Written by Scholar-in-Residence Bruce Lamott
The English transition from the musical style of the Renaissance to the Baroque took place in a single generation, amidst the turmoil of the English Civil War (1642-1651) and the Protectorate of Oliver and Richard Cromwell’s Puritan republic (1653-1660). In the music history of great names, it is the passage from the Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan composers such as Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625), whose “The Silver Swan” is perhaps the best-known English madrigal, to the next stop: Henry Purcell. Lost in the shuffle are the composers on this program—both of whom were Purcell’s teachers—Orlando’s eldest surviving son, Christopher Gibbons, (1615-1676) and his pupil, John Blow (1649-1708). Both overcame the cancel culture of the Puritan interregnum and, as musicians at the court of King Charles II, both were highly influential in bringing the Restoration court up-to-date in musical style.
While Purcell’s works are not found on this program, his influencers are. An outstanding keyboardist like his father, Christopher Gibbons became organist of Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal, where he was succeeded by his student, John Blow. While Gibbons was best known for his church and consort music, Blow provided the pleasure-loving court with theatrical entertainments as well as liturgical music. Spectacles such as Blow’s Venus and Adonis gave English audiences an appetite for opera, then flourishing on the Continent.
Gibbons, Fantasia in A Minor
The biographer Roger North described Gibbons as “a great master in the eclesiasticall stile, and also in consort musick.” While pieces entitled fantasia by later composers frequently contained spontaneous and improvisatory passages—as the word fantasy would suggest—fantasias written for instrumental consorts were more often works written in the continuously polyphonic style of 16th century sacred vocal music. Earlier seventeenth century consort music was often written for like instruments in varying sizes, such as the treble, alto, and bass viol (aka viola da gamba). After a last stand in England, the viols were driven to extinction by the increasingly popular violin family. Only the bass viol survived well into the eighteenth century, thanks to its compatibility with violins and violas, as heard in this program.
This fantasia is written for four independent parts, with all of the instruments playing almost continuously. Although there are four different musical ideas presented, they follow one upon the other without a pause or cadence in all parts. The first idea is a standard-issue fugue subject which outlines the key in rising fifths and fourths, each part entering at a respectful distance from the preceding. The second is more animated, with a faster repeated note figure immediately interrupted by a subsequent voice, dividing the texture into two tightly connected pairs of violins and viola/viol. The third section consists of slower-moving scales between the first violin and viol moving in opposite directions (contrary motion), then rising chromatically (by half-steps) in all four parts. There are no tempo changes, but the fourth section introduces note values twice and four times as fast (eighth and sixteenth notes) as the preceding section, producing the illusion of acceleration.
John Blow, Chaconne in G Major
The chaconne is a continuous variation form originally based on the chord progression of a dance from the New World that was imported to Spain and Italy in the late sixteenth century. Its open-ended form, in which one variation leads directly onto the next, made it useful in theatrical productions where a solo guitar could “vamp until ready.”
In this work, Blow at first follows the chaconne recipe of an eight-bar phrase that finishes with the first note of the next eight bars, but soon thereafter these modules are truncated and extended and the harmonies become less predictable. He also introduces characteristically English “cross-relations” in which a note in one part is juxtaposed immediately with its sharp or flat version in another part. (This jarring effect may lead us to suspect that someone has played a wrong note. They haven’t.)
The ebullience of this chaconne is created not only by the lilting rhythms that permeate the opening but also by the lack of a typical slower section in minor. Instead, Blow springs the meter from 3/4 to 9/8, i.e., dividing into thirds the same pulse that was previously divided in halves, creating the lively dance-rhythm of the gigue. Blow surprises us once again by returning to the slower 3/4 for the final variation with its pungent harmonies.
Gibbons, Fantasy-Suite in F Major
The equality of the four instrumental voices in the Fantasia in A minor reflects the Renaissance style of Christopher’s father, Orlando. The Fantasy-Suite in F, on the other hand, is written in the texture of the Baroque trio sonata: two equal treble instruments supported by a harmonic foundation of the basso continuo, a bass line under chords supplied by the keyboard.
