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Flow, my teares fall from your springs,Exilde for ever: Let mee morneWhere nights black bird hir sad infamy sings,There let mee live forlorn.1

Although Dowland’s Lachrimae2 was undoubtedly his most popular work during his lifetime, its genesis remains shrouded in mystery. Best known today in the form of a lute-song (Flow my teares), Lachrimae almost certainly began life as a pavan for solo lute, probably composed in the late 1580s or 1590s. Yet no autograph manuscript copy survives, nor is it known which of the earliest extant copies is nearest to Dowland’s original conception of the work – if, indeed, he had a fixed version in mind at all. After all, Dowland was first and foremost a virtuoso lutenist, a vocation inextricably bound up with the practice of improvisation, and so it is quite possible that he would never have played (or written out) his most esteemed composition the same way twice. Nevertheless, it is clear that the widespread fame of Lachrimae was central to Dowland’s own growing reputation as a composer; he even signed his name as ‘Jo: dolandi de Lachrimae’ in the album amicorum of the early seventeenth-century German traveller Johannes Cellarius.

Dowland committed two later versions of his Lachrimae to print: the iconic lute-song Flow my teares (in his Second Booke of Songs or Ayres published in 1600), and 1 John Dowland, Flow my teares, Second Booke of Songs or Ayres, 1600.2 The spelling of ‘Lachrimae’ takes a number of forms in different sources. In this booklet ‘Lachrimae’ is used when referring to Dowland’s original pavan, and matches the spelling in Lachrimae or Seaven Teares (1604). ‘Lachrymae’ is used in William Byrd’s keyboard setting, as found in the Breitkopf & Härtel edition of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (1899), and this spelling is retained for David Gorton’s string arrangement of the piece, and also in his Lachrymae Variations.

LACHRIMAE: JOHN DOWLAND’S GREATEST HITby Michael Gale

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as the first of a sequence of thematically linked pavans for instrumental ensemble (in Lachrimae or Seaven Teares, which appeared in 1604). Although Lachrimae was already circulating in various guises throughout Europe, its publication in song form increased its popularity further still. Published as a vocal duet with lute accompaniment, Flow my teares now provided the starting point for several re-imaginings of Lachrimae by other prominent keyboard composers, among them William Byrd, Giles Farnaby and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. Shorn of the original lute part, Dowland’s printed treble and bass lines provided the contrapuntal scaffolding onto which their own complex figural variations were grafted.

Numerous other contemporaneous composers and arrangers used Lachrimae as a structural template and thus a stimulus to further creation. Some of the products of this fad are predictable enough – a plethora of rather mundane settings for solo lute or keyboard, for instance – but others reveal far more novel flights of fantasy. For instance, the 1640s saw the publication in the Low Countries of a slew of independently conceived Lachrimae derivatives: Jacob van Eyck’s flamboyant sets of melodic variations for solo recorder, a reworking for solo violin and continuo by Johann Schop, and even a rather eccentric four-part version for vocal ensemble, furnished with newly fitted Dutch words and published by Dirck Rafaelszoon Camphuysen.

Conversely, other musicians found in Lachrimae a fount of expressive motivic and textural gestures from which to fashion new works more freely; Morley’s Pavana 11 and John Danyel’s mournful lute-song Eyes, look no more (1606) are only two of the finest surviving examples of this approach. Dowland’s evocative pavan clearly captured the imagination of seventeenth-century musicians across Europe in a myriad of ways – and, as this recording demonstrates, it continues to act as a catalyst for further musical creativity right up to the present day.Michael Gale is a musicologist with research interests in the musical culture of early modern England. He is currently an Associate Lecturer at the Open University and an Honorary Associate in its Music Department.

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Why would one composer wish to spend a lot of time and creative energy on the 400-year-old music of another composer? Sheer admiration is one answer, and the music in this album joins a long tradition of enraptured engagements with Dowland’s music. Examples in the last fifty years or so include Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal for guitar and the string-orchestra version of Lachrymae (based on the song If my complaints could passions move rather than the Lachrimae theme itself), Thomas Adès’ Darknesse Visible for solo piano, and collaborative projects such as Joanna MacGregor’s Dowland-based recordings with the Britten Sinfonia, and Natasha Barrett’s and Stefan Östersjö’s album Black Bile Extempore.

