Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Peebles, David

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1157392Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 44 — Peebles, David1895Henry Davey

PEEBLES or PEBLIS, DAVID (d. 1579), musician, was one of the canons of St. Andrews before the Reformation. In 1530 he set ‘Si quis diliget me’ as a motet for five voices, and presented it to James V. Thomas Wood, who in 1566 (and again in 1592) copied out the famous St. Andrews harmonised psalter, recorded that the tunes were ‘Set in iiii partes be a Notable cunning man, David Peables i. s., Noted and Wretin.’ The words ‘Noted and Wretin’ suggest that Peebles had also versified the psalter. Some of the other pieces which Wood included in his collection are also by Peebles. David Laing, who wrote an admirable account of Wood's part-books, could not give a complete example, as the contratenor volume was then missing from both of Wood's copies; all the treble and bass volumes, and one of the tenors, are at Edinburgh, and a supplementary volume is at Dublin. One of the missing contratenors, bound with a second copy of the supplement, has since been acquired by the British Museum (Addit. MS. 33933); it is, unfortunately, defective, but most of the psalter can now be completed by its help, and the result proves Peebles to have possessed great skill in pure diatonic harmony. He died in December 1579. During the short-lived episcopalian establishment set up by Charles I, Edward Miller, canon of Holyrood, published in 1635 a harmonised psalter, declaring that the settings were by ‘the primest musicians that ever this kingdome had, as John Deane Angus, Blackhall, Smith, Peebles, Sharp, Black, Buchan, and others, famous for their skill in this kind.’

[David Laing's Account of the St. Andrews Psalter of 1566, Edinburgh, 1871; Addit. MS. 33933; Grove's Dict. of Music and Musicians, iii. 441.]

H. D.