I know some of you have to be here, and I know
some of you have your hearts twisted into being
here, so I thank all of you for being here.
Tonight I'm going to introduce some music that
some of you, probably not many of you, don't know.
It certainly works by one of the least known of
the Kenny White's English Virtual School, Mr. Burst.
I want to be a little closer to the instrument.
Okay, let's start over.
This is an introduction to some of the keyboard
music of Peter Phillips, who was, I think,
probably one of the least known of the English
Virtual composers.
That school flourished really roughly through
the Elizabethan and early to Philippian periods.
Though his music, and his keyboard music in
particular, has largely been ignored,
Phillips was one of the most highly respected
musicians of his era.
He was highly regarded in his own lifetime as
both an organist and as a composer of motets
and madrigals.
And the motets and madrigals, he made his fame
essentially. He published nearly 100 Italian
madrigals and around that many sacred compositions.
So he was essentially one of the most highly
published composers at the turn of the 17th century.
Until the last roughly 10 or 15 years, almost
no research had been done on Phillips whatsoever.
And the only study done on keyboard music at
all was one dissertation done 40 years ago, now
quite outdated.
In 1999, the Music of the Tannica had published
the complete keyboard works of Peter Phillips,
which was edited by DJ Smith,
who was one of these two people in particular
who led to these resurgence of interest in Phillips.
This is a modern critical edition, which for
the first time allowed the easy access to all
of the keyboard music.
Only half of this keyboard music is contained
in the Fitzwilliam Virgil book.
So that critical edition is quite important.
In spite of that, the pieces I'll be pointing
to do come from the Fitzwilliam Virgil book.
And I chose some of them, all of them for
particular reasons.
The Vivana 1580, because it's Phillips' most
famous piece, not only in our time, but in his
own lifetime as well.
The Entabulation are really also because most
everybody knows that piece in its original form.
The other pieces I selected show certain
particular compositional facets that I think
are quite peculiar to Phillips
and set him apart from most all of his contemporaries.
And in fact, that's really the aim of this
presentation tonight is to highlight a lot of
these things that make his music so unique
and in my estimation, deserving to be better known.
Now before I start on the music, I'd like to
say just a little bit about his life, which is
quite interesting
and can sort of help explain some of the
features we find in the music.
He was born in 1561.
We don't know exactly where, but we do know he
was raised in London
because he was a member of St. Paul's Cathedral
as one of the boy choristers.
We don't know really anything about his early training.
He did claim late in his own life that he was a
pupil of Bird, but that may have been sort of
to get ahead of the world a little bit,
not necessarily because it was true.
There's no proof of that whatsoever.
The only real thing that we know about his
training was that according to the church
records at St. Paul's,
the boys there were required to take daily, I
say daily, lessons in voice, keyboard, lute,
Viol, composition, and theory, daily.
And that's in addition to the daily choir rehearsals.
In 1582, he left England for Rome.
Philips claimed that he used to study music in
Italy, but there's considerable evidence that
he in fact fled for his life.
Being a Catholic, he was trying to escape the
tumultuous times of religious persecution going
on in England.
On his way to Rome, he stopped at the English
Catholic College in Dubai, which is in far
north of France.
This college was founded by the Spanish as a
resistance against the Reformation,
and there was a lot of represents English
Catholics there.
It was a center of higher learning and education.
Philips stopped there for a few months, and
while he was there, he actually met Francis
Trejan, who was there from the year it was founded.
This was Francis Trejan the Elder, not the
Younger, who there's still speculation about
which one composed or compiled the Fitzwilliam
Virgil book.
Anyway, after arriving in Italy in 1582, he was
employed in the service of Alessandro Frenesi,
the Cardinal there, a famous supporter of the arts,
and it's here that he probably became
acquainted for the first time with the magical composers,
particularly Maurizio Mancini, who he would
later use as models in his own music, both
keyboard and vocal levels.
After three years in the Cardinal's service, he
left Italy and joined the service of a fellow
Englishman in 1585, Thomas Lord Paget, who was
a well-known spy for Spain.
Philips traveled with Paget to Spain, spent a
year and a half in Paris, traveled all through
Italy and all around the Low Countries.
But in five years' time, Paget had died, in
1590, in Brussels. Philips composed his Divina
Gallia in Paget's honor,
and that piece is a Lucas Wayne Virgil book, at
which time then Philips then moved to Antwerp.
In 1593, after a few years in Antwerp, we know
he left a message to some of his pupils that he
was going to Amsterdam to, quote,
see and hear an excellent man and his
faculties, and there can be little doubt that
this was Sweelink, the most famous organist in
Europe at the time.
They must have had quite a meeting. There's
quite a lot of similarities in their music.
Sweelink offered a tribute, I suppose, to
Philips and his setting of Philips' Pavan of
1580, called the Pavan of Philippi.
On his return to Antwerp from Amsterdam, he was
accused of treason and the anti-intempted
assassination of Queen Elizabeth by another
Englishman, Roger Walton.
He was promptly arrested, thrown in jail, but
being fluent in Latin and presumably Dutch as
well, he served as his own lawyer, defended
himself, and was exonerated and released.
He returned to Antwerp. In 1597, he moved to
Brussels because he came to the service of
Archduke Albert, the governor-royal of the Low Countries,
and he was named the principal organist at the
Chapel Royal, a post that he would hold until
his death almost 30 years later.
