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The Elizabethan and
Jacobean Age in England was a period of
the most intimate relationship between
poetry and music. Verse was conceived to
be sung; the two arts were never more
closely united and interdependent. In
the madrigal, though, it was often
necessary for the composer to compromise
because of the polyphony. In the less
involved accompanied solo song, a real
bond between word and tone was achieved.
Both these vocal forms enjoyed a rich
flowering from the last years of the
sixteenth century to about 1630.
Frequent literary references to the airs
would seem to indicate that they were
more widely known than the madrigals.
Furthermore, the
practise of substituting instruments for
voices in the madrigals ("apr for voyces
or violls") tended to make the
performers more interrested in the
interplay of the parts than in the
poetry - a situation wich provided an
incentive for the creation of an
indipendent instrumental art. A siteable
body of chamber music thus came into
being, in the form of fantasias, In
Nomines, and dance pieces for
consorts of viols or wind instruments,
the like of which was unknown in
continental Europe until a century
later. The Fantasia and Pavan
of John Jenkins (1592-1678) are among
the finest examples by a master of this
type of compositions. The scores are
from a manuscript in the British Museum
in london. Thomas Morley's (1557-1603) Air
for three viols appears in the author's
celebrated treatise, A Plaine and
Easie Introduction to Praticall
Musicke, where it is an
illustrarion of a kind of "song without
words".
John Dowland's Book
of Airs, 1597, was the first of a series
of "Airs to the Lute or Viol" published
by luternist composers, most of whom
performed and popularized their songs
before committing them to print.
Entitled, The First Booke of Songes
or Ayres of fower parts with Tablature
for the Lute; So made that all the
parts together, or either of
them severally may be sung to the
Lute, Orpherian or Viol de gambo,
thecollection was apparently a
concession to the contemporary fondness
for part-singing. Each song was printed
so that it could be permormed either by
one person who could sing the tune to
his own accompaniments, or by four
people who could sit around a table and
sing together from one book. With few
exceptions, notably the above-mentioned
and Dowland's unique addition of a
treble viol obbligato for three of his
songs in The Pilgrim's Solace,
1612, the books of airs were printed for
voice and lute in tablature notation. In
the third section of the song Can
she excuse my wrongs Dowland uses
a popular tune of the day, The Woods
so Wild and If my complaints
was also know in many instrumental
settings as Captain Piper's Galliard.
These are from The First Booke of
Songes or Ayres, From silent
Night, for voice, lute, treble and
bass viols, is from A Pilgrim's
Solace.
Besides his
accomplishments as one of the greatest
Elizabethan song writers, a distinction
he shares with the poet-composer Thomas
Campian (1567-1620), Dowland (1562-1626)
was the outstanding lute virtuoso of his
day. His music for the instrument as
well as the numerous other surviving
contemporary manuscripts give ample
evidence of the highly developed state
of this solo literature, the extent and
importance of which is only now being
investigated. The lute solo, My Lady
Hundson's Puffe, exists in
manuscript in the British Museum. Lady
Hundson was probably the wife of Sir
George Carey, the second Baron Hudson to
whom Dowland dedicated his First
Book of Songes and Ayres.
Campian's air, I care not for these
ladies, set to his own words, is
one of the best of the humorous songs of
the time. It is found in Part One of Rosseter's
Book of Ayres, 1601.
Of all the
birds that I do know by John
Bartlett (fl. 1606) is from A Booke
of Ayres... 1606. Set to a poem by
George Gascoigne, it is a skit on the
name of his friend Philip Sparrow, the
poet. The theme is, feed the sparrow
(any small bird in Elizabethan times)
and it will do anything to please you. Pandolpho
by Robert Parsons (d. 1570) is a song
from a stage play, and exists in
manuscript in Kings College, Cambridge.
Equally impressive
in quality and quantity is the
remarkable output of Elizabethan and
Jacobean keyboard music which, after
almost a century of development, was
thoroughly sophisticated and completely
idiomatic in style and technique. Giles
Farnaby (c. 1560 - c. 1600), a name
perhaps less familiar than those of
Byrd, Bull and Gibbons, was one of the
most original and imaginative of the
virginalists. ("Virginals" was the
English term for the harpsichord in all
its shapes and sizes) Like all the
writers of this school he utilized
simple popular airs or borrowed dance
tunes as themes for variations, the form
such keyboard music usually assumed. Up
Tails All is based on a popular
country dance tune, and is one of the
most elaborately worked out sets of
variations in the literature. It appears
in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book,
which is also the source for Farnaby's
harpsichord setting of the Alman
by Robert Johnson (1569-1633).
Notes (BG 539) by Sydney
Beck, Music Division, New York,
Public Library
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