PARTHENIA
Beverly Au, treble viol
Lawrence Lipnik, tenor viol
Rosamund Morley, bass viol
Lisa Terry, bass viol
with
Joanna Blendulf, treble viol
David Shuler, organ
William Lawes : The Consort Setts for 5 viols
Consort Sett a5 II in A Minor
Fantazy for ye Violls
Fantazia
Aire
Consort Sett a5 IV in F Major
Fantazy
Paven
Aire
Consort Sett a5 III in C Minor
Fantazia
Aire no. 1
Paven
Aire no. 2
~ INTERMISSION ~
Consort Sett a5 I in G Minor
Fantazya
On the Playnsong
Aire
Consort Sett a5 V in C Major
Fantazy
Paven
Aire
Church of Saint Luke in the Fields
Sunday, October 12th, 2014, 4 p.m.
We dedicate our concert season to the memory of Michael Hesse, a quiet, thoughtful, faithful friend of the viola da gamba and Parthenia.
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
B
y the end of the summer of 1645, the
balance of the English Civil War had
shifted decisively in favor of the
Parliamentarians. A series of defeats
thwarted the scattered and beleaguered
forces of Charles I as they sought in vain to
regroup. Most pivotal was the defeat of the
last remaining Royalist field army, led by
George Goring, at the Battle of Langport
near Bristol. Then on 24 September,
Royalists under the personal command of
the king rallied to relieve their besieged
compatriots garrisoned in the city of
Chester, near the Welsh border, in the Battle
of Rowton Heath. As the last remaining
port city under Royalist control, well
situated for recruitment in Wales and
Ireland, Chester was strategically essential
if the desperate Charles were to have any
hope of regaining any advantage. Instead
the Battle of Rowton Heath was disastrous
for the Royalists, and indeed personally
devastating for the king: among the
casualties were his cousin, Lord Bernard
Stewart, and a prized servant in the court
musician-turned-soldier William Lawes.
Lawes was born in Salisbury, in 1602, where
he may have begun his musical training as a
chorister at the cathedral with his elder
brothers Henry (1595-1662) and John.
However they were first cultivated, his
talents drew the early attention of Edward
Seymour, Earl of Hertford, in whose service
the young Lawes apprenticed (as Henry
had done before him) with John Cooper.
Cooper—or “Coprario,” as he styled
himself in Italianate fashion, possibly upon
having returned from studies on the Italian
peninsula—was a leading English
composer, viol player, and lutenist of his
generation, and the success of both Lawes
brothers suggests that they were well
served by their teacher. In 1626, Henry
secured a position within the Chapel Royal,
and in 1631 he received an appointment to
the so-called “Lutes, Viols and Voices,” a
group that comprised the most
distinguished musicians in England and
formed a valued component of the royal
household. William followed closely in his
brother’s footsteps, although his service to
Charles has been harder to date: it might
have begun, as one seventeenth-century
source attests, even before the ill-fated
monarch’s succession to the throne in 1625,
but it cannot be assigned securely before
1635.
In that year, Lawes first appears among the
members of the Lutes, Viols, and Voices.
Not coincidentally, this was also the
beginning of the period, according to John
Cunningham’s recently proposed
chronology of Lawes’ viol consorts, in
which Lawes composed most of the fivepart sets. As Cunningham observes, the
timing of their composition suggests that
Lawes—who was, after all, a servant—
catered directly to the tastes of the king, in
fulfillment of his official obligations. By the
mid-1630s, Charles’s court was becoming
politically isolated and somewhat
conservative in its musical tastes, with
special honor accorded to composers of the
previous generations, albeit ones as
innovative in their day (and as different
from each other) as Gibbons and Coprario.
Such a compositional context accounts in
part for the survival of Lawes’ consort sets
for five and six voices in a small number of
manuscripts only—including a bass
partbook in the Osborn Collection of the
Beinecke Library at Yale University (the
only important seventeenth-century source
now in North America). The music’s initial
circulation was limited primarily to the
court circle within which it was conceived
and first performed. It has survived to
achieve a broader circulation thanks largely
to the foresight of Henry Lawes, who was
probably responsible for having entrusted a
set of holograph manuscripts to Oxford’s
Bodleian Library (where they remain today,
a stone’s throw from the famous portrait of
the composer that hangs in the Music
Faculty) following his brother’s death.
The presumed courtly genesis of the sets for
five and six parts also helps to account for
some aspects of their formal and stylistic
orientation. For Lawes’ success in the late
1630s surely followed from the ease with
which he was able to innovate within the
inherited forms and generic constraints that
Charles favored. Witness, for example, the
unusual double pedal at the end of the
second strain of the Aire from the Set a5 in
C: there the First Tenor and Bass hold a Gmajor sonority for six full measures as the
other players unfold a contrapuntal
florescence in the climactic approach to the
final cadence. No mere epigone of Coprario,
Lawes nevertheless employed this and
diverse other effects—including striking
chromatic alteration—all in the service of a
highly varied style that was true to his
teacher. Indeed, in the sets for five and six
parts Lawes adopted for viols the
juxtaposition of contrapuntal fantasies with
dance forms, which Coprario had originally
conceived for a “mixed” consort.
