Purcell and Cowley

We purchased this album of Purcell "catch songs", a cantata set to a poem by Abraham Cowley, and an ode to Saint Cecilia at one of the used record stores in Wichita. The LP was from the Musical Heritage Society, the budget mail-order record company, and the music is performed by The Deller Consort. The Musical Heritage Society licensed the material from Harmonia Mundi, which released the recording as a CD. The theme of the album is that composers like Purcell had to be active both in the secular and the sacred world--the "ale-house and the Chapel Royal, as well as the playhouse and the church."

The songs on A side of the LP combine "strict counterpoint and scatological verse", according to Denis Stevens' liner notes, while the B side contains the more serious works, including the setting of Cowley's poem:

If ever I more riches did desire

Than cleanliness and quiet do require, 

If e'er Ambition did my fancy cheat, 

With any wish so mean as to be great, 

Continue, Heav'n, still from me to remove 

The humble blessings of that life I love. 

Upon the slipp'ry tops of human state, 

The gilded pinnacles of fate, 

Let others proudly stand, and for awhile 

The giddy danger to beguile, 

With joy and with disdain look down on all, 

Till their heads turn, and down they fall. 

Me, O ye Gods, on earth, or else so near, 

That I no fall to earth may fear, 

And, O ye gods, at a good distance seat 

From the long ruins of the great. 

Here wrap'd in the arms of Quiet le me lie; 

Quiet, companion of Obscurity. 

Here let my life with as much silence slide 

As time, that measures it, does glide. 

Nor let the breath of Infamy or Fame 

From town to town echo about my name, 

Nor let my homely death embroider'd be 

With scutcheon or with elegy: 

An old plebeian let me die. 

Alas, all then are such as well as I. 

To him, alas, to him, I fear, 

The face of Death will terrible appear, 

Who in his life flatt'ring his senseless pride 

By being known to all the world beside, 

Does not himself, when he is dying, know, 

Nor what he is, nor whither he's to go.

Abraham Cowley was one of the Metaphysical poets and a friend and admirer of Richard Crashaw. According to this biography:

Poet and essayist Abraham Cowley was born in London, England, in 1618. He displayed early talent as a poet, publishing his first collection of poetry, Poetical Blossoms (1633), at the age of 15. Cowley studied at Cambridge University but was stripped of his Cambridge fellowship during the English Civil War and expelled for refusing to sign the Solemn League and Covenant of 1644. In turn, he accompanied Queen Henrietta Maria to France, where he spent 12 years in exile serving as her secretary. During this time, Cowley completed The Mistress (1647). Arguably his most famous work, the collection exemplifies Cowley’s metaphysical style of love poetry. After the Restoration, Cowley returned to England, where he was reinstated as a Cambridge fellow and earned his MD before finally retiring to the English countryside.

English Monarchs and Music on the BBC

I wonder if we shall see David Starkey's BBC series on Music and Monarchy, on PBS which includes many examples of Renaissance polyphony, royal influence on musical composers, and the integration of music in the life and ceremony of royalty in England from the Middle Ages to the modern era. If not, a book, DVD, and CD are either available now or for pre-order and release later this year. There is also a youtube video of the first episode, beginning with Henry V and Henry VIII (interrupted by commercials).

Gramaphone Magazine liked the series:

There's a sort of exuberant delight to Starkey's presentation – there he is pondering a performance just off centre-stage, or sometimes even standing right next to the conductor, or perhaps midway between the two ranks of choir stalls. He may as well stand in the best acoustic spot I suppose – but I guess the message is that Starkey is on a journey of discovery, and, through him, so are we. It's accessible history in the best tradition: rich in observation, a strong narrative told with conviction and colour, enthusing energetically throughout. The script takes fascinating facets of the story and elevates them with the sort of rhetoric which has made Starkey such a successful communicator of history. Thus, Henry V's French invasions were 'A Holy War to be fought with music'. Henry VIII 'was a master of the politics of splendour, and the brightest jewel and the most effective instrument was his Chapel Royal'. Episode one closes with Elizabeth I's court and the glories of her Chapel Royal: 'Outside it was the cold winter of Protestant austerity, inside it was indeed the warm summer of the Golden age of English Church music'.

But above all, we get to see some of the most important pieces of music of the past half-millennium performed in the places for which they were written, by the modern musicians who know them best, among them David Skinner, Fretwork, Richard Egarr and the Choirs of King's College Cambridge and Westminster Abbey. The lists of works featuring in the series runs onto four sides of A4.

