Music from English Court Masques

 Date: Friday, April 12, 2024

Time: 8 pm, followed by a reception 

Location: Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art 338 Lighthouse Avenue Staten Island, NY 10306 Bus: 54, 74, and 84 buses and the #15 SIM express bus 

Tickets: $15 Purchase online at https://www.tibetanmuseum.org/event-details/music-from-englishcourt-masques-with-collectio-musicorum OR at the door 


 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Wednesday, March 6, 2024 

The English Court Masque was the most extravagant theatrical event of its time. Evolving during the 16th century, it reached its climax in productions at the court of King James I and his successors in the 17th century. Wildly elaborate and focusing on praising the monarch, these theatrical extravaganzas featured both professional and amateur performers, and combined florid poetry and music with sumptuous scenery and costumes. 

It is not possible to resurrect masques in the 21st century; too much source material has disappeared. However, enough music has survived to present a concert of selections from several of them, and that is what Collectio Musicorum, under the direction of its artistic director Jeff S. Dailey, will do on Friday, April 12th. Dr. Dailey, joined by tenor Alex Longnecker, gambist Patricia Ann Neely, and lutenist Christopher Morrongiello, will perform highlights from four 17th -century masques — Lord Hay’s Masque, The Masque of Beauty, The Masque of Queens, and The Masque of Oberon. 

The Jacques Marchais Museum provides a suitably exotic setting for this music. Constructed in 1947 to imitate a Himalayan temple, it will be illuminated by candlelight to evoke the luxurious surrounding of the Stuart court. In her 2022 book, The Buddha and the Bard, author Lauren Shufran draws connections between Buddhist teachings and Shakespeare’s plays. While she acknowledges that Shakespeare did not reference Buddhist texts in his works, she points out that he drew upon problems of the human condition, and that the Buddha did the same. This concert, unlike Collectio Musicorum’s last performances, will not contain texts by Shakespeare, but will focus, instead, on lyrics by his younger colleague, Ben Jonson, who wrote the poem eulogizing Shakespeare in the First Folio. Jonson, the principal masque writer of the early 17th century, was also a convicted murderer, who avoided hanging through a legal technicality. He was also a prolific annotator of the human condition. The music for these masques is by a variety of composers, including Robert Johnson, Thomas Campion (who also wrote some of the texts), Thomas Lupo, and Alfonso Ferrabosco. 

Dr. Jeff S. Dailey, a longtime friend of the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art, has been displaying his collection of Himalayan musical objects at the Museum since 2021. In April 2024, part of his collection will be exchanged with new objects and instruments never before seen by the public. This performance celebrates this collection update. Collectio Musicorum celebrates 10 years of concerts this year, and is pleased to return to Staten Island, the location of its first performance. About the Ensemble Collectio Musicorum, Inc. is a 501(c)3 tax-exempt corporation whose mission is to present the best possible performances of music from the earliest of times. Founded by Dr. Jeff S. Dailey, it presents concerts and workshops focusing on music that is not heard anywhere else. Collectio Musicorum is a member of Early Music America and the New York Opera Alliance. Further details may be found here: https://collectio-musicorum.blogspot.com/ Music 

Director Jeff Dailey studied musicology and theatre history at New York University where he received his PhD in 2002. He is an active instrumentalist, musicologist, conductor, and stage director. His publications include studies of Medieval and Renaissance music and theatre, Eugene O’Neill, Beowulf, Donizetti, and Gilbert and Sullivan. He has been president of the Greater New York Chapter of the American Musicological Society since 2008. Now retired as a college professor and administrator, Dr. Dailey devotes his time to researching the musical cultures of the Himalayas. 


