Motets and Anthems

With the completion in this volume of the corpus of Richard Dering’s vocal music available in modern scholarly editions, we are now in a position to acknowledge fully his contribution to seventeenth-century music. The contents include his entire sacred output in English (none of which was published in his lifetime): two verse anthems, two contrafacta, and one sacred song. There are also 18 motets for five voices and continuo. These Cantiones Sacrae, printed in Antwerp in 1617 by the Flemish publisher Pierre Phalèse the younger, are more typical of the impassioned Counter-Reformation motet style of Giovanni Gabrieli, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, and another émigré Catholic composer working in the Low Countries at the time, Peter Philips.