Excerpt: the Preface
The opening pages of the book. The rest — historical-methodological introduction, glossary, analyses of all twenty-one songs, 2026 Postscript — is in the printed edition.
Modern criticism has always accorded English secular music a place of considerable distinction, above all for its contribution to the formation of the late Renaissance style. On the one hand stand the complex developments of the instrumental style (the virginalists and lutenists); on the other, the vast though chronologically circumscribed repertory of the Ayre, in which the several currents of the Italian polyphonic madrigal, the French Air and the English solo Song converge.
Various composers, in the years from 1597 to 1622, tried their hand at this musical form; yet among them the figure of greatest historical significance — almost the founder of the genre — remains without doubt John Dowland (1563-1626), whose contribution to vocal and instrumental music is among the most substantial. The publication of his First Booke of Songes or Ayres (London, Peter Short, 1597), reprinted several times, seems at once to have opened new prospects to those composers alert to innovations of ‘continental’ allure.
Although Dowland’s fame is by now firmly established in the great fresco of history, his work does not cease to invite reflection; and however little uncertainty of judgement the historiographical manuals betray, there remain questions whose complexity seems almost to ‘intimidate’ criticism. There is, in truth, a far stronger stimulus behind this interest: the never-quieted astonishment at a music suspended between vocal fluidity and instrumental rigour, between expression and form. The familiar fascination of ‘borderline’ musics (the historical juncture between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) is joined by other features of no lesser suggestiveness, such as the profound melancholy that pervades the English composer’s music: of that melancholy Dowland made his own signature (the celebrated Semper Dowland, semper dolens).
Studies of the complex figure of John Dowland may be divided into three principal classes. The first, historical-biographical in character, centres on the exhaustive work of Diana Poulton, probably the foremost authority in the field, who also offers a rapid yet concise survey of the works; reference to this study is constant and indispensable. The second category comprises the restricted number of analytical studies, while the third concerns questions relating to the poetic texts chosen by the composer and included in his collections.
Most analytical studies, at least on the musical side, nevertheless reveal fundamental lacunae: the most evident concerns their sectorial character, since the critics’ attention is often absorbed by questions which, however important, cover only a single aspect of the composer’s work. In this direction tends, for example, Robert Toft’s work on the role of rhetoric in Dowland’s most ‘seductive’ Ayres, or the broader studies of Gregor Butler and of Headlam-Wells; what is altogether lacking is a thorough study of the compositional technique that would frame its fundamental characteristics. What is not lacking is interest in the essential components of the style: several studies have been devoted, at various times, to the suggestions exercised by the Italian polyphonic madrigal (and by lighter genres too) and above all by the ‘new’ monodist school. The weight of the French compositional school (the Air de cour) in the young Dowland’s formation has likewise been investigated. The comparative study of the French and Italian repertories, mediated by Poulton’s brilliant interpretation, constitutes a valid point of departure for analytical reflection, though not the only one. If it is true, on the one hand, that the repertory of the Ayre does not attain the level of the conspicuous flowerings of the Italian madrigal, it is equally true, on the other, that we find in it examples of musical art of the highest profile and, above all, of autonomous invention. What, then, are the characters and techniques that rendered this invention so noble as to arouse an interest both widespread and enduring — such that within twenty-five years no fewer than 34 volumes of Ayres appeared?
The answer is doubtless hidden in the 21 pieces (a number that recurs significantly in other collections) that make up the First Booke; and the lack of an ad hoc technical-analytical approach to so significant a monument of musical history, and not of English musical history alone, becomes graver still when joined to the almost total absence of historical and analytical literature in Italian.
The reasons for this ‘dark corner’ must necessarily be connected with the inherent difficulty of assessing and understanding the poetic texts, which are notoriously among the most ‘dense’ and elaborate of the flourishing Elizabethan literary culture. From the musical point of view matters change little: for some years criticism has been engaged in refining analytical methods successfully applicable to the Italian polyphonic madrigal (Powers, La Via, Brown), which constitute the only basis for reflection on the analytical side, but they have not yet been tested in the field of English secular vocal music.
This situation has strongly stimulated interest in the Ayre and in the questions more specifically bound up with the analysis of music between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The need for a comprehensive yet searching view of the repertory demands a concurrence of factors and analytical insights that take account, first of all, of the peculiarities of the relationship between poetic text and music (and of its rhetorical implications) and, consequently, of the composer’s contrapuntal technique — and hence of his style. If recourse to the analytical means already applied to the madrigal is an obligatory point of departure, reference to the contemporary music theory (Campion) has proved indispensable.
It was therefore decided to organise the work as follows: a general introduction to the Ayre, historical and comparative in character, presents the reader with the principal questions relating to the poetic texts and their cultural substratum, and traces in broad outline the relationship between Dowland and the French and English compositional schools, with particular attention to the literary side. There follows a presentation of the problems bound up with musical analysis and an exposition of the methods used (La Via, Brown and Campion) for the systematic investigation of the pieces, contained in Part Two. There each Ayre is first ‘described’ according to its tonal-cadential plan; this kind of scheme, as we shall see, permits the immediate perception not only of the overall harmonic direction but also of the music’s global affective trajectory in relation to the poetic text, owing to the ‘quality’ of the cadences chosen by the composer. The synthesis of the cadential processes is the point of departure for a broader reflection within each individual piece, involving in detail both the salient aspects of the poetic text and the relations between the latter and the music that sustains it. Although this analytical approach is the same for every piece, it has been necessary to furnish some of them with special schemes and tables, drawing the reader’s attention to whichever aspects are most relevant in each case.
Each piece, in the reception of its contemporaries, becomes a model of expressive coherence enclosed within the outlines of a form which, as we shall see, is almost constant and in any case well defined by a set of norms codified by tradition, towards which it stands in a continual dialectical play; analysis, therefore,
continually interrogates the music between norms and individuation; while it treats the structure as an individual case, it cannot avoid the problem of the normativity of the constituents, and only by ascertaining that normativity will it recognise the individuation (va continuamente interrogando la musica tra norme e individuazione; mentre tratta la struttura come caso individuale, non può evitare il problema della normatività dei costituenti, e solo accertando questa normatività riconoscerà l’individuazione).
The ‘total musical fact’ of the First Booke, certainly shrewder than any aprioristic schematisation, rests on the conviction of its unity: the ensemble of the individual pieces gives life to a complex structure, and each piece draws meaning from it; even though
the rationality of the structure revealed by analysis is not ‘prediction’, but the condition of its existence. The adequacy of the analytical operation is not limited to its degree of rationality and complexity; analysis remains dead if it does not grasp that existence (la razionalità della struttura rivelata dall’analisi non [sia] ‘previsione’, ma condizione della sua esistenza. L’adeguatezza dell’operazione analitica non si limita al suo grado di razionalità e di complessità; l’analisi resta morta se non coglie quell’esistenza).