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The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book is a primary source of keyboard music from the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods in England, i.e. the late Renaissance and very early Baroque. It takes its name from Viscount Fitzwilliam who bequeathed this manuscript collection to Cambridge University in 1816.
Originally called Queen Elizabeth's Virginal Book (though the title has been abandoned because it has been determined that she never owned it), it is the manuscript collection of an amateur keyboard player of the very early 17th century named Francis Tregian, who copied the entire collection between 1609 and 1619. It is a rarity among music sources of the time in presenting an enormous quantity of music by current composers, collected by a performer rather than a publisher.
It includes music dating from approximately 1562 to 1612 by John Bull, Giles Farnaby, William Byrd, and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, as well as many others; there are more than 300 separate pieces. Although written for the virginal, the pieces are often performed on other keyboard instruments including more modern harpsichords and the piano. Most of the pieces in the book are short, and many of them are character pieces with droll and memorable titles, including: "Put up thy Dagger, Jemy," "The New Sa-Hoo," and "Quodlings Delight," by Giles Farnaby; "Nobody's Gigge," by Richard Farnaby; "Pakington's Pownde" and "The Irishe Dumpe" (anonymous); "The Ghost" and "The Earle of Oxford's Marche," by William Byrd; "Worster Braules" by Thomas Tomkins, and the famous "Lachrymae Pavan" by John Dowland, as arranged by Giles Farnaby.
Sources
- Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0393095304
- The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Don Randel. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1986. ISBN 0674615255
- Article "Sources of Keyboard Music" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1561591742
- Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music. London, Oxford University Press, 1970. No ISBN.
- Harold Gleason and Warren Becker, Music in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Music Literature Outlines Series I). Bloomington, Indiana.
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