Instrumental Music from the Courts of Queen Elizabeth and King James

00:00 Five Dances: The Honie Suckle; The Faerie Round; Sie Semper; Pavana Ploravit; Galliard (Anthony Holborne, c1545-1602)
08:01 In Nomine à 4 (John Ward, 1571-1638)
11:03 Lord Willobies Welcome Home (William Byrd, 1543-1623)
12:39 Il Lamento (Thomas Morley, 1557-1602)
14:47 Fantasia à 6 (Thomas Lupo, 1571-1627)
17:40 Fantasia à 5 (Giovanni Coperario, c1570-1626)
20:31 Two Masque Dances: Williams his love; The Mountebanks' Dance (Anonymous)
23:23 Fantasia à 3 (Lupo)
25:36 The Lord Salisbury His Pavin (Orlando Gibbons, 1583-1625)
28:44 Five Dances: Pavan; Galliard; Heigh Ho Holiday; The Wanton; The Choise (Holborne)

New York Pro Musica - Noah Greenberg, Director
LaNoue Davenport, Martha Bixler & Joel Newman: recorders
Shelley Gruskin: flute, recorders, krummhorn
Morris Newman: recorders, tenor shawm
Ronald Roseman: alto shawm / Philip West: treble shawm
Robert Montesi & Don Smithers: cornett / Barbara Mueser: bass viol
Gilbert Cohen: bass sackbut / Arnold Fromme: tenor sackbut
Paul Maynard: harpsichords, organ, portable organ / Paul Fein: percussion

The Instruments and Their Makers
Recorders: sopranino, alto, bass by Arnold Dolmetsch Ltd., England; tenors by Hermann Moeck, Germany and William Koch, U.S.A.; great bass by Johannes Adler, Germany
Flute (early 18th Century) by Firth & Hall, U.S.A.
Shawms: soprano, alto, tenor by Otto Steinkopf, Germany
Bass krummhorn by O. Steinkopf
Cornetts: straight, curved in c’ and a’ by O. Steinkopf
Bass viol by Voss, Germany
Sackbuts: tenor, bass by Gebriider Alexander, Germany
Portable organ by Josef Mertin, Austria with one rank of flue pipes
Two-manual harpsichord by Frank Hubbard, U.S.A. with three sets of strings: 8’ and 4’ registers on the lower keyboard and 8’ on the upper which couples to the lower. An additional set of jacks on the upper manual operates the Lute stop.
Single manual harpsichord by John Challis, U.S.A. with one 8’ set of strings and two pedals: one controlling the forte and piano top, the other the buff stop.
Organ (Chapel of General Theological Seminary, N. Y.) by Walter Holtkamp, U.S.A., with two manuals and pedal; having forty ranks of pipes and thirty-four stops.

The high degree of development of English instrumental music toward the end of the Renaissance was a fact much appreciated at that time both in England and on the Continent. In particular, ensemble dance music by the many English Catholic musicians in exile in Germany and the Lowlands left its stamp as on the dance music of masters like Schein, Scheidt and Franck, as well as their provincial counterparts. This was, in fact, the last time in music history that England was to take the lead in exporting a musical style. Although Anthony Holborne did not reside abroad like Bull, Brade and Deering, he traveled widely. His published collections of dances are typical of this school, involving five “‘viols, violins, or other musicall wind instruments’ in rich chordal and, at times, semi-polyphonic cd oat textures. He uses few dance types—slow pavans, livelier galliards and the corantos newly in fashion—but usually gives them fanciful titles, as was the custom with French lute pieces and Italian dances and canzoni. These are not functional dances, but dance music to play and listen to. Hence Holborne — is free to indulge in wonderful rhythmic ambiguities in his galliards, often combining 3/4 and 6/8 patterns, as in ‘The Fairie Round.” The ‘‘Pavana Ploravit’’ begins by quoting from Dowland’s fabulously popular song, ‘Flow my tears’ (better known as a pavan entitled “Lacrimae’’).

A more important influence was that of English keyboard dances and variation forms on such Dutch and German masters as Sweelinck, Scheidt and Froberger, continuing in a direct line to Bach’s wonderful “Goldberg Variations’ The Elizabethan school was led off by Byrd, Gibbons, Morley, Farnaby, and Tomkins and gloried in patterned variations on English folksongs and in applying variation techniques to dances such as pavans and galliards.

Though pioneering in respect to her dance music, England's insular conservatism also came to the fore in one important genre of instrumental music. Long after continental composers had dropped the Fantasia in favor of the stylish Canzona and Sonata, seventeenth-century Englishmen continued pouring their musical energies into the ‘Fancy for viols” and that most distinctively British form, the “In nomine’’. But though John Ward, Thomas Lupo and John Cooper (alias Giovanni Coperario) and so many other composers of James the First’s reign went on writing Fantasias, they did heed the new sounds from abroad; the same changeableness and nervous unrest typical of Italy’s early baroque style is to be savored in their work.

JOEL NEWMAN