Musical Offerings ⦁ 2026 ⦁ Volume 17 ⦁ Number 1 3 The musical context for this point in England was one of drastic simplification in musical texture, where the “likes of Taverner’s Masses or the Eton Choirbook’s florid Marian antiphons would now give way to simpler settings of English texts.” 12 We can extrapolate from this context and from the data that psalmody was in high demand. Although it was never made a part of the Anglican liturgy, “over a million copies [of various psalters] had been sold” from 1562 to 1640.13 Duguid noted that several streams of tradition began to emerge at this time, associated with either Anglican or Reformed traditions.14 The Reformed (also known as non-conformist) tradition carried the legacy of the Genevan Psalter to an English audience, setting the Genevan psalm tunes to new English texts. The Anglican tradition developed out of the Tudor style of the late English Renaissance, mixing elements of the madrigal with the Genevan style. This Anglican style can be seen as early as the Hamond Partbooks, a collection of manuscripts collected around 1560–1590.15 In “Purge Me, O Lord” by Thomas Tallis, we can see a prototype for what would be a key form of metrical psalmody going forward, the fuging tune. This featured fuging imitation, in which a singular voice starts a certain interval pattern which the other voices imitate before continuing into free counterpoint.16 In Tallis, we can see this fuging imitation in mm. 3–5, where the alto begins the pattern on an ascending minor third interval (see Example 1). This would have been accessible to a church choir, and there is some evidence that it was included in the Hammond Partbooks for such a purpose.17 The form is interesting since the B section repeats instead of the A, a practice that would be seen in future fuging tunes of the 1700s, a genre of psalmody that would maintain hold of the style until the end of the century. 12 Atlas, 545. 13 Duguid, 105. 14 Duguid, 105. 15 Butler, 29. 16 Temperley, 1. 17 Butler, 43.
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