But beyond admiration there are other reasons that I have been interested in working on the edges of transcription, arrangement and composition. It is a common practice to classify a composer’s style in relation to his or her harmonic, rhythmic or aesthetic concerns and, where these considerations might change over a lifetime, to divide someone’s output into distinct stylistic periods. Yet questions of style run much deeper than that, and are influenced by the kinds of choices made by a composer on a note-by-note basis: the voicing of a chord, the pacing of materials, the dovetailing of a line between instruments, the idiosyncrasies of instrumental writing. Usually these small-scale choices become subsumed or obscured by the more obvious stylistic considerations, but when working with borrowed materials they come to the fore. The compositions on this album therefore represent a process of discovery for me, in which I have found new facets of my compositional ‘voice’ through that of another.

The two central works in this recording use borrowed materials in different ways. Lachrymae Variations 2 – 10 is not, as it would seem at first sight, a set of variations on the Dowland Lachrimae theme. Rather, it is one step removed: a set of variations on a set of variations with the compositional materials taken from versions of the

VARIATIONS ON VARIATIONSby David Gorton

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Lachrimae made by other composers, specifically keyboard versions of the theme by William Byrd, Giles Farnaby, Thomas Morley, William Randall, Heinrich Scheidemann and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. I made four-part arrangements for strings of each of these keyboard pieces, which were then used as raw materials in the composition of Lachrymae Variations, layering them on top of one another, initially in passages of increasingly complex counterpoint, but then leading to a gradual disintegration as pitches and rhythms begin to collide. In this way each successive variation sounds more ‘modern’, and certainly the final microtonal variation 10 is the most challenging to listen to, and to play. But it is interesting to consider that the microtonal passages would not have sounded entirely alien to some late-sixteenth-century listeners. In his radical treatise L’Antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (1555), Dowland’s Italian contemporary Nicola Vicentino developed a tuning system in which the octave is divided into 31 pitches. This microtonal system is used in fragments of Vicentino’s compositions that survive therein, arguably sounding as strange to modern ears as the end of Lachrymae Variations.

Forlorn Hope 14 – 20 was written for the rare and unusual eleven-string alto guitar, an instrument that was designed by the Swedish luthier Georg Bolin in the 1960s with the purpose of playing Renaissance lute music. The piece takes Dowland’s Forlorn Hope Fancy – presented here first in a transcription by Stefan Östersjö for the eleven-string alto guitar 13 – and breaks it up, stretches it, and expands it into a sequence of dance (Galliard, Pavan, Almain) and fantasia movements. It was written to be performed with or without electronics, and it is the acoustic version of the piece that is recorded here. Forlorn Hope Fancy provided raw materials for Forlorn Hope through a partitioning into three sections: the first third is used in the Galliard movement, the second third in the Pavan, and the final third in the Almain. The eleven-string alto guitar is tuned to a system that includes microtonal pitches, and so an important part of the compositional work involved transferring Forlorn Hope Fancy into the new tuning. This process generated tablature information about the positioning of fingers on the strings; I used this information, along with improvisations in the microtonal tuning made by Stefan Östersjö, as an extra layer of compositional material. Following Dowland’s example,

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the dance movements are named after prominent, although not necessarily popular, members of the UK coalition government that was in power at the time of composition.

Also included here are a four-part arrangement for strings of the Lachrimae theme, taken from the version published by Dowland in the Second Booke of Songs or Ayres in 1600 1 , and arrangements of two of the keyboard pieces used in the composition of Lachrymae Variations: William Byrd’s Pavana Lachrymae 21 and Thomas Morley’s Pavana and Galiarda 11 12 . Both the Byrd and the Morley are taken from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. The Byrd is a sophisticated elaboration of the Lachrimae theme. The Morley, unique among the versions represented on this recording, is not really a complete Lachrimae at all, but rather quotes the opening of the theme and moves in its own compositional direction; the pavan-and-galliard pair are arranged here with deliberate swagger.

