Music for the unaccompanied parrot

I’ve been reading David Rothenberg’s Why Birds Sing (Allen Lane, 2005), and was charmed to learn of The Bird Fancyer’s Delight (1717): “Choice Observations and Directions Concerning ye Teaching of all Sorts of Singing-birds, after ye Flagelet and Flute, if rightly made as to Size & tome, with a Method of fixing ye wett Air, in a Spung or Cotton, with Lessons properly Composed, within ye Compass & faculty of each Bird, Viz. for ye Woodlark, Blackbird, Throustill, House-sparrow, Canary-bird, Black-thorn-linnet, Garden-Bull-Finch, and Starling”.

I cannot find this agreeable sounding and doubtless diverting book on the ECCO database, but I did ask a colleague if, as an 18^th century specialist, she had heard of it. Not only had she heard of it, but down in her cellar, had an LP of performances by Richard and Theodora Schulze (recorders, sopranino), accompanied by a harpsichordist. Academics! – when you think you are being absurdly recondite, but there they are, way ahead of you, head full of knowledge, cellarage a latter day wonder cabinet.

I duly begged the loan of this venerable LP. It isn’t dated, but may be from the 60’s: Stereovox of New York:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_album

for anyone unfamiliar with the technology. Apparently the 1717 collection of tunes for pet birds became important to the recorder player’s repertoire. Richard Schulze has added a second part and the harpsichord, but the original idea was that you played the music on your bird flageolet (they use a sopranino on the recording) until your bird had the tune off perfectly. You then might enter your bird in singing contests, etc.

As a parrot owner, I was especially pleased to find two tunes ‘for the parrot’. Now Barney, my African Grey (see him marking Renaissance Literature exam scripts for me here http://roy25booth.blogspot.com/2008/05/mere-parrotting-52.html ) had a poor early upbringing. He can whistle ‘Half a pound of tuppenny rice’, but he then skips the boring bit, and seques straight into ‘Pop goes the weasel’.

Here, however, is a bird doing a very creditable Queen of the Night:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=sWh_2Iit3Ek

and here’s a rather less highbrow compilation of Leonard the parrot amid cries of ‘Exterminate!’ intermittently doing the ‘Mission Impossible’ theme and singing ‘Red Red What’ instead of UB40’s hit song, ‘Red Red Wine’:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/articles/2008/09/02/parrott_video_feature.shtml

Anyway, my MP3 is of the two tunes for parrot in The Bird Fancyer’s Delight, 1717. The first I recognize as ‘The Happy Clown’, which is such an appropriate choice. Like most birds, Barney has a syrinx rather than a larynx, and can make two sounds at once, but it will take a long time to get him up to this (and I think he’s out of his best learning age-range, which is closed in birds). I didn’t try to edit off all the pops and crackles, as they as so many, and they rather add to the parrotty ambience:

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhle/001/soloparrot.mp3

http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/national-songbook/national-songbook%20-%200122.htm

My image is ‘The Serinette’, the little hand-cranked barrel-organ people used to train their birds, with depicted in use by Jean-Siméon Chardin in 1751. I will have to get one of those, maybe.

To round off, here’s William Cowper’s ‘On the death of Mrs Throckmorton’s bullfinch’. A sad tale of the death of one of those trained birds – with a very apt moment of mock heroic in the final stanza:

‘On the death of Mrs Throckmorton’s bullfinch’

Ye Nymphs, if e’er your eyes were red
With tears o’er hapless favourites shed,
O, share Maria’s grief!
Her favourite, even in his cage,
(What will not hunger's cruel rage?)
Assassin'd by a thief.

Where Rhenus strays his vines among,
The egg was laid from which he sprung,
And though by nature mute,
Or only with a whistle bless’d,
Well-taught he all the sounds express’d
Of flageolet or flute.

The honours of his ebon poll
Were brighter than the sleekest mole,
His bosom of the hue
With which Aurora decks the skies,
When piping winds shall soon arise
To sweep away the dew.

Above, below, in all the house,
Dire foe alike of bird and mouse,
No cat had leave to dwell;
And Bully's cage supported stood

On props of smoothest-shaven wood,
Large built and latticed well.