Music, argues Starkey's series, was as integral to the image and power of monarchy as were armies and architecture. Nothing embodies the latter quite so well as Westminster Abbey itself of course, built as a shrine to a King-Saint, and later adorned at the east end with its glorious Lady Chapel in the most exquisite Perpendicular Gothic and itself a monument to Tudor prestige. Here, and throughout the Abbey's many chapels, the kings and queens now lie silent beneath austere tombs. The music, of course, lives on. Perhaps it's fitting that of all the memorials in the Abbey, it's one to a musician - Handel, sculpted by Louis-François Roubiliac - that is by far the most full of life.

The Spectator likes the book too, and highlights the influence of the English Reformation on English music, as Starkey notes that Henry VIII nearly destroyed the liturgical music he loved so much:

The Reformation targeted not merely the liturgy gracing the chapels themselves but the very performance style of their masses and motets. As early as 1516 Erasmus, in his Commentary on Corinthians 1.14, had criticised the vogue for increasingly complex polyphony, ‘a certain elaborate and theatrical music’ for which English clerics cherished a special fondness. ‘Those who are more doltish than really learned are not content unless they can use a distorted kind of music called descant.’ Thirty years later, with the walls whitewashed, shrines desecrated and idolatrous images torn down, Archbishop Cranmer, backed by Queen Catherine Parr, took up the cry. ‘In mine opinion,’ he told Henry VIII, ‘the song that shall be made would not be full of notes, but as near as may be, for every syllable a note, so that it may be sung distinctly and devoutly.’

Starkey and Greening neatly demonstrate how much of what we treasure in Tudor church music is due to skilful religious fudging and compromise by Catholic court musicians, as also to the unfathomable quirks and ambiguities of Elizabeth I’s spiritual outlook and artistic tastes. Sovereigns in her time were noted, not always sycophantically, as accomplished performers, vocal or instrumental. Elizabeth may not have been quite such a versatile keyboard player as her flatterers claimed, but King Charles I handled a bass viol with professional skill and honoured his lutenists and singers with the ultimate royal accolade of leaning a hand on their shoulders as they played. Music & Monarchy captures the tragic irony underlying Charles’s execution outside the very same Inigo Jones Banqueting House once resonating with the lyrics and dances of those extravagant masques which, during the 1630s, had sustained the increasing illusion of his kingship.

The book and the DVD are definitely on my wish list!

Music For Holy Week

Stile Antico has another new CD, which I'll be listening to starting tomorrow, called Passion & Resurrection:

Stile Antico's seventh recording focuses on the dramatic events of Holy Week, retracing in music the journey from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday. Twelve different composers are represented in an enthralling programme encompassing the English, Flemish and Spanish Renaissance. At the heart of the disc are twin settings of the mediaeval carol Woefully Arrayed: one by William Cornysh (1465-1523), and one commissioned in 2009 especially for Stile Antico by British composer John McCabe (b. 1939) and recorded here for the first time.

The CD contains performances of:

1. Cornysh: Woefully Arrayed
2. Gibbons: Hosanna to the Son of David
3. Tallis: O sacrum convivium
4. Lassus: In monte Oliveti
5. Morales: O crux, ave
6. Victoria: O vos omnes
7. John McCabe: Woefully Arrayed
8. Taverner: Dum transisset
9. Guerrero: Maria Magdalene
10. Byrd: In resurrectione tua
11. Lheritier: Surrexit pastor bonus
12. Gibbons: I am the Resurrection
13. Crecquillon: Congratulamini mihi

The CD folder and booklet are beautifully illustrated, with pictures of the Risen Christ, Christ the Man of Sorrows, and border details from fifteenth century English Books of Hours.

First Things featured William Cornysh's "Woefully Arrayed" yesterday:

Woefully arrayed
My blood, man for thee ran, it may not be nayed;
My body, blo and wan;
Woefully arrayed.

Behold me, I pray thee
with all thy whole reason
and be not hard-hearted,
and for this encheason,
sith I for thy soul sake
was slain in good season,
Beguiled and betrayed
by Judas’ false treason,
unkindly entreated,
with sharp cord sore freted,
the Jews me threated,
they mowed, they grinned,
they scorned me,
condem’d to death as thou may’st see;
Woefully arrayed.