David Gorton (b. 1978) first came to public attention in 2001 when he was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize. Commissions followed for ensembles that include the London Sinfonietta, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Exposé, Jane’s Minstrels, Chroma, Hermes and the Kreutzer Quartet. His compositions have been performed throughout Europe and America, in China and in Vietnam, and have been recorded on the Métier, Usk and, now, Toccata Classics labels. Much of his output comprises series of works for solo performers with whom he has built a collaborative relationship over a period of years, including the violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved, cellist Neil Heyde, oboist Christopher Redgate, pianists Zubin Kanga and Roderick Chadwick and the guitarist Stefan Östersjö.

David Gorton was a student at Durham University, King’s College London, and the Royal Academy of Music, studying composition with Harrison Birtwistle and Simon Bainbridge. In 2004–6 he held a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for a compositionally driven project about musical time, structure and performance. He has been an associate researcher

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at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, and a composer-in-residence at the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University. He has taught at the Royal Academy of Music since 2006, where he is currently a University of London Associate Professor.

Stefan Östersjö is a leading classical guitarist specialising in the performance of contemporary music. Since his debut album (which won a Swedish Grammy in 1997) he has recorded extensively and toured Europe, the USA and Asia. He has been part of numerous collaborations with composers, and participated in the creation of works involving choreography, film, video, performance art and music theatre. Since 2006 he has been developing inter-cultural artistic methods, primarily with the Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones as a platform. Within these contexts he has developed performance practice and playing techniques for experimental and non-European instruments, including the eleven-string alto guitar, the ten-string guitar, fretless guitars, Vietnamese lutes, and the charango, an Andean lute.

Stefan Östersjö completed a PhD on contemporary performance practices in 2008. In 2009 he became a research fellow at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, and he is currently associate professor of artistic research in music at the Malmö Academy of Music. He has been invited as keynote presenter, held residencies, and given master-classes throughout the world; he regularly publishes papers and book chapters, and has edited two books on artistic research in music.

Longbow is a collective of international performers known for recordings on labels including Naxos, Toccata Classics and Métier. They regularly give performances at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall, where their programmes bring together music ranging from early Mendelssohn to works written for them. The ensemble is drawn from some of the most creative and original performers active today; its members hail from Australia, Canada, France, Japan, Macedonia, Taiwan, the UK and the USA. Recent recording projects have included discs of orchestral music by Nigel Clarke, Hans Werner Henze, Elliott Schwartz and Mihailo Trandafilovski.

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Peter Sheppard Skærved is the director of Longbow. He is the dedicatee of over 400 works for violin, and his discography stretches from Telemann to many of the works written for him; he was nominated for a Grammy in 2007. Peter has a unique record of long-term work with galleries, including the curation of a major exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery (‘Only Connect’), and has collaborated on projects with the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Galeria Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Tate St Ives, the Metropolitan Museum and Kunsthallen, Bergen. He is the only living violinist to have played on the instruments of Paganini, Viotti, Kreisler, Ole Bull and Joseph Joachim. Peter is the founder and first violin of the Kreutzer Quartet, and the Viotti Lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music. He holds artistic residencies at Peabody Conservatoire, Baltimore, Ithaca College, NY, and Wilton’s Music Hall.

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Lachrymae Variations ViolinsPeter Sheppard Skærved (director)Alice BarronAnnabelle Berthomé ReynoldsSara CubarsiMidori KomachiPreetha NarayanAisha OrazbayevaSalomé Rateau

ViolasMalcolm AllisonDiana MathewsShulah OliverUilleac Whelan

CellosEvie HeydeValerie Welbanks

Double-bassCarter Callison

Dowland, Morley, Dowland/ByrdViolinsPeter Sheppard SkærvedMihailo Trandafilovski

ViolaDiana Mathews

CelloNeil Heyde

Longbow

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AcknowledgementsThe composition of Lachrymae Variations included a stage of development involving a series of experimental workshops that took place in February-March 2014 at the Royal Academy of Music, London, and the Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, with Maciej Burdzy, Sean Calhoun, Carter Callison, Sara Cubarsi, Matthew Lammers, Audrey Lee, Diana Matthews, Caitlin Quinlan, Michael Alec Rose, Peter Sheppard Skærved and Michael Slayton. The piece is dedicated to them all.

