English keyboard music c.1650-c.1700: a series of facsimiles of manuscript sources

London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1040 is an example of a teaching manuscript that includes extensive contemporary fingerings and may predominantly be in the hand of the Westminster Abbey organist Albertus Bryne (c.1621–68). Copied in the 1660s, it contains 31 pieces, two of which are fragments. Its highlights include a fine four-movement suite in B minor, probably by Bryne, and two suites by his Norwich-based contemporary Richard Ayleward (c.1626–69), the only pieces included with a composer attribution, which have been copied in a different, less accomplished hand. Some pieces it contains appear in versions that differ considerably from those in other sources, an indication of the varied ways in which accomplished keyboard players performed this music (three of the variant versions from other sources have been transcribed in an appendix to illustrate). A group of A minor pieces is also suggestive of how suites were constructed from larger 'pools' of pieces. As a whole, the manuscript has been carefully copied, providing good versions of a small but varied cross-section of mid-seventeenth-century pieces intended primarily for stringed-keyboard instruments, many of which it preserves uniquely. This edition includes a complete facsimile, transcription, extended introduction and critical commentary.