used
alternative sources or created his own independent parts on some
occasions.6
It would be dangerous to conclude from the addition of some
3 Turner’s anthem ‘O praise the Lord’ appears to have existed in three different
versions. Gostling’s organ book and the related incomplete parts in Ob T 1176–9 contain
the second version of the piece, for which no complete full score survives. Hawkins’s full
score in Lbl Add. 31445 comprises the first version of the piece. It has been given here for
comparison because the first and second versions are largely identical in this verse. For a
full account of the different versions of this piece, see Rebecca Herissone, ‘The Revision
Process in William Turner’s Anthem O Praise the Lord’, Journal of the Royal Musical
Association, 123 (1998), 1–38.
4 These occur in anthems by Locke, and are discussed in Chapter 5 below.
5 See Introduction, n. 58.
6 See Example 20 below for one instance where Blow’s and Gostling’s arrangements
differ and where they both include independent lines in the organ part.
53
independent writing by some scribes – albeit those who were most

prolific in creating material for London sacred establishments – that all
notes written above the bass line in organ parts were intended to be
incorporated into the organist’s accompaniment. But – if we follow the
same argument as was used for independent figuring above – there
seems little point in an arranger going to the trouble of writing new
material for the organ part if he did not intend it to be played: otherwise
it would be a feature of the notation alone, and would be entirely lost
from the music. And the crucial observation in this respect is that
independent material in vocal sections is never distinguished from
ordinary doublings on the stave; rather, it is seamlessly incorporated
around part doublings and it is difficult to see how even an organist
very familiar with the music (and of course some of these pieces may
well have been accompanied by the composer himself) would
consistently have been able to distinguish independent writing from
doublings so that the extra material could be played while the
doublings were not.7 And even though independent writing is most
commonly found in books associated with St Paul’s (Mp 35 and Ob T
1180–2), some is also included in other organ books, such as Cfm 116
(see Example 20(c) below); moreover, the types of accompaniments
found in these three books are not inherently different from Purcell’s
organ part in Och 554, the fragments in Cfm 669, or most of the
Restoration music in Cfm 152 and Lbl 27.a.13–15: the majority of the
accompaniments in all these manuscripts have basically the same
character, and it seems difficult to imagine an organist using them in
different ways.
It is conceivable that these extra parts are included merely to clarify
particular harmonic progressions – that is, to provide harmonic
information allowing the organist to create the correct chords above the
bass line – and that they were not, therefore, intended to be realized
exactly as notated (or at least not necessarily). But this argument is
surely contradicted by the fact that Blow and Gostling do not just add
new pitches, they write genuinely shaped melodic lines; moreover, the
new material does not always, or even often, contribute to the harmonic
profile of the music, as will be seen in the examples given below.
Some independent lines, nevertheless, are probably best thought of
in harmonic terms. The most commonly found of these occur in florid
bass solos and comprise an added suspension at cadences where the
7 The same could also be said of a number of pieces originally conceived as symphony
anthems which were arranged for accompaniment by organ alone by Blow in Mp 35.
Blow’s task in recasting these pieces not only involved replacing or reworking ritornelli, it
also entailed incorporating obbligato accompaniments into some verses. If one compares,
for example, the first verse of his anthem ‘Thy mercy, O Lord’ in Mp 35 (f. 12) against
Gostling’s full score in AUS 85 (p. 59, front end), it becomes clear that, where extracts of
the two violin parts are included between vocal phrases, they are not always
distinguished from vocal doublings on the stave. For more detail on the nature of Blow’s
arrangements of symphony anthems in Mp 35, see Dexter, ‘The Restoration ‘Symphony’
Anthem in Organ Transcription’, 6–18 and 26–9.
54
(a)
(b)
Example 18. Extract from Purcell’s ‘The way of God’: (a) Blow’s organ part,
Mp 35, f. 3v; (b) full score, in the hand of Gostling, AUS 85, p. 96 (reverse end).
solo vocal line descends to double the organ bass part. A typical
instance is given in Example 18. The added part here is effectively just
an alternative way of notating the independent figures 7–#6 which
occur in Gostling’s full score. In the same way as the figures in the full
score were intended to be included in the realization as an extra
dimension to the harmony, these notes too were surely to be played.
In Blow’s copy of Purcell’s ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’ (Example
19), the second of two added 4–3 cadences in the phrase ‘even to the
place which thou hast appointed’ in the opening bass solo verse leads
straight into a more extended passage of independent writing, and it is
difficult to see how the organist might have been able to distinguish the
cadential cliché from the more significant material. In the last two bars
of the extract the new right-hand organ part is obviously given because
the bass voice sings in unison with the organ left-hand part, and this is
one place where one might assume the independent writing was
mainly included to give extra harmonic information. However, Blow
55
(a)
(b)
Example 19. Extract from Purcell’s ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’: (a) Blow’s
organ part, Mp 35, f. 7v; (b) full score, in the hand of Gostling, AUS 85, p. 112
(front end).
not only makes use, in bar 5 of the extract, of the dotted-

crotchet–quaver–crotchet rhythm that characterizes the vocal phrase,
he also includes the rising-fourth motif with which it is associated –
even though, from a purely harmonic perspective, the most obvious
notes to write would have been f #–g–a. An added melodic line which
imitates its surrounding vocal material can surely only have been
designed to have been part of the realization.8
Indeed, independent lines in organ parts are not only used to
imitate vocal music that has already been heard, some also set up new
dialogue between the organ and a voice part. A good example of this
occurs in Gostling’s version of Blow’s full anthem ‘My God, my God’
where, as shown in Example 20, an independent scalic figure is
introduced in the left-hand organ part in anticipation of the tenor’s
entry in bar 3 of the extract. Again, there would be no reason for the
organist to know to play one scale and not the other, especially within
the generally imitative character of a full anthem such as this. In
contrast to the anthems in Ob T 1180–2 for which Blow’s organ
arrangement was his source, here Gostling seems to have worked
8 The more conjunct melodic line would nevertheless have created a clumsily
meandering melodic line in the last three bars of the extract. I am grateful to Bruce Wood
for this observation.
56
independently: an organ part in Blow’s hand survives in Cfm 116, and,

while it is very similar in its general character to Gostling’s organ part, it
is clearly not Gostling’s source. Interestingly, Blow also adds some
independent writing at this point, likewise suggesting imitation with
the ensuing tenor entry, though less conspicuously so (Example 20(c)).
I have already noted that the greatest concentration of independent
figures occurs in solo verses, where there is considerable scope for
adding to the melodic and harmonic material given on the stave.9
Similarly, independent writing on the stave itself is most frequently
used to augment solo verses, and there is clearly more need for material
unique to the organ part in this context than in a larger ensemble verse
or chorus, where part doublings alone can create a rich accompaniment
and where there is less need to fill in the harmonic canvas. Never-
theless, Example 20 demonstrates that independent writing was by
(a)
(b)
(c)
Example 20. Extract from Blow’s full anthem ‘My God, my God’:
(a) Gostling’s organ part, Cfm 669, p. 8; (b) Blow’s autograph full score, Lbl
Add. 30932, p. 462; (c) Blow’s autograph organ part, Cfm 116, p. 220.
9 See p. 34 above.
57
no means reserved for solo verses. In fact, as well as isolated examples

in full anthems, both Blow and Gostling regularly incorporate
independent notes and melodic lines into ensemble verses; a typical
example, taken from Gostling’s organ part for the opening ATTB verse
of Humfrey’s ‘Hear my crying, O God’, is given in Example 21. Again,
as is the case for independent figures, there seems no way in which the
organist could have known to play the notes unique to the organ part
while omitting straightforward part doublings.
Not all independent writing in these organ books is obviously
melodic in its nature: some consists only of added inverted pedal notes,
or brief transitions between two doubled parts (though usually
entailing more than the single notes used in Example 17). Nor is it
possible to state that such added lines are used consistently.10 But I am
not aware of any examples of independent additions where the new
material does not seem to have taken account of doublings so that it fits
(a)
(b)
Example 21. Extract from Humfrey’s ‘Hear my crying, O God’: (a) Gostling’s
organ part, Ob T 1180, p. 86; (b) Blow’s full score, Och 628, pp. 64–5.
10 For example, in Blow’s copy of Purcell’s ‘Blessed are they that fear the Lord’, an
inverted pedal is added above a vocal melisma in the bass soloist’s phrase ‘And happy
shalt thou be’, but similar decoration in the phrase ‘Thy children like the olive branches’ a
few bars later is merely simplified in the organ part; compare Mp 35, f. 6v with the full
score in AUS 85, pp. 107–8 (front end).
58
well around them: all the evidence points to these organ-only parts
having been designed to contribute both harmonically and melodically
to the music, which suggests strongly that they were intended to be
played more or less as written. Since they are also essentially
indistinguishable from ordinary part doublings, the natural conclusion
to reach is that both independent lines and doublings in organ books of
this repertory would have been played by the organist as part of his
realization.
59
3
Distinctions between
Different Genres and Sections
The inclusion of independent writing in a range of different sacred
pieces copied by Blow and Gostling is undoubtedly an important factor
in establishing the relationship between the music notated in organ
books and what organists would have included in their accompani-
ments. Added to the supporting evidence of doublings that are
simplified and adapted to render them idiomatic to the instrument and
make them fit well under the hands, as well as the transposition of
doublings between octaves, this independent material does seem to
suggest strongly that organists would have followed the right- and left-
hand parts notated in organ books fairly closely. Moreover, the fact that
we can find adapted doublings or independent material in a wide range
of different contexts, covering different genres (full and verse anthems),
as well as different sections within genres (choruses, ensemble
verses and solos), indicates that notated parts were probably played in
most accompaniments regardless of the type of sacred music
being played. General comparisons between the organ parts provided
for particular genres and section types tend to support this
hypothesis.
service settings, full anthems and verse anthems

The marked differences of style and especially texture between, say, a
service setting and a full anthem clearly require us to consider the
possibility that distinct accompaniment styles might have been used for
each genre. Superficially, such differentiation would indeed appear to
have been made, because a typical service setting is notated mostly in
two parts (doubling the outer parts), whereas for a full anthem at least
one or two inner parts are likely to be included more or less
throughout.1 On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that such
differences in fact derive entirely from the texture of the pieces
themselves and are not inherently a result of genre distinction: services
tend to be quite simple and homorhythmic in style, whereas many full
anthems are predominantly imitative. Since, as we have established,
imitation is usually included in organ parts, involving the inclusion of
inner-part doublings, a piece that is fundamentally imitative in texture
1 Compare, for example, Blow’s copy of his Morning Service in A re b3 [A minor] in Cfm
116, p. 74 against his autograph part for the anthem ‘My God, my God’, on p. 220 of the
same manuscript.
Distinctions between Different Genres and Sections
is likely to include many such doublings. If we assume that the

doublings are played by the organist, it is certainly true that the style of
accompaniment created for the full anthem will be quite different from
that for the service setting, but this is not fundamentally because one is
a full anthem and the other is a service setting. This is clearly
demonstrated by full anthems that are homorhythmic, or that have
homorhythmic sections, where only outer parts are given.2 In terms of
the notation of the organ books, then, variance between organ parts is
based on texture, and there does not seem to be good evidence to
suggest basic differences between accompaniment styles appropriate
for service settings, full anthems and verse anthems.
choruses, ensemble verses and solos

One of Spink’s observations about Restoration organ books is that they
include markings identifying choruses, verses, and sections for cantoris
and for decani.3 There is nothing exceptional about such indications:
they are almost ubiquitous in all sources in the period, and are
symptomatic of the block-like approach to form taken in most English
genres at this time – structure was created through repetition and
contrast of discrete sections.4 In Restoration sacred music contrast
between sections was primarily (though by no means uniquely)
achieved through the juxtaposition of different groupings of voices,5
and, as discussed in Chapter 1 above, we can surely assume that the
organist would have contributed to the contrast by changing
registration so as not to drown out the distinction between, say, a four-
part chorus and a four-part verse. The need for sensitive choices of
registration is, of course, reason enough for section markings to have
been included in organ books, but is there any evidence that the style of
accompaniment, and the relationship between the organ part and the
voice parts, might have varied also?
There is no obvious differentiation in the organ books between the
notation given for choruses and that for ensemble verses; without
section markings, it would almost certainly be impossible to
distinguish between them. Although very occasionally there is a
tendency for more inner parts to be notated in verses than in choruses
within a piece, such examples are isolated, usually inconsistent, and
often explained by the predominance in verses of features such as
2 Within Cfm 116, these might include Blow’s copies of Batten’s anthem ‘Hast[e] thee,
O God’, on p. 60, and Tucker’s ‘O give thanks’, on p. 62.

3 Spink, Restoration Cathedral Music, 64; see also p. 4 above.
4 For more detailed discussion of structural principles in the Restoration period, see
Herissone, ‘The Theory and Practice of Composition’, 104–8.

5 In a genuine full anthem, of course, such contrast did not occur, but an increasing
number of so-called ‘full’ anthems in the period were actually ‘full with verse’: that is,
they opened and closed with a lengthy full section, but this was contrasted in the centre of
the piece by one or more verses. See Spink, Restoration Cathedral Music, 28–9.
61
imitation and parallel thirds/sixths.6 Obviously one cannot be certain

from the notation alone how many voices might have been added in the
realization. However, in terms of what is notated and its relationship to
the voice parts, the organ books do not provide convincing evidence to
suggest that organists might have adopted different accompaniment
styles for ensemble verses and choruses: if they doubled the voice parts
at all, it seems likely that they did so for both ensemble verses and for
choruses.
The doubling of some solo verses, however, is more problematical.
We have already established that both independent figuring and the
inclusion of independent writing on the stave are most prevalent in solo
verses, where they can be an important means of adding to the
harmonic and melodic framework of the doubled part. The player
cannot distinguish between this independent material and doubled
lines and figures, so it has been inferred that he would have played all
that is notated in the part, including the doubled solo part itself, which
is usually simplified to some extent; in addition, he would add material,
of which some would be indicated by figures but much would be
improvised, to fill in the harmony. In many solo verses this proposed
solution is entirely workable, but in some, particularly bass solos and
some others for low voice, the given right-hand part cannot be played
strictly as written. There are two fundamental problems: first, in some
cases it is impossible to realize figures without playing above the right-
hand line; second, the doubled bass solo part sometimes descends to a
register which seems too low for a right-hand part – indeed, it often
joins the instrumental bass line already written in the left-hand part.
This happens typically at cadences where independent writing such as
that shown in Example 19 is not added.
These two difficulties do not seem to me to be sufficient to indicate
that all independent writing in the right hand in solo sections was
included pointlessly because the right-hand part was not played. The
first, indeed, can be overcome quite simply.7 Examples 18, 19 and 21
show that organ-part arrangers frequently added independent writing
at the top of the texture, above the voice parts. Indeed, it may not be
coincidental that the majority of added passages in Blow’s and
Gostling’s organ books lie higher than the vocal lines: the implications
are both that the two organ-part arrangers wished to encourage some
consistency of tessitura, and that they felt there might be a need to notate
6 One example of such a distinction occurs in the autograph copy of Humfrey’s

Magnificat and Nunc dimittis in Cfm 152, although it is certainly not the case that all
chorus sections are in two parts while all verses are in three. We could also, perhaps,
include as examples Gostling’s copies of C. Gibbons’s ‘The Lord is my shepherd’,
Turner’s ‘O sing unto the Lord’, and Blow’s ‘I beheld, and lo’ and ‘I said in the cutting off
of my days’ in the Tenbury organ books.
7 I am grateful to Keri Dexter and Geoffrey Webber for their helpful comments on my
earlier proposed solution to this problem, which have helped in the development of this
refined version.
62
at least some added parts when they rose above part doublings, whereas
material falling between doubled lines on the two staves could more
straightforwardly be improvised. In any case, it is clear that there was no
objection in principle to the idea that the organ part might rise above the
voices. I established in Chapter 1 that figuring and notes given on the
stave are interchangeable in their function in these organ books – and
Example 18 demonstrates that independent figures could be expressed
alternatively as notes on the score – so it surely follows that figures could
also be realized above the vocal parts. Although it is perhaps dangerous
to draw comparisons with organ accompaniments that seem to
demonstrate a more extremely prescriptive style than the London books,
it is worth pointing out that written-out organ parts by Matthew Locke
and Benjamin Rogers show examples of precisely this technique of
adding independent material above relatively low part-doublings.8
Allowing figures to be realized above parts doubled in the right
hand partly solves the second problem, in that it enables the organist to
avoid unduly low tessitura, particularly if we assume that the melodic
lines implied by added figuring would have been continued by
improvisation at the same register in the normal fashion. What the
organist did when the right-hand part clashed with the left-hand part is
more difficult to determine with certainty. Bearing in mind the relatively
sophisticated instruments available to them,9 it is clear that the organists
of the principal London sacred institutions would have been able to
incorporate considerable flexibility and variety in their accompaniments.
Playing the left-hand part on one manual and the right-hand on another
would certainly have been possible and would have averted the problem
of the two parts becoming entangled with one another. However, this
solution results in some clumsy intervallic clashes between parts and
makes for an inflexible accompaniment, in which melodic lines cannot be
passed between the hands. It seems more likely that organists simply
omitted the notated right-hand parts for a few notes when they came into
conflict with the continuo bass given in the left hand.10
8 These are discussed in detail in Chapter 5 below. Locke does not include consistent
part-doubling in the two solo treble verses in his part for ‘How doth the city’, but does
add parts above doublings in low ensemble verses; Rogers includes both doubling and an
independent part above the solo voice in the bass solo verse of ‘Bow down thine ear, O
Lord’, and in the tenor solo verse of ‘I beheld, and lo’.
9 See pp. 45–6 above.
10 The French theorist Saint Lambert is the only writer on thoroughbass of whom I am
aware who explicitly mentions the avoidance of clashes between right and left hands in
this period. The context in which he writes involves the right-hand part being improvised
above a notated bass, so it is not entirely relevant here, although it still makes for
interesting reading. The passage from his Nouveau Traité reads as follows: ‘Quand le
progrés de la Basse & le mouvement contraire de l’Accompagnement ont tellement
rapproche les mains l’une de l’autre qu’elles s’en trouvent embarrassees; on peut & même
on doit remonter tout d’un coup la main droite, en faisant un intervalle aussi grande qu’il
en est besoin pour se degager; & quoique cela se fasse par mouvement semblable, & sur
un petit intervalle de Basse, il n’y point de mal, parceque la necessité la demande.’ (‘When
the progress of the Bass and the contrary motion of the Accompaniment have brought
63
It would seem, then, that the most appropriate way of interpreting

the notation of bass solos and similar sections for other low voices in
these Restoration organ books is to follow the notated right-hand line in
a flexible manner, so that part doublings and independent material are
played more or less as written, but awkward or impossible passages are
omitted as necessary. Notes can be added above the notated right-hand
part, to enrich the texture, provide necessary harmonic notes (including
those indicated by figures) and to ensure consistent tessitura. Some idea
of the principle behind this approach can be gained from Example 22,
which includes an editorial realization of the bass solo verse ‘Thou hast
girded me with strength’ from Blow’s copy of Purcell’s anthem ‘The
way of God’ in Mp 35.11 Although this verse only contains two brief
passages of independent writing, there are several phrases where the
bass voice line, as given in the right hand of Blow’s organ part, cannot
be played as notated because it collides with the left-hand part. In the
editorial realization, the essence of the doubled part is retained, but
Blow’s notation in the right-hand part is not followed entirely strictly,
and low notes close to or doubling the left-hand part are omitted; the
semiquavers in bars 3–4 of the extract are also simplified. The solo line
is passed from right to left hand freely throughout. Figures are realized
both hands close together so they collide; one can and one must raise the right hand at
once, making an interval large enough that it must make a break; and although that must
be done by similar motion, and on a small Bass interval, this is not bad, because necessity
demands it.’) Quoted and translated in Grundeen, ‘French Baroque Organ
Accompaniments’, 31; c.f. Saint Lambert, Nouveau traité de l’accompagnement du clavecin, de
l’orgue et des autres instruments (Paris, 1707), 59.
11 In this realization, on the bottom system of the example, only notes included in Blow’s
organ part are given in full-size notation. All editorial notes, including realized figures,
are in small notes.
64
65
Example 22. Extract from Purcell’s ‘The way of God’: Gostling’s full score,
AUS 85, p. 97 (reverse end) shown on top system; Blow’s organ part, Mp 35, ff.
3v–4 shown in middle system; editorial realization based on Blow’s organ part
shown on bottom system.
both above and below the written right-hand part, and non-figured
parts of the realization also rise above the solo line, so that there are no
dramatic changes in tessitura.
There is, of course, a certain amount of conjecture involved in this
proposed solution, and I cannot say beyond doubt that this is the way
that solo verses would have been accompanied. But it does seem to be
the most obvious and practical interpretation of solo verses in
Restoration organ parts – particularly those by Blow and Gostling: any
notation or figures unique to the organ part but indistinguishable from
doublings are likely to be included, since more or less all the notes and
figures on the page form part of the realization unless right and left
66
hands are very similar; nevertheless extreme changes of tessitura are

