In 2006, Sting came out with Songs from the Labyrinth, an album devoted to the Elizabethan composer John Dowland. It was an unlikely choice of musical material for a rock star, yet Sting approached Dowland with enthusiasm and respect, refraining from rendering his songs into pop or setting them to a rock beat (as Richard Thompson for example has done with Renaissance tunes and Italian madrigals). He employed a professional lutenist, Edin Karamazov, and accompanied some of the pieces on the lute himself, one of his recent passions. Showing restraint and taste, Sting did not attempt to sing the songs in the stylized “classical” manner but used his voice’s natural register to adopt at times a relaxed and conversational, at times a more hushed or emphatic tone to suit each song’s occasion.

The result was oddly compelling and delightful. In the decade since the recording was released, the album’s Amazon page has accumulated over 200 largely favorable customer reviews. The handful of negative reviews are not, as one might suspect, from Sting fans baffled by his newfound classical preoccupation but rather finicky classical purists taking issue with his vocal incompetence, his nerve in attempting something out of his league. Yet they miss the point. The rocker’s homespun approach reveals the music’s texture in a fresh way, and moreover reflects the actual conditions in which Dowland’s music was performed, namely by musician friends in a relaxed and intimate setting.

Dowland appeals to us in that he shares certain affinities with the modern notion of the artist—the artist as alienated, rebellious iconoclast, misunderstood by his society, striking out on his own in proud defiance of convention. The English long for a Caravaggio, Beethoven or Van Gogh to call their own (they do have one in fact: Shakespeare, but he’s not neurotic enough). Dowland can, partially at any rate, be said to fit the bill. He is indeed an enigmatic and somewhat tragic figure, in the Greek sense, his fate largely self-inflicted. Before we investigate the reasons for this, and what it all has to do with the point of this essay, we need to slip back a few decades in time to the start of Queen Elizabeth’s reign and the extraordinary story of her chief court musician, Alfonso Ferrabosco.

Elizabeth and Ferrabosco

The Tudors took music seriously. Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII was a composer. To ensure the court was surrounded by cutting-edge musicians of the highest caliber, he hired them from Italy, the musical center of Europe. Two musician families of Jewish heritage, the Bassano’s and the Lupo’s, established themselves at the English court in the 1540s, when Elizabeth was a young girl (the tradition of Jewish excellence in classical music carries on today). She herself had thorough musical training. Music was taken for granted in royal life; any man not skilled on the lute, or woman on the virginal, was uncultivated and boorish. It was constantly at hand, performed by musicians of the court and the church, by courtiers and the Queen herself—an endless outpouring of hymns, dances, songs, anthems. It’s hard to imagine the like in our time, as if the most important item on the resume of White House staffers up to the President himself was proficiency on an instrument (a vestige of this survives in the popular musical acts given the honor of performing at White House state dinners). Incidentally, two recent books explore the possibility that Amelia Bassano, born in 1569 of the same family, was the “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets (Sally O’Reilly, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady) or that she herself was the author of Shakespeare’s plays (John Hudson, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady).

Elizabeth assumed the throne in 1558 at the age of twenty-five. Not long after, a few years perhaps, we find a teenage musician from Italy suddenly appearing at the English court. By 1562, Alfonso Ferrabosco’s status was such that at the age of nineteen he was hired full-time at the generous annual salary of £66 (raised to £100 five years later, or about USD $40,000 in modern currency). This must have been humiliating for the established court musicians, who were traditionally regarded as menial workers and paid on a part-time basis. The circumstances of the boy’s hiring aren’t known, whether a young musician of fresh blood had been sought after by Elizabeth, or Ferrabosco’s family had sent him there on rumors of handsome employment opportunities; in any case there was no apparent involvement by the Bassano or Lupo families.

