Elizabethan Songs And Consort Music

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Cat No: 8554284

Release Date: 12 January 1999

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 636943428429

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: Elizabethan Songs and Consort Music

Description
Elizabethan Songs andConsort MusicAlthough the Golden Age of Elizabethan music-making is commonly linkedwith the upsurge in popularity of the madrigal, this was really only aphenomenon of the very last years of the Queen's life. The earlier part of herreign (1558-1603) saw the production of a wealth of secular music, bothinstrumental and vocal. Consort songs for solo voice and viols wereparticularly esteemed, since their rich polyphonic fabric shared musicalinterest between all the parts without detracting from the clarity of a singlevoice declaiming the text. The voice was often the highest part, and thereforemost clearly audible, as in the simple beauty of Pattrick's Send forth thysighs [14], though it was common to have one treble viol spinning a descantabove the voice: the anonymous lullaby Ah, silly poor Joas [22] is agood example.Many consort songs stem from the entertainments and dramaticpresentations made at court and other London venues by troupes of choirboymusician-actors from the Chapel Royal and the choir schools of WestminsterAbbey and St Paul's Cathedral, whose boys were in great demand in the earlyyears of Elizabeth's reign. Some songs, like Rennet's Eliza, her name giveshonour [17], were addressed directly to the chief guest. More often, musicwas used in plays to heighten moments of great tragedy or distress: the textsmake frequent use of alliteration, as parodied by Shakespeare in the Pyramusand Thisbe play produced by the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night'sDream. So Pour down, you pow'rs divine [8] by Robert Parsons, whodrowned in the River Trent in 1570, contains such lines as 'Unless my hurtedheart have help, My hopes are but my hates'. The second part of this piecesurvives only as an early seventeenth-century lute song, whose written vocalembellishments give some idea of the virtuosity with which such songs mighthave been performed. The viol parts have been reconstructed here by RichardRastall.Many of these dramatic songs take the form of elegies or 'death songs',either evoking death as a relief, as in the gentle O Death, rock me asleep [5],or railing against fate like Panthea in Richard Farrant's Ah, alas, you saltsea gods [2] as she prepares to die next to the body of her husbandAbradad. O Jove, from stately throne [20] is from Farrant's play KingXerxes, one of a series of annual entertainments he produced each winterfor the Queen from 1567 to 1579, performed by the boys in his charge as Masterof the Choristers of the Chapel Royal. Farrant was clearly something of anentrepreneur, for in 1576 he leased a rehearsal room in Blackfriars, London, toprepare for that year's royal entertainment, but was subsequently sued forcharging the public to attend these 'private' rehearsals.Another type of consort song took moralising rather than dramatic texts:Climb not too high [15] by Nathaniel Pattrick, Master of the Choristersof Worcester Cathedral between 1590 and 1595, sets a poem from The Arbor ofAmorous Devises on the theme of '
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