Warlock Dowland and Segovia-libre

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WARLOCK, DOWLAND AND SEGOVIA, PART 1 1

Warlock, Dowland and Segovia

Part 1: Dowland Restored

Allan Clive Jones

In 1927, at a concert in London, Segovia performed two Dowland galliards.

Dowlands solo lute music was almost unknown at this time. Where did Segovia get

these pieces from? The answer is not straightforward, but Peter Warlock, who

transcribed several pieces from manuscript tablatures in the 1920s, played a part.

These three articles tells the story, and resolve a puzzle over one of the Dowland

pieces in Segovias repertoire.

Segovias performance of two Dowland pieces in London on 18 May 1927 was a

remarkable event in the history of Dowlands music. It was probably the first time any

of Dowlands solo lute music had been performed in the modern era to a substantial

audience, by a performer of high professional standing. In these three articles I want to

look at the access Segovia had to Dowlands music at this early part of his

international career.

It would be wrong to suggest that Dowland was ever a large part of Segovias

repertoire. To the best of my knowledge, he recorded only three Dowland pieces, and

reviews of his London and Paris concerts between the wars rarely mention Dowland.1

However, there is good reason to believe that in the 1920s Segovia knew much more

of Dowlands music than he chose to perform, as I hope to show in these articles.

What is more, he knew this music at a time when even specialist musicologists hardly

knew it, let alone guitarists. The striking feature of Segovias adoption of Dowlands

music is therefore not the amount he played, but the early date at which he adopted it,and the fact that he did not make more use of it.

A crucial figure in the revival of interest in Dowland was the British composer, writer

and musicologogist Peter Warlock, or, to give him is real name (which I shall use

from now on), Philip Heseltine. Heseltine is, in fact, the focus of my story, rather than

Segovia. As these articles show, he was a pioneering but not unique transcriber of

Dowlands instrumental music, and, on his own account, introduced Segovia to it. On

this latter point, though, Heseltines word should not be accepted unquestioningly, as

he was not Segovias only source of Dowland.

(First published in Classical Guitar, May, June and July 2011)


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An intriguing puzzle surrounds one of the Dowland pieces in Segovias repertoire. On

recordings it was named incorrectly as a galliard; and its absence from Dowlands lute

oeuvrehas cast doubt on whether it was by Dowland at all. Part 3 of this series will

present the solution to this puzzle.

1920s Dowland revival

During Dowlands lifetime, four books of his songs were published. Thanks to these

publications some of his songs retained a currency through the following centuries.

Shorn of their lute parts, they were performed as four-part unaccompanied madrigals

(though technically they were not madrigals). A few Victorian editors produced

anthologies of lute-songs, but they were poor editions, often with rewritten

accompaniments. As for Dowlands instrumental music, it was hardly known in the

centuries after his death, although his reputation as a lutenist and composer for the

instrument was familiar to music historians. Apart from a few items, Dowlands lute

pieces were not published in his lifetime, and the bulk of them survived as manuscript

tablatures in museums, libraries, and private collections. Little attention was paid to

these pieces until the late nineteenth century, and the pioneering work of musician and

instrument-builder Arnold Dolmetsch. However, the major revival in Dowlands

fortunes, and those of the other lutentists of his era, began in the 1920s, thanks largely

to two people, Canon Edmund Horace Fellowes and Philip Heseltine.

In 1921, the first of Fellowess modern editions of English lutenists songs, The

English School of Lutenist Songwriters, was published. In his early editions, Fellowes

gave a fairly accurate keyboard version of the lute parts, together with elaborated

versions of the lute parts devised by himself. However, and remarkably for the period,

he also included lute tablatures. In later publications he abandoned these.

Writing about Fellowess first volume of songs in The Musical Times, Heseltine took

Fellowes to task for amending the original lute accompaniments in his elaborated

keyboard versions.2Perversely, elsewhere in his review, Heseltine rebuked Fellowes

for not adapting the original barring to modern conventions. He wrote:

The bar in Elizabethan times had none of the rhythmic or accentual significance with which

it was subsequently invested. It was used in the song-books chiefly as a convenient

method of enabling singer and accompanist to keep together in the virginal books to help

the left hand know what the right hand was doing. In the separate part-books, vocal and

instrumental, bars rarely occur at all. It is therefore merely pedantic to retain this original

irregular and largely arbitrary system of barring in a modern reprint which should be the

means of bringing these songs not only to the libraries of professional musicians and

musical institutions, but into the hands of every English speaking amateur who ever buys or

sings a good song; for music depends for real popularity upon the great body of amateursrather than upon the comparatively small body of professional musicians. And to replace


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the old system of irregular barring by a new one is a most unnecessary procedure, seeing

that every Elizabethan song can be divided into bars of equal length (changes from duple

to triple time being invariably marked in the original editions). This regularity is a great

convenience to the reader, and detracts nothing from the music so long as it is phrased

intelligently and not accented by the bar.3

Heseltine thus thought that the key to reviving this old music was to present it in aform accessible to the non-specialist. One way to do this was to use modern notational

conventions. He scorned pedantry, seeing no point reproducing the tablature, which

hardly anyone would have understood. Furthermore, he thought that Fellowess

inclusion of elaborated versions of the lute accompaniments would suggest that

Dowlands original versions were inadequate or inept. For Heseltine, a crucial tenet

was that the compositions themselves required no improvement. Writing to a friend in

1921, he spoke of the body of music from this period as the culmination of the most

perfect technically as well as aesthetically periods music has ever known.4As far

as Heseltine was concerned, this early music was not a mere antiquarian curiosity. It

was interesting not because it was a precursor of what came later, but because it had

its own perfection. It was as worthy of respect as any later music more so in some

regards, given Heseltines jaundiced view of much contemporary music of his own

time.