Well latticed, - but the grate, alas!
Not rough with wire of steel or brass,
For Bully’s plumage sake,
But smooth with wands from Ouse’s side,
With which, when neatly peel’d and dried,
The swains their baskets make.

Night veil’d the pole: all seem’d secure:
When, led by instinct sharp and sure,
Subsistence to provide,
A beast forth sallied on the scout,
Long back’d, long tail’d, with whisker’d snout,
And badger-colour’d hide.

He, entering at the study door,
Its ample area 'gan explore;
And something in the wind
Conjectured, sniffing round and round,
Better than all the books he found,
Food chiefly for the mind.

Just then, by adverse fate impress'’d,
A dream disturb’d poor Bully's rest;
In sleep he seem’d to view
A rat fast clinging to the cage,
And, screaming at the sad presage,
Awoke and found it true.

For, aided both by ear and scent,
Right to his mark the monster went, -
Ah, Muse! forbear to speak
Minute the horrors that ensued;
His teeth were strong, the cage was wood, -
He left poor Bully’s beak.

O, had he made that too his prey!
That beak, whence issued many a lay
Of such mellifluous tone,
Might have repaid him well, I wote,
For silencing so sweet a throat,
Fast stuck within his own.

Maria weeps, - the Muses mourn; -
So, when by Bacchanalians torn,
On Thracian Hebrus’ side
The tree-enchanter Orpheus fell,
His head alone remain’d to tell
The cruel death he died.

An early modern fart-lighting contest, and other sonic delights.

I cannot remember what I was looking for when I strayed that way, but I found myself reading through Catch that catch can, or, A choice collection of catches, rounds & canons for 3 or 4 voyces collected & published by John Hilton (1652).

These are jolly songs for drunken amateur performers – male performers, that is to say. Among my ancient vinyl, I do not have any catches from this collection performed, but have posted here

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhle/001/sincetimesokind.mp3

members of the Hilliard Ensemble doing very nicely a similar naughty song, Purcell’s catch, ‘Since time so kind to us does prove’, with Paul Hillier as the baritone, Leigh Nixon, tenor, and David James singing counter-tenor (and having great fun as the girl). All over in a minute and a half, so no wonder the lady is less enraptured than the gentleman. This was released on ‘The Merry Companions’ back in 1981.

But my life is the poorer for not having heard this splendidly bawdy catch performed, ideally at the Wigmore Hall:

“My Lady and her Mayd upon a merry pin, they made a match at farting, who should the wager win. Jone lights three Candles then and sets them bolt upright, with the first fart she blew them out, with the next she gave them light. In comes my Lady then with all her might and maine, and blew them out, and in, and out, and in, and out againe. My Lady, &c.”

I suppose that Dame Emma Kirkby is too grand these days to enact such fooleries.

Here’s another naughty one, about lovers on May Day, and it exploits the way a word can be syllabically divided in a musical setting to produce its bawdy:

“See how in gathering of their May, each Lad and Lass do kiss and play, do kiss love’s hole, & play with love’s hole, do kiss and play, do kiss and play, each thing doth smile as it would say, this is love’s hole, love’s Holiday, love’s hole doe kiss, and play with love’s hole, love’s hole, love’s Holyday, & while love’s kindly fires doe sting, hark Philomel doth sweetly sing, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, doth sweetly sing. See, &c.” William Lawes, no less, is responsible.

This one by ‘Mr. Cranford’ uses a low pun for the same joke:

“Here dwells a pretty Mayd, whose name is Sis, you may come in and kisse: Her hole, her hole, her hole, her whole estate is seventeen pence a yeare, yet you may kisse, you may kisse, you may kisse, you may kisse her, if you come but neare. Here, &c.”

But to come to a serious point, I have heard many, many versions of Shakespeare songs using the limited surviving early settings, but I have never heard anyone picking up on Hilton’s own setting of the catch in As You Like It:

“What shall he have that kill’d the Deere, his leather skin and horns to wear, take you no scorn to wear a horn, it was a crest e’re thou was born, thy father’s father bore it, and thy father wore it, the horn, the horn, the lusty horn is not a thing to laugh to scorn. What shall he, &c.”

