Singing Potatoes
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Sunday, 3 August 2003
Unexpected Progress

For years I've had a love-hate relationship with the music of John Dowland. I love his lute songs, but I've always found them too hard to play.

I decided that I would, come Hell or high water, learn to play at least I saw my Lady weepe, my favorite of his lute songs. Unfortunately, the first page of it seems to have disappeared from my collection, so today I went to the library to replace it. Though they did have it in a modern edition, I checked the microfilm catalogue and found that they had a copy of the original 1600 edition, so I printed it out from there. Just for grins, I also printed some of my other favorite Dowland songs from the first and second books of Ayres.

To my utter surprise, I was actually able to sight-read through them, albeit slowly, and with only slight trouble due to the fact that the 'e' used in sixteenth-century lute tablature, lacking the middle 'crossbar', looks an awful lot like a 'c', especially when folio-sized pages are reduced to 8½-by-11 sheets. Even Flow my teares went astonishingly well.

I can't account for why I'm suddenly finding Dowland much easier to play, but I'm certainly not going to complain.

Posted by godfrey (link)
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Comments
Why are Elizabethan songs so sad? Is this where country music comes from?
Posted by Ginevra on 4 Aug 2003 06:57
There is indeed a direct lineage; compare any of today's country music with Thomas Campion's I am so lonesome I could weepe, Robert Jones' Breake not mine Hart, for mine Hart acheth unto breaking or John Adson's seminal madrigal Were it not for bad Lucke, I'ld haue no Lucke at all.

Posted by Godfrey on 4 Aug 2003 08:38
You made that last one up, didn't you? :)
Posted by Ginevra on 4 Aug 2003 09:31
I admit nothing.

Posted by Godfrey on 4 Aug 2003 10:07
Your sight reading skills have been pent up over years of putting up with the rest of us. They had to break out.

And hey, its not like the pieces were BURGUNDIAN(Lunchbox,pass the matches and sweet Trinidado, please) or anything.

But the real reason is all of the visualization I have been doing on your behalf. Whenever I hear lute on the radio, I immediatly picture you playing.

Sid
Posted by Sid on 4 Aug 2003 16:42
I don't know why you all are always ragging on the Burgundians. It's just like mediæval jazz.

Posted by Godfrey on 4 Aug 2003 16:58
I think the formulaic problem with the Burgundian music was:
(low skill/little preparation time)*pressured performance=smokable charts.
Posted by The Lunchbox on 4 Aug 2003 19:11