Figure 1 Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock), 18941930

Heseltines dissatisfaction with Fellowess editorial methods prompted him to begin

preparing his own editions of the work of the English lutenists, starting with the song


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collections, and eventually, in the second half of the 1920s, arriving at Dowlands lute

pieces. However, although Fellowes was the spur, Heseltine had been contemplating

the editing of old music, on and off, for several years.

Heseltines discovery of early music

Philip Heseltine was born in October 1894, making him just under two years younger

than Segovia. His first few years were spent in London. At around the age of nine the

family moved to Abermule in Wales. Wales was to be an occasional retreat for

Heseltine throughout his life. At Eton,5Heseltines musical talent was encouraged by

a sympathetic piano teacher, although he never became a proficient pianist. In his

mid-teens he developed a passion for the music of Delius, and began a

correspondence with the composer that lasted for the rest of his life. Delius, in fact,

became a mentor to Heseltine.

After Eton, in 1911, he enrolled at the Cologne Conservatoire to study the piano, but

was deterred by the emphasis on technique. He soon abandoned his studies there, and

in October 1913 went up to Oxford University to study Classics. He abandoned this

after a year, and in 1914 enrolled at University College, London, to study English,

philosophy and psychology. This too he abandoned after a few months, and the rest of

his short life consisted of an unsettled mixture of composition, journalism,

musicology and dissipation. In 1915, after a few months as music critic for theDaily

Mail(how times have changed), he was profoundly affected by his discovery of early

English keyboard music by Byrd, Gibbons, Tomkins and Farnaby. He conceived the

idea of editing this music for publication in modern editions. This plan came to

nothing. In 1917, whilst dodging call-up for the First World War in Ireland, he came

across the William Ballet Lute Book in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. He

resolved to transcribe it, but once again this plan came to nothing.6

When Heseltine finally buckled down to editing early music, with the appearance of

the first of Fellowess editions of lute songs 1921, he was again living at the family

home in Wales, having retreated there from London almost penniless. He was toremain in Wales for three years, working industriously and moderating his drinking.

During this three-year period he edited over 300 lute-songs. Some of these appeared

in his English Ayres series of song books, which began to appear in 1922.7He also

worked on a short book The English Ayre, published in 1926. This is still a useful,

readable and lucid introduction to the lute and the songs of Danyel, Dowland, Robert

Jones, Tobias Hume, Campion, Rosseter, and several others. Heseltines prodigious

transcribing of the lute parts of these songs is all the more remarkable given that he

was not himself a player. In reply to a correspondent who wrote for advice about waysof performing lute songs, Heseltine wrote in 1928:


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I have always understood that the lute is an exceedingly difficult instrument to master. I

only know one lutenist [probably Diana Poulton, 190395], and she is very far from

accomplished after years of practice; and I am told that Dr Fellowess performances on the

lute are quite as funny as Grocks on the fiddle. The contrapuntal texture of many of the

Elizabethans such as Dowland and Danyel cannot be easy on any plucked instrument

[...] To my mind an infinitely better effect [then trying to use a lute] is obtained with far less

trouble by playing these lute parts on a harpsichord, spinet or virginals...8

Following his spell in Wales, Heseltine moved back to the London area in 1925,

finding a house in Eynsford, Kent. From this period comes his famous Capriol Suite,

as well as numerous songs, a book on Gesualdo, and transcriptions of many of

Dowlands solo lute pieces.

The second half of the 1920s, when Heseltine was working on Dowlands

instrumental works, was also the period when Segovia gave his first UK concerts. His

London debut was on 7 December 1926, when he performed at the Aeolian Hall (onBond Street). He performed in London again on 29 January 1927 at the Wigmore

Hall. In view of subsequent developments, it is likely that Heseltine attended one or

both of these Segovia concerts. The extent to which the British musical world was

becoming aware of the Elizabethan and Jacobean lutenists is possibly indicated inThe

Timessreview of Segovias 29 January concert: ...we venture to call Mr Segovias

attention, if it has not already been done, to the music of our English lutenists.9

Transcribing Dowlands lute works

February 1927 found Heseltine busy in the Cambridge University Library, consulting

manuscripts of Dowlands solo lute music. Less than two weeks later, on 2 March

1927, he delivered a selection of fifteen keyboard transcriptions of lute solos to his

publisher.10

These transcriptions were published in 1927 under the title The Lute

Music of John Dowland.11

The title page describes the contents as Literally

transcribed from the original tablature notation, and edited for Piano or Harpsichord

by Peter Warlock. Given Heseltines attitude to Fellowess work, it is easy to see why

he should make such a point of the fidelity of his transcriptions.

The lutenist and Dowland scholar Diana Poulton heard Heseltine play one of his

transcriptions when she was around 24 years old. She wrote:

I had visited [Heseltine] in Eynsford, Kent, where he was living at the time, in September

1927, and I can still remember his playing me Forlorn Hope which he had just finished

transcribing; possibly it was the first time it had been played in three hundred years.12

On 18 May 1927, Segovia performed again in London. This was the concert,

mentioned at the start of this article, where he played two unspecified galliards by


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Dowland.13

Segovias performance was precisely at the time that Heseltine was

shepherding his edition of Dowland lute solos through publication. Had Heseltine

therefore supplied Segovia with some of his transcriptions? It is likely that he had.