Forlorn Hope emerged from a series of collaborative workshops with Stefan Östersjö that took place in 2010–12 at the Malmö Academy of Music and the Royal Academy of Music; the piece is dedicated to him.

Early versions of the Dowland and Byrd Lachrimae arrangements for four parts, as well as an arrangement of William Randall’s Lachrimae setting, were performed as part of a project at the British Museum, London, on 13 December 2013, with Peter Sheppard Skærved and Mihailo Trandafilovski (violins), Diana Mathews (viola) and Lucy Railton (cello). Forlorn Hope was first performed by Stefan Östersjö (guitar) and Juan Parra Cancino (electronics) at the ORCiM Research Festival, Orpheus Institute, Ghent, on 5 October 2012. Lachrymae Variations was first performed by Longbow, directed by Peter Sheppard Skærved, at the Maison Dieu, Dover, on 20 May 2016, as part of the Dover Arts Development Chalk Up project. The producers are grateful to all of these individuals and institutions for providing the time and space that allowed the project to develop.

This recording was made possible through the generous support of the Royal Academy of Music, and a group of individual donors who contributed through a Kickstarter campaign. Special thanks to Joel Lewis and Mary Proudlock.

Many thanks also to Michael Gale for providing expert advice on all things Dowland.

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Recorded on 25 June 2015 at All Souls Church, East Finchley (Lachrymae Variations); 16 March 2016 at Aldbury Parish Church (Dowland, Morley, Dowland/Byrd); and 13–14 August 2015 at the Malmö Academy of Music (Forlorn Hope Fancy, Forlorn Hope)

Sound engineers: Jonathan Haskell (www.astoundingsounds.co.uk) and Martin Svensson (Forlorn Hope Fancy, Forlorn Hope)

Producers: David Gorton and Peter Sheppard SkærvedMastering: Jonathan Haskell

Booklet essays: Michael Gale and David GortonCover photograph: Benjamin EalovegaCover design: David M. Baker (david@notneverknow.com)Typesetting and lay-out: KerryPress, St Albans

Executive producer: Martin Anderson© Toccata Classics, London, 2017 ℗ Toccata Classics, London, 2017

Toccata Classics CDs are available in the shops and can also be ordered from our distributors around the world, a list of whom can be found at www.toccataclassics.com. If we have no representation in your country, please contact: Toccata Classics, 16 Dalkeith Court, Vincent Street, London SW1P 4HH, UKTel: +44/0 207 821 5020 E-mail: info@toccataclassics.com

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TT 62:22

FIRSTRECORDINGS

DAVID GORTON Variations on John Dowland

Longbow 1 2 –12 21

Stefan Östersjö, eleven-string alto guitar 13–20

1 John Dowland arr. Gorton: Flow my teares fall from your springs (1600, arr. 2013) 3:55David Gorton: Lachrymae Variations (2014) 23:582 Introduction 1:16

3 Theme 1:51

4 Variation I 1:48

5 Variation II 1:52

6 Refrain 1:57

7 Variation III 4:14

8 Variation IV 3:36

9 Refrain 2:26

10 Variation V 5:02

Thomas Morley arr. Gorton: Pavana and Galiarda (c. 1590, arr. 2015) 6:2011 Pavana 4:31

12 Galiarda 1:49

13 John Dowland arr. Stefan Östersjö: Forlorn Hope Fancy (c. 1590, arr. 2010) 3:23David Gorton: Forlorn Hope (2011) 21:3114 Contrapuntal Fantasia 1:51

15 Dr Cable’s Pavan 4:02

16 Fantasia on 1 to 4 1:30

17 Mr Hunt’s Thing, Almain 4:22

19 Fantasia on 10 and 11 1:45

19 The Right Honourable David, Minister of State for Universities and Science

(attending Cabinet), his Galliard 4:49

20 Harmonic Fantasia 2:12

21 John Dowland, set William Byrd arr. David Gorton: Pavana Lachrymae

(c. 1600, arr. 2013) 4:04