Despite his great position of privilege as the Queen’s top musician, Ferrabosco bumbled his way throughout his career from one misstep and mishap to the next. A year later in 1563, he returned to Italy to deal with unknown family matters. Forbidden from leaving Italy (due to England’s apostate status with the Church), Ferrabosco snuck back to England. At this point he had grown friendly with the Queen’s favorite (and alleged lover) Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who made him master of his horse. Leicester himself had become the Queen’s Master of the Horse in 1558 and was frequently seen riding with her; I imagine the three of them rode together. Dudley and Ferrabosco would certainly have been useful to each other, Ferrabosco conveying Dudley’s messages to the Queen whenever out of favor with her, and Dudley speaking on Ferrabosco’s behalf when the Queen grew impatient over his frequent absences abroad.

In 1569 the Queen legally bound Ferrabosco to her in perpetual service as chief musician of the court. In the same year, Ferrabosco was in Italy again, where he remained for the next two years. He wrote letters to the Secretary of State William Cecil with various excuses for his delays: he was in danger of losing his family inheritance over his previous unlicensed trip to England (this indeed transpired upon his father’s death in 1574), he was robbed, etc. Back in England by 1572, he published his first compositions. Around that time he married a woman from Antwerp named Susanna and had a girl and a boy by her, the latter named after him, Alfonso. Perhaps because the children were born out of wedlock before their marriage took place, or the Church refused to recognize the marriage (Ferrabosco was Catholic), or Susanna wasn’t the actual mother of the two children, they were declared illegitimate.

Music was taken for granted in royal life; any man not skilled on the lute, or woman on the virginal, was uncultivated and boorish.

By 1575 his musical fame in England was earning him the praise of the two most prominent English composers at the time, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd. Meanwhile, some Venetian diplomats on a visit to the English court were struck by the fact they could only receive communications from the Queen through Ferrabosco, now serving as groom of her privy chamber. In 1577 word got out of secret visits by Ferrabosco to the French Ambassador to attend mass, scandalizing the court and embarrassing the Queen (Ferrabosco’s Catholicism had not been an issue as long as he maintained the pretense of no longer professing it). Two weeks later he was accused of killing a musician employed by the poet courtier Sir Philip Sidney, but had probably been framed by his enemies. Likely as a result of this his annual salary was cut by half, and he succumbed to pressure to leave England, this time for good. A year later, the Queen hired Englishman John Johnson to take Ferrabosco’s place as chief court lutenist.

Remarkably, in spite of these events, Ferrabosco’s relationship with the Queen remained in good standing. A letter from Robert Dudley reassured him that she believed in his innocence regarding the homicide. In fact she seemed to rely on him for important matters of state. While in France, he was entrusted by English officials acting on the Queen’s behalf to deliver thousands of pounds worth of currency and jewels (totaling as much as several million USD today) to certain highly placed Englishmen living in Italy; he proceeded to sell one of the jewels to pay off his debts. We next hear of Ferrabosco’s imprisonment in Italy on the Pope’s orders, accused of spying for England.

Suspicions had been rife among diplomatic circles in Italy and France that Ferrabosco was the Queen’s spy, and his proximity to her indeed made this possible. He may also have been her lover. No portraits survive to indicate whether he was handsome, but he was young enough when first established at court in his role as fashionable and exotic Italian musician to have had a strong symbolic, if not physical sex appeal. Historians have conjectured much on Elizabeth’s hypothetical love life, often doubtfully, given that her ladies in waiting surrounded her twenty-four hours a day to safeguard her status as the “virgin queen.” Others have argued she was after all the one who was in charge and could have met privately with anyone she chose. There is no reason to rule out the possibility she and Ferrabosco were intimately involved. It’s no more implausible than the widely held assumption she had slept with the Earl of Leicester or any of the other lover candidates with whom she had frequent association; rumors of her sexual involvement with favorites at the time were rife enough.

The Queen enlisted the Queen Mother of France, Catherine de’ Medici, to seek Ferrabosco’s release through the French Ambassador in Rome. He was set free in 1582 and thereafter employed by the Duke of Savoy. At this time Ferrabosco petitioned the Queen through her secretary Sir Francis Walsingham to have his two children sent to him (who had been in the care of a guardian). She refused, evidently holding them as ransom to force his return to England. He continued to receive his annuity, which he instructed to be distributed to his children; the payments stopped in 1583. By 1586 he was still petitioning for their release. And then, suddenly, in 1588 he died. Meanwhile, Ferrabosco the younger was now in his teens, and had been receiving musical training. In 1592 he was appointed musician in the Queen’s Viols. Yet he never managed to attract her personal attention, perhaps because she was resentful of his father’s betrayal. In 1594 court lutenist John Johnson died, and the top musical post opened up again. This is where Dowland enters the picture.