The evidence comes from an article Heseltine published in theMusical Timesin

August 1927.14

Entitled More light on John Dowland, the article begins by casting

doubt on an earlier article by Dr W. H. Grattan Flood which had claimed that

Dowland was Irish.15

Heseltine went on in his article to deplore the musical worlds ignorance of

Dowlands instrumental works, and proceeded to discuss many of Dowlands lute

works. In several cases, Heseltine gave extracts from them in keyboard notation,

together with a short discussion of their particular merits, as shown in Figure 2.

Among the works Heseltine mentioned was Forlorn Hope, showing that he must have

transcribed it at least a few months before Poultons visit is September 1927.

At the conclusion of his article Heseltine wrote:

The pianoforte, however, is but a poor substitute for the lute itself, and those who know

what amazing variety and beauty of tone that great artist Seor Segovia can produce from

the Spanish guitar will realise that the lute (which has the same technique as the guitar)

was no mean instrument and the old lutenists no mean performers. It has been my privilege

to introduce the music discussed in this article to Seor Segovia, and we may look forward

to some memorable performances of it at his hands in the near future. Most assuredly our

English lute music could not be given back to the world under more favourable auspices.

Evidently Heseltine was hoping, and possibly expecting, that Dowlands music would

soon become a significant part of Segovias repertoire, and through Segovia gain the

esteem it deserved. It is very likely that Heseltine would have supplied Segovia with

many transcriptions, as there is good evidence his generosity where his transcriptions

were concerned.16

He clearly admired Segovias way with the music. Writing to a

friend in November 1927, he said:

Most of the year I have spent transcribing and editing some of the magnificent music that

has come down to us from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries songs by the

contemporaries of Shakespeare, the wonderful lute-music of John Dowland which I have

transcribed for the piano (though that fine artist Segovia plays it wonderfully on his Spanish

guitar),...17


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Figure 2 A page from Heseltines article More light on John Dowland in The

Musical Times, August 1927.

If we take Heseltines word that the pieces mentioned in his More light on John

Dowland article were introduced personally to Segovia, then this amounted to

twenty-six items (more, if we count a few folk-song arrangements). Among these

were such gems asDigorie Pipers Galliard, The Earl of Essex Galliard, Farewell,

Forlorn Hope,Melancholy Galliard,My Lady Hunsdons Puffe, and Queen

Elizabeths Galliard.18

The extracts above, and the fact that Segovia played a couple of Dowland pieces in

London in May 1927, look like convincing evidence that Segovia got his Dowland

pieces from Heseltine. Unfortunately, matters are not that simple. At some point in his

career, Segovia adopted a piece which he described as a Galliard by Dowland , and

which he recorded in 1944, 1956 and 1969.19

The first four bars of the piece are

shown in Example 1.


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Notes

1 My series of articles The Judgement of Paris, published in Classical Guitarfrom August to

December 1998, looked at Segovias inter-war Paris concerts and some of his London concerts.

2 The Musical Times, 1 July, 1922, p. 478.

3 The Musical Times, 1 July, 1922, p. 479.

4 Heseltine to Fritz Hart, 15 November 1921, quoted in Barry Smith, Peter Warlock: the Life of Philip

Heseltine, Oxford University Press, p.195.

5Readers outside the UK might not be aware that Eton is one of the UKs most famous, all-male private

schools. It is notable for the very large number of its alumni who have held high office in public life.

6 Barry Smith, Peter Warlock: the Life of Philip Heseltine, Oxford University Press, p.125.

7 The seriesEnglish Ayreswas initially published by Enoch, from 192225. The series was taken over

by Oxford University Press.

8 Letter from Heseltine to Arnold Dowbiggin, 3 January 1928, reproduced in Barry Smith (ed.) The

Collected Letters of Peter Warlock, vol IV, 192230, Boydell Press, 2005, p. 185. The editor of these

letters, Barry Smith, surmises that the female lutenist referred to by Heseltine is Diana Poulton, who

later became highly accomplished. Heseltines reference to Grock in the letter is the celebrated Swiss

clown who, according to Barry Smith, could play fourteen instruments including a miniature violin.

9 The Times, 31 January 1927, p. 10.

10 Barry Smith, Peter Warlock: the Life of Philip Heseltine, Oxford University Press, p.246.

11The following are the pieces in Heseltines edition The Lute Music of John Dowland, published in

1927 as edited by Peter Warlock. The P numbers after each item refer to their number in Diana

Poulton and Basil Lams edition The Collected Lute Music of John Dowland, 3rd edition, Faber, 1981.Dowlands Adew(P13, where it is titledResolution); Fantasia(P1a); Farewell(P3); Forlorn Hope

(P2); The Lady Rich her Galliard(P43a);Melancholy Galliard(P25);Mrs Vauxes Gigge(P57);Mrs

Whites Nothinge(P56);My Lady Hunsdons Puffe(P54);My Lord Chamberlaine his Galliard(P37);

Orlando Sleepeth(P61); Queen Elizabeths Galliard(P41); The Shoemakers Wife(P58);An Unnamed

Piece(P49);An Unnamed Piece(P51).

12 Diana Poulton,John Dowland, second edition, Faber, 1982, p. 446.


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13 The review in The Times, 20 May 1927, p. 12, refers simply to Two galliards by the English John

Dowland, and the concert programme for the event, which survives at the Wigmore Hall in London,

gives no further information.

