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Edward Martyn was a member of Magdalen College, Oxford for about twenty years from 1485, rising through the ranks from chorister through scholar to fellow. This huge votive antiphon, his only surviving work, sets a highly rhetorical prose text celebrating the five joys of Our Lady to music of unusual enterprise and distinctiveness, in a style akin to that of the younger Eton choirbook composers but showing idiosyncratic features such as rapid text declamation and a penchant for dissonance. The setting is exceptional among English works of the period in its exploitation of canon: all the verse or reduced-voice sections are canons at various intervals and distances. For five voices: SATTB. viii + 28 pages. ISMN 979-0-57039-175-2.
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