In the Shakespearean text, Act IV scene 2, the words with a minor variation, and indication that the original setting was a solo voice and then a chorus:

Forester
What shall he have that kill'd the deer?
His leather skin and horns to wear.
Then sing him home;
(The rest shall bear this burden)
Take thou no scorn to wear the horn;
It was a crest ere thou wast born:
Thy father's father wore it,
And thy father bore it:
The horn, the horn, the lusty horn
Is not a thing to laugh to scorn.

This is jolly too: I can imagine finding these words funny after a glass or two
“Let Simon’s beard alone, alone, let Simon’s beard alone, 'tis no disgrace to Simon’s face, for he had never one: then mock not, nor scoff not, nor jeer not, nor fleer not, but rather him bemoan. Let, &c.”

I do not think that I have sung songs in a pub since I was an undergraduate, and it seems so long ago it might as well have been the Carmina Burana.

Thomas Campion's Secret Love

I suppose I’ve always given Thomas Campion short shrift (mainly for not being John Dowland). But I’ve just been looking back at his words, and enjoying their directness when it comes to amatory subject matter. His Two bookes of ayres The first contayning diuine and morall songs: the second, light conceites of louers of 1613 clearly made Campion feel defensive at having put devout and undeniably naughty songs between the same book covers:

‘To the READER.’

That holy Hymns with Lovers’ cares are knit
Both in one Quire here, thou maist think’t unfit;
Why do’st not blame the Stationer as well,
Who in the same Shop sets all sorts to sell?
Divine with stiles profane, grave shelv’d with vain;
And some matcht worse, yet none of him complain.

The ‘light conceits of lovers’ show Campion writing out of classical models, particularly Catullus and Ovid. These were liberating influences: there’s a fine lyric requesting sex before marriage (‘Sweet, exclude me not…’), and asking (in same way that Ovid’s male lovers get absurdly aggrieved about things) why it was the doors were ever invented ‘in love’s despite’ (he’s asking his fiancée not to ‘bar not the door’, but she is doing so, and laughing at him). The lover who just daren’t speak is here, analyzing whether keeping painfully silent doesn’t in fact preserve the hope that will vanish if he speaks:

Fain would I my love disclose,
Ask what honour might deny;
But both love and her I lose,
From my motion if she fly.

Campion goes quite deep, psychologically: ‘Though your strangeness frets my heart’ is a lover’s complaint to a Lady who insists on such secrecy, and requires such arbitrary postponements of meetings that he just has to suspect her of being up to something (– it’s a good tune too).

But I’d forgotten about this set of verses for a very candid woman speaker/singer:

A secret love or two, I must confess,
I kindly welcome for change in close playing:
Yet my dear husband I love ne’ertheless,
His desires, whole or half, quickly allaying,
At all times ready to offer redress.
His own he never wants, but hath it duly,
Yet twits me, I keep not touch with him truly.

The more a spring is drawn, the more it flows;
No Lampe less light retains by lighting others:
Is he a loser his loss that ne’re knows?
Or is he wealthy that waste treasure smothers?
My churl vows no man shall scent his sweet Rose:
His own enough and more I give him duly,
Yet still he twits me, I keep not touch truly.

Wise Archers bear more then one shaft to field,
The Venturer loads not with one ware his shipping:
Should Warriors learn but one weapon to wield?
Or thrive faire plants ere the worse for the slipping?
One dish cloys, many fresh appetite yield:
Mine own I’le use, and his he shall have duly,
Judge then what debtor can keep touch more truly.

The wife loves her ‘dear husband’ well enough, but she also needs her ‘secret love or two’ (how many, though, really?) for variety’s sake. Her husband, who is given everything he wants sexually (it seems he could have plenty more if he could deal with it) is not in her view the loser by her extra-marital adventures. To justify her in all this there flows a stream of semi-proverbial instances and analogies. How unreasonable of him to want to keep all to himself all of something that he can’t in practice use all of!

