Mus. 88

Manuscript. Organ book, copied by at least four copyists; English, mid 17th century. Probably copied for/at Winchester Cathedral, or (less likely) for/at Winchester College (see comments below). Subsequently transferred to William King, organist of New College, Oxford, who appears to have owned the volume but not added to its contents. (Regarding King's ownership, see comments following the inventory.) No attempt is made below to locate all the hands that contributed to the book. However, the following copyists can be discerned:

• Christopher Gibbons (organist of Winchester Cathedral, 1638-c.1660): items 11 (Nunc dimittis only, pp. 23-4), 13, 16, 32 and 44.
• Probably John Silver (Master of the Choristers, and later Organist of Winchester Cathedral, during the period 1638-1666): item 17 (dated '1660'), and probably other material, including items 25, 37, and 38/47.
• 'Unidentified infiller': this copyist appears to have been the last to add music to the volume, using previously unused staves. Pieces marked with an asterisk (*) appear to be drafts of his own compositions. Responsible for items *2, 12/14/30, 21, and *22/23/42/46.

Table of titles and composers as shown in the manuscript. Display in modern form.

• Item 1: occupies two non-adjacent openings (pp. 1-2 and 3-4), inexplicably passing over the intermediate opening (pp. 2a-2b; it was subsequently used by the 'Unidentified infiller' to draft item 2). The opening section of item 1 was then recopied as item 39 (p. 78). Both versions were copied by the same person.
• Item 2 (drafts by the 'Unidentified infiller'): the treble and bass lines largely do not form good counterpoint with one another, and may represent independent conceptions.
• The copy of the Litany (items 12/14/30) by the 'Unidentified infiller' clearly makes use of previously unused staves, hence its distribution over three non-adjacent pages.
• Four different drafts of 'O all ye works of God the Lord', a composition by the 'Unidentified infiller', can be discerned: see items 22/23/42/46.

Upright format, 290 x 195 mm. 50 surviving folios, the majority of which are made from two sheets pasted together, presumably in order to create robust leaves able to withstand heavy use. All the leaves were mounted on guards in the mid 20th century, as part of a substantial rebinding project; for that reason, no attempt is made here to describe the current collation, which is likely to be entirely modern. The volume was paginated in ink by an early owner, but with errors in the sequence. (Small additions to the pagination were made in August 1990; these will not be present in microfilms made before that date.) Some leaves are now missing from the volume. A table at the end of this web-page shows how the pagination relates to the physical structure of the volume. Unused ruled staves on pp. 5, 10, 72, 85 (not ruled with staves; pen-trials only), 88, 94, 97 and 101-2. Mid 20th-century binding of brown leather over boards, incorporating the following elements of the original 17th-century binding: (1) the original upper and lower covers of vellum are inset into the new upper and lower leather covers; they have stab-holes at the fore-edge for ties; (2) what may originally have been pastedowns to the original upper and lower covers are now used as pastedowns in the new binding; both have numerous annotations and pen-trials. Original upper cover: an annotation in faded ink is largely illegible under ultra-violet light, but opens and closes as follows: 'For / Mr King [illegible] / Oxford'; the significance of this is discussed below (section on provenance). Pastedown on inside upper cover: annotations include 'William Kinge' and 'Mr King / Organ', together with pen-trials and crude images of a man holding a sword. Annotations on p. [0] include the names 'William Kinge' (written four times) and 'Richard' (apparently written as 'Richard Ric', not 'Richard King', as suggested in previous descriptions). Pastedown on inside lower cover: annotations include 'George st', 'William', and what appears to be 'Stong' (written five times). No early bookplate. 19th-century shelfmark: I.1.52.

Provenance: probably Winchester Cathedral. To judge from the annotation on the original upper cover, the volume was then transmitted to William King, organist of New College from 1664. A possible intermediary is George King, organist of Winchester College up to his death in 1665. From King, the book presumably passed to Richard Goodson Sr, King's immediate successor as Organist at New College. Two further items of New College provenance were bequeathed to Christ Church by Goodson; see the entries for Mus. 974-8 and Mus. 1001. For another item annotated with King's name, see Mus. 230*. See also King's 1668 printed song-book, Mus. 93.

Microfilm: manuscript music, reel 10.

Biblography:

• J. Bunker Clark, Transposition in Seventeenth Century English Organ Accompaniments and the Transposing Organ (Detroit, 1974), pp. 57-8 and 121-4.
• Watkins Shaw, The Succession of Organists of the Chapel Royal and the Cathedrals of England and Wales from c.1538 (Oxford, 1991).
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (entries for Christopher Gibbons and William King).

For a list of other items at Christ Church associated with Christopher Gibbons, see the entry for Mus. 92.

The following table shows how the pagination of Mus. 88 relates to the volume's physical structure.