The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (58 page)

If you are keen to play along with the musicians of Elizabethan England, you will have plenty of opportunities to do so. However, it may not be as easy as you think. Music is not written or printed in the modern way. Although the notes are depicted in more or less the same form, there are no bar marks. This makes it very difficult to play in time together – especially because music books are not printed with all the parts of a five-part piece on the same page. They are designed to be dismantled and handed out to the various players, who only have their own part. Take a music book like Anthony Holborne’s
Pavans, Galliards, Almains and Other Short Aeirs Both Grave and Light in Five Parts
(1599) and you will see that all the canto parts to all sixty-five pieces of music are printed in one section, all the alto parts in another, and all the ‘quinto’, tenor and bass parts in separate sections after that. Therefore you cannot see what the other parts are doing. Music stands are very rare; normally music is laid on a table.

The instruments also vary from their modern equivalents. A lute is not like a guitar. Its head is at a right angle to the neck, its gut strings are all in pairs or ‘courses’, and it may have anything from six to ten courses, with the strings of lower courses tuned an octave apart from one another. The standard tuning is in fourths, with a
major third between the central pair of courses; but there are many variations on this. Easier to play is the cittern, which generally only has four courses, a flat back and an angled neck. Large bass versions are known as ‘bandoras’, and intermediate ones as ‘orpharions’. Instruments of the viol family, whether small ones the size and shape of a violin or large ones the size of a cello, are strung with six strings, all made of gut. As for wind instruments, trumpets do not have valves. Flutes are made of wood. Keyboards instruments include the organ, the medieval hurdy-gurdy and the harpsichord and its variants: the spinet and the virginals. Harpsichords are stringed instruments in which plectra pluck the strings when the key is pressed. In a spinet the strings are at a 45-degree angle to the keyboard, not perpendicular to it (as they are in a proper harpsichord). The third member of the harpsichord family, the virginals, is a smaller, rectangular instrument in which the strings run parallel to the keyboard. As a result it is small, light and portable – most of them are constructed without legs – and therefore very popular. As the virginals have keyboards that are not dissimilar to a modern piano, they will be among the easiest instruments for you to play.

Another reason you might have difficulty making your way as a musician in Elizabethan England is the low status of most performers. You would have thought that, with such a wide interest in music, players would be highly respected. However, musical ability is so common that many people place no great value on skill. A poor man with a musical instrument is first and foremost a poor man; his ability to play music does not make any difference to his status. In 1573 no fewer than fifty-six itinerant musicians are arrested for vagabondage in Essex.
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Women cannot make money from music – paid positions are not open to them – and there are precious few opportunities for men to gain status or money as musicians. Puritans are hostile to singing and the playing of the organ in churches, and many parishes play safe by not encouraging music at all. As a result musicians and composers are dependent on the court, the cathedrals and the patronage of aristocrats and town corporations. Official groups of musicians called ‘waits’, consisting of four or five men, are employed by many of the larger towns. Public performances are organised in the towns on Sundays – in London these take place at the Royal Exchange – and at official receptions and other functions. But being a town musician will not make you wealthy. Members of the
Cambridge Waits in 1567 are paid just £2 per year; you will have to supplement this by playing at weddings and public celebrations, or by performing privately at the houses of noblemen if you are a virtuoso.

English music is not well known outside England in 1575, but that is all set to change: the last quarter of the century brings English music to the forefront of European critical attention. Religious music shows a strong recovery after the low point of the Reformation, when the choirs of abbeys and priories found themselves suddenly unemployed. Although many congregations only sing hymns and psalms, as allowed by the Religious Settlement of 1559, the cathedrals keep the tradition of religious music and polyphony alive. So too do noblemen’s private chapels – including, most importantly, the Chapel Royal and the chapels in Catholic households. Men start as choirboys and progress to being choirmasters or organists (or both), and then learn to compose their own music for the organ or the choir. The leading composers of the day, Thomas Tallis, William Byrd and Dr John Bull, are employed to perform in the Chapel Royal even though all three are Catholics. They continue to compose motets and Masses even though these cannot be performed in public. It is ironic that the greatest musical achievement of the reign, Tallis’s motet ‘Spem in alium’, one of the most famous pieces of polyphony of all time, has to be performed behind closed doors. To hear it in its full glory, sung by eight choirs, each of five voices, you will need to go to the Nonsuch Palace, where the Catholic earl of Arundel has it performed and where the music is kept in his library.

