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Music of the English Renaissance

ABC Classic

18–23 minutes

Music from England’s Golden Age: Sublime sacred music soaring above intrigues
of church and state, and intimate lute songs full of love and longing.
Notes from the album Music of the English Renaissance from the series 1000
Years of Classical Music. Listen On Apple Music, on iTunes, on CD, on Spotify,
and on YouTube:
Music of the English Renaissance playlist

William Lawes, Aire [Alman 2]

This Air is from Royall Consort — Sett No. 2. This album explores two of the
major styles of vocal music from the English Renaissance, beginning with sacred
part songs (motets), and ending with secular music, especially the lute song. In
amongst these vocal pieces, however, we have included a number of purely
instrumental works, and the album begins with a movement from one of William
Lawes’ suites (or "Setts") of dance pieces for the "royal consort," an ensemble of
stringed instruments — lutes, viols, harps and keyboard instruments — that
performed in the private apartments of the English courts of the 17th century.
Unlike the ceremonial pieces performed by wind bands and violin ensembles at
masques and during meals, this was a gentler, more intimate music.
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Lawes wrote his consorts for the court of Charles I. With the outbreak of civil war
in 1642, the royal treasury soon found itself unable to support such luxuries as
paid musicians; Lawes instead enlisted as a soldier, and was killed at the Siege of
Chester in 1645. The king, deeply affected by Lawes’ death, decided to honour
him with the title "Father of music."

William Byrd, O lux beata Trinitas

William Byrd began composing in his teens during the reign of the Catholic
Queen Mary, but most of his work was written in Protestant Elizabethan
England. A devout Catholic, he managed somehow to avoid the persecution being

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 meted out to other non-Protestants at the time, enduring only the occasional
fine, and even continued to write Latin motets for the old rites (presumably for
use in private homes), dedicating them to Elizabeth herself: it seems that he was
protected purely by his talent. Indeed he and his older contemporary, Thomas
Tallis, were granted by Elizabeth the monopoly over music publishing in England
(though this privilege seems to have generated relatively little income).
Nevertheless, the delicacy of his situation is clear from the title given to the
collection of Latin motets he published with Tallis in 1575: Cantiones, quae ab
argumento sacrae vocantur — that is, "Songs which are [strictly speaking not
sacred but only] called sacred on account of their texts."
O lux beata Trinitas was one of Byrd’s contributions to this volume. He treats
each verse of the hymn differently, each becoming more elaborate, especially in
the repetition and increasing complexity of the final line; yet when the work is
examined closely, almost every melody grows out of the one before. The motet
climaxes at the doxology ("Glory be to God the Father...") with many close points
of imitation including a three-part canon, representing the Trinity.

William Byrd, Justorum animae

By the 1590s, Byrd had begun to publish explicitly Catholic music, and his two-
volume Gradualia of 1605 spelt out his Catholic agenda in full detail: the
complete mass propers (introit, gradual, tract, offertory, communion) for the
major feasts of the church year, Marian feasts and Marian votive masses. There is
a record of someone being arrested for possessing Gradualia partbooks; Byrd
seems to have simply withdrawn the edition and stored the pages. As Byrd wrote
in the dedication of Gradualia, "There is a certain hidden power, as I learnt by
experience, in the thoughts underlying the words themselves; so that, as one
meditates upon the sacred words and constantly and seriously considers them,
the right notes, in some inexplicable manner, suggest themselves quite
spontaneously."
Justorum animae comes from Book I of Gradualia; it was written as the
Offertory motet for the Feast of All Saints. The text comes from the Old
Testament book of Wisdom — part of the Roman Catholic bible but considered
by the Church of England to be merely useful reading rather than holy scripture.

Thomas Tallis, O nata lux de lumine

Thomas Tallis worked under four monarchs and experienced the traditions of the
old liturgy, Henry VIII’s confiscation of the monasteries, the Protestantism of
Edward VI, the Restoration of Catholicism under Queen Mary and the strategic
manoeuvres leading to the discipline of Elizabeth’s new church establishment in
1558. He survived by adapting his music to the times: early Latin polyphony that
he wrote for the old, ornate Tudor liturgy; Protestant music in English,
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 employing the one-note-to-a-syllable ideal of the reformers; music for the Roman
rite as restored under Mary; and a range of styles under Elizabeth: elaborate
Latin music for court or private use, and soberer music in English for the new
Anglican services.
O nata lux de lumine, published in the volume Tallis had issued in conjunction
with Byrd in 1575, uses a homophonic hymn style, in keeping with Archbishop
Cranmer’s edict regarding the intelligibility of the words. What has endeared this
gem of a miniature to generations of choristers is its surprising false relations
(juxtapositions of sharp and natural versions of notes which ordinarily would
belong to unrelated chords), asymmetric phrasing and the vivid word painting
that opposes the opening high, angular melodies illustrating "light", to low,
smooth and serene writing for a more introspective ending. The text is a 10th-
century office hymn for the Feast of the Transfiguration.

