Concepts of Creativity in Seventeenth-Century England
IT'S MY SONG
Solo singing in seventeenth century England
Works by John Dowland, Robert Johnson, Henry Lawes, Pietro Reggio and Henry Purcell
Robin Blaze (countertenor)
Elizabeth Kenny (lute)
Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall
Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama
Saturday 6 September 2008
19.30
Tickets: £15 (full price), £7.50 (concessions)
Box office: Telephone +44 (0)161 275 8951 (open 10.00-13.00/14.00-16.00 BST) or e-mail boxoffice@manchester.ac.uk. Tickets may also be booked using the symposium registration form, or online via the Quaytickets website.
Seventeenth-century England saw many changes to the ecosystem of patron, composer, publisher and performer, giving rise to a remarkable variety of approaches to performance, even by that most stable-seeming of combinations, a single voice and lute. Our programme explores some of these identities. The English School of Lutenist Song-Writers has Dowland at its apex, the lute and the written composition being its chief pillars in a manner of which he would have approved. Nonetheless, despite being the most iconic and personal of songs, 'Flow My Tears' - even more so than most other songs - was appropriated by players and singers to suit their own performing personalities and techniques, and this is our starting point. Singer-songwriters like Henry and William Lawes avoided some of the pitfalls of unpredictable interpreters by shaping their songs around their own voices, but negotiated a range of external influences from the requirements of virtuoso displays in the masque, to a demand for clarity of text from poets, to the need of their publishers to adapt performing materials to a post-civil war book buying market not always as skilled in extracting a performance from minimal notation as composers might have liked. Theatre musicians like Robert Johnson and Pietro Reggio left traces of a highly individual style that could be adapted to variable performance conditions in which 'character', musical gracing and special effects were intertwined. Successive generations of chapel and theatre singers were trained in the 'art of descant', which became so ingrained as to be 'natural', a paradox captured in Purcell's tribute to vocal creativity, ''Tis nature's voice'. This sort of paradox perhaps lies behind the fascination of ground basses, limited by definition yet inspiring some of the most wide-ranging and beautiful fancy, and similarly able to transcend the occasion for which they were written.
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