Robert Parsons is something of a forgotten man of English Renaissance music, and annotator and conductor Barnaby Smith discusses in the booklet a startling reason why: Parsons fell into the River Trent and drowned in 1572, and there was "upset and suspicion surrounding his death" -- apparently to the point where the choristers of the Chapel Royal uneasily began to avoid his music. If anyone is inspired to write a mystery novel yet, know that you'll have an additional selling point to use when your agent tries to get your ...
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Robert Parsons is something of a forgotten man of English Renaissance music, and annotator and conductor Barnaby Smith discusses in the booklet a startling reason why: Parsons fell into the River Trent and drowned in 1572, and there was "upset and suspicion surrounding his death" -- apparently to the point where the choristers of the Chapel Royal uneasily began to avoid his music. If anyone is inspired to write a mystery novel yet, know that you'll have an additional selling point to use when your agent tries to get your book turned into a movie: Parsons' music is an attractively varied lot that reflects its time and would offer all kinds of ideas to an enterprising director. Parsons lived from around 1530 to 1572, and his career thus coincided with the musical beginnings of the Reformation in England. The program is structured as an imagined musical requiem for Parsons that he never had in his own time -- not an actual service for the dead but a collection of Parsons' works that both represents his...
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