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English Tunes Common to Playford's “dancing Master,” the Keyboard Books and Traditional Songs and Dances
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1952
Extract
John Playford, one of whose minor works, albeit that now best-known, is the subject of this paper, stands in the midst of a landscape that is musically almost barren, and one that is, by chance circumstance, almost a terra incognita. By comparison with the ‘golden’ Elizabethan age a great part of the 17th century, lustrous in literature, science and architecture, has almost nothing to offer to the musicologist; the great body of work on English printing and publishing accomplished by the Bibliographical Society still awaits continuation after 1640; an intimate knowledge of music does not necessarily invest bibliography, nor can the musicologist necessarily identify at sight the press at which a page of music was printed, nor the provenance of its type or ornaments; lastly, the material with which John Playford sought to revive the English appetite for music, the contents of the lesson-books, by which he hoped to re-instil musical knowledge, is so slight, so small in compass, or possessed of so little except melody, that to the musician of to-day it is scarcely ‘music’ at all.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1944
References
* It is possible that their Archives, many of which have since been either transcribed or collated, were not available for examination in Miss Middleton's day.Google Scholar
* Baring-Gould's Songs of the West came out in 1889; the annotated edition, following Chappell's mode of annotation, two yean later.Google Scholar
* Kemp's Jig’ is a jest at the expense of the Earl of Leicester. The sub-title ‘Rowland’ in Fitzwilliam refers to the three-part farce-jig or Singspiel, Rowland, Rowland's Godson and The Third Part of [Rowland], to the tune of ‘Bony Sweet Robin’ (‘Soete Robbert’), which made Kemp and Leicester's Players famous in England, the Netherlands and Germany. The tune is immortalized in C. P. E. Bach's ‘Keinen hatt Gott verlassen.’Google Scholar
* The ‘barley’ metaphor, often carried to considerable lengths, is usually of feminine reference, “to sell barley” being a companion-phrase to “sowing wild oats.” The metaphor is so widely used and to so late a date at a certain level of parlance that it could have been implied, though not, by polite readers, suspected, in The Lady of Shalott.'Google Scholar