ABSTRACT
Copies of William Bathe’s A Briefe Introduction to the Skill of Song began to appear on London bookshelves just as a new market for instructional texts on musical subjects was being cultivated by some of the leading publishers in the city.1 Although the book was issued without a date on its cover page, Jeremy L. Smith, an authority on the work of Bathe’s publisher Thomas East, has recently argued that Bathe’s treatise was most likely printed in 1596 – thereby strengthening our confidence in a publication date that had been hypothesized previously by a number of other scholars.2 If accurate, Smith’s assertions, based upon an analysis of both bibliographical and watermark evidence, would place the work among a handful of similar texts that appeared within a very short span of time. That same year, the anonymous The Pathvvay to Musicke was published by the fiercely competitive William Barley.3 In 1597, Peter Short, a relative newcomer to the field, printed Thomas Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke. Before the appearance of these three books in 1596-97, only three other music textbooks are known to have been published in the English language, and of these only one was an original work intended for a general readership: Bathe’s own A Briefe Introductione to the True Art of Musicke, printed by Abell Jeffes in 1584.4
It is understandable that East, who was among the busiest publishers in Elizabethan London, would have been eager to publish Bathe’s second treatise in 1596.5 As Jessie Ann Owens has observed, Bathe’s contemporary Thomas Whythorne noted in his diary that Bathe was among ‘the most famous musicians in his time’. It also appears that Morley, who was often outspoken in his criticism of the work of his peers, may have thought highly enough of Bathe’s writing to quote from it directly when composing his own Plaine and Easie Introduction.6 Indeed the reputation that Bathe already enjoyed among his peers could only have been bolstered by the publication of A Briefe Introduction to the Skill of Song, whose contents comprised a significant pedagogical contribution to the musical culture of late sixteenth-century England in two respects. First, Bathe’s text outlines a method of solmization – the means by which the novice singer learned to tune the tones and semitones in a melody – that is not only unlike those described by the theorist’s contemporaries either in England or on the Continent but that furthermore appears to anticipate the four-syllable, non-hexachordal solmization method that became standard in England over the course of the seventeenth century. Second, his book includes a numerical method for composing canons that provides rare and perhaps even unique evidence for the use of a kind of combinatorial procedure that has recently been proposed to lie behind the composition of canons throughout the sixteenth century, but that appears, apart from Bathe’s treatise, not to have been discussed explicitly by theorists until the mid-1600s.