Campion, writing such a splendidly uninhibited lyric voiced for a woman speaker, surely offered a very risqué piece for amateur and domestic performance. Could a man, his wife, and their friends, really ever have sat round a table singing their parts in this song-setting? Or would it always have been ‘performers’, distanced by profession from the unblushing sentiments they were voicing? She sounds, in her commonsense and socially aspirant euphemisms (‘close playing … scent his sweet rose’), a bit like one of the citizen’s wives in the comedies of Middleton, and in this way, the song is lightly ‘in character’. In my next post I will look at how one in particular of Campion’s songs was a great success with the broadside ballad audience. This poem is like one of the more outspoken state-of-a-marriage ballads.

The verb ‘twit’ is a characteristic Elizabethan usage: the OED, bless it, explains that it began with a long ‘i’ (‘twite’), and that was itself an aphetic form of ‘atwite’, which is the word in Beowulf for ‘reproach’ – if you in the later centuries were ‘twitting’ somebody, you were reproaching, as the OED sagely defines it, in a light or annoying manner. Perhaps it's still used only in English Departments? Even we no longer 'twit' one another 'in the teeth', as they did in the 16th century.

Antonio Vivaldi and early music

Away for the weekend, to experience some Cotswolds rain for a change, and therefore away from the wilds of EEBO and the 17^th century. So, as a musical interlude, something to make you feel happy for a hundred years, the Allegro Molto from Vivaldi’s ‘Concerto in C major for Diverse Instruments’, R.558:

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhle/001/vivaldiloudversion.mp3

This was originally scored for two violins ‘in tromba’, two recorders, two mandolins, 2 salmoè, two theorbos, cello, strings and harpsichord. (I just love that general feeling you get with Vivaldi of ‘Right, who’ve we got this morning? OK, off I go…’, though actually this was a very special piece presented to Prince Friedrich Christian of Saxony on his visit to Venice in 1740).

I’ve read Eleanor Selfridge-Field’s piece, ‘Vivaldi’s Esoteric Intruments’ (Early Music, 1978), which explains the ‘violini in tromba marina’, while the website below publishes a whole study of the instrument Vivaldi was somehow treating the violins to sound like (the ‘tromba marina’ was apparently a monochordal stringed instrument (usually), where the bridge for the string was not rigidly fixed, but was allowed to vibrate against the sounding board at one side, producing a trumpet-like blare of sound).

http://www.oriscus.com/mi/tm/app1.htm

Selfridge-Field suggests that Vivaldi loved to explore all kinds of sonorities, and would utilize otherwise obsolete instruments for that purpose; she even suggests that Venice enjoyed an early music revival in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries (after all, was there anywhere that had better early music?).

In this performance, the theorbos (or arch-lutes) have been swapped for harps, the salmoè for bass oboe, recorders for flutes, while trumpets take the ‘tromba marina’ parts, with violin, cello, and harpsichord (that’s Leonard Bernstein at the harpsichord, no less, making it trill like an electric bell). Available in less hissy form (no doubt) on

http://www.sonyclassical.com/music/bernstein_idx.html

My mp3 is called 'vivaldiloudversion' because is one of my stupid moments, I thought a lower setting might result in a smaller file size (D'Oh!). The image is by Hans Memling, of ‘angel musicians’. The Web Gallery of Art explains all the esoteric instruments, and a ‘tromba marina’ appears second left.

"The onely pretiring time"

After marking a couple of M.A. essays on the songs in Shakespeare’s comedies, I thought I’d get busy and post of few mp3’s transferred from my collection of antique vinyl, and so here they all are on a site I rather hastily put together yesterday:

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhle/001/Shakespearesongs.htm

I had no idea that Thomas Morley, Shakespeare’s sometime London neighbour (and who set music for the lyrics ‘O Mistress Mine’ and ‘It was a Lover and his Lass’) had lived a life that was quite so far from ‘Hay ding a ding a ding’. I checked the biography by Michael W Foster in the ODNB, and though Foster seems reluctant to make much of it, Morley evidently set off as a Catholic musician, working under the tutelage of the defiantly Catholic William Byrd. The senior composer was secured by the Queen’s approval of his talent (“process to cease by order of the Queen” ran the note on a document reporting his recusancy). Morley had no such protection: he seems to have been suspected and intimidated by both Catholics and Protestants. Finally he was turned, becoming an informer against his erstwhile co-religionists (“I hear since his coming thither he has played the promoter and apprehends Catholics”, wrote the Catholic exile Charles Paget).

