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Philip ap Rhys and his Liturgical Organ Music Revisited JOHN HARPER 1 Philip ap Rhys (/7.1547): historiography and biography When Thomas Morley wrote his Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597) he listed a number of sixteenth-century musicians from Wales among his 'authorities'. Philip ap Rhys was not among them; indeed it was not until the period after the Second World War that music historians took an interest in him, as a small part of the new impetus in British musicology spearheaded by Thurston Dart, and marked by the launch of Musica Britannica particularly the editions of Tudor and Jacobean keyboard and ensemble music. Denis Stevens, then a young scholar working on sixteenth-century keyboard music, published the first article on Philip ap Rhys in Musica Disciplina in 1952, as well as biographical entries in The Dictionary of Welsh Biography (1953 and 1959), and in the fifth edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1954).2 Stevens's awareness of Philip ap Rhys derived from his study of a repertory of mid-sixteenth-century keyboard music found in the three earliest layers of London, British Library MS Additional 29996 (henceforth, Add. 29996). His interest stemmed neither from Philip ap Rhys's apparently Welsh identity nor from the quality of his surviving music, but from the nature of five pieces grouped together in the source. These constitute what is apparently the only British example of a genre that was more widespread on the Continent at that time the Organ Mass, keyboard music based on plainsong of the Ordinary of the Mass normally intended for alternatim performance by organ and voices. Although the historical significance of Philip ap Rhys was estab- lished in 1952, and the Organ Mass was published in an anthology of early English keyboard music in 1953,4 it was not until 1969 that all his keyboard music appeared in a critical edition, alongside the other