14 Philip Heseltine, More light on John Dowland,Musical Times, August 1927, pp. 689691.

15 Dr W. H. Grattan Flood, New light on late Tudor composers: John Dowland,Musical Times, June

1927, pp. 504505.

16 In her appreciation of Diana Poulton, Donna Curry writes that Heseltine gave Poulton copies of

approximately 300 lute songs that he and a colleague hard transcribed. (Donna Curry, Diana Poulton:

an Appreciation of her Life,LSA Quarterly, vol. XXXI, February 1996, p. 8.) This article is available

online at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~lsa/publications/Q/1996/LSAQ31-07-1996-PoultonCurry.pdf.

It is provides an interesting counterpoint to Heseltines ungenerous view of the youthful Poultons

abilities quoted earlier.

17 Heseltine to Paul Ladmirault, 12 November 1927, quoted in Barry Smith, Peter Warlock: the Life of

Philip Heseltine, Oxford University Press, p.874.

18 The items referred to in Heseltines More light on John Dowland article in theMusical Times,

August 1927 are listed here. On Heseltines account, these are the piece he introduced to Segovia. The

P numbers after each item is the number in Diana Poulton and Basil Lam,The Collected Lute Music

of John Dowland, 3rd edition, Faber, 1981. Asterisked items appear in Heseltines The Lute Music of

John Dowland(1927), published as edited by Warlock.Aloe(P68), (Heseltine gives no title for this,

and refers to it simply as Variations on a short theme of folk-song character);Digorie Pipers

Galliard(instrumental version of song If My Complaints) (P19); Pipers Pavan(P8); The Earl of

Derbys Galliard(P44),Earl of Essex Galliard(instrumental version of Can She Excuse) (P42, P42a);

Farewell* (P3); Forlorn Hope* (P2),Henry Noels Galliard(also known asMignarda) (P34); King of

Denmarks Galliard(P40);Lady Richs Galliard* (P43a); The Lord Chamberlains Galliard(for two

to play upon one lute)* (P37);Melancholy Galliard* (P25);Mistress Winters Jumpe(P55);Mr

Buctons Galliard(also called Sir Robert Sidneys Galliardand Viscount Lisles Galliard) (P38);John

Langtons Galliard(P33);John Langtons Pavan(P14, P14a);Mr Knights Galliard(P36);Mrs

Vauxes Gigge* (P57);Mrs Whites Nothinge* (P56);My Lady Hunsdons Puffe* (P54); Orlando

Sleepeth* (P61); Queen Elizabeths Galliard* (P41); Sir John Smith his Almaine(P47); Solus cum

Sola(P10); The Shoemakers Wife* (P58); Untitled Piece(not in Poulton).

19 In the 1944 recording, the Galliard in question is appended to three short Purcell pieces. It has

been reissued on CD on Andrs Segovia: the 1944 American Recordings, Naxos, 8.111087. In the

1956 recoding it is paired withDigorie Pipers Galliard. These two items have been reissued on theCD Andrs Segovia: 1950s American Recordings, volume 4, Naxos, 8.111092. The 1969 recording


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coupled it again with the adaptation ofDigorie Pipers Galliard(described as song in the CD

reissue). This recording session also included DowlandsMelancholy Galliard. The 1969 recordings

have been reissued on Andres Segovia: a Centenary Celebration, Disc 1, MCA Classics, MCAD4

11124.

20 Liner notes to Andrs Segovia: 1950s American Recordings, volume 4, Naxos, 8.111092.

21Digorie Pipers Galliardwas recorded, as mentioned earlier, in 1956, and is on Andrs Segovia:

1950s American Recordings, volume 4, Naxos, 8.111092. Segovia recorded it again in 1969, coupled

with the non-galliard galliard referred to in the text. Also in 1969 Segovia recorded Dowlands

Melancholy Galliard. These 1969 Dowland recordings are on Andres Segovia: a Centenary

Celebration, Disc 1, MCA Classics, MCAD4 11124.

22 The story of Breams encounter with Dowland, via the Heseltine/Warlock edition of fifteen lute

solos The Lute Music of John Dowland, is told in Paul Balmers DVDJulian Bream: My Life in Music,

Music on Earth Productions.


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DOWLAND, WARLOCK AND SEGOVIA, PART 2 1


Part 2: Warlock the editor

Allan Clive Jones

In Part 1 we saw that Philip Heseltine (who often used the pseudonym Peter Warlock)

was prompted to transcribe the music of the Elizabethan and Jacobean lutenists out of

frustration with the editorial practices of earlier editors, notably Canon E. H.

Fellowes, whose volumes The English School of Lutenist Songwritersbegan to appear

in 1921. Heseltine says, in an article quoted in Part 1, that he introduced Segovia to

Dowlands lute music.

In this article I want to look at Heseltines philosophy of transcription. As outlined in

Part 1, this was based on the following principles:

1 The music needed to be made accessible to amateur performers, even if that meant

adopting modern conventions of notation.

2 The compositions themselves, however, required no improvement.

I want to investigate how well these principles worked in practice. I will do this by

looking at a small case study one of Heseltines solo lute transcriptions from his

1927 volume of fifteen Dowland lute pieces The Lute Music of John Dowland. I have

chosen a piece that strikes me as particularly interesting from the point of view of

editorial policy. A facsimile of Heseltines keyboard transcription of the piece is

shown in Example 1.


