English Tunes Common to Playford's “dancing Master,” the Keyboard Books and Traditional Songs and Dances

Abstract

John Playford, one of whose minor works, albeit that now best-known, is the subject of this paper, stands in the midst of a landscape that is musically almost barren, and one that is, by chance circumstance, almost a terra incognita. By comparison with the ‘golden’ Elizabethan age a great part of the 17th century, lustrous in literature, science and architecture, has almost nothing to offer to the musicologist; the great body of work on English printing and publishing accomplished by the Bibliographical Society still awaits continuation after 1640; an intimate knowledge of music does not necessarily invest bibliography, nor can the musicologist necessarily identify at sight the press at which a page of music was printed, nor the provenance of its type or ornaments; lastly, the material with which John Playford sought to revive the English appetite for music, the contents of the lesson-books, by which he hoped to re-instil musical knowledge, is so slight, so small in compass, or possessed of so little except melody, that to the musician of to-day it is scarcely ‘music’ at all.