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Tavern Songs
BG-561, original LP cover

Catches and Glees are the most delightful of listening, but as Grove's Dictionary puts it, "The skill with which they were sung has become a tradition, and certainly many old specimens are so difficult that they must have required considerable labor and practice to sing them perfectly."

The Catches and Glees on this record not only afford a view of "pre-Victorian" popular composed music in England, in which three or four voices join to sing convivial song. Many are definitely "pre-Victorian" in the verses. "Come sing me a bawdy song" said Shakespeare's Falstaff, as he entered the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap. This was typical of the boisterous love of life in Elizabethan times, with its uncensored frank view of every side of human existence. Its highest expression came in Shakespeare's plays, where "low" comedy helped highlight the deepest tragedy, and where the banter between men and women indicated that neither had much to learn about the facts of life.

Then came the Puritan attack upon such "frivolities" in song and play. With the short-lived Stuart Restoration, described as "dissolute" in most histories, the lid was lifted again. Charles II, who came to the throne in 1660, not only imported French music but was fond of "a very merry play." Dryden complained bitterly that a poet to make his way had to write comedies. And comedies amply licentious, and brilliantly witty, were supplied to the Restoration age by Congreve, Wycherly and Vanbrugh. A passage in John Vanbrugh's The Provoked Wife indicates the spirit both of this kind of drama and of many of the songs on this record:

But there was a realistic side to this frivolity and wit. The gentry, coming to the playhouse, saw themselves mirrored, their frailties underlined and laughed at. This is clearly put in a passage from William Wycherly's The Country Wife:

It is this Restoration spirit that is mirrored in about half the songs on this record. The remainder put them in a context starting with the age of Henry VIII and ending with the reign of George III.

The forms of Catch and Glee are inextricably mixed in origin with part songs, rounds and madrigals. A Catch however meant specifically a round for three or more voices, written only in a single voice part, so that each succeeding singer, upon his entry with the melody, had to "catch" his part at the proper time. With the passage of years, to quote Groves, "words were selected so constructed that it was possible, either by mispronunciation or by the interweaving of words and phrases given to the different voices, to produce the most ludicrous and comical effects. The singing of catches became an art." Glee is a looser term, coming from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning "music". In the 18th century it came to mean a song of massed harmony in contrast to the polyphonic Catch. In printed music, the Catch appears as early as 1609, in a collection of Pleasant Roundelayes and delightful Catches. The Restoration saw a flood of such books, one of the most popular being Thomas d'Urfey's Wit and Mirth; or Pills to Purge Melancholy, which grew from one volume in 1682 to six volumes in 1720. As for the singers, in 1741 a Madrigal Society was founded, of whose members Sir John Hawkins wrote, "most of them were mechanics, some weavers from Spitalfields, others of various trades and occupations who were all versed in the practise of Psalmody." They became highly skilled in English and Italian madrigal. The Catch Club, in which "noblemen and gentlemen'' came together to sing catches, canons and glees, started in 1761, with the Prince of Wales (later George IV) becoming a member in 1786. The first Glee Club, with a middle-class membership, was established in 1787.

Henry Purcell (c.1659-1695) was the greatest composer to write such English convivial songs and catches, and nine of his are presented on this disc. The earliest composer represented is William Cornyshe (c.1465-1523), who was for a time a favorite of King Henry VIII, but also spent some years in jail for writing satirical songs. His touching Ah, Robin and Falstaffian Hoyda, jolly rutterkin are among the first masterpieces of English composed popular song. The anonymous We be soldiers three proves that the soldiers who returned from the Elizabethan Flemish wars were kin in spirit to the soldiers of World War I who sang Mademoiselle from Armentieres. John Bennet's Lure, falconers, lure! is a beautiful pictorial madrigal with its soaring "flight" image at the close. Henry Lawes was immortalized in a Milton sonnet. In the merry month of May exhibits the French influence on Restoration song. With Reginald Spofforth's lovely part song, to an Italian text, we know we are in the age of Mozart.

Tavern Songs, Volume 2
BG-602, original LP cover

Many of the songs in the latter half of this CD are ribald songs that were sung at gentlemanly gatherings during the English Restoration era and at meetings of the "Catch Club" in the 18th century. The restoration of the Stuart kings in 1660 had touched off a lighthearted trampling on puritanical restraints. The foremost composers, like Henry Purcell (1659-1695) and his teacher, John Blow (1649-1708), both represented here, provided songs on indelicate subjects for merry assemblages of gentlemen. Such occasional ditties were meant only for entertainment, but they do give a slight inkling of an important movement that would soon develop on a much higher level: that of providing a critical, satiric picture of life in its "unmentionable" as well as pretty aspects. This would be seen in the writings of Swift, Defoe and Fielding and the engravings of Hogarth. The production of such witty songs continued in the 18th century. In 1761 the Noblemen and Gentlemen's Catch Club was formed, of which three of the composers represented here were members (along with the Prince of Wales and the future William IV). The three composers were Dr. Thomas Arne (1710-1778), who won an annual prize offered by the Club with Which is the properest day to drink; Luffman Atterbury (d. 1796) who won a prize with As t'other day; and Jonathan Battishill (1738-1801), composer of Here on his back.

The remainder of the program offers an engaging sampling of the songs, many of high musical distinction, created by and for people who enjoyed coming together to sing in harmony and counterpoint, from a medieval countryside round to a 19th century sentimental ballad. Oldest, and as important to music history as it is wonderful music, is Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu. Obviously in folk or popular style, with its sprightly dance melody and bird imitations, it was apparently put down in manuscript during the 13th century by a musically gifted cleric who set it as a double canon, one for the upper voices and the other for two voices singing the ground bass, "sing cuccu." The Elizabethan period, an age of rich production in learned and popular song, provides the round, He who will an alehouse keep, published in Melismata: Musical Phansies fitting the court, citie and countrey Humours (1611). Most recent of the songs is the ever popular Sweet and Low, composed by Joseph Barnby (1838-1896) to a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

[Three concluding tracks from Tavern Songs, Volume 2 appear on CD 2 of this volume.]

Originally released as Vanguard/The Bach Guild BG-561 (tracks 1-25) and BG-602

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