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Example 1 Dowland lute solo, transcribed by Heseltine

In Example 1 I have added bar numbers, following the common convention of

counting as bar 1 the first full bar of music. Although this piece is not well known, a

version of it appears in Frederick Noads popular anthology The Renaissance Guitar,

under the title Air.1It also appears in the Collected Lute Music of John Dowland,

edited by Diana Poulton and Basil Lam, where it is entitled An Almain.2

To make the discussion easier to follow, I have made a guitar version from

Heseltines transcription, shown in Example 2. Here I have transposed the lute part

down a minor third, as usual when adapting renaissance lute music to the guitar. I

have not made any other adaptation for the guitar. For the moment I simply want to

retain the notes that Heseltine has transcribed, and his barring. The original

manuscript source does not follow modern barring conventions. This point needs to

be borne in mind during the following discussion.


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Example 2 A guitar version of Example 1

Now, among the several curious features of this piece is its length, 17 bars. The first

half of the piece is regular enough, being eight bars long. The second part, though,

beginning on the fourth beat of bar 8, is nine bars long. Has something gone adrift?

Also, can bar 12 really be right? Anyone playing the piece is likely to feel that the

chord lasts too long. Heseltine, though, presumably thought this was plausible.

Heseltine does not mention in his edition that there is actually a problem with the

manuscript source, which is not in Dowlands hand. As mentioned in Part 1, music of

this period was not barred according to modern conventions, and part of the task of

the editor is deciding where the upbeats and downbeats fall, so that modern bar lines

can be inserted, and parsing the lute notes into independent voices in addition to

deciding on durations of notes in cases where this is implicit rather than explicit.

From bar 12 to the end of this piece, in terms of modern barring principles, the note

values do not add up. An extra beat is required if the final chord of the piece is to land

on the first beat of the last bar.

3

Heseltines solution is to amend the chord shown inbar 12 of his transcription. In the manuscript, this chord is one beat shorter. By

extending the chord by a beat, Heseltine makes it a last a whole bar. However, he says

nothing about this modification in his edition.

Other editors have taken a different approach. Diana Poulton and Basil Lam, in their

Collected Lute Music of John Dowland, adopt a solution suggested by lutenist Ian

Harwood, which entails putting the extra beat elsewhere. Poulton and Lam, unlike

Heselting, explain what they have done. In Example 3 I have adapted Heseltines

transcription to incorporate the Poulton/Lam/Harwood solution.


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It is not difficult to see how bar 16 of Example 4 could be given an extra beat. The

simplest option is probably to prolong the first two notes of the bar, as shown in

Example 5. Paul ODette plays something like this (to my ears) in his recording.5At

his brisk tempo, the prolonged notes do not draw attention to themselves.

Example 5 Amendment to Example 4 to rectify the beats in bar 16.

For lesser mortals, though, playing the piece at a moderate pace exposes only too

clearly the lack of musical interest in the first half of bar 16 in Example 5. One feels

the music marking time simply to fill up the bar, which, of course, is precisely thepurpose of the prolongations.

Now, my reason for discussing this piece is not so much to draw attention to it, and its

several versions, but to use it as an opportunity to reflect on Heseltines philosophy of

musical editing. Here are some more remarks by Heseltine on the preparation of old

music for the modern reader.

There is no advantage in adhering to the obsolete conventions of Elizabethan notation

which are likely to confuse the ordinary reader of today; but where notes and texts areconcerned, nothing should be added to or detracted from what the composer actually

wrote.6

Dowland [...] was one of the most technically proficient as well as one of the most inspired

song-writers the world has, ever seen, and no one who has any regard for purity of style

to say nothing of a sympathetic understanding of the music itself would wish to add to or

detract anything from what he has written.7

Heseltine here shows great respect for Dowland, and deplores the corrections that he

considered other editors to have indulged in. However, the question arises of whether,given the unreliability of some old manuscripts, correcting the text is entirely

separable from fixing the composition. In the piece under discussion, there appears to

be something amiss with the manuscript, but there is no way of creating a plausible

version without engaging in re-composition. Of course, this is a different issue from

adapting a work to make it suit modern taste, which Heseltine especially objected to.

Even so, judging whether a manuscript contains an error is likely to involve aesthetic

judgements, and these can be highly contentious. Its worth recalling here that

Heseltine saw no virtue in retaining old conventions of notation a view many

modern editors would dissent from.


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Heseltine did not have much use for the critical apparatus of the scholarly edition,

with its footnotes and appendices explaining every decision taken. No doubt this type

of edition does deter many non-specialist readers. However, eschewing it means that

anomalies can appear without comment, which might not serve the best interests of

the composer. A case in point is the long chord in bar 12 of Heseltines transcription

(Example 2). Readers might reasonably be doubtful about Heseltines claims for

Dowlands greatness as a composer when confronted with this.

In the 1960s, some of Heseltines editions of Elizabethan songs were republished.

Reviewing them, British musicologist Jack Westrup wrote:

...there are passages in these collections which no sane person could defend as correct. It

was all very well for Warlock to suggest, as he did in The English Ayre, that tablature

notation was a guarantee of accuracy: he must have known perfectly well that errors in a

printed tablature are even more likely than in staff notation. In fact, he made his own

emendations from time to time; only, unlike Fellowes, he did not indicate them in a

preface.8

Westrup implies here that Heseltines purist approach verged on the doctrinaire. This

is understandable if we consider that, in his transcriptions, Heseltine was not simply

making Dowlands music available, but also making a case for Dowlands greatness

as a composer. His transcriptions became part of a larger musical mission to elevate

Dowlands status. The trouble is, with such variable source materials, reverence for

Dowland and reverence for the surviving texts are two different, but overlapping

matters. Heseltine seems to have conflated them. Actually, Heseltine didsometimes

indicate emendations that he had made, as we will see in Part 3, but he appears to

have been somewhat inconsistent in this.