The first of the four untitled movements consists of three repeated sections instead of the usual two in Baroque dances. It bears the least similarity to a dance movement, as the phrase lengths are irregular and the cadences are elided ( i.e. the parts do not end phrases together), creating the continuous contrapuntal texture found in the previous fantasia. However, the two violins answer one another in fugal imitation over a more sustained bass, creating a polarity between upper and lower parts, a characteristic of the Baroque style.
The second movement is similarly imitative but more playful, though its two continuous eleven-bar phrases also make it an unlikely candidate as a dance movement. The third movement resembles the French courante in its rhythmic ambiguity. It’s a lively dance in which two groups of three beats alternate with three groups of two. The violins also sometimes join together in parallel lines, thus sharpening the shapes of the phrases.
The final movement resembles a Baroque sarabande, with prominent accents on the second beat of the three-beat measure. The first repeated section consists of an eight-bar phrase, neatly divided in half by parallel writing for the violins. The second section, with the exception of the final two bars, returns to the cat-and-mouse imitation that pervades the whole piece.
Blow, Instrumental Music from Venus and Adonis
The Restoration court of Charles II wasted no time in compensating for the Puritan stringencies of the republicans who had ordered the execution of his father. The excesses of Continental Europe flooded back into England in manners of entertainment, musical style, and debauchery. Opera was flourishing in Italy and France while England, late to the party, produced masques—vaudevillian entertainments of music, dance, and sketch comedy enhanced by gratuitous special effects produced by French and Italian stage machinery.
As Master of the King’s Musick—though Purcell was by this time the court composer—Blow composed Venus and Adonis in 1683. Entitled “A Masque for the Entertainment of the King” it has been variously called a masque, a semi-opera, or England’s first opera, and it bears characteristics of each. Unusual for the period, the libretto, based on a classical myth, was penned by a woman—either Aphra Behn or Anna Kingsmill. The role of Venus was played by the king’s former mistress and Cupid by their daughter. (See “debauchery,” above.)
The simple plot needs scarcely to concern us here. The backstory is that Cupid had accidently shot his mother, Venus, with a badly aimed arrow. It caused her to fall in love with the next man she saw, and lucky for her, it was the handsome huntsman Adonis. Presumably to give the couple something to talk about, the goddess of love transformed herself into Artemis, the goddess of the hunt.
The work opens with a French overture, a form originated by Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), the French King Louis XIV’s court composer since the 1650s. Despite their political differences, the Restoration court of Charles II emulated French style in dress, music, dance, and culture in general. The Overture opens with the stodgy dotted rhythms and swirling ornamentation befitting the entrance of the monarch to the theater. It frames a faster fugal section that soon abandons contrapuntal procedure in favor of a courtly minuet. The dotted rhythms that pervade Cupid’s dance in the Prologue mimic the overture in a lighter, more flippant tone appropriate to his cherubic character.
The dalliance of the lovers in Act I is interrupted by Adonis’ hunting buddies in pursuit of a wild boar. The rustic character of the solo dance by a huntsman is reflected in the repetition of a short-long figure known as a “Lombard” rhythm or “Scotch snap” (as in the word comin’ in the Scotch folksong, “Comin’ thro’ the Rye”) Unlike the galloping figures typically evoked in musical references to the hunt, the imagery of this peculiar figure is an enigma. I propose beagles.
While Adonis is away, Act II is an interlude celebrating the art of love featuring Venus, the Graces, Cupid and his Cupids-in-training. It ends with a divertissement of French court dances, including a gracious minuet for the Dance of the Cupids and a gavotte. It concludes with a ground, another continuous variation form like the chaconne, but one in which the bass line (also called a ground bass or basso ostinato) continually repeats. In this particular example, the bass line descends chromatically and then reverses.
The Tune [a term Blow uses for instrumental interludes] which opens Act III portends the tragic consequences facing the lovers after Adonis is mortally injured by the boar. Cast in the rhythm of a sarabande in a plaintive D minor with the tempo marked simply “Slow,” its downward cascading lines in the first section and the simultaneous rising and falling chromaticism dispel the gaiety and humor of the first two acts and set the stage for the poignant final love duet and elegaic close. We know much more about this work than we do of Purcell’s incomplete opera Dido and Aeneas. Though the date of Purcell’s composition is uncertain, what is certain is that it came later than Venus and Adonis, and that the indisputably better composer received a great deal of musical inspiration from Blow’s work.