John Taverner, Dum transisset Sabbatum

With John Taverner, we move back a generation. Taverner was appointed to

Cardinal Wolsey’s chapel in 1526 as the first Organist and Master of the
Choristers of Christ Church, Oxford. The college, founded in 1525 by Cardinal
Wolsey, was then known as Cardinal College. The motet Dum transisset
Sabbatum is based on the Gregorian chant for the same text, and incorporates
the chant melody in the baritone part sung in long-held notes, against which
contrasting rhythmic and melodic material is interwoven in the other vocal lines.
The words, which recount part of the story of Christ's resurrection, are from the
Gospel according to St Mark.
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John Sheppard, Libera nos

John Sheppard was appointed to the Chapel Royal around 1549, after a period of
service at Magdalen College, Oxford. His compositions for the Latin rite in the
college, and in the chapel under the reign of Queen Mary (whose death preceded
Sheppard’s own by mere weeks), show the influence of Taverner’s style. Libera
nos is set for a seven-part choir, with the plainchant melody in the bass part. The
text is an antiphon for Matins on Trinity Sunday, hence the threefold invocation
in the first line.

William Byrd, Haec dies

After Tallis died in 1585, Byrd published two more volumes of Roman Catholic
motets. Haec dies comes from the second of these books of Sacred Songs
(Cantiones Sacrae), published in 1591. Its jaunty rhythms and upward-reaching
melodies reflect its joyful words, set as a Vesper antiphon for Easter Day.

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 Christopher Gibbons, Fantasia-Suite No. 2

Music of Christopher Gibbons — composer, organist and younger son of Orlando

Gibbons — returns us to the mid-17th century, and the private courts of the
Stuart monarchs. Among the musical genres which flourished in this
environment was the fantasia, or "fancy:" "Of Musick design’d for Instruments …
the chief and most excellent, for Art and Contrivance, are Fancies, of 6, 5, 4, and
3 parts, intended commonly for Viols. In this sort of Musick the Composer (being
not limitted to words) doth imploy all his Art and Invention solely about the
bringing in and carrying on of … fuges … When he has tryed all the several wayes
which he thinks fit to be used therein; he takes some other point, and does the
like with it: or else, for variety, introduces some Chromatick Notes, with Bindings
and Intermixtures of Discords; or, falls into some lighter Humour like a
Madrigal, or what else his own fancy shall lead him to: but still concluding with
something which hath Art and excellency in it." (Christopher Simpson, A
Compendium of Practical Musick, 1667)
Fantasia-suites were an extension of this model: a fantasia followed by two dance
movements, typically a stately "Alman" (German dance) and a more lively triple-
time Galliard. Gibbons’ Fantasia-Suite No. 2 is found in an unpublished
manuscript from the collection of Christ Church College, Oxford, recorded here
for the first time.

Peter Philips, Tibi laus

Peter Philips is not a familiar name today, but in the early years of the 17th
century he was second in reputation only to William Byrd. Philips, however,
spent the greater part of his life in the Netherlands, which imparts a more
Continental style to his works. After singing as a choirboy at St Paul’s Cathedral,
London, where he may well have been Byrd’s pupil, Philips left for Rome in 1582
to avoid the persecution of Roman Catholics. Like most composers of his age, he
wrote many secular madrigals as well as sacred works and keyboard pieces, but
he is best remembered for his several hundred motets, published in large
collections of Cantiones sacrae (Sacred Songs). Tibi laus for Trinity Sunday,
published in Antwerp in 1612, shows the influence of the Italian madrigal style,
with explicit word painting and chordal rather than polyphonic harmony until
the final extended setting of the magnificent word "superexaltatum."

