English edition · 2026 · paperback 6×9, 156 pp.
John Dowland. The First Booke of Songes or Ayres (1597)
A Historical-Analytical Study · Claudio Nuzzo
In 1597 John Dowland published the First Booke of Songes or Ayres, a collection that helped transform the history of English song with lute. This volume offers a complete study of the book: it reconstructs the poetic and musical contexts of the ayre, examines the theory of Morley, Ornithoparcus, and Campion, and presents individual analyses of all twenty-one vocal pieces.
Originally written as a Musicology dissertation at the University of Pavia’s Cremona school, the study has been fully revised for the four-hundredth anniversary of Dowland’s death. A substantial 2026 Postscript places the original analyses in dialogue with recent work on book materiality, courtly networks, melancholy, voice, historical pronunciation, mode, and cadential expectation.
Written for musicologists, performers, students, and readers of Elizabethan culture, the book includes a glossary, cadential plans, complete song texts, and an updated scholarly bibliography. It is both a rigorous study and a tribute to the enduring vitality of Dowland’s music.
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John Dowland’s First Booke of Songes or Ayres, published in 1597, is a monument of Elizabethan culture: poetry, song, lute, and print design combine to form a work of exceptional coherence.
Claudio Nuzzo analyses its twenty-one vocal pieces through the relationship among poetic text, form, counterpoint, and cadential organisation. First developed at the University of Pavia’s School of Palaeography and Musical Philology, the study was completely revised and updated in 2026. A substantial Postscript surveys new perspectives on biography, print materiality, court politics, melancholy, voice, and performance practice.
Rigorous yet readable, this is a book for scholars, performers, and anyone wishing to enter Dowland’s poetic and musical workshop four centuries after his death.