## Newly Discovered Music Sheds light on Henry purcell’s Work
A notable discovery of previously unknown music by the 17th-century English composer Henry Purcell has been announced,hailed as “highly significant” by experts. The find,stemming from a project cataloguing musical manuscripts in England’s county record offices,offers new insights into Purcell’s compositions and performance practices.
the research is a collaboration between Royal Holloway, University of London and Newcastle University, working to preserve musical heritage within archives “often struggling after decades of local authority funding cuts” through the Music, Heritage, Place project.One newly identified piece is a song written for a character in Thomas D’Urfey‘s 1691 play *Love for Money*, a satire of a girls’ boarding school and a frequent collaboration with Purcell.the song, titled “As soon as day began to peep,” depicts a French fop attempting to woo a woman, “not quite in control of his emotions,” according to researcher Dr.david Rose.He explains the song features Purcell musically representing “the miaows” of a cat, as the character comically compares himself to an animal trying to gain entry.
Interestingly, the play was met with boos at its London performance due to its perceived attack on the Chelsea girls’ boarding school – the vrey same school where Purcell’s opera *Dido and Aeneas* was performed around 1687.
The discovered song survived, albeit incomplete, amongst legal warrants and has been reconstructed by Alan Howard, chair of the Purcell Society and college associate professor of music at Selwyn College, Cambridge, allowing it to be performed once more.Further discoveries came in the form of a lavishly bound keyboard manuscript in red leather with gold decoration, dating back to around 1810, which had been repurposed for indexing Thetford town council records. This manuscript contains nine pieces by Purcell and his contemporary,John Blow,in versions differing from those currently known. Crucially, three of the Purcell pieces are in the composer’s own hand, identifiable by his “distinctive note-shapes and musical symbols.” These include early versions of his G minor suite, revealing “many differences of keyboard texture and ornamentation, giving insights into how Purcell may have played the harpsichord.”
Howard emphasized the rarity of such a find: “This is a piece we were completely unaware of by Purcell, the major composer of that era in England.It’s almost unheard of for something like that to turn up.” He noted that typically, such discoveries would be documented in play texts or contemporary diaries, but no such records exist for this piece.
digitised versions of the Norfolk and Worcestershire archives’ findings will be made available, and a scholarly article detailing the discoveries will be published by Rose, Howard, Caro Lesemann-Elliott and Andrew Woolley. The research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research council.
A performance of Purcell’s G minor Allemand, as found in the Norfolk manuscript, will be featured in the final episode of the BBC Radio 3 programme *The Song Detectorists*, broadcast on October 24th, performed by Dr. David Rose.