For further information or to set up an interview: Call (917) 796–6112 or Email: drjsdailey@aol.com Website: https://collectio-musicorum-upcoming.blogspot.com/ ### Media services provided by: Gotham Early Music Scene, Inc. 340 Riverside Drive # 1-A, New York, NY 10025 www.gemsny.org

The Panizza Project

When Collectio Musicorum performed its concert "The Many Sounds of Rigoletto--the Music behind the Music," it performed a selection from Giacomo Panizza's "Faust."  The recording of this concert being online, it was heard by people from Castellazzo Bormida, the town in Northern Italy wherre he was born.  This resulted in Dr. Dailey being invited to speak about the composer, via Zoom and in Italian, to a meeting in the town to celebrate the release of a booklet about Panizza and his decendants (his son, Achille, was the conductor at the premiere of Puccini's first opera).  Dr. Dailey subsequently spoke about Panizza at a meeting in Dublin of the Society for Musicology in Ireland.  One of the questions that arose at that meeting was where one could hear music by Panizza, whose music has been overlooked--with the exception of his Ballabile con Variazioni for E flat clarinet, none of his music has appeared in modern editions.  

Collectio Musicorum has since started The Panizza Project, which will present recordings of selected pieces by this composer, as well as other materials.  The first recording--of ballet transcriptions--has already been done and is being edited.  Recordings of his vocal music will take place in 2024.  

 

Collectio Musicorum is featured in this article in the New York Times on Shakespeare's First Folio.


 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/arts/music/shakespeare-music-first-folio.html?unlocked_article_code=1.50w.2yc6.IOsh73odxsH3&smid=url-share



CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

‘Make Noise Enough’: Excavating Shakespeare’s Songs

In Shakespeare, music is an integral part of the action. But the First Folio, which turns 400 this year, failed to transmit how it should sound.

A balding man in a green shirt with glasses, sits at a piano. Behind him, a wall is covered in music notation with the notes and clefs in many colors.
Jeff Dailey, the director of Colectio Musicorum, which is presenting a program of songs, ballads and rounds from Shakespeare plays at the Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side.Credit...Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times
A balding man in a green shirt with glasses, sits at a piano. Behind him, a wall is covered in music notation with the notes and clefs in many colors.

Musicians from the early-music ensemble Collectio Musicorum were practicing a 17th-century round on a recent afternoon in Manhattan. The tune was jaunty, full of the cantering rhythms and mimetic horn calls that fit a song about hunting. But sung in canon, some of the notes bumped roughly against one another in daring dissonance. The singers broke off, looking at their conductor for guidance.

Jeff Dailey, the group’s director, glanced up encouragingly from his music stand. The dissonances they were hearing were not a mistake, he said, then added: “If you want to make it any more chromatic, like you’ve just killed a deer, you could do even more shouting than singing. Remember, you’re drunk at this point.”

The performers were preparing a program of songs, ballads and rounds from Shakespeare plays that brings to life the tunes scholars think might have been part of the earliest productions. Some of the numbers that will be featured in a concert on Friday at the Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side are exquisite settings for voice and lute by composers like Robert Johnson and Thomas Morley.

But there are also humble songs laced with innuendo, the kind that would have appealed to the groundlings in the cheap section of the Globe Theater, like the one Dailey and his singers were rehearsing, “What shall he have that kill’d the deer?” from “As You Like It.” A nobleman commands a forester to “Sing it: ’tis no matter how it be in tune, so it make noise enough.”

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This year is the 400th anniversary of the publication of what is known as the First Folio, which comprises 36 Shakespeare plays, half of which had never been published previously. Put out by members of his company only a few years after his death in 1616, in the weighty format normally reserved for important religious works or histories, the First Folio determined how Shakespeare’s writings would be transmitted.

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Singers in front of music stands watch a conductor. In the background, speakers are on a wall.
Dailey leads singers in a rehearsal. From left, Christopher Preston Thompson, Chad Kranak and Alex Longnecker.Credit...Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times
Singers in front of music stands watch a conductor. In the background, speakers are on a wall.

But the folio failed to transmit one vital part of Shakespeare’s vision: the music. His plays are punctuated by drum rolls, fanfares and dances, indicated in stage directions. And they are teeming with verses meant to be sung. In the First Folio these verses are clearly marked as “song” in the stage instructions and set apart typographically with italics. Singing is essential for rendering Ophelia’s madness, Ariel’s magic and the inebriated antics ratcheting up the comic confusion in “Twelfth Night.”

In much of Shakespeare, Dailey said in an interview, “music is an integral part of the action.” But figuring out what it sounded like is another matter.

