ABSTRACT
Date and publication. A Song for St CECILIA’s Day, 1687 was first printed ‘for T. Dring, in Fleetstreet’ as a single folio half-sheet which was distributed at the celebrations of the feast of St Cecilia (22 November) in 1687, when the poem was performed in a musical setting by Draghi (see below). The text is printed on one side in a double column; the verso is blank. Only one copy of the first edition (now in the BL) seems to have survived. The poem was reprinted in EP without substantive change. There is one late seventeenth-century MS of the poem alone (Beal DrJ 188), apparently copied from one of the printed editions. There are also five MSS which contain the poem together with its musical setting, three in the BL (see Beal DrJ 189–91), one in BodL (MS Tenbury 1226) and one in the West Sussex Record Office, Chichester (Cap. VI/1/1, fols. 24r–63r) (the last two not listed by Beal). The Chichester MS gives a list of singers, probably for the first performance. BL MS Royal College of Music 1106, fols. 29–74 (Beal DrJ 191) seems to be derived from a performance in 1694 or 1695 (see Peter Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court, 1540–1690 (1993) 326–7). The present text is based on 1687.
