Transcribing John Baldwin's Partbooks
Do you read sixteenth-century music notation and are you good with Sibelius music software? If so, then you might enjoy helping us to transcribe the partbooks of John Baldwin.
John Baldwin's partbooks are a vital source of Tudor polyphonic music. Unfortunately the tenor book has been lost rendering all its music incomplete. We're creating a facsimile of Baldwin's partbooks using high quality images provided by Christ Church library, but if people are going to be able to perform from Baldwin's notation again we're going to need to reconstruct the missing tenor book. Sometimes we can find the tenor part from another manuscript, but in around 60 cases we're going to have to use the surviving parts and our knowledge of the composers' styles to reconstruct the missing tenor voice.
Before we can start each piece, therefore, we need have to transcribe the music from the remaining partbooks. These transcriptions are then used for reconstruction, including at our workshop weekends (previously held in Oxford and Cambridge, and forthcoming in Newcastle in March).
So there are two ways that you could help in reconstructing Baldwin's partbooks: firstly, by making transcriptions and, secondly, by participating in polyphonic reconstruction. If you'd like to volunteer, or would like guidelines on the Tudor Partbooks house style, just email Magnus.
