William Mundy's ‘Vox Patris Caelestis’ and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary

Abstract

T h e p o l y p h o n i c v o t i v e a n t i p h o n belongs to a distinctive and peculiarly English genre. These large-scale paraliturgical pieces, generally in honour of the Virgin, were sung by the highly trained singers of collegiate and similar choirs as acts of communal devotion and recreation, most often as a votive observance after Compline. 1 The tradition reached its high-water mark around 1500, with some of the most famous surviving examples found in the Eton Choirbook. As Magnus Williamson has pointed out while discussing the Eton pieces and their ritual context, it is no less than`miraculous' that any of these works has been preserved to the present day. 2 Votive antiphons were in the first layer of English musical practice affected by the Reformation: devotion to Mary and other saints was one of the most bitterly contested issues of the time, and music of this sort was revised, censored, and discarded even before substantial changes were made to the Mass. 3 When older forms of public worship were restored under Queen Mary Tudor in the mid-1550s, the votive antiphon enjoyed a correspondingly rapid if short-lived revival. Although it fell into more or less permanent disfavour at the accession of Elizabeth, it left its mark on the style of the mid-century psalm motet (which featured subject matter more congenial to reformed ears) and even on the forms of vernacular paraliturgical music. 4 It is no coincidence that the English anthem, still flourishing after four and a half centuries as a freely chosen conclusion to the daily evening service in cathedrals and college chapels, is the exact verbal cognate of the late medieval antiphona.William Mundy's Vox patris caelestis is almost certainly a product of the brief Marian restoration of the votive antiphon, and among the very last examples of its genre. 5 Its subject matter appears at first glance to be out of step with some trends of its day. Unlike Tallis's Gaude gloriosa, a comparable work and perhaps the best known of the 353