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

Sequera, Hector

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


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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

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Copyright Statement
This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Early music following peer review. The version of record Sequera, Hector (2019). Article Navigation 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 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caz069





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