Of all pre- twentieth century English songwriters, John Dowland has enjoyed the most powerful afterlife, his voice unmistakeably present in any version of his songs. This is down to the greatness of the music of course, but also because he wanted it that way. His Firste Booke of Songes or Ayres (1. He may have written himself into a cul- de- sac with the Third and Last Booke in 1. A Pilgrim’s Solace in 1. The extraordinary output of these fifteen years distilled the experiences of a long and varied musical life which took him from France through what is now Germany, Italy and Denmark and finally back to England and the court of James I. Printed prefaces gave him space to air his individual, sometimes truculent and always absolute musical opinions while detailing the injustices of his own life, the shortcomings of composer and performer rivals and the inadequacies of the late Elizabethan world in general. Dowland’s calculating self- advocacy shaped reactions to his passionate, wide- ranging and sometimes chromatically adventurous music before anyone got to hear a note of it. Nineteenth- century literary historians reaffirmed the greatness of English culture through Elizabethan lyrics, and early twentieth- century . Our own age has responded to the romantic isolation of many of his songs, the individual voice alienated from his own society expressing many of our deepest anxieties. It is tempting to assume he wrote at least some of them himself. We open, as Dowland did his Firste Booke, with Unquiet thoughts, which is a summary of many of his classic preoccupations: internal struggles which have disquieting echoes of the political upheavals that were never far from the collective memory in late Elizabethan England, whether to be silent or to speak the heart’s passion, and a taste for startling visual imagery that inspires dramatic musical gestures: . His early biographer Thomas Fuller claimed: . The Dowland who flirted with Catholicism and defended himself in a well- known letter to Sir Robert Cecil was not the same as the smooth operator who coolly absented himself from his European employers without permission whenever an unmissable opportunity arose in England. Surviving records show that Dowland was a successful band- leader, an extravagantly gifted lute soloist and accompanist, and later (after his career had peaked) a paid participant in other people’s masques. As far as we know he was not a professional singer. Over the years many great singers have made Dowland’s voice their own, and this is one of our starting points for this disc. His contemporaries began a process of adaptation and re- imagining which continues to this day. Early seventeenth- century versions of his songs stripped of their lovingly crafted tablature lute parts can be found particularly in manuscripts associated with small private theatres. In covered venues like the Blackfriars Theatre companies recruited from the boys of the Chapel Royal and other prominent choir schools performed lute songs sometimes to the accompaniment of a viol, or a wire- strung plucked instrument like the bandora, or to a lute playing improvised parts above the bass line. Dowland’s music—with or more likely without his approval—provided material for arrangement and improvisation alongside Byrd, Campion, Morley and the choirmasters themselves. We’ve chosen to record a version of If my complaints could passions move from one of these (probably) theatrical sources, MS4. Christ Church Library, Oxford. In some ways the loss of the written- out lute part is the singer’s gain, allowing a flexible delivery of the words to take priority over strict conformity to the galliard rhythm. We often associate this degree of interpretative licence with the next generation of more obviously ! I must complain in Christ Church MS4. We have recorded the first verse of this manuscript version followed by Dowland’s complete setting (from the Third and Last Booke, 1. Dowland’s books. Sometimes this freedom collides with his music, at other times perhaps it enhances it. What if I never speed? The first and last phrases rise towards . The revolutionary abandonment of the singer on the last note is the ultimate expression of alienated misery. But if Dowland’s modern admirers have seized on this song as his greatest, it is interesting to note that, apart from Lachrymae, or Flow, my tears, the songs that appear most frequently in seventeenth- century manuscript anthologies and commonplace books represent the other Dowland, the one he himself undersold, whose output has a strain of wit and humour almost throughout. Sleep, wayward thoughts exists in arrangements for lyra viol, lute, and just as a tune and bass. It became a repertoire standard so familiar that John Playford included it, shorn of words and Dowland’s syncopated lute part, as an example of four- part harmony in some editions of his Introduction to the Skill of Music. We’ve used a version of this as a prelude introducing Come, heavy Sleep. Come again! Other songs like To ask for all thy love, published in 1. Dowland’s popularity was declining, explore with profound cheerfulness—a sort of serious ecstasy—the mystery of how fulfilled love can get any better. Benjamin Britten's Nocturnal. A novel approach to program music and variation structure: en. Benjamin Britten uses John Dowland's song 'Come Heavy Sleep' as the basis for his Nocturnal. Dowland: Lute Songs; Britten: Nocturnal Mark Padmore (tenor), Elizabeth Kenny. Britten’s Nocturnal after John Dowland. Benjamin Britten frappa «d’interdit les compositeurs Tudor. It is a good match for John Donne’s much- anthologized poem . This must have been deliberate. Now, O now, I needs must part is a good example. Few at the time, and certainly no one now, could say for certain whether there was any love involved in the duc d’Alen. The Frog Galliard was associated with d’Alen. Benjamin Britten Nocturnal After John Dowland Pdf ConverterElizabeth’s letters show that he wasn’t entirely convinced about her age. She disliked his pockmarked appearance; and they both felt aggrieved that the blandishments of love hadn’t produced enough hard cash to cement a marriage settlement. The jaunty triple metre may be intended to parody the supposed lovers’ sense of their own tragic misfortune or to reflect a courtship that had become something of a public farce, but the words and the nostalgia of the setting are unexpectedly moving. The image of the moon is common to songs that touch on the symbol of the Virgin Queen (constant yet ever- changing). Whether or not Elizabeth’s razor- sharp intellect would have been taken in by the extravagance of Say, Love, if ever thou didst find (. Away with these self- loving lads strikes nearer the bone of Elizabeth’s self- imposed chastity. Both songs have an exuberant accompaniment that shadows the text with chords rather than counterpoint—a . Similar to John Dowland - Lute Songs for Guitar. Download free sheet music and scores: britten nocturnal. Nocturnal After John Dowland, Op. Nocturnal After John Dowland For Guitar Op.70. Britten's dreamy guitar solo Nocturnal after John Dowland is sandwiched between the songs and. Benjamin Britten Nocturnal After John Dowland Pdf EditorHere we’ve recorded the last of seven Fantasias printed in A Varietie of Lute Lessons. Many other players copied it into their own manuscript . Britten warmed to Dowland’s dark sensibility—the opposite of pastoral—and his anti- establishment isolation expressed in chromaticism. Dowland’s galliard song tune If my complaints could passions move appears in a wonderfully melancholic version at the end of Britten’s Lachrymae (for viola), suppressing the original’s slightly unsettling up- tempo optimism. Dowland’s song hovers in the shadows between G and B major, exploiting the ambiguity of scale patterns common in English music at this time (neither quite modal nor quite tonal). This perfectly encapsulates the slippage between sleep and death, between rest and disturbance. Britten’s Op 7. 0 Nocturnal, written for Julian Bream to play at the 1. Aldeburgh Festival, is an extended exploration of tensions and nightmares behind the song tune. The guitar being a much more popular recital instrument at this point, Bream’s advice was not to write the piece for the lute in case it wasn’t played very much. A magnificent Dowland- inspired addition to the guitar repertoire resulted (in a long line of Dowland adaptations, as Britten was well aware), though personally I harbour a few regrets!
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