Consort anthem is early Stuart verse anthem, in quintessence: voices backed by a full instrumental ensemble, in counterpoint of 5-8 parts, no watery organ reduction. The Jacobean Chapel Royal at Greenwich Palace employed cornetts and sackbuts for this twopence-coloured version. It threw in organ (why not?), and other unspecified forces, more than doubling one’s staff. But kings reck cost little when impressing the odd foreign ambassador, or even one’s subjects. Anthem texts range correspondingly wide, expansively splendid to confessional-intimate, from cathedral to domestic level. Continuo-backed declamation took over under Charles I, at times decked with ritornelli; an innovatory episode possibly lost on Frenchified composers of his son, Charles II. Samuel Pepys (for one) hailed 14th September 1662 as an utter novelty for the Whitehall Chapel: ‘the first day of having Vialls and other Instruments to play a Symphony between every verse of the Anthem … very fine’. Older, sager, John Evelyn deprecated how ‘a Consort of 24 Violins’ was ousting ‘the antient grave and solemn wind musique accompanying the Organ’. History, if not quite repeating itself, still rhymed in fits. Full anthem survived civil war and puritan Commonwealth (1642-59) in concealed part-sets; it adapted to Restoration taste. So did verse anthem, discursive and pliant; one retrospective part-set even reached print, but organ-accompanied, a step down from its vanished consort origins. The Great Fire in 1666 ravaged any remains at Saint Paul’s, or in City households; Whitehall Palace and its Chapel followed suit, succumbing to flame on 4 January 1698.

Rustication saved consort part-sets. One, copied by Thomas Myriell with title-pages dated 1616 (the year he gained a City parish), represents London and Old Paul’s: Ward, Tomkins, Stubbs, Ravenscroft, and Pysinge (of Canterbury, but for a piece extant only here). One less bulky was owned by Sir Christopher Hatton, patron of Orlando Gibbons; his extra penchant, semi-sacred royal events. He kept Westminster lodgings, leased a manor out at Barking—where he built a private chapel—and hosted royal progresses on his Northamptonshire estate. Slighter sets from the Music School and colleges at Oxford, home of tradition (the royal court decamped there during civil war), conserve college organists Nicholson and Stonnard, and unique Tomkins (BMus, Magdalen College). Amner of Ely Cathedral is the main outlier, by issuing in 1615 the only published consort anthem by a first-rank composer other than Byrd, specifically ‘for Voyces & Vyols’; dedicated to (maybe sponsored by) William Bourchier, 3rd Earl of Bath, part-written for his staff (in Devon, or a Cambridge college outpost). Few scores weathered mid-century turmoil, but one unique survival luckily holds consort anthems by Orlando Gibbons, some specific to Whitehall. He died in 1625, his wife 1626: Edward Gibbons in distant Exeter took on their young children, and (it seems) scored his younger brother’s loose papers entire, here down to decani-cantoris voice-alternations.

This music’s glow humanises an era too easily overvisualised as chiaroscuro strife, religious and civil. In fact mainstream clergy, busy thrusting ritual on resentful congregations, could feel dubious over music, a potential worldly indulgence. Archbishop William Laud kept household instruments and singers: his acrid visitations enforced high-church discipline, never music. Archbishop John Williams of York, his Calvinist nemesis, opposed ‘altar ceremony’; contrariwise, as Dean of Westminster he had held concerts in the Abbey’s Jerusalem Chamber. Ritualist Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, mildly chiding his Whitehall flock, let slip how two anthems flanked sermons there. ‘The streame of our times tends all to this, To make Religion nothing, but … a matter of ease, a meer sedentarie thing: and our selves, meerly passive in it; sitt still, and heare a Sermon, and two Anthems, and be saved: as if, by the act of the Queer [Choir], or of the Preacher, we should be so (for, these be their acts) and we do nothing our selves.’ In voicing a concern, he was also bearding a king blithely given to drop in just for the sermon—his entries abruptly curtailed any foregoing part of a service. James VI & I relished knock-down apologetics so far as to spar benignly with theologically nimble subjects, even puritans. If never credited with an ear for a tune, this most fiercely literate of British monarchs soon grasped music’s function: to buttress a new Anglo-Scots order, while lauding him and his kin to the heavens—literally. Matthew Jeffries, Master of the Choristers at Wells, ushered him to that dawning realisation: or so Jeffries claimed, in commending a poet who furnished him a text. ‘I was the firste that, with ann oten quill, (skoring thy lines), fast caught dread James his eare, With serious heede, to love Apolloes skill, thoughe of my note, no notice woold appeare’. (Cue his metrical verse anthem titled ‘A prayer for the King and the Royal Family’.) Its credentials boosted thus, consort anthem graced major state events.

