William Mundy (composer)

C16 English composer

William Mundy (c. 1529–1591) was a Renaissance English composer of sacred music and father of composer John Mundy.

Mundy was the son of Thomas Mundy, a musician and sexton of the London church St Mary at Hill. William Mundy married Mary Alcock and had two sons, John Mundy, an organist and composer, and Stephen Mundy, a gentleman of the household to James I and Charles I. In 1543, William Mundy was head chorister of Westminster Abbey, until his voice broke. He was appointed deputy to St Martin, Ludgate in 1547, and from 1548 to 1558 Mundy served as Parish Clerk for the church of St Mary at Hill in London (his father Thomas' employer). Mundy was appointed Vicar choral to the Chapel Royal in 1559, and as a Gentleman of the Chapel in 1564,

Coming of age during the reign of Henry VIII, Mundy's career spanned much of England's Tudor Dynasty, and reflected the changes in church music that accompanied the religious turmoil of that period. Mundy's extant body of sacred music consists of the two masses above, six Anglican service settings, the single Kyrie, twenty two motets (in Latin), thirteen anthems, and a large number of musical settings for specific Psalms. These settings included his versions of Miserere mei Deus (from Psalms 51), Adolescentulus sum ego (from Psalms 119), In aeternum (also from Psalms 119), and Let the sea make a noise (from Psalms 98), which was composed for twelve instruments. Most musicologists definitively date Vox Patris caelestis to the brief English counter reformation during the reign of Queen Mary (1553–58) due both to its subject matter and Catholic style. English tenor and historian of Tudor music, Nicholas Robertson cites Vox patris caelestis as "the culmination of the great antiphon tradition" and describes its structure as beginning "with two voices only, expanding to a trio before the full choir enters with éclat in the second half, now in duple instead of triple time, the solo sections are enlarged in scope, climaxing in a "gymel" (derived from the Latin for twin) where two equal treble voices soar above the rich accompaniment of double alto and bass", and praises it as "elaborate and virtuosic, the range daunting". was—bizarrely—originally attributed to Henry VIII. Composer and music historian Ernest Walker, held that particular contrapuntal service to be "one of the very finest of all written for the English ritual".

Other works by Mundy that have survived to the present day include In exitu Israel, an extensive setting of Psalm 114 (113 in the Vulgate) rivalling Vox patris in scale and complexity; this seems to have been a collaborative work between the young William Byrd, the more senior John Sheppard, and Mundy himself, with each composer responsible for a section of the text. Also extant in a slightly reconstructed form is the large scale motet Maria virgo sanctissima, a comparable work to Vox patris and similarly devoted to the Virgin Mary. In 1563, when composer John Baldwin of Windsor wrote of the great musicians of the period, he included Mundy ("th'oulde", as opposed to his son John) writing: "I will begin with White, Sheppard, Tye, and Tallis; / Parsons, Giles, Mundy, th'oulde: one of the Queen's Pallis."