Early Music Advance Access originally published online on August 24, 2006
Early Music 2006 34(4):561-586; doi:10.1093/em/cal037
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Toledo Cathedral's lost ‘magnifique livre de messes’ recovered, and ‘new’ works by Boluda, Palomares and Navarro
Michael Noone is Visiting Research Fellow at Boston College and director of the Ensemble Plus Ultra. mnoone{at}musicologia.com
In his conspectus of Toledo Cathedral's manuscript polyphonic choirbooks, Henri Collet (1913) mentioned a ‘magnifique livre des messes’. In his 1953 summary of its contents, Trumpff erroneously proposed 1696 as the manuscript's copying date. Reported ‘lost’ by Stevenson (1961), who suggested that it had been relocated to Germany, the manuscript in fact remained in Toledo where the author uncovered it in 2002. Now renumbered as ToleBC 35, it contains nine masses, including three hexachord masses by Morales, Palestrina, and Boluda, and two In exitus. In 1584 the sackbut player Alonso Gascón was paid 39,168 maravedís for copying its 233 paper folios. Between 1581 and 1594 Gascón also copied a number of fascicles now bound in ToleBC 8. The following compositions survive uniquely in the two Gascón choirbooks: the Missa Ut re mi fa sol la by the Toledo chapelmaster, Boluda, the Missa Usquequo Domine (on Guerrero's motet) by the otherwise unknown Palomares, Navarro's ostinato motet Laudate Dominum, and an anonymous Missa In te Domine speravi (on Jacquet's motet). Gascón's ToleBC 8 copy of Victoria's Missa Ascendens Christus can be dated to 1590, two years before its publication. This article presents a codicological study of ToleBC 35, examines the relationship between ToleBC 8 and ToleBC 35, discusses the repertory uniquely preserved in Gascón's choirbooks, and reveals Gascón as responsible for the copying of two polyphonic choirbooks now held at the monastery of Guadalupe.
Key Words: 16th-century Spanish polyphony • Alonso Gascón • Fernando Palomares • Ginés de Boluda • hexachord mass • Juan Navarro • Toledo cathedral choirbooks