What of the Unnamed Piece which has featured in this article? My own feeling is

that Noads version (Example 4) is musically the most convincing as far as bar 16.

However, any fix adopted for bar 16 needs to have more musical interest than the

version in Example 5. I claim no compositional expertise, but I think a couple of

desirable characteristics for any fix in bar 16 are:

1 The pattern of descending thirds should be continued into the first half of bar 16

2 The dissonance on beat 3 of bar 16 should be prepared in the first half of bar 16.

Example 6 is my shot at this, although I wouldnt pretend this is what Dowland would

have written. The descending third is between (on beat 1) the E in the top part and (on

beat 2) the C sharp on an inner part. The decision to make this falling third between

two parts rather than within the top part was conditioned by desire to have to


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dissonance at the top of the chord on beat 3 arise from two separate parts. This might

be unduly punctilious for lute music of this period.

Example 6 Descending third used at the start of bar 16

In Example 6 one might object to the consecutive fifths between the outer parts on

beats 1 and 3 (actually an octave plus a fifth), but Dowland seems to have been

untroubled by such things.

The reader might be amused to know that the piece under discussion was described by

the Dowland scholar Diana Poulton as an agreeable little composition but not

particularly distinguished in any way.9Heseltine evidently thought otherwise. One of

the attractions of the piece to me is the ease with which it lends itself to

embellishment along the lines of Example 7. However, I would also suggest that the

piece benefits from a few more discreet modifications, in addition to those discussed

here.

Example 7 Simple embellishment of opening

Issues of editorial practice recur in the final article of this series next month, when I

bring Segovia back into the story and give an explanation for an enigmatic piece he

recorded as a galliard by Dowland.

Notes

1 Frederick Noad, The Renaissance Guitar(Ariel Music Publications Inc.), 1974, p. 65.

2 Diana Poulton and Basil Lam (eds) The Collected Lute Music of John Dowland(Faber, 1981).

In this volume the piece is number 49.


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3 The problem with the manuscript of this piece is explained, somewhat tersely, in a note in

Diana Poulton and Basil Lam (eds) The Collected Lute Music of John Dowland(Faber, 1981), p. 171.

4 Frederick Noad, The Renaissance Guitar(Ariel Music Publications Inc.), 1974, p. 65.

5 John Dowland: Complete Lute Works, vol. 1, Harmonia Mundi, 907160.

6 Philip Heseltine, The English Ayre, Oxford University Press, 1926, p.133.

7 Philip Heseltine, On Editing Elizabethan Songs,Musical Times, July 1922, p. 480.

8 JAW (Jack Westrup) reviewingEnglish Ayres, Elizabethan and Jacobean, transcribed and

edited by Peter Warlock, Oxford University Press, inMusic and Lettersvol. 45, no. 3, July 1964, p.

306.

9 Diana Poulton,John Dowland, second edition, Faber, 1982, p. 160.


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Part 3: Dowlands mysterious galliard

Allan Clive Jones

Part 1 of this series of articles discussed the pioneering work of Philip Heseltine (real

name of the composer Peter Warlock) as a transcriber Dowlands lute songs and lute

solos in the 1920s. Heseltine appears to have made some of this music possibly a

great deal of it available to Segovia around 1927, although it is not clear that

Segovia made much use of it. Part 2 looked at Heseltines editorial practices when

producing his editions of early music. All these elements come together in this final

article of the series, where I resolve a puzzle surrounding one of the Dowland pieces

recorded by Segovia.

Pioneering as Heseltines work on Dowland was, he did not have the field entirely to

himself. Mention was made in Part 1 of the work of Canon E. H. Fellowes, who began

transcribing and publishing the lute songs of Dowland and other lutenists a few years

before Heseltine. Even these British editors, however, were not alone. A couple of

editors in continental Europe began to republish a few of Dowlands works in the

early 1920s. Their work actually preceded Heseltines, although in quantity it

amounted to much less.

An early continental editor of Dowland was Dr Hans Dagobert Bruger, who also

published an edition of the Bach lute suites. In 1923 he publishedJohn Dowlands

Solostcke fr die Laute(John Dowlands solo pieces for the lute). This slim

volume contained four unnamed galliards, theLachrimaepavan, two unnamed

allemands, and a version of the pavan Semper Dowland Semper Dolens. Bruger,

unlike Heseltine, did not go back to manuscripts or other authoritative sources for his

edition. His main source was Joachim van den HovesDelitiae Musicae, an anthology

of lute tablatures by various composers published in Utrecht in 1612.1Several lute

solos in this volume were attributed to Dowland.

For many of the Dowland pieces in hisDelitiae Musicae, Hove drew on one of the

few authoritative collections of Dowlands instrumental works published in

Dowlands lifetime. This wasLachrimae or Seven Tears Figured in Seven Passionate

Pavans, with Divers other Pavans, Galliards and Almands. For brevity I will refer to

this from now on simply as theLachrimaecollection. In an article published in 1927,

Heseltine explained that theLachrimaecollection consisted of:


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... twenty-one pieces for five viols, with an ad libitumlute part (which in some numbers is a

free transcription of the viol parts, in others a mere accompaniment, the melody being

omitted).2

The viol, which Heseltine refers to here, was a bowed string instrument with frets.