avoided, three or four parts are maintained consistently, and the
harmony is sufficiently full. Perhaps most importantly, it is entirely
plausible that an accompanist would have been able to improvise this
sort of realization with ease from Blow’s organ part in Mp 35. That such
an accompaniment style suggests a tendency towards less part-
doubling and more improvisation than seems generally characteristic
of the London organ books during this period may be indicative of the
beginnings of a shift towards independent, figured-bass style
accompaniments – a shift that is further emphasized in the later organ
parts discussed in Chapter 4. Certainly, the almost recitative-like style
of this solo section lends itself more readily to a free chordal
accompaniment than does the more contrapuntal part-writing of many
Restoration choruses and ensemble verses.
ritornelli
Ritornelli have so far been largely ignored in this book, since issues of
doubling and distinguishing between doubled and independent lines
are obviously irrelevant to sections for organ alone. They are, in fact,
relatively unproblematic for the continuo player, since the standard
format two-stave accompaniments in the London organ books virtually
always include right-hand parts for ritornelli – as, indeed, do a fair
number of parts otherwise notated with bass line only (discussed
below) – and these would almost certainly have been played as written.
The strongest evidence for this assumption is that, for verse anthems
conceived to be accompanied only by the organ, ritornelli in the organ
books are usually identical to the notation in full scores of the same
pieces, or at least very nearly so.12 Because the organist plays these
passages as a soloist, composers and organ-part arrangers seem to have
taken care to notate them accurately. Indeed, not infrequently the scribe
also includes simple ornamentation markings on the stave, and this
adds to the impression that these ritornelli should not be considered as
essentially improvisatory.
Further support for a fairly strict interpretation of the ritornelli
notated in organ books is provided by Blow’s approach to rearranging
12 To give just a few examples, compare the three ritornelli in Blow’s autograph organ
part for ‘Bring unto the Lord’ (Mp 35, f. 10r–v) against those in Gostling’s full score (AUS
85, pp. 185–9 (front end)); the complex final ritornello in Gostling’s organ part for Purcell’s
‘Blessed is the man’ (Ob T 1180, pp. 28–32) against that in his full score (AUS 85, pp. 58–62
(reverse end)); and Church’s copy of Purcell’s ‘O give thanks’ in the Chapel Royal organ
book Lbl 27.a.13, pp. 117–25) against Gostling’s full score (AUS 85, pp. 78–86 (reverse
end)). The last example shows perhaps the greatest degree of variance between ritornellos
in organ parts and full scores: two out of three bars in the second ritornello (following the
duet ‘Who can express noble acts’) have an imitative inner part included in the organ
book which is omitted in the full score. This inner part is included in Purcell’s autograph
organ part to the anthem in Cfm 152, and this part’s close relation in Lbl Add. 30931;
further comment on these parts is given below.
67
ritornelli in pieces originally conceived as symphony anthems which he

recast for accompaniment by organ alone in Mp 35. As has been well
documented by Dexter,13 Blow sometimes provided entirely new
ritornelli to replace those for strings, but he also sometimes drew on the
material of the original orchestral ritornelli. The significance of these
arrangements for us is that, rather than just taking the outer lines of the
string parts, or even reproducing them literally, Blow took care to make
them idiomatic for organ. This can be seen particularly in Example
23(a), which reproduces the ritornello following the verse ‘He bringeth
forth grass for the cattle’ from Purcell’s anthem ‘Praise the Lord, O my
soul’: Blow retains the essence of the scalic first violin part, but adds a
new sustained accompaniment for organ left hand.14
(a)
(b)
Example 23. Purcell’s ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’: (a) ritornello from Blow’s
arrangement, Mp 35, f. 7v; (b) extract from full score, in the hand of Gostling,
AUS 85, p. 113 (front end).
13 See Dexter, ‘The Restoration “Symphony” Anthem in Organ Transcription’, 14–19.

14 The annotations in the example, relating this ritornello to the original string version,
are derived from Dexter, ibid., 16.
68
It seems, then, that we can assume that the notes included in organ
book ritornelli should be played, but should any be added? The
occasional inclusion of figures within ritornelli suggests that it is
sometimes appropriate to fill in chords surrounding the notated parts.
However, many ritornelli are notated with three and four parts in the
organ books – often, but not always, including imitation and/or
parallel thirds or sixths in the same way as vocal sections in Restoration
sacred music; one cannot be entirely certain that extra parts would not
also have been added, but the ritornelli are usually harmonically and
texturally complete without, as is demonstrated by Example 24(a),
taken from the opening of Blow’s ‘Blessed be the Lord’. Where figures
are included, ritornelli tend to be notated in only two parts, as is
demonstrated in Example 24(b), from Blow’s ‘I will hearken’; these
examples imply a straightforward chordal realization, presumably
creating three or four parts to match the more fully notated ritornelli.
(a)
(b)
Example 24. Extract from Gostling’s organ part for (a) Blow’s ‘Blessed be the
Lord’, showing three- and four-part ritornello, Ob T 1180, p. 24; (b) Blow’s ‘I
will hearken’, showing two-part ritornello with figures; Ob T 1180, p. 98.
69
4
Incomplete Right-Hand Parts
and Figured-Bass Parts
There is some evidence – albeit inconsistent – from a number of unusual
organ parts in Cfm 152 that playing part doublings may occasionally
have been restricted to only some sections of the music. As is well known,
Purcell’s organ part to his anthem ‘O give thanks’, which dates from 1693,
is scored with space for both right- and left-hand parts throughout, but
Purcell left some of the right-hand staves blank. Most were subsequently
filled by another copyist – from the hand, an eighteenth-century scribe –
and the whole of the final page was recopied (as a ‘make good’ page) by
Church. Although there is no obvious reason for Purcell to have included
a stave for the right hand if he had no intention of filling it in, it seems that
he did not simply leave his organ part incomplete, since there is dense
autograph figuring in the left-hand-only sections.1 It is therefore
potentially significant that the right hand is omitted in a duet for alto and
bass, a four-part verse for TrATB and an alto solo, while it is always
included for choruses and ritornelli. However, Purcell also notates a
right-hand part in the opening section, in which the chorus alternates
with ATB verse; and the final TrATB verse – which concludes with entries
for chorus in the last few bars – also has parts for both hands notated.2
Assuming that we can rely on the authenticity of Church’s copying, the
overall result is curious: it is easy enough to accept a general principle
that parts in this piece might have been doubled in choruses while solos
and ensemble verses were accompanied by chords derived from the
figuring; but here the player would have had information about melodic
lines and (some) part movement and imitation for the final TrATB verse
while having no notation for the upper vocal parts in the earlier four-part
verse. It is difficult to see how a consistent accompanying style could
have been adopted in this piece even if, as Shay and Thompson suggest,
Purcell copied the part for his own use.3
1 This would seem to be supported by the existence of a copy of the organ part to ‘O
give thanks’ in Lbl Add. 30931, ff. 37v–39, where the sections for which Purcell provided
only a left-hand part are copied as figured-bass parts, while the others have right- and
left-hand staves. The two copies are very close, and it seems likely that the version in Add.
30931 was copied directly from Purcell’s autograph, but there is some additional and
variant material (principally figuring, some inner parts and some differences of register in
the bass).
2 Although this is in Church’s hand, it seems, from the absence of a right-hand part at
the end of the alto solo where Church begins copying, that he was following Purcell’s
version of the organ part.
Incomplete Right-Hand Parts and Figured-Bass Parts
One might dismiss this organ part as an anomaly were it not for the
fact that there are several other autographs surviving in Cfm 152 in
which blank right-hand staves have been left. The surviving final page
of Tucker’s autograph organ part to ‘Praise the Lord, ye servants’
includes only a two-bar ‘returnella’ in the right hand, so in this case a
tenor solo, two-part verse and chorus are notated with blank right-hand
staves; on the other hand, the surviving first page of his anthem ‘My
heart is fixed’ has right-hand incipits for the initial solo verse and three-
part verse, while the chorus is notated with both right- and left-hand
parts throughout. Blow includes right-hand doublings for only the first
two bars of the opening verse in his autograph of ‘Lord, how are they
increased’, and subsequently notates a right-hand part only for the
anthem’s two chorus sections, leaving long stretches of blank right-
hand staves.
It is difficult to know how to interpret these organ parts. Tucker’s
pieces could, conceivably, have been left unfinished, since neither
includes any figures; moreover, in the first system of ‘Praise the Lord’
Tucker does incorporate some inner part-writing in the left-hand stave,
which would seem to suggest that parts above the bass were not
entirely unimportant and perhaps that Tucker intended also to include
right-hand parts. Blow’s anthem, which also has no figures, runs on
directly from another of his autographs in the manuscript, ‘O Lord, I
have sinned’, which has complete right-hand parts, and which does not
seem to differ significantly in style from ‘Lord, how are they increased’.
It is not obvious why Blow would have included right-hand parts in
one anthem while omitting them in the other so, again, it is possible that
the organ part for the latter anthem is incomplete. This is perhaps made
more likely by the fact that, as far as I know, all of the very many organ
parts copied by Blow elsewhere are scored for both right and left hands
throughout.
On the other hand, despite substantial inconsistencies, these pieces
do generally concur with the Purcell autograph of ‘O give thanks’ by
including right-hand parts principally for choruses and ritornelli, and
this might suggest a deliberate approach to accompaniment in which
right-hand doublings and adaptations of vocal parts are played only in
choruses, while verses are realized as non-figured-bass parts. Working
with such unclear evidence, it is difficult to be sure that this would,
indeed, have been the approach taken by organists for these pieces, and
the organ parts in Cfm 152 would certainly not always have made such
a style possible. What is perhaps most important is that it seems highly
unlikely that all accompaniments might have taken this form: as has
been amply demonstrated, the overwhelming majority of pieces in
Restoration organ books from the major London sacred institutions are
notated with left- and right-hand staves filled throughout, and Cfm 152
itself maintains this format in most of its pieces. It seems beyond
plausibility to suggest that a range of different copyists would have
gone to the trouble of copying right-hand parts for verses in hundreds
71
of pieces if that information was essentially unnecessary for the

organist. The idea that this group of accompaniments in Cfm 152 is
exceptional is reinforced by the fact that Church, despite conforming to
Purcell’s notation in his make-good page in the Cfm 152 organ part for
‘O give thanks’, recopied the same piece in Lbl 27.a.14 (pp. 117–25) with
complete right-hand staves.
If we assume that the copying in these organ parts in Cfm 152 is not
unfinished, perhaps the most appropriate way of understanding them is
as close relatives of another small group of organ parts notated
principally with bass line alone. These genuine figured-bass parts are
found sporadically in Ob T 1180–2 and Lbl 27.a.13, and there are also two
figured-bass parts in Cfm 152: one, copied by Tucker, is of Child’s
anthem ‘The Earth is the Lord’s’, perhaps significantly ‘for 3 bases’; the
other, in Church’s hand, is a fragment of Aldrich’s ‘We have a strong
city’.4 Three of Church’s four figured-bass parts in Lbl 27.a.13, while
scored for one stave throughout, contain occasional fragments of upper
parts,5 and the other, for Blow’s ‘O Lord, thou hast searched me out’,
includes a right-hand stave for the opening system and in the final
chorus; in his copy of Aldrich’s anthem in Cfm 152 considerable portions
of the vocal parts are incorporated into the figured-bass part in solo
sections, and a complete right-hand stave is added for the three short
choruses in the fragment.6 Gostling too usually includes some upper
parts in his figured-bass parts: Blow’s ‘Turn us again’ has a right-hand
stave provided for ritornelli, for instance, and Croft’s ‘I will magnify
thee’ has standard two-stave doubling of parts for its choruses while
maintaining only the left-hand stave for ritornelli.7 There is certainly a
tendency in these organ parts to provide information about the vocal
parts mainly in choruses, and often to provide a realization for ritornelli,
but there is little consistency overall. For example, Gostling’s figured-
bass part for Croft’s ‘O sing unto the Lord’ includes right-hand parts for
all but one ritornello, and throughout the first chorus, but in the final
chorus the upper part is included for only the first nine bars, and the
previous section, where verse and chorus alternate phrase by phrase, is
scored for left-hand only;8 similarly, there is no direct correspondence
between the inclusion of a right-hand part and distinctions between
sections in Croft’s ‘The Lord hath appeared for us’.9
4 See Cfm 152, ff. 11v and 21v.
5 These are: Croft’s ‘Lord, teach us to number’ in Lbl 27.a.13, p. 5; Turner’s ‘Lord, thou
hast been our refuge’, on p. 81; and Turner’s ‘Lord, what is man?’, on p. 85 (which,
however, includes only one incipit, at the beginning of the final chorus).
6 See Cfm 152, f. 21v (p. 234).
7 See Ob T 1180, p. 119 and T 1181, p. 471.
8 See Ob T 1180, p. 482.
9 Ibid., p. 478; this anthem contains some blank right-hand staves in a manner similar to
the Cfm 152 pieces mentioned above. Figured-bass parts are also given in the Tenbury
organ books for Henry Hall’s ‘O clap your hands’ (Ob T 1181, p. 476); Isham’s ‘Bow down
thine ear’ (T 1181, p. 486); Weldon’s ‘O sing unto the Lord’ (T 1181, p. 490); and Goldwin’s
‘O Lord my God’ (T 1181, p. 495).
72
It is perhaps safe to assume that right-hand parts would be played

for these pieces where provided in ritornelli, and probably for choruses,
at least where they continue throughout a section. However, in the same
way as for the accompaniments with incomplete right-hand parts, the
evidence is too inconsistent to allow confident interpretation, and we
must assume that the accompaniment style overall would have been
largely chordal. Matters are complicated by the fact that the absence of a
notated part apparently did not necessarily preclude the possibility of
doubling vocal parts: an annotation at the end of Goldwin’s ‘O Lord my
God’ in Ob T 1181 (p. 495) tells the organist ‘To Each Ritorn[ello]: repeat
the Singing part to the Bass: except the 2d Ritor[nello]: that as you
please’, despite the fact that the piece is notated with left-hand only
throughout, so the player would have had to have added the vocal
parts by ear to form each ritornello.
The incomplete right-hand parts by Tucker and Blow, and Tucker’s
figured-bass part for Child’s anthem in Cfm 152, can be dated to around
1676, since they are included in the Chapel Royal ‘Catalogue of Severall
Services & Anthems’ copied between 1670 and 1676,10 while Purcell’s
‘O give thanks’ is from 1693, as mentioned above. It seems, therefore,
that the rather different style of accompaniment implied by these
isolated organ parts must have been used by organists alongside the
more standard realizations suggested by the majority two-stave parts.
The fact that these accompaniments all occur in Cfm 152 naturally leads
to the suggestion that chordal realizations with limited doubling may
have been favoured at the Chapel Royal, but it is by no means common
in the surviving Chapel Royal books, nor can I find distinguishing
features for the anthems in which incomplete or figured-bass parts are
used which would explain the difference in accompaniment styles.
However, it is significant that Ob T 1180–2 and Lbl 27.a.13–15 are
relatively late books within our collection of sources, and that the
majority of figured-bass parts in the Tenbury organ books in particular
are for pieces by the new generation of composers, Clarke, Croft,
Weldon, Goldwin and their colleagues. This perhaps implies that, with
the exception of the small group of parts in Cfm 152, the style of
accompaniment necessitated by figured-bass parts is more appropriate
for eighteenth-century repertory than for strictly Restoration sacred
music. There is, indeed, other evidence that styles of accompaniment
were changing at the beginning of the new century. Several of the later
pieces scored with two staves by Gostling in the Tenbury books, and a
good many by Church in the Chapel Royal books, together with some
in his hand in Cfm 152, suggest a new approach to realization: figuring
is much denser and often creates an almost complete harmonic
framework for the player; figures often duplicate given voice parts in
the right hand, making the notated parts largely superfluous; and in
10 See Shay and Thompson, Purcell Manuscripts, 190–1, and also the reference to the list
on p. 17 above.
73
74
8/11/05
10:39 am
Page 74
Figure 2. Opening of Church’s organ part for Clarke’s anthem ‘I will love thee’, Cfm 152, f. 15v.
some solo sections right-hand doubling is replaced by an independent

obbligato accompaniment, with blank bars between phrases.11 These
characteristics are all demonstrated in Church’s organ part for Clarke’s
‘I will love thee’ in Cfm 152 (Figure 2).12
The fullness of the figuring in the opening three-part verse, and its
tendency to follow the given right-hand part, suggests that the
accompaniment style would have been chordal, based largely on the
bass line and figures, with the right-hand part almost superfluous. The
overall result would have been very similar to a realization from one of
the figured-bass parts discussed above, but rather different from a
typical Restoration accompaniment, in which doubling appears to be
much more significant. In the solo bass verse, the player would
presumably have followed the notated right-hand part, filling it in with
the notes indicated by the figuring, then played chords (again with the
help of the given figures) where there are rests in the right-hand part.
Such obbligato parts – although distantly related to the fragments of
independent writing found in some Restoration organ parts –
demonstrate a much more rigid approach to accompaniment than is
usual for the latter half of the seventeenth century: the organ book right-
hand parts are included in full scores13 and are clearly as much a part of
the composer’s conception of the piece as the solo vocal lines
themselves. As far as I am aware, the only similar accompaniments
from the Restoration repertory occur in the small group of symphony
anthems in which obbligato string parts are rearranged (mainly by
Blow) for organ alone.14
11 A few others in Church’s Chapel Royal organ book have blank right-hand staves
throughout some solo sections, like the Cfm 152 anthems discussed above.
12 A very similar accompaniment for this anthem, including the obbligato sections but
with much less figuring in the opening verse, is complete in Gostling’s Tenbury set; see
Ob T 1180, p. 252.
13 Compare, for example, Figure 2 with Gostling’s full score of Clarke’s ‘I will love thee’
in AUS 85, p. 204 (reverse end).