Increasing political instability in the early
1640s cut short Lawes’ service among the
king’s Lutes, Viols, and Voices, but the
composer remained a loyal servant. At
some point in or around 1642, when Charles
was forced to relocate his military
headquarters to Oxford (many among the
university remained staunch Royalists),
Lawes enlisted as a soldier. His powerful
friends may have intervened to secure him
a place as a commissary, although more
recent accounts have placed him among the
Life Guard led by Bernard Stewart. Neither
position, of course, was enough to save him
from his untimely death at Rowton Heath,
which supplies a poignant example of the
disastrous effect that the Civil War had
upon English cultural life. Upon having
heard of Lawes’ death—if he did not in fact
witness it—the distraught Charles is
reported to have called the composer “the
father of music.” Henry, meanwhile, who
outlived his younger brother by nearly two
decades and thus survived into the
Restoration, dedicated the volume Choice
Psalmes (1648) to the king as a monument to
William. In retrospect, its elegiac tone might
seem to mourn the passage of an era as
much as the personal losses Henry had
endured: after the Civil War, the
circumstances of the patronage system that
had produced music such as the sets for five
parts were ineluctably altered.
Mark Rodgers, Yale University
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Viol player JOANNA BLENDULF has
performed in leading period instrument
ensembles throughout the United States and
abroad. Ms. Blendulf holds performance
degrees with honors from the Cleveland
Institute of Music and the Jacobs School of
Music at Indiana University where she was
awarded the prestigious Performer's
Certificate for her accomplishments in early
music performance. Joanna is currently
performing with the Catacoustic Consort,
Ensemble Electra, Ensemble Mirable, Nota
Bene Viol Consort, Pacific Baroque
Orchestra, Pacific MusicWorks, Portland
Baroque Orchestra and Wildcat Viols. Ms.
Blendulf's summer engagements have
included performances at Tage Alter Musik
Regenburg, Musica Antigua en Villa de
Lleyva in Colombia, the Boston and
Berkeley Early Music Festivals, the Ojai
Music Festivals as well as the Carmel and
Oregon Bach Festivals. Joanna is also
sought-after as a teacher and chamber
music coach and is on the faculties of early
music workshops across the country.
DAVID SHULER was educated at the
Eastman School of Music, Columbia
University, and the Berkshire Music Center
at Tanglewood. He is Director of Music and
Organist at the historic Church of Saint
Luke in the Fields in New York City, where
he oversees an extensive music program.
He is also active as a synagogue musician
and is the Music Director of the Dalton
Chorale in Manhattan. Mr. Shuler is a
champion of contemporary music, having
premiered organ works of Charles
regularly with the world’s foremost early
music specialists. The quartet has been
featured in prestigious festivals and series
as wide-ranging as Music Before 1800, the
Harriman-Jewell Series, Maverick
Concerts, the Regensburg Tage Alter
Musik, the Shalin Lui Performing Arts
Center, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Yale
Center for British Art and Columbia
University’s Miller Theatre. Parthenia’s
performances range from its popular
touring program, When Music & Sweet
Poetry Agree, a celebration of Elizabethan
poetry and music with actor Paul Hecht,
to the complete viol fantasies of Henry
Purcell, as well as the complete
instrumental works of Robert Parsons, and
commissions and premieres of new works
annually. Parthenia has recorded As it Fell
on a Holie Eve - Music for an Elizabethan
Christmas, with soprano Julianne Baird, Les
Amours de Mai, with Ms. Baird and
violinist Robert Mealy, A Reliquary for
William Blake, and Within the Labyrinth. The
ensemble’s most recent release is The
Flaming Fire – Mary Queen of Scots and Her
World with Ryland Angel, countertenor,
and Dongsok Shin, virginal.
Wuorinen, William Albright, Ralph Shapey,
Gunther Schuller, and Frank Retzel, among
others. He received a National Endowment
for the Arts Consortium Commissioning
Grant to commission works from Ralph
Shapey, Charles Wuorinen, and Gunther
Schuller as well as a grant from the
Washington, D.C. American Guild of
Organists Foundation for the promotion of
contemporary music. Mr. Shuler has been
featured as an organ soloist on both the East
and West coasts in productions of the ballet
Voluntaries, Glen Tetley’s choreography of
Francis Poulenc’s Concerto for Organ, Strings
and Timpani by the American Ballet Theatre
and the Dance Theatre of Harlem.
The viol quartet PARTHENIA brings early
music into the present with its repertoire
that animates ancient and freshcommissioned contemporary works with a
ravishing sound and a remarkable sense of
ensemble. These “local early-music stars,”
hailed by The New Yorker and music critics
throughout the world, are “one of the
brightest lights in New York’s early-music
scene.” Parthenia is presented in concerts
across America, and produces its own
series in New York City, collaborating
Parthenia is represented by GEMS Live! artist management and records for MSR Classics.
More information about Parthenia’s activities can be found at parthenia.org.
~~~
As part of the 2014 Daniel Pearl World Music Days, Parthenia dedicates the opening concert of our season to the principles by
which Daniel Pearl lived - support of tolerance, diversity, and the extraordinary power of music. Daniel Pearl was working as a
Wall Street Journal reporter in South Asia when he was murdered by terrorists in 2002, and he was a practicing musician
throughout his life.
Parthenia's concert season is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew
Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Parthenia is a sponsored organization of the New York Foundation for the Arts,
and is a member of Early Music America and Chamber Music America.