Hi,
you may have wondered about my lack of sting comments, well I have been
having tremendous fun lurking around various forums. It is so amusing reading
sting
fans who see him as the saviour of renaissance singing. The observer
published an article about the BBC message forum where the general tenor is
that the
CD is not so wonderful.
That is all opinion, but what is interesting is how the early music worlds
aproach to Dowland performance is viewed on the basis of one Andreas Scholl CD
in the observer article. Here are the obvious mistakes in the article..
1. What does the counter-tenor voice have to do with Dowland ?
Purcell maybe, but the majority of Dowland CD's by hip performers used
Sopranos or Tenors and nobody in the early music world has ever said that a
male
alto voice was the standard voice for Dowland.
Also we are many years away from wagner style sopranos singing Dowland....
2. Sorry but how ever quaint, Dowlands songs were not designed for singers
sitting around a table. This was a way to publish Dowlands songs, as we now
have
songbooks for Metallica. But it does not mean that metallica sit playing
their songs from music stands on stage. Many of the songs were written for
court
perormances and would have been performed by trained professionals. So they
were not designed for amateurs, but were published as the metallica songbooks
for
amateurs to sing. Even these amateurs would have had some training how ever
that might irritate some modern free spirits.
It is so amusing to hear Edin (in an interview for the DG Mag) say he doesn't
think you have to read 30 books or be part of a lute cult to be able to play
the lute well. But I think that reading 30 books about the lute and being a
member of a lute society (which is I suppose what he means) probably does help
you to understand the music more deeply.
If any of you are in Belgium for the meeting of one of those evil "Lute
Cults" look forward to seeing you there....
best wishes
Mark
There is thy Sting
James Fenton on new tunes from an old lute
Saturday October 14, 2006
The Guardian
Sting's new album, Songs from the Labyrinth, consists almost entirely of
music by John Dowland. It has caused a deal of outrage among contributors to
Radio
3's unpleasant message board. Nevertheless, the match is not so surprising:
Sting is a most distinguished popular singer-songwriter; Dowland (1563-1626)
has in recent years become a very popular composer. Dowland's Lachrimae, a
collection of dance music - pavans, galliards and almands - is, according to
one
expert, "probably the most recorded and performed collection of instrumental
music before the Water Music or the Brandenburg Concertos." Dowland represents
his age for us, as Handel and Bach represent theirs.
But this rise to fame happened rather recently, essentially in the past 50
years. The counter-tenor voice, the copies of period instruments such as the
viol, the art of the lutenist - everything had to be revived and to a great
extent reinvented before we could hear Dowland as he sounds today when sung by,
say, Andreas Scholl. By the time of the Restoration, the composer's work had
been
forgotten in England, and it continued forgotten or devalued in subsequent
centuries. Most of the lute music was not published until 1974. The complete
songs had been edited only 50 years earlier. Lachrimae awaits a proper edition.
(All this, according to Peter Holman's handy Cambridge Music Handbook to
Dowland.)What this means is that there is no authentic style, no historical
style,
for singing this repertoire. Look back a full century from now and the
tradition just peters out. It is not like the tradition of reading and enjoying
Elizabethan verse, which can be traced back without difficulty to Keats and
beyond.
Nor is it like the tradition of performing Shakespeare, which, allowing for
its regular and radical transformations, is almost continuous. It is instead a
long-broken tradition, a lost art revived. And it would be ridiculous to
suppose that the last word has been said, or sung, on the subject, or the last
insight achieved.This much should be common ground. In interviews, Sting was
careful to emphasise the historical dimension to vocal style. Dowland's lute
songs
are designed for singers and musicians sitting around a table. The layout of
the text allows for this, as the helpful booklet in the CD illustrates. This is
not the context, or the idiom, for a Brunnhilde. Sting conceded that his own
voice was untrained. But, he said, he could sing in tune, and he knew how to
sing a song - that is, he knew how to put over a song so that it would
communicate its emotion and its meaning.Nothing that the voice does on the
resulting
disc is unintended or beyond the singer's limitations. You may not like a
particular effect - you may, quite simply, not like this voice at all - but
everything proceeds from the original proposition: that a popular (albeit
unusual)
vocal style could be applied directly to this material. Looking on my shelves
for
something to compare it with, I found Andreas Scholl's A Musicall Banquet, a
recording of Dowland's son's collection of English and European songs. The
lutenist is the same Edin Karamazov who accompanies Sting, and really the two
albums have a great deal in common. Could you say that Scholl is idiomatic
where
Sting is not? I don't think so. Both styles seem to share that quality of
having been invented for the purpose. Sting's style was invented by Sting.
Scholl's style is a version of something invented by Alfred Deller.These
Dowland
songs, by the way, are common property, as much as any folk song or traditional
melody. Their lyrics, usually anonymous (but surely often by Dowland), belong
to
that great age when poet and songwriter had not yet parted company. The
language is essentially modern English, and it is not hard to find a line in a
Dowland song which, taken out of context, could have been written yesterday.
"I'll
cut the string that makes the hammer strike." Or lines which, though
identifiably archaic, are made out of elements that are in common usage: "Cold
love is
like to words written on sand, / Or to bubbles which on the water swim." This
is typically Elizabethan: "Come away, come sweet love, The golden morning
breaks. / All the earth, all the air, Of love and pleasure speaks." It is
typically Elizabethan, but, unlike the lute, we do not have to learn it, to
reconstruct its meaning or its sounds.This is our living tradition of song.
When Sting
began making his recordings he was apparently unclear as to whether they would
make an album or end up simply as a private amusement. What made the
difference for him was coming across Dowland's letter to Sir Robert Cecil,
written in
Nuremberg in 1595, setting out his grievances and protesting his loyalty to
the Queen. Short extracts from this letter are interspersed with the songs, and
given in the booklet in their original spelling.It is strange that the prose
of Dowland's letter should have been the clincher, for Elizabethan prose is
usually harder to understand than the simple verse of song. What brought the
project together was the sense that Dowland could be presented in profile, as
the
alienated singer-songwriter, wandering from court to court in his melancholy
exile.No doubt it is this dark side to Dowland that made the album feasible for
Deutsche Grammaphon, making the match of performer to his material more
comprehensible than if the composers had been, say, Campion or Morley.In the
darkness let me dwell,
The ground shall Sorrow be;
The roof Despair to bar
All cheerful light from me.
The walls of marble black
That moisten'd still shall weep;
My music hellish jarring sounds
To banish friendly sleep.Any poet, any songwriter, can return to this
extraordinary material with pleasure. It offers an example of an ideal. The
poets who
want still to split poetry from song lyric ("Poetry mistrusts language: song
cosies up to it" - George Szirtes) should think again. Our greatest
songwriters knew no such division.Nor is this great repertoire anybody's
"turf". It is
our common ground. That is the great joy of it, and why this album is so
welcome.
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