FREE DOWNLOADS

Sheet music

The following free sheet music downloads are taken from materials that I have arranged from original 18th-century sources for various of my CD recordings, and are made available for study according to the ‘Conditions for Users’ set out on their title-pages. These are arrangements of orchestral and other scores, and are not intended as critical performing editions.

Anonymous [c.1764]: Lord Exeter’s Minuet
  www.burghley.co.uk
   
Thomas Erskine 1732-1781: Two Minuets
  Earl of Kelly The Duchess of Gordon’s Minuet
  Lord Stanley’s Minuet
  www.dolmetsch.com

Music (mp3)

The following sound files are taken from CDs of harpsichord and organ music that I have recorded at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, by kind permission of The Marquess of Cholmondeley. www.houghtonhall.com

George Frideric Handel: Bourée (from Il Pastor Fido)
1685-1759 (arranged for harpsichord by Gerald Gifford)
   
Anonymous 17th-century: Resonet in Laudibus
  (played on a chamber organ)

 



The Pleasures of Minstrelsy?

‘Just as Vicky [Lady Victoria Leatham, of Burghley House, Stamford] is talking to harpsichordist Gerald Gifford, of Wolfson College, Cambridge, about the carol service, Richard [her son] wants to know how to cut the tail off a dead squirrel. ‘Use game shears and put it in the freezer in a plastic bag marked ‘Squirrel’. Now Mr Gifford, about the Handel. The 9th Earl was a fervent Handelian, did you know?’ Mr Gifford blinks rapidly, a man who cannot believe that he has heard a false note’.

- Victoria Mather, ‘The Hurly-Burghley of Christmas’, Harpers & Queen (1986)