Caustun’s Contrafacta

Abstract

The received view of the Tudor composer Thomas Caustun is of a minor and relatively uninteresting figure. That view is adjusted, however, by the discovery among his works of contrafacta of music by Nicolas Gombert, Philippe van Wilder, Rogier Pathie and Sebastiano Festa. This article considers the reasons why Caustun made these adaptations, and why they they were published under his name, rather than those of their true composers, in John Day’s anthology of Protestant church music, Mornyng and Evenyng Prayer and Communion (London, 1565).

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John Milsom

John Milsom ([email protected]) has published widely on sixteenth-century music in general, and on Tudor music and Josquin Desprez in particular. His current research focuses on the analysis of fuga in sixteenth-century polyphony. He continues to expand the online Christ Church Library Music Catalogue, a major research project that addresses the provenance history of the eighteenth-century music collections at Christ Church, Oxford.