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Circle Singers : Program Notes for May 2007
No one seems to be sure of the origin of the word "madrigal," but it was first used for a type of secular poetry in the early14th century in Italy. Not long after, the poetry began to be set to music. But this madrigal was not long-lived in either the literary or musical sense, and was superseded by other forms before the end of the 1300's. The term reappeared in Italy in the 1520's, again first in a literary, and then a musical sense. The poetry was not particularly defined in terms of number of lines or stanzas, or rhyme schemes. The only constant seemed to be that there were seven or eleven syllables in each line, or some combination of the two. Texts often had pastoral or love themes, usually serious, but not always. The great composers of 16th century Italy (not all of them native Italians), including Palestrina, Lassus, and Gabrieli, all composed musical settings. They were primarily a capella settings for four or five voices, but sometimes for three or as many as eight. During the second half of the 16th century, the Italian style exerted enormous influence over the rest of Europe and England. Some of England's greatest composers absorbed, adopted, and adapted the madrigal style. They first translated, and then paraphrased the Italian texts, and set them to new music. Interestingly, although this was the age of Shakespeare and Spenser, only a few of their texts were incorporated into the madrigal musical literature. Most of the English texts were lighter, on pastoral subjects that included references to shepherds and nymphs, the goddess of the hunt Diana, and similar characters. They would have been performed by musically educated amateurs in their social circles with one singer on a part, originally. But in the 18th century, there was a revival of interest in these works and the formation of madrigal "societies" that would have included several singers on each part. Today, they are performed by groups specializing in early music, madrigal singers in secondary schools and universities, chamber choruses, and friends gathering for some informal music-making. Love, spring, shepherds and nymphs, singing and dancing, and all things beautiful are themes of the madrigal texts. Thomas Morley is the composer with whom we most closely associate the English madrigal. He was strongly influenced by the style of the Italian Giovanni Gastoldi, who used short poems punctuated with fa-la's and other nonsense syllables. Two of Morley's best-known madrigals heard today follow the same pattern. Now Is the Month of Maying and Sing We and Chant It have 5, 6, or 7 syllables to a line, followed by fa-la. In these pieces, the voices generally sing all together, with a little more independence in the refrain. The opening piece, Sing We at Pleasure by Thomas Weelkes, is a more complex setting. The two soprano parts chase each other throughout, with first one taking the lead, then the other. But listen especially to the dancing and skipping of the basses in the refrain. In both the Italian and English madrigals, composers used "aural" means to represent the "visual." In a simplistic example, words such as "rise," "sky," or maybe "heaven" would be depicted with ascending musical lines, while descending ones were used to show the opposite. This "tone painting" was so much a part of the madrigal composition of the sixteenth century that it is known "madrigalism." In Fair Phyllis I Saw, you can hear each voice wandering "up and down" as the shepherd searches for his love, then everyone coming together when the lovers are united. The young lover asks his maiden, Whither Away So Fast? and the voices run after each other throughout the piece. In Sweet Suffolk Owl, only the sopranos sing the phrase "thou singst alone," and the voices call to each other echoing the bird's "te whit te whoo." In 1601, Morley published an anthology of madrigals called "The Triumphs of Oriana." Morley asked a number of composers to compose a madrigal in honor of Queen Elizabeth I (a.k.a. Oriana or Glorianna) and published 25 of them. John Bennett's All Creatures Now was one of the pieces in the collection. The text includes all the typical images of spring: flowers, birds, and shepherds, until the "entrance" of the Queen. The music is less playful and more in the nature of a procession at the words "See where she comes with flowery garlands crowned, Queen of all queens renowned." And, as required by Morley, the final phrase is "Long live fair Oriana." William Byrd also honored Her Majesty in his six-voice madrigal This Sweet and Merry, Merry Month of May. All the splendors of the season are described: birds do sing, beasts do play, and all greet Eliza, the "beauteous queen of Second Troy," with a song. Byrd hopes that she will accept his musical offering, what he calls a trifle, or a "simple toy." It is not Elizabeth, but the May Queen invoked in others of the pieces. In Sing We, Dance We, the Summer's Queen, surrounded by young men, joins in the dance in the midst of flowers. And Robin Hood and Little John dance before the May Queen in one of the Three Country Dances by Thomas Ravenscroft. He calls it a "round," but it is really four separate works combined in a quodlibet (literally "what you please"). The basses set a groundwork, announcing what is to happen, "three country dances in one to be." Then three popular dances are added above, successively at first and finally all together, fitting perfectly. Strike It Up, Tabor exhorts the musician to play for dancing around the maypole. The tabor is a small drum, played by a musician who simultaneously plays a little flute (pipe) to accompany dancing, in this case, Morris dancing. Six men dressed in white, with bells fastened around their knees, dance in various leaping and skipping figures. They also carry white handkerchiefs - the "napkin" referred to in the song. This piece is in two sections: the first in a quick tempo of three beats, and the second with a slower tempo of two beats. This shifting between two and three divisions of the beat was a frequent device used in madrigals. It occurs again in Thus Sings My Dearest Jewel in the first of the fa-la refrains, and in other pieces for only a few measures, as where Fair Phyllis and her lover "fell a-kissing" or in the "ring dance" at the end of our final dance.
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