Robert White, Christe qui lux es et dies (Christ, who is light and day)

Robert White lived for just 36 years — he and his family were killed in an
outbreak of plague in 1574 — but his music was judged among the finest in the
country by his Tudor contemporaries. Son of an organ-builder, he began his
musical career as a boy soprano in the choir at Trinity College in Cambridge,

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 where he went on to obtain a music degree in 1560. There followed appointments
as Master of the Choristers at Ely and Chester Cathedrals, and finally at
Westminster Abbey.
The ethereal motet Christe qui lux es et dies, one of four settings of this text by
White, is based on the Gregorian chant for the Compline hymn of the same name.
Verses in plainchant alternate with five-part counterpoint which uses the
plainsong melody, sung very slowly by the baritones, as the foundation of the
more agile, interweaving lines.

John Dowland, Lachrimae

Of all the English Renaissance composers, the only one who could be considered
a ‘household name’ today is John Dowland — famous not for ethereal sacred
music (although he did compose a number of psalm-settings and devotional
songs), but for a popular music genre which swept through England and across
Europe at the dawn of the 17th century: the lute song. Dowland was not the first
to write these songs for solo voice with lute accompaniment, but he was the lute
song’s first great champion, and he raised the genre to a major art form. His
songs achieved an extraordinary popularity, with his first volume being reprinted
at least four times, and other composers were quick to follow his lead.
In tune with the spirit of the times, most of his songs are tinged with sadness.
Melancholy was the fashionable ailment of the late Elizabethan age (Robert
Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, claimed that there were no fewer
than 88 ‘degrees’ of melancholy) and music was acknowledged to be one of its
most powerful remedies. Dowland’s most famous piece — literally his signature
piece, in fact, as he took to signing his name at one point as Jo[hannes] Dolandi
de Lachrimae — is a setting of what seems to have been a well-known tune
known as Lachrimae, or ‘Tears’. It begins with a plaintive, four-note falling figure
which evokes a tear trembling on the edge of an eyelid and then tumbling down a
cheek. Dowland first used this tune as the basis of a lute song called Flow My
Tears; he later wrote a set of seven ‘Passionate Pavans’ (a pavan being a slow and
stately dance) on the same theme, for viola da gamba ensemble.

Alfonso Ferrabosco, Fly from the World

Alfonso Ferrabosco, despite the exotic name, was English born and bred. His
father, also Alfonso Ferrabosco and also a musician, came to England from Italy
in his late teens and entered the service of Queen Elizabeth; he made several trips
to the continent as her agent, but when he decided to return there for good, the
Queen was reluctant to release him, so his children, kept perhaps as hostages,
remained in England in the care of another of the royal musicians, the flute
player Gomer van Awsterwyke. On the death of his guardian, Alfonso the younger
was given a royal appointment as "musician for the viols," but it was not until the
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 accession of James I to the throne eleven years later that his star began to rise.
Ferrabosco achieved success composing for masques, a spectacular courtly
entertainment that combined poetry, pageantry, music and dance. But alongside
a taste for pomp and splendour — perhaps because of it — the Jacobean era also
had a moralistic vein and a preoccupation with the morbid and sombre. Fly from
the World shows this mood expressed in music: it is a sober reflection on the
corruption of human society, and death as the soul’s only escape. The shifting
tonality matches the turmoil of the soul; the melody is articulated with silences,
marking out the rhetoric of the poem (O world! O thoughts!) and, in the closing
lines, it rises with a sense of effort only to collapse back to the song’s opening
pitch, the music "tiring" as, in the text, the preoccupations of earthly life exhaust
the soul.

John Dowland, Lady Hunsdon’s Puffe

Dowland’s fame failed to win him the job he most coveted: an official position at
the court of Queen Elizabeth I. This was probably because of his Catholicism: he
had converted during a four-year stay in Paris while in the service of English
ambassador Sir Henry Cobham. Knocked back for the position of lutenist to the
Queen in 1594 and again in 1597, he became lutenist at the court of Christian IV
in Denmark in 1598. Not until 1612 did he finally secure an appointment at the
English court, under King James I. Meanwhile, he cultivated numerous noble
and wealthy patrons, including Lady Hunsdon (Elizabeth Carey), for whom he
wrote the almain (German dance) known as Lady Hunsdon’s Puffe. Elizabeth
was a noted supporter of the arts, as was her husband, George Carey, patron of
Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

John Dowland, Come Again: Sweet Love Doth Now Invite

Much of the poetry of Renaissance England focused on love and desire — usually
unobtainable and unfulfilled. Dowland’s song Come Again: Sweet Love Doth
Now Invite tells the standard hopeless tale of a lover’s anguish at his beloved’s
disdain. The music is light, even playful, and in the major mode, although the
second part of the melody is crafted from the rhetorical gestures typically
associated with pain and suffering — short, gasping, sobbing phrases leading to a
long-held note which ultimately falls away as the melody tumbles down the scale
(a contour familiar from the tear motif in Lachrimae).

