CD 4: Handel: Alexander's Feast / Elizabethan and Jacobean Music
Click here for the full notes for Handel's Alexander's Feast.
Elizabethan and Jacobean Music
BG-539, original LP cover
England's Elizabethan and Jacobean Age was a period of the most intimate relationship between poetry and music. Verse was conceived to be sung and the two arts were never more closely united and interdependent. Both the solo song and the madrigal enjoyed a brief but rich flowing from the last years of the 1500s to about 1630. But while in the madrigal it was often necessary for the composer to compromise on vocal imaging because of the polyphony, in the less involved accompanied solo song, a real bond between word between work and tone was achieved. Frequent literary references to the airs would seem to indicate that they were more widely known than the madrigals.
The practice of substituting instruments for voices in the madrigals ("apt for voyces or viols") furthermore tended to make the performances more interested in the interplay of the parts than in the poetry - a situation that provided an incentive for the creation of an independent instrumental art. A sizeable 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 of this type of composition. 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 Practicall Musicke, where it is an illustrated of a kind of "song without words."
The Book of Airs, 1597 by John Dowland (1562-1626) was the first of a series of Airs to the Lute of Viol published by lutenist composers, most of who performed and popularized their songs before committing them to print. Entitled The First Booke of Songes or Ayres of Four Partes 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 gamba, the collection was apparently a concession to the contemporary fondness for part-singing. Each song was printed so that it could be performed 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 In 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 Words, Dowland uses a popular tune of the day, The Woods so Wild; his song If my complaints was also known 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 songwriters, a distinction he shares with the poet-composer Thomas Campion (1567-1629), Dowland was the outstanding lute virtuoso of his day. His music for the instrument as well as numerous other surviving contemporary manuscripts give ample evidence of the highly developed state of this solo literature. The lute solo My Lady Hundson's Puffe exists in manuscript in the British Museum. Lady Hundson was probably the wife of Sire George Carey, the second Baron Hundson to whom Dowland dedicated his First Book of Songes and Ayres.
Campion'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 is from A Book 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) 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).
– Sydney Beck, Head, Rare Manuscript Collections Music Division, New York Public Library
Originally released as Vanguard/The Bach Guild BG-666/7 (tracks 1-8) and BG-539