Under the terms of this agreement, John Bircheley of London taught the monks plainsong,
pricksong, faburden ("fafunden") and descant, as well as organ playing and "to sett songes yf thay be dysposed to gif theymsellffe therunto," In other words, among several other duties, Bircheley was expected to teach the whole gamut of skins required of a liturgical musician to the monks, including composition.
Hearing him play I am reminded of Mercutio's description of Tybalt's fencing skills: 'He fights as you sing
pricksong.' As with Tybalt's fencing there is in O'Dette's performance a consideration of execution which occasionally inspires more awe than delight, particularly on the earlier discs.
By 1510, the year in which the singers of the Chapel Royal are first recorded as having visited St Mary's, the church certainly owned
pricksong, chat is to say notated polyphony.
However, a small amount of additional information concerning the contents of the Chapel Royal and the liturgical books in use there is contained in a little-known inventory of chapel goods compiled between September 1547 and January 1548.(20) During the last five years of his reign Henry VIII and his household spent more days at Westminster than at any other palace, and, although it must be realized that the 'ten books of
pricksong' listed in this inventory would still have been carried around with the peripatetic chapel as it accompanied the royal household on its travels, it is probable that a large number of pieces contained within them would have been performed in the chapel at Whitehall, even if that building would not have formed their permanent home.
Like the royal chapel of St Stephen, the parish church of St Margaret maintained a skilled choir competent in '
pricksong' or polyphony.
Though along the way Girl and "Order and Flux" might re-Cooverize a descanted
pricksong or two.
"The Babysitter."
Pricksongs and Descants: Fictions by Robert Coover.
He has received the Rea Award for lifetime achievement in short fiction, based on such works as
Pricksongs & Descants, A Night at the Movies, and A Child Again.
My forty-year engagement with Coover fiction and its author begins in 1970 when, a green assistant professor, I read
Pricksongs & Descants, which so bowled me over I had to teach it to understand it better.
Otro ejemplo interesante y metaficcionalmente eficaz es el relato de Coover "The Elevator" (en
Pricksongs and Descants), que presenta, por un lado, una estructura con divisiones que busca evocar las plantas o pisos del edificio de oficinas en el que discurre la narracion y, por otro, ofrece una accion de subidas y bajadas alternas y reiteradas que convierte al texto en expresion simultanea del propio ascensor de la ficcion.
As Coover states in
Pricksongs and Descants in his dedication to Cervantes, all the stories of the great Spanish trailblazer of literature "exemplified the dual nature of all good narrative art: they struggled against the unconscious mythic residue in human life and sought to synthesize the unsynthesizable, sallied forth against adolescent thought-modes and exhausted art forms, and returned home with new complexities" (77).