Thus naked am I nailed.
O man, for thy sake;
I love thee, then love me,
why sleepst thou, awake,
remember my tender heartroot for thee brake;
with pains my veins constrained to crake;
thus tugged to and fro,
thus wrapped all in woe,
whereas never man was so entreated,
thus in most cruel wise
was like a lamb offer’d in sacrifice;
Woefully arrayed.

Of sharp thom I have worn
a crown on my head.
So pained, so strained, so rueful, so red,
thus bobbed, thus robbed,
thus for thy love dead;
unfeigned, not deigned,
my blood for to shed,
my feet and handes sore
the sturdy nailes bore;
what might I suffer more,
than I have done, O man, for thee?
Come when thou list, welcome to me!
Woefully arrayed.

John McCabe comments on his version of "Woefully Arrayed" here:

Woefully arrayed is a supreme choral setting by William Cornysh, Junior, who died in 1523, of a text usually regarded as of anonymous composition, though there have been some attributions to John Skelton. It is a thoughtful, powerful meditation on Christ on the Cross, and though Cornysh's setting has remarkable intensity and contrapuntal artistry, I felt a strong wish to add my own response to this fine text. The different versions of it have different verses - that used by Cornysh has three verses (plus the refrain), while there are others with four or even five (one attributted to Skelton has five). I have chosen to restrict myself to the three used by Cornysh, using my own adaptation of the modernised words which yet incorporates some archaisms - a deliberate choice for reasons of rhythm and verbal sound.

Herbert, Vaughn Williams, and Allen

This morning at Mass for Laetare Sunday, at the Offertory the choir sang an arrangement of Ralph Vaughn Williams' The Call (George Herbert's poem) for choir, organ and flute. Above, a youtube video of Thomas Allen singing The Call at a Proms performance in 2004. (Starts at 5:38, after "Love Bade Me Welcome"; both are from the Five Mystical Songs (1906-1911)--then the choir sings the rousing Antiphon!)

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way, as gives us breath:
Such a Truth, as ends all strife:
Such a Life, as killeth death.

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:
Such a Light, as shows a feast:
Such a Feast, as mends in length:
Such a Strength, as makes his guest.

Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart:
Such a Joy, as none can move:
Such a Love, as none can part:
Such a Heart, as joyes in love.

I have Allen's recording of the Five Mystical Songs with the Serenade to Music, Flo Campi, and the Fantasia on Christmas Carols--it is one of my favorite CDs!

One Christmas Present: "England, My England"!

Our godson Hugh's parents gave us this two CD set from the Choir of King's College Cambridge: "England, My England" with music from Byrd to Elgar, Tallis to Rutter, Handel to Holst!:

There is surely no more quintessentially English sound than that of the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, its unaccompanied voices – evocative of immemorial sandstone, of cool cloisters, of evensong in church, chapel and cathedral – serene in the music of Shakespeare’s contemporaries Byrd and Gibbons, ethereal in Delius heard of a summer’s night across the Backs of the River Cam.

No less iconic is the chapel that lends its unique acoustic to that sound. One of the glories of the English perpendicular style of architecture, it was eventually completed in 1547, a little over a century after the founding of the college itself by Henry VI.

This collection opens and closes with coronation music: Zadok the Priest was written for the crowning of George II in 1727, I was glad for that of Edward VII in 1902. Both were so successful that they have been sung at every coronation since their premières. Parry’s ‘processional anthem’ is heard here in its full panoply of extra brass and shouted Vivats, the choir of King’s choir providing the semi-chorus in the exquisite interlude 'O pray for the peace of Jerusalem'.

In between are motets ancient and modern – from the miniature If ye love me and the architectural splendour of the 40-part Spem in alium to William Harris’s dramatic double-choir Spenser setting Faire is the Heaven; well-known psalms sung to Anglican chant; and favourite hymns, notably All people that on earth do dwell, arranged ceremonially for another coronation, that of Elizabeth II.

As well as national rejoicing there is solemn remembrance. Come ye sons of art away is Purcell’s 1694 birthday ode for Queen Mary, Thou knowest, Lord part of the music he wrote for her funeral just nine months later. John Ireland’s Greater love hath no man is often heard on Remembrance Sunday; Sir John Tavener’s Song for Athene made a powerful impression at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales; while John Rutter’s small-scale, personal Requiem touched a wider public following the attacks of 11 September 2001. But ‘Nimrod’ above all epitomises music of national remembrance. Here a choral setting of it, Lux aeterna, represents our ‘Shakespeare of music’, Edward Elgar.