One can see that from their training and employment in the Cathedrals, and by their attachment to their art, senior Tudor musicians would include men strongly attached to the Catholic faith, something which might be reinforced by their travels abroad and contact with Italian musicians. But, living a life in the brazen age, Morley made his compromise: "Morley the singing man employs himself in that kind of service … and has brought diverse into danger".

The memorial brass on Thomas Tallis's tomb had paid a kind of tribute to his adaptability:

He serv'd long Tyme in Chapp[ell] with grete prayse,

Fower sovereygnes reignes (a thing not often scene),

I mean King Henry and Prince Edward's Dayes,

Quene Mary, and Elizabeth our Quene.

He maryed was, though Children had he none,

And lyv'd in Love full thre and thirty Yeres …

As he did Lyve, so also did he dy,

In myld and quyet Sort (O! happy Man).

Arriving in a younger generation, Morley seems to have had to prove his usefulness to the new regime before he could enter the protective zone of the Chapel Royal.

Such admirable art...

I was looking at John Dowland's First Book of Songes, and noticed that it concludes with 'an invention by the sayd Author for two to playe upon one Lute'. So I hied me to the in-house greenwood, etc, and was disappointed to find that my purported 'Complete Lute Music' of Dowland (vinyl LP's that already feel quite thrillingly ancient, almost Elizabethan themselves) do not include this rather jolly stunt - and frankly, my dears, the delicate young men who twangle their way through the five discs look as though the close proximities required by the two-men-on-a-single-lute business might have been just too overwhelming to contemplate.

But too the rescue comes the internet, with, amazingly, a whole collection of free mp3's of Dowland duos, including the 'Lord Chamberlain's galliard', the piece in question.



So here's the link:
http://www.emclute.com/download/luteduo/15chamberlain.mp3

and here's the full page of their other toys, fancies, dumps, almains (and the rest):

http://www.emclute.com/download/luteduo/index.html

(***Now, I hope repaired: 7th November)


What you don't get is any assurance that Kenji Sano and Jinke Nosa performed the galliard together on the single instrument. There are no giggles or brief breaks for self disentanglement. Maybe there's a film on YouTube one could use to verify. The galliard was very much a dance for male display, I think Dowland maybe did divert it a little here towards male intimacy. But I assume male players, rather we might imagine that if your plucking was up to it, you might have canoodled pleasantly in this manner with Lady Mary Wroth, bassus to her cantus (though the arch lute she totes in her famous portrait perhaps allowed plenty of space for chaste distance anyway).

Thomas Coryate, footing it towards Venice, heard another remarkable performance in the Tuileries Garden:
"At the end of this garden is an exceeding fine Eccho. For I heard a certain Frenchman who sung very melodiously with curious quavers, sing with such admirable art, that upon the resounding of the Eccho there seemed three to sound together" (Coryates Crudities, 1611, p. 27). The only example I know off-hand of a song with an echo is the wonderful 'In a dark shady grove/Our charms we prepare/Too dreadful a practice/For the open air' chorus in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. But I am ignorant, and there must have been hundreds. But music sung to a literal echo?

One of our first year students happened to play me 'Greensleeves' on her psaltery last week. It is not often you can use a sentence like that (and it's hard to write without getting the giggles). On College premises too. No, literally. Things are looking up.

Possess yourself with an amorous humour, Phillis!

There's lots of effort being made at approaching the erotics of early modern culture, with literary texts being picked over, and the small corpus of Elizabethan pornography given much attention. I am as amused as anyone by Nashe's 'Choice of Valentines' - who could fail to respond to a poem which starts by invoking, pricelessly, 'the merry month of February'?

But the culture was one that generally hid it all well. If we don't look for it in music, we are not looking in the right place. This is John Ward, in 1613, a madrigal setting of a quatrain. 'Phillis' is always a dubious character, and 'frankly' is a code word for 'the opposite of chaste':

Phyllis the bright, when frankly she desired
Thyrsis her sweet heart to have expired,
'Sweet', thus fell she a-crying,
'Die for I am a-dying.'

