«Was ich euch singen thu!»

Why I’ll be there 

by David Fallows 

 Broadside ballads were everywhere in the sixteenth century: large printed sheets with a story or two in (usually) deplorable verse, sometimes with a tune added, sometimes with the tune’s name. I know them primarily from the collection owned by the English diarist Samuel Pepys: five massive volumes in his library in Cambridge, to which a very inaccurate handwritten copy of the famous Agincourt carol was added at the front, written around 1700 but on parchment (to which Pepys had easy access through his work in the admiralty). Alongside this copy is an even worse transcription of the music for Pepys himself to sing to the guitar. Bishop Percy published the text in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), and a colleague added a transcription of the music, thinking that the lower texted line was the tune and the line below it the accompaniment, thereby producing one of the world’s worst attempts at rendering earlier music. Charles Burney found it so absurd that he made a special journey to Cambridge for his edition (1782), which given the circumstances, was fairly creditable. But the first edition from any other source, that is, a fifteenth-century manuscript, was published only in 1891.  

The German-language broadsides I know only from my work on the New Josquin Edition: yes, it includes a setting of a German broadside, and I even argue passionately that it could well be by Josquin (though I am fairly certain nobody has ever believed me: Josquin scholars are a suspicious lot). 

So: how lovely that Ivo Haun, Sabine Lutzenberger, Baptiste Romain, and Marc Lewon have chosen to bring some of these stories to life. There was an English group in the 1970s that did something similar, but I have heard nothing of the kind since. Obviously, I am very much looking forward to what they do.