CD 2: The Cries of London
BG-563, original LP cover
"There is nothing which more astonishes a foreigner, and frights a country squire, than the Cries of London": thus Joseph Addison, writing in The Spectator of December 1711. The foreigners' forbears, however, knew street cries for certain, for composers of medieval France and Italy immortalized them in caccie and secular motets. As for the country squire, he was bound to hear the kind of cries that Richard Dering uses in his witty portrayal of rustic talk and farmyard noises.
Many of the cries must have remained constant for centuries, and in the Jacobean age, when most of the musical settings were made, the tunes for the cries are found almost unaltered in works by different (though contemporary) composers. Some of the greatest musicians of the age condescended to write fantasies, usually for a quintet of strings and voices, on London cries: Gibbons, Dering, Weelkes and Ravenscroft all contributed to this fascinating repertory of essentially popular music.
The longest and perhaps the most beautiful of the fantasias is Dering's Cries of London. Each of the five singers is given a melodious and extended cry, and throughout the entire work shorter cries are heard, first from this quarter, then from another. There is one lull, and that is when the town crier, a stock character in these fantasies, delivers himself of a particularly fatuous announcement about a grey mare. However trivial the matter, there is little change in Dering's suave and polished manner of writing: it seems almost a paradox that such fine music has been set to words of little import, until it is realized that a stylistic norm is the one thing that a composer cannot easily cast aside.
Thomas Weelkes's setting is slightly unusual in that only one voice is called for, but there is ample contrast in mood and metre besides the inherent differences of the cries themselves, The last cry, which is lettuce, provokes a punning coda "Now let us sing, and so we will make an end with Alleluia." The rounds and catches are ideally suited to the cries, for the gradually increased excitement of added voices faithfully reflects the growing clamour of a busy street, as tinkers, oyster-sellers, muffin-men, and a hundred-and-one other tradesmen crowd in to beguile the public.
In the Country Cries, Dering follows a similar plan, for there are fewer single cries to exploit and more opportunities for ensemble. The rustic dialogue has a flavour of western England about it, but the town crier is there in all his pompous glory, and farmers, yokels, hunstmen and whistling drivers of horse and cart suggest a generalized picture rather than a musical portrait of one particular locality. Without this lighter side of Jacobean music, a true fusion of life and art, our knowledge of the times would he that much the poorer.
The program concludes with three glees with roots in the sacred and the profane. From the most famous composer of the Puritan era, Henry Lawes (1596-1662), who was mentioned with praise in John Milton's poems, comes The Angler's Song and the touching The Captive Lover. His even more gifted brother, William Lawes (1602-45) composed the beautiful She weepeth sore in the night, an adaptation of lines from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. In 1761 the Noblemen and Gentlemen's Catch Club was formed, of which the Prince of Wales (and the future William IV) and Jonathan Battishill (1738-1801), composer of Here on his back, were members
– Adapted from notes by Denis Stevens
Originally released as Vanguard/The Bach Guild BG-563 (tracks 1-14) and BG-602