The early years of Henry VIII’s reign were a time of ostentatious pageantry, ceremonial and courtly entertainments of all kinds. Royal entries, tournaments, funerals, executions, banquets, coronations, christenings were all ceremonial occasions in which music had a function. Very little actual ceremonial music has survived; most of it was probably never written down. But many […]

A collection of songs and dances by Dowland, East and Holborne performed by two of the most eminent of British early-music groups in the late-1960s: Musica Reservata and the Purcell Consort of Voices. The performance of contrapuntal vocal music with viols doubling the voices, stems from a long European tradition and in several of the […]

Time to pass in court circles there certainly was – and money to spend in the passing of it too! Lavish entertainments, revelry and dancing, pageants, music and the ritual of the hunt were known to Henry’s queen, Katharine; and all these culminated in the superlative splendours of the Field of Cloth of Gold in […]