In 2006 the Bodleian Library acquired, thanks to the generosity of the Friends of the Bodleian, an autograph score of William Croft's concerted Latin ode ‘Laurus cruentas’ (1713). Croft set to music two texts by Oxford's first Professor of Poetry, Joseph Trapp (1679–1747) – one Latin, the other English – in celebration of the Peace of Utrecht; the Duke of Ormonde (chancellor of the university) duly recommended the composer for a doctorate, which was conferred on Monday 13 July at the end of a long weekend of celebrations.

The manuscript (GB-Ob, MS Mus. d.271) preserves the only surviving extensive autograph material for Croft's Utrecht music. No autograph score remains for the longer English ode, ‘With noise of cannon’, though we do have the remarkable score (US-Su, MS M782.8 C874t) copied by Croft's thirteen-yearold apprentice James Kent for presentation to John Dolben, and also the later engraved publication Musicus apparatus academicus (hereafter MAA) of 1720, both of which also contain the Latin ode. Thus Mus. d.271 offers a unique window onto Croft's creative processes in his secular vocal music, of which it is indeed the most significant surviving autograph. The manuscript reveals that, despite his overwhelming concentration on sacred music over his almost thirty-year career, Croft was intimately familiar with the creative strategies adopted by his teacher John Blow and other composers of secular music for the court and public performance, including royal welcome songs and new year and birthday odes as well as the closely related Cecilian odes such as Purcell's ‘Hail, bright Cecilia’ (1692).

If Croft's preservation of these methods reveals his indebtedness to his seventeenth-century predecessors, his pioneering production of prestigious retrospective compendia of his compositions, neatly engraved in score – most famously in the two volumes of Musica sacra (published by Walsh, 1724) – set a pattern for the proliferation of printed anthem collections by English musicians throughout the remainder of the century and into the next. Indeed, this applied equally – thanks to the views expressed in his preface, which amounts in part to a manifesto for the preservation of English sacred music in printed score – to the emergence slightly later of monumental collections of English sacred music extending back to the Reformation, chief among them William Boyce's Cathedral Music (vol. 1, 1760).

It has frequently been observed that the techniques that Purcell employed in his trio sonatas found a new outlet in his orchestral symphonies and overtures of the 1690s. Giovanni Battista Draghi’s 1687 Cecilian ode had shown how a large-scale work could begin with an Italianate orchestral sinfonia rather than the more conventional English take on the French overture, and in their odes and theatre music of the 1690s Purcell and Blow embraced this feature with enthusiasm. What is not often acknowledged is that, Draghi’s example aside, Purcell was effectively forced to invent this genre for himself, adapting the chamber sonata to the larger orchestral resources available at performances of court odes and in the theatre.

What was Purcell aiming to do when he wrote his Chaconne for two flutes in Act III of The Prophetess, or the History of Dioclesian (1690; see facing page)? Such questions are not always easy to answer, but in this particular case there are strong grounds for optimism. Even without the informative heading, it is quickly obvious how the piece is constructed. Neither the repetitive ground bass nor the canon at the unison between the recorder parts could plausibly have arisen fortuitously, so at least in the context of compositional technique we can disregard many of the usual caveats about intention: in this work, Purcell was seeking to compose a canon ‘Two in one upon a Ground’, with the second recorder following the first, two bars later, at the unison.

In recent years, the cultural background to Purcell’s interest in the trio sonata has become much better understood and far more accessible. Apart from the perennial issue of his likely Italian models, we now recognize a body of ‘Restoration Trio Sonatas’, including works both by English composers (notably John Blow) and by Europeans active in London (among them Giovanni Battista Draghi and the elder Nicola Matteis). The example of Robert King’s ‘Sonetta after the Italion Way’ apparently composed around 1680, even sits alongside Purcell’s sonatas as an example of an explicitly acknowledged attempt to emulate Italian stylistic features.

Having laid out in Part I some of the ways in which Purcell’s instrumental music can be better understood through a historically sensitive approach to analysis, learning from contemporary theoretical discussions – both their contents and their omissions – I turn in Part II of this study to a broader consideration of what the same methods can reveal about some of the best known of the composer’s later works, while at the same time developing tools where necessary to explain the phenomena to be found there.

Some of the most conspicuous moments of artifice in Purcell’s vocal music of the 1690s arise from the deployment of contrapuntal augmentation, or ‘fugeing per augmentation’ as Purcell calls it in ‘The Art of Descant’. This chapter examines this phenomenon largely by delving again into the case of transformative self-borrowing identified at the start of Chapter 6: the relationship between the setting of ‘World without end’ in the orchestral Jubilate of 1694 and its antecedent – in terms of materials and contrapuntal treatment – in the last section of Fantazia XI. The technical resources necessary to devise such sustained passages of imitation per augmentation are worthy of consideration in their own right, and provide a fresh avenue for inquiry into Purcell’s compositional choices.

At the climax of his last great choral work, the orchestral Te Deum and Jubilate in D major for the St Cecilia’s Day celebrations of 1694, Purcell dusted off a contrapuntal motif familiar from the end of his much earlier Fantazia XII (Ex. 6.1). Moreover, he also used exactly the same compositional conceit in his working of this motif – no doubt, in fact, his very choice of materials was motivated by the desire to select an idea suitable for subjection to the extreme contrapuntal augmentation of bars 201–8, an illustration of the words ‘world without end’.

One way we can get at the kinds of creative strategies Purcell employed in his most contrapuntally intricate music is to examine it alongside contemporary theoretical writings, including his own. This chapter, then, is principally concerned with the establishment of a methodological basis for the analysis that follows later. This basis is unfolded in three parallel strands: the examination of theoretical texts by Purcell and his immediate contemporaries, the situation of these within the wider context of Restoration cultural discourse, and the analysis of Purcell’s music in the light of the insights gained from both. It culminates in a more detailed study of the first part of one of Purcell’s most accomplished fantazias, with the aim of recovering the composer’s working methods through a careful analysis of his use of counterpoint, or fugeing, as he called it in ‘The Art of Descant’.