Figure 1 shows a tenor viol, with a guitar for comparison. Viol consorts, with viols of

various sizes, were popular chamber ensembles from around the time of Henry VIII.

Figure 1 Tenor viol and guitar for comparison.

The viol was fretted, had six strings, and was played with a bow. The tenor instrument

had Renaissance-lute tuning: G C F A D G. Viol consorts comprised treble, tenor and

bass instruments, often with multiple parts for each type of viol. The viol family was

developed at about the same time as the violin family, and was not a forerunner of the

violin family

The first item in DowlandsLachrimaecollection is a consort arrangement of his

famousLachrimaepavan. This piece is known in its song form as Flow My Tears, but

is re-titledLachrimae Antiquaein the collection. This piece, of course, is the source

of the collections title.

Although DowlandsLachrimaecollection contained no solo items, enterprising

publishers in the seventeenth century extracted solo lute pieces from it. As Heseltine

explained:

These accompanying lute parts [in the Lachrimaecollection] were sometimes reprinted

no doubt by pirate publishers as though they constituted the whole piece.3

That is to say, the lute parts from the consort pieces were sometimes published by

pirate publishers as solo items. According to Heseltine, one of these pirates was

Hove. Bruger unwittingly gave Hoves artificial solos a new lease of life in his 1923

edition of Dowland lute pieces, as Heseltine explained:

Dr Hans Dagobert Bruger has recently published the accompanimentsonly of two

Galliards and two Almans from Lachrimae without, apparently, being aware that the

melodies were missing. His transcriptions were made from Joachim van den HovesDelitiae Musicae, which was printed at Utrecht in 1612.

4


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Hove might not have been as reprehensible as Heseline suggests for extracting lute

solos from DowlandsLachrimaecollection. When Heseltine says in the extract

quoted above that theLachrimaepieces are for five viols, with an ad libitumlute

part, he is giving only one interpretation of a notoriously ambiguous statement by

Dowland. On the title page ofLachrimae, the text says: set forth for the Lute, Viols

or Violons, in five parts. This could mean that lute, viols and violins were

alternatives an interpretation supported by the fact that the lute parts generally

incorporated much of the music of the other parts, including, in most cases, the tune.

On that interpretation, Hoves extraction of lute solos fromLachrimaecould be

defended. Nevertheless, the prevailing opinion nowadays is that the lute should play

along with the five bowed-string parts, and that the lute parts were not intended as

independent solos.5

In editing the Dowland solos from the lute tablatures in HovesDelitiae Musicae,

Bruger transposed them down a minor third, and put them in the treble clef, creating a

version playable directly on the guitar. One of the solos in his edition, entitled

Almain, is shown in Example 1. I have added the letters X and Y to clarify the

following discussion. This Almain is one of those lute parts fromLachrimaethat

lacks the tune.

Example 1 Almain from BrugersJohn Dowlands Solostcke fr die Laute,1923

Example 1 is the mysterious Dowland piece I referred to in Part 1 of this series.

Segovia recorded it more than once, and billed it on his recordings (and presumably in

concert performances) as a galliard by Dowland.6It is not a galliard (which is a

triple-time dance) and, as we have seen, not a lute solo. It is, however, definitely by

Dowland.

From consort to solo


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viol. Using members of the violin family, the equivalent could be violin, three violas

and cello, rather than the Schubert-quintet instrumentation given by Heseltine.8

The lute part of Example 2 is virtually the same as the almain in Example 1. Thus the

mysterious Dowland galliard is actually the lute part from the consort pieceMrs

Nichols Almand, published as a lute solo by Hove in 1612, and re-published by Brugerin 1923 in guitar notation.Mrs Nichols Almandalso exists as a genuine lute-solo,

known asMrs Nichols Almain.9The real lute-solo bears little audible relation to the

lute part of the consort version in Example 2. It is not surprising, therefore, that the

identity of the piece recorded by Segovia should have been so mysterious.

Missing notes

How can we be sure that Segovia got his so-called galliard from Brugers edition,

rather than from HeseltinesLachrimaetranscription? After all, as Part 1 of this seriesshowed, Heseltine had some contact with Segovia in the 1920s, and, by his own

account, Heseltine introduced Segovia to Dowlands music. The answer lies in some

telling differences between Heseltines transcription and Brugers publication.

In Heseltines consort transcription (Example 2), the stretch from the beginning as far

as the letter X in the lute part is the same as the equivalent stretch in Brugers

Example 1 (allowing for the downward transposition of Example 1 relative to

Example 2). Similarly, in both pieces, the stretch from the letter Y to the end is the

same. However, Brugers solo in Example 1 contains, between X and Y, four

quavers (eighth-notes) over a two-note chord. This passage is absent from Heseltines

consort transcription (Example 2). Segovia plays this passage in his recordings, and

this tells us that he got the piece from Brugers 1923 publication, rather than from

Heseltines transcription.10

The passage in question does actually appearMrs Nichols Almandas published in the

Lachrimaecollection in Dowlands lifetime. Heseltine, however, has suppressed it in

his transcription to fix what he and other editors considered to be an error in the lute

part. The error, in modern parlance, consists of an additional half-bar of music in the

lute part for which there is no corresponding music in the other parts. The passage that

Heseltine has suppressed would, if played, make the lute part half a bar longer than

the other parts.

