Reconstructing William Byrd’s consort songs from the Paston lutebooks: a historically informed and computational approach to comparative analysis and musical idiom

Sequera, Hector

Abstract

This article outlines how computational analysis can be applied to the process of making and evaluating idiomatic reconstructions of polyphonic music from lute intabulations. It focuses on some of William Byrd’s consort songs that survive only as intabulations in one of the lute books owned by Edward Paston (1550–1630), London, British Library, Add. Ms. 31992. Fourteen of the consort songs survive as intabulations and full settings, and form the corpus used in this study; 15 survive only as intabulations needing reconstruction to return them to a performable state. After discussing the context of the pieces, the article presents three analyses: (1) to establish the differences between the tablatures and the full settings, (2) to study more closely these differences in order to inform reconstruction work, and (3) to evaluate three separate reconstructions of Byrd’s ‘In tower most high’ using the corpus and the data collected.

Citation

Sequera, H. (2019). Reconstructing William Byrd’s consort songs from the Paston lutebooks: a historically informed and computational approach to comparative analysis and musical idiom. Early Music, 47(4), 455-477. https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caz069

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 17, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Nov 18, 2019
• Publication Date: Dec 30, 2019
• Deposit Date: Mar 26, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 18, 2021
• Journal: Early Music
• Print ISSN: 0306-1078
• Electronic ISSN: 1741-7260
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 47
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 455-477
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caz069
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1305319