Sweet
Division
The years from 1550 to 1625 saw a rise in music for instrumental consort,
not the least being the music composed or arranged for multiple lutes.
Surviving music for lute consort runs the gamut of Renaissance instrumental
fare, from sprightly and fashionable Italian dances like the corranto,
saltarello, and piva, to complex and highly involved intabulations
of the finest vocal counterpoint.
In the case of intabulations, that is, the arranging of preexisting
vocal music for lute, the lutenist playing the soprano lute generally
played the top line, while the other lutenists of the consort carried
their respective lines (i.e., alto, tenor, and bass); they also doubled
the bass and added harmony and melodic ornamentation to their parts.
This versatility inherent in the lute and in lute consorts was well
suited for arranging and for composition. Small wonder, many of the
finest composers throughout the Renaissance, such as Philip Van Wilder,
Giovanni Gastoldi, and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, were themselves
excellent lutenists. They were likely to have the instrument at hand
while composing.
Few literary references from the Renaissance mention a quartet of
lutes performing together, although there are many descriptions of
ensembles of lutes in early seventeenth-century English masquing books.
One rich account is Thomas Campion’s “Description”
of Lord Hay’s Masque, which was presented at Whitehall Palace,
London, in 1607. But even here, a “deepe Bandora” is mentioned
as being played in combination with three lutes, never a quartet of
lutes alone.
Large numbers of lutenists (up to about 30) are known to have performed
together in elaborate dramatic works, including the intermedi of the
late sixteenth century and the Italian operas of the early seventeenth
century. Composers such as Claudio Monteverdi and Agostino Agazzari
used ensembles of lutes as the core of their “continuo bands”
in the earliest Baroque operas. Whereas Italian lutenists in these
operas realized an improvised part from the bass (“basso continuo”)
to accompany singers, the lutenists in English masques were more likely
to play from parts both in lute tablature and in staff notation, although
they, too, surely improvised and added ornamentation.
Since it was customary for each lutenist to have a separate partbook,
there was probably never a single score of the music made. We can
probably safely assume that many of these partbooks were lost and
that the existing music for lute consort, some 150 pieces, represents
only a small portion of the total output. It is also possible that
consort parts survive today, disguised by history as pieces for solo
lute.
A modern lute quartet needs more repertoire to create a viable performing
ensemble, so our solution is to intabulate vocal and instrumental
pieces. After studying the intabulation procedures described in Adrian
Le Roy’s treatise on lute intabulation (c. 1571), and after studying
the lute ensemble publications of Giovanni Pacoloni (1564), Giovanni
Terzi (1599), Emanual Adriansen (1584), Nicolas Vallet (c. 1618),
and works found in the Thysius Lute Book (c. 1600), members of the
Venere Quartet have created many “new” Renaissance and early
Baroque pieces for lute quartet.
Although
Michael Praetorius was a prolific composer of German sacred
music, he is best known today for Terpsichore (1612), a collection
of dance music for 4–5 instruments. These pieces have long been
a favorite repertoire for homogeneous consorts of viols, recorders,
krummhorns and shawms. Now the lutenists can join the fray! In our
arrangement of the famous “Courante” that opens our set,
a polymetric figure (4+3+3+2) in the tenor line is appropriated by
the soprano and alto lutes, who use it to accompany divisions played
by the tenor and bass. Note also the evocation of pecking chickens
in “Ballet des Coqs.”
Orlande de Lassus was one of the most prolific composers of
his day, and many of his works were intabulated for solo lute. “Veni
in hortum meum” is a Song of Songs motet; the last phrase of
the text, set in a very lively fashion, is “et inebriamini, carissimi”
(“and be drunk, dearest ones”). Lassus seems to have been
quite partial to texts, sacred and secular, that had to do with wine.
“Bonjour mon cœur,” a setting of a poem by Ronsard,
is one of his loveliest chansons. Pierre Certon’s rowdy “La,
la, la je ne l’ose dire,” on the other hand, has as its
subject back-fence gossip over local adultery.
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Program
Notes
(...continued
from previous column)
Philip van Wilder was lutenist to Henry viii, although sadly
little of his lute music survives. “Amour partes” is suffused
with a gentle melancholy, reflective of the text which reads “Love,
be gone, I cast you out, not for the harm that you have done to my heart:
but False Seeming, whose only concern is to deceive, has banished you
from my good graces.”
After the application
of moveable type to music printing, which made music available to the
Renaissance middle class, it was quite common for popular music to be
published in more than one form. The frottole of early 16th century
Italy were first published in 4-part vocal versions, but there are also
two volumes of frottole arranged for a single voice and lute. Several
intabulations of these pieces for solo lute also appear in contemporary
publications and manuscripts.
“Surge, amica mea” comes from Giovanni Luigi da Palestrina’s
collection of Song of Songs motets, published in 1584. In the foreword,
Palestrina apologizes for having set secular love poems while a foolish
youth, and offers these songs of “the divine love of Christ and
his spiritual Betrothed for each other” in atonement for his youthful
indiscretion. The sincerity of his musical repentance may be called
into question by the fact that his second book of madrigals appeared
just two years later.