Hatton’s brother-in-law Sir Henry Fanshawe, a courtier of James’ elder son Henry, had his domestic John Ward (a former Canterbury chorister) set a text celebrating Henry’s investiture as Prince of Wales, 1610. ‘This is a joyfull happy holy day’, whether for court or family prayers, elicited the most elaborate structure that Ward ever crafted, projecting solemn joy with vivacious panache. When, though, that first Stuart heir-apparent died of typhoid, November 1612, a consummate heavyweight was enlisted to serve up unrestrained grief, resonating in 7-part choruses through the Abbey; not to amateur verse, either. Tomkins set an Old Testament medley vetted by the Dean of his cathedral (Worcester), deploring the transience and frailty to which even the Lord’s anointed was subject. Consort anthem suited the well-to-do as much as royalty: a vogue developed for gentry seeking episcopal ‘faculties’ to build private chapels. Domestic devotions account for Ward’s clutch of eight, only one of which ever entered cathedral part-sets: ‘Let God arise’. On peak form again, it grants bass duettists amply muscular antiphony to picture the buccaneering deity invoked by the Psalmist: a type of wrestling bout found irresistible in this sphere by Tomkins, and Gibbons too.

Chapel, cathedral and college intersected most in Oxford. For over two decades Stonnard served its cathedral and college, Christ Church, offering four-square Byrd-like tradition. Nicholson’s ‘When Jesus sat at meat’ is Jacobean in comparison, from a refined talent never stretched to fullest by a more demanding, less parochial milieu. Rhythmically elastic, it delicately paraphrases the new Authorised Version’s account of contrite Magdalen, patroness of his college. (Gibbons had similarly provided ‘This is the record of John’ for another summer feast-day, at Laud’s college of John Baptist.) It repeats verses as refrain; more a domestic than church trait, especially with rhymed metrical texts. Amner gave it a Christocentric twist for a stark Good Friday meditation drawing on The Seven Last Words: found in Hatton’s set, it still did enter cathedral usage, alongside quite a few that seem homely devotional at root.

London part-sets offer a vista beyond court, of its counter-pivot Saint Paul’s: lively Martin Peerson; eccentric William Cranford (one item in Hatton); Ravenscroft, ex-chorister of Paul’s, singing-master at nearby Christ’s Hospital, and a folksong pioneer. Myriell’s curiosity offered this motley clique of writers open house. Paradoxically, experimentalism in their work shows confusing emergent quandaries, even before Gibbons died: if pure counterpoint loses conviction, whither? Stubbs, a petty canon of Paul’s from December 1613 (and so a singer), reveals the scale of problems facing them all. ‘Have mercy’, one of three anthems by him, launches with a Monteverdian swoop (‘O, com’è gran martire’), but then backs down in part: milder solo contours straddle unexpected chord-shifts, and especially in chorus sections block-harmony declamation emerges; all laced with ripe ‘English’ dissonance. One can almost hear his colleagues egging him on to a gallimaufry of their pet devices. Ravenscroft contrasts with a shot of smoother normality. Consort anthem petered out, as if directionless, thereafter. In fact Europe’s musical climate had downsized 1620/1, as trade shifted: patrons went baroque everywhere. If only as good house-keeping, why retain what is achievable with equal glitter but less expenditure, when continuo offers that?

Yet consort anthem had after-echoes submerged in the psyche, one anecdote conveys. Henry Hammond, briefly a chaplain to Charles I under captivity in Carisbrooke Castle, 1647/8, had been troubled in sleep in 1643 when a fugitive (for raising royalist horse), a memoire reported:

He thought himself and a multitude of others to have been abroad in a bright and cheerful day, when on a sudden … a most tempestuous Storm arose, with thundring and lightnings, with spouts of impetuous rain, and violent gusts of wind, and whatever else might adde unto a scene of horror; particularly balls of fire that shot themselves amongst the ranks of those that stood … When a gentle Whisper seem’d to interrupt those other louder noises, saying, Be still, and ye shall receive no harm … soon after the Tempest ceas’d, and that known Cathedral-Antheme begun, Come, Lord Jesus, come away; with which he awoke.

Hammond died in 1660, barely outliving the composer principally enshrining recall: Tomkins himself. On abolition of his cathedral post in 1646, he spent his final decade writing reflective, trancelike dances, fantasias, and voluntaries, for keyboard. Nathaniel Tomkins eventually issued his father’s church oeuvre as Musica Deo Sacra (1668). A neglected manuscript addition unique to Christ Church Library’s copy, recently recognised and coaxed outdoors, compounds that achievement, shedding light on the war years after Tomkins’ wife died in 1642. He had never cut a prominent figure at court but, summing up a participation in church and state affairs over seven decades, was impelled to despair at their desolation. He made resort again to an Old Testament extract of bleakest sort, to achieve adequate compass: Psalm 79, almost entire. He cannot have envisaged its performance, maybe never perfected it; but ‘O God, the heathen’, the latest consort anthem ever devised, also weighs in at the lengthiest. To express the deepest conveyable angst, only revisiting consort means sufficed: an adieu to a world beyond recall.