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhle/001/Phillisthebright.mp3


'That strain again! It had a dying fall!' ~ Phillis asks Thyrsis to join her in her approaching climax, and Ward's madrigal shudders sweetly at its close. I have posted, outside 'Blogger', the Consort of Musicke's 1981 performance, for purposes of comment etc (I cannot see that this music is still available anyway).

Here goes Phillis again, surrendering to pleasure after a bit of persuasion:

He:
Phillis, I fain would die now,
I fain would die now.
She:
O to die what should move thee?
He:
For that you do not love me.
She:
I love thee, but plain to make it,
Ask what thou wilt and take it.
He:
O sweet, then this I crave thee,
Since you to love will have me,
Give me in my tormenting,
One kiss for my contenting.
She:
This unawares doth daunt me,
Else what thou wilt I grant thee.
He:
Ah, Phillis, well I see then,
My death thy joy will be then.
She:
O, no, no, no, I request thee
To tarry but some fitter time and leisure.
He:
Alas, death will arrest me,
You know, before I shall possess this treasure.
She:
No, no, no, dear
He:
No, no, no, no, dear
Both:
No, no, no, no, dear, do not languish,
Temper this sadness,
For time and love with gladness,
Once ere long will provide for this our anguish.

Once again, a link to where I have posted a 1983 performance by the Consort of Musicke, and once again, for purposes of comment, and music that does not seem to be available commercially any more:

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/UHLE/001/PhyllisIfain.mp3


What Thomas Morley audaciously did here was score for three women to sing 'She' (aka 'Phyllis'), four men as unnamed 'He'. Amateur performance of this song must have been as intimate as a session of 'dauncing signifying matrimony', especially in that responsive interlacing of the voices on 'no, no, no, no, dear'.

Morley himself (well he would, wouldn't he?) represents being able to take your part more or less impromptu as a necessary social grace. Morley's A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke, 1597, is dialogue form, and it opens with one of the dialogists scurrying off to put right his own ignorance after experiencing social disgrace:
"But supper being ended, and Musick books, according to the custom, being brought to the table, the mistress of the house presented me with a part, earnestly requesting me to sing. But when after many excuses, I protested unfainedly that I could not, every one began to wonder. Yea, some whispered to others, demanding how I was brought up: so that upon shame of mine ignorance I go now to seek out mine old friend master Gnorimus, to make myself his scholar..."

When you consider just how amorous this otherwise sexually restrained culture seemed prepared to allow its private music to be, you can see the social advantages in being able to perform. Yet, speaking officially, Morley toes the moral line. This is what he says about naughty music (like some madrigals): first he lays the blame on the poets who have written the words, but then insists that once it comes to the musical setting, you have to write as expressively as possible:

"This kind of musicke were not so much disallowable if the Poets who compose the ditties would abstain from some obscenities, which all honest ears abhor ... If therefore you will compose in this kind you must possess your self with an amorous humor (for in no composition shall you prove admirable except you put on, and possess your self wholly with that vein wherein you compose) so that you must in your musicke be wavering like the wind, sometime wanton, sometime drooping, sometime grave and staid, otherwhile effeminate..."

And so he is free to score something as erotically descriptive as he can make it be.

Semper Dowland, semper ludens

1^st voice Humour, say, what makest thou here

In the presence of a queen?

2^nd voice Princes hold conceit most dear,

All conceit in humour seen.

1^st voice Thou art a heavy, leaden mood –

2^nd voice Humour is Invention’s food.

Both But never Humour yet was true,

But that which only pleaseth you.

1^st voice O, I am as heavy as lead,

Say then who is Humour now?

2^nd voice I am now inclined to mirth,

Humour I as well as thou.

1^st voice Why then 'tis I am drowned in woe.

2^nd voice No no Wit is cherished so.

Both But never Humour yet was true,

But that which only pleaseth you.

1^st voice Mirth then is drown’d in Sorrow’s brim,

O, in sorrow all things sleep.

2^nd voice No, no Fool, the light’st things swim

Heavy things sink to the deep.

1st voice In her presence all things smile,

2^nd voice Humour frolic then awhile.

