At 11:25 AM -0500 11/2/07, Robert Patterson wrote:
dhbailey wrote:
Jeff Beck did a wonderful acoustic guitar version back in the 60s
I find whole question of performance history and how it informs our
listening to be quite interesting. This is especially true of tune
like that for "Greensleeves", with its meandering inflected 6th
degree. Is the composer of this tune known?
I think not, and we always have to be careful to differentiate
between a tune and a particular set of lyrics, since the two were
often interchangeable. (And indeed, the "What Child Is This" lyrics
are a 19th century addition or contrafactum, I believe.) According
to Wikipedia:
"Greesleeves" is a traditional English folk song and tune, basically
a ground of the form called a romanesca.
A broadside ballad by this name was registered at the London
Stationer's Company in 1580 as " in the surviving A Handful of
Pleasant Delights (1584) as "A New Courtly Sonnet of the Lady Green
Sleeves. To the new tune of Green sleeves." It remains debatable
whether this suggests that an 'old' tune of "Greensleeves" was in
circulation, or which one our familiar tune is. Many surviving sets
of lyrics were written to this tune.
The tune is also found in several late 16th century and early 17th
century sources, such as Ballet's MS Lute Book and Het Luitboek van
Thysius, as well as various manuscripts preserved in the Cambridge
University libraries.
A widely-believed (but completely unproven) legend is that it was
composed by King Henry VIII (1491-1547) for his lover and future
queen consort Anne Boleyn. Anne, the youngest daughter of Thomas
Boleyn, rejected Henry's attempts to seduce her. This rejection is
apparently referred to in the song, when the writer's love "cast me
off discourteously." However, it is most unlikely that King Henry
VIII wrote it, as the song is written in a style which was not known
in England until after Henry VIII died.
It is widely acknowledged that Lady Green Sleeves was at the very
least a promiscuous young woman and perhaps a prostitute.[1] The
reference to the colour of her sleeves suggests grass stains from a
recent rendezvous with a suitor. Additionally, in England the colour
green was associated with prostitution. It is said that the green
sleeves were removable and required to be worn by prostitutes as a
label of their profession.[citation needed]
[Sleeves in general were separate from bodices in this time period,
and were made to be tied on and thus interchangeable. --John]
An alternative explanation is that Lady Green Sleeves was, as a
result of of her attire, incorrectly assumed to be immoral. Her
"discourteous" rejection of the singer's advances quite clearly makes
the point that she is not.[2]
In the page 500 of the Canterbury Tales (Penguin Classics, ISBN
0-140-42438-5), the translator Nevill Coghill explains that "green
(for Chaucer's age was the color of) lightness in love. This is
echoed in 'Greensleeves is my delight' and elsewhere."
Never mind that "traditional English folk song" is simply a way of
saying "we don't have a clue who wrote it, but obviously someone did!"
But even in much more recent history, where the composer is
well-known, questions abound. Here are two thorny ones from the
world of horn music. Brahms wrote is horn trio for the natural horn,
but because it was so difficult without valves, and because
valve-horn playing was so well-established by then, most performance
in his lifetime were probably on valve horn.
I think he's known to have said he preferred the sound of the natural
horn, but he wrote parts that could not be played without valves
(i.e., the horn in B natural basso in one of the symphonies, a
transposition of a tritone on F horn!).
This leaves aside the whole thesis of Richard Taruskin (e.g., google
his book, "Text and Act") that historically informed performances
are not really about hearing, e.g., Bach the way an early-18th cent.
person heard his music. He thinks that is not possible. After all,
unlike the 18th-century person we've also heard Strauss,
Stockhausen, and Pink Floyd, and even the most rigorous historically
informed performance has jets flying overhead and car horns blowing
outside. (These days, probably cell phone beepers too.)
And back in the day the street hawkers singing their wares would also
have been a problem! But Taruskin's thesis relies a bit too much on
pure theory and philosophy for me. The fact is that an excellent
modern baroque orchestra DOES sound quite different from an excellent
modern orchestra using 19th century performance practices, making the
sound new, different, and for my ear very attractive. Then of course
there are the nitty gritty details of phrasing, ornamentation, and
all the rest of them that CAN be learned and applied, and it doesn't
really matter on a practical level whether our ears have been
"tainted" by other musical styles. We really are capable of doing
more than one thing!!! Once we read JJ Quantz saying that a cadenza
should be playable in one breath, it does call into question the
gradual accretions of 10-minute cadenzas that proliferated in the
19th century.
A cycnic might add that they also allowed the recording industry to
sell a whole new set of standard rep recordings to their audiences.
Well, I certainly prefer hearing (or playing!) the overture to
Meffiah as a proper French Baroque overture, and not as a travesty
that reminds one of lumbering hippopotomi!
John
--
John R. Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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