14 See Blow’s ‘O sing unto the Lord’ (Mp 35, f. 9v), where a passage originally for violin
in the verse ‘Let the sea make a noise’ is recast for organ right hand, but the subsequent
return to part doublings is not identified on the stave; his ‘Thy mercy, O Lord’ (Mp 35, f.
12), where the string parts are reproduced only where the voices cannot sustain the music
alone; Purcell’s ‘Blessed are they that fear the Lord’ (Mp 35, f. 6v), where Blow ensures that
the original three string parts are reduced so as to create good counterpoint in the organ;
and Purcell’s ‘O sing unto the Lord’ (Mp 35, f. 11), where there appears to be some
inconsistency in the way in which Blow sometimes includes and sometimes excludes the
string parts. Gostling’s copy of Humfrey’s ‘Hear my crying’ (Ob T 1180, p. 86) also
includes a small passage of violin obbligato in the solo treble verse.
75
5
The Unusual Case of
Matthew Locke
‘how doth the city sit solitary’
A single autograph organ part survives in the hand of Matthew Locke
(c. 1622–77), one of the most important composers at the English court
during the early years of the Restoration. Written for his verse anthem
‘How doth the city sit solitary’, Och 1219(D) is preserved as an unbound
single sheet, copied stratigraphically on both sides of the paper. It has
obvious importance as a Locke autograph, but is also particularly
significant within the context of this study because it provides evidence
of a style of accompaniment rather more complex than that suggested
by the main body of London sources. Figure 3 reproduces the recto side
of the page on which the part is written.
The nature of the relationship between Locke’s accompaniment
and the vocal parts is sufficiently complex to warrant detailed analysis.
The Appendix provides the complete text of the organ part together
with a full score of the anthem copied by John Blow (Och 14, f. 140v).
Although the readings in Blow’s score suggest a reasonably close
stemmatic relationship with Locke’s organ part, bars 114–26 are omitted
from Och 14, and this disparity, together with a relatively large number
of minor differences between the continuo bass lines in each source,1
implies that Blow did not copy his score from sources related to Locke’s
surviving organ part. One cannot, therefore, rule out the possibility that
compositional revisions might account for some of the interesting
features preserved in Locke’s autograph.2 Nevertheless, it is clear from
the broad correlation between the two sources that the organ part
contains an exceptional amount of material independent of the voice
parts. In the Appendix, this independent material is shaded to facilitate
comparison with the full score, and the following commentary is
1 In particular, where the continuo line doubles the vocal bass, Blow’s continuo part
generally contains more simplification of melodic detail and conflation of repeated

pitches than does Locke’s, which remains more literal. Nevertheless, there is
inconsistency in Blow’s score, because he gives both continuo bass and bass voice line on
the same stave in bars 33–59, yet, where some of the same material is used again in bars
106–13 and 127–34, a separate continuo part is given, this time incorporating significant
simplification of the vocal part.
2 This is not to suggest that Locke’s version is certainly, or even probably, later than
Blow’s; rather it is intended to concede that the organ part might reflect at least some
variant readings.
8/11/05
10:41 am
Page 77
77
Figure 3. First page of Locke’s organ part for ‘How doth the city’, Och 1219(D).
intended to highlight Locke’s treatment of the solo, ensemble verse and

full sections of the anthem. Table 2 shows the division into sections.
Table 2. Structure of Locke’s anthem ‘How doth the city’.
Bars Text Scoring Comments
1–25 How doth the city sit Verse: ATB Bars 1–42 comprise an
solitary? introduction for organ
only.
26–33 The Lord is righteous Verse: Two trebles Leads straight into
following ATB verse.
33–45 Woe now unto us Verse: ATB
45–59 Woe now unto us Chorus (TrATB) Bars 53–9 relate to bars
40–5.
60–75 Behold O Lord Solo: First treble
75–89 Woe now unto us Chorus (TrATB) Repeat of bars 45–59.
90–106 What thing shall I take? Solo: Second treble
106–21 Woe now unto us Verse: TrTrATB Blow’s score contains
only the first eight bars,
followed by bar 127 ff.
of chorus. Bars 106–13
relate to bars 33–40; bars
115–21 relate to bars
40–5, 53–9 and 129–34.
121–42 Woe now unto us Chorus: TrTrATB Bars 121–7 relate to bars
45–51; bars 127–33
relate to bars 51–9, and
also bars 113–21, except
for the final cadence.
Solo verse sections

The two sections for solo treble contain the greatest proportion of
independent writing: in fact, there is no consistent doubling of the solo
vocal lines. Fragments of the treble parts do appear in the right-hand
organ part, but these are restricted to only three or four successive
notes, and there are relatively long passages in which the organ part
does not double the solo line at all, particularly in ‘What thing shall I
take to witness for thee?’, which is almost recitative-like. One passage of
doubling is at pitch (bars 664–67), but the remaining six examples all
occur in the organ part an octave lower than in the treble part.3 These
doublings are usually simplified in the manner outlined in Chapter 2
above, and the impression given is that the organ part is designed to
support the singer subtly, without detracting from his solo role.
3 The relevant passages are as follows: bars 602–613 in the left hand; bars 63–641, bars
644–652,bars 692–71, bar 74, and bar 99 in the right hand. Transposed doublings are also
discussed in Chapter 2 above.
78
The Unusual Case of Matthew Locke
The independent parts of the accompaniment are not without

melodic and rhythmic interest – there is small-scale imitation of the solo
line and passages in parallel sixths4 – but generally have the character of
sophisticated written-out figured-bass accompaniments: it is not
difficult to imagine a similar style of accompaniment being improvised
by an organist playing from Blow’s full score. Nevertheless, harmon-
ically Locke’s organ part is in places more complex than Blow’s score,
and Blow’s very limited figuring – consisting of just one figure 2 in bar
61 and a 7–6 in bar 63 – would be insufficient to allow a player to predict
some of the features of Locke’s part, especially the changes from major
to minor mode in bar 60 and (to a lesser extent) bars 64 and 101, and the
major third in bar 69. Locke uses three or four parts almost throughout
these sections, which accords with the suggestions relating to texture
given in Chapter 1 above. It is notable, however, that he seems more
concerned to maintain a consistent tessitura than to avoid the organ
part rising above the solo treble lines: where the first treble is in its
lowest register in bars 62, 66 and 73, Locke makes no concessions to the
singer and allows the right-hand organ part to rise above the vocal line.
Conversely, the right-hand part does not follow the treble soloist to the
top of the register, and the registral peak is c’ in bars 66–7.
Ensemble verse in two parts

The verse for two trebles, ‘The Lord is righteous’, contrasts interestingly
with the solo treble verses, because here the solo parts are doubled
throughout and at pitch, except where they cross awkwardly in bar 31,
where Treble 1 is omitted for two beats.5 Given that the two soloists
alternate in bars 26–30, so are effectively singing solo lines with little
overlap between the parts, the difference in approach between the solo
and ensemble verses is notable. It suggests, indeed, that Locke
considered different styles of accompaniment to be appropriate for solo
and ensemble verses. To fill in missing harmonic notes, an independent
inner part is added in the organ part, shared between right and left
hands. It continues throughout the section, which results in three-part
texture where the soloists alternate, but four-part texture where they
sing together. Since Locke could have omitted the independent part in
bars 31–2 without great detriment to the harmony, this suggests careful
control of the number of voices used. Again there is some contrapuntal
interest in the added part: the imitative figure on ‘For I have rebell’d’ is
taken up in the left hand in bars 30 and 32, and normal voice-leading
4 The entry on ‘For I am in distress’ in bar 64 is preceded two notes earlier by the same
repeated-note figure in organ right hand; the entry on ‘O daughter of Jerusalem’ in bar 93
is followed by imitation at the tenth one bar later in organ left hand; and repeated notes in
the left hand in bars 99–100 precede the entry on ‘For thy breach is great’. There are
parallel sixths in bars 68 and 100–1.
5 It is interesting that Locke here prefers to show clearly the second treble part, thus
preserving the contrapuntal line, rather than maintaining the highest part where Treble 1
rises above Treble 2.
79
rules are followed throughout the independent line.6 It seems unlikely

that an organist playing from Blow’s full score would anticipate
the opportunity to include the two passages of imitation in his
accompaniment, and Locke’s harmonization of bar 28 in particular is
not implied by the given vocal parts.
Ensemble verses in three parts

The two ATB verses, ‘How doth the city sit solitary?’ and ‘Woe now
unto us’, dominate the first half of the piece, meaning that there are
lengthy passages in which the top voice part has a relatively low
tessitura. Locke compensates for this problem in his organ accompani-
ment by adding independent material in the right-hand organ part,
above doublings of the three voice parts. Doublings are given
consistently and at pitch in bars 33–45 (‘Woe now unto us’), without
simplification of the melodic lines; in bars 4–25 (‘How doth the city’)
there are occasional omissions from the alto and tenor,7 limited
simplification of some passages involving repeated notes or semi-
quavers,8 and one short passage of the alto is transposed down an
octave (bars 13–14). Although in some cases it is not easy to explain the
omitted doublings,9 the overall impression given by Locke’s notation in
these two verses is that he is not concerned to communicate to the
organist precisely what each voice is singing, but instead is trying to
create a complete accompaniment part, based on doublings, but not
strictly adhering to them. This is particularly clear in ‘Woe now unto
us’, where the alto part given in the right hand is shown sometimes
with upward- and sometimes downward-facing stems, the doubling
interweaved with Locke’s independent part.
The added material in these two verses is different in character
from that used in the solo verses: it is more consistently imitative of the
6 The only exception is between bars 26 and 27, where the c’ in the right hand needs to
resolve onto a b b in bar 27. It seems likely that an organist would add such notes in playing
this part, but the possibility that Locke intended his part to be played exactly as written
cannot be discounted.
7 In bars 8, 13, 21, 241–2 and 25 the tenor is omitted, and in bars 22–3 and 243–4 the alto is
omitted (bar 243 may in fact be a variant reading of the alto part).
8 For example, the quaver–semiquaver–semiquaver figure in the tenor in bar 7 is
adapted, and the two semiquavers are also omitted from the tenor’s melodic line in bar
12. Repeated notes resulting from textual underlay in the alto in bars 15–17 and the bass in
bars 7 and 12–14 are shown in the accompaniment as equivalent longer values, even
though other repeated-note figures (such as in bars 18–20) are retained.
9 The tenor line in bar 8, for instance, could easily have been played in the left hand
together with the notated continuo bass, as could the tenor in bar 21, although this would
have created a simultaneous false relation with the topmost part of the accompaniment.
The 7–6 suspension in the alto in bar 22 is prepared in bar 21, and it seems likely that it
could have been filled in by the organist in performance; this, indeed, is le Huray’s
assumption in the version of the accompaniment he provides in his modern edition of the
anthem, given in Matthew Locke: Anthems and Motets, 75. Nevertheless, Locke may have
wished to avoid the clash of the dissonant d’ against its resolution in the organ part.
80
motifs used in the voice parts, and also includes more conspicuous use
of parallel writing (in this case tenths rather than sixths) alongside part
doublings.10 The contrapuntal line added a fourth above the alto at ‘She
that was great’ (bars 14–17) is especially carefully worked out, and
imitative material is similarly (although rather less successfully) added
above the top voice part at ‘Woe now unto us’ in bars 35–6, 37–8 and
42–4; Locke also seems to have taken every opportunity to include
imitation of ‘That was full’ in bars 7–13. While there are some
individual notes added in the middle of the texture – mostly, it appears,
for harmonic reasons11 – Locke concentrates on providing an
independent organ line in the treble register, ranging from d’ in bars 7,
15 and 44–5, to f ’ in bar 11. The inclusion of an additional treble voice in
the homorhythmic section in bars 17–22 highlights Locke’s emphasis on
tessitura in his independent writing in this section. While the lengthy
entry at ‘She that was great’ raises the possibility that Locke’s organ
part in fact reflects a vocal line missing in Blow’s score, the lack of
complete imitative entries in the treble register elsewhere in the two
ATB sections (such as in the entries from bar 4 and in those from bar 33),
and in particular the slightly clumsy imitation in bars 35–8, makes it
much more likely that Locke sought to integrate his organ
accompaniment as fully as possible into the vocal parts by adding
imitation in the independent line of the organ part where it could be
made to fit. The added treble-register line means that four-part texture
is maintained more or less consistently throughout both verses, except
where new imitative entries occur.
As for the two-part verse discussed above, it is clear that an
organist working from Blow’s score would be unlikely to produce an
accompaniment of the complexity of Locke’s. Nevertheless, the
principles Locke follows – of adding a voice or two above the solo lines,
and of incorporating at least small-scale imitation of the main melodic
figures – could be followed by an experienced accompanist, expecting
to accompany in a contrapuntal rather than a largely chordal style.
Harmonic additions such as the bn’ in bar 21, the major third in bar 5,
and the false relation in bar 9, would probably not be anticipated, but it
would nevertheless be possible to provide a correct harmonization of
both passages from Blow’s score.
Ensemble verse in five parts

The five-part verse ‘Woe now unto us’ in bars 106–21 cannot be directly
compared with Blow’s full score because Blow omits the second phrase
(bars 1133–21). However, as is described below, this phrase does occur
elsewhere in the piece, set for four-part chorus in bars 51–9, and for five-
part chorus in bars 127–34, albeit with a different version of the final
10 The opening bass entry is accompanied a tenth higher in bars 5–6, for example, and
there are parallel tenths added also in bar 11.

11 For example, the added f in bars 10–11 and the f # in bar 15.
81
cadence. Comparison of Locke’s organ part with these two sections, as

well as with the beginning of the five-part verse as it occurs in Blow’s
score, reveals that the organ part is based almost entirely on part
doublings in this verse. There may be a limited number of isolated
independent notes in bars 111–13,12 but these could result from minor
variants between Locke’s and Blow’s manuscripts, and their function in
any case appears purely harmonic. If one assumes a first-treble entry on
d’’ in bar 118,13 the second phrase seems likely to contain only
doublings.
The fact that Locke transposes the second treble part in bars 111–13
down an octave may suggest that his intention was to maintain a
relatively low tessitura in this verse, but this interpretation is
contradicted by the previous phrase, in which he follows the e b’’ of the
first-treble part. The rest of the doublings appear to be at pitch, and,
since the organist could easily have played the second treble in bars
111–13 at pitch without awkward stretches in the right hand, it is
difficult to explain his transposition of this phrase ending. This cadence
is also the only section of the verse in which five-part texture is allowed:
elsewhere passages where all five voices are singing are restricted to
four parts in the organ (by the omission of the alto in bar 1103–111 and
probably bars 1183–19), and it is also notable that Locke apparently
omits the tenor vocal line in bars 1154–17, so that this four-voice section
is accompanied by only three-part doublings in the organ part.
Nevertheless, all four voices are doubled in bars 109–10, so the organ
part overall maintains Locke’s usual three- to four-part texture during
this verse.
Chorus in four parts

The organ part in the four-part chorus ‘Woe now unto us’ (bars 44–59)
comprises only doubling of the vocal parts, and the parts are
reproduced almost entirely literally – with stem directions preserved –
and largely at pitch. In the second phrase (from bar 51), three notes are
omitted from the alto (bars 532–542), the part as written being
unplayable because the alto’s notes are doubled at pitch, first by the
tenor and then by the bass. Another concession to the player is
apparently made in bars 50–1, where the tenor is transposed an octave
higher, so that it can be incorporated into the right hand – at pitch it
would have required a stretch of a tenth in the left hand in bar 51.14 Two
notes from the tenor part are also missing in bar 55, with no clear
explanation, but it is possible that the player was intended to fill in the
12 Specifically, the tenor vocal line does not correspond exactly with the crotchets c’, a in
bar 111, and there is no a ’ in either treble part in bars 1112 or 1131, although the latter note
does occur in the tenor an octave lower and is not otherwise doubled.
13 Le Huray does assume this entry where he fills in the missing parts in Matthew Locke:
Anthems and Motets, 80.

14 It must be conceded that there is a tenth notated in the left hand in bar 55, but the d’ in
the tenor could here be played in the right hand, a solution impossible in bar 51.
82
texture at this point, since the directs used in the left-hand part in bars
46 and 47 suggest strongly that Locke felt the inner parts in the opening
phrase could be inferred by the organist without exact notation being
given; interestingly the alto is notated in bar 48, where its e n’ would
probably not be predicted by a player unfamiliar with the music.
Chorus in five parts

The opening phrase of the final chorus (bars 121–7) does not occur in
Blow’s score, but it is obviously a close repeat of the opening of the four-
part chorus in bars 45–51, an additional treble part being added at the
top of the texture. Treble 2 and tenor seem to be omitted from the
doublings in this version of the phrase, but the alto part is now given
complete, so that three-part texture is retained until the cadence. Here, a
third part is added in the right hand; it may reflect the tenor transposed
up an octave as before, but is more likely to be the new part for first
treble.15 From bar 127, where comparison with Blow’s score can be
made, the imitative entries are followed closely, but once five-part
texture is established in bar 130, Locke omits sections of some inner
parts – tenor in bars 130–3, alto in bars 1353–372, second treble in bars
1373–92, and alto again in bars 1393–40 – so that three- and four-part
texture predominates in the organ part except at the cadences, where
five parts are permitted. The part doublings are otherwise simple, with
the exception of bars 133–4, where Treble 1 is transposed down an
octave, despite the fact that the entry on f ” in bar 132 was given in the
right hand at pitch.16 Locke’s primary concern in making these slight
adaptations to his part doublings does not seem to have been to make
his organ part more easily playable: although there are some
exceptions, most of the omitted lines could have been played together
with the notated doublings, as could the transposed treble part. We
must assume, then, that his intention was to retain four-part texture in
the organ where five voices were singing and, presumably, to avoid an
excessively high tessitura in the right hand.
Related sections
As suggested above, three musical phrases based on the text ‘Woe now
unto us’ are repeated within Locke’s anthem, with some revisions or
additional voices:
1. Bars 33–40, part of an ATB verse, relate to bars 106–13, in which two
treble verse parts are added, and the closing cadence is reworked.
2. Bars 45–51, written for four-part chorus, are repeated in bars 75–81
and heard again with an additional treble part in the closing chorus
(bars 121–7).
15 This is le Huray’s assumption in Matthew Locke: Anthems and Motets, 80.
16 Locke’s score is smudged here, but there seems little doubt that this note was included
in his score.
83
3. Bars 40–5, for ATB verse, are extended in bars 51–9, for chorus, by
the addition of a treble line, two extra bars at the beginning of the
phrase, and an elongated working of the closing cadence; the
extended version of the phrase obviously occurs again in the repeat
of the four-part chorus in bars 81–9, apparently (from Locke’s organ
parts) occurs again in the five-part verse section in bars 113–21 with
the addition of an additional treble line, and is repeated in five parts
in the closing chorus, with alterations to the final cadence (bars
127–34).
Comparison between the sections reveals that Locke did not

mechanically reproduce his accompaniments for each repeated
passage. While they are broadly the same, even exact reiteration of a
phrase can demonstrate minor differences in his treatment of the organ
part. In bar 36, for example, the crotchet rest in the tenor part is
reproduced in the left hand of Locke’s part, but in bar 109 the same
passage has a crotchet tied to the previous g semibreve in the tenor; the
tenor crotchets a, g are notated in bar 42, but not in bar 55; and the alto
part is given in the right hand in bars 52–3 and 114–15, but in the left in
bars 128–9. These variations suggest that Locke did not, in fact, refer
back to related sections when making his organ part, but worked
through the score in a linear fashion. If this inference is correct, it
suggests that the broad correlation between his treatment of the
ensemble verses and choruses set to related passages can be taken as an
indication that he felt similar styles of accompaniment should be used
for these sections of his anthem.
Another interesting observation is that, where Locke adds
independent material above part doublings in the ATB versions of these
phrases, he does not consistently anticipate his own addition of new
treble voice parts later in the anthem: his rather unsuccessful added
imitation in bars 35–8 does not relate to the treble parts in bars 109–11
(one of which, admittedly, transposes the original alto part up an
octave), whereas the independent material in bars 42–4 does become a
new treble entry in bars 55–7. Once again, this suggests that Locke did
not consciously compare related blocks of music.
Summary
Overall, Locke’s fully notated organ part for ‘How doth the city’
suggests that he differentiates on principle between solo verses and
ensemble verses or choruses: in the two solo-treble verses he writes
largely independent accompaniments, resembling written-out figured-
bass realizations, with very limited doubling, most of which is not at
pitch; in ensemble verses and choruses, his accompaniments are based
on doubling, almost all of which occurs at pitch. Nevertheless, in
ensemble verses involving only two singers, or where the tessitura of
the voice parts is relatively low, Locke does add in an independent part;
84
its character, however, is quite unlike that of the material added in the
solo verses, here being strongly imitative of the surrounding vocal
parts. In ATB verses the added part is written above the highest vocal
line; one result is that the register of the right-hand part in the organ
remains quite consistent throughout the piece, regardless of the number
and type of voices singing. Another notable feature of the organ part is
that Locke seems keen to maintain three- or four-part texture more or
less consistently, his additional voices in solo and duet sections filling
out the texture where necessary, and omitted inner-part doublings,
reducing it in five-part sections.
locke’s style of accompaniment in context

