Customer Reviews

Elizabethan Song Book: Lute Songs

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This book, a collection of lute songs, part songs, and rounds with an excellent introduction by W.H. Auden, is a fine source of Elizabethan-era English music for any who wish to study it or better still attempt it. (The only drawbacks I can find are the occasional omission of verses, e.g. for "Angelus ad Virginem," though OTOH some of the quite unsingable verses of "Nova, Nova" could have been omitted, and the binding that won't lie flat.) I once could point any interested in early music at it and at the other book Noah Greenberg edited (which covered English music from a wider chunk of time). Once through with this review, I will look for W.W. Norton's web page and plead with them to reissue the paperback versions, which no home that delights in early music should be without...

...Wait! Great news: Dover has reprinted this book, under the title _An English Medieval and Renaissance Song Book: Part Songs and Sacred Music for One to Six Voices_. If you have any interest in early music, seek it out.

Back in the sixties I had several copies of this book, read it, used it, sang and played from it. Books get borrowed or lent, and I distinctly recall the surviving copy falling apart and having to be held together with rubber bands.

The songs included here are the most sung numbers of Campion, Dowland, Rosseter, Morley, Jonson and others of the era 1580 to 1620 give or take a few years. Most of them were originally lute songs, but the accompaniments here are piano transcriptions. The melody line is clear cut, sung harmonies are optional, accompaniments interchangeable.

These songs are more than merely poems set to music. Music and verse are one with each other: the lyrics alone are inconsequential and slight, the music alone loses the cognitive quality the words lend it. In this epoch people were expected to sight read and improvise and to be able to turn a sonnet or verse with grace. In several languages!

So in trying to reconstruct a song each of Campion and Dowland I have been seeing these pages in my mind's eye. I found the words on line easily enough, as well as some MIDI sequencing of the tunes, but no sheet music. This I've spent an afternoon reconstructing and hoping I get it right. Of course, I'll be looking for a used copy... and, no, you may not borrow it!