Held in the Bodleian libraries at Oxford University, the Sherard collection includes a substantial amount of music of German origin brought together around the start of the eighteenth century by the apothecary, amateur composer and botanist James Sherard (1666–1738). This volume of eight sacred pieces from the collection is one of the most important volumes of seventeenth-century sacred music to have been published for some time. Edited by Stephen Rose, it offers a valuable insight into the music performed at the Leipzig Thomaskirche at the end of the seventeenth century and the performing traditions later inherited by J. S. Bach. As Rose points out in his Introduction, the pieces ‘document the final flowering of a liturgical and musical tradition in Leipzig’ (xiv) and provide a valuable context not only for Bach's Latin-texted church music, but for other parts of his sacred output as well.

Even if he declined to purchase the contents of Kuhnau's musical estate, apparently rejecting his Leipzig forebears’ music, Bach must have had at least partial knowledge of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century repertoire of the Thomaskirche. It is telling that his own bwv243 setting of the Magnificat has an almost identical use of the chorus to the one by Johann Schelle published here, and thematic similarities further link the two settings. As Rose says, ‘Schelle's work allows Bach's Magnificat to be viewed not in isolation but in the context of Leipzig conventions for setting this canticle’ (xviii). Perhaps even more important in this respect is Schelle's ‘Durch Adams Fall’ that Rose rightly describes as ‘a landmark in the history of the Lutheran sacred concerto’ (xvi). The work is amongst the first to combine a Lutheran chorale with settings of Biblical texts and it may well have provided a model for Bach's own chorale cantatas from the cycle of 1724–1725.

All but three of the pieces in this volume are taken from unicum sources, and five of the eight are settings of Latin texts. The instrumental and vocal requirements vary; Knüpfer's ‘De profundis’, Schelle's ‘Salve solis orientis’, ‘Durch Adams Fall’ and Magnificat are large-scale settings with five- or six-part vocal texture and instrumental ensembles of wind and strings. Reflecting the Leipzig Stadtpfeifer repertoire of the so-called Turmmusik, the wind instruments are mostly cornetti and trombones, but ‘Salve solis orientis’ features an additional trumpet that is quite independent of the rest of the ensemble. The instrument is designated ‘Clarino piccolo’, apparently a small Italian trumpet, but there is nothing in the part that is particularly high.

The volume also contains two smaller-scale, more intimate pieces. Schelle's ‘Ah! quam multa sunt peccata’ is for alto, two violins and cembalo. Kuhnau's ‘Muss nicht der Mensch’ is for tenor, trumpet, violin, bassoon and continuo. The latter may be a piece where the inclusion of a lute in the continuo group is appropriate – as Rose points out (xxiv), the lutenist Esaias Reusner studied in Leipzig and Kuhnau made specific reference to the use of the instrument in church music. Rose makes the equally valuable point that the organ continuo part for this piece is one of two in the volume that need to be played on full-sized instruments with sixteen-foot stops rather than the ubiquitous box organ (xxv). In addition, we should notice the specific requirement of the harpsichord by Schelle. But if the latter is finding its way into present-day performances of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sacred music, including Bach’s, the regular use of a suitably sized organ still seems to be some way off.

Current thinking on the vocal forces required in Bach's performances is certainly supported here by seventeenth-century precedents. Knüpfer's ‘De profundis’ has a five-part concertino of two cantus parts, alto, tenor and bass, along with written-out ripieno parts for the normal four voices. There are also ripieno manuscript parts for Schelle's Magnificat, while ‘Conc[ertino]’ and ‘Cap[ella]’ are called for in the latter's ‘Durch Adams Fall’, albeit in a rather haphazard way. The intention is clear: all these larger pieces should be performed throughout by a core of solo singers with concertino reinforcement at the appropriate moments. Describing his approach to this issue, Rose notes that ‘because the capella was an optional reinforcement . . . this edition does not notate the capella parts on separate staves’ (272). Nevertheless, Knüpfer's ‘De profundis’ is given with separate ripieno staves even though Rose himself admits that these parts ‘remain optional’ (272). And while the entries and exits of the reinforcements elsewhere are never less than clear, I think it is a shame that other pieces in this edition are not laid out in the same way as the Knüpfer. In the pieces without separate staves, the visual impact is greatly reduced. I wonder if the use of smaller staves throughout for the ripieno would have been a better solution.

