5-516: The Dow Partbooks (Christ Church, Mus. MSS 984–988) are a collection of five partbooks compiled by Robert Dow in Oxford around 1581–88. The collection includes mostly choral but also some instrumental pieces. At the end is an instrumental La gamba and a canon, both a 3 and apparently copied from Vincenzo Ruffo 's book printed in Milan in 1564. The partbooks are an important source for Tudor music , and
10-440: A cost-cutting measure, as large-scale printing was much more expensive. For example, by 1529, King's College, Cambridge had replaced almost all of its choirbooks with partbooks. The reduced cost also allowed each performer to have his own copy, and partbooks were more portable than a choirbook. They were, however, flimsy, and originals do not survive in large numbers. Choral scores completely replaced individual vocal parts during
15-403: A later time (19th century), in sequences that do not coincide perfectly. The collection was acquired by Henry Aldrich and donated to Christ Church, Oxford as part of his bequest to the college following his death in 1710. Partbook A partbook is a format for printing or copying music in which each book contains the part for a single voice or instrument, especially popular during
20-470: The Renaissance and Baroque . This format contrasts with the large choirbook , which included all of the voice parts and could be shared by an entire choir . The choirbook still followed the convention to notate the parts separately, but within a double page, likewise part books were arranged that they show the one extract of the composition on the same page. The production of partbooks appears to have been
25-485: The sole known source for some of the pieces. Robert Dow was a trained calligrapher and the books are unusually easy to read among manuscripts of the Tudor period . All works were copied by him, with the exception of numbers 53–4, which were copied by John Baldwin (a singing-man at St George's Chapel), and nos. 99–100, which were copied by an unidentified person. The numberings following no. 54 were added by several other people at
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