Virgin, there to sing a Marian antiphon meliori modo quo sciverint, “as well as they know how.”
The Salve Regina excerpted from the Eton Choirbook in Ex. 13-6 was specifically composed for this
very purpose. Its author, William Cornysh (d. 1523), ended his life as the head of the Chapel Royal under
Henry VIII. He was one of a brilliant generation of late fifteenth-century English chaplain-musicians;
some of the others were John Browne, Richard Davy, Walter Lambe, and Robert Wylkynson, to name only
those few who are more copiously represented in the Eton Choirbook than is Cornysh himself. Their
works now barely survive, and so they do not command historical reputations comparable to those of
either their continental counterparts or their English predecessors. Since 1961, however, when Frank
Llewelyn Harrison published a modern edition of the complete manuscript, it has been apparent that, as
Harrison put it, “the Eton music, like the chapel for which it was created, is a monument to the art and
craftsmanship of many minds united in the object of carrying out the founder’s vision of perpetual
devotion.”^1
Shown in Ex. 13-6 a and b are the beginning and end of this exceedingly lengthy motet. That length is
the product of two characteristically English factors. One, which may easily be appreciated from the
music as printed, is a veritable jungle growth of melismatic proliferation. The parts shown are not even
the most florid sections of the antiphon, and yet they exceed in melodic extravagance any other music
illustrated in this book except for the Notre Dame organa with which the Eton music is still clearly vying,
at a time when continental motets have taken another expressive tack. Perhaps that is why Tinctoris,
having praised the English for providing the stimulus that transformed continental style, immediately took
it all back by complaining that “the English continue to use one and the same style of composition [he
means the lofty style, of course], which shows a wretched poverty of invention.”^2
EX. 13-6A William Cornysh, Salve Regina, beginning