Early keyboard music

Abstract

A shadowy figure, apparently not a professional musician but a woodworker like his father, perhaps a harpsichord maker, Giles Farnaby has seemed a minor figure when compared to his most distinguished contemporaries. Yet in the judgment of the compilers of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, his compositions were considered worthy to stand beside their work and comprise about one-sixth of that anthology. Although not a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, Farnaby nonetheless contributed sacred vocal pieces to several psalters and in 1598 published his own collection of Canzonets to Fowre Voyces dedicated to a member of Queen Elizabeth's court who may have been his patron. It is facile to say that Farnaby could not command the technical resources of a Byrd or a Bull, but the real difference between him and such masters seems to be a matter of personality rather than technique. He seldom writes with the majestic dignity and grandeur of Byrd, or the extrovert brilliance of Bull, but his musical language is instead intimate and modest, on a more domestic scale. His writing, like Bull's, is firmly based in the generation of Blitheman, and from him he seems to inherit a certain unlikely wildness, an occasional oddity, caprice and daring, but with a fine judgment of the emotional effects of juxtaposed harmonies and intricate lines moving across the compass of his instrument.