There is some evidence that Blow’s full score of Locke’s anthem
preserved in Och 14 may itself have been used, or intended for use, by
an organist in performance. The figures included in the first-treble
verse, although sparse, are clearly placed strategically where they are
most needed, and the opening four bars include a right-hand organ part
in the top stave, corresponding with the top line in Locke’s organ part. It
is quite clear that two organists, playing respectively from Locke’s
written-out part and Blow’s full score, would create distinctly different
accompaniments for this anthem. While some of the simpler passages
of imitation included in Locke’s independent lines might have been
anticipated by a skilled thoroughbass player who had been trained in
the rules of counterpoint, the more complex examples and Locke’s
richer harmonies probably could not. Blow’s score does give enough
information to the player to allow him to produce a correct
accompaniment based on doubling, but it would be notably simpler
than Locke’s, both harmonically and contrapuntally.
The style of Locke’s accompaniment is also notably different from
that suggested by the organ books associated with the major London
institutions – the books on which this study has concentrated in
Chapters 1–4. There are many aspects of Locke’s manuscript that do
relate to the mainstream London sacred-music continuo style – all
sections but the two solo verses do, after all, incorporate doubling of the
vocal parts – and, as has been described, there are plenty of examples in
the London books where organ-part arrangers incorporate inde-
pendent material. None, however, comes close to either the volume or
the complexity of Locke’s added parts in ‘How doth the city’, and it
seems very unlikely that such material could have been incorporated
into their realizations through improvisation. If a modern player were
to adopt the style of accompaniment suggested by the notation in
Blow’s or Gostling’s organ books, he/she would certainly not end up
producing an organ part audibly similar to that in Locke’s manuscript.
Locke’s autograph could be nothing more than an exceptional
example of a fully written-out part, notated precisely because the type
of accompaniment Locke wanted for this anthem was unlike the kind of
85
continuo part a player might be expected to produce under normal

circumstances. Yet ‘How doth the city’ does not seem to differ greatly in
style from Locke’s other English anthems, so the autograph could
provide evidence that at least some organists did create contrapuntally
conceived accompaniments with extensive independent material. The
question one must ask, therefore, is why Locke’s continuo style for this
anthem seems so much more complex than that implied by the main
London organ books surviving from the Restoration period. In order to
provide some possible answers, we need to look more closely both at
Locke himself, and at the manuscript in which his work is preserved.
As is well known, Matthew Locke was probably born in 1622,17 and
he received his early musical education as a chorister at Exeter
Cathedral.18 Despite evidently having been brought up within the
Anglican musical and religious tradition, he appears to have converted
to Catholicism, possibly during his trip to the Low Countries in 1648,
during which time he copied a set of Latin motets now preserved in Lbl
Add. 31437.19 In any case, an allegation was made on 29 March 1654
against ‘Mr Matthew Lock as being a papist’, apparently after he was
involved in a disturbance in Hereford, and he dedicated his Flat Consort
to his ‘Cousin Kemble’, possibly a member of a prominent Catholic
family from Herefordshire.20 It is no great surprise, therefore, that,
while Locke took up the main compositional posts in Charles II’s new
court at the Restoration, he did not become a member of the Chapel
Royal. Instead, he was appointed organist to Queen Catherine at St
James’s Palace, probably when her Catholic chapel was established
there in 1662: his old friend from Exeter, Christopher Gibbons, refers to
him as ‘ye Queenes-Organist’ in a letter of 22 June 1663,21 and he is also
17 This date derives from a portrait of Locke now held at the Faculty of Music,
University of Oxford. When the portrait was cleaned for an exhibition in 1960–1, the
inscription ‘aetat 40 / anno domini 1662’ was revealed; see Peter Holman, ‘Locke [Lock],
Matthew’, New Grove II, xv, 44–52 (p. 44).
18 Anthony à Wood states that Locke was ‘bred a chorister in the Cath. Church of
Exeter’, and the Chapter Act Books at Exeter Cathedral include an entry for 29 August
1640 stating ‘Whereas Richard Carter and Matthew Locke have misbehaved themselves
by fighting with one another, the Dean and Chapter gave them solemn monition for the
first offence to behave themselves more soberly and orderly hereafter upon payne of
expulsion’; the quotation from Wood is given ibid., and that from the Chapter Act Books in
Rosamond E.M. Harding, A Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Matthew Locke, with a
Calendar of the Main Events of his Life (Oxford, 1971), p. xxiv. Two carvings, the first
comprising the words ‘MATHEW LOCK 1638’, the second the initials ‘ML 1641’, survive
in the organ screen at Exeter Cathedral, and are presumably the work of the young Locke
himself; the latter initials in particular bear a strong resemblance to those Locke habitually
inscribed at the top corner of his manuscripts in later life. Both are reproduced ibid., plates
facing pp. xxii and xxiii.
19 This suggestion is made in Holman, ‘Locke [Lock], Matthew’, 44.
20 See ibid.
21 Quoted ibid., 45, and reproduced in Clare G. Rayner and Sheila Finch Rayner,
‘Christopher Gibbons: “That famous musitian”’, Musica Disciplina, 24 (1970), 151–71 (p.
159).
86
included in a list of the queen’s servants dating from September 1672,

after the Chapel had moved to Somerset House, when he is described as
‘our organist’, his wage being £100.22
Locke’s position at the Catholic chapel brought him into contact
with a large number of foreign musicians. Peter Leech has established
that groups of Portuguese and French musicians probably provided
music for the queen throughout Locke’s employment as organist there,
and Italian musicians seem to have entered her service from the mid-
1660s.23 According to North, the influence on Locke of the latter group
in particular was significant, ‘for by the service and the society of
forreiners he was not a litle Italianized’.24 Is it possible, then, that the
style of accompaniment in ‘How doth the city’ reflects Locke’s
Catholicism and the Continental sacred music to which he was exposed
in Queen Catherine’s chapel? Instinctively, this seems most unlikely: to
suggest a direct link between the Catholic sacred repertory and an
Anglican anthem seems unwise, for one thing; for another, we do not
normally associate Italian continuo playing of the mid-seventeenth
century with complex imitative styles and part doubling.25 In any case,
there is more direct, albeit anecdotal, evidence that Locke’s continuo
playing in the Catholic chapel was not modelled on that of the Italians
with whom he worked. North twice mentions that Locke was organist
of Somerset House, noting both times that in his position as principal
organist he was apparently demoted in favour of Giovanni Battista
Draghi. North’s later entry on the topic explains how this unusual
situation came about:
Mr. Mathew Lock was the most considerable master of musick after Jenkins fell
off. He was organist at Somerset Hous chappell as long as he lived, but the
Itallian masters, that served there, did not approve of his manner of play, but
must be attended by more polite hands; and one while one Sabinico [i.e.,
Giovanni Sebenico], and afterwards Signor Babtista Draghi used the great
organ, and Lock (who must not be turned out of his place, nor the execution)
had a smaller chamber organ by, on which he performed with them the same
services.26
Could it be that Locke’s ‘impolite’ playing in the Somerset House

chapel included complex, contrapuntal accompaniments of motets, in a
style unacceptable to Italian musicians used to lighter, figured-bass-
22 J.C.M.. Weale (ed.), Registers of the Catholic Chapels Royal and of the Portuguese Embassy
Chapel 1662–1829, i: Marriages, Catholic Record Society, 38 (London, 1941), pp. xxix–xxxii.
23 Peter Leech, ‘Musicians in the Catholic Chapel of Catherine of Braganza, 1662–92’,
Early Music, 29 (2001), 571–87, esp. 575–81.

24 Wilson (ed.), Roger North on Music, 301, from the first Musicall Gramarian (c. 1726).
25 On Italian continuo styles in sacred music, see Conclusions below.
26 Roger North, Memoires of Musick, f. 134, quoted in Chan and Kassler (eds.), Roger
North’s The Musicall Grammarian, 260; also cited in Wilson (ed.), Roger North on Music, 348.
Leech notes that the reference to Locke as ‘our organist’ in the 1672 Establishment list of
Somerset House ‘does seem to suggest he was in a principal post’, despite North’s
comments; see Leech, ‘Musicians in the Catholic Chapel’, 581.
87
style accompaniments? It is tempting to offer this interpretation of

North’s comment, although it should be noted that it is not made
explicit whether the ‘manner of play’ North describes refers to Locke’s
performance of solo organ music, or to his work as an accompanist.
Unfortunately, Locke’s own Latin settings cannot provide any evidence
about his continuo-playing style in the Catholic repertory either: there
is no firm evidence that any of his surviving motets was performed in
the queen’s chapel,27 and doubt persists over whether the stringed
instruments they require were available there.28 In any case, no organ
parts are extant for Locke’s Latin works.
There are, however, non-autograph organ parts surviving for three
of Locke’s English anthems, and two of these make for interesting
comparison with ‘How doth the city’. Despite his Catholicism, several
of Locke’s anthems are known to have been written for the Chapel
Royal, including ‘Be thou exalted, Lord’, which Locke describes in his
autograph copy in Ob Mus.c.23 as ‘A song of Thanksgiving for his
Majesty’s Victory over the Dutch on St. James his day 1666 And
Perform’d before his Majesty on the 14th of August following’. Four
texts are attributed to Locke in Clifford’s The Divine Services and Anthems
usually Sung in his Majesties Chappell, from 1664,29 and Locke famously
insinuated that his setting of the Ten Commandments was sabotaged by
the Chapel Royal choir at its premiere on 1 April 1666.30 Two of the
anthems for which organ accompaniments survive, ‘Lord, let me know
mine end’ and ‘Not unto us, O Lord’, were copied in the Chapel Royal
organ book Lbl 27.a.13 by John Church. Since, as has already been
outlined in the Introduction above, Church may have had access to
surviving fragments of older Chapel Royal organ books when he
copied this manuscript in the early eighteenth century, it is conceivable
that his organ parts for these two verse anthems could derive directly
from the composer. This speculation is strengthened considerably by
the fact that the accompaniments for these anthems are quite distinct
from Church’s other organ parts in his Chapel Royal set: whereas the
27 Only one motet, ‘Ad te levavi oculos meos’, can be linked with a specific performance,
this being at the Music School in Oxford in November 1665.
28 See, for example, Holman, ‘Locke [Lock], Matthew’, 45; and le Huray, Introduction to
Locke, Anthems and Motets, p. xvi. Dennison, on the other hand, suggests a link between
the motets and the Catholic chapel, and Leech considers it ‘not inconceivable that motets
such as “Audi Domine” and “Super flumina Babylonis” could have been performed’
there, with Locke, Francis Bridges and the Portuguese musician Mignill Ferreira playing
violin. See Peter Dennison, ‘The Sacred Music of Matthew Locke’, Music & Letters, 60
(1979), 60–75 (p. 64); and Leech, ‘Musicians in the Catholic Chapel’, 582.
29 These are ‘O be joyful in the Lord’, and three anthems for which no music survives:
‘Awake, awake, put on thy strength’, ‘Lord, thou art become gracious’ and ‘O sing unto
the Lord a new song’. See J[ohn] C[lifford], The Divine Services and Anthems usually sung in
His Majesties Chappell, and in all Cathedrals and Collegiate Choires in England and Ireland (2nd
edn, London, 1664), 397–401.
30 Locke published the Commandments in the same year, as Modern Church-Musick Pre-
accus’d, Censur’d, and Obstructed in its Performance before his Majesty, Aprill 1. 1666.
88
vast majority of Church’s two-stave parts in Lbl 27.a.13 are based on

doubling alone, some sections of ‘Lord, let me know mine end’ and ‘Not
unto us, O Lord’ incorporate passages of independent writing much
more extensive than even the examples found in Blow’s and Gostling’s
manuscripts, as described in Chapter 2.
There are, indeed, several ways in which the accompaniments
Church gives for ‘Lord, let me know mine end’ and ‘Not unto us, O
Lord’ relate to Locke’s autograph organ part for ‘How doth the city’,
although neither part is entirely consistent, nor are they as contra-
puntally complex as Locke’s autograph. Material that does not double
the vocal parts is added almost exclusively in verses with three singers
or fewer, exactly as in Locke’s organ part, and is omitted in the larger
verses (in this case with five and eight parts respectively), and in all but
one full section.31 Of the small-scale verses including independent
writing, the opening three-part section of ‘Lord, let me know mine end’
(Example 25) is treated in a way not dissimilar to the ATB verses in
‘How doth the city’: since it is for treble, tenor and bass, there is less
emphasis on the addition of a treble-register part, but one is added in
bars 2–5, above the initial solo entry in the tenor, and the independent
writing is incorporated around doublings of the vocal parts, most, but
not all, of which occur at pitch.32 The independent material includes
some, albeit limited, imitation of the vocal part in bar 3 (following the
tenor’s falling fourth on ‘let me know’), and parallel writing in sixths
31 The single exception is the final eight-part chorus of ‘Not unto us, O Lord’, where the
final nine bars incorporate an independent right-hand part woven around the two treble
lines, at times reaching above both in the manner of a descant. Not all verse sections with
few singers include independent writing: these are described below.
32 An exception is the lower right-hand part in bars 154–161, which transposes the vocal
bass up an octave.
89
90
Example 25. Opening verse of Locke’s anthem ‘Lord, let me know mine end’:
AUS 85, p. 5 (reverse end) shown on top system; Lbl 27.a.13, p. 92 shown below.
with the treble part in bars 13–16. The section for alto and bass, ‘And
now, Lord’, in the same anthem (Example 26), also incorporates
independent writing around part doublings, but here the emphasis
seems to be on filling in harmonic notes and adding suspensions. This
two-part passage is therefore more stylistically similar to Locke’s
accompaniment in the section for two trebles, ‘The Lord is righteous’, in
‘How doth the city’, although the added notes are more sporadic here,
and there is no attempt at imitation.
In ‘Not unto us, O Lord’, two ATB verse sections include
independent material. The verse ‘Wherefore shall the heathen say’
(Example 27) begins with a series of alternating phrases between the
91
, ,
, ,
, , , ,
, , , ,
92
, ,
Example 26. Alto and bass section of ‘And now, Lord’ from Locke’s anthem
‘Lord, let me know mine end’: AUS 85, p. 6 (reverse end) shown on top system;
Lbl 27.a.13, p. 92 shown below.
bass voice, on the one hand, and alto and tenor on the other.
Throughout, the bass’s phrases have a simple, independent, sustained
accompaniment in the organ’s right-hand part above the solo, while
sections for alto and tenor are accompanied with doubling of the alto
part, sometimes with the tenor part, in the organ. In the later verse ‘The
dead shall not praise thee, O Lord’, the opening imitative entries,
respectively in tenor, alto and bass, have a largely independent right-
hand accompaniment in Church’s organ part, only a few notes of each
entry being doubled, an octave higher in the tenor and at pitch in the
93
94
Example 27. Verse ‘Wherefore shall the heathen say’ from Locke’s anthem
‘Not unto us, O Lord’: AUS 85, p. 154 (reverse end) shown on top system; Lbl
27.a.13, p. 42 shown below.
alto (Example 28).33 Where the three voices sing in ensemble from ‘But
we will praise the Lord’, independent writing continues in the right
hand, but increasingly reverts to simple doubling of the highest part
towards the end of the verse. It is notable that doubling is omitted
principally for solo entries within these two verses, a tendency that
invites comparison with the first-treble solo in ‘How doth the city’.
Nevertheless, it should be acknowledged that Locke apparently adopts
[ ]
33 See bars 2–3 and 6–7 of the example.
95
sic
96
Example 28. Verse ‘The dead shall not praise thee, O Lord’ from Locke’s
anthem ‘Not unto us, O Lord’: AUS 85, p. 157 (reverse end) shown on top
system; Lbl 27.a.13, p. 43 shown below.
a different approach for solo entries within an ensemble verse – as

demonstrated by the opening of the section for two trebles, ‘The Lord is
righteous’ – where doublings are used, than for solo sections per se,
and this principle is not reflected by the two ensemble verses in
Church’s organ part.
There seems little doubt that the quantity of independent material
in the organ parts Church copied for these two anthems, together with
aspects of the treatment of that material, indicate some link with the
distinctive accompaniment for ‘How doth the city’. The connection is
heightened by the emphasis on doubling in the large-scale verses and
chorus sections of both anthems. Nevertheless, in other respects, the
97
accompaniments for ‘Lord, let me know mine end’ and ‘Not unto us’
are self-contradictory and rather unlike Locke’s autograph. As we have
seen, Locke is consistent in his treatment of sections set for similar
forces, but this is not true of Church’s settings: the opening ATB verse of
‘Not unto us, O Lord’ contains no independent material, for example
(although it is set homorhythmically for all three parts, unlike the other
ATB verses described above); the section for two trebles, ‘For man
walketh in a vain shadow’, immediately preceding the alto–bass entry
‘And now, Lord’ in ‘Lord, let me know mine end’ has only three
independent notes, while the verse for alto and tenor ‘When thou with
rebukes dost chasten man for sin’ consists entirely of doublings, despite
the low register of the voice parts. Indeed, even in the opening tenor
entry of this anthem, shown in Example 25, it is noticeable that the
consistent tessitura maintained by Locke in ‘How doth the city’ is not a
feature of this organ part: Church’s accompaniment falls into the tenor
register where it only doubles the voice in bars 5–7, and the same could
also be said of the alto–bass section in Example 26. Both organ parts also
require much more filling in of inner parts in order to maintain the
three- and four-part texture Locke creates within his autograph.
The only other surviving organ part for an anthem by Locke is for
the anthem ‘Turn thy face from my sins’, which was copied by Gostling
in Ob T 1181. It does not relate at all stylistically to ‘How doth the city’,
since it consists of straightforward two- and three-part part doublings,
with just a small number of independent figurings in the central verse
section. Whether or not it therefore contradicts the stylistic links
between Locke’s autograph and the other surviving organ parts for his
English anthems is difficult to judge: as is described in the Introduction,
T 1181 almost certainly relates to St Paul’s rather than to the Chapel
Royal, and there is no suggestion of a direct link between Gostling’s
accompaniment and Locke. It seems likely that Gostling made his own
organ part for ‘Turn thy face from my sins’, written in his own style, so it
is not surprising that his accompaniment does not relate to Locke’s
stylistically, though such a hypothesis is obviously impossible to prove.
Overall, then, the relationship between Locke’s autograph for
‘How doth the city’ and other surviving organ parts for his English
anthems seems complex, but there is at least a hint in Church’s copies
that Locke’s preferred style of organ accompaniment in his anthems
may have been more complex than that of the mainstream Anglican
composers such as Blow and Purcell. Church’s organ parts are not
stylistically identical to Locke’s in ‘How doth the city’, but they are
distinct from his other parts in the Chapel Royal books, and they do
display marked similarities with Locke’s autograph.
There is one final set of evidence, relating to the autograph itself,
which may help to provide a context for Locke’s accompaniment style
in ‘How doth the city’. Although Och 1219(D) is a single-sheet
manuscript, with no explicit links to any particular musical institution,
it may be significant that it is preserved at Christ Church, Oxford. The
98
extensive collection of printed and manuscript music from before 1700

held in Christ Church Library is dominated by the bequests of Dr Henry
Aldrich (1648–1710), the Dean, and of Richard Goodson Jr. (1688–1741),
who succeeded his father as Professor of Music at Oxford in 1718. Since
these collections were deposited at Christ Church, ‘[the] collection has
remained relatively stable; little new material has been acquired and
little has gone astray’.34 Aldrich did acquire a good number of his
printed books and a few manuscripts from outside Oxford, most
notably from the Hatton family, whose principal residence was at Kirby
Hall in Northamptonshire,35 but the vast majority of the manuscripts
held in the library have strong ties with Oxford itself; many may never
have left the city. Unusually, then, it may be possible to assert that this
particular Locke autograph originated in Oxford itself.
It is well known, of course, that Locke came to Oxford with the
London court when it took up residence between 1665 and 1666 to
shelter from the plague. An entry in the court records for 20 April 1666
records a payment of £464 to John Banister ‘for himself and seven others
of his Majesty’s musicians, viz.: Mathew Lock, Jeoffrey Bannister,
William Young, Symon Hopper, Richard Hudson, Isaack Staggins and
Theophilus Fitz, for their riding charges and other expenses to Oxford
and Hampton Court by the space of 232 days, from the last of June 1665
to the 18 of February following’.36 Locke is known to have become
involved with performances in the Music School during his stay in
Oxford, because an inscription in the hand of the then Oxford Music
professor, Edward Lowe, on the recto of the first page of Ob
Mus.Sch.C.44, Set D1 – Locke’s working draft of a Prelude and Gloria to
be added to his Jubilate Deo – gives a detailed account of the piece’s
inception: ‘This Prelude for two violins & a Base Viol was made, prickt,
& Sung, at ye Musicke Schoole, betweene ye Howers of 12, & 3
afternoone the 9th of November [1665]: by Mr Lock who did it to add to
his Songe – Jubelate & sunge the Base then him-selfe: & Mr Blagrave the
Countertenor’.37 A further inscription by Lowe on the front page of
Locke’s autograph for ‘Ad te levavi oculos meos’, preserved in
Mus.Sch.C.44, Set D21, demonstrates that this motet was composed and
performed precisely one week later: ‘This songe & Phantasye was made
34 John Milsom, ‘Introduction to the Online Catalogue’, Christ Church Library Music
Catalogue, http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/library/music/page.html?page=Intro%2Finfo
(last accessed 6 September 2004).
35 Jonathan Wainwright has established that the sale of the library probably took place
in 1671, following the death of Christopher, First Baron Hatton, on 4 July 1670; see
Jonathan P. Wainwright, Musical Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England: Christopher,
First Baron Hatton (1605–1670) (Aldershot, 1997), 42. Wainwright’s proposed list of items
now at Christ Church and probably or possibly of Hatton provenance includes twelve
manuscripts, but these do not include Och 1219(D); see ibid., 430.
36 Ashbee, Records of English Court Music, i, 70.
37 The date 1665 is confirmed both in Harding, Thematic Catalogue, p. xxviii, and in le
Huray’s Introduction to Locke, Anthems and Motets, p. xv. Presumably both derive the
dating from the simple evidence of Locke’s presence in Oxford during this year.
99
by Mr Mathew Locke to carry on the Meetinge at ye musick schoole.