There are no such limitations on the singing of psalms.
The Whole Booke of Psalmes
by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, printed by John Day in 1562, proves so popular that it remains in print for more than 250 years. Composers such as John Farmer, Giles Farnaby, Thomas Ravenscroft, Thomas Morley and William Byrd are producing anthems, canticles, plainsong chants and new settings for alternative versions. Some of this music will be familiar to you: Psalm 100, for example – ‘All people that on Earth do dwell’ – is sung to the same tune as in the modern world, although the four-part setting by John Dowland might cause you some confusion.

In 1575 the queen grants an exclusive monopoly on printing music (for twenty-one years) to Thomas Tallis and William Byrd. Their initial joint publication of ‘sacred songs’ is a disaster; they lose so
much money that no further publications are planned in Tallis’s lifetime. But after his death in 1585, Byrd begins to realise the potential of his monopoly. He gets together with a new printer and, in the last eight years of his patent, oversees the publication of twenty books of music, four of them consisting of his own compositions. Soon everyone who has the ability to do so starts publishing new songs. And most of this new work is not remotely sacred. Indeed, secular music is another reason to call Elizabeth’s reign ‘a golden age’.

At the start of the reign most secular music composed for the court consists of dances, such as slow and stately pavanes or sprightly and energetic galliards. There are also scores of popular songs and ballads, many of which are collected in the four books published early in the next reign by Thomas Ravenscroft: you may be familiar with tunes such as ‘Three Blind Mice’ and ‘Three Ravens’. But everything changes in 1588, when a book of Italian madrigals with English lyrics,
Musica Transalpina
, appears. Many composers in England, including those who learnt their music in a cathedral choir, are inspired to write madrigals for three to six voices. Even the Catholic court composer William Byrd is touched by this new fashion and writes a couple of madrigals in 1590. In 1601 Thomas Morley edits an anthology of twenty-five madrigals by the twenty-three leading composers of the day in honour of the queen, entitled
The Triumphs of Oriana
. The two men who command the greatest success in the genre of the madrigal are John Wilbye and Thomas Weelkes. They are chalk and cheese in terms of personality: Wilbye is a cautious and tidy man, his music exceedingly polished, who never offends his patron (Lady Kytson) and grows old in retirement. Weelkes is the nearest thing to an Elizabethan rock ’n’ roller, famous for his drunkenness, blasphemy and bad behaviour as much as for his brilliant musical achievements. On one occasion during evensong at Chichester Cathedral (where he is employed) he urinates from the organ loft on the dean below.

After madrigals it is the ‘air’ that becomes the flavour of the moment. The craze for these single-voice songs accompanied by a lute is started by John Dowland, a brilliant lutenist in his own right, whose
First Booke of Songes or Ayres
appears in 1597. It is as influential as
Musica Transalpina:
now composers compete with each other in producing airs. Thomas Morley, in true ‘battle-of-the-bands’ spirit,
replies to Dowland’s offering with his own
Canzonets or Little Short Aers
the same year. The following year Michael Cavendish produces his
Ayres in tabletorie to the lute
and Giles Farnaby his
Canzonets to Fowre Voices
. In 1598 Thomas Morley acquires the monopoly on publishing music previously enjoyed by William Byrd and enthusiastically prints his fellows’ work. By the end of the reign he has brought out nine further collections by himself, John Danyel, Robert Jones and the master of the form, John Dowland. He also publishes the first collection of airs by the remarkable physician, poet and composer, Thomas Campion.

Just as exciting is the growing demand for instrumental music, especially works for solo virginals and solo lute, and ‘consorts’ (groups) of viols, flutes and lutes. If you want to hear such pieces you should watch out for performances of lute music by John Dowland, virginals music by Giles Farnaby, William Byrd and John Bull, or the court dances written for viol consorts by Bull, Byrd, Dowland and Anthony Holborne. It is a glittering musical array – London will not be home to such a wealth of musical talent again for many centuries. It is very much a community of musicians too. They might be rivals, but they speak warmly of each other, perform each other’s music and even write new music for each other. In the 1590s Thomas Morley, William Byrd, John Bull, Giles Farnaby and John Wilbye all live in the parish of St Helen Bishopsgate – and so does William Shakespeare. Thomas Morley sets two songs from Shakespeare’s plays to music and publishes them: ‘O mistress mine’ (from
Twelfth Night)
and ‘It was a lover and his lass’ (from As
You Like It)
. No wonder Shakespeare reflects on music so positively.

