John Birchensha (c.1605–1681) (sometimes spelled Birkenshaw or Berkenshaw) was an English

Baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...

music theorist. He presented at the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

and made an impression on its members in the 1660s and 1670s. Birchensha invented a system that he claimed would enable non-musicians to learn to compose in a short time by means of "a few easy, certain, and perfect Rules". This was at a time when other music theorists were codifying the rules of

counterpoint In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more musical lines (or voices) which are harmonically interdependent yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. It has been most commonly identified in the European classical tradi ...

, and writing about other rule-based and combinatorial systems to aid in the composition of music, such as the ''

Arca Musarithmica The Arca Musarithmica (also Arca Musurgia or Musical Ark) is an information device that was invented by Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in the mid 17th century. Its purpose was to enable non musicians to compose church music. Through simple ...

'' of

Athanasius Kircher Athanasius Kircher (2 May 1602 – 27 November 1680) was a German Jesuit scholar and polymath A polymath ( el, πολυμαθής, , "having learned much"; la, homo universalis, "universal human") is an individual whose knowledge spans ...

. Information about his life and work remains scanty.

Early life

The son of Ralph Birchensha, an English official in Ireland, and his wife Elizabeth, he lost both his parents while still quite young, and was in the household of

George FitzGerald, 16th Earl of Kildare George FitzGerald, 16th Earl of Kildare (23 January 1612 – 29 May 1660) was known as the "Fairy Earl", apparently for no other reason than that his portrait, which is extant, was painted on a small scale." Biography FitzGerald was the son of T ...

, up to the

Irish Rebellion of 1641 The Irish Rebellion of 1641 ( ga, Éirí Amach 1641) was an uprising by Irish Catholics in the Kingdom of Ireland, who wanted an end to anti-Catholic discrimination, greater Irish self-governance, and to partially or fully reverse the plantatio ...

. In the 1650s, he was known as a

viol The viol (), viola da gamba (), or informally gamba, is any one of a family of bowed, fretted, and stringed instruments with hollow wooden bodies and pegboxes where the tension on the strings can be increased or decreased to adjust the pitc ...

teacher in London.

Pupils

Birchensha's pupils included

Silas Taylor Silas Taylor (16 July 1624–4 November 1678) was an English army officer of the Parliamentarian forces, known also as an antiquary and musical composer. Life The son of Silvanus Taylor, a parliamentary committee-man for Herefordshire and support ...

, Thomas Salmon, and most famously

Samuel Pepys Samuel Pepys (; 23 February 1633 – 26 May 1703) was an English diarist and naval administrator. He served as administrator of the Royal Navy and Member of Parliament and is most famous for the diary he kept for a decade. Pepys had no mariti ...

. Pepys recorded impressions of his sessions with Birchensha (and hints at an eventual disillusionment with his teacher) in 1662.Pepys, Samuel: Diaries - entries mentioning Birchensha
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Works

Birchensha's great aim was to publish a treatise on music in its philosophical, mathematical and practical aspects (which would have included a definitive summary of his rules of composition), entitled ''Syntagma musicæ''. It was due to be published by March 1675. A summary was read to the Royal Society in 1676, but it never appeared, and no final manuscript of it survives. A manuscript for

Robert Boyle Robert Boyle (; 25 January 1627 – 31 December 1691) was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, alchemist and inventor. Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of ...

, a relative by marriage of the Earl of Kildare, remains as the major source for his ideas on music. In recent years, some manuscripts have been discovered which provide a more complete picture of Birchensha's theories. A book of his writings (with a biography and copious analysis) was published in 2010.Birchensha, John: Writings on Music, Field and Wardhaugh, editors, 2010
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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Birchensha, John Year of birth uncertain 1681 deaths Baroque musicians British music educators English music theorists