Letters

Musical Times, Autumn 2001

Out with the Old

During his third year at Cambridge, my contemporary Peter Williams left Music for the English Tripos. He sat at the feet of the legendary FR Leavis, and ever since has looked down on the rest of us, as Leavis looked down on much English literature, with distaste. Peter doesn't go to conferences, so the rest of us are judged vapid for attending them. Peter doesn't like modern ways of thinking and writing, so the rest of us are labelled 'trendies' and roundly condemned whenever we stray from the True Path of Musicology (i.e. his).

What Leavis would not have encouraged, however, is disrespect for and misrepresentation of intellectual issues. As the person whose work is attacked first in Peter's recent diatribe (MT, Summer 2001, pp.2-3), I am said to be `attributing the fine critical mind of EJ Dent to his apparently preferring boys to girls', a move described generically as `the compulsory turn to modern obsessions that might be no more than gossipy dead-ends - e.g. the invocation of same-gender sex as if it were Mr Casaubon's Key To All Mythologies'. This is a vulgar caricature of an honest attempt to connect Dent's critical opinions and his (now demonstrable) interest in the social and political aspects of (his) homosexuality, an attempt placed in the wider context of an argument about the effects of sexology upon music and music scholarship. (An expanded version of the essay, including details culled from Dent's letters and from a recent biography of Siegfried Sassoon, will appear next year in Queer episodes in music and modern identity, edd. Sophie Fuller & Lloyd Whitesell, University of Illinois Press.) Since specific reference is made to homosexuality as `part of the master narrative for identity and social organization in Western countries, along with categories of gender, class, nationality, and race' (Musicology and sister disciplines, p.420), there is no attempt to invoke same-gender sex in a Casaubonic fashion. Since I began making such moves in 1976, moreover, when they were the reverse of `compulsory', one would have thought I had earned the right by now.

At least Peter gives me the full treatment, and doesn't, as with Ruth Finnegan, Nicholas Cook and others, jump on a single sentence treated out of context.

I am as willing as anyone to be teased about my preoccupations as well as to have them intelligently opposed. Part of what I see as being important to the love of music that is as demonstrably part of my make-up as Peter's, however, is a willingness to entertain new ideas, to welcome diversity, and to extend courtesy to others rather than sneering at them, and it makes me sad to see him behaving like this and invoking 'music' to justify that behavior.

Philip Brett University of California, Riverside

Counting the Coste

Even in these postmodern days it is reasonable to observe that Thomas Coste is among the least significant of early English composers. All the sources of his few surviving pieces are listed on p.95 of part II of The sources of early English church music compiled by Ralph T. Daniel & Peter le Huray (London: Stainer & Bell, 1972), Early English Church Music, supplementary vol.l.

These pieces amount to two anthems which survive complete, and some Anglican liturgical music which survives fragmentarily in Durham Cathedral Library and cannot be reconstructed. None of the music was published, though the words of the anthem He that hath my commandments are included as no.clvii in both editions of James Clifford's The divine services and anthems (London: Godbid, 1663-64), the latest of the sources that contain any aspect of Coste's music.

Coste's only claim to attention is that his other anthem, Save me 0 God, picked up what has proved to be an adhesive attribution to Byrd, having been confused with Byrd's festal psalm of the same title. In those modern reference sources where he is named, Coste's Christian name is given as Thomas. However, none of the sources listed by Daniel & le Huray provide a Christian name. When Coste's name appears, it is given as Coste, Cost or Coast, prefixed M., Mr., or not at all.

The earliest reference I have been able to find to Coste with Thomas as Christian name is in Anthems and anthem composers by Myles Birket Foster (London: Novello, 1901). Roger Bowers has traced a musician named Richard Coste (fl.1543-97: see his letter in Early Music Review 42 (1998)) who was a layclerk and acting organist at Canterbury Cathedral, noted as a composer. John Harley has found that a Thomas Coste, son of one Richard Coste, was baptised on 1 January 1574 at Aldington, fifteen miles south of Canterbury (e-mail to present writer, 4 June 2001).

Is there an unnoticed contemporary source that gives Coste's Christian name as Thomas? If not, is Thomas an invention or a confusion with Thomas Caustun? Several writers since 1901 have accepted this Christian name, some of us wrongly crediting Thomas Myriell's 'Tristitiae remedium' (Lbl Add 29372-7) of 1616 with uniquely preserving it, Perhaps some light could be shed on this minor mystery.