Elizabeth and Dowland

Dowland had displayed attributes of the artist from early on—restlessness, individualism and curiosity, a strong desire to wander, to travel. At the mere age of seventeen, he was in France serving under the English ambassador. Something kindled his interest in music, and a few years hence he returned home to pursue a musical career. By 1590 we first hear of his accomplishments on the lute, and in 1592 he managed to perform before the Queen. On the basis of this minor triumph, he might have convinced himself he was the foremost lutenist in England. Two years later, he applied for Johnson’s post and was rejected. In evident despair, he abandoned his country and traveled to Rome, with the intention of meeting, or studying under, the great madrigalist Luca Marenzio, whose fame had spread to England, but it seems they never met.

Dowland proceeded to Florence, where he mingled with English Catholic agitators conspiring to overthrow the Queen. Though he had converted to Catholicism on his previous stay in France, he quickly distanced himself from them. He took the occasion to gain the Queen’s favor with a letter to her Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, providing details of the plot (Sting reads excerpts from this letter between songs on his Dowland album). Nothing came of it, but a year later the courtier Henry Noel, a long-time friend, offered to plead on Dowland’s behalf before the Queen and urged him back to England. Dowland returned, but Noel unfortunately died before he could be of any help. Dowland’s reputation throughout Europe meanwhile had been growing. He was offered employment in Germany but accepted a position as court lutenist in Denmark. This lasted until 1606, when for unknown reasons he was fired, and despite the high salary he had received, left penniless and in debt. He returned once again to England where he spent his remaining years, finally being appointed court lutenist under King James in 1612, and dying in 1625.

Belated success notwithstanding, Dowland likely never got over his 1594 rejection for the post of court lutenist. It’s interesting to speculate as to why he was passed over. He himself told Robert Cecil it was due to his Catholicism (this is unlikely considering it never subsequently became an issue). More probably, to the extent that the Queen had been involved in the decision at all, she was weary of court lutenists since the Ferrabosco affair and indifferent. A simpler explanation is that Dowland was never more than a peripheral figure at court. To Elizabethan ears at the time, there was nothing about his music which particularly stood out, and he had no musical publications to his name (his First Book of Songs wasn’t published till 1597); he was a non-entity. Ferrabosco, on the other hand, despite his erratic tenure, had been held in the highest esteem; his early departure from England was perceived as a significant loss for English music. The lutenist succeeding him for the next fifteen years, John Johnson, was himself a fine musician and composer (as his recordings testify today). These musicians were surely deemed irreplaceable, and any new talent difficult to discern, least of all by the aging Elizabeth.

Dowland and contemporaries

The parallels between the Dowland and Ferrabosco stories are striking, and the contrasts telling. Both were Catholics who spent years away from their homeland, alienated loners who despite the popularity of their music and successes in the courts of Europe stumbled through their careers blindly and never seemed to fit in anywhere or call any place home. Though they received high salaries, they mismanaged both their finances and their friends and grew resentful, even paranoid, toward the very people who were trying to help. Ironically, their sense of inadequacy only seemed to increase with their popularity. And ironically too, whereas Dowland, the superior composer, longed for proximity to the Queen, Ferrabosco, the inferior composer, fled the Queen. (It’s tempting to add a third notorious Catholic composer to the story, John Bull, whose intrigues got him kicked out of England despite a former friendship with Elizabeth.)

