A corollary to the melodic proliferation is the use of shorter note-values than anywhere (yet) on the
continent. The boys in the famous Eton choir needed to be proper vocal athletes to negotiate their
passagework in music like this, so that the official choral endowment of the college and the requirement
that it be well staffed, amounted, then and now, to a kind of athletic scholarship for qualified students.
And yet what the use of semiminims (sixteenth notes in transcription) accomplishes, in seeming paradox,
is not the speeding up of the music, but just the opposite, its effective slowing down. That is because
adding a new level of motion at the high end simply represents the limit of speed with a new symbol,
increasing the spread of notated durations, while more of the change in actual note-lengths takes place at
the opposite end, among the slow-moving “structural” voices.
EX. 13-6B William Cornysh, Salve Regina, end