Thursday ye 16th Novem[ber] 1665.’ In addition, a copy of Locke’s
setting for male voices of ‘O give thanks unto the Lord’ survives at
Christ Church, partly in the hand of Lowe, implying that the work may
have had a performance in Oxford.38
While there is no helpful inscription to prove that ‘How doth the
city’ has an Oxford provenance, there is some circumstantial evidence
supplementary to the autograph’s survival at Christ Church that
suggests it may have been performed there. Principal to this is the fact
that Och 1219(D) is written for transposing organ. As is explained by J.
Bunker Clark in his 1974 study, transposing organs were built with
pipes of 10-, 5-, 2.5- and 1.25-foot lengths rather than the 16-, 8-, 4- and 2-
foot lengths of the non-transposing organ. Clark convincingly
demonstrates from contemporary literature that the difference in pipe
length meant that such instruments were tuned in F, so that a
transposing organ ‘sounded choir-pitch F when the C-key was
depressed, and when the lowest stop normally used with the choir, the
5-foot principal, was drawn’.39 Consequently, organ accompaniment
parts copied for a transposing organ were usually notated a fifth higher
than the sung pitch, a C4 clef being used in the left-hand stave and a G2
in the right-hand stave, so that ‘the accompaniment is easily shifted up
a fifth without even changing the position of the notes on the staff’.40
Comparison of Och 1219(D) with Och Mus. 14 demonstrates precisely
this system in use for Locke’s organ part of ‘How doth the city’:
following the treble-register introduction, the C4 clef is used in the left-
hand part for the rest of the piece; the right hand maintains the G2 clef
throughout; and the pitch is a fifth higher than in Blow’s full score.41
The fact that Locke’s organ part is notated for transposing organ
does not prove that it was performed in Oxford, but it does make it very
likely. Locke’s employment following the Restoration associates him
with only two locations: Oxford and London. Clark’s survey of organ
accompaniments demonstrating transposition does not include any
parts related to the London institutions at which we might expect
Locke’s anthems to have been performed in his lifetime (that is, those
linked with his court colleagues, such as the Whitehall Chapel, St Paul’s
and Westminster Abbey), and none of the surviving organ books
associated with those institutions in the Restoration shows evidence of
transposition.42 Parts for transposing organs are, however, related to at
38 Lowe copied only the opening of the anthem in score form on an unbound single
sheet now preserved as Och 1188–9, f. 38.
39 J. Bunker Clark, Transposition in Seventeenth-Century English Organ Accompaniments
and the Transposing Organ, Detroit Monographs in Musicology, 4 (Detroit, 1974), 26–7.
40 Ibid., 39.
41 This can be seen by comparing Figure 3 above with the transcription of Blow’s full
score in the Appendix.

42 The descriptions of London organs made by Bernard Smith given by Freeman also do
not suggest transposition, although many were built too late to be relevant to Locke in any
case: the instructions for rebuilding the Westminster Abbey organ in 1694 mention a
100
least two of the Oxford Colleges: Och 88 includes the inscriptions

‘William Kinge’ and ‘Mr Kin[g] / Organ’, which appear to identify the
book as belonging to William King, the organist at New College from
1664 to 1680;43 Och 437 seems to be a post-Restoration book from St
John’s College, Oxford;44 and Ojc 315 is known to have been copied for
St John’s, probably during the early years of the Restoration.45 Indeed, a
letter from 1665 describing a transposing organ built by Thomas Dallam
in 1613–14 at Worcester Cathedral also mentions that ‘of the same
number of stops & matter & dimension was ye organ at St Johns Coll in
Oxford build within 7 yeares after, by ye same workman old Tho:
Dallam’,46 and this was perhaps the organ on which the accompani-
ments in MS 315 were played.47
There is one further important piece of evidence that suggests that
‘How doth the city’ was written for one of the Oxford transposing
organs during Locke’s stay in Oxford in 1665–6: the strongly
prescriptive approach to continuo Locke adopts in his autograph seems
to relate to that in at least one of the Oxford organ books. Lbl Add. 30834
is in the hand of Benjamin Rogers, organist of Magdalen College from
1665 to 1686.48 This relatively small book was copied in the customary
manner, with anthems at one end and services at the other. While the
organ parts for the simple service settings are based entirely on
doubling,49 those for the anthems are more complex, and some, like
Locke’s autograph, include a considerable amount of notated
independent material, although they are not fully written out.50 The
style of accompaniment is well represented by Rogers’s verse anthem
fifteenth stop; the list for the new St Paul’s organ of 1694 cited on p. 45 above includes
twelfth and fifteenth stops; and the specification for the Banqueting House Chapel organ
built for use after the Whitehall Chapel was destroyed by fire in 1698 also includes twelfth
and fifteenth stops; the description for the original Chapel Royal organ built at Whitehall
in 1662 is unfortunately too vague to be informative. See Freeman, Father Smith, 13, 14,
34–5, 38–9.
43 See Clark, Transposition in Seventeenth-Century English Organ Accompaniments, 57.
44 Ibid., 58–9.
45 Ibid., 68–70; see also J. Bunker Clark, ‘A Re-emerged Seventeenth-Century Organ
Accompaniment Book’, Music & Letters, 47 (1966), 148–52. In addition, Och 438 is
associated with John Wilson, Professor of Music at Oxford from 1661 to 1682; see Clark,
Transposition in Seventeenth-Century English Organ Accompaniments, 60.
46 Quoted ibid., 25.
47 This, of course, assumes that the organ at St John’s survived the Civil War and
Commonwealth intact.
48 I am grateful to Keri Dexter for making me aware of this interesting organ book.
49 In four-part settings, the right hand comprises the treble and virtually all of the alto,
while the left hand contains the bass voice and some sections of the tenor; the texture is
therefore mainly in three parts. This is similar to the treatment of services in the London
organ books, but they tend more towards giving outer parts only, so the Oxford book is
somewhat fuller.
50 There are very occasional figures, for example, and the texture is not as consistent as
one would expect from a fully notated part.
101
Table 3. Structure of Rogers’s anthem ‘Bow down thine ear, O Lord’.
Bars Text Scoring
1–36 Bow down thine ear, O Lord Verse: TrT

37–45 Be merciful unto me, O Lord Chorus: TrATB
46–68 Comfort the soul Verse: TrTB
69–78 For thou, Lord, art good and gracious Solo: Bass
79–89 Give ear, O Lord, unto my prayer Solo: Treble
90–94 Ritornello Organ
95–107 I will thank thee, O Lord Verse: TrTB
108–29 Blessed be the Lord God Chorus: TrATB
‘Bow down thine ear, O Lord’, dating from 1677,51 whose structure is
shown in Table 3.
The solo bass verse is the most interesting section of the organ part,
because Rogers incorporates entirely independent material in the right
hand, thus providing an accompaniment in the treble register (Example
29(a)). There is no attempt to create imitation with the solo part –
polyphonic writing, indeed, does not seem to have been a feature of
Rogers’s anthems52 – but the added part has more of the character of a
composed accompaniment than of an improvised part. Indeed,
essentially the same independent part is included on an additional
stave in Rogers’s autograph full score of the anthem in Och 21 (Example
29(b)),53 so it is clear that the right-hand line is a compositional feature
of the piece, rather than what one might describe as a notated version of
an improvisation. An organist playing from the full score would easily
be able to distinguish between the independent part and the bass
voice’s solo because separate staves are used; in the organ part,
however, the bass solo, continuo bass and added treble-register line are
incorporated on two staves, with no distinction made between what is
doubled and what is independent. This arrangement implies that the
accompanist would both have doubled the solo part and played the
added material, although an organist familiar with the music might
have omitted the bass voice line without great difficulty.54
51 This is the date written below the title of the anthem in Rogers’s full score of the
anthem in Och 21 (see below).
52 Holman comments that Rogers’s services and anthems ‘tend to be unadventurous,
with homophonic four-part textures and simple, foursquare rhythms’; see Peter Holman,
‘Rogers, Benjamin’, New Grove II, xxi, 517–18 (p. 517).
53 This score mainly consists of autograph material in the hand of Orlando Gibbons, but
was apparently acquired by Benjamin Rogers, who copied some of his own sacred works
on leaves left blank by Gibbons.
54 The somewhat contradictory implications of Rogers’s full score and his organ part for
‘I beheld, and lo’, another of his anthems showing similar characteristics in the two
autographs, are noted by Keri Dexter and Geoffrey Webber in their Preface to The
Restoration Anthem: Volume One, 1660–1689, Church Music Society Reprints, 102 (Oxford,
2003), 5. The complete organ part for ‘I beheld, and lo’ is included in their edition, ibid.,
68–75.
102
(a)
(b)
Example 29. Solo bass verse section, ‘For thou, Lord, art good and gracious’,
from Benjamin Rogers’s ‘Bow down thine ear, O Lord’: (a) organ part, Lbl Add.
30834, f. 15v; (b) autograph full score, Och 21, p. 168.
The treble solo verse, ‘Give ear, O Lord’, which follows on

immediately from the bass solo, also includes notes independent of the
voice part in both the organ book and full score. That the additional
parts are not identical in the two autograph sources highlights their
apparent function: they occur beneath the doubled treble line, mainly
filling in the harmony to create a three-part texture (Example 30).
In the opening two-part verse, ‘Bow down thine ear, O Lord’, for
treble and tenor, a considerable amount of independent material is
woven around doublings of both solo parts. As can be seen in Example
31, the voices sing phrases in alternation for much of the verse, and
Rogers seems to concentrate on providing one or two additional parts
103
(a)
(b)
Example 30. Solo treble verse section, ‘Give ear, O Lord’, from Rogers’s ‘Bow
down thine ear, O Lord’: (a) organ part, Lbl Add. 30834, f. 15v; (b) autograph full
score, Och 21, p. 168.
where only one voice is active – it is noticeable, for instance, that no

independent material is added in bars 162–181, nor in bars 342–36, where
treble and tenor sing together. The organ part therefore maintains three
or four parts throughout. Added notes are given at the top of the texture
where the treble rests (such as in bars 11–13), and below the treble
where the tenor rests (such as in bars 14–15), so that there are no
extreme changes of register between phrases.
In the two four-part choruses in this anthem, ‘Be merciful unto me,
O Lord’ and ‘Blessed be the Lord God’, the organ part only doubles the
vocal lines, without added independent material: the outer vocal parts
and most of the alto and tenor are included in the first chorus; the final
chorus, meanwhile, has mainly three-part texture, outer parts being
given together with either alto or, more occasionally, tenor. The two
three-part verses for treble, tenor and bass also consist mainly of part
doublings in the organ part – indeed, the simple, homorhythmic setting
of ‘I will thank thee, O Lord’ is straightforwardly reduced in Lbl Add.
104
105
106
Example 31. Opening two-part verse from Rogers’s organ part for ‘Bow
down thine ear, O Lord’: Och 21, p. 166 shown on top system; Lbl Add. 30834,
f. 16v shown below.
30834. The earlier verse, ‘Comfort the soul of thy servant’, however,
includes added material above the initial tenor–bass entry, and below
the following phrase sung by treble alone. Since there is no independent
material given where all three parts sing together, the implication is that
Rogers supplements the voices where one or more singers are resting,
ensuring that the tessitura is kept consistent by adding notes above the
tenor and below the treble. It should be noted, however, that the first
phrase of the verse, where the treble sings along, includes no such
added material until the independent figures in bar 3 of the extract.
Despite occasional contradictions of this nature, there are several
features of Rogers’s accompaniment for ‘Bow down thine ear, O Lord’
that relate to Locke’s approach in ‘How doth the city’. Principal among
these, of course, is the sheer amount of independent material
incorporated in the organ part – and in this case also the autograph full
score. But Rogers is also like Locke in that he notates independent
material only in solo sections and verses with relatively few singers,
reverting to doubling alone where the voice parts are sufficient to fill in
the harmony. Rogers’s respective treatment of the bass and treble verses
and of the two-part verse for treble and tenor suggests that, like Locke,
he wanted to create an accompaniment with consistent tessitura: he
adds independent material in the treble register in the bass solo verse
and phrases for tenor only in the duet, but fills in the middle of the
texture where the treble sings alone. And, throughout the piece, he uses
added parts to maintain three- to four-part texture consistently,
although there are no examples of five-part writing that might
demonstrate that he sought to restrict the number of voices to no more
than four, as Locke does. The only notable discrepancies between
Locke’s and Rogers’s approaches are that Rogers includes doubling of
107
the vocal parts in the two solo sections, whereas Locke reproduces very
little of the solo treble lines in his autograph, and that Locke’s
independent material includes imitation of the vocal parts; as we have
seen, Rogers’s more homophonic textures may simply highlight
stylistic differences between the two musicians’ compositional
techniques.
The lack of independent imitative material in Rogers’s organ part
means that, in performance, his accompaniment sounds at least
recognizably similar to the kinds of realizations I have proposed may
have been created from the London organ books; Locke’s part, on the
other hand, is heard as markedly more contrapuntal. Despite this,
Locke’s and Rogers’s autograph organ parts share an important feature:
the notation is considerably more prescriptive than that typical of the
London books. It seems possible that Locke’s accompaniment could
exemplify an approach to accompaniment heavily reliant on notation
that was characteristic of at least some of the Oxford colleges during the
early years of the Restoration.55 Of course, this suggestion rests on a
certain amount of speculation, not least because it is only circumstantial
evidence that links Locke’s ‘How doth the city’ with Oxford. We have
also seen in the two examples of Locke anthems copied into Chapel
Royal books that incorporation of an unusually high quantity of
notated independent material may have been associated with Locke’s
accompaniments generally, not just in the Oxford context. Other organ
books surviving from the Oxford chapels also do not give the
impression of a common accompaniment style – indeed, they seem
remarkably varied in their relationships to full scores of the works they
contain.
Four manuscripts illustrate well the lack of consistency in the
Oxford organ parts. Och 525, 526 and 1230 all contain a sacred repertory
and appear to be in the hand of Richard Goodson the elder (c.
1655–1718), who succeeded Lowe as Professor of Music at Oxford in
1682, and was organist at Christ Church from 1692 until his death;56 Ojc
315 is probably in the hand of William Ellis, organist at St John’s College
55 A transcription by Ian Cheverton of the anthem ‘The king shall rejoice’ by Richard
Ayleward – organist of Norwich Cathedral in 1661–4 and 1666–9 – gives the impression
that this anthem also contains a considerable amount of independent material, which
would suggest that the link was not unique to Oxford. However, despite Cheverton’s
claim that the organ part is given ‘as in the original’, virtually none of the added notes is
found in the source, Ckc 9, pp. 89–91, so the material is not Ayleward’s own; see Ian
Cheverton, ‘English Church Music of the Early Restoration Period, 1660–c.1676’ (Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Wales, Cardiff, 1985), 44 and 198. I am grateful to Geoffrey
Webber for consulting the manuscript in the Rowe Library to confirm my suspicions
aroused from analysing the organ book on microfilm.
56 The later material in Och 1230 is not in Goodson’s hand. Och 1230 is catalogued
alongside several other Oxford organ books, with shelf marks from 1225 to 1235; all the
other books, however, seem to be from a much later period, including music by
composers such as William Hayes (1706–77), Thomas Norris (1741–90), William Walond
(1719–60) and even William Crotch (1775–1847).
108
before the Civil War and from the Restoration until his death in 1674.57
The manuscripts Och 525 and 526 appear to be organ books, most
works being notated on two-stave systems; however, three staves are
used for anthems with five or more parts, apparently for practical
reasons, since Goodson notates exact reproductions of all the vocal
parts throughout. There is some evidence that the books were used in
performance – the annotation ‘count’ in Goodson’s hand occurs at the
beginning of an ATB verse in Blow’s anthem ‘And I heard a great voice’
on f. 110v of Och 525 – but it is difficult to know how prescriptive the
notation was intended to be, since there are no concessions made for the
organist in the part reductions, and at some points it would certainly
not be possible to play all the material notated on the score. The music
Goodson copied into Och 1230 includes some of the same pieces as Och
Mus. 525–6, but is much more similar to the accompaniment style found
in the London books: outer vocal parts are doubled consistently, and
inner parts are added selectively to create mostly three-part texture,
being drawn from various vocal lines between which Goodson swaps
freely; this creates a part that is easy for the organist to play.58 The main
differences between Och 1230 and the London style seem to be that
Goodson includes imitation less frequently, and is less inclined to
simplify melodic lines from the vocal parts; and, although independent
figures are occasionally added, he does not incorporate any inde-
pendent material into the notation on the stave. The St John’s College
organ book Ojc 315, apparently dating from the early years of the
Restoration, shows elements of a different style again: in contrast to
both Goodson’s strict doublings and his selectively added inner parts,
Ellis seems to prefer skeletal doubling of outer parts only, as can be seen
from the facsimile reproduced by Clark, showing Ellis’s ‘This is the
record of John’.59
It seems unlikely that sufficient data survive for an entirely convincing

explanation for Locke’s unusual accompaniment style in his autograph
organ part for ‘How doth the city’ to be found. Nevertheless, much of
the circumstantial and stylistic evidence that has been explored in this
chapter does point to solutions that are plausible, and that need not be
mutually exclusive. The links between Och 1219(D) and the two
anthems copied by Church in Lbl 27.a.13 suggest a continuo style
distinctive to Locke, which involves extensive addition of notated
material independent of the vocal parts, and which is therefore more
prescriptive than the style suggested by the London organ books. This
57 The attribution is made in Clark, ‘A Re-emerged Seventeenth-Century Organ

Accompaniment Book’, 150.
58 Compare, for example, the strict transcription of parts in Goodson’s version of
Hooper’s ‘Behold, it is Christ’ in Och 525, f. 81 with the arrangement in Och 1230, pp.
23–4.
59 Clark, ‘A Re-emerged Seventeenth-Century Organ Accompaniment Book’, plate
facing p. 149.
109
approach to accompaniment is, however, not unique: some of Benjamin

Rogers’s autograph organ parts for anthems that would have been
performed at Magdalen College, Oxford in the early Restoration show
marked similarities with Locke’s part for ‘How doth the city’, in terms
of their reliance on notated independent parts. A number of factors,
indeed, link Locke’s autograph with Oxford: its survival in the
collection of manuscripts at Christ Church, which is dominated by
Oxford sources; the fact that it is arranged for transposing organ, a form
of the instrument associated with several Oxford colleges but with none
of the major London institutions; and evidence that other sacred works
by Locke were performed in Oxford during his stay in the city in
1665–6. Examples from other Oxford organ books of the period are
dissimilar to Rogers’s autograph, and demonstrate that Locke’s style of
accompaniment probably did not predominate in the city at the time.
Nevertheless, it is possible either that Locke was influenced by hearing
a more prescriptive approach to accompaniment while he was living in
Oxford, or – rather more likely – that his notational style was adopted
by Rogers, and perhaps other Oxford musicians, after they had
experienced Locke’s own performances and/or seen his manuscripts.
110
NJ455 - 09Conclusion 8/11/05 10:44 am Page 111
Conclusions
The surviving Restoration organ books from the major London sacred
institutions are not perfect sources of information about the accom-
paniment styles that were used by organists during the period: they are
quite often contradictory, and will never provide as clear a picture as a
detailed contemporary written account would have. There are also
plenty of gaps in our knowledge about the conditions under which the
organists who used the books would have worked. For example, we do
not know how well those organists who were not performing their own
compositions would have known the pieces they played; we have very
little evidence of how much rehearsal time they would have had with
the choir and soloists;1 and it is difficult for us to understand how they
would have coped with the poor vertical alignment typical of these
books and, indeed, of keyboard scores generally during the period.
Nevertheless, reading between the notes, as it were, we can infer a good
deal about what accompaniments could and could not have included,
and this enables us to develop some conception of appropriate
realization styles.
In this study I have concentrated principally on the fundamental
issue of whether or not vocal parts doubled in the organ part above the
bass line should be played. It seems to me that the inclusion or
exclusion of these lines has a major influence on many aspects of
continuo style: quite apart from determining the degree to which the
organ part is independent of the vocal lines, it affects the level of
contrapuntal activity, the number of parts played and the prominence
of those parts. Modern editors (and indeed performers) have tended to
include only limited doubling in their realizations, despite the fact that
most organ books double vocal lines in solo verses and include at least
the outer parts of choruses and ensemble verses throughout; this
sometimes means that modern editorial accompaniments largely or
completely ignore notated right-hand parts from the organ books,
presumably because the editors think that they were not incorporated
into realizations. I have suggested that there are four main reasons
for believing that contemporary organists did, in fact, follow both
1 The only relevant contemporary comment of which I am aware is an entry in Pepys’s

diary for 23 February 1661: ‘After dinner to White-hall chappell with Mr. Childe; and
there did Captain Cooke and his boy make a tryall of an Anthemne against tomorrow,
which was rare Musique’; Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Latham and Matthews, ii,
41. Pepys’s use of the word ‘tryall’ perhaps implies that Cooke and the boy – presumably
a treble soloist – were rehearsing the piece for the first time, but it is easy to read too much
into such descriptions when other evidence is lacking.
right- and left-hand parts quite closely when accompanying this