In certain respects Dowland’s life parallels that of Shakespeare’s as well. They were born only a year apart. Both had rapid career success, culminating in performances at court by their late twenties, though neither succeeded in garnering the Queen’s sustained interest. Both fared better under James, whose reign saw more frequent artistic activity at court. Shakespeare wrote his last plays in 1612 or 1613 before retiring to Stratford, the same year Dowland was appointed court lutenist. Shakespeare died a decade before Dowland, no doubt contentedly, at the knowledge of his magnificent achievement in the theater along with his wise real estate investments, which had enabled him and his family to retire comfortably. And there the similarities end. Dowland too ceased composing and seems to have wiled away his remaining years of cushy sinecure in increasing obscurity—and melancholy, as popular attention shifted to a new generation of composers.

We can picture Dowland stewing in resentment at two younger upstarts. One was Robert Johnson, son of the court lutenist John Johnson whose vacant position Dowland failed to secure two decades earlier; the other was the viol player Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger (Dowland derided the growing fashion for the viol). Innovative collaborations in masque productions were now taking place in the Jacobean theater under director Inigo Jones, playwright Ben Jonson, and the younger Johnson and Ferrabosco, both highly talented at song writing. This was when secular music in England was migrating away from the court to the public and into the homes of amateur players. The Italian madrigal had been all the rage in England since the late 1580s, with a new school of composers like Thomas Morley, John Wilbye and Thomas Weelkes writing English madrigals designed for amateur singers. Dowland too had his hand at the English madrigal, scoring many of his songs optionally for four or five voices instead of instrumental accompaniment. But around the time of Elizabeth’s death, the madrigal craze came to a halt.

Cast as unlikely genius composer from England, Dowland’s reputation on the Continent was stronger than in his homeland (the last English composer to have achieved such renown was John Dunstable two centuries earlier). This reputation rested largely on a single song, “Flow my teares,” published in his Second Book of Songs in 1600; the same melody was scored for solo lute and elaborated in a consort set for viols, the Lachrimae or Sevean Teares of 1604. The melody’s seductive little descending theme, depicting the falling of tears, struck a powerful chord. It rapidly spread and was soon borrowed or plagiarized by composers throughout Europe, riding on the current fashion for the “melancholic” (the black bile of the four humors, or the depressive cast). It was an early example of the rapid international dissemination of a meme centuries before electronic media. The aestheticizing of despair also prefigured the Romantic hysteria that greeted Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther two centuries later, when a rash of young men copied Werther’s life down to his dress and suicide and shot themselves. The cult-hit status of Dowland’s song has survived into the present; it was the inspiration for Philip K. Dick’s 1974 science fiction novel, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, as well as featuring in Sting’s Songs from the Labyrinth.

Retrospect shows us the relative merits of past composers more objectively. While employed in Spain in the mid-1580s, Ferrabosco the elder had published two sets of madrigals to widespread acclaim. Some of these were included in Nicholas Yonge’s 1588 Musica Transalpina, which took the English musical world by storm. Most of the madrigals in the collection were by Ferrabosco and Marenzio. That these two figures were liberally represented side by side reveals much about the era’s misapprehension of artistic worth. Today’s verdict is that Ferrabosco was a composer of accomplished but uninspired music, and is remembered only for being an important conduit of Italian musical ideas into England, and for fathering a composer superior to himself, Ferrabosco the younger.

Over his thirty-five year career, Dowland composed some 200 songs and lute pieces, a modest body of work, not especially prolific. He was innovative but not radical or revolutionary. Many of his songs have memorable melodic hooks and a distinct individuality (e.g., the starkly sublime “In darknesse let mee dwell” from 1610). He had the artist’s obsessiveness and attention to detail required to lift his product above the swamp of mediocrity, and consequently his reputation beyond provincial borders to wider Europe. Nonetheless, though he attained amazing success with his “Flow my teares,” he never replicated it. Distinguished as many of his songs are, he is remembered as a one-hit composer. At most he could be described as having achieved for English secular music the gravitas and respectability enjoyed by sacred music, and thus he shares the stage with his contemporaries Byrd and Tallis. But Dowland was no Marenzio.

