Stephen Bing's Part Books Y M.1.S: The Personal Collection of a 17th-Century Cathedral Musician

Stephen Bing (1610-1681) has been established as one of the most prolific music copyists of the seventeenth century. His career as a cathedral musician stretched from his training as a chorister in Canterbury Cathedral to his death while working as a lay vicar at Westminster Abbey, a span of sixty-three years encompassing the Laudian Revival, the Interregnum, and the Restoration. He worked with many of the important musicians in English cathedral music during this time, including George Jeffreys, John Barnard, William Turner, William Tucker, John Blow, and Henry Purcell. During the last thirteen years of his life, Bing was engaged in a unique copying project, now known as the 'Bing-Gostling Part books', housed at York Minster Library under the collective shelf-mark M.1.S. This complete set of eight books represents a personal collection of the music Bing had access to as a copyist during those years.

Researchers have previously used the Bing-Gostling Part books as a source of specific and isolated anthems and as a way to date Purcell's early works, or mentioned them in a few paragraphs as part of the story of Bing's life. This study investigates the set of part books as an entity in their own right. It contextualises the part books in light of contemporary surviving sources, and in relation to Bing's life as a working cathedral musician. Bing's detailed marginalia are explored as the basis for a study of the transmission of cathedral repertoire during the Restoration.