Richard Ayleward, a harmonic link between Tudor and Restoration music.

Born in 1626, Richard Ayleward was the son of a minor canon at Winchester Cathedral, also called Richard. Ayleward sang as a chorister in the Winchester cathedral choir under the director of music Christopher Gibbons, son of Orlando Gibbons. Ayleward must have paid attention, or received a significant amount of tuition since his handwriting style for text and music is almost identical to Gibbons! During the English Restoration, Ayleward was organist and choirmaster of Norwich Cathedral from 1661-1664, and again from 1666-1669. It's not clear why Ayleward gave up his post temporarily in 1664 but he was reappointed in 1665 and remained until his death in 1669.

During the Civil War Interregnum Ayleward must have privately composed many choral pieces, since after the Restoration he was able to quickly produce twenty highly original anthems, one written for the Coronation of Charles II. Ayleward seems to have had distinct Royalist sympathies, and possible connections to the Royal Court, which would have not made him a popular figure during the Interregnum and hence suggests a possible reason for composing privately until the Restoration.

And that was as much as I could discover about this Restoration composer whose Preces and Responses I have sung with our choir for some years.

However Dr. Hugo Janacek, a member of a Facebook Choral Evensong group, piqued my interest recently when he shared some research of his. Janacek researches East Anglian choral music, and has used a complete set of 17th century partbooks written in Ayleward’s hand and signed by him. All the manuscripts of Ayleward's compositions were owned by Norwich Cathedral, purchased by A. H. Mann in the nineteenth century and published.  However whilst Mann deserves much credit for preserving Ayleward's work, he seems to be the source of some confusion around Ayleward's dates, writing in 1886 that Ayleward's birth year was 1626, later admitting he was without proof. As part of his research, Janacek ha in fact uncovered a good candidate for Ayleward’s baptism record, which suggests he was in fact baptised in April 1625 in a village close to Winchester.

The surviving choral music consists of 20 verse anthems, 2 verse settings of the evening canticles (the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis) and the Short Service, which contains settings of music for the whole daily office. it is his Short Service which is best known. His responses, with which I was already familiar, are from this Service.

Ayleward's compositions are known to be unusual in that they include three or four solo voices, in the same range in some cases. This would have required massive resources for a full performance. His compositions were extensively scored for many performers, certainly greater personnel than Norwich would have possessed in its regular choir. Janacek also discovered sources which demonstrated that Short Services, and choruses from verse anthems,  were regularly ornamented during the Restoration period.

My information comes from sources at Norwich Cathedral but given Norwich’s importance as a musical centre at the time, it seems a fair assumption that the practice was adopted more widely."  Hugo Janacek

It seems that ornamentation was not unusual during the Restoration period, perhaps making Ayleward's partbook a particularly important source for learning about performance practice at Cathedrals during this period. As Janacek says, "ornamentation appears sparsely – if at all – in most Restoration sources, making that aspect of performance at the time unclear. For most works, while we can at least infer that ornamentation did take place, we largely don’t know the manner in which it was done, and we have very few written examples."

Janacek has gone one stage further, recording an ornamented version of Ayleward's Short Service, in the style it seems to have been sung in Norwich shortly after Ayleward’s death. It demonstrates a complete set of treble ornamentation dating from around the 1670s/1680s. Janacek acknowledges that it’s unclear whether Ayleward himself would anticipated his music sung this way, but the ornamentation certainly works very harmoniously with the material!

All the ornamentation included in this recording is as written in this 17th century partbook, with one exception. Sadly, this partbook is slightly damaged, and a couple of lines in the middle of the Nunc Dimittis have been lost due to a torn page. For these missing lines (for which the parts are complete in other sources), Janacek has ornamented the treble part himself, keeping as close as possible to the style of ornamentation shown in the rest of the source. As Janacek points out there are differences in rhythm, word underlay, brief alterations of the harmony of the internal parts etc. These differences are the result of careful study of the sources. For example, there is a curious moment in the original parts where the treble part splits before the Gloria of the Magnificat. This seems likely to be a copyist’s mistake at first glance but since this is preserved in other parts in Norwich’s collection (while other apparent mistakes made by the copyists are corrected) Janacek decided to include it in the recording.

Below is Janacek's  recording of Richard Ayleward’s verse anthem ‘Blow the Trumpet in Sion’. Were it not for Arthur Henry Mann, who found the complete set of manuscripts containing this anthem in a Norfolk second-hand book shop, this work might have been lost to us as well.

"This anthem is a real work of art, one that was very nearly lost to history. Written in a Cathedral that was out of the way, in a time where choirs were decimated after the restrictions of Cromwell’s Republic, and when very few people would even consider publishing something as unprofitable and unrealistic as large-scale choral music, the vast majority of works like this were never published, most of this music is now lost to us."  Hugo Janacek 

Janacek's analysis makes fascinating reading :-
"Blow the Trumpet" is one of a number of works by Ayleward that seem to have been written as show pieces, perhaps for special occasions or high feasts. Whilst Ayleward wrote anthems with up to twelve vocal parts, there are three anthems in which he draws attention to this by explicitly stating the number of parts – and this is one. Of his verse anthems, this is the only anthem that is in eight parts throughout, making use of eight solo singers and an eight-part chorus.

This anthem harmoniously draws on a number of different styles, some looking backwards from Ayleward’s perspective, and some looking forwards. Perhaps the most obvious comparison to make – one that others have made, not just myself – is with Orlando Gibbons’s ‘O clap your hands’. There is a distinct feeling of the exuberance of Gibbons’s 8-part anthem in ‘Blow the Trumpet’, and some of the techniques Ayleward employs would not have been out of place in Gibbons’s day.

Ayleward combines an eight-part choral texture with some of the fast-moving devices employed in organ music of the pre-Restoration era – some of William Byrd’s keyboard music comes to mind. It’s worth noting that this style would evolve into the fast, elaborate trumpet and cornet voluntaries that would become popular a few decades after Ayleward’s day. The combination of the eight voices with the fast moving trumpet stop playing over the top produces a remarkable and quite wonderful effect, making the opening of this anthem quite unique. I don’t think I’ve come across any other work of the period that combines the organ and the choir in this sort of way."

What is particularly fascinating is Ayleward's of harmony in the latter portions of the work which were extremely modern and would have fitted well in to the world of Humfrey and Purcell – and yet Ayleward is writing decades before these later composers. It’s entirely possible that ‘Blow the Trumpet’ was written before Purcell was even born.

In this work, Ayleward is showing himself both as a master of the old style, and a trail-blazer of the newer styles of the Restoration. But perhaps the most remarkable stylistic device is the combination of two different musical worlds in the opening. Hugo Janacek

Harpsichord
Ayleward was also an extremely prolific writer of harpsichord music, in fact more of Ayleward’s harpsichord music survives than any of his contemporaries! Andrew Woolley has undertaken a considerable amount of research on Ayleward's harpsichord compositions.

Citation

This article has only been possible due to the fascinating information provided by Dr. Hugo Janacek, who has most kindly given permission for me to share with full credit to him. I have used some of his own text to me at times, since his analysis and expertise far exceeds my own! It has been fascinating to learn more about a little known composer, and I am extremely grateful for Dr Janacek's support and encouragement in writing this article.