Roots
Like Deller’s 1972 recording and those of groups specialising in this repertory such as the Baltimore Consort (in Watkins Ale, 1991; Elizabeth´s Music, 1997; and The Ladyes Delight, 1998, (Dorian) or The Dufay Collective (in Johnny, cock thy beaver. Popular music making in seventeenth-century Englad, (Chandos), Scholl’s album follows a line that was common in London culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that regained popularity during the 1960s in accordance with an interest in folk music that arose in various parts of the world. This renewed interest was a result of the fluid circulation of performing traditions and “high” and “low” repertories between different social groups. It is said that in Dowland’s time lutes were hung on the walls of barber’s shops so that those who were waiting could delight in singing and listening to music. Performances of street theatre were undoubtedly a factor in there being little difference between what was heard in the town and at the palace. With a fair degree of certainty, it can be assumed from paintings of the period but, above all, from the pieces that have come down to us, that the way in which this music was performed must have been fairly different from one setting to another. But the frequent arrangement of popular songs and dances by court composers, as well as the permanence of songs and texts that were once associated with the palace in popular traditions, reflects a common repertory that was merely rediscovered, both in art and folk music, during the twentieth century.
There are various reasons for these cultural exchanges. The period in which the song tradition was at its height, both in popular and palatial settings, is commonly known as “Elizabethan”. In fact, this represented over a century in which England initiated a series of important religious and political changes, as well as its capitalist expansion. The period spans the reigns of Henry VIII (especially the latter stages, from 1509 to 1547), Edward VI (1547-1553), Marie Tudor (the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, 1553-1558), Elizabeth I (the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, 1558-1603), Jacob I (the son of Mary Stuart, 1603-1625) and Charles I (1625-1649). It also coincides with one of the most exceptional epochs in the history of art. It was the era of the great dramatists and metaphysical poetry: Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick and George Herbert, among others, as well as that of composers such as Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, John Dowland, John Bull, Thomas Morley, Peter Phillips and John Taverner. It was also the period in which secular music was first printed in England (with Wynkyn de Worde, in 1530), the instrument making industry was consolidated and domestic and bourgeois markets began to emerge, along with new ways of performing and listening to music. Collections of elegant and virtuosic diminutions, often of pieces with popular origins for lute or keyboard instruments, appeared and circulated in this context.
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