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Music printing was a specialized craft, and it would have been too expensive for even a luxury edition like the First Folio to include notated music. And though settings of Shakespeare lyrics appear in many 17th-century English song collections and lute books, these often date to later decades, making it difficult to determine their origin. A few popular songs can be traced back to Shakespeare’s time, but even then, Dailey said, “it’s a chicken and egg question: Did Shakespeare include them because they were famous, or did they become famous because they had been in his plays?”

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Credit...Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times
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Credit...Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times

In 2004, the musicologist Ross W. Duffin published “Shakespeare’s Songbook,” which sets hundreds of lyrics to tunes he identified as likely matches. Among them is the hunting round “What shall we have” that was first published, with textual variants, in a collection from 1652. In a manuscript in the Folger Library, Duffin found a version appearing to date back as far as 1625, with a text that more closely aligns with the First Folio. That’s nearly contemporaneous with the play’s publication, but it’s still a quarter century off from 1599, when scholars think Shakespeare first wrote “As You Like It.” In the play, moreover, a single forester is bidden to sing it, whereas this is a round for four voices. Which characters would have joined in onstage?

Another song from the play, “It was a Lover and his Lass,” survives in a setting by Morley printed in 1600, which some see as evidence that it was the original song, perhaps even commissioned by Shakespeare. Yet even such a seemingly clear attribution raises questions in performance. Morley’s setting is for a solo voice, whereas in the play it is sung by two pages.

“How do you then perform it?” Dailey asked. “Do you have two singers sing it in unison? Do you have two actors alternate verses? Or do you compose an additional part for the second singer?”

In concert, Dailey will have his performers take turns with the verses and then sing the refrain in unison. But Duffin, in a recent article, makes a case for reconstructing the song as a duet. He argues that the lute accompaniment in Morley’s printed version is so unusually awkward that it was probably adapted from a previous version for two voices.

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Credit...Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times
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Credit...Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times

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Records show that Shakespeare and Morley were neighbors, leading some to conjecture that they were friends and collaborators. But Duffin sees no reason to believe that Shakespeare ever commissioned specific music. The clues linking him to Johnson, a master lutenist and the author of artful settings in the plays, are also inconclusive. “The evidence that he was the composer of the King’s Men is so circular,” Duffin said in an interview, referring to Shakespeare’s company of actors. “Everybody wants him to be. The songs are beautiful, but were they the original songs? Probably not.”

Much of Duffin’s research has focused on the humble tunes that were the currency of popular culture in Shakespeare’s time. He said ballads in particular were so ubiquitous that an actor presented with a particular meter and rhyme schema would have known which tune to supply. Looking into the names of actors listed in the First Folio, he said he found evidence that many were “tumblers, jugglers and song-and-dance men,” adding that they would have brought their musical skills into the theater.

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Musicians and singers, seated in a classroom-type rehearsal space, are rehearsing.
A few popular songs can be traced back to Shakespeare’s time. But, Dailey said, “did Shakespeare include them because they were famous, or did they become famous because they had been in his plays?”Credit...Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times
Musicians and singers, seated in a classroom-type rehearsal space, are rehearsing.

Duffin believes that there is even more music in Shakespeare’s works than is evident from the italicized lines in the First Folio. He has identified dozens of what he calls “snatches” of songs embedded in dialogue that turn out to be the opening lines or key phrases of popular songs. These would have sparked a shower of associations in contemporary audiences.

In “Winter’s Tale,” a brief allusion to a ballad about a murderously jealous husband would have raised the stakes for an audience following the play about a jealous king. In “Twelfth Night,” an otherwise out-of-context reference to “The 12th Day of December” would have been recognized as the title of a famous ballad about a battle, evoking the noise of war in a scene of domestic mayhem.

“Everybody would have known these ballads from down the pub,” Duffin said, “so when he quotes a line everybody would have made the connection.”

Part inside jokes, part cryptic crossword clues, these brief references would have made performances interactive experiences for contemporary audiences. In 1623, the readers of First Folio would have still been able to listen between the lines, as it were. But over time, the brilliance of Shakespeare’s imagination would come to be defined by what the First Folio was able to capture: the language, divorced from the real and imagined music of the plays.

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 27, 2023, Section C, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: A Soundtrack to ShakespeareOrder Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe




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