Perhaps the most difficult decisions for all editors of seventeenth-century music are those regarding notation. Peter Holman's keynote address to the recent ‘Music in Transition’ symposium at Birmingham Conservatoire (2–3 July 2015) stressed the importance of the period around 1700 as a ‘watershed’, and there are clear notational differences between the pre-watershed pieces in this volume and the music of the post-watershed era. For example, composers and copyists exhibited a different approach to barlines in the pre-watershed era, and the manuscripts of these pieces from the Sherard collection are typical in their apparent refusal to mark every single bar with a line or equivalent oblique slash. This is particularly the case for music notated in triple-time minims, and it is important for editors of seventeenth-century music to give the modern performer some indication of the absence of bar lines, especially where there may be implications for performance practice. Rose, in common with most other editors, has regularized bar lines ‘in accordance with the meters’, but I can't help thinking that the imposition of consistency on inconsistency in such notation is unwise. For example, the Sherard manuscript organo part of Schelle's Magnificat (Mus. Sch. C. 31, fols 1r–25v) clearly implies cadential cross-beat accentuation in its absence of bar lines at the start of the triple-time ‘Sicut locutus est’. Rose's modern barring gives no clue to this and leaves the performer to make an educated guess. And where cross-beat accentuation is specifically noted by the presence of blackened notes (coloration), the modernization policy makes even less sense. Especially in Leipzig, this remnant of the mensural notation system was regularly used not only to show strong beats, but weak ones as well (see Michael Robertson, ‘Edited Out: Note-Blackening and Mensural Notation in 17th-Century Dance Music from Leipzig’, Early Music 42/2 (2014), 207–218). In Rose's edition, small brackets are placed over the notes blackened in the sources without any further comment. I suspect that this is an ‘in-house’ publisher's policy, and I have found the same in other A-R volumes, such as Charlotte A. Leonard's Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Church Music with Trombones (Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era 131; Middleton: A-R Editions, 2003). I feel that this policy presents a trap for the uninformed performer – it is perfectly possible to notate note blackening in a more meaningful way and certainly important to warn of its implications. The triple-time sections of both vocal and instrumental parts of Knüpfer's ‘Lauda Jerusalem’ suffer particularly in this respect.

Elsewhere, Rose's editing is a model of scholarship; he deals with any inconsistencies between parts with unfailing common sense, and only the exceptionally inquisitive will feel the need to consult the original manuscripts. Likewise, Rose's Preface is an extraordinarily informative piece of work, its thoroughness mirrored in no fewer than 211 footnotes. It is certainly required reading for anybody interested in the pre-watershed vocal repertoire. Not only are there detailed sections dealing with the Sherard collection and the composers represented in this volume, but Rose also writes extensively, and with great clarity, on the music itself, the Latin liturgy in Leipzig and performance practice. The critical report is equally thorough.

Although not reviewed here, performance parts are available: according to the publisher's website the three smaller-scale pieces are available for purchase (Kuhnau's ‘Laudate pueri’ and ‘Muss nicht der Mensch’, and Schelle's ‘Ah Quam multa sund peccata’), while the larger pieces are only available for hire. The full score is well produced and strongly bound, although, even when laid flat, it was very difficult to keep open without inflicting damage on the spine; any organist or harpsichordist attempting to play directly from it will certainly have a difficult time. But this review must end on a laudatory note; with very few reservations, the volume is one of the finest modern editions of seventeenth-century German music, either vocal or instrumental, to have come my way. Rose must be congratulated on a splendid piece of work that sets a new benchmark for the rest of us as editors.