DANCING

Music and dancing go hand in hand in Elizabethan England. You have already heard how, on entering a tavern, you are likely to have a fiddler and bagpipe player entice you to dance. All physically able people dance, not just the young. You might come across folk dances such as ‘the satyr’s dance’, ‘the soldiers’ dance’, ‘the hay dance’, ‘the shipmen’s dance’, ‘the children’s dance’, ‘the maidens’ dance’, ‘the old men’s dance’, ‘the winding dance’ and ‘the barefoot dance’ – all of which are mentioned by William Horman. These are intended to
involve as many people as possible, so that every woman can dance with every man (and thus her favourite) within the social and moral security of the occasion. Thoinot Arbeau, who publishes a manual of dance in 1589, mentions several other country dances, such as the washerwomen’s dance and the Scottish dance, referring to them collectively as ‘branles’ or ‘brawls’. They are very similar to medieval carolling, in which people hold hands and perform simple steps. Some of them include a special feature: in the ‘dance of the candlesticks’, for instance, people light candles from one another as they pass between pairs.

One of the most common forms of dance is morris dancing. Originating in fifteenth-century Moorish dancing, this is very much a spectacle – not for everyone to join in but to be performed by practised troupes of dancers, with feathers in their hats, bells on their boots and scarves tied to their wrists. In 1577 Lord North pays 2s 6d for a group of morris dancers with their accompaniment of fife and drum to entertain him and his household at Whitsun, the traditional time for morris dancing in England.
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It may be seen at other times of the year too. In March 1559 Henry Machyn notes that the queen, after watching an artillery display and two bears baited at Mile End, is entertained by a troupe of morris dancers.
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Much of the court music we encountered above is composed specifically for dances. Generally these can be divided into two sorts:
basse dance
, in which your feet stay on the ground, and
haute dance
– in which they do not. The original
basse dance
is still danced by old men and women, but according to Arbeau it has been unfashionable at court for forty years now. Instead newer forms of
basse dance
are in vogue: the pavane, a slow, stately processional dance, and the slightly faster almain. Gentlemen wishing to ask ladies to dance should remove their hats with their left hand, and offer the right hand to their partner to lead her out to dance. Most court dances presume that men and women will dance in pairs. Some slow dances allow a man to dance with two female partners, in which case he should lead his chosen women out in turn, one after the other, by the right hand. After the dance a gentleman should thank his partner (or each partner), bow to her, and escort her back to where he found her before the dance. In case you are wondering, ladies are permitted to ask gentlemen to dance. Note that it is bad manners to refuse an invitation.
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The galliard and coranto, both of which are types of
haute dance
, are more exciting than the slow processional dances. The pair dance around the hall a couple of times together to the quick tempo of the music and then they separate, so they can each show off their dancing skills with hops, half-steps, fast steps, twists, side-steps and leaps. Men might be seen to perform high kicks, jumps and turns of 180 degrees or even 360 degrees in mid-air. Ladies, encumbered by their skirts, cannot leap very high and it would not be seemly for them to kick; but they are expected to keep up with the fast-moving men. Obviously you cannot improvise such moves: you will need to go to one of the many Italian dancing masters who have settled in London. Alternatively, after 1574 you can seek tuition in the various London dancing schools, which are now open again (having been closed down by Queen Mary in 1553). The queen dances galliards to keep fit, often completing six or seven of them in the morning. However, it is unlikely that you will see her dancing a variation on the galliard called
la volta
: in this fast dance the gentleman lifts the lady by placing his left hand on her far hip and his right hand at the bottom of her corset, beneath her legs. It is no surprise that Philip Stubbes sharpens his quill and vents his spleen against ‘the horrible vice of pestiferous dancing in England … What clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what smouching and slabbering of one another: what filthy groping and unclean handling is not practised everywhere in these dancings?’ Stubbes would have women dance only with women and men dance only with men, ‘because otherwise it provoketh lust and the fire of lust, once conceived … bursteth forth into the open action of whoredom and fornication’. Despite such censure, even he has to acknowledge that dancing ‘in England … is counted a virtue and an ornament to man, and the only way to attain promotion and advancement, as experience teacheth’.
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