The madrigalian revolution

The secular art song, long dominated by the French chanson, had evolved since the thirteenth century in incremental, glacial step with the conservative pace of sacred music. Now in the latter decades of the sixteenth century it was time to explode it and see what could be done with the detritus. Beethoven did something analogous at the turn of the nineteenth century, destabilizing the facile symmetries of the Classical genres, breaking them open, enlarging them, rendering them more asymmetrical and organic, as if modeled on natural forms. At the turn of the twentieth century, Mahler, Richard Strauss and Schoenberg likewise took Wagner’s destabilization of tonality to its endpoint and beyond and unleashed soundscapes of ever more daring dissonance. Each musical revolution brings us closer to the sounds of nature—cacophony. The Renaissance Italians set about a similar task, cracking open the madrigal’s stately, measured artifice, pulling it apart, plasticizing its rhythms, making them entwine more tightly with the text, injecting the music with drama and suspense. But by destabilizing the madrigal, they turned it into something else. It blew apart, and out came the panoply of the early Baroque.

We might compare Marenzio, his contemporary Giaches de Wert and later Claudio Monteverdi to Da Vinci, Titian and Michelangelo in the visual arts respectively: they moved the state of art forward by the sheer weight of their achievements. Over his twenty-year career, Luca Marenzio wrote some 500 madrigals and sacred songs, one wrought gem of concentrated power after another, many a miniature masterpiece. Consider his madrigal “Nè fero sdegno mai, Donna, mi mosse” (from Book Four, 1587), where the six overlapping voices succeed in enacting with visceral pull the lover’s frantic rowing of his boat toward his disdainful beloved while buffeted by crashing waves: “Even though from all the foam coming from them…so many Venuses were born….” Or his “Questi vaghi concenti” (Book Seven, 1595), where the echo effects of the lover’s shouting “in these lonely and deserted hills” rebound with increasing majesty. The echo was a common cliché of madrigal word-painting (and later of Baroque instrumental music), but it takes a great composer to transfigure a cliché into musical necessity, and to do this again and again in hundreds of madrigals.

By destabilizing the madrigal, they turned it into something else. It blew apart, and out came the panoply of the Baroque.

The madrigalian revolution started in the 1560s under Wert and lasted until the opening decades of the 1600s, by which point it had morphed into something else: the aria, and the opera. England’s knowledge of the madrigal had been limited to Yonge’s 1588 narrow compilation (Ferrabosco and the early Marenzio), and it took time for the latest developments coming out of Italy to migrate to England. Meanwhile, some English composers such as John Ward were adapting madrigals wordlessly for ensemble or consort of viols, matching the four, five or six voices of the madrigal to the same number of viols. The convenience of dispensing with the Italian language was one motivation; the other was the dawning realization that the huge and growing body of madrigals provided an inexhaustible storehouse of musical ideas—and some of the profoundest music ever written.

Native works for viol consorts could be found in England since the early sixteenth century. Most of these were courtly dances and transcriptions of popular tunes and religious pieces. The new Italian influence on viol music was more inspirational than literal, giving composers license to take a musical idea and play with it as they saw fit. The name given to this type of composition was “fantasy” or “fantasia,” and hundreds were written for viol consort and solo instruments in England from the 1590s, with William Byrd setting the bar, through much of the next century, along with French-style dances and the enormously popular native English sacred melody, the “In nomine,” which had been appropriated from John Taverner’s mass Gloria tibi Trinitas of the 1520s.

The flourishing of the arts and music in England enabled by Elizabeth’s long and stable reign has earned this era the term “golden age.” Likewise the golden age of English music usually refers to the generation of composers that flourished in the last decades of her reign (Tallis, Byrd, Dowland, Morley); others extend this to those under King James (Ferrabosco the younger, Robert Johnson, Orlando Gibbons, etc.). It’s sometimes claimed that no great English music was written between the high points of Byrd and Dowland, and Henry Purcell a century later. Recent advances in period performance standards and recordings are proving these assumptions wrong. On the contrary, the real golden age occupies the space between these high points, from the death of Elizabeth to the death of Purcell.

The English consort school

We notice a deepening musical expressiveness and sophistication to viol consort compositions after the madrigal craze ends and James assumes the throne. More than any other musical genre in England in the seventeenth century, it was consort music that took up the Italian challenge. Not only that. The English consorts form the first great body of European chamber music. Until the trio sonata, another import from Italy, finally displaced the fantasia and the viol consort in the latter decades of the century, no other chamber music sounded the depths of the musical sublime with as much industry.

