Kerry McCarthy (Musician and Author), ‘Tudor Singers on the Road’

Abstract: The ‘Gentlemen Singers’ of Henry VIII’s Privy Chamber were offered a new benefit in 1544: ‘att every removeing, allowance of a cart for the carriage of their stuff.’ Many Tudor singers spent a significant amount of time on the road. This was true above all for the royal household musicians who followed kings and queens in their ‘removeings’ and progresses. Itinerant music-making attracted its share of controversy, as we can see in a variety of contexts, from the court reforms of the Eltham Ordinances (which described touring with a large professional choir as a cause of ‘great annoyaunce... labour, travail, charge and paine’) to the unscripted musical duel that took place when the peripatetic Chapel Royal singer Robert Philips made an appearance as guest soloist at St George’s, Windsor. This talk explores the practicalities of life for Tudor royal singers on the road: the distinctive genres and sub-genres of music they sang in various situations, the ‘stuff’ they carried, and the ideological turmoil they often faced at close range.

Biography: Kerry McCarthy is a musician and author known for her work on the English Renaissance. She attended Reed College (BA, Music, 1997) and Stanford University (PhD, Musicology, 2003), and spent eleven years teaching at Duke University in North Carolina. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is active as a performer and interpreter of early music. She also maintains a busy schedule of public speaking and public engagement, including a five-day guest appearance on BBC Radio 3 celebrating William Byrd as Composer of the Week in July 2023. Her books (including new biographies of Byrd and Tallis, both published with Oxford University Press) have been reviewed in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and other venues of note. Her Tallis biography was given the 2021 American Musicological Society award for early music book of the year. Other recent publications include articles in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Early Music, and Renaissance Studies. She is now writing her fourth book, an exploration of the lives of professional singers in Tudor England. She is a Visiting Fellow at Sidney Sussex College during Michaelmas Term 2025.