hyperion-records.co.uk
hyperion CDA 66003
1980 / rel. 1988
01 - Thomas CAMPION. If thou long'st so much to learn [1:47]
02 - John DOWLAND. Fine knacks for ladies [2:35]
03 - Thomas CAMPION. Shall I come sweet love? [3:48]
04 - Piper's Galliard [2:29]
05 - John DOWLAND. In darknesse let me dwell [4:21]
06 - Alfonso FERRABOSCO. Tell me, o love [2:51]
07 - John DOWLAND. Time's eldest son, Old Age [4:32]
08 - Tobias HUME. Tobacco, tobacco [1:54]
09 - John DOWLAND. Flow, my tears [4:22]
10 - John DOWLAND. Now, o now, I needs must part [2:49]
11 - John DANYEL. Eyes look no more [4:36]
12 - Francis PILKINGTON. My choice is made [4:13]
13 - The Earl of Essex Galliard [1:48]
14 - Robert JONES. Now what is love? [3:30]
15 - John DOWLAND. Come away, come sweet love [2:35]
16 - John DOWLAND. Humor, say what mak'st thou here [3:26]
Glenda Simpson, mezzo soprano
Paul Hillier, baritone
Barry Mason, lute
Rosemary Thorndycraft, bass viol
Recording: August 1980
Produced by Robert Burnett
Engineered by Adam Skeaping
Release date: January 1988
The last two decades have seen an enormous revival of interest in, and
research into, the field of what for want of a better word has been
called "early" music. The term is an imprecise one since it covers many
centuries, but it is generally understood to mean "pre-Bach" —
that is, to include the multifarious styles and schools and periods
which flourished in Europe up to about 1750, the year of Bach's death.
To appreciate the vast extent of the field of "early" music it is only
necessary to reflect that it can be said to stretch back to, say, the
twelfth-century school of Notre Dame and the medieval period, which is
twice the distance — 500 years — removed from the death of
Bach than is our own time, a mere 250 years or so.
All of these centuries have provided a happy hunting ground for
musicians and scholars and a great deal of research has been carried
out into such matters as interpretation of manuscripts, performing
styles and, not least, instrumentation. Indeed, growing out of all this
research has been the concomitant phenomenon of a new minor industry
devoted to the reconstruction of authentic instruments. It is, after
all, fairly pointless to attempt to reconstruct the music of a vanished
age in an authentic fashion if an attempt is not also made to reproduce
its timbre.
With regard to vocal music, however, one area of authenticity appears
so far to have been largely overlooked, perhaps because it involves an
altogether different field of scholarship — that of language.
Would an Elizabethan, for instance, magically transported into our own
time for, say, a concert of Dowland songs at the Wigmore Hall,
understand what he heard? He would certainly feel at home with regard
to the lute with which they would no doubt be accompanied, and to the
manner in which it was played. But what would he make of the words?
Would they be intelligible to him? Clearly, the only way to find an
answer to this question would be to seek the advice of an expert in the
field of philology, and that is what has been done for the making of
this record which, for the first time, marries the fruits of
scholarship in two quite separate fields.
Before making the record, a great deal of study was undertaken by the
members of the Camerata of London with Professor E J Dobson, a Fellow
of Jesus College, Oxford, and the British Academy, and the author of English
Pronunciation, 1500-1700 (Clarendon Press, 1957; 2nd ed. 1968).
Together with notes on the music by Glenda Simpson and full texts of
the songs, an extensive note by Professor Dobson accompanies this
record and both the Camerata of London and Hyperion Records are deeply
indebted to him for his interest in and enthusiasm for the project.
The English ayre (or lute song, as it is perhaps more commonly known)
can most easily be defined as a solo song, with an accompaniment played
on the lute. The genre, which flourished briefly and gloriously for
only two decades, began with the publication of Dowland's first book in
1597, and went on to inspire almost twenty composers to publish
collections of ayres. Although on first inspection the lute ayre seems
to be something of a musicological freak, surrounded by a sea of choral
music and madrigals, a closer look at the development of vocal music
throughout the second half of the sixteenth century shows the ayre to
be a logical development of a number of musical features that were
evident at this time.
