Top 40 English Lute Song

We'll be playing a program of English lute ayres of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, featuring many lesser known works by John Dowland, John Danyel, Robert Johnson and more. Themes of love found and lost, the despair of loneliness, and the sweet consolation of sleep are explored through the passionate words and music of the lute composers of early modern England.

The works on this program are English part songs from the late 16th- and early 17th-centuries. These songs were composed in 4-5 voice parts, with an assumed flexibility in instrumentation, allowing the owners of musical prints and part books to perform the music with whatever configuration of singers and instrumentalists they had access too. This included a singer-lutenist duo, with the lute playing the alto, tenor, and bass voice parts under the soprano melody sung by the singer, allowing for intimate and text-forward performances. The texts reflect the early modern English obsession with melancholy, and also the extended metaphors and complex ambiguities of the Metaphysical poets, such as John Donne, who were active in the same period.