FIG. 11-1 Sumer is icumen in (London, British Library, MS Harley 978).
So this piece is a round—a canon with a beginning but without a specified end—and it is to be sung
over a repetitive phrase or ostinato (what pes means in this context) that is itself split like a round
between two parts. (Or rather, since the two pedes are directed by their own rubrics to enter together
rather than in sequence, they are sung in perpetual voice exchange: A against B, then B against A, and so
on forever.) An accompanied round in as many as six separate parts! There is nothing comparable to such
a conception in any other manuscript music of the period from any country, and no other six-part
composition would be preserved in writing until the latter part of the fifteenth century, some two hundred
years later.
The “Reading rota,” as it came to be known, grew instantly famous in 1776, when it appeared, both in
diplomatic transcription (that is, a reproduction of the original notation) and as written out (or “realized”)
in score, in A General History of the Science and Practice of Music by Sir John Hawkins. This was the
first general survey of music in the Western literate tradition that (on the one hand) attempted to recount
the whole chronological panoply and (on the other) was grounded rigorously in the empirical method—
the inspection and analysis of documentary source material. Hawkins’s history, in other words, was the
first endeavor in the line of which the present book is the latest.
It had an instant competitor in the four-volume General History of Music by Dr. Charles Burney, the
first volume of which appeared in the same year as did Hawkins’s history. The second volume, published
in 1782, contained a detailed discussion of the “Sumer canon” (as it is also commonly known) partly
cribbed from Hawkins, which also included both a diplomatic transcription (only partial, Burney being a
less laborious antiquarian than his rival) and a full realization in score (more accurate, Burney being also
the better musician). Every subsequent history of music has done the same, and the present one, as you
see, is no exception.
Having seen and discussed the original from a photographic facsimile (something for which Hawkins
in particular would have given his eyeteeth), we will now proceed to the realization, in an ingenious
space-saving version devised by the Irish musicologist Frank Llewellyn Harrison. The twelve phrases of
the melody are all arranged over the double pes that accompanies the lot of them, with nine brackets