Unlike the trio sonata, a pragmatic type of composition that lent itself to different combinations of instruments to suit whatever musicians were at hand, consorts were composed strictly for viols. This is what lends more than passing resemblance to the Classical era’s chamber ensembles for strings, and why the viol consort can be regarded as the ancestor of the string quartet, despite belonging to a different family of instruments. Viols have flat backs, frets and five to seven instead of the four strings of the violin family, and are all played upright between the legs. Still, there is an obvious correspondence between the two families. Consorts are typically made up of two treble viols, a tenor viol and a bass viol, resembling in appearance, size and function the two violins, viola and cello of the string quartet. Many consorts are written for five or six viols, adding a second tenor and bass viol, corresponding to the string quintet or sextet. The viol consort and the string quartet involve a similar distribution of forces for the production of a comparable rainbow of sonorities.

There are also significant differences. The viol consort took the Renaissance miniature and extended and deepened it with a many-layered resonance; it’s the madrigal writ large. Conversely, the string quartet imitates the large forces of the orchestra in miniature; it’s the symphony writ small, for the drawing room. Yet both strive after and achieve something akin: a more contemplative and abstract form of composition, the perfect balance of complex forces in an intimate space: an intellectual music. Due to this shared endeavor, the English consort school is often uncannily reminiscent of the great body of chamber music that was to follow two centuries later, that of the First Viennese School and the string quartets of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.

Those of the late Beethoven in particular. Some of Orlando Gibbons’ fantasies, such as his Fantasias Nos. 2 and 6 in six parts, unfold with the limpid clarity of the “Heiliger Dankgesang” from Beethoven’s string quartet No. 15. Matthew Locke’s sturdy fantasy-fugue in four parts from his Suite No. 2 recalls the opening fugue of Beethoven’s quartet No. 14. William Lawes’s Fantasy in F minor in six parts (or equally Purcell’s Fantasia No. 2 in three parts) conjures up the bustling drive of the presto from the same Beethoven quartet. Locke’s poignant air from his same Suite No. 2 has the searching beauty of the sixth movement adagio, again, from the Beethoven quartet. It’s as if Beethoven had been familiar with these earlier composers (which of course he wasn’t), or somehow channeled their ghostly presence. The ability of all the great chamber composers to establish at the outset a durable theme or motif, a concise but commanding statement, we also find in abundance among the English consort composers, examples being the weighty opening phrase of John Jenkins Fantasy No. 7 for five parts, or the opening of Christopher Simpson’s fantasia from “Spring” of his Four Seasons. They rivet the attention the way, say, the opening of the first movement of Brahms’ first cello sonata does.

England’s Civil War which broke out in 1642 swept away the last vestiges of the English Renaissance. By the Restoration of 1660, the country was changed in many respects, not least in the arts. The great public theaters that Shakespeare had performed in were demolished, and smaller venues designed after the Italian opera house took their place. The fashion for the opera soon took off as well, by which time consort music for viols must have seemed quaint and already from another age. Locke wrote one set of consorts, in 1660, as a valedictory gesture to the genre. Twenty years later, at the age of twenty or twenty-one, one foot in the past, Purcell too wrote a set of fantasies for the viols. The Locke and Purcell sets contain some of the most affecting music for viols ever written. His other foot in the present, Purcell went on to write a set of trio sonatas and a set of quartets, both completed sometime before 1684 or 85. Of these three major works of his, the trio sonatas are the finest; they stand with the outstanding chamber works of the late Baroque—J. S. Bach’s flute sonatas, Telemann’s Paris Quartets, Zelenka’s trio sonatas, and Rameau’s Pièces de clavecin en concert. The viol continued to thrive through the turn of the eighteenth century in France under masters such as M. de Saint-Colombe and Marin Marais (both featured in the marvelous 1991 film, All the mornings of the world). By then, the English consort school had been long forgotten.

