When I was a student at the Royal College of Music, I purchased a paperback reprint of the late nineteenth century edition of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book edited by Fuller Maitland and Barclay Squire – two fat volumes of keyboard music by Byrd, Bull, Gibbons, and a host of other composers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (‘Virginal’ is an old name for ‘keyboard’, and the original manuscript is housed in the Fitzwilliam Museums in Cambridge).
My appetite had been whetted for this music when as a schoolboy I acquired a collection of music of the same period called Early Keyboard Music, edited by Louis Osterle, which was heavily ‘edited’, with extra notes, expression marks and phrasing, in a possibly misguided attempt to make this music suitable for the modern piano. I loved this book and played from it nonstop as a 12-year old, and still do use it occasionally, despite its inauthentic qualities. It is quite instructive to compare these two editions, published within five years of each other!
At the time I was at the RCM the concept of the ‘English Musical Renaissance’ was heavily entrenched in the thoughts of some of the older professors, who were born around the time that great discoveries of early English music were being found and documented, and it’s not surprising that my composition teacher, Herbert Howells, wrote much music for the organ and the clavichord which was clearly inspired by these late Renaissance models. So I suppose, although I maybe didn’t really acknowledge it, something of that influence trickled down into my own musical language too.
So it was an interesting reminder of those days when the American composer and concert organist, Carson Cooman, asked me to contribute to a project in which he was asking around 150 composers to each write a pavane and a galliard, interpreting the traditional dances in their own way.
In his ‘Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke’ (1597) composer Thomas Morley described the pavane as ‘a kind of staide musicke’ and the galliard as ‘lighter and more stirring’. And traditionally the two dances were paired, the steady two-in-a-bar pavane being followed by the livelier three-in-a-bar galliard – and they often shared the same musical ideas, as well.
So in my contribution to Carson Cooman’s project I wrote a pair of dances which shared the same musical material, which was a twelve-note phrase based on the commissioners name, produced by using the simple device of continuing up the scale as the alphabet continues – so H is A, I is B, J is C, and so on (transposing down an octave or two to keep the notes on the treble stave.). Thus CARSON becomes CADEAG and COOMAN becomes CAAFAG. In the Pavane the music is quite free flowing and decorated, and later the twelve-note phrase becomes the basis of the harmonies rather than the melody. The dancingly rhythmic melody of the Galliard uses the same notes, repeated several times with intervening episodes and gradually introducing more decoration. And in keeping with the late-renaissance feel, the music is written for a chamber organ with just one manual, two stops, and no pedals – the kind of instrument that the wealthy might have had in their house at the time, and which would also have been used as a continuo instrument. And for today’s keyboardists, this means that it could also be played on a harpsichord, clavichord – or even a piano.
You can hear Carson Cooman’s scintillating performance on YouTube here, and if you are interested in buying the music please visit this page on my website. And thank you to Carson for giving these ancient dances a new lease of life!