By the end of the sixteenth century the idea of a solo voice being
accompanied by a plucked instrument was not a new one (and indeed, it
stretched back to antiquity if the traditions of Orpheus are to be
believed). Almost a century before Dowland's first book, the Italian,
Franciscus Bossinensis, had been publishing arrangements of four-part frottole
for voice and lute, and this tradition continued throughout the century
with publications by Attaingnant and Verdelot. Although no mid-century
English publications of music for voice and lute survive, there is
sufficient literary and musical evidence to suppose that the genre was
not unknown.
Despite the continental precedents of solo songs accompanied by the
lute, perhaps the most important influence on the English composers of
lute ayres was the tradition of the consort song. This, in contrast to
the madrigal (which was essentially Italianate in style), was a truly
English idiom. The consort song was usually strophic in form and, like
the ayre, had a dominant melodic line called 'the first singing part'.
The accompaniment of viol consort consisted of imitative polyphonic
lines, which provided both harmony and movement, as the vocal lines of
the consort songs tended to be syllabic and rarely employed melismatic
phrases.
Although one can detect, in some of the songs from the court of Henry
VIII, the beginning of this melodically-dominated vocal style, most of
the viol consort songs date from the second half of the sixteenth
century. Parsons, Whythorne and Byrd are among the composers who wrote
in this form. Very few of these songs remain in versions transcribed
for lute and voice (Pandolpho by Parsons is an exception here),
but William Whythorne, speaking of his life in the 1550's, shows that
the practice was not uncommon: 'In thes daies I yuzed to sing my songs
and sonets sumtym to the liut and sumtyms to the virginals.' It would
seem to be a logical step, that composers should wish to satisfy the
demand for solo songs by transcribing their consort songs for voice and
lute, and indeed most of the lute song publications offer alternative
arrangements of the pieces in four parts.
However, it would be very wrong to suggest that the extremely vital,
original and idiomatic lute ayres were mere transcriptions of outdated
part songs. They were a far more important means of musical expression
than that; and indeed, as Campion admits, were primarily composed as
solo songs to which the four-part version, in many cases, seems very
much 'the alternative version'. The 'added parts' in some of Dowland's
songs show how clearly he conceived the pieces as solo songs with lute
accompaniment. There are some highly un-vocal phrases, and some of the
very typically 'lutenistic' idiosyncracies of the accompaniment have
been transcribed note for note in the four part version.
Not all the composers offer the alternative parts (Morley and Danyel
are examples), but most do suggest that the songs can be performed with
the addition of an optional bass line. This is a much more satisfactory
arrangement since the bass, second only in interest to the melody,
often incorporates melodic fragments and passages of imitation, and in
some cases (e.g. Dowland's In Darkness and Danyel's Eyes
look no more) has passages quite independent of the lute.
By far the largest number of ayres composed between 1597 and 1620 were
written in strophic form. These multi-versed songs very often
incorporate a repeat of the last two lines of each stanza (all the
strophic songs on this record are in this form except If thou
long'st). Many of the strophic ayres are very light and melodious,
and these songs owe much in their structure to the dance and ballad
traditions of the time. The accompaniments tended to be written in a
chordal style (e.g. Fine knacks for ladies and If thou
long'st). Due to their dependence on repetitive phrase patterns
these strophic ayres have a much more regular rhythmic outline than the
through-composed ayre or the madrigal. The fact that the same music had
to serve a number of verses meant that there was very little
opportunity for word painting in the strophic ayre; and this favourite
Italianate device had to be left almost exclusively to the madrigal
composers. One way of ensuring variation in the strophic ayres was the
practice of ornamentation. Unlike Caccini, in his publication of
1602, the English ayre composers did not specify the style of
ornamentation that they favoured. It is possible, however, to get at
least an inkling of how individual singers ornamented certain songs,
from the manuscript collections of ayres that remain. Some of these
collections include well-known ayres in highly decorated versions.
Although these ornamented songs are only a specific person's jottings,
used for learning purposes or as a memory aid, they reinforce the idea
that ornamentation was an integral part of the performance of the ayre.
This is especially true as the seventeenth century progressed. The
version of Shall I come used on this record is taken from one
such collection (BL Add Ms 29481).
Not all the ayres were written in strophic form, and there is a large
number of through-composed settings in the collections. These often
tend to be songs with a high level of poetical and musical emotion and
seriousness. There was a much greater attempt made in these
through-composed songs, than with the English madrigal of this period,
to let the speech-rhythms of the poetry dictate the melodic line of the
song. Also the compositional structure was not so episodic as that of
the madrigal, which resulted in the musical phrases corresponding
closely, in the through-composed ayre, with the lines of the poetry.