(A note on terminology: the “trio sonata” is not to be confused with the “trio” of the Classical era, that is, a chamber work for three instruments, typically the piano trio. The Baroque trio sonata is shorthand for “sonata in three parts,” the instruments dividing three melodies between them; similarly, a Baroque quartet is a sonata in four parts. Added to the melody instruments was a lute, theorbo, small organ or harpsichord continuo, providing a rhythmic or background harmony. A trio sonata thus typically employed four instruments, but could also be performed on a single instrument capable of three overlapping melodic lines, e.g., Bach’s trio sonatas for organ.)

A legerdemain of history

If these English consort composers are so great, a classical fan today might wonder, why haven’t I heard of them? Literature and the visual arts of the Renaissance are prominent enough, why not also the music of the same era? Why did it disappear with hardly a trace? The reasons are poignant, and an instructive example of the capricious and arbitrary workings of history—and our perceptions of history.

The literary and visual arts from past centuries, going as far back as early antiquity, are permanently on display in the form of books, paintings, sculpture and architecture. Music, by contrast, must be constantly recreated or it’s lost. One problem is that the instruments of Renaissance and early Baroque music fell out of use by the early eighteenth century; they stopped being made and disappeared. Most early instruments in use today are copies made from originals (China of all places is an important manufacturer of high-quality viols). The violin family had existed since the early sixteenth century but did not gain widespread respectability until a century and a half later, when it superseded the viol family once and for all. The piano likewise superseded the harpsichord, the trumpet the cornetto, the guitar the lute and theorbo, and so on. A few instruments carried on but were greatly altered, such as the oboe from the old hautboy and shawm, and the harp from the lyre. The organ survived and thrived, due to its special function as a symbolic orchestra of the Church. The entire array of Western musical instruments from their medieval and Arabic origins, in use for half a millennium in some form or another, was replaced wholesale by the classical orchestra, which stuck and remains in place today, largely unchanged. The only difference between today’s orchestras and those of 250 years ago is they are bigger and louder; their core instruments are the same.

With their disappearance, the knowledge of how to play the old instruments, and therefore the music that was written for them, disappeared as well. Scholars in musical historiography had been carrying out research on early music practices since the nineteenth century, but it was not until the 1970s when interest in period instruments spread and a new generation of classical musicians began to bring them back. After being scattered on old library shelves, music academy archives or house attics for centuries, the surviving musical scores needed to be found and understood. If the instrumental parts were not specified or rhythms and other markings indicated, as was often the case, the music had to be reconstructed, interpreted and convincingly recreated in performance. The first recordings of period performances were notorious for being hard-edged and pedantic. It has taken another generation of musicians to grow into the music, and now many recordings are superlative (some are listed below). But it remains a long-term, ongoing project.

More than any other musical genre in England in the 17th century, it was consort music that took up the Italian challenge.

And an uphill battle. There is a built-in bias against the music of the past, and the further into the past, the greater the bias. Before the Early Music revival of the seventies, the only people who had kept up any involvement in this music were amateur madrigal societies who sang a cappella compositions for fun. The very notion of being interested in the music of previous generations is a fairly recent phenomenon. It began with the Romantics in the early nineteenth century, most famously with Felix Mendelssohn’s revival performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 1829. Before that, composers and scholars showed scant enthusiasm for the history of their craft; Charles Burney’s History of Music (1789) was the first comprehensive account. The present state of composition was the only thing that mattered. We find similar attitudes among artists and popular musicians (pop, rock, jazz) in our time. Why should they care about what happened in the arts 50 or 100, or even five years ago?

The default assumption among classical audiences today is that the Western musical legacy reaches back only some 300 years, with Bach, Handel and Vivaldi suddenly appearing on the scene out of an obscure historical vacuum. This shortsightedness has resulted from a self-reinforcing ideology. As the size of the orchestra grew from the modest chamber ensembles of the Renaissance through the gradually larger Baroque and Classical orchestras, to the standard ninety-piece orchestra of the late Romantic era, the prejudice took hold that bigger is better. Classical music is thus felt to have reached its peak of development at this time. If the great nineteenth-century composers—Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms, Bruckner, Verdi, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Puccini, Mahler and R. Strauss—are the ones who are most often performed today, it’s because modern concertgoers like their classical music on the grandest of scales. The big concert halls and opera houses capable of performing these “standard repertoire” works are happy to oblige, because they can draw large audiences. Orchestras, star conductors and performers, recording artists and companies, all conspire to shore up this celebration of the Romantics (and those Modernists such as Sibelius, Bartok, Shostakovich and Prokofiev that carried on the Romantic spirit in the twentieth century), while Early Music is consigned to a niche market.