repertory:
1. Restoration organ books are more than just short scores: organ-
book arrangers seem to have included inner-part doublings
selectively to inform the player about particular features of the
music – principally imitation and parallel thirds, sixths or their
compounds. The emphasis on imitation, in particular, indicates that
it was considered important for organists to know about melodic as
well as harmonic characteristics of the music, which does not fit
well with a conception of purely chordal realization. Moreover,
there is some evidence in the notation that doubled imitation was
included in the accompaniment.
2. Figuring is as incomplete and irregular in these books as in full
scores of the period, but seems to have been regarded as largely
interchangeable with parts doubled on the stave; some passages of
figuring, indeed, reproduce entire melodic lines from the vocal
parts and seem to go beyond a purely harmonic function. Others
create harmonic and sometimes melodic features independent of
the vocal parts. Since these cannot be distinguished by the player
from those that double the voices, we must assume that figures
were intended to be included in the accompaniment, and that
probably most were realized. It seems very unlikely that vocal lines
would have been doubled when the organist realized figures, but
not when the parts were notated on the stave itself.
3. Doubled vocal parts are often adapted in organ parts: decorative
melodic lines are simplified, groups of parts are sometimes subtly
changed so that they fit well under the hands and so that impossible
stretches are avoided, and some doublings are transposed up or
down an octave. This does suggest that organ-part arrangers
thought carefully about the notation in organ books, and were
concerned with more than just providing players with descriptive
information about the vocal parts.
4. Some organ parts copied by Blow and Gostling include independent
material that does not double the voices at all. Since this material is
not distinguished in any manner from doublings, the only way that
it could have been included in the music is if organists incorporated
all the material in the right hand into their accompaniments. Some of
these independent lines are effectively substitutes for independent
figures, but others imitate melodic material in the vocal parts and
are therefore woven into the fabric of the piece.
Working on the basis of this evidence, it seems probable that both

right- and left-hand parts in organ books were included in
accompaniments of Restoration sacred music: in short, the notation in
the books only really makes sense if it is treated as broadly prescriptive
rather than descriptive. This is not to suggest, however, that organists
112
Conclusions
played strictly what was notated and nothing more: the way in which
doublings of inner vocal parts are added on the score and in figuring
strongly implies that players would have filled in notes suggested by
the voice-leading principles of the day. Limitation of part doublings in
pieces with many voices suggests that extra chordal notes were added
to create no more than three or four voices in total, possibly with
occasional expansion to five parts in order to create added emphasis.
The organ books therefore cannot be described as fully written-out
parts, but incorporate very little improvisation in comparison with
genuine figured-bass parts.
The basic principle of an organ part maintaining three- to four-part
texture, and doubling at least the outer voice parts consistently, but
with some simplification of melodic lines, seems to apply in general for
the entire Anglican polyphonic repertory from 1660 to at least the first
decade of the eighteenth century. There does not seem to be any
inherent distinction between genres, and apparent differences between
styles of accompaniment for service settings, full anthems and verse
anthems relate more to the texture of individual pieces – particularly
the degree to which they are imitative – than to the genre itself. Within
verse anthems and services, the style seems to apply equally to full
sections and ensemble verses, and it is possible that contrast between
these sections was created through changes of manual and registration.
It is only in solo verses that doubling of voice parts is at all contentious.
Melodic lines are, of course, often more florid in solo verses than
elsewhere, and the sometimes considerable simplification of decorative
passages in the notation results in an organ part that supports and
underpins the soloist, rather than strictly doubling his part. Moreover,
realizations in solo sections for low voices almost certainly included
notes improvised above the voice part (in addition to those
independent notes notated on the score) – thus allowing for a consistent
right-hand tessitura – and part doubling was probably abandoned
where the voice descended to a low tessitura, close to the left-hand part.
Overall, the London organ books seem to suggest that accom-
paniment of some solo sections was less strongly based on doubling
and was more independent than were ensemble verses and choruses.
This tendency towards an approach to accompaniment close to figured-
bass style in some sections is also demonstrated in a small number of
surviving organ books that have incomplete right-hand parts, or
contain pieces copied largely as figured-bass parts with fragmentary
part doublings added. For several of these pieces, the manuscripts
imply that organists may have doubled at least outer parts in choruses,
while adopting a largely chordal realization style in verses. Although
three organ parts of this genre probably date from the 1670s and one
dates from 1693, the remaining pieces are by post-Restoration
composers from the early eighteenth century, implying a shift towards
improvised chordal accompaniment in music by the new generation of
composers. Several two-stave organ parts from the same late period
113
include detailed figuring, have passages where the right-hand stave is

blank, and incorporate obbligato organ accompaniments, and these
seem to confirm the increasing reliance on figured bass and inde-
pendent accompaniment by the early eighteenth century.
The fully written-out accompaniment by Matthew Locke for his
anthem ‘How doth the city’ in some respects emphasizes the distinction
between styles of accompaniment based on doubling and those that are
mainly independent. In solo verses, Locke’s parts, while fully notated,
have the character of figured-bass realizations, being almost free of
doubling and essentially chordal. In ensemble verses and choruses
doubling predominates. Locke is very unusual, however, because he
adds contrapuntal material in the more small-scale ensemble verses,
often imitating the vocal parts. While the volume of independent
writing is therefore much greater than that found in other Restoration
organ books – and similarities with a number of other accompaniments
suggest that this may have been a characteristic of Locke’s style
generally and perhaps that of some Oxford organists – the resulting
accompaniment highlights the essentially polyphonic nature of part
doubling. In a sense, Locke’s autograph encapsulates in a more extreme
way than the London organ books the tension between two opposing
styles: on the one hand, the ensemble and full sections are reminiscent
of the traditional English verse anthem, the strongly contrapuntal
character requiring an organ accompaniment closely based on the vocal
parts themselves to ensure correctness; on the other hand, the solo
sections – particularly the second-treble solo – are much closer to
Italianate recitative, and their accompaniments therefore reflect a
nascent move towards genuine, independent basso continuo. What is
lacking from Locke’s part, of course, is the freedom for the player that
improvised independent parts created from figured bass would bring to
English sacred music in the eighteenth century.
These observations have potentially profound implications for
modern approaches to the accompaniment of English sacred music of
the seventeenth century, but they also, together with a number of other
recent studies,2 highlight the need to consider on an individual basis
styles of accompaniment appropriate to other seventeenth-century
genres of music from across Europe. It is no great surprise that
accompaniment based on doubling should have been applied primarily
to ensemble music, especially that of contrapuntal character, while it
was gradually replaced by figured-bass style accompaniment in solo,
virtuosic music. Keyboard continuo, after all, has its roots in sixteenth-
century part doubling,3 and there is abundant evidence that the
2 See Introduction, n. 6.
3 Some evidence from relevant sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century sources is
discussed by Peter Holman, in ‘“Evenly, Softly, and Sweetly Acchording to All”’, 355–9
and 360–5, relating to sources in full score and those notated on two staves. See also
Horsley, ‘Full and Short Scores’ (as discussed below), where some of the Italian sources
mentioned by Holman are covered in more detail.
114
Conclusions
invention of figured bass was explicitly intended to create an

improvised, chordal accompaniment style appropriate to the new
monodic music of the seconda prattica. Comments such as the following,
made by Agostino Agazzari in his famous treatise of 1607, Del suonare
sopra il basso con tutti stromenti & uso loro nel conserto, are typical:
[S]ince the true style of expressing the words has at last been found, namely, by
reproducing the same thought in the best manner possible, which succeeds best
with a single voice, or only a few, as in the modern airs of sundry able men, and
as is the constant practice at Rome in Concertos, I say that it is not necessary to
make a score [spartitura] or tablature [intavolatura]; a Bass, with its signs [i.e.,
figures], . . . is enough. But if someone were to tell me that, for playing the old
works, full of fugues and counterpoints, a Bass is not enough, my answer is that
vocal works of this kind are no longer in use, on account of the confusion and
chaos of the words arising from the long and intricate fugues, and also because
they have no charm, since, being sung by all the voices, one hears no period or
sense, it being interrupted and covered up by the fugues; in fact each voice is
singing different words from the other at the same moment, which, to men of
intelligence and judgement, is displeasing.4
What has often been made much less clear – probably as a result of
our tendency to concentrate on the development and adoption of the
new style – is that accompaniment based on part doubling was not
simply and straightforwardly superseded by figured bass at the turn of
the seventeenth century, but existed alongside it for some time.5 Indeed,
evidence from both theoretical writings and surviving notation
suggests that it was used in some genres well into, and in some cases
throughout, the seventeenth century.
It is clear, for example, that sacred music was not the only type of
English music in which accompaniments continued to be based on
doubling. Peter Holman’s analysis of sources of consort music from
about 1620 to 1660 has demonstrated that in the written-out organ parts
for this repertory – while there is some variation according to the
number of string parts used and sometimes differing from composer to
composer – ‘the function of the organ . . . was essentially to double the
string parts’.6 Indeed, there are several direct similarities between the
London Restoration organ books and these earlier consort parts:
doublings are sometimes adapted so that one or more inner parts are
omitted where it would be awkward for an organist to try to play them
all;7 there are examples of repeated-note figures being simplified;8 some
4 Quoted and translated in Arnold, The Art of Accompaniment, 73.
5 The point is, however, made explicitly in Johnston, ‘Polyphonic Keyboard
Accompaniment’, 51–2.
6 Holman, ‘“Evenly, Softly, and Sweetly Acchording to All”’, 373; see also 373–80
passim.
7 See Holman’s Ex. 13.3, from John Hingeston’s Pavan-Almand a 5, and Holman’s
comments on the example, ibid., 374.
8 Examples occur both in Ex. 13.3 and in Ex. 13.6, from John Jenkins, Air from Fantasy-
Air ‘Divisions’, given ibid., 378.
115
organ parts by John Jenkins double outer parts only, producing a kind
of skeletal texture;9 Jenkins’s parts also include examples of doublings
transposed down an octave;10 independent material is sometimes
added to the organ parts;11 and the organ’s independent writing
includes melodic lines that participate in the imitation.12 As was
mentioned in the Introduction, Holman also asserts that some
accompanists, particularly composers of consort music who were
themselves organists, played from full scores, a habit that again
strongly implies the doubling of at least some of the string parts.13 The
consort music of which Holman writes is, of course, often strongly
contrapuntal, and the persistence of doubling here is in marked contrast
to accompaniments for some other English secular genres, particularly
lute song, where unfigured bass parts began to be supplied in place of
lute tablature as early as 1615.14
The evidence so far might suggest that part-doubling in
seventeenth-century music was simply an English idiosyncrasy, but
similar approaches can also be detected in mainland Europe. Even in
Italy, some theorists continued to advise early in the century that
following the parts produced the best accompaniment: Lodovico Grossi
da Viadana, often credited as the inventor of figured bass, nevertheless
explained in the Preface to his Cento concerti ecclesiastici of 1602 (last
reprinted in Frankfurt in 1613) that, although he had not included an
intavolatura for the bass in his edition, and recognized that a single-
stave bass was less trouble to produce, he hoped ‘that the Organists will
be able to make the said tablature at their own convenience, which, to
tell the truth, is much better’.15 In a well-known comment from his
Conclusioni del suono del Organo (Bologna, 1609), Adriano Banchieri
contrasted well-trained organists with those who practised figured bass
alone: ‘in short, we shall soon have two classes of players: on the one
hand Organists, that is to say, such as practise good playing from Score
and improvisation, and, on the other hand, Bassists who, overcome by
9 This is demonstrated in Ex. 13.6 and ibid. 377–9; Holman asserts that such thin
textures should not be filled in for Jenkins.
10 Ibid., 379–80.
11 It is often woven around part doublings in much the same manner as the material
discussed in Chapter 3 above. A good example occurs in Holman’s Ex. 13.8, from a
Fantasy in C major by John Coprario; see ibid., 380.
12 See Holman’s Ex. 13.4, ibid., 376. The consort-music organ parts do tend, however, to
be more consistently contrapuntal than those for Restoration sacred music, and are more
clearly woven into the imitative fabric of each movement than even the part for Locke’s
‘How doth the city’.
13 Ibid., 368–72. Locke is one of the composers who may have accompanied his own
consort music from score (specifically his autograph Lbl Add. 17801), according to
Holman. If this assertion is correct, it perhaps implies that Locke notated the organ part
for ‘How doth the city’ because he was not playing the part himself (which would not be
surprising, given his Catholicism). However, the need for transposition (and conceivably
also the added contrapuntal parts) would be reason enough for notation to be necessary.
14 Ibid., 366.
15 Quoted and translated in Arnold, The Art of Accompaniment, 15.
116
Conclusions
sheer laziness, are content with simply playing [from?] the Bass’.16 And
in the same year, Girolamo Diruta condemned figured bass in the
Seconda parte del Transilvano, because it was impossible to know from
figuring which consonances and dissonances occurred in which vocal
parts; he advised that the only solution was to make a score and play all
the parts.17
That the perpetuation of part doubling did not merely represent
the ideology of a few theorists has been demonstrated convincingly by
Imogen Horsley: it is quite clear that doubling continued to be used in
the accompaniment of northern Italian sacred music until at least
around 1620. Organ parts printed as full scores were produced in Milan
by Simon Tini and Filippo Lomazzo, and by Agostino Tradate until
1607.18 Meanwhile, four works for six or more voices are known to have
been published with three-stave short-score organ parts (including the
‘Laudate pueri’ and ‘Laetatus sum’ from Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610),
which deploy ‘a series of fugal or free entries in the scores in precisely
the manner one would expect an organist to play them – an organist,
that is, who finds more parts than can be played, but who continues to
lead in all the voices as they enter, while supporting the essential notes
in the texture’.19 When the elaborate concertato style was imported into
sacred music around 1610, precise doubling of the voice parts became
impractical and an independent instrumental bass line was sometimes
necessary, but two-stave scores including at least the bass and topmost
part continued to be produced, and Horsley asserts that there is still
evidence that organists continued to double vocal parts, albeit
sometimes with simplified melodic lines: indeed, Giovanni Paolo Cima,
in his Concerti ecclesiastici (Milan, 1610), gave specific instructions that
the organist should play a simplified version of the ornamental vocal
line,20 and similar indications are found in publications by Pietro Lappi
16 Quoted and translated in ibid., 81. Banchieri makes a similar comment in the ‘Dialogo
Musicale’ added to the 1611 edition of his L’Organo suonarino opera ventesima quinta: ‘As for
this new fashion of playing on a Basso continuo, I do not condemn it, but I do not praise it,
because the new-fashioned Organists omit to study the Ricercatas in four parts and
improvisations of illustrious men in the profession, seeing that nowadays many consider
themselves adept Organists on the strength of a few stretches of the hand and playing on a
Basso continuo; but it is not true, seeing that adept Organists are those who play good
counterpoint in which all four parts are heard’; quoted and translated in Arnold, The Art of
Accompaniment, 90.
17 Arnold, ibid., includes a quotation from Otto Kinkeldey’s account of Diruta’s
directions, originally given in Orgel und Klavier in der Musik des 16. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig,
1910), 211. See also Horsley, ‘Full and Short Scores’, 473, where Viadana, Banchieri and
Diruta are all mentioned; and Johnston, ‘Polyphonic Keyboard Accompaniment’, 51–2,
where Diruta and Banchieri are cited.
18 Horsley, ‘Full and Short Scores’, 472–4.
19 Ibid., 474.
20 Ibid., 478. Horsley also suggests that this style of accompaniment would have been
intended by Monteverdi in elaborate movements from the Vespers, such as ‘Duo

seraphim’.
117
in 1608 and Girolamo Giacobbi in 1609.21 Even when northern Italian

prints began to be produced with figures around 1609, the tendency to
give figuring that reflected the exact intervals of the inner parts, so that
they could be doubled at unison pitch, was strong, and it was only in
the 1620s that two-stave parts ceased to be published in the region.22
Much later in the seventeenth century, references to the doubling of
voice parts in the continuo can still be found in Italian theory. In the
section on thoroughbass in Li primi albori musicali of 1672, Lorenzo
Penna advocates supportive doubling of solo parts, apparently similar
to that of Cima described above. According to Arnold, Penna states that
‘[i]n accompanying a Soprano or Alto, the upper part of the
accompaniment is to coincide with the voice part, or, at least, follow its
general outline, the presumption evidently being that the singer is likely
to be in need of such support, for we are told that the Organist must be
careful “to be quick in touching the key, in order to give the note to the
singer”’.23 Bartolomeo makes a similar comment in his Compendio
musicale of 1677, and the remark is even restated in Nicolò Pasquali’s
Thorough-Bass made Easy of 1757.24 A slightly different perpetuation of
doubling relates more closely to its original association with
contrapuntal music: several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
theorists indicated that fugal entries – today often interpreted only as
cues in the part – should be doubled,25 and Lars Ulrik Mortensen
demonstrated that Antonio Tonelli’s written-out realizations of
Corelli’s op. 5 violin sonatas consistently follow this rule. What is
perhaps more interesting, however, is that doubling of the violin part is
21 Ibid., 493; Giacobbi in fact states that the top part need not always be doubled, but, as
Borgir points out, this implies it was doubled at least some of the time; see Borgir, The
Performance of the Basso Continuo, 129.
22 Horsley, ‘Full and Short Scores’, 495–6. On the use of exact intervals in figuring in
Italian works of this period, see also Johnston, ‘Polyphonic Keyboard Accompaniment’,
53.
23 Arnold, The Art of Accompaniment, 132 (italics his).
24 Borgir, The Performance of the Basso Continuo, 158.
25 Examples mentioned by Mortensen include Michael Praetorius in 1619, Alessandro
Poglietti in 1676, Georg Muffat in 1682 and Heinichen in 1725; see Mortensen,
‘“Unerringly tasteful”?’, 675. To this could be added Giuseppe Paolucci, who wrote in his
Arte pratica di contrappunto (Venice, 1766): ‘si può accompagnare all’unisono la parte
[vocale] acuta con la parte dell’organo; e ciò a fine di render più sensibile l’entrata del
soggetto, e tal modo di scrivere la parte dell’organo da alcuni vien detto scrivere in
chiavette, cioè servirsi di chiavi che non son proprie della parte dell’organo, tanto più che
queste chiavi si suonano molte volte con uno, o con due diti solamente, senza la
riempitura dell’accompagnamento intiero’. (‘One can accompany the high [vocal] part
with the organ at the unison; and this is so that the entrance of the subject will be better
heard, and such a way of writing the organ part is called by some “writing in chiavette”,
that is using clefs that are not properly used in organ scores, especially since these clefs are
often played with only one or two fingers, without the fullness provided by the whole
accompaniment’.) Quoted and translated in Patrizio Barbieri, ‘On a Continuo Organ Part
Attributed to Palestrina’, Early Music, 22 (1994), 587–605 (pp. 599–600). The quotation is
also given in Holman, ‘“Evenly, Softly, and Sweetly Acchording to All”’, 360.
118
Conclusions
not restricted to such imitative entries, but appears to show limited,

simplified doubling, again in the manner of Cima:
Whenever the bass is silent, even only for a few notes, the harpsichord follows
the solo part in unison, or an octave below. . . . Furthermore, melodic figures in
the solo line may be incorporated into the continuo texture. The only possible
explanation for this must surely be that a simultaneous rendering of both the
unornamented and the ornamented version of the melody was intended.26
German music presents somewhat different challenges from that of

Italy because of the existence of a large body of sacred music
transcribed into German organ tablature. The question that scholars
have had to address is not so much what organists would have played,
but whether the tablatures were created for accompaniment purposes
at all. There was a long-standing tradition in Germany of making solo
keyboard arrangements of polyphonic vocal music, a use of tablature
that flourished particularly in the sixteenth century – as it did elsewhere
in Europe – but that continued well into the seventeenth, with some
north German manuscript tablatures dating from the latter half of the
century.27 Such arrangements were often used during church services,
when a choir was not available, and could also be performed alongside
secular music as private or public entertainment.28 They are easy to
identify because the music is adapted to make it suitable for keyboard,
so that polyphonic lines are not always clearly identified, some parts
are missed out, and complete bars may also be omitted occasionally,
thus rendering the tablature unsuitable for use alongside a choral
rendition of the piece.29 However, there are plenty of other tablatures
that are not altered in this way: instead, they record the entire piece, in
the manner of a full score. Evidence that these sorts of tablatures were
actually played in performance is provided by Curtis Lasell, who notes
in the contents of two large tablature collections from Lüneberg pieces
arranged for solo organ juxtaposed with literal transcriptions, and
concludes: ‘the presence of tablature scores alongside “real” organ
music in these two collections, then, most likely refutes an explanation
which claims their use as conducting scores’;30 a similarly revealing
dual use of notation – some pieces being given as figured basses, and
others in tablature – is noted by Cleveland Johnson for a manuscript
26 Mortensen, ‘“Unerringly tasteful”?’, 676–7.
27 These are tablatures from Lüneberg, discussed in detail in Curtis Lasell, ‘Vocal
Polyphony in the Lüneberg Tablatures: A Double Repertory of Solo Organ Literature and
Accompanimental Absetzungen’, Church, Stage, and Studio: Music and Its Contexts in
Seventeenth-Century Germany, ed. Paul Walker, Studies in Music, 107 (Ann Arbor and
London, 1990), 231–78 (pp. 233–9). Lasell notes (p. 233) that the last printed tablature
anthology of this sort was Johann Woltz’s Tabulatura, published in Switzerland in 1617.
28 Ibid., 240; on the use of organ to substitute for the choir, see also Cleveland Johnson,
Vocal Compositions in German Organ Tablatures, 1550–1650: A Catalogue and Commentary,

Outstanding Dissertations in Music from British Universities (New York and London,
1989), 132.
29 Lasell, ‘Vocal Polyphony in the Lüneberg Tablatures’, 234–9.
30 Ibid., 241.
119
from the mid-seventeenth century, now in Berlin.31 These observations

are strengthened by the fact that one of the Lüneberg manuscripts was
copied by two organists working at the Johanniskirche in the city, rather
than by a cantor, who would have been the only figure likely to use a
conducting score.32
German organists of the seventeenth century were well used to
preparing their own tablatures for accompanying choral music, and,
indeed, often seem to have built up sizable collections of their own
manuscripts.33 Several scholars have noted how reluctant the organists
seem to have been to give up this tradition of recording the vocal parts
of each piece exactly,34 a habit that is strongly suggestive of a continued
adherence to accompaniment based on part doubling. Cleveland
Johnson, for instance, gives examples of printed continuo parts being
renotated in manuscript as tablatures, or with a mixture of figures and
letters.35 Gregory Johnston draws attention to the ambivalence of
Heinrich Schütz towards figured bass, demonstrated in the prefaces to
works published between 1619 and 1657, where Schütz consistently
expresses doubts about figured bass and claims to have been
pressurized into including basso continuo parts by his publishers. The
prefatory address of his Cantiones sacrae of 1625 provides a good
example:
The publisher, thinking that this slight work would be more agreeable [to the
public], wrested this basso continuo from me; and he provided the opportunity
that I should furthermore add, at the end, one or two pieces suited to basso
continuo. I would beg the organists who wish to satisfy more sensitive ears,
however, not to spare the pains of writing out all the parts in score or so-called
tablature; should you wish to accompany, in the usual manner, solely from the
continuo part, I should find it misguided and clumsy.36
31 The manuscript in question is Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Mus. MS 40075; see
Johnson, Vocal Compositions in German Organ Tablatures, 70–1.