Thomas Morley, Will You Buy a Fine Dog?

Gentlefolk, suffering the pains of unrequited love, must have thought enviously
of the lower classes who, unconstrained by the expectations of polite society,
were free to revel in the pleasures of the flesh — or so the stereotype ran. Among
those apparently fortunate unfortunates was the travelling salesman, peddling
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 his wares to ladies up and down the country. The merchant in Thomas Morley’s
Will You Buy a Fine Dog? has a catalogue of knick-knacks that includes a few
items less innocent than gloves, combs and "rebatoes" (a kind of stiff collar): one
can imagine his "potinge stickes" (poking irons) being put to uses far removed
from the ironing of ruffs, and the "dildos" in his version of the nonsense "diddle
diddle" refrain had exactly the same connotation in 1600 as they do today.

John Dowland, Can She Excuse My Wrongs?

The anonymous poet in Dowland’s song Can She Excuse My Wrongs? has had
enough of fashionable pining and sighing, and moved on to righteous
indignation, though not without the usual threat of perishing on the spot from
the disdain of his beloved. The rising contour of the opening phrase offers a
challenge to the cruel lady, and the insistent repetition of single pitches over an
almost galloping rhythm in the last phrases of each verse lends a note of urgency.

Thomas Lupo, Fantasie in D minor

Thomas Lupo belonged to a dynasty of royal string players of Italian descent.

(The first Lupo, Ambrose, had come to England from Milan in 1540 as a viol
player to Henry VIII.) After the untimely death of the 18-year-old Prince Henry,
eldest son of King James I, in 1612, Lupo joined the household of Henry’s
brother, Charles. This Fantasie for two violins and bass is notable for its ‘ayery’
(airy) dance-like character. It may have been among the music contained in ‘a
Booke by him presented’ to Charles in 1622, for which Lupo was paid £20.

Robert Johnson, Have You Seen but a White Lily Grow?

Music was a regular feature in the Renaissance English theatre; there are, for
example, more than 100 songs scattered throughout the texts of Shakespeare’s
plays (Where the Bee Sucks, Under the Greenwood Tree, Blow, Blow, Thou
Winter Wind, Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies...) Have You Seen but a White
Lily Grow? comes from a comedy by Ben Jonson called The Devil is an Ass,
written in 1612; it is sung in the play by the young gallant Wittipol, as he attempts
to seduce the wife of the eccentric and foolish gentleman Fabian Fitzdottrel.
There is no composer listed in any of the sources of the music, but it has been
attributed to Robert Johnson, who also wrote music for the original productions
of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.

John Dowland, In Darkness Let Me Dwell

Dowland’s late songs show him to be a master of the declamatory style. The
closing notes of In Darkness Let Me Dwell are intensely affecting, with the voice
abandoned by the lute and left to sing the final note alone. There are signs of an
Italian influence: the plangent "O let me living die" recalls the sighing Ohimè
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 (Alas!) of many a Monteverdi madrigal, and repetition of words breaks up the
lines of the poetry, adding to the emotional tension. The chromaticism around
"My musicke hellish jarring sounds," while sensitively expressive of the text as we
would expect of the English style, is a technique more characteristic of the
madrigal and the motet, and rarely used in lute song repertoire.

Anonymous, Greensleeves: Song and Divisions

The album ends with the archetypal English song: Greensleeves. There is no
truth to the claim that the song was composed by King Henry VIII, but it was
certainly well known by the time of Shakespeare, who has the character Falstaff
bellowing "Let the sky rain potatoes! Let it thunder to the tune of Greensleeves!"
in his play The Merry Wives of Windsor. The tune is presented here first as a
song and then as a set of variations — performers in the Renaissance were skilled
in embellishing tunes with elaborate ornamentations or "divisions" to show off
their virtuosity. In this recording, two separate sets of anonymous divisions for
violin and bass viol are combined: one from John Playford’s The Division Violin
(1684), and the other from a manuscript found bound into the back of one copy
of Christopher Simpson’s The Division Viol (1659). The soprano can be heard
again as the piece continues in a reminiscence of the simple version of the
melody.

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