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Hearing John Browne's motets: registral space in the music of the Eton Choirbook

This article is the first extended analytical study of the output of any composer of the Eton Choirbook repertory, the one most often singled out as its most significant personality; it is the single most detailed stylistic study of the Eton repertory since Hugh Benham’s Latin Church music in England, published in the 1970s. Further, the analytical methodology is distinctive, in that it dwells on the composer’s deployment of registral space as a means of locating his achievement relative to other Eton figures. The analytical methodology includes other parameters as well, but the treatment of vocal scoring is considered as a primary determinant. This feature of medieval and Renaissance music is only rarely considered on its own terms, which is curious, given that the alternation of full and reduced textures is perhaps the most audible means of structural and formal articulation. Because of the larger number of voices used in the Eton repertory as compared to contemporary continental music, this aspects assumes an enhanced significance there. The article opens with a close reading of the opening of Browne’s most ambitious extant work, the 8-voice antiphon O Maria Salvatoris mater, showing how texture has an equal status to other features such as cadential structure, rhythmic design, and motivic integration derived from the cantus firmus that is the work’s starting-point. It continues with a brief consideration of Browne’s status within the Eton repertory, and a survey of the repertory’s use of texture and scoring (building on the work of Hugh Benham). This introduces the article’s principal thesis, that Browne’s practice differs in this respect from that of his colleagues, and may be interpreted as a critical re-appraisal of the Eton style, enhancing its rhetorical and affective potential. Passages from Browne’s most important compositions are analysed in support of this thesis.