8. Music in Seventeenth-Century England

Title page of John Hilton, Catch that Catch Can (London: Playford, 1652), Folger Shakespeare Library

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John Ward, “Weep forth your tears,” performed by Gallicantus with our very own Gabriel Crouch (conductor):

William Lawes, excerpts from Consort No. 8 in G Major (before 1645), performed by Il Caleidoscopio:

Example 8.1

Orlando Gibbons, “If ye be risen again with Christ” (before 1625), performed by the Truro Cathedral Choir, Robert Sharpe, director.

Example 8.2

William Byrd, Ave verum corpus, performed by Tallis Scholars:

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Excerpts from John Playford’s publication The English Dancing Master (1651), performed by Les Witches:

• Paul’s Steeple:

• Schottisch Tanz:

Henry Purcell, Fantasia upon One Note, Z. 745, performed by Hespèrion XX, conducted by Jordi Savall:

Example 8.3

Henry Purcell, King Arthur, Act 3 “What ho!” and “What power art thou,” performed by The English Baroque Soloists, John Elliot Gardiner (conductor) and Stephen Varcoe (Cold Genius):

Anthology 14

See also “What power art thou,” performed by the French ensemble “Le Concert Spirituel,” Hervé Niquet (conductor):

Henry Purcell, “When I am laid in earth” from Dido and Aeneas, performed by Barbara Bonney:

Example 8.4

Additional versions of the lament:

• Performed by Véronique Gens:

• Performed by Susan Graham:

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Dido and Aeneas, opera in three acts (complete), film directed by Richard Hickox, with Maria Ewing as Dido.

STUDY GUIDE 8

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Additional Digital Resources:

• Musical Creativity in Restoration England is a database of 17th-century English music manuscripts.
• Many of the largest collections of seventeenth-century broadside ballads have been digitized in the English Broadside Ballad Archive created by the Early Modern Center in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
• A 3-D tour of seventeenth-century London before the Great Fire of 1666, produced by a team from De Montfort University.

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Global Resources Chapter 8

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 Further Reading

Austern, Linda Phyllis. “‘For Musicke Is the Handmaid of the Lord’: Women, Psalms, and Domestic Music-Making in Early Modern England.” In Psalms in the Early Modern World, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd McBride, and David L. Orvis. Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/756484126

Burden, Michael, ed. Performing the Music of Henry Purcell. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/32240218

Burden, Michael, ed. A Woman Scorn’d: Responses to the Dido Myth. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/60138178

Burrows, Donald. Handel and the English Chapel Royal. Oxford Studies in British Church Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/57283035

Cunningham, John. The Consort Music of William Lawes, 1602–1645. Music in Britain, 1600–1900. Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2010. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/619611629

Gouk, Penelope. Music, Science, and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/40927065

Harley, John. Orlando Gibbons and the Gibbons Family of Musicians. Aldershot, Hants, and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/41387611

Heller, Wendy. “‘A Present for the Ladies’: Ovid, Montaigne, and the Redemption of Virgil’s Dido.” Music & Letters 84, no. 2 (May 2003): 189–208. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3526191

Herrisone, Rebecca. “Playford, Purcell, and the Functions of Music Publishing in Restoration England.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 63, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 243–90. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2010.63.2.243

Holman, Peter. Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court, 1540–1690. Oxford Monographs on Music. Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/27265398

Lindenbaum, Peter. “John Playford: Music and Politics in the Interregnum.” Huntington Library Quarterly 64, no. 1/2 (2001): 124–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817880

Marsh, Christopher W. Music and Society in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/605019363

Playford, John. A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick for Song and Violl. London, 1654. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/839045122

Pollack, Janet. “Princess Elizabeth Stuart as Musician and Muse.” In Musical Voices of Early Modern Women: Many-Headed Melodies, ed. Thomasin La May. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Aldershot, Hants, and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2005. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/54974608

Price, Curtis A. Henry Purcell and the London Stage. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/9852421

Shay, Robert. “Dryden and Purcell’s King Arthur: Legend and Politics on the Restoration Stage.” In King Arthur in Music, ed. Richard Barber. Arthurian Studies [52]. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/50334083

Uribe, Patrick Wood. “‘On that single Instrument a full Consort’: Thomas Baltzar’s Works for Solo Violin and “the grand metamorfosis of musick.” Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music 15, no. 1 (2009). http://www.sscm-jscm.org/v15/no1/uribe.html

Winkler, Amanda Eubanks. O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, Its Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/64688662