the fourteenth century, when evidence of English musical activity becomes much more abundant, it is clear
that there were plenty of English composers who kept well abreast even of the most arcane ars subtilior
techniques and paraded them proudly in their own work. Even they, however, were sure to put an English
spin on whatever they appropriated.
A piquant case in point is a Gloria by a composer known to us only as Pycard. It comes from the
earliest English source of decipherable polyphonic church music to come down to us relatively intact, a
magnificent codex known as the Old Hall manuscript because at the time of its discovery by scholars it
was owned by the College of St. Edmund in the village of Old Hall, near the town of Ware, to which it
had been willed by a private owner in 1893. It had been previously owned by the composer John Stafford
Smith, whose song “To Anacreon in Heaven,” adapted to new words by Francis Scott Key, became “The
Star-Spangled Banner”; in 1973 it was sold to the British Library. The fact that it had been in private
ownership since the sixteenth century, and more or less out of sight, was probably what saved it from
destruction.
The manuscript was compiled and copied during the second decade of the fifteenth century, but its
repertory probably extends back at least a generation before that and represents the state of English music
at or near the end of the fourteenth century. It is now thought to have been copied for the chapel of
Thomas, Duke of Clarence, second son of Henry IV and younger brother of Henry V. Its contents consist
predominantly of Mass Ordinary settings organized in sections according to category: first Kyries (a
section now lost), then Glorias (followed by a few antiphons and sequences, the one major non-Ordinary
portion, but appropriately placed), then Credos and so on. Within each section there are, first, some
“English descant” settings notated in score, then some more modern (that is, motetlike) pieces notated in
separate parts. Pycard’s Gloria is of the latter type.
The piece is planned out in a very French sort of way. It apportions the text (the standard Mass Gloria
“farced” with a Marian trope—Spiritus et alme orphanorum—that was very popular in England) into
four sections, each consisting of a double panisorhythmic cursus. The lower parts have a recurrent color
and talea that unite all eight cursus; the upper parts have four different taleae, one for each major section,
each repeated once. As this description already begins to suggest, the four “real” voices in the texture are
“twinned” just as they are in Ex. 11-11, the “Thomas” motet. The two upper parts, spitting out the text in
rapid-fire bursts like fanfares, share a single range and a great deal of melodic material as well. Their
very frequent if irregular imitations are clearly related to the old voice-exchange technique. The lower
parts enunciate in tandem an old-fashioned English pes that oscillates between G and F as stable points.
One of the parts is broken up “stereophonically” between two hocketing lines, so that the two-part pes
actually requires the participation of three voices or instruments. (That is why there are four “real” parts
even though the piece requires five players.) The combination of a popular English trope and the old
English pes technique with isorhythm already justifies the remark about English “spin” on continental
procedures. What justifies the reference to the ars subtilior is the changing rhythmic relationship between
the upper voices and the pes. In the second pan-isorhythmic section (coinciding with the beginning of the
trope) the upper parts continue singing as before, while the pes shifts over from longs equaling twelve
minims (eighths) in the upper parts, to longs equaling nine minims. But the hocket-like splitting of notes in
the pes means that in reality each note in the hocketing parts equals of the minims running in the treble
parts above. At the same time, by the use of red ink, those upper-voice minims are grouped by twos,
hemiola-fashion, into semibreves, so that the actual ratio of lengths between the notes of the trebles and
the notes of the pes is . Now that is subtilitas! This remarkable stretch is shown in Ex. 11-12.
Complications mount: during the next pan-isorhythmic section each pes note equals eight of the
trebles’ minims, but in the trebles those minims are grouped by threes. And so it goes, the pes steadily
contracting in a series of “Pythagorean” proportions (12:9:8:6) until the voices at last come back into