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170:'perfyght in remembraunce' (undoubtedly a legal requirement) but also as 'hole in bodye'. 'Nycolace Ludfoorthe of age' died and was buried on 9 August 1557 in St Margaret's Church. Skinner has suggested that as the will seems to have been finished with urgency, the influenza epidemic that was sweeping England might have been the final blow for the aged composer.
98:. This might suggest that he undertook singing work in the Abbey's Lady Mass choir or at the Parish Church of St Margaret's, which Ludford was to have a deep connection with throughout his life. There are no records of Ludford being employed at any of the prestigious household or chapel choirs in London so charting his early career is a matter of speculation.
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collegiate church' (Bowers). This means he could have been employed as a singer from as early as 1524 and been deemed fit to run the music-making of the chapel in 1527. He was not the choir master, however, and it is more likely he played the organ for the alternatim Lady Masses and sung for Festal Masses when required.
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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,
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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
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More of
Ludford's involvement with St Margaret's is documented in the church warden accounts, which Ludford witnessed in 1537, 1542, 1547, 1549, 1551 and 1556. From 1552-1554 he was church warden himself, and as such he would have been responsible for overseeing the restoration of Catholic rites at
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Ludford's employment at St
Stephen's is described as 'manifold services in the skill of singing and organ playing'. As Nicholas Sandon has suggested, such a post would have probably been preceded by a term of probation, given the high standard of music making in what was an 'immensely prestigious
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as a 'clericus', a guild of musicians the membership of which was an essential step in the life of a London musician. This allows us to estimate that
Ludford was born sometime in 1485. In 1522 he left his lodgings on King Street and took up accommodation elsewhere. This may be because he left his
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Ludford had two wives, the first of which he had married by 1543 according to
Skinner. She must have died because he married Helen (or Elen) Thomas in St Margaret's in 1554. This suggests he was in good health and even in his will three months before his death (4 May) he is described not only as
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and started working at the collegiate chapel of St
Stephen's, Westminster (or to give it its full title, the Royal Free Chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Stephen the Protomartyr). Ludford's employment here is recorded in the accounts drawn up at the dissolution of the Chapel in 1547 which
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records
Ludford as starting work as 'verger' on 30 September 1527. This title does not signify that Ludford was merely a caretaker of the accoutrements of worship; the term had taken on a different meaning by about 1460, when, as Roger Bowers notes, the twin foundations of St Stephen's and
162:. St Margaret's was obviously his principal focus after the dissolution of St Stephen's in 1547 (the employees were only pensioned off in 1549, Ludford receiving £12, equivalent to his annual salary). While this was part of the widespread closure of collegiate foundations in the reign of
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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
244:, 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
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Nick Sandon, ‘The
Henrican Partbooks Belonging to Peterhouse, Cambridge: A Study, With Restorations of the Incomplete Compositions Contained in Them’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 1983,
142:. There were about six choirbooks in use around Westminster in this period and it has even been suggested by David Skinner that Ludford may have been partly responsible for the creation of the
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at Westminster and Windsor respectively. Meanwhile, the actual duties of the verger were transferred to the 'subsexton'. At this time Ludford was also a regular parishioner at
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David Skinner, ‘At the Mynde of Nicholas Ludford: New Light on Ludford from the Churchwardens’ Accounts of St Margaret’s, Westminster’, Early Music, vol. 22 (1994)
166:, it has been suggested that a particular motive in this case may possibly have been resistance at St Stephen's to the teaching of new Protestant ideas.
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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".
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and St Margaret's Church Westminster. The first reference we have is in 1517 when he took up tenancy of lodgings on King Street, belonging to
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212:, though Ludford's music is less versatile than Taverner's, it is more experimental. Caldwell regards Ludford as the equal of Taverner in
208:, Ludford sought an effect of exuberance and grandeur, and his work has been described as containing "florid detail". In the view of
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published Ludford's complete Masses and wrote commentaries on his work. The first recordings of Ludford's works, in editions by
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owned copies of Ludford's Lady Masses, but Ludford never wrote in the new styles demanded by England's Protestant reformation.
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284:. This is the only recording to feature trebles and is a wonderful recreation of how Ludford's music might have sounded.
66:(1490–1545). Music scholar David Skinner has called Ludford "one of the last unsung geniuses of Tudor polyphony". In his
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Ludford's work seems to have extended outside St Stephen's in this period. In 1533 he was paid by St Margaret's for a
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Ludford's musical style is notable for the abundance of melody and for the imaginative use of vocal texture. Like
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H. Baillie, ‘Nicholas Ludford (c. 1485–c. 1557)’, Musical Quarterly, vol. 44 (1958)
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Roger Bowers, ‘Review: Ludford Illuminated’ , Early Music, Vol. 35, 2007
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Vol 2. Edited by Denis Arnold. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
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The Oxford History of English Music: From the Beginnings to c. 1715.
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Not much about Ludford is known compared to his contemporaries
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22:(c. 1485 – 1557) was an English composer of the
293:http://www1.cpdl.org/index.php/Nicholas_Ludford
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394:Vol 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
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