Both But never Humour yet was true,

But that which only pleaseth you.

The closing sung dialogue in John Dowland’s Second Booke of Songs (1600). I have ventured to post an mp3 of this delightful piece on my academic web space, for purposes of comment only. I will take down this posting should objection be made:

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhle/001/Humour%20%20say.mp3

“There can be little doubt that the song was written for a masque”, says Diana Poulton, in her study, John Dowland (1972). The musicologist’s curt comment may be right. The dialogue is complete, its little drama resolved within its three stanzas, but a masque ‘entry’ could be short and complete in itself. But I would rather see it as more properly a moment of courtly entertainment, to be staged as if impromptu. The Queen is going to take her exercise in a long gallery. She comes across a man in black, absorbed in thought (I’ve supplied a detail of Jan de Heem’s ‘A Student in his Study’ 1628, which, appropriately, is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). Immediately, the first voice reproaches the Melancholic, who counter-argues that Princes approve of productive artistic melancholy. After the wonderful complimentary chorus, the speakers swap humours, with a continued defence of melancholy, and the little drama ends when both resolve to be glad in the Queen’s presence.

The Queen, whose purse was just as impenetrable as a more famous part of her person, no doubt expressed some general pleasure, and passed on in maiden meditation, fancy free, leaving her nation’s greatest melancholy artist (‘Semper Dowland, semper dolans’) unrewarded. That she had just heard something that sounds like a stray part of Cosi fan Tutti miraculously wafted into the wrong century would have been neither here nor there.

The text set might have been Dowland’s own, as he clearly wrote words for his own music. Published in 1600, the ayre must have been written during the vogue for ‘Humour’ pushed by Jonson and Chapman from 1597. Jonson himself might have written the words, as he was proprietorial about 'Humour'. The Entertainment he wrote for King James and Queen Anne at Althorpe in 1603 is another carefully staged and very flattering courtly impromptu (‘The invention was, to have a Satyre lodged in a little Spinney, by which her Majestie, and the Prince were to come, who (at the report of certayne Cornets that were divided in severall places of the Parke, to signifie her approach) advanced his head above the top of the wood, wondring, and (with his pipe in his hand) began as followeth. Satyre: ‘Here? there? and every where? / Some solemnities are neere…’) with elaborate music: “whilst to the sound of excellent soft Musique, that was there concealed in the thicket…”

Sir John Davies’s A Lottery Presented before the late Queene's Majesty at the Lord Chancelor's House, 1601 gets us even closer to the kind of pleasant surprise poets and musicians tried to contrive to please their ageing Queen:
A Mariner with a box under his arm, containing all the several things following, supposed to come from the Carrick came into the Presence, singing this Song:
Cynthia Queene of Seas and Lands,
That Fortune euery where commands,
Sent forth Fortune to the Sea,
To try her fortune every way…

I haven’t been able to find other personifications of ‘Humour’. There’s something close in a poem by Samuel Rowlands, but the LION database produces no dramatic character simply named ‘Humour’ or ‘Melancholy’. The Consort of Musick's peerless performance is still available if you buy their complete Dowland on CD, there seems to be no separate recording of their Second Booke on the market. I'd include the precise link, but it will be too long to fit this column; easily found anyway on a site like Amazon.

Well, it smites my lyre anyway

I have been listening, over and over, to Handel’s 1707 ‘Dixit Dominus’: I’ve got a version performed wonderfully by The Sixteen Choir and Orchestra http://www.chandos.net/details05.asp?CNumber=CHAN%200517

Apart from a gruesome ‘midi’ file, I’m afraid that I cannot find an mp3 on the net. Anyway, once it had got under my skin, I wanted to know what it was about. Handel was setting the Latin text (from the Vulgate) of what became Psalm 110 in the English bible. I was aware of other settings of this psalm, notably Monteverdi’s. There’s a list at http://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Psalm_110

To see what the text of this glorious music actually says is a shock. In the fifth and sixth sections, Handel is setting ‘confregit in die irae suae reges’ (‘hath broken kings in the day of His wrath’) and ‘conquassabit capita in terra multorum’ (‘He will crush heads in the land of many’ or (AV), ‘he shall wound the heads over many countries’). To ‘confregit’ and, even more markedly, ‘conquassabit’, Handel gives an exultant setting. The sopranos shriek, the tenors shout (all in their highly modified way). Violence was (surely) never celebrated with such beauty. The sentiments are those of a savage tribe, but delivered in such a way that you have to love and admire humanity: the special genius who can score such music, and the men and women who have nurtured their talent till they can perform with such intensity and precision.

