ONE OF JOHN Caldwell's major contributions to musical scholarship has been in the field of music editing: not least in his Editing Early Music, an indispensable companion for music editors, and in his association with the British Academy's series Early English Church Music. Although his signal contribution to the series has been to oversee a transformation in its house style since 1997, his association with EECM can be traced back to 1966, when he published the fruits of his doctoral research on English keyboard music in EECM 6. The first of two volumes dedicated to early Tudor organ music, EECM 6 is a treasure-house for scholars and performers of the Henrician organ repertory, bearing directly upon pre-Reformation liturgy, improvisatory techniques (particularly faburden), related compositional methods, source studies, and performance practice (pitch standards, alternatim format, organology and fingering).

EECM 6 appeared during the series’ first flush under the general editorship of its founder, Frank Harrison. In 1961, EECM's foundation year, Harrison had completed his three-volume edition of the Eton Choirbook for Musica Britannica, which had been prepared simultaneously with another enduring monument, Music in Medieval Britain. Harrison's MB edition provided a model for EECM which endured throughout and beyond his tenure as General Editor. Harrison's working methods were exacting and accurate, and so the second edition, prepared by Harrison himself between 1967 and 1973, required only minor adjustments. Likewise, in a recent third edition of MB 11, David Fallows substantially revised Harrison's preface in order to reflect the amount of research published in the intervening decades, but needed to make very few changes to the transcriptions themselves. A third edition of MB 12 is in process (prepared by the author of this essay); again, this leaves Harrison's transcriptions largely untouched, except in one regard. Harrison divided the contents of his three-volume edition according to the sequence of contents within the choirbook itself (see Table 1): if the third volume seems somewhat heterogeneous, even anticlimactic, compared with the first and second, this can be attributed partly to the quantity of miscellaneous (but very useful) letter-press, and to the juxtaposition of complete pieces (items 33–50), incomplete (presented in full transcription: 51–5) and fragmentary (presented as incipits only: 56–65).