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Chelys, vol. 7 (1977), article 1
organist of Lincoln Cathedral, succeeded Parsons at the Chapel Royal. 10 It is
of course possible that Parsons was visiting his newly acquired property, for
the previous lease on Sturton rectory expired on February 26th 1570.
At any rate, Parsons cannot have been very old when he died. An
inscription at the end of Parsons’s large-scale psalm-setting Retribue servo
tuo in the tenor book of Oxford, Christ Church, MSS. 984-8 reads:
Qui tantus primo Parsone in flore fuisti,
Quantus in autumno ni morere fores.
If Parsons died in his prime, we may deduce that he was born c.1530 and
may have commenced his career as a composer in the early 1550s. Kerman
has suggested 11 that Parsons began writing ‘around 1555-60’, but this would
seem to be too late in view of Le Huray’s more recent assertion that
Parsons’s First Service must have been composed before 1553, since it is
based on texts from the 1549 Prayer Book. 12 Thus, this service dates from a
critical period in the history of English music, when composers were
prevented by injunctions such as those issued by Archbishop Holgate at
York in 1552 13 from writing the elaborate polyphonic settings of latin
liturgical texts which had figured large in the output of their predecessors.
They were obliged to seek out ways of making the words of the English
liturgy clearly audible to congregations, and thus there was a tendency
towards simple, direct, often homophonic music similar in style to the
‘french’ or ‘small mass’ style current earlier in the century. It is strange
therefore that Parsons’s First Service should be an elaborate, contrapuntal
setting of the English text. It is not known where such a piece could have
been performed, but is should be noted that there are similar large-scale
settings of service texts from the 1549 Prayer Book by Sheppard and
William Mundy.
Parsons’s other English music was probably written during the 1560s,
and may well have been composed for performance in the Chapel Royal.
His Deliver me from mine enemies in five parts with a sixth canonic part
makes use of passing and suspended dissonances within a contrapuntal
texture, recalling an older polyphonic style. However, the use of regular
(indeed somewhat four-square) imitative points suggests a familiarity with
more modern techniques.
Though Parsons’s English music is not entirely representative of [6] its
era, his Latin music has many features which are typical of the period in
which it was composed. As Kerman has pointed out, 14 the late Henrician and
early Marian periods saw an increased interest in cantus firmus respond
motets—an interest which for technical reasons and probably from force of
habit continued into the early years of Elizabeth’s reign. Libera me Domine
10 Rimbault: loc. cit.
11 J. Kerman: `The Elizabethan Motet. . . ‘, Studies in the Renaissance, x (1962),
p.278.
12 Le Huray: op. cit., p.191.
13 Le Huray: op. cit., p.25.
14 Kerman : op. cit., p.277.