Monday night.

Zan and I have just returned from a long day out of the house. We left as usual at 0750 for our training course, where we worked intensively until 1245. Then we went straight to a rehearsal at Alison's house which ended at 2030, whereupon we caught the train home. The course continues to be exciting and challenging for both of us. I'll write more about it when I get some time. The rehearsal was with the Rose Consort, for Thursday night's concert in Manchester.

Since I wrote last, Catherine and I did our concert at Nottingham University. It went well, though the audience was fairly �select�. We did most of John Danyel's fabulous song book of 1606, plus a couple of lute solos. The songs are far too little known. They are right up there as far as I'm concerned. Fantastic music! But very demanding lute parts, and not easy to sing either. I think that may be part of the reason they're not heard more often. They're particularly challenging to do on the big 70-cm lute which I use with Catherine, because it suits her voice.

Here's a note I wrote about the Danyel song book, for the concert programme:

SONGS

FOR THE LVTE VIOL

and Voice:

Composed by I. Danyel,

Batchelar in Musicke.

1606

To Mris Anne Grene.

Thus reads the title page of John Danyel�s (1564-c1626) first and only book of songs, one of the finest in the English lute song repertoire. The songs rival Dowland�s in quality, and include a great range of expression. They can be said to be more influenced by the madrigal and consort song than are the lute songs of Dowland and other contemporaries, with much greater emphasis on counterpoint. Often, particularly in the slower songs, of which the two trilogies (�Griefe keep within� and �Can dolefull notes�) are examples, the voice part plays the role of an equal voice in the texture alongside the contrapuntal voices skilfully woven into the lute part, rather than that of a solo voice with chordal or quasi-contrapuntal lute accompaniment.

The song texts are particularly fine; at least two of them (�Like as the Lute� and �Time cruell Time�) are by John�s more famous brother, the court poet Samuel Danyel. Another (�Thou prety Bird�) is a translation of Guami�s �O come se� gentile�. The trilogy �Can dolefull notes� explores the aesthetics of music, and the question of how to express grief in music. This piece, full of word painting, somehow manages to be metaphysical and highly expressive at the same time.

The book has numerous unusual and delightful features. The first of these is the pervading and sometimes subtly hidden influence of the book�s dedicatee, Anne Grene, �worthy daughter to Sr William Grene of Milton Knight�, and lute pupil of Danyel. Her influence appears most obviously in Danyel�s use of puns on the word green (as in the second verse of �Coy Daphne�), and again in the lute solo which ends the book: �Mrs Anne Grene her leaves bee greene�. The latter is rather a complex joke: �The leaves be green� was an old folk song, and many sets of variations were written on it in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. These sets of variations on �The leaves be green� came to be known as leaves be greens, in the plural. So the title means two things (at least): firstly, it means that this lute solo, specially composed for Anne, is her own personal leaves be green. Secondly, the title is a flattering reference to Anne�s youth and beauty: �her leaves be green�. This also refers back to the line about Daphne (�she rests still [i.e., forever] green�). Another more obscure musical joke is that �The leaves be green� is unusual in that it ends a tone lower than it begins. Thus, it begins in A and ends in G, outlining Anne�s initials.

Other unusual features include completely new scordatura tunings for the lute (in the aforementioned leaves be green and in one of the songs), and hidden musical games in the lute parts. The best example of this occurs in �Like as the Lute�, in which the lute part several times outlines a hexachord in the bass part or an inner part, playing first a slow rising scale of six notes, followed by the descending scale, rather in the manner of an Italian or English Fantasia sopra ut re mi fa sol la for keyboard or melody instruments.

The combination of puns, musical jokes, and word painting make Danyel�s music in a sense �musicians� music�. But there�s far more to it than that. It is simply a superb collection of lute songs, quite capable of being enjoyed without detailed or specialised knowledge. And, delightfully, the book is pervaded, even at its most melancholy moments, with an intelligent playfulness � a feeling of the enjoyment of music, words and ideas � all centered around Anne Grene, Danyel�s Muse:

Like as the Lute delights or else dislikes,

As is his art that playes upon the same:

So sounds my Muse according as shee strikes

On my hart strings, high tun�d unto her fame.

Her touch doth cause the warble of the sound,

Which here I yeeld in lamentable wise:

A wayling descant on the sweetest ground,

Whose due reports gives honour to her eyes.

If any pleasing relish here I use,

Judge then the world her beautie gives the same:

Else harsh my stile untunable my Muse,

Hoarse sounds the voice that praiseth not her name.

For no ground else could make the Musicke such,

Nor other hand could give so sweet a touch.