Tune Thy Musicke to Thy Hart: The Art of Eloquent Singing in England 1597–1622 9781487584177

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TuNE THY MusICKE TO THY HART THE ART OF ELOQUENT SINGING IN ENGLAND, 1597-1622

Many singers today perform Elizabethan and Jacobean lute-songs, but until now no book has addressed the concerns of these performers. In this practical, illustrated guide Robert Toft outlines the principles which governed song performance and composition in the early seventeenth century, and shows how these historical principles may be used to move and delight modern audiences. The main purpose of early seventeenth-century singing was to persuade listeners by using a style of utterance that had two principal parts to sing eloquently and to act aptly. Toft discusses these two facets of singing within a broad cultural context, drawing upon music's sister arts, poetry and oratory, to establish the nature of eloquence and action in relation to singing. He concentrates on those techniques which can be transferred easily from one medium to the other. Specifically, he draws on the two aspects of oratory which directly bear on singing: elocution the methods of amplifying and decorating poetry and music with figures and pronunciatio - techniques of making figurative language inflame the passions of the listeners. The arrangement of the material has been inspired by the method of schooling William Kempe prescribed in 1 588. The first part of the book examines elocutio, for singers need to understand the structure of the songs before they can sing them well. The second part considers pronunciatio and focuses on the techniques used to capture and inflame the minds of the listeners, that is, the role of punctuation in utterance, the methods for making figures and other passionate ornaments manifest, the application of divisions and graces to melodies, and the art of gesture. In the final section, Toft applies the techniques of early seventeenth-century eloquent delivery to two songs - 'Sorrow sorrow stay' and 'In darknesse let mee dwell' - by the great English songwriter John Dowland. Robert Toft teaches at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. He is author of Aural Images of Lost Traditions: Sharps and Flats in the Sixteenth Century.

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1993 Reprinted in 2018

Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-2848-9 ISBN 978-1-4875-7354-6 (paper)

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Printed on acid-free paper Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Toft, Robert Tune thy musicke to thy hart Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-2848-9 1. 2. 1.

Performance practice (Music) - 17th century Singing - Interpretation (Phrasing, dynamics, etc.) Title

ML

457-(75 1993

Book design by Counterpunch/Linda Gustafson

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

❖ CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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3

INTRODUCTION 1

Elocutio

15

2

Pronunciatio

53

To sing eloquently

57

'All the senses satisfied' Pronouncing distinctly

57 72

'Figures and passionate ornaments made manifest' Divisions and graces To act aptly 3

108

Passionate Ayres Pronounced

NOTES

155

GLOSSARY

167

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I

LIST OF EXAMPLES INDEX

189

75 I

87

85 127

73

❖ ACKNOWLEDCiMENTS

I wish to thank all those people who made it possible for me to write this book. The need for a book such as this one became apparent to me more than a decade ago when, as an accompanist, I began coaching singers who, like me, were searching for ways of approaching English lute-songs of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries from within the culture of the period. In this endeavour, a number of singers, colleagues, and friends have been a great help to me. To all those students over the years who persevered and mastered, to a greater or lesser degree, the art of eloquent singing as I believe it was practised in the early seventeenth century, I owe a great debt of gratitude, for they provided me with the kind of workshop a researcher in this area needs. At the end of a lengthy process of putting principles derived from treatises of the period into practice, this book emerged. Robert Spencer, working separately along similar lines, most generously supplied me not only with information he had gleaned from the plays of Shakespeare but also with the engraving which graces the cover of this book. Richard Rastall read the manuscript carefully and made a number of useful suggestions for its improvement. Any errors, omissions, or misinterpretations of the material used in this study remain, of course, my own responsibility. To the Faculty of Graduate

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Acknowledgments

Studies at the University of Western Ontario, I extend my gratitude for various grants which facilitated the production of this book. And finally, I thank Margaret, Karin, Kira, and Aidan, as well as my parents, for their constant support and encouragement. Portions of this study originally appeared in 'Musicke a sister to Poetrie: Rhetorical Artifice in the Passionate Airs of John Dowland,' Early Music 12 (1984) 190-9 © Oxford University Press, and the passages

concerned are used by permission.

TuNE THY MusICKE TO THY HART

THE ART OF ELOQUENT SINGING IN ENGLAND

❖ I NTRODVCTI ON

Although attitudes toward the performance of music from earlier cultures have changed greatly in the past twenty or thirty years, the performer's task, or at least the task of those performers who are interested in performance from an historical perspective, remains the same. If we wish to re-create performing practices of these cultures, we must extrapolate from historical documents to bridge the gap that exists between those documents and actual performance. The further the culture is from our time, the more difficult the problem, especially when, to take the historical period of this book as an example, it might seem at first glance that English society at the beginning of the seventeenth century is simply an earlier form of our own culture. On closer examination, however, we realize that it is, in fact, quite a different culture. Obviously, musical style and the aesthetic underlying that style have changed markedly in the past four hundred years, and this makes us foreigners in late Elizabethan and Jacobean society. It is probably safe to assume that we -< (")

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