Although not polyphonic music, these serious lute ayres do have a
contrapuntal texture in the accompaniment, which owes much to the
influence of the consort song. Compared to the chordal, rhythmic,
strophic songs, composers favoured a more adventurous use of harmony,
syncopation and imitative figures in the through-composed style.
In some of the songs the Italianate use of dramatic recitative-like
passages is incorporated to interrupt the flow of the contrapuntal
texture. Such passages as 'For Quare fremuerunt' from Time's eldest
son and 'jarring sounds' from In darkness let me dwell are
but two examples of this. Dowland's inventive use of dissonance can
also be heard in the latter example , which is one of the not
over-abundant instances of word painting that one finds in the lute
ayres. Ferrabosco's dialogue Tell me o love also has a
suggestion of recitative in some of its phrases; and in this song one
can see how the influence of baroque style, in the form of the continuo
bass, was being incorporated into the ayre.
The bass line of Tobias Hume's song Tobacco is also of
interest. Hume was a great advocate of the viol being played in 'leero
fashion'. In this accompaniment the viol plays chords instead of the
usual single line, thereby making the lute redundant. A number of other
composers of ayres (including Robert Jones) offer lyra viol music as an
accompaniment to their songs, but none are quite so insistent as to its
merits as Tobias Hume.
The influence of the dance played a very important part in the
development of the lute ayre, both in England and on the continent.
Indeed the French tradition of solo song accompanied by the lute, which
had started early in the sixteenth century, was based firmly on the
dance. It has been suggested that the influence of the French
dance-song or 'voix-de-ville' can be seen in the first English
publication of ayres, Dowland's book of 1597. This book was heavily
biased towards the dance, containing no less than five galliards. Two
of these galliard-songs, If my complaints and Can she
excuse my wrongs are also well known as instrumental pieces, and it
is the anonymous settings for solo lute, known respectively as Piper's
Galliard and The Earl of Essex Galliard that we hear on
this record.
This influence of the dance on the English ayre is substantiated by
Webbe, who states in his A discourse of English Poetrie, 1586,
'neither is ther anie tune or stroke which may be sung or plaide on
instruments, which bath not some poetical ditties framed according to
the numbers there of: some to Rogero ... to Galliards, to Pavines, to
Jygges, to Brawles, to all manner of tunes wich every Fidler knows ...'.
Although the gaillard was the favoured dance form in the ayres, there
were a number of pavan song-settings. Dowland's famous Lachrimae,
which was set as Flow my tears, was one of the most influential
pieces of the early seventeenth century and no doubt was, to some
extent, an inspiration for the other pavan setting on this record,
Danyel's Eyes look no more.
Notes by GLENDA SIMPSON
NOTES ON THE PRONUNCIATION
by Professor E J Dobson, MA, D Phil, FBA
Nobody can know exactly how any language was spoken before the
invention of sound-recording; not even the most skilled modern phonetic
descriptions can record in writing the precise details of intonation,
strength of accentuation, or the characteristic timbre of individual
speech-sounds. No one ever learnt to pronounce a foreign language like
a native by following only written instructions. But with this
important qualification, the history of pronunciation is the most
soundly based, detailed, and scientific of the branches of philology
— scientific not in the sense that it can be verified by
experiment or observation, but that it depends on the collection and
analysis of a vast body of recorded evidence. It has been of
fundamental importance to the comparative study of languages and has
been closely investigated since the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The history of a language's pronunciation can be known only if it has
written records and if it uses an alphabet phonetic in principle, i.e.
