Weelkes: Anthems

Cooper:Ox Camerata

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Cat No: 8553209

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Release Date: 01 January 2000

Label: Naxos / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 730099420921

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: WEELKES

Description
Thomas Weelkes (1576 -1623)It is not just the approach of a new millennium which encourages ideologicaldiatribes about change and fortune: fins de siecle are adequate enough,so history relates, to stimulate new directions and a sense of quest. Modemmusic history can thus be broadly pinned on five important dates: 1499 - Josquinand the flowering of vocal polyphony; 1599 - Monteverdi, opera, and musicwritten in a definite key; 1699 - Corelli, the concerto, and discovering how tomake movements longer; 1799 -Beethoven Symphonies and revolution; 1899 - Debussyand the abuse and decline of tonality. However simplistic, the implications forthe rest of the century of these milestones of musical thinking cannot beunderestimated.Yet the way in which individual composers react to times of intense change isnot so straightforward. This is where chronological studies of the 'development'of music history often reveal their shortcomings. 1599 is one of the biggerdates on account of the radical polemics brought about by Italian dare-devilswho, literally, wanted to create a scene. Small groups of arty folk met forlunch in Rome and invented a new musical language: a type of speech in tonescalled recitative whose freedom from the shackles of the strict rules of theRenaissance would allow music to reach the parts to tickle the senses and stirthe passions as never before. The fact that little of this pioneering fare ismemorable tells much. If Monteverdi is the father of modem music then this isbecause his genius was for understanding where innovation was truly liberatingand established principles of order, beauty, and balance were unnegotiable.Thomas Weelkes would not have known much about Rome in the early 1600s norwould he have been aware of Monteverdi's successful synthesis of old and new. Hewas a busy Church of England musician whose music is distinctly "Clog'dwith somewhat of an English vein". This description, employed by RogerNorth over a hundred years later to describe Purcell's Sonatas, is as apt forWeelkes and his generation as it was for the great 'Orpheus'; the vein isclogged with the same infusion, that of an unusually enterprising and timelessaffinity to counterpoint. This shows, above all, that England - if not entirelyoblivious of the ultimate importance of the new Baroque - had its own sense ofvalues and destiny according to a national temperament, one which foundcontinental histrionics and emotional outpourings rather embarrassing.So, no opera in England. Nevertheless, enough changes were afoot at the turnof the seventeenth century, as Elizabethan culture drew to a close, for Weelkesto realise that he was operating in a world of transition and he took advantageof it. The power of representing words and images, central to the Italianbaroque ethos, was not lost on those composers involved in lute-song andparticularly madrigal writing. The fact that Weelkes, Gibbons, Dowland, Byrd,Wilbye, and Tomkins were not at the forefront of the latest Italian innova
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