32 Lasell, ‘Vocal Polyphony in the Lüneberg Tablatures’, 241.
33 John Butt, ‘Towards a Genealogy of the Keyboard Concerto’, The Keyboard in Baroque
Europe, ed. Christopher Hogwood (Cambridge, 2003), 93–110 (p. 105).

34 As well as in Johnson and Johnston, the same ground is also covered ibid., 105–8.
35 Johnson cites Warsaw, Biblioteka Narodowa, Mus. 326, the latest works of which date
from 1641, as an example of the former; examples of the latter are given as Berlin,
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Mus. MS 40075 and Levoča (Slovakia), Evanjelická a v.
cirkevná knižnica, MS Mus. 13990b (probably from 1600–20). See Johnson, Vocal
Compositions in German Organ Tablatures, 131 and (for manuscript datings) 70–1, 76–8 and
95.
36 Quoted in translation in Johnston, ‘Polyphonic Keyboard Accompaniment’, 56. The
original Latin is given ibid., 64, n. 40, as follows: ‘Bibliopola, opusculum hoc gratius fore
ratus, Bassum istum Generalem mihi extorsit, & ut porrò unam atq; alteram cantilenam
propriè ad Basin accommodatam in calce adijicerem, ansam praebuit. Vos autem
Organicos, qui auribus delicatioribus satisfaciendum judicatis, rogatos volo, ne
gravemini voces omnes in Partituram seu Tabulaturam, uti vocant, vestram transcribere.
Siquidem in hoc genere Bassum solum pro solido fundamento vobis struere, vanum atq;
inconcinnum mihi visum fuit.’
120
Conclusions
Johnston also points out that in the early account of figured bass given
by Michael Praetorius in his Syntagma musicum of 1619, figuring is
described almost as an equivalent to tablature, being intended to reflect
exactly the polyphonic texture of the music being accompanied:
Praetorius even tries to ‘convert’ organists used to accompaniment
from tablature to figured bass by inviting them to compare a piece
notated with figures against a setting ‘in their customary letter
tablature, and see for themselves therein how it agrees with the basso
continuo in every respect’.37 The evidence therefore points clearly
towards the conclusion that organists in Germany continued to
accompany some sacred music in a polyphonic manner, based on close
adherence to the vocal parts, during the seventeenth century. That they
still did so towards the end of the century, at least in some provincial
cities, may be proved by Lasell’s dating of two Lüneberg manuscripts
notated in the ‘old’ style to the 1660s or even early 1670s.38
It is clear that accompaniment including at least some part
doubling persisted in seventeenth-century England and mainland
Europe in some genres, and that it existed alongside free chordal
realizations during the period; for some composers and keyboard
players at least, it remained the preferred method of accompanying
music of a contrapuntal nature. There is no doubt that prescriptive
notation, supplied in two-stave parts or in full scores, was eventually
supplanted by largely or completely improvised accompaniments from
figured bass, and that some music was already being accompanied in
this manner by the early 1600s. Both in theory and practice, however, it
seems that musicians acknowledged that the new style of
accompaniment was more appropriate for soloistic, virtuosic music
than it was for polyphonic music with traditional part-writing and
especially imitation. For the historically informed modern performer,
the implications are significant: just as a keyboard player chooses his or
her instrument according to the genre of the piece being played, so he or
she needs to consider the style of accompaniment appropriate to that
genre.
37 Ibid., 54–5. The original German is given ibid., 63, n. 35 as follows: ‘in ihre gewöhnliche
Buchstaben Tabulatur . . . vnd sich darinnen notdürfftig ersehen / wie es allerseits mit dem
General-Baß vberein komme’.
38 The two manuscripts are Lüneburg, Ratsbücherei und Stadtarchiv der Stadt
Lüneburg, Musikabteilung, KN 2072 and KN2073; see Lasell, ‘Vocal Polyphony in the
Lüneberg Tablatures’, 243–62.
121
NJ455 - 10Appendix 8/11/05 10:44 am Page 122
Appendix
Matthew Locke’s ‘How doth
the city sit solitary’
A transcription of full score in the hand of John Blow (Och 14, f. 140v) is
shown on the top system; the autograph organ part (Och 1219(D)) is
shown on the bottom system, transposed down a fifth.
Appendix
123
, ,
124
Appendix
125
126
Appendix
127
128
Appendix
129
,
,
130
Appendix
, , ,
131
NJ455 - 11Bibliography 8/11/05 10:47 am Page 132
Bibliography
primary sources
The main manuscript organ books referred to in this study are described on pp.
12–15 of the Introduction.
Agazzari, Agostino, Del suonare sopra il basso con tutti stromenti & uso loro nel
conserto (Siena, 1607)
Anon., ‘Rules for Playing a Through Bass’, included in A Collection of Lessons and
Aires ([London, 1702])
Ashbee, Andrew (ed.), Records of English Court Music, 5 vols. (Snodland and
Aldershot, 1986–92)
Bach, C. P. E., Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1753,
1762)
Banchieri, Adriano, Conclusioni del suono dell’Organo (Bologna, 1609)
—, L’Organo suonarino opera ventesima quinta (2nd edn, Venice, 1611)
Bismantova, Bartolomeo, Compendio musicale [1677], Archivum musicum:
Collana di testi rari, 1 (facs. edn, Florence, 1978)
Blow, John, Anthems II: Anthems with Orchestra, ed. Bruce Wood, Musica
Britannica, 50 (London, 1984)
— , Anthems III: Anthems with Strings, ed. Bruce Wood, Musica Britannica,
64 (London, 1993)
—, Rules for playing of a Through Bass upon Organ & Harpsicon (GB-Lbl Add.
MS 34072, ff. 1–5)
Chan, Mary, and Jamie C. Kassler (eds.), Roger North’s The Musicall Grammarian,
1728 (Cambridge, 1990)
Cima, Giovanni Paolo, Concerti ecclesiastici a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 e 8 voci (Milan, 1610)
C[lifford], J[ohn], The Divine Services and Anthems usually sung in His Majesties
Chappell, and in all Cathedrals and Collegiate Choires in England and Ireland
(2nd edn, London, 1664)
Dexter, Keri, and Geoffrey Webber (eds.), The Restoration Anthem: Volume One,
1660–1689, Church Music Society Reprints, 102 (Oxford, 2003)
Diruta, Girolamo, Seconda parte del Transilvano (Venice, 1609).
Giacobbi, Girolamo, Prima parte de i salmi concertati a due, e più chori (Venice,
1609)
Heinichen, Johann David, Der Generalbass in der Komposition (Dresden, 1728)
Humfrey, Pelham, Complete Church Music: I, ed. Peter Dennison, Musica
Britannica, 34 (London, 1972)
— , Complete Church Music: II, ed. Peter Dennison, Musica Britannica, 35
(London, 1972)
Keller, Gottfried, Compleat Method for Attaining to Play a Thorough Bass (London,
1707)
Lappi, Pietro, Partitura per l’organo delle Messe ad otto e nove voci, libro secundo
(Venice, 1608)
Locke, Matthew, Anthems and Motets, ed. Peter le Huray, Musica Britannica, 38
(London, 1976)
— , Melothesia: Or, Certain General Rules for Playing upon a Continued-Bass
(London, 1673)
Bibliography
— , Modern Church-Musick Pre-accus’d, Censur’d, and Obstructed in its

Performance before his Majesty, Aprill 1. 1666 (London, 1666)
Paolucci, Giuseppe, Arte pratica di contrappunto (Venice, 1766)
Pasquali, Nicolò, Thorough-Bass made Easy, or Practical Rules for Finding and
Applying its various Chords (Edinburgh, 1757)
Penna, Lorenzo, Li primi albori musicali per li principianti della musica figurata
(Bologna, 1672)
Pepys, Samuel, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, A New and Complete Transcription, ed.
Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (London, 1970–83)
Playford, John, The Whole Book of Psalms: With the usual Hymns and Spiritual
Songs . . . Compos’d in Three Parts (London, 1677)
Prencourt, François de, Tract of the Continued or thro-base, GB-Lbl Add. MS 32531,
ff. 29–41v
Purcell, Henry, Sacred Music, Part II: Nine Anthems with Orchestral
Accompaniment, ed. Peter Dennison, Purcell Society Complete Edition of
the Works of Henry Purcell, 14 (rev. edn, London, 1973)
—, Sacred Music, Part II: Nine Anthems with Strings, ed. Lionel Pike, Purcell
Society Complete Edition of the Works of Henry Purcell, 14 (new edn,
London, 2003)
—, Sacred Music, Part III: Seven Anthems with Orchestral Accompaniment, ed.
Nigel Fortune, Purcell Society Complete Edition of the Works of Henry
Purcell, 17 (rev. edn, London, 1964)
— , Sacred Music, Part V: Anthems, ed. Anthony Lewis and Nigel Fortune,
Purcell Society Complete Edition of the Works of Henry Purcell, 29 (rev
edn, London, 1967)
Saint Lambert, Michel de, Nouveau traité de l’accompagnement du clavecin, de
l’orgue et des autres instruments (Paris, 1707)
Schütz, Heinrich, Cantiones sacrae (Freiberg, 1625)
Simpson, Christopher, A Compendium of Practical Musick (London, 1667)
Telemann, Georg Michael, Unterricht im Generalbass-Spielen (Hamburg, 1773)
Viadana, Lodovico, Cento concerti ecclesiastici, a una, a due, a tre, & a quattro voci
(Venice, 1602)
Weale, J.C.M. (ed.), Registers of the Catholic Chapels Royal and of the Portuguese
Embassy Chapel 1662–1829, i: Marriages, Catholic Record Society, 38
(London, 1941)
Werckmeister, Andreas, Die nothwendigsten Anmerckungen und Regeln wie der
Bassus continuus oder General-Bass wohl könne tractiert werden
(Aschersleben, 1698)
Wilson, John (ed.), Roger North on Music (London, 1959)
secondary sources
Arnold, F. T., The Art of Accompaniment from a Thorough-Bass as Practised in the

XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries (Oxford, 1931; repr. in 2 vols., New York,
1965)
Barbieri, Patrizio, ‘On a Continuo Organ Part Attributed to Palestrina’, Early
Music, 22 (1994), 587–605
Borgir, Tharald, The Performance of the Basso Continuo in Italian Baroque Music,
Studies in Musicology, 90 (Ann Arbor, 1987)
Butt, John, ‘Towards a Genealogy of the Keyboard Concerto’, The Keyboard in
Baroque Europe, ed. Christopher Hogwood (Cambridge, 2003), 93–110
Cheverton, Ian, ‘English Church Music of the Early Restoration Period,
1660–c.1676’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wales, Cardiff, 1985)
Clark, J. Bunker, ‘A Re-emerged Seventeenth-Century Organ Accompaniment
Book’, Music & Letters, 47 (1966), 148–52
133
—, Transposition in Seventeenth-Century English Organ Accompaniments and

the Transposing Organ, Detroit Monographs in Musicology, 4 (Detroit,
1974)
Cyr, Mary, Performing Baroque Music (Aldershot, 1992)
Dennison, Peter, ‘The Sacred Music of Matthew Locke’, Music & Letters, 60
(1979), 60–75
Dexter, Keri, ‘The Restoration “Symphony” Anthem in Organ Transcription:
Contemporary Techniques and Transmission’ (MMus dissertation,
University of Reading, 1996)
Donington, Robert, The Interpretation of Early Music (new edn, London, 1974)
—, A Performer’s Guide to Baroque Music (London, 1973)
Freeman, Andrew, Father Smith, otherwise Bernard Schmidt, being an Account of a
Seventeenth-Century Organ Maker, ed., annotated and with new material
by John Rowntree (first published 1926; rev. edn, Oxford, 1977)
Grundeen, Paulette, ‘French Baroque Organ Accompaniment, 1689–1782’ (DM
doctoral dissertation, University of Indiana, 1989)
Harding, Rosamond E.M., A Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Matthew Locke,
with a Calendar of the Main Events of his Life (Oxford, 1971)
Haymoz, Jean-Yves, ‘French Thorough-bass Methods from Delair to Rameau’,
Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis, 19 (1995), 33–54
Herissone, Rebecca, Music Theory in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford,
2000)
— , ‘The Revision Process in William Turner’s Anthem O Praise the Lord’,
Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 123 (1998), 1–38
— , ‘The Theory and Practice of Composition in the English Restoration
Period’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1996)
Holman, Peter, ‘“Evenly, Softly, and Sweetly Acchording to All”: The Organ
Accompaniment of English Consort Music’, John Jenkins and his Time:
Studies in English Consort Music, ed. Andrew Ashbee and Peter Holman
(Oxford, 1996), 353–82
— , Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court, 1540–1690
(Oxford, 1993)
—, ‘Locke [Lock], Matthew’, New Grove II, xv, 44–52
—, ‘Rogers, Benjamin’, New Grove II, xxi, 517–18
— and Robert Thompson, ‘Purcell: (3) Henry Purcell (ii)’, New Grove II, xx,
604–30
Horsley, Imogen, ‘Full and Short Scores in the Accompaniment of Italian
Church Music in the Early Baroque’, Journal of the American Musicological
Society, 30 (1977), 466–99
Johnson, Cleveland, Vocal Compositions in German Organ Tablatures, 1550–1650: A
Catalogue and Commentary, Outstanding Dissertations in Music from
British Universities (New York and London, 1989)
Johnston, Gregory S., ‘Polyphonic Keyboard Accompaniment in the Early
Baroque: An Alternative to Basso Continuo’, Early Music, 26 (1998), 51–64
Kinkeldey, Otto, Orgel und Klavier in der Musik des 16. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig,
1910)
Lasell, Curtis, ‘Vocal Polyphony in the Lüneberg Tablatures: A Double
Repertory of Solo Organ Literature and Accompanimental Absetzungen’,
Church, Stage, and Studio: Music and its Contexts in Seventeenth-Century
Germany, ed. Paul Walker, Studies in Music, 107 (Ann Arbor and London,
1990), 231–78
Laurie, Margaret, ‘The Chapel Royal Partbooks’, Music and Bibliography: Essays
in Honour of Alec Hyatt King, ed. Oliver Neighbour (New York, London
and Munich, 1980), 28–50
Leech, Peter, ‘Musicians in the Catholic Chapel of Catherine of Braganza,
1662–92’, Early Music, 29 (2001), 571–87
134
Bibliography
McGuinness, Rosamond, ‘Writings about Music’, The Blackwell History of Music

in Britain, iii: The Seventeenth Century, ed. Ian Spink (Oxford, 1992), 406–20
Milsom, John, ‘Introduction to the Online Catalogue’, Christ Church Library
Music Catalogue, http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/library/music/page.html?
page=Intro%2Finfo
Morelli, Arnaldo, ‘Basso Continuo on the Organ in Seventeenth-Century Italian
Music’, Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis, 18 (1994), 31–45
Mortensen, Lars Ulrik, ‘“Unerringly tasteful”?: Harpsichord Continuo in
Corelli’s Op. 5 Sonatas’, Early Music, 24 (1996), 665–79
Parrott, Andrew, ‘Performing Purcell’, The Purcell Companion, ed. Michael
Burden (London, 1995), 387–444
Pike, Lionel, ‘Alternative Versions of Purcell’s Praise the Lord, O my Soul: O Lord
my God’, The Maynooth International Musicological Conference 1995: Selected
Proceedings, Part II, ed. Patrick F. Devine and Harry White, Irish Musical
Studies, 5 (Dublin, 1996), 272–80
Rayner, Clare G., and Sheila Finch Rayner, ‘Christopher Gibbons: “That famous
musitian”’, Musica Disciplina, 24 (1970), 151–71
Shaw, Watkins, ‘The Autographs of John Blow (1649–1708)’, Music Review, 25
(1964), 85–95
— , ‘A Cambridge Manuscript from the English Chapel Royal’, Music &
Letters, 42 (1961), 263–7
— , ‘A Contemporary Source of English Music of the Purcellian Period’,
Acta Musicologica, 31 (1959), 38–44
—, The Succession of Organists of the Chapel Royal and the Cathedrals of England
and Wales from c. 1538, also of the Organists of the Collegiate Churches of
Westminster and Windsor, Certain Academic Choral Foundations, and the
Cathedrals of Armagh and Dublin (Oxford, 1991)
Shay, Robert, and Robert Thompson, Purcell Manuscripts: The Principal Musical
Sources (Cambridge, 2000)
Spink, Ian, Restoration Cathedral Music, 1660–1714, Oxford Studies in British
Church Music (Oxford, 1995)
Temperley, Nicholas, ‘Organ Music in Parish Churches, 1660–1730’, BIOS:
Journal of the British Institute of Organ Studies, 5 (1981), 33–45
Wainwright, Jonathan P., Musical Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England:
Christopher, First Baron Hatton (1605–1670) (Aldershot, 1997)
Walls, Peter, Review of John Blow, Anthems III: Anthems with Strings, ed. Bruce
Wood, Musica Britannica, 64 (London, 1993), Music & Letters, 77 (1996),
485–7
Westrup, Jack, ‘Henry Purcell’, New Grove, xv, 457–76
Williams, Peter, ‘Basso Continuo on the Organ’, Music & Letters, 50 (1969),
136–52, 230–45
——, Figured Bass Accompaniment, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1970)
Wood, Bruce, ‘John Blow’s Anthems with Orchestra’ (Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Cambridge, 1977)
— Review of The Gostling Manuscript, Early Music, 9 (1981), 117–20
Wulstan, David, ‘Purcell in Performance: I’, Leading Notes, 5/2 (1995), 10–13.
Zappulla, Robert, Figured Bass Accompaniment in France, Speculum Musicae, 6
(Turnhout, 2000)
Zimmerman, Franklin B., Henry Purcell 1659–1695: An Analytical Catalogue of his
Works (London, 1963)
135
NJ455 - 12Index 8/11/05 10:47 am Page 136
Index
Bold numbers denote references to musical examples and figures
Agazzari, Agostino: ‘Lord, remember David’, 22–3, 24–5,