Psalm 110 is power-worshipping, the kind of power that smashes enemies abroad. The version in The Book of Common Prayer enthuses: ‘He shall judge among the heathen; he shall fill the places with the dead bodies: and smite in sunder the heads over divers countries.’ It celebrates the inauguration of a king as being, simultaneously, high priest ‘for ever according to the order of Melchisedech’. For this moment of union of temporal and sacred power, Handel again supplies a canon (I think) of astonishing beauty. When Henry VIII passed the Act of Supremacy, he didn’t know it, but this was what he had in mind. And yet, and yet: because Handel sets in a Christian tradition, while there may be a residual sense of power embodied in a here-and-now mortal priest-king, as that priest-king really has to be Christ, the psalm (as set) also expresses, exuberantly, the destruction of all temporal kingship: kings as footstools, broken kings, a new reign in which ruling has been swept away.

Psalm 110 achieved its cultural prominence through a misunderstanding: ‘Dixit Dominus Domino meo’, it starts: and this was inevitably read as ‘The Lord (God) said to my Lord (Jesus)’. With that poorly-evidenced doctrine of the Trinity to shore up, here was a text with God speaking to His Son. What might have begun as a praise-song by a court poet about David, or might have been David’s own song about Solomon (or some future leader), and what was certainly a psalm that acquired a very special personal application in the reign of Simon Maccabeus, then went on to be quoted repeatedly in the New Testament. Heralding a messiah, it was inevitably recruited by Christians as being a messianic text about Jesus. This is Isaac Watts’ 1719 version (opening):

Thus the eternal Father spake
To Christ the Son, ‘Ascend and sit
At my right hand, till I shall make
Thy foes submissive at thy feet.’

Watts’ title for his version of the psalms was candid enough: The Psalms of David, imitated in the language of the New Testament, and applied to the Christian state and worship. He translated by choosing those interpretations of the text which were to his mind the “most evangelical and most beautiful”. Watts found the psalm so important, that he gave it three iterations, and interpolated into the text as he thought fit: “Thro' the whole earth his reign shall spread, / And crush the powers that dare rebel” – Christ as the conqueror.

Yet as Watts indulges these sanguinary but devout fantasies, he acknowledges the actual gospel narrative. The last verse of the Latin psalm is obscure (‘De torrente in via bibet: propterea shall He lift up the head’ – ‘He shall drink of the torrent in the way: therefore shall he lift up the head’). Mary Sidney (1561-1621) translated expansively, and swings deftly from the bloodily triumphant, to the Messiah being victorious in death:

Thy Realm shall many Realms contain:
Thy slaught’ed foes thick heaped lie,
With crushed head ev'n he shall die,
Who head of many Realms doth raign.
If passing on these ways
Thou taste of troubled streams:
Shall that eclipse thy shining rays?
Nay, light thy glories’ beams!

Isaac Watts pushed that ‘torrent’ still further into metaphoric paraphrase:

Tho' while he treads his glorious way,
He drink the cup of tears and blood,
The sufferings of that dreadful day
Shall but advance him near to God.

There’s a story that the birth of English Literature as a discipline had something to do with World War I: that a generation of classicists forgot their Greek while serving in the army prior to going to ‘Varsity’, and so a new subject was devised to suit their shortcomings. Looking into psalm interpretation made me think that our kind of interpretation took root after people lost faith in 19^th century forms of Bible interpretation (or that form of scholarship just became too difficult/vexed/mad). Just have a gander at Professor Hildebrandt’s footnote density!

http://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/Ted_Hildebrandt/OTeSources/19-Psalms/Text/Articles/Bateman-Ps110-BS.pdf

http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=1573

(My picture is Kind David harping, from a painting by Jan de Bray.)