The Part-Songs of the English Lutenists

Abstract

It is well-known that many of the airs of Dowland and his contemporaries were printed so that they could be performed either as solo songs or as part-songs. Every music student reads about the unusual way in which the extra vocal parts were disposed on the page, and simple airs like Ford's ‘There is a lady sweet and kind’ and Campion's ‘Never weather-beaten sail’ are probably best known to most of us in their part-song form. But on the whole modern scholarship has concentrated on the solo versions rather than the part-songs. E. H. Fellowes's English School of Lutenist Song Writers prints only the versions for voice and lute, and so do the smaller collections of Peter Warlock and Noah Greenberg. Of the part-songs, only those of Pilkington and Dowland have been reprinted in entirety, Pilkington's in the Old English Edition edited some seventy years ago by G. E. P. Arkwright and Dowland's in Musica Britannica. For the rest, only a selection is available in not always reliable sheet-music copies. This bias is reflected in most comment on the air: Fellowes and Warlock make only passing reference to the part-songs, and the same is mainly true of more recent work. Now I do not wish to suggest that, in the last analysis, this emphasis is mistaken. But I do think that the part-songs deserve closer examination, not only because of their own worth but for the deeper insight which this exercise offers into the nature of the air.