Osbert Parsley

Osbert Parsley (1511 – 1585) was an English renaissance singer and composer. Few details of his life are known, although he evidently married in 1558 and lived for a period in the parish of St Saviour's Church, Norwich. He died in Norwich in 1585 and was buried in Norwich Cathedral.

Parsley began his musical career as a boy chorister at the cathedral, and worked there all his life. First mentioned as a lay clerk, he was appointed a 'singing man'in c.1534 and was probably the cathedral's unofficial organist for half a century. He wrote church music at Norwich for both the Latin and English rites, as well as instrumental music. His commemorative plaque, a mark of the respect he held in by those who knew him, was a unique honour for the cathedral's choristers. It is inscribed with a poem in praise of Parsley's character and musicianship.

Osbert Parsley was born in 1511; the identity of his parents or place of birth are not known. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that in 1558 he was married to Rose and bought a house and premises in the parish of St Saviour's Church, Norwich from a man named John Hering and his wife Helen. Parsley owned the house until 1583.

Parsley was a friend of four Bishops of Norwich: Richard Nykke, Thomas Thirlby, John Parkhurst and Edmund Freke. He was well respected by his contemporaries for his musical ability and his personal character; the cathedral's organist Henry Manning bequeathed20 shillings to his friend and "owld servant", and his fellow lay singing-men uniquely honoured him by commissioning his memorial in the cathedral's north aisle. The memorial, which once had indecipherable text, reads:

Musicae Scientissimo
Ei quondam Consociati
Musici posuerunt Anno 1585

Here lies the man whose Name in Spight of Death,
Renowned lives by Blast of Golden Fame:
Whose Harmony survives his vital Breath.
Whose Skill no Pride did spot whose Life no Blame.
Whose low Estate was blest with quiet Mind:
As our sweet Cords with Discords mixed be:
Whose life in Seventy and Four Years entwin'd,
As falleth mellowed Apples from the Tree.
Whose Deeds were Rules whose Words were Verity:
Who here a Singing-man did spend his Days.
Full Fifty Years in our Church Melody
His Memory shines bright whom thus we praise.

Parsley's will, made on 9 December 1584, was proved by his widow on 6 April of the following year. He left bequests valued at about £75. He died in Norwich in 1585, aged 71, and was buried in the cathedral where he had worked throughout most of his life.

Details of Parsley's life first appeared in Henry Davey's History of English Music, first published in 1895, when Parsley was described as a "lesser composer" from Norwich Cathedral whose works existed in manuscript form.

Musical career at Norwich Cathedral

Like many of his contemporary English composers, Parsley began his musical career as a choirboy. He was appointed a 'singing man'in c.1534, a post he retained for 50 years. He is first listed in Norwich Cathedral's extant accounts for 1538–1540. where he is named as a lay clerk, and he continued to be mentioned in subsequent documentation until his death. He was probably the cathedral's unofficial organist from 1535 until his death. During the time he was a chorister, William Inglott and his son William were in turn Master of the Choristers; the works written by the younger William are found in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Composers in Tudor England were honoured by being awarded an academic degree from either Oxford or Cambridge, or by becomimg a member of the Chapel Royal—Parsley received neither of these highly-prized honours.

By the start of the 1570s, Parsley was being paid £12 a year, and the five other men in the cathedral choir were paid either £10 or £8, equivalent to the pay given to an unskilled construction worker. A decade later the master of the choirboys and the choirmen were being paid at the same rate. The composer Thomas MorleyThomas Morley, master of the choirboys from 1583, had a salary was not much more than those of the singing men. Parsley was subject to ‘gifts’ from the cathedral, possibly for his compositions. In 1576, he received three pounds and ten shillings extra, making his yearly income substantially more than that of his fellow singers.

In 1578, Elizabeth I and her royal court came to Norwich as part of a royal "progress", and the city was expected provide accommodation, banquets and entertainment. Then the second city in England after London, Norwich was one of the few cities with such sufficient numbers of skilled musicians, but even so the city had to resort to using viol, trumpet and cornet players from Elizabeth's entourage. Together with her courtiers, the most prominent of Norwich's citizens, and the clergy of the cathedral, Elizabeth heard Parsley's Te Deum sung during the first evening of her visit to the city, with the choir being supported by the city's waits. Parsley was paid 6+1⁄2 shillings "for the songs composed and sung by him" during the queen's visit. His music was also performed before the queen when she returned to Norwich in 1597. None of his compositions for Elizabeth's visits to Norwich have survived.

English composers of the late 15th century and early 16th century set a limited number of types of sacred music, each with a clear place in a the liturgy. Until the Reformation of 1534, when Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church, English composers based their works on the Sarum rite, abolished in 1547.

During the decades that followed the Reformation, the lives of English church musicians changed according to the policies of the reigning monarch. Henry allowed church music in England to continue to be written in a florid style, and use Latin texts, but during the reign of his son and successor, Edward VI,polyphonic music was no longer allowed to be composed, and there was a wholesale destruction of church organs and music. The damage done was never completely restored by Edward's successors Mary and Elizabeth.

Parsley's composing career spanned the Reformation, and he wrote church music for both the Latin and English rites. The musicologist Howard Brown noted that Parsley belonged to a group of outstanding composers who during the middle period of the 16th century—William Mundy, Robert Parsons, John Sheppard, Christopher Tye, Thomas Tallis, and Robert White—who together produced a body of high quality music.