In sum, as the prevailing historical paradigm would have it, Western music flowered only gradually from modest, murky beginnings, reaching its apogee two centuries ago, before declining a century later once again into the murk of Modernist dissonance and atonality. But we may more accurately comprehend a uniform development occupying a much longer span of time: as more and more early music is uncovered and understood, the notion of Western music keeps being pushed back in time to an earlier starting date. When each earlier era is newly discovered and appreciated, whole new vistas open up, radically realigning our assessment of succeeding eras.

Notes:

For more information on the Ferrabosco affair see Richard Charteris, “New information about the life of Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder (1543-1588),” Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, No. 17 (1981), pp. 97-114.

For more historical context on the English consort school, see the entry under “Fantasia” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians (Ed. Stanley Sadie, Macmillan, 1980).

Recommended recordings:

Anthologies and sixteenth-century consort music:

Elizabethan consort music 1558-1603 (Hesperion XX, AliaVox 1998)

In Nomine: 16thC. English music for viols including the complete music of Thomas Tallis (Fretwork, Amon Ra, 1987)

Four Temperaments: Byrd, Ferrabosco, Parsons, Tallis (Phantasm, Avie, 2004)

Birds on fire: Jewish music for viols (Fretwork, Harmonia Mundi, 2008)

Music for viols: Purcell, Lawes, Locke, Jenkins (Fretwork, Virgin, 1988-96)

Christopher Tye: Lawdes Deo (Hesperion XX, Astree, 1988)

William Byrd: Complete consort music (Phantasm, Linn, 2011)

Anthony Holborne: The teares of the muses 1599 (Hesperion XXI, AliaVox, 2000)

Seventeenth century:

John Dowland: Lachrimae or Seaven Teares 1604 (Hesperion XX, Astree, 1988)

John Ward: Consort music for five and six viols (Phantasm, Linn, 2009)

John Coprario: Consort music (Savall, Coin, Casademunt, Astree, 1980)

Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger: Consort music to the viols in 4, 5 & 6 parts (Hesperion XXI, AliaVox, 2003)

Orlando Gibbons: Consorts for viols (Phantasm, Avie, 2004)

John Jenkins: Consort music for viols in six parts (Hesperion XX, Astree, 1991)

John Jenkins: Five-part consorts (Phantasm, Avie, 2007)

John Jenkins: Six-part consorts (Phantasm, Avie, 2006)

William Lawes: Consort sets in five & six parts (Hesperion XXI, AliaVox, 2002)

William Lawes: Consorts in four and five parts (Phantasm, Channel Classics, 2000)

William Lawes: Consorts in six parts (Phantasm, Channel Classics, 2002)

William Lawes: Consort music for viols, lutes and theorbos (Rose Consort of Viols, Naxos, 1992)

William Lawes: The royall consorts (Les Voix Humaines, Atma, 2012)

Matthew Locke: Consort of fower parts (Hesperion XX, Astree, 1994)

Christopher Simpson: The monthes (Sonnerie, Veritas, 1998)

Christopher Simpson: The 4 seasons (Les Voix Humaines, Atma, 1998)

Christopher Simpson: The Seasons, The Monthes & other divisions of Time (Watillon, etc., Alpha, 2005)

Henry Purcell: Fantasias for the Viols 1680 (Hesperion XX, Astree, 1995)

* * *

Like this post? Buy the book (see contents):

paperback

Kindle

Smashwords



Related posts:

A Shakespeare sex-and-violence starter kit

On harpsichords and white pianos: The challenge of music in China

Philip Glass and Tan Dun