Giovanni Gastoldi’s “A lieta vita,” most familiar
today from Thomas Morley’s English adaptation, “Sing we and
chant it,” is arranged in the style of Giovanni Pacoloni, whose
lute trios sound very much like written-out improvisations, full of
passing dissonances and occasional parallel unison divisions.
The only music actually published in the Renaissance for the lute quartet
in d, a, g, and d comes from a 1618–19 publication by Nicholas
Vallet, a Frenchman living in Amsterdam. The extremely detailed
contract for Vallet’s own lute quartet is still extant, and it
offers a fascinating glimpse into the employment conditions and group
dynamics of a working lute band. Vallet stipulates penalties for performing
with other musicians; he also provides for “residuals” when
an engagement calls for only a trio. His arrangements of French popular
tunes and dances blend the extroverted style of Pacoloni with an emerging
French Baroque aesthetic which emphasizes rhythmic delicacy and nuance.
Anthony Holborne was a gentleman in the service of Queen Elizabeth
I. Many of the pieces from Pavans, Galliardes, and Almaines, his 1599
collection of dances for 5-part instrumental ensemble, also appear in
versions for solo lute and cittern.
Although the lute quartet was undoubtedly passé by the time of
Marc-Antoine
Charpentier and Henry Purcell, many of their works are readily
adaptable to this medium. The four pieces performed on this program
were originally written for two violins, viola and continuo, here played
with two soprano lutes, an alto, and a bass. The Charpentier works are
found in Noels sur les instruments (c. 1690); the first is set to the
popular tune “Une jeune fillette.” The “Minuet”
from Henry Purcell’s The Gordion Knot Unty’d and the “Air”
from Abdelazar were published in a posthumous collection of his theater
music.
In Thomas Campion’s music for Lord Hay’s Masque (1607),
“Move now with measured sound” accompanies a dance by performers
costumed as trees. Some of the divisions in this arrangement are taken
from the broken consort version by Philip Rosseter. John Coprario’s
sailors’ song “Come Ashore” is from Campion’s The
Earl of Somerset’s Masque (1614). “The Maypole” (or “Joan
to the Maypole”) was used in Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner
Temple and Gray’s Inn (1613); the arrangement used here is taken
from a 5-part consort setting by William Brade. Brade’s 1617 collection
of dance music includes several pieces taken from English Masques.
Our program concludes with an Anonymous lament for Sir Philip Sidney,
an Elizabethan courtier, soldier, statesman, poet, and patron of the
arts whose death in 1586 occasioned a massive outpouring of public grief.
Sidney’s friend and biographer, Fulke Greville, recounted that
Sidney, on his deathbed, called for music “to fashion and enfranchise
his heavenly soul into that everlasting harmony of angels, whereof these
concords were a kinde of terrestriall echo.” “And in this...orb
of contemplation,” concluded Greville, “he blessedly went
on, within a circular motion, to the end of all flesh.”
©
2003 by the Venere Lute Quartet
All Rights Reserved.
Unauthorized duplication of music or materials
on this website is prohibited.
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*di·vi·sion
(d&-'vi-zh&n) n.
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French, from Latin division-,
divisio, from dividere to divide Date: 14th century. 1) The act or
process of dividing : the state of being divided. 2) The act, process,
or an instance of distributing among a number. 3) The mathematical
operation of dividing something. 4)
A musical term used in England during the 17th century for a technique
of improvised variation in which the notes of a cantus firmus, or
ground, are "divided" into shorter ones. The practice is
part of the long tradition in Western music of spontaneous variation
and embellishment.
A note
on Shakespeare's use of the word division.
Shakespeare's
reference to "sweet division" in Romeo & Juliet is, of
course, tinged with irony. In the scene, Romeo and Juliet argue about
what bird song they are hearing. Romeo, denying that it is dawn, insists
that it's the nightingale, not the lark. Juliet retorts:
It is, it
is!--hie hence, be gone, away!
It is the lark that sings so out of tune,
Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps.
Some say the lark makes sweet division;
This doth not so, for she divideth us:
To Juliet,
the lark's divisions are not sweet, but sad, because they signify that
Romeo must leave (sweet division=sweet sorrow).
Shakespeare
also uses the term ‘division’ in a musical sense in Henry
IV, Act 3,
scene
1. Lord Mortimer while reflecting on his ignorance of Welsh, the only
language his wife speaks, says:
I understand
thy kisses, and thou mine,
And that's a feeling disputation;
But I will never be a truant, love, till I have learnt thy language,
for thy tongue
Makes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penned,
Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower
With a ravishing division, to her lute.
Ironic or
not, Shakespeare's use of the musical term "division" precisely
captures the mission of the Venere Lute Quartet: passionate, collective
improvisation on gently-stroked lutes---"sweet division" at
its best.
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