Tudor Settings of the Lord's Prayer

The reign of Elizabeth I brought comparative stability after the turmoil following her father's Reformation and the various regimes that followed it. The fate of English religion was now settled. The Book of Common Prayer, written by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, was re-established. All Church Services were to be held in English, rather than Latin. The musicians of the day would have to compose works to new texts, rather than to the familiar Latin. Many musicians, such as William Byrd, were Catholic or had Catholic sympathies, and had previously written music especially for the catholic rite. Some of these works were simply given new, English titles.

Yet this was a time of great musical creativity. All the major components of the prayer book were set to music: The Magnificat, Nunc Dimittis, Benedictus, Te Deum, Jubilate, Responses, Litany and Psalms, as well as the liturgy of Communion and many other prayers. However, one important text was given short shrift by all this musical activity: The Lord's Prayer.

The dearth of sources is striking. There are only a handful of settings, which is strange, considering the liturgical importance of the text. However, those which do remain are both interesting and impressive. I have split them up into three groups, according to their various attributes:

Homophonic Settings

Robert STONE (1516 - 1613)

This is the Lord's Prayer with which most choral musicians will be familiar, because of its similarity to the Book of Common Prayer text. From Certaine notes set forth in foure & three parts, printed by John Day. Despite the composer's long life, it is his only known composition.

The British Library has the Medius and Bass books of the first edition, published in 1560, (K.7.e.7.) and a complete set of the second edition of 1565, (K.7.e.8.) which corrects a wrong note in the Medius part. Each of the part books, with the exception of the Bass, contains the seemingly obvious sentence: "This Meane is for Men"; "This Contratenor is for Men"; and "This Tenor is for Men". Pauses are printed at the ends of each phrase in only the Contratenor and Tenor books, whilst the key signature is given in only the Medius and Tenor. The books also provide a number of settings of the Canticles for Evening and Morning Prayer, and various other settings.

The ending is problematic, since the Medius has one more semibreve that the other parts. The solution assumes the penultimate note in the lower three parts to be a breve lasting three semibreves. The alternative is to halve the value of two notes in the penultimate bar of the medius part. John Day was one of the greatest printers of his age, and well known for his attention to detail. It is difficult to understand why this error was not corrected in the second edition, unless it is not an error at all.

These Lord's Prayers are similar for two reasons. Firstly, the text is the version found in the metrical psalter by Sternhold & Hopkins, and secondly, they share the tenor line. This line was sung by the congregation and known as The Church Tune.

Such psalters were originally produced by John Day, as is the 1563 edition, in which the setting by Parsons appears. Day won the exclusive right to produce these psalters from Elizabeth I in 1557, and demand became so great that he had to license other printers. Eventually the monopoly broke, due in part to domestic strife between Day and his son, Richard. The composer William Byrd gained the monopoly on music printing in 1575, but handed over control in 1587 to Thomas East, his printer. The 1592 edition of the metrical psalter, printed by East, contains the Lord's Prayer by John Farmer. Thomas Morley won control of the music printing monopoly in 1595, and so it is no surprise that the publisher William Barley included a setting of the Lord's Prayer by Morley in his edition of 1598.

Farmer's version is the best known to present day church musicians, but usually appears with the underlay changed to the Book of Common Prayer version, which adversely affects the natural rhythm. Originally, it is more likely that these settings would be sung in the Communion service, at either of the two occasions where the prayer appears in the Book of Common Prayer liturgy.

Since the publication of the Church Music Society's edition of Tudor Responses, there has always been a desire to complement it with contemporary settings of the Lord's Prayer. However, a dearth of suitable settings has created a climate in which only a few editions, of mostly dubious pedigree, abound.

For this reason, Ancient Groove Music has published Four Tudor Settings of the Lord's Prayer, being those by Stone, Parsons, Farmer and Morley. The intention is to provide a companion to the responses, which will prove a similarly standard, and hopefully definitive, rendering of Lord's Prayers suitable for singing in church services.

12pp £2.50 | Buy copies |

Polyphonic Settings

John SHEPPARD (1515 - 1560)

This piece is in a class of its own, as it is a rare polyphonic setting of this text. Whilst the text is close to the Book of Common Prayer, it is more of a motet than a hymn. The piece is in 5 parts, (SAATB) and is a superb example of Sheppard's style, incorporating complex contrapuntal movement and imitation. This gem exists only in a Tenor part book of 1578 (British Library Add. 22597 f15b), however a table book of the same year contains the piece set out for viols (Add. 31390 f94) and is titled: A book of In Nomines and other solfainge songes of v, vi, vii parts for voices or instruments, followed by the motto Vermis et non homo (I am a worm and no man: Psalm 22, verse 6). Consequently the only extant underlay is in the tenor.

The underlay for the other parts is editorial and italicised. Text in square brackets in the tenor denotes the editorial filling in of repeat marks. The text of the Amen exists as the phrase 'Always so be it' and has been altered for idiomatic conformity. The placing of the underlay in the Amen reflects the original phrasing. Note values have been halved. Each F in the source is sharpened individually; there are no editorial accidentals. Ligatures in both sources are marked by a bracket over the notes concerned. Small notes are editorial; in the Tenor part they show variation in the viol book from the vocal source. A broken tie represents a note which has been split, or joined, to accommodate underlay. All barlines and slurs are editorial. All punctuation and spelling has been corrected to the Book of Common Prayer, where appropriate.

These four settings have a markedly different text, a nine verse metrical setting also included in the Sternhold and Hopkins psalters, and again share a tenor line. This is 'an old High Dutch [i.e. German] tune', according to Ravenscroft, and is described elsewhere as Vater unser in Himmelreich. Indeed, it does match the tune of this name as used by Bach and others. The verses elaborate on each phrase of the Lord's Prayer, and the whole is sung as a hymn, each verse being musically identical. It is well worth displaying the text in its entirety: