Pills to Purge Melancholy: The Evolution of the English Ballett

Abstract

Lionel Pike brings ideal credentials, as both a scholar and a choral director, to this worthwhile project: a study of the ballett, an ensemble vocal style originally borrowed from Italy in the late sixteenth century that eventually became truly English by the mid-seventeenth. At the outset, Pike clearly states the issues that must be addressed in dealing with a transitional repertory: modality versus tonality, polyphony versus harmonic counterpoint, and English secular music versus that of the Continent. The delicate miniature size of the ballett is a perfect canvas on which to view these vital changes in Renaissance music, and Pike is to be applauded for examining a genre whose very simplicity and lightheartedness has masked its important position in the repertory of the social music of its period. Pike defines the ballett as strophic, binary with repeats, using nonsense syllables, with light-hearted texts set syllabically, and in a major tonality usually found as modified Mixolydian or Ionian modalities. He further divides balletts into three categories: Dance, Imitative, and Contrastive. The last two of these, both with the fewest extant examples, are the most accurately defined. Concentrating on major composers—Thomas Morley, Thomas Weelkes, and Thomas Tomkins, and those he designates ‘satellites’, for instance Robert Jones and Francis Pilkington, Pike describes specific models of each title. Imitative balletts like Thomas Weelkes’s Sing we at pleasure use white notes for the light suspensions and polyphony that characterize this type. Thomas Morley’s Fyer, fyer represents the Contrastive type that alternates between the homophonic dance rhythms using black notes and polyphony using white notes. Pike also discusses madrigals that contain ballett-like traits. He analyses in harmonic, textual, and textural detail.