David Pinto © 2025

Over the course of these recordings this project has (with apology for using such an overworked phrase) 'been on a journey'. From the outset its aim has been to re-imagine the English Pre-Restoration verse anthem—a hugely neglected repertoire, still largely unexplored but surely one of the most remarkable artistic products of this country’s Reformation. We have sought to present it afresh in a number of ways, some of them never tried before, and we began by eschewing the very medium through which it is known at all by most people: an Anglican choir singing a choral evensong, wafting politely down a nave. Yet it was this context that Fretwork was to assemble more than two decades of experience in accompanying consort anthems (verse anthems accompanied by instrumental consort rather than organ) with several of the country’s leading collegiate and cathedral choirs, before concluding in the end that it simply ‘doesn’t work’ when performed in this manner, for a variety of reasons. Leaving aside the simple fact that there is negligible evidence in this period that a viol consort would ever have accompanied a church choir, it had proved impossible to present it in this combination without unacceptable compromise of the composer’s likely intentions. For even adoption of the very key in which the music was originally written has to be abandoned by the typical modern SATB choir in favour of upward transpositions, since the voice ranges of the music do not fit such a choir’s normal voice types, at least at the pitch which research now shows to have been a widely used standard of the time for sacred vocal music. That research, published nearly 25 years ago by the Early English Organ Project, established the standard to be close enough to the conveniently practical pitch A466 (an exact semitone above A440 rather than the minor third above, that was previously and misguidedly believed to be correct) for us to use A466 as our starting point.

Thereafter, a number of performance problems solved themselves. By recruiting singers who specialise in historical voice types rather than those of modern SATB, the vocal ranges of the music at last fell into place in the original keys that the composers had used. This is most noticeable when the inner Contratenor lines are sung by light, high tenors rather than falsettists (clearly anachronistic for this period of English music, as argued long ago by Andrew Parrott). In so doing, the whole sonority of the choral body is transformed. A brighter—sometimes even ‘edgy’—core to the ensemble provides much greater clarity in this highly intricate style of music as well as arguably better articulating its rhetoric (an aspect too often ignored in favour of superficial smoothness). But whilst A466 proved to be the ideal vocal pitch for the way that the great majority of this music is scored, it was initially a problem for the viols, who are historically the most likely consort accompaniment in the many surviving smaller-scale anthems. Previously, Fretwork’s comparatively large instruments, well suited to secular instrumental music at a lower pitch, had string lengths too long to reach A466 and needed to play from parts transposed up a tone. A realisation that the smaller dimensions of several surviving English viols of the period might well indicate that these were constructed to play at a ‘high’ pitch prompted us to assemble and restring a complete consort of smaller-bodied viols (including an original treble of 1630) specially for this project. It had never before been tried in such music and the resulting translucent sonority proved a perfect fit when accompanying a vocal consort of (usually) single voices. In the larger, occasional anthems, the grand sonority of cornetts and sackbuts, frequently documented in historical record but rarely heard today in English sacred music, provides a suitably opulent colour, complemented by a reconstructed ‘Tudor’ organ (see more below).

With so many unfamiliar elements to accommodate, it is unsurprising that the 'journey' undertaken by this project should have thrown up discoveries along the way. We have tried to learn from these in the process of these performances. Above all, we have tried to come to terms with the rhetoric of this peculiarly English yet still under-explored musical form and must hope that in throwing new light on it we may encourage others to take it further.

‘St Teilo’ organ by Goetze and Gwynn
This is based on the Wetheringsett organ made for the Early English Organ Project in 2001, which was itself based on the soundboard found in 1977 at Wetheringsett in Suffolk. Its characteristics suggest that it was made by an English builder, probably local. They include a long, fully chromatic key compass, choruses of wooden or metal pipes of the same scale and style, each with its own slider, and a voicing style familiar from 17th-century English organs, but also Italian and Spanish organs. The organ for St Teilo is physically smaller. Its pipes are based on the only pipes surviving from the mediaeval West Country tradition, from John Loosemore’s 1665 organ for Nettlecombe Court. They are very narrow-scaled and without nicking, so the speech is sibilant and the tone rich. The nominal pitch is 5ft, i.e. a fourth above singing pitch, the basis for all the Tudor organs we know about. The actual pitch is a semitone above A440 (A466). Its distinctive voice, which has contributed so significantly to these recordings, stands as a fitting tribute to Dominic Gwynn, who shared his vast knowledge and energy to assist our project but sadly died in May 2024.

William Hunt © 2025