Del suonare sopra il basso, 115 33 n. 10
Aldrich, Henry, 99 Morning Service in A minor, 47 n. 36,
‘Call to remembrance’, 31 n. 6 60 n. 1
‘We have a strong city’, 72 Morning Service in A, Te Deum,
Arnold, F.T., 1 19–20, 20
Ayleward, Richard: ‘My God, my God’, 13, 56–7, 57, 60 n.
‘The king shall rejoice’, 108 n. 55 1
‘O give thanks unto the Lord, and call’,
Bach, C.P.E.: 5 n. 18
Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier ‘O God, wherefore art thou absent?’,
zu spielen, 1 n. 2 19 n. 3, 49, 50
Banchieri, Adriano: ‘O Lord, I have sinned’, 71
Conclusioni del suono del Organo, ‘O Lord, thou hast searched me out’, 72
116–17 ‘O sing unto the Lord’, 75 n. 14
Banister, John, 99 ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’, 29, 30,
Banqueting House Chapel: 43–4, 44
organ, 100 n. 42 Rules for Playing of a Thorough Bass,
see also Chapel Royal; Whitehall 2 n. 7, 44 n. 20
Chapel ‘The Lord is king’, 47
Batten, Adrian: ‘Thy mercy, O Lord’, 34, 35, 47, 54 n.
‘Haste thee, O God’, 61 n. 2 7, 75 n. 14
Bismantova, Bartolomeo: ‘Turn us again’, 33 n. 10, 72
Compendio musicale, 118 Borgir, Tharald, 2, 118 n. 21
Blackwell, Isaac, 7, 47 Braddock, Edward, 13
Blow, John, 7
‘And I heard a great voice’, 109 catholicism, 86, 87, 116 n. 13
‘Arise, O Lord’, 5 n. 18 catholic sacred music, 86, 87, 88
as copyist, 12–13, 14, 19–23, 26, 28, Chapel Royal, 7, 16–17, 73
29, 31, 33 n. 10, 34, 37 n. 15, 43–4, choir, 88
46–7, 48, 50, 53–4, 55, 57, 58, 60 n. organ books, 12, 13, 14, 46, 53, 73, 75
1, 61 n. 2, 62, 64, 66–7, 67–8, 69, 71, n. 11, 98, 100, 108
73, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81–2, 83, 85, 98, see also London; Manuscripts;
112 Whitehall Chapel
‘Awake, awake, utter a song’, 47 Cheverton, Ian, 108 n. 55
‘Blessed be the Lord’, 33 n. 10, 69 choruses, accompaniment of, 5–6, 7,
‘Bring unto the Lord’, 23, 26, 31, 32, 61–2, 70, 71, 72, 73, 82–3, 84–5,
48, 67 n. 12 113
Evening Service in F, Magnificat, 22 see also doubling of voice parts in
‘God is my hope and strength’, 15, organ books
42–3 Child, William:
‘I beheld, and lo’, 62 n. 6 ‘The Earth is the Lord’s’, 72
‘I said in the cutting off of my days’, 62 Church, John, 12 n. 40, 13, 14, 17, 46, 53,
n. 6 67 n. 12, 70, 72, 73, 75, 88–9, 97–8
‘Lift up your heads’, 35, 36, 40 Cima, Giovanni Paolo, 118, 119
‘Lord, how are they increased’, 49–50, Concerti ecclesiastici, 117
51, 71 Clark, J. Bunker, 100
NJ455 - 12Index 8/11/05 10:47 am Page 137
Index
Clarke, Jeremiah, 46, 73 unusual harmonic features, 27–8, 29,

as organist, 7 31, 33–4
‘I will love thee’, 46 n. 27, 74, 75 where outer parts sustained, 29
‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’, 46 n. 27 where parts are widely spaced, 49–50,
clefs, 20–22, 100 82, 112
Clifford, James: where parts converge, 49, 62, 63, 64,
The Divine Services and Anthems, 88 82
Collection of Lessons and Aires, 2 n. 7 Draghi, Giovanni Battista, 87
conducting score, 119–20 dynamic markings, 47
consort music, accompaniment of, 11–12, see also organ registration
115–16
Cooke, Henry, 111 n. 1 editorial realizations, 4–7, 111
Coprario, John: Ellis, William, 108–9
Fantasy in C, 116 n. 11 ‘This is the record of John’, 109
Corelli, Arcangelo: ensemble verses, accompaniment of, 5, 7,
violin sonatas, op. 5, 118–19 44, 61–2, 70, 79–82, 84–5, 113,
Croft, William, 46, 73 114
as copyist, 13 see also doubling of voice parts in
‘I will magnify thee’, 72 organ books; independent notation in
‘Lord, teach us to number’, 72 n. 5 organ books
‘O sing unto the Lord’, 72 Eton:
‘Send down thine hand’, 46 n. 27 chapel organ books, 46
‘The Lord hath appeared for us’, 72 Evelyn, John, 3, 16 n. 66
Exeter Cathedral, 86
Dallam, Robert, 45
Dallam, Thomas, 101 Ferreira, Mignell, 88 n. 28
Dennison, Peter, 3, 5–6, 7, 88 n. 28 figured-bass parts, 9–11, 19 n. 1, 67, 70 n.
Dexter, Keri, 68 1, 72, 73, 75, 113–14, 115, 116–17,
Diruta, Girolamo: 118, 119, 120, 121
Seconda parte del Transilvano, 117 figuring in organ books, 32–41, 45, 48,
Donington, Robert, 1 62, 63, 69, 70, 73, 75, 79, 98, 101 n.
doubling of voice parts in organ books, 7, 50, 107, 109, 112, 118
54, 58–9, 73, 75, 85, 98, 101, 111, 112 register of realization, 63, 64, 66, 118
imitation, 22–3, 31, 41, 60–61, 62, 83, Fitzwilliam, Viscount, 12
109, 112, 117 Fortune, Nigel, 6, 7
in choruses, 7, 19, 22–31, 61–2, 71, 72, France:
82–3, 84, 89, 97, 104, 111, 114 accompaniment styles, 2
in continuo bass line, 49, 76 n. 1 French musicians in England, 87
in ensemble verses, 7, 19, 22–31, 44, full anthems, accompaniment of, 60–61,
61–2, 79, 80, 82, 84, 89, 91, 93, 95, 113
97, 98, 103–4, 107, 111, 114 see also independent notation in organ
in figured bass, 34–9, 73, 112, 118 books
inner parts, 22–31, 34–7, 39, 48, full scores, accompaniment from, 9–10,
60–61, 83, 85, 109, 112, 115 11–12, 85, 102, 115, 116–17, 121
in solo verses, 62, 78, 84, 102, 107–8,
111, 113 Germany:
number of voices notated, 41–4 accompaniment styles, 1, 38, 119–21
outer parts, 19, 48, 60, 104, 109, 111, organists, 120, 121
116, 117 Giacobbi, Girolamo, 118
parallel thirds and sixths, 23, 26, 31, Gibbons, Christopher, 12, 86
35, 61–2, 79, 112 ‘The Lord is my shepherd’, 62 n. 6
simplification of parts, 48–53, 62, 64, Gibbons, Orlando, 11–12, 102 n. 53
76 n. 1, 78, 80, 109, 112, 113, 117, Goldwin, John, 73
119 ‘O Lord my God’, 72 n. 9, 73
transposition of parts, 28 n. 5, 50, 53, Goodson, Richard Jr., 99
78, 80, 82, 83, 89, 93, 112, 116 Goodson, Richard Sr., 108–9
137
NJ455 - 12Index 8/11/05 10:47 am Page 138
Index
Gostling, John, 5 n. 17, 8, 13, 14, 15, 19 n. Jenkins, John, 116

3, 22, 26, 33 n. 10, 35, 37, 46, 49, 50, Fantasy-Air ‘Divisions’, 115 n. 8
53–4, 56–7, 58, 62, 66, 67 n. 12, 69, Johnson, Cleveland, 119, 120
72, 73, 75 nn. 12–14, 85, 98, 112 Johnston, Gregory, 120, 121
Grundeen, Paulette, 2
Keller, Gottfried, 2 n. 7, 44 n. 20
Hall, Henry: King, William, 101
‘O clap your hands’, 72 n. 9
harpsichord, 11 Lappi, Pietro, 117
Hatton family, 99 Lasell, Curtis, 119, 121
Hawkins, James: Laurie, Margaret, 13
as copyist, 46, 53 n. 3 Leech, Peter, 87, 88 n. 28
‘O give thanks’, 46 n. 24 Le Huray, Peter, 3, 4–5, 7, 80 n. 9, 83 n. 15
Hayboz, Jean-Yves, 2 Locke, Matthew, 7, 86
Heinichen, Johann David, 118 n. 25 ‘Ad te levavi’, 88 n. 27, 99–100
Hingeston, John: as copyist, 63, 76–84, 88, 89, 95, 97,
Pavan-Almand a 5, 7 n. 115 98, 99, 107–8, 109–10, 114, 116 nn.
Holman, Peter, 2, 11, 16, 115, 116 12 and 13
Hooper, Edmund: as organist, 8 n. 29, 12, 86–8, 116 n. 13
‘Behold, it is Christ’, 109 n. 58 at Oxford, 99–100, 108, 110
Horsley, Imogen, 2, 117 ‘Audi Domine’, 88 n. 28
Humfrey, Pelham, 7 ‘Awake, awake, put on thy strength’, 88
as copyist, 13, 19 n. 3, 28–9, 34 n. 13, n. 29
50, 62 n. 6 ‘Be thou exalted’, 5 nn. 16 and 17, 88
Evening Service in E minor, 19 n. 3, 27, Flat Consort, 86
28–9, 34 n. 13, 62 n. 6 Melothesia, 2 n. 7, 32 n. 7, 44 n. 20
‘Hear my crying’, 26, 58, 75 n. 14 ‘How doth the city sit solitary’, 5 n. 17,
imitation, accompaniment of, 4 n. 13, 31, 63 n. 8, 76–85, 77, 89, 95, 97–8, 100,
60–61, 85, 112, 116, 117, 118 101, 107–8, 109–10, 114, 116 nn. 12
see also doubling of voice parts in and 13, 122–31
organ books; independent notation in ‘I will hear what the Lord will say’, 5 n.
organ books 17
incomplete right-hand parts, 113–14 ‘Lord, let me know mine end’, 5 n. 17,
in Cfm 152, 70–72 88–91, 89–91, 92–3, 98
in ‘figured-bass’ parts, 72–3, 113 ‘Lord, thou art become gracious’, 88 n.
independent notation in organ books, 29
53–9, 108 n. 55, 109–10, 112, 116 ‘Not unto us, O Lord’, 5 n. 17, 88, 89,
at cadences, 54–6, 62 91, 93, 93–5, 95, 95–7, 97–8
imitating vocal parts, 56–7, 79–81, ‘O be joyful’, 5 n. 17
84–5, 89, 108, 112, 116 ‘O give thanks unto the Lord’, 100
in ensemble verses, 58, 80–81, 82, 84–5, ‘O sing unto the Lord’, 88 n. 29
89, 91, 93, 95, 98, 103–4, 107, 114 Prelude and Gloria Patri, 99
in figuring, 39–40, 45, 62, 63, 98, 107, ‘Super flumina Babylonis’, 88 n. 28
109, 112 Ten Commandments, 88
in full anthems, 56–7, 58 ‘The Lord hear thee’, 5 nn. 16 and 17
in Locke’s anthems, 76, 78–81, 84–5, ‘Turn thy face from my sins’, 5 n. 17,
89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 114 98
in Rogers’ anthems, 101–4, 107 Lomazzo, Filippo, 117
in solo verses, 39, 54–6, 57, 62, 63, 64, London, 100
78–9, 84, 93, 102–4, 107, 114 organ books from London institutions,
Isaack, William, 28 n. 5 7, 8, 12–15, 54, 63, 67, 71, 76, 85,
Isham, John: 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115
‘Bow down thine ear’, 72 n. 9 see also Chapel Royal; St Paul’s
Italy: Cathedral; Westminster Abbey
accompaniment styles, 1, 2, 87, 116–19 Lowe, Edward, 99
Italian musicians in England, 87 Lüneberg tablatures, 119–20, 121
138
NJ455 - 12Index 8/11/05 10:47 am Page 139
Index
Manuscripts: Och 1230: 108–9

AUS 85: 14, 15, 17, 21, 23, 28–9, 32, Ojc 315: 101, 109
33 n. 10, 35, 37, 42–3, 47 nn. 33 and Monteverdi, Claudio, 46 n. 28
35, 50, 51, 54 n. 7, 55, 56, 58 n. 10, Vespers (1610), 117
64–6, 67 n. 12, 68, 75 n. 13, 89–91, Mortensen, Lars Ulrik, 118
92–3, 93–5, 95–7 Muffat, Georg, 118 n. 25
Bu 5001: 36, 40
Cfm 116: 12–13, 17, 19, 20, 22, 29, 30, North, Roger:
44, 47 n. 36, 54, 57, 60 n. 1 annotations of Prencourt’s Tract, 9–12,
Cfm 117: 27, 28 n. 5 32 n. 7, 33 n. 9, 34 n. 12
Cfm 152: 13, 14, 17, 19 nn. 1 and 3, 27, Memoires of Musick, 10–11, 87–8
28, 34 n. 13, 46 n. 26, 49–50, 51, 54, note stems, direction of, 22, 34, 80, 82
62 n. 6, 67 n. 12, 70–73, 74, 75 number of parts played, 4, 31, 41–7, 62,
Cfm 240: 12 n. 39, 47 n. 34 69, 79, 82, 83, 85, 98, 103, 104, 107,
Cfm 669: 13, 19 n. 3, 49, 50, 54, 57 109, 113
Cfm 671: 13
Ckc 9: 108 n. 55 obbligato parts, 75, 114
Cu 2: 46 arrangements of, 16–17, 47, 75
Cu 4: 46 organ registration, 4, 41, 45–7, 61, 113
Lbl 27.a.1–8: 14, 17 organs:
Lbl 27.a.13: 43 n. 19, 67 n. 12, 72, in London sacred establishments, 45–6,
88–9, 89–91, 92–3, 93–5, 95–7, 100
109 in Oxford sacred establishments,
Lbl 27.a.13–15: 14, 17, 19 n. 1, 54, 73 100–101, 110
Lbl 27.a.14: 72 in parish churches, 7 n. 26
Lbl Add. 17801: 116 n. 13 transposing organ, 100–101, 110
Lbl Add. 30834: 101, 103, 104, 105–7 ornamentation, 67
Lbl Add. 30931: 67 n. 12, 70 n. 1 Oxford, 99, 100–101, 108–10, 114
Lbl Add. 30932: 57 Christ Church, 98–100, 108, 110
Lbl Add. 31437: 86 Magdalen College, 101, 110
Lbl Add. 31445: 52, 53 n. 3 Music School, 88 n. 27, 99–100
Lbl K.9.b.9 (5): 20 New College, 101
Lsp A2: 13 organ books from Oxford institutions,
Mp 35: 14–15, 16–17, 18, 21, 22–3, 23, 7, 101, 108–9, 110
24–5, 26, 28, 28–9, 31, 32, 33 n. 10, St John’s College, 101, 108–9
34, 35, 37, 46–7, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58 n.
10, 64–6, 67, 68, 75 n. 14 Paolucci, Giuseppe:
Ob Mus.c.23: 88 Arte pratica di contrappunto, 118 n. 25
Ob Mus.Sch.C.44, Set D1: 99 part-crossing, 19 n. 3
Ob Mus.Sch.C.44, Set D21: 99 Pasquali, Nicolò:
Ob T 1176–9: 30, 44, 53 n. 3 Thorough-Bass made Easy, 118
Ob T 1176–82: 14, 37 n. 15 Penna, Lorenzo:
Ob T 1180: 26, 36, 40, 52, 53, 58, 67 n. Li primi albori musicali, 118
12, 69, 75 nn. 12 and 14 Pepys, Samuel, 3, 16 n. 66, 111 n. 1
Ob T 1180–2: 15, 19 n. 1, 22, 46, 53, Pike, Lionel, 6, 7, 17
54, 56, 62 n. 6, 72, 73 Playford, John:
Ob T 1181: 98 Whole Book of Psalms, 7 n. 26
Och 14: 76, 79, 80, 81–2, 83, 85, 100 Poglietti, Alessandro, 118 n. 25
Och 21: 102, 103, 104, 105–7 Portugal:
Och 88: 101 Portuguese musicians in England, 87,
Och 437: 101 88 n .28
Och 525: 108–9 Praetorius, Michael, 118 n. 25
Och 526: 108–9 Syntagma musicum, 121
Och 554: 15, 42–3, 54 Prencourt, François de, 2 n. 7, 9, 32 n. 7,
Och 628: 26, 58 33 n. 9, 44 n. 20
Och 1219(D): 76, 77, 98, 100, 109 see also North, Roger
139
NJ455 - 12Index 8/11/05 10:47 am Page 140
Index
Purcell, Henry, 7 solo verses, accompaniment of, 5, 38,

as copyist, 12 n. 40, 13, 15, 42–3, 70, 62–7, 70, 72, 75, 78–9, 84, 102, 113,
71, 98 114, 118
as organist, 12 see also doubling of voice parts in
‘Blessed are they that fear the Lord’, organ books; independent notation in
47, 58 n. 10, 75 n. 14 organ books
‘Blessed is the man’, 67 n. 12 Somerset House, Catholic Chapel, 8 n.
Funeral Sentences, 28, 28–9 29, 87, 88
‘It is a good thing’, 20–22, 21, 37, 47, sonatas, accompaniment of, 118–19
48 sources for accompaniment styles:
‘I was glad’, 19 n. 3 organ books, 3–5, 7–8
‘My song shall be alway’, 13 theoretical writings, 2–3, 9–12
‘O give thanks’, 13, 14, 17, 67 n. 12, Spink, Ian, 3–4, 19, 61
70–71, 72, 73 stringed instruments, 16–17, 88
‘O sing unto the Lord’, 37 n. 15, 47, 75 ‘symphony’ anthems, 6 n. 20, 15–18, 54
n. 14 n. 7, 68, 75
‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’, 37 n. 15,
55, 56, 68 tablature, accompaniment from, 115, 116,
‘Rejoice in the Lord, alway’, 6 n. 22 119–21
Sonatas in Four Parts, 38 n. 17 Telemann, G.M., 1 n. 2
‘The Lord is King’, 37 n. 15 tessitura of accompaniment, 5, 62–7, 79,
‘The way of God’, 55, 64–6 80, 81, 82, 83, 84–5, 98, 102, 104,
Purcell Society Complete Edition, 3 n. 11, 107, 113
6, 17 n. 70 texture, see number of parts played
Thompson, Robert, 13, 14, 15, 17, 70
rehearsal of sacred music, 111 Tini, Simon, 117
ritornelli, 67–9, 71, 72, 73 Tomkins, Thomas, 12
Rogers, Benjamin: Tonelli, Antonio, 118–19
as copyist, 63, 101–4, 107–8, 110 Tradate, Agostino, 117
‘Bow down thine ear, O Lord’, 63 n. 8, Tucker, William:
102–8, 103, 104, 105–7 as copyist, 13, 72, 73
‘I beheld, and lo’, 63 n. 8, 101 n. 54 ‘My heart is fixed’, 71
‘O give thanks’, 61 n. 2
St James’s Palace, 86 ‘Praise the Lord, ye servants’, 71
Saint Lambert, Michel de: Turner, William:
Nouveau traité de l’accompagnement ‘Lord, thou hast been our refuge’, 72 n.
du clavecin, 63 n. 10 5
St Paul’s Cathedral, 7 ‘Lord, what is man?’, 72 n. 5
organ, 45–6, 100 n. 42 ‘O praise the Lord’, 52, 53
organ books, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 54, 100 ‘O sing unto the Lord’, 62 n. 6
see also London; Manuscripts
Schütz, Heinrich, 120 unfigured bass parts, 116
Sebenico, Giovanni, 87
seconda prattica, 115 verse anthems, accompaniment of, 60–61,
section markings, 39, 61 113
service settings, accompaniment of, vertical alignment in organ books, 111
60–61, 113 Viadana, Lodovico Grossi da:
Shaw, Harold Watkins, 12–13, 14 Cento concerti ecclesiastici, 116
Shay, Robert, 13, 14, 15, 70 voice-leading, 42 n. 18, 79–80, 113
short score, accompaniment from, 117
Simpson, Christopher: Wainwright, Jonathan, 99
Compendium of Practical Musick, 10 Weldon, John, 73
n. 33 ‘O sing unto the Lord’, 72 n. 9
Smith, Bernard, 45 n. 21, 46, 100 n. 42 Werckmeister, Andreas:
solo keyboard arrangements of vocal Die nothwendigsten Anmerckungen
music, 119 und Regeln, 38, 39
140
NJ455 - 12Index 8/11/05 10:47 am Page 141
Index
Westminster Abbey, 7 Windsor:

organ, 45–6, 100 n. 42 St George’s chapel organ books, 46
organ books, 12, 15, 16, 100 Wood, Anthony à, 86 n. 18
see also London; Manuscripts Wood, Bruce, 3, 4–5, 7, 14, 15
Whitehall chapel, 100 Worcester Cathedral, 101
organ, 45, 100 n. 42 Wulstan, David, 38 n. 17
see also Chapel Royal
Williams, Peter, 1, 3, 4, 7, 38 Zappulla, Robert, 2
141

(Royal Musical Association Monographs 14) Rebecca Herissone - To Fill, Forbear, or Adorne - The Organ Accompaniment of Restoration Sacred Music-Routledge (2016)

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

(Royal Musical Association Monographs 14) Rebecca Herissone - To Fill, Forbear, or Adorne - The Organ Accompaniment of Restoration Sacred Music-Routledge (2016)

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

NJ455 - 01prelims 8/11/05 10:28 am Page i

‘To fill, forbear, or adorne’

This is the first study to provide a systematic and thorough