Description

This album stands as a monument to a particular space, place and time: the Chapel Royal of Linlithgow Palace, as it once stood, at the turn of the sixteenth century. Now a ruined shell, with no roof or windows, clinging to the side of the peel above Linlithgow Loch, it was once the great pleasure palace of the kings and queens of Scotland, and the birthplace of James V and Mary, Queen of Scots. As a refuge for the royal family between the bustle of the capital, Edinburgh, and the main royal residence in Stirling, the building once resounded to music sung by the skilled musicians of the itinerant chapel royal, surrounded by magnificent decorations and sculptures. Almost none of this—the music or the building, save its walls—survives.

What we do have, though, is the famous Carver Choirbook, from which all the polyphonic works on this recording, with one exception, are taken. This is one of only two large-scale collections of music to survive from pre-Reformation Scotland, the long-term work of its principal scribe, the Augustinian canon Robert Carver (also known as Robert Arnot), whose name appears in a number of entries in the source. Whether the collection itself had a role to play at Linlithgow is unknown; clearly, however, it was compiled for a sophisticated chapel, almost certainly a royal one. Eight of its twenty-seven works were written by Carver himself in the first half of the sixteenth century, but we have not chosen any of them for this album. Our reconstruction of the palace focuses instead on a slightly earlier period, before the building of an organ within the chapel and the consequent changes to its internal layout. The centrepiece of our recording is a magnificent Mass cycle, found within a layer of the choirbook containing—alongside Dufay’s Missa L’homme armé—works both anonymous and from the mid-to-late fifteenth century. This, along with a companion cycle, has previously been described as either Continental or English, but we now believe the pair to be the oldest surviving Mass cycles of Scottish origin.

Given the known proclivities of Linlithgow’s overlord, King James IV, the present cycle may well have found a place in the king’s devotions. Saint Katherine seems to have held a special place in his observances, as we will see below. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that the famous tale of James being warned of his impending death at Flodden by a spectre takes place in the St Katherine aisle of Linlithgow Parish Church. That the warning came from the saint is rendered the more likely given her particular reputation as an intercessor. This derives from her imploration to Christ at the moment of her own death (in the words of The Golden Legend): ‘I beg of you that anyone … who invokes me at the moment of death or in any need may receive the benefit of your kindness.’ We know that James celebrated Masses for Saint Katherine in the chapel at Linlithgow Palace, having given significant funds for the celebration of her feast there in both 1490 and 1497.

We know also from surviving records that James more generally had ‘chapele geir’ and ‘organis’ in the royal chapel at Linlithgow, originally transporting these as necessary from the other royal chapels, in Stirling and Edinburgh, but eventually having them permanently installed. The king spent many important occasions there, and was present particularly often for Easter, including—as a sixteen-year-old—in 1489, and again in the 1490s, most probably for the first official use of the new chapel; his last Eastertide visit occurred in 1512, the year prior to his death on the battlefield at Flodden, and perhaps the occasion for his putative spectral warning. The treasurer’s accounts show that he often spent Yuletide in Linlithgow too, seemingly visiting the palace frequently during the most important occasions in the Christian calendar.

The music
The music recorded here is dedicated to the veneration of Christianity’s two foremost female intercessors. The first of these is clearly the Virgin Mary—more on this below—but the second, Saint Katherine, is a virgin martyr who yields in weight of medieval veneration only to Christ’s mother. King James IV’s particular veneration of Katherine centred on a healing well in the village of Liberton, just outside Edinburgh, which he visited no fewer than fifteen times between 1502 and 1512. The legendary origins of the well have been traced to James’s ancestor Queen Margaret, consort to King Malcolm. The story goes that the queen had been presented, by a pilgrim returning from the Holy Land, with a vial of healing oil from Saint Katherine’s shrine at Sinai. On accidentally dropping the vial, the queen was amazed to see the emergence of a spring of black, oily substance. The viscous substance came to be seen to have healing powers, capable of curing rashes and scabies.

Missa Horrendo subdenda rotarum machinamento—the ‘Catherine Wheel Mass’, as we have taken to calling it—has only recently had its structural chant identified as belonging to a responsory for Saint Katherine of Alexandria. The work is both strange and beautiful; its underlying structure mirrors that of contemporary Mass cycles from south of the border, but its surface details, like those of its companion, the Missa Rex virginum, are quite unlike anything else from the period. It makes frequent use of the octave-leap cadence, which would seem to be a rather antiquated feature for a Mass of c1460, and of a particular kind of floridity that seems on the one hand redolent of the slightly later Eton repertory, and on the other quite distinctive. Its opening movement is missing two folios, robbing us of half of the voices of its opening movement, which we have refashioned in a reconstruction for this recording.

We place the Mass here in the context of a series of snapshots, as it were, from a succession of alleged Saint Katherine’s day devotions at Linlithgow. Our proceedings begin with the extraordinary Matins responsory itself—its bewildering musical machinations vividly recalling those of the famous wheel on which the saint was tortured—which, quoted in the tenor, forms the basis of the Mass. The Sarum introit for Saint Katherine, Dilexisti iustitiam, serves to usher in the glorious polyphonic Mass cycle itself, its movements heard without interruption. Following this, we fast-forward to Vespers, with one of the Carver Choirbook’s elaborate and brilliant settings of the Magnificat, alternating its polyphonic verses with chant set in a four-voice formulaic succession of intervals following the ‘fourth kind of faburdoun’ discussed in the mid-sixteenth-century treatise on the ‘Art of Music’ and known as the ‘Scottish Anonymous’. We end proceedings, as every liturgical day would have ended, with a Marian antiphon following Compline, calling in this instance on the famous Ave Maria, mater Dei by William Cornysh found in the Eton Choirbook. In doing this, we invite comparison with music from that great collection with which our Carver selections stand in oblique comparison. At the same time, moreover, we invoke the English repertory whose representatives also found their way into the Carver book, the expression, perhaps, of Anglophile influx brought with Margaret Tudor, the elder daughter of Henry VII of England and wife of James IV from 1503 until his untimely demise a decade later.