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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