Steve Mansfield wrote:
Help please!
Can anyone point me at any settings (other than Thomas Arne's) of the song 'Blow, blow, thou winter wind' from Shakespeare's As You Like It? There's nothing coming up on JC's tune finder.
There is an anonymous tune from the time of Shakespeare (possibly even the one used by Shakespeare) in John Runge's "It was a lover and his lass" - a collection of original songs from Shakespeare's plays arranged for voice and guitar.
I believe the same tune also is in Edward W. Naylor's great 1898 book "Shakespeare and Music".
Unfortunately I seem to have lost my copy of Runge's collection, and the Naylor book I found at a public library a thousand kilometers away from where I live today, so I can't help you much more than that.
I don't know whether Morley set it, he certainly did 'There Was A Lover And His Lass'.
He definitely didn't. "It was a lover and his lass" is the only known work by Morley with any Shakespeare association at all, and even then there's no reason to believe it to be anything more than that the two just happened to pick up and use the same poem. Morley doesn't seem to have been involved in theatre/masque at all. That field was mainly left for the younger generation of Elizabethan composers like John Coprario, Robert Johnson and to some extent the Campian/Rosseter duo and John Dowland.
If you're looking for original Shakespeare music in general, Robert Johnson would be the composer to check out. There seem to be strong evidence that some of his songs (including "Hark, hark the lark", "Where the bee sucks" and "Full fathom five") were indeed the ones used by Shakespeare.
First you should try to locate a copy of Naylor's book though. And don't let the publishing date put you off. Yes, it was written during a period when objetivity was a virtue virtually unkown among musicologists, but Naylor was unique - with a understanding and *respect* for his sources decades ahead of his contemporaries.
Frank Nordberg http://www.musicaviva.com http://www.irish-banjo.com http://www.blues-banjo.com
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