To be an English composer in the 16th century was a risky business. Monarchs came and went, changing the state religion every time the Crown passed on. And if you valued your head, you kept it down: as seems to have been the case with Nicholas Ludford, one of the less famous Tudor composers whose life – from about 1490 to 1557 – saw him through the reigns of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I. A rollercoaster ride of princes if there ever was one.
We don’t know much about Ludford’s life, and until fairly recently we didn’t know too much about his music either: it was overshadowed by the more familiar names that followed him such as Tavener, Tallis and Byrd. But two decades ago the Cambridge academic David Skinner took Ludford on as a cause. There was a batch of recordings from the ensemble Skinner co-founded, The Cardinall’s Musick, that kick-started some interest. And a brand new Ludford disc has just been released by the choir of Westminster Abbey under their director James O’Donnell – prompted by the fact that, as he says, “this was what you could call a local boy, based in Westminster and writing music for the various institutions, governmental and ecclesiastical, that functioned here in the 1500s”.
To the best of everybody’s knowledge, Ludford was never employed by the abbey itself, but he had connections with St Margaret’s Church next door (ending up buried in its vaults). And for some years he bore the office of Virger (which seems to have involved musical duties) at St Stephen’s Chapel: a part of the old Palace of Westminster that had its own substantial religious foundation comprising a dean,
12 canons, 13 vicars choral, four “singing men” and six boy choristers.
“As a building,” says O’Donnell, “St Stephen’s was not unlike the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, with an upper and a lower chamber. Upstairs you’d get the grand royal services. But underneath was the Lady Chapel – which survives and is still loosely called St Stephen’s, though its proper designation is the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft. And we assume it was for there that Ludford wrote a complete cycle of Lady Mass settings for every day of the week: a uniquely interesting thing because it’s probably the only cycle of its kind that survives.”
Many Catholics today will know about the concept of the Lady Mass. But in pre-Reformation times it had a greater currency. Medieval England acquired a particular devotion to the Virgin; large monastic and collegiate establishments usually had a separate Lady Chapel in which a daily votive Mass to the Virgin would be sung. And “sung” was the word – because the Lady Chapel, as opposed to the rest of the building, was where the real development of liturgical music took place.
In a monastic church like Westminster Abbey, the general worship would use monastic plainsong; and for much of its earlier history there’s no record of any organ in the main body of the abbey church – which tells you something about how limited the musical activity there would have been. But in the Lady Chapel (more commonly known these days as Henry VII’s Chapel) it was a different story. That’s where the full choral forces would assemble to sing the daily Lady Mass. It’s where the abbey’s tradition of boy choristers began in 1380; and, significantly, it’s where the pre-Reformation Abbey kept not one but two organs.
Across the road in the Palace of Westminster the concentration of daily musical life on the downstairs Lady Chapel would probably have been much the same. Hence Ludford’s cycle. And for the Lady Mass extracts that appear on his new disc, O’Donnell recorded the organ sections on the instrument currently installed in St Mary Undercroft – for the sake, he says, of “historic connection”.
That the disc features extracts rather than complete settings is because O’Donnell wanted to showcase the music rather than attempt any kind of liturgical reconstruction. And you’re unlikely ever to find these Lady Masses used liturgically, because their texts are no longer in use.
But there is a complete setting on the disc – not of a Lady Mass but of Ludford’s Missa Videte Miraculum: a setting for the feast of the Purification that most scholars think is the composer’s best work.
“We actually sang this in the abbey at Candlemas last year,” says O’Donnell. “It was probably the first time it’s been done liturgically since Ludford’s death. And it was fabulous, if long. The Gloria alone is 30 minutes, and that sort of duration means it’s never going to get taken up for practical use. But simply as music, it tells you why Ludford deserves a hearing. He was a significant figure whose work still speaks. Even if we don’t know much about him.”
Nicholas Ludford: Choral Works, sung by the choir of Westminster Abbey, out now on Hyperion
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