page_title: Nicholas Ludford
section_title: Music
hierarchical_section_title: Nicholas Ludford / Music
context_page_description: Nicholas Ludford was an English composer of the Tudor period. He is known for his festal masses, which are preserved in two early-16th-century choirbooks, the Caius Choirbook at Caius College, Cambridge, and the Lambeth Choirbook at Lambeth Palace, London. His surviving antiphons, all incomplete, are copied in the Peterhouse Partbooks. Ludford is well-known as being the composer of the only surviving cycle of Lady Masses, small-scale settings of the Ordinary and Propers in three parts to be sung in the smaller chapels of religious institutions on each day of the week. Ludford's composing career, which appears to have ended in 1535, is seen as bridging the gap between the music of Fayrfax and that of John Taverner. Music scholar David Skinner has called Ludford "one of the last unsung geniuses of Tudor polyphony". In his Oxford History of English Music, John Caldwell observes of Ludford's six-part Mass and Magnificat Benedicta that it "is more a matter of astonishment that such mastery should be displayed by a composer of whom virtually nothing was known until modern times".
context_section_description: Unlike some composers of the period, such as Thomas Tallis (c. 1505–1585) and John Sheppard (c. 1513–1558), Ludford does not seem to have adapted his style to the demands of the English Reformation, and no compositions are recorded under his name after about 1535. The reasons for this could be due to his devout Catholic faith which might have made it unacceptable to him to tone down his high polyphonic style. Alternatively, it might be that Ludford occupied a generation awkwardly placed: too young to have died, like Fayrfax, before the religious turmoil, but too old to have been able to adopt and learn new styles like his younger contemporaries Tallis and Taverner.
  Ludford's musical style is notable for the abundance of melody and for the imaginative use of vocal texture. Like John Taverner, Ludford sought an effect of exuberance and grandeur, and his work has been described as containing "florid detail". In the view of John Caldwell, though Ludford's music is less versatile than Taverner's, it is more experimental. Caldwell regards Ludford as the equal of Taverner in contrapuntal skill and in sensitivity to the human voice.
  Ludford wrote 17 known masses, a greater number than any other English composer of the time. Three of these are now lost and three survive only in fragments. All Ludford's masses begin with a "head-motive", a similar passage at the beginning of each section. His cycle of seven three-part Lady Masses (masses sung in honour of the Virgin Mary) is unique. These masses were part of a manuscript collection that once belonged to Henry VIII and his Roman Catholic queen, Catherine of Aragon. The Lady Masses were presumably written to be sung daily at St Stephen's.
  The few contemporary references to Ludford suggest that he was a private and highly religious man. He was not renowned in his own day, and his work cannot be identified with any of the major events of the time. In 1597, the Elizabethan composer Thomas Morley (c. 1557–1602), in his Introduction to Practicall Music, noted Ludford as an "authority"; but in the 17th century Ludford's music was neglected and finally forgotten. In 1913, scholar H. B. Collins drew attention to Ludford, whose unpublished masses were then being sung by the choir of Westminster Cathedral under Sir Richard Terry. In the 1960s and 1970s, scholar John Bergsagel published Ludford's complete masses and wrote commentaries on his work. The first recordings of Ludford's works, in editions by David Skinner, were made in 1993–95 by The Cardinall's Musick under Andrew Carwood. Significant recorded additions since include the Gramophone-award winning disc by New College Choir, Oxford, which includes the Missa Benedicta and the votive antiphons Ave Cuius Conceptio and Domine Jesu Christe. This is the only recording to feature trebles and is a wonderful recreation of how Ludford's music might have sounded.
caption: Henry VIII owned copies of Ludford's Lady Masses, but Ludford never wrote in the new styles demanded by Henry's reformation of the English church.
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