CHAPTER 27

MUSIC IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND: INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC

AND LATER VOCAL MUSIC

A painting believed to show Queen Elizabeth dancing the volta with the Duke

of Leicester

In 1599 the Spanish ambassador reported that the 66-year-old queen still danced three or four galliards a day. Elizabeth also sang, and played the lute and harpsichord.

ENGLISH KEYBOARD MUSIC

• Queen Elizabeth I played an instrumental called a virginal—a diminutive harpsichord possessing a single keyboard with the strings placed at right angles to the keys. The instrument was small enough to reset easily on a table. Because of its modest size, sound, and cost, it was the ideal beginning instrument for young girls—hence the term “virginal.” Women, far more often than men, played the virginal.

The title page of Parthenia (1612), a collection of keyboard music by Byrd, Gibbons, and Bull, showing a young performer seated at a virginal. Notice the prominent use of “2-3 fingering”—the second finger crosses over the third (or vice versa) rather than the thumb passing under.

THE FITZWILLIAM VIRGINAL BOOK

• The largest collection of English keyboard music—indeed of any Renaissance keyboard music from any country—is the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (c1615), so-called because it is today housed in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. Among the 297 compositions in it are dances, descriptive pieces, intabulations of Italian madrigals and French chansons, and, most importantly, sets of variations on popular tunes and even ON religious melodies.

VARIATION TECHNIQUE

• Variation technique is a procedure in which successive statements of a theme are changed or presented in altered surroundings. This practice can also be witnessed in the variations composed throughout the history of music—in those of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, for example. Oddly, in the variation technique of the Renaissance, the melody is rarely given at the beginning—the composer simply assumed that the listener had the tune in his ear.

The popular Elizabethan ballad tune Goe from my window

THOMAS MORLEY’S SETTING OF GOE FROM MY WINDOW

• Thomas Morley (1557-1602) provided seven variations for the tune Goe from my window as it appears in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Some of these require great technical skill on the part of the performer if the tune is played up to tempo.

The beginning of Variation 5 of Thomas Morley’s setting of Goe from my window for

virginal

THE ENGLISH MADRIGAL

• A sure sign of the arrival of the Renaissance in England was the vogue enjoyed by the Italian madrigal at the end of the sixteenth century. The first madrigals to be published in England appeared in 1588 in a collection called Musica transalpina (Music across the Alps). Here thirty-three madrigals by Italian composers were given with English, not Italian texts. Two years later a second publication of this sort appeared under the title Italian Madrigals Englished. Soon English composers began to issue collections of their own madrigals.

THE ENGLISH MADRIGAL SCHOOL

• Between 1588 and 1627 more than forty books of madrigals were published in London, each volume usually containing some twenty pieces or more. The composers who fashioned this great outpouring of English secular music—among them Byrd, Morley, Weelkes, Wilbye, and Gibbons—have been dubbed the English Madrigal School.

THE TRIUMPHES OF ORIANA

• In 1601 Thomas Morley engaged twenty-three colleagues to join him in creating a collection of madrigals to honor Queen Elizabeth. It was called The Triumphes of Oriana—Oriana and Gloriana being two names the Elizabethans had adopted for their queen. Morley required that each madrigal end with the acclamation “Thus sang the nymphs and shepherds of Diana/Long live fair Oriana.”

THOMAS WEELKES

• Thomas Weelkes (1576-1623), a singer in the queen’s royal chapel, contributed the six-voice madrigal As Vesta Was from Latmos Hill Descending to Morley’s The Triumphes of Oriana. Weelkes’s descriptive text provides many opportunities for madrigalisms (word painting). When Diana’s attendants come “running down,” they do so to music that moves faster (in shorter note values) and descends. When the text says “all alone,” it is sung by a soloist. And so the word painting goes in this typically light, witty English madrigal.

THE ENGLISH LUTE AYRE

• The future of music (as practiced in the succeeding Baroque era) was to be found in the expressive solo song. At the end of the Elizabethan Renaissance, the solo art song existed in two forms. In one, called the consort song, the voice is accompanied by a consort of viols. In the other, called the lute ayre, the soloist is accompanied by a lute. Both consort song and lute ayre are strophic—the same music serves each of two, three, or four stanzas.

JOHN DOWLAND

• The finest composer of English lute songs was John Dowland (pronounced “Doe-land”; 1563-1626). Between 1597 and 1612, Dowland published four collections of lute ayres. His Second Booke of Songs or Ayres (1600) contains Flow my tears, which became a sensation as well as Dowland’s “signature tune,” for he began to sign himself “John Dowland de Lacrimae” (Lacrimae being the Latin for “tears”).

A portion of the John Dowland’s Flow my tears

Exhibiting a moment of expressive, indeed surging passion for solo voice and lute.