You're right Jim,
and many paintings by renowned artists show bawdy stuff to back up your
claim. Why would a musician not tackle the same stuff?
Also, in such dire times some fun would surely have been welcome.
I am surprised about the lack of common sense applied to history. These
were not aliens, they were human beings, with sometimes very weird
habits. Just like today.
Am 10.08.2018 um 17:12 schrieb Jim Dunn:
I'd say it's more than likely named for prostitutes, and Purcell very
likely wrote the dirty stuff, especially after the Chapel Royal purge
forced him to chase other income streams⦠Plus wan't he supposed to be
rather fond of singing in the pub?
I think we often underestimate the place of the bawdy in Early Modern
life and its sense of humour â the ever prevalent protest of the pious
can go some way to indicating how rude everyday life was for most but
the very top strata of society. In a city you were pretty much pressed
up against various bodily functions and those who service them, and the
satire they inspire as well as the battle against them seem just as
present. After all, Pepys is a lusty gent, and the British at least had
a great love of saucy anatomical street names...
When thinking of past sexual morality I'm often reminded of a 17th C
German prayer sheet (on p. 106 here [1]https://bit.ly/2M6Guml ) where
Christ's wounds and a nail are pretty unashamedly sexed up, as if to
repurpose sexual feeling as devotion. I'm not saying that this reveals
any pious motivation behind any naughty tunes by Purcell or Lasso or
others, but I do think it's revealing about how both sacred and sexy
were on people's minds enough that someone would try to reconcile them
so awkwardly.
Doesn't do it for me though *quietly vomits*
On 10 Aug 2018, 13:07 +0200, r.turov...@gmail.com, wrote:
Another Purcell item, priceless-
"On the night he was wedded quoth Inigo Jones etc,
..in I go Jones!"
Sent from my iPhone
On Aug 10, 2018, at 5:37 AM, Alain Veylit
<al...@musickshandmade.com> wrote:
I seem to remember reading about Purcell being particularly targeted
by this kind of mirthy-ful mis-attribution. My memory can well be
wrong. Most of Purcell's music was published posthumously and it was
very prolific (800 works for someone who died at age 36). Playford,
the publisher of the Orpheus Britannicus, may have had an interest
in stretching the attributions of (particularly bawdy) pieces to a
famous and respected musician, if only just for fun and financial
gain --
I am a little bit suspicious that such a high brow musician could
also be the celebrated author of so many popular tavern songs. It is
not impossible that he actually wrote 200 songs and 50 catches, all
the while composing more serious stuff on the side just to make a
living, but it does not seem impossible either that among those 250
very profane works some popular tunes directly issued from the
taverns found their way under his name, for sheer publicity
purposes. "Pox on you" and the "Indian queen" might be the fruits of
the same mind, but did he have time to do both really? I admit I
don't have any solid proof, but I am also highly suspicious of
English publishing practices at the time (before the first
copyrights law) . I would be happy to be proven wrong and recognize
a truly ubiquitous genius. Also, theater music was definitely a
source of income, but catches were unlikely to provide much
financial support to the composer, while they would be for a
publisher.
Just imagine if J.S. Bach was credited by a contemporary publisher
with a song entitled "Once, twice, thrice, I Julia tried", would
that raise an eye brow?? Just curious: did Mozart compose anything
we'd consider "bawdy" or tavern material?? Or other composers,
besides Lasso??
On 08/09/2018 10:06 PM, howard posner wrote:
On Aug 9, 2018, at 9:15 PM, Alain Veylit <al...@musickshandmade.com>
wrote:
Like Henry Purcell, who seems to have found his name attached to a
very large number of bawdy songs in 17th century England, if I
recall correctly.
Is there any reason to think he didn't write the music for all those
catches? I'm not aware that his authorship has ever been questioned.
He lived in an age of relaxed sexual mores and worked a great deal
in the theater.
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References
1. https://bit.ly/2M6Guml