He was ordained a priesthood in 1609, and this
date is important because after this time there
are no secular works known to have either been
published or composed,
but there were many, many, many, many sacred
vocal works composed by publications between
1611 and 1616.
In 1621, after 25 years of service to the
Archduke, the Archduke Albert died, and Philips
took part in his funeral.
A few months later, in 1622, he marched to the
assembly at the head of the chaplains of the
court, and that's one of the copies that I gave you.
You can see Philips on the far, far left. He's
the head of the line of the chaplains of the court.
He has a long face, a high forehead, prominent
nose, flowing mustache, and a pointed beard.
This is the only picture we have of Peter Philips.
1628, the age of 67, Philips died in Brussels,
and we know nothing of the circumstances of his
death, nor is there any documentation about his
funeral or place of burial.
To the music, there are 32 keyboard works, when
you count the Vons and Gavignards as separate
pieces, which is most often done, as well as
the different movements of the intabulations.
This is quite a lot fewer than many of his
famous contemporaries. Bird, many, many pieces.
Sway Lake, near 100. Bird, over 100. Roll, near 100.
So, in that respect, Philips does seem to be
somewhat of a minor composer.
You can divide these 32 extant works into three categories.
Liturgical organ works, of which there are only
two. Original works for the originals and intabulations.
Of the original works, there are two types,
namely dances, which is the Von and Gavignard,
and fantasias.
There are no variation sets, no campus
performance pieces, anything like that, which
is so popular with Bird and Roll and Orly and
many of the other composers of this time.
Philips didn't write anything.
The Pavons were most often paired with the
Gavignards, but they can't stand alone. We'll
see an example of that.
The Gavignards, when they were paired with the
Pavons, Charles Vandenborn, a musicologist in
the late 19th century, said that after his
study, roughly four-fifths of the pieces that
he looked at, the Pavons were drawn directly
from the Gavignards.
The Gavignards were drawn directly from the
Pavons, but in many of these cases, the
similarities were quite trivial and in some
cases hard to even determine the extent to
which they were similar.
Bird, as a rule, never ever unified his Pavon
and Gavignard pairs this way. They're
completely separate pieces.
Bull did, but it was much more like the
Vandenborn example, quite vague a lot of times.
He would start it in a similar way as the
Pavon, and then he'd go off and do something
completely different.
Philips, in this respect, is the most different.
He was very much unified between his Pavons and
Gavignards, particularly the Pavon and
Gavignard and Dolorosa, which we'll talk about.
This makes Philips, like I said, the most
different from his contemporaries. There are
three Pavon and Gavignard pairs, the Dolorosa,
the Paget, and the Pacimento.
There's likewise a Pavon from 1580 and an
undated Gavignard.
In the margin of the Fitzwilliam virtual book,
Francis Trejan compiled the manuscript book for
the Pavon in 1580, and it was the first one
that Philips made.
This was his most famous piece, and it's
curious considering it was possibly his very
first composition when he was 19.
There were numerous arrangements made in this
piece. There was a broken consort version in
Morley's first book of consort lessons, as well
as several other anonymous instrumental versions.
There are apparently, and I'd be curious to
find this, there are apparently two vocal
arrangements, which I have no idea where they
are, with text.
Swaylick, as I said earlier, wrote his Pavano
Philippi. There are a couple of notable
features in this particular piece.
At least a couple of things that I'd like to
say first and then I'll find out some other
features. First of all, the Pavans at this
time, and I'll give you maybe an example from
William Byrne, typically start, they were
always in three sections, almost always in
three sections.
They typically started in one key, and the
first section would last throughout that. The
key would last throughout the first section.
The second section would be a completely
different key and it would often modulate to
yet a different key. The third section would be
yet a different key and modulate back to the home.
So, in this respect, Phillips is quite
different because, and this is typical of his
writing, the first section starts in G, ends in
G, it's very normal.
The next section, however, starts in D and
stays in D, does not modulate. The last section
starts in G and stays in G, does not modulate again.
Compared with William Byrne, I believe it's the
third Pavane for the Laney-Nettles book, starts
in C, the first section starts in C and goes
through that section in C.
The next section starts in B flat and goes to G.
The next section starts in F and goes back to C.
So it's quite varied in terms of harmony.
Phillips doesn't, don't encounter that in any
of Phillips' music. Another unusual aspect is
that there are, there's quite, there's much
less use of imitation.
Byrne was the master contrabuntist. Lots of
imitation in all of his music. You could say
essentially the same thing for Bowl as well.
Peter Phillips, he found much, much less of it.
He was content to try other means of expression.
The overall harmony is quite simple.
Simple four or five note scales characterize
the division sections. There is a bit more
imitation in the divisions, but not a lot.
The most curious section is this third section
of this piece, which is based on a Cantor's
Furnace type melody, which is underpinned by a
lot of chords.
I had a conversation with Furnace some time
back about a particular piece by John Wall,
Queen Elizabeth's Pavane, that was apparently
the first piece to utilize this.
Well, I found this piece and there's nothing of
the sort in this, in Queen Elizabeth's Pavane.
So I have no idea exactly what this person was
talking about.
In my study, this is the only piece I found in
the entire original repertoire that works for
Cantor's Furnace, in a non-Cantor's Furnace
piece. Quite unusual.
So with that, I'll play the Pavane in 1780.