According to the scholar John Morehen, Parsley was less at ease when working with English texts, a trait Morehen finds Parsley had in common with similar composers who worked during the Reformation. His Latin music is fluent and attractive, with extended phrases that become increasingly melismatic as they progress. The parts in Latin are characteristically independent in a way that was typical of sacred polyphony in England before the Reformation. The expressive psalm Conserva me, Domine has an elegant polyphonic style. The technique shown in his English church music is less assured than his compositions for the Latin rite. His five-part Lamentations, which differs from settings by his contemporaries Tallis and White in that the treble line is maintained throughout, was probably intended for domestic devotional use. The musicologist and composer W. H. Grattan Flood described Parsley's Lamentations as being "of particular interest". One piece, a well-crafted three-part canonic setting of Salvator Mundi, was printed by Morley in 1597. Morley described Parsley's arrangement of this Gregorian hymn as a model of its kind, and alluded to him as "the most learned musician".

Parsley also composed secular music. Some instrumental music, nearly all for viols, survives, includingsix consort pieces. His instrumental style combines both of his Latin and English vocal styles.

Peter Phillips, writing in The Musical Times, noted that "Parsley can be remembered as one of those men who just once conjured up a masterpiece, as it seems to us now, from nowhere."

Most of Parsley's surviving works consist mainly of church music, located in various places. He is credited with the following compositions:

• Conserva Me Domine. "Parsley can be remembered as one of those men who just once conjured up a masterpiece, as it seems to us now, from nowhere."
• Flat Service: Benedictus (Canticle)
• Flat Service: Te Deum
• In Nomine (five different compositions)
• Lamentations. Four of the great Lamentations of the Tudor period for Holy Week date from the 1560s: two by Tallis, and one each by William Byrd and Parsley. Earlier Lent services avoided polyphony, which was regarded as lacking in solemnity.
• O praise the Lord all ye heathen
• Salvator mundi

• Service in C Major
• Spes Nostra
• Super septem planetarum
• Parsley's Clock. This composition is similar to Charles Butler's Dial Song, What strikes the clocke by Edward Gibbons, and an anonymous piece, all of which are built around a line that counts the hours.
• This is the Day

Key

BL—work held at the British Library in London; BodL—work held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford; ERO—work held at the Essex Record Office, Chelmsford; PC—work held at Peterhouse, Cambridge; RCM—work held at the Royal College of Music.Benedicum and Multiplicati (both only fragments) are found in RCM 1737.; NYL—work held at the New York Public Library; Private collection of David McGhie, London; Private Library of J. A. Owens, Davis, California; f.—folio, r,v—recto and verso; vv—voices.

Music for voices

Instrumental music

Complete works

incomplete works or single complete parts

• Boyd, Morrison Comegys (1962). Elizabethan Music and Musical Criticism (2nd ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. OCLC 599711.
• Brennecke, Ernest (1951). "Shakespeare's "Singing Man of Windsor"". Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA). Cambridge University Press. 66 (6): 1188–1192 – via JSTOR.
• Brown, Howard Mayer (1976). Music in the Renaissance. Prentice Hall History of Music Series. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc. ISBN 978-01360-8-505-8.
• Butler, Katherine (2015). Music in Elizabethan Court Politics. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press. ISBN 978-18438-3-981-1.
• Davey, Henry (1921) [1895]. History of English Music (2nd ed.). London: J. Curwen. OCLC 890125681.
• Dovey, Zillah (1996). An Elizabethan Progress: The Queen's Journey Into East Anglia, 1578. Phoenix Mill: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 978-08386-3-721-0.
• Fellowes, Edmund H. (1969). English Cathedral Music (5th ed.). London: Methuen. ISBN 978-04161-4-850-3.
• Ford, Elliott (2019). A Study of the Musicians of Norwich, 1558–1660 (MA (unpublished dissertation)). University of East Anglia. Docket 100119792. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
• Gant, Andrew (2017). O Sing Unto the Lord: A History of English Church Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-02264-6-962-1.
• Grattan Flood, W. H. (1925). "New Light on Late Tudor Composers: XIII. Osbert Parsley". The Musical Times. 66 (993): 990. doi:10.2307/911434 – via JSTOR.
• Kerman, Joseph (1998). "On William Byrd's Emendemus in melius".In Pesce, Dolores (ed.). Hearing the Motet: Essays on the Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-01953-5-165-1.
• Milsom, John (1997). "The Passing of Time". Early Music. Oxford University Press. 25 (4 (25th Anniversary Issue)): 583–588 – via JSTOR.
• Morehen, John (1974). "The Instrumental Consort Music of Osbert Parsley". The Consort. 30: 67–72. ISSN 0268-9111.
• Morley, Thomas (1608). A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke. London: Humpfrey Lownes. OCLC 965139297.
• Murray, Tessa (2014). Thomas Morley: Elizabethan Music Publisher. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press. ISBN 978-18438-3-960-6.
• Oxford University (1937). "Reviews of Music". Music and Letters. 18 (2).
• Phillips, Peter (1997). "Voices from Nowhere". The Musical Times. 138 (1855): 16–21. doi:10.2307/1003540 – via JSTOR.
• Willis, Jonathan (2013). Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England: Discourses, Sites and Identities. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited. ISBN 978-14094-8-081-5.