1. Looking for arrangements by Edward Paston for one part voice and lute/continuo organ. 2. Also interested in any other suggestions for unison mass ordinaries or easy unison "motets" with polyphonic accompaniment. 3. Also interested to hear what common motets people have found work well with ATB played as organ accompaniment and Soprano sung by unison choir, and where to go to access these arrangements
I am not that familiar with this style of repertoire, but I am looking with special interest for our children's choir as an introduction to polyphonic music.
1. The Paston arrangements are primarily in three manuscripts in the British Library. Unfortunately, you may know that their site has been down for some time now, so there is no way to view them online. I have performed a couple of dozen of the pieces over the years and can share the images with you if you message me. However, I have only ever played directly from images of the manuscripts, which are strict lute intabulations of all but the top part of the pieces. There are nearly 500 pieces, mostly motets by pre-reformation English composers plus a ton of Byrd as well as Victoria/Lassus/Palestrina. it's mostly liturgical music but there are a few other styles. When I play from these manuscripts, which are generally pretty good and error-free, I always have the singers just sing from whatever CPDL edition works. Most of the Byrd is available there. Anyway, I can share what I have, but I'm afraid it won't be much help unless you read lute tablature.
2. There is a huge repertoire, but as for doing renaissance music this way, the sky is the limit. Reducing polyphonic texture to a single voice with instrumental accompaniment was probably a big part of how continuo got started. Again, I have a few things in lute tablature that I did during Covid. But really a whole lot of music can be done this way, and the Paston collection just goes to show that it WAS done this way in some places, especially where choral forces were limited like in the domestic Masses in recusant circles in England.
3. Others will have suggestions. I found during Covid that Victoria's Masses worked really well this way for us.
A good reference for looking up historic arrangements is "Instrumental Music Printed Before 1600" by Howard Mayer Brown. It only covers printed music, but that already is enough for a lifetime. There are several indices, e.g., by title or first line of text, by composer, or by performing medium. The latter index lists 24 prints for lute and solo voice. Then you can look up the content in the main part of the book. I have used it a lot for finding lute intabulations for accompanying a vocal quartet that sang French Chansons.
Secular repertory dominates most collections, but there are also some motets, for example the four pieces at the end of Hortus musarum secunda pars (Phalése, 1553). Further sources might be available as online facsimiles in "Early Music Online" in the Royal Holloway digital repository. There seems to be no search option for performing medium, but a search for "lute" in the catalogue lists 83 results, some of which are described as "for lute and voice".
Note that arrangements for voice and lute usually do not double the voice part in the lute, which makes the lute part simpler, but does not provide support for the singer. As an alternative, you can also play full arrangements with all parts. These are often transposed, but for chiavette notation transposition is a good idea anyway.
Those Phalèse motets are very nice. We have done the Josquin Stabat Mater in that arrangement. Another really nice arrangement from the printed sources is Alonso Mudarra's version of Escobar's Clamabat Autem Mulier. What's cool about that is that the voice part jumps around between parts to cover all the words.
I'm attaching the catalog of the three main Paston lute-arrangement manuscripts, so you can get a sense of what kind of material there is. The first two manuscripts are arranged by number of voices. So they start with three-voice music and move up eventually to seven parts, which makes the lute part really quite challenging.
There is one piece that I did edit and publish: the Gloria from Taverner's Missa Gloria tibi trinitas. I had to add a few bass notes, as Paston must have been working on a six-course lute, and he just leaves the bassline out when it goes below the range of his lute. This suggests that he may have also had a viol playing the bassline for these. Anyway, attaching that for the lute players here.
Notice that the lute just restrikes on long notes (i.e., notes longer than a semibreve), which means that the accompaniment is very chordal. It's almost like a mechanical process the way Paston does this, rather than seeming to be done for musical reasons. It is helpful but difficult to try to avoid a blocky style of execution.
@Charles_Weaver Thanks for posting your transcription, The Taverner arrangement seems to be interesting in several ways. First, it is in Italian tab, wheras most English lute sources use French tab as far as I know.
And second, it is an almost complete arrangement of the Gloria (is the end before the "cum sancto spiritu" due to missing pages in the manuscript or does it really stop there?). From the table of contents that you posted, this seems unusual, because most other mass parts are only excerpts like only the "pleni sunt" from teh Sanctus, or only the "crucifixus" from the Credo.
There is some sacred music in the Bottegari Lutebook. I recall trying something by Wert, but the tablature transcription there really didn't work on organ.
This Fogliano Ave Maria might be of interest. I edited it from HAM, so no musicological guarantees.
Yes, Paston used Italian tablature, which was very rare in England. It could be that he had an Italian or Spanish lute/vihuela teacher working for him.
As for the ending, the manuscript runs out of pages there, so the rest of it would have to be completed to do it liturgically. But in fact it's not quite complete. It just skips all sections where the treble voice is not singing. I'm attaching an article I published about this in the Lute Society of America quarterly back in 2019, along with that edition. If you want some further thoughts on it. I've performed this as-is in concert with my wife, but never recorded this one.
One item of note near this spot in the manuscript is that a couple of pieces before this is the Missa sponsus amat sponsam of Fayrfax, which is otherwise not extant. IIRC, there is also a bass partbook surviving of this. For years I've thought about extracting the parts from the tablature and then composing a superius part, but I have never managed to devote any time to it.
If you want to see more of our Paston stuff, these are some of my favorites:
@Charles_Weaver Wow, I did not expect to meet such an exquisite fellow lutanist in this forum. You have digged out a wonderful repertoir and your performances are exemplary (the second and third link point to the same video, BTW).
This has whetted my appetite for trying out some of these arrangements, too. So far, I have only used the lute as a support for voices, but not as a replacement, as in these example setting of a famous 10th century Easter sequence (disclaimer: the setting is by myself):
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