if its system of writing depends on the analysis of the significantly
different sounds used in that language and the provision of a written
symbol (a letter or pair or group of letters) to represent each speech
sound. Then the task of the philologist is to determine what were the
phonetic values of the spelling-symbols at the successive stages of a
language's history. The method is primarily the comparison of related
languages on the assumption that normally the known variant modern
pronunciations of words which are plainly or probably the same in
origin derive ultimately from a single spoken form in the parent
language. An important variant on this is to study words adopted from
one language by another, assuming that at the time of adoption the
pronunciation in the adopting language was, as closely as its
sound-system allowed, that of the donor language (which of course has
to be determined). Again, the modern dialects of a language can be
compared to discover how they came to differ from each other; often a
dialect preserves an older stage of pronunciation than that of the
educated standard language. Work done on one language may have
important consequences for the history of another, especially if it is
related. The theoretical basis for the fitting together of the pieces
of the jigsaw is provided by the science of phonetics, the analysis of
the sounds of speech and their method of articulation not just in one
language, but in many. Always the philologist is working back from the
observable facts of modern pronunciation, which are the only observable
facts; statements about earlier pronunciation are hypotheses, however
soundly-based, though they may be regarded, with reason, as certain or
near-certain.
The earliest stage of English (Anglo-saxon) is amply evidenced in
written records and was spelt in an efficient phonetic manner in an
alphabet derived mostly from the Roman one with the sound-values of
contemporary Latin. The pronunciation of Anglo-saxon was therefore
relatively easy to determine, and the further task was to trace the
stages of its development to Modern English. Medieval English spelling
was less efficient (with surviving consequences) but was largely
influenced by that of French, another well-studied language, so that it
is possible to allow for its non-phonetic conventions. From about 1500
we begin to get books which, in teaching foreign languages, explicitly
compare English with foreign sounds. The imperfections of the
traditional spelling, and the study of the relationship between
spelling and pronunciation in classical Greek and Latin, led to a
movement for the reform of spelling and to the invention of
deliberately phonetic scripts, with long transcriptions of comtemporary
English as examples, and this in turn led on, in the seventeenth
century, to the study of phonetics for its own sake. There were also
very many spelling-books, which necessarily give evidence about the
sounds of English as well, and grammars with descriptions of English
pronunciation and spelling. Many books contain lists of words
pronounced alike but spelt differently, and others give lists of words
with rough phonetic spellings, such as the uneducated might use, set
beside the correct spellings. Many unintended mis-spellings of this
sort have been collected from private letters and documents. There are
several rhyming dictionaries, and a little evidence on pronunciation in
shorthand books. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the
evidence is rich and varied.
An important subsidiary source of evidence is the rhymes of poets which
ought to show that the vowels and final consonants of words rhymed
together were identical at the time of writing. The emergence of new
types of rhyme shows that sounds previously distinct have become the
same (which may enable important deductions to be made about the
sound-system more generally); the disuse of old types shows that what
was once a single sound has split up, in varying phonetic contexts,
into more than one (as when put ceases to rhyme with cut). But
rhyme-evidence is difficult to use. From the beginning certain licenses
of rhyming have to be allowed for, and in post-medieval times rhyming
is often traditional, so that rhymes unjustified by current
pronunciation may still be used; and after spelling became more or less
fixed and people became obsessed by the written forms of words, poets
gradually came to use eye-rhymes which had never been justified by
pronunciation. Again, many rhymes depend not on general sound-changes,
but on special variant pronunciations (which may since have been lost
from the standard language) of one or other of the words involved. The
use of a style of pronunciation contemporary with the poet, applying
merely general rules, will not make all his rhymes good; knowledge of
the possible variants of individual words is also necessary, and the
same word may have to be pronounced in different ways in a single poem.
At the outset of the seventeenth century there was already, in the
speech of educated people in the London area and also in the South and
Midlands more generally (but not in the North and South-west), a
recognized standard of correctness, but it was not rigid and allowed
much variation; and it is possible to distinguish a more conservative
and a more advanced mode of pronunciation (and indeed one even more
advanced which was probably still vulgar and was certainly condemned).
The performers in this recording have chosen not to use the more
conservative mode, believing that the singers of lute-songs, then a
modern fashion, would not generally have used the more old fashioned
style of pronunciation; this chiefly affects the pronunciation of the
long vowels of words like name, meat or mete, and loam or home. It must
be said, however, that rhymes indicating the more advanced type are
rare in the lute-songs, which suggests strongly that most of the poets
relied on the more conservative type; but it is known that in many
cases the composers were setting words written by older men. It cannot
be claimed that the pronunciations used in the recording would
necessarily have been those of every singer about 1600, but they would
have been recognizable, as modern pronunciations would not be.
Allowance must also be made for the exigencies of singing, especially
when a vowel which is (or was then) short in speech is set to a long
note or series of notes.