DESCRIPTION:
The sheet music for this work published by SHP is available as a free sample (for the time being) at http://Rousseau.SHP.media along with other 16th century compositions. Please subscribe here to this YouTube channel if you wish to be updated on further uploads of recordings and sheet music.

John Redford was organist of the pre-Wren St Paul's Cathedral, London, from 1525 and also Choirmaster from 1531 until his death. He was also a noted dramatist of the Tudor period. His position as Almoner and Master of the Choristers required him to write not only church music but secular entertainment for them to perform, such as plays.

Although he is known to have composed a large number of keyboard and organ works, mostly based on plainchant melodies, such as "O Lux on the faburden" here, very few of them survive, and those mostly because they were collected by Thomas Mulliner (The Mulliner Book) in the period around or just after Redford's death.

Some of Redford's poems were used by later composers, such as Thomas Morley, who set "Nolo mortem peccatoris".

Redford is also noted for his sense of humour, as represented by a poem called "The Chorister's Lament" - quite possibly one of those secular entertainments - in which choirboys complain about the beatings they have to suffer from the hands of their "cruell" and "cursyd" master.

He is known to have lived with his sister, Margaret Coxe, quite probably in the Almoner's House on the south side of St Paul's Cathedral.