Rather unusually, given his reluctance to explain his editorial procedures (see Part 2),

Heseltine gives a footnote in which he says he has suppressed four redundant

quavers. He marks their location with an asterisk visible in Example 2 at the end of


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bar 8 of the lute part. Unfortunately the asterisk is misplaced. It should be in the

middle of bar 8, between the letters X and Y.11

It might seem strange that the lute part toMrs Nichols Almandcould have appeared in

print in Dowlands lifetime with so significant an anomaly. However, these consort

pieces were printed not as a score (like Example 2), which would make unequalamounts of music in the parts obvious, but in table layout, in which the parts were

arranged around the sides of a book-opening. Players sat around the opened book and

played from it. Figure 2 indicates the table layout used inLachrimae.

Figure 2 Table layout used for the original publication of Dowlands

Lachrimaeconsort pieces

Example 3 is the cantus part forMrs Nichols Almand. Like all the other bowed parts,

it is unbarred. The lute part (Example 4), although barred, is not barred in a way that

corresponds to modern practice. It contains the entire first section of the lute part ofMrs Nichols Almand(bars 14 of Heseltines transcription). With table-layout, and

with unbarred parts, anomalies in individual parts can arise easily, and are hard to

spot.12

Example 3 Cantus part ofMrs Nichols Almand

Example 4 Lute part for first section ofMrs Nichols Almand


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Duos

Although Hoves (and Brugers) lute solos extracted from theLachrimaecollection

were deprecated by Heseltine, he was sympathetic to the idea of a duo arrangement of

the consort pieces. In the introduction to his edition of DowlandsLachrimae,

Heseltine suggests that a melody instrument could play the cantus part, accompanied a

keyboard instrument playing the lute part. As the lute parts on the whole contain much

of the music of the bass and inner parts, little is lost by this arrangement.

Clearly there is scope here for adapting Heseltines idea, but with a guitar playing the

lute part. In Example 5 I have created such a duo version ofMrs Nichols Almandfor

flute (or any other melody instrument) and guitar. The guitar part is the consorts lute

part transposed down a minor third, but with no further adaptation to the guitar. Theflute part is the cantus part, also transposed down a minor third. For the guitar part,

instead of using Brugers transcription in Example 1, I have gone to Heseltines

transcription (Example 2). Naturally the redundant notes shown in Example 1

between X and Y are absent from the guitar part in my arrangement. In addition, a

couple of notes at the end of bar 7, and the chord at the beginning of bar 8, are

changed from Heseltines version. Heseltine transcribed these bars faithfully from the

source edition, adding the Latin SIC over the staff to indicate that what he had

transcribed really was what the source said. He felt reassurance was necessary because

the lute here does not duplicate notes elsewhere in the consort parts, and its part

doesnt fit with the harmony. The Dowland scholar Diana Poulton has suggested that

there is an error in the source, and proposed an amendment which I have adopted.13


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guitar quite comfortably. Other pieces from theLachrimaeset could similarly be

adapted for guitar-ensemble use.

Heseltines demise

The years after his work on Dowlands instrumental pieces marked a sharp

deterioration in Heseltines well being. His output declined, and he felt musical

inspiration was deserting him. His high level of alcohol consumption no doubt played

a part in this. His habitually disordered life became more so, and he was subject to

bouts of despair at his condition. At the end of 1930, at the age of 36, he took his own

life.

Heseltines early death was a sad loss for several reasons. He was, within a limited

field, a fine composer. His speciality was songs. He was also, as this series has shown,

remarkably enterprising, if idiosyncratic, editor of old music. His scholarly interestswere by no means confined to music from the British Isles; he also transcribed music

by French lutenists. As a writer on music he was lucid and insightful, and many of his

articles and books can still be read with profit, and certainly with pleasure. Somewhat

speculatively, I would also like to suggest that he was a loss to the world of the guitar.

He strikes me as the sort of composer who would have been sympathetic to the

instrument, and who, if he had lived a few more decades, would have enjoyed creating

a significant body of music for it.

Notes

1Of the eight pieces in BrugersJohn Dowlands Solostcke fr die laute, five are from Hoves

Delitiae Musicae(1612), and three are from Besards Thesaurus Harmonicus(1603).

2Philip Heseltine, More light on John Dowland,Musical Times, 1 August 1927, p.689.

3Philip Heseltine, More light on John Dowland,Musical Times, 1 August 1927, p.689.

4Philip Heseltine, More light on John Dowland,Musical Times, 1 August 1927, p.689. Italics in

original.

5Peter Holman gives the arguments for this interpretation inDowland: Lachrimae (1604), Cambridge

University Press, 1999, p. 2225.

6Segovia recorded it in 1944, appended to three short Purcell pieces. This recording has been reissued

on CD on Andrs Segovia: the 1944 American Recordings, Naxos, 8.111087. He recorded it again in

1956, paired withDigorie Pipers Galliard. These two items have been reissued on the CD Andrs


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Segovia: 1950s American Recordings, volume 4, Naxos, 8.111092. He recorded it yet again in Madrid

in December 1969, along with a free adaptation ofDigorie Pipers Galliardand theMelancholy

Galliard. This recording has been reissued on Andres Segovia: a Centenary Celebration, Disc 1,

MCA Classics, MCAD4 11124.

7Heseltines edition of DowlandsLachrimaewas published by Oxford University Press in 1927.

8Peter Holman explains this inDowland: Lachrimae (1604), Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 18.

9The lute-solo version ofMrs Nichols Almainis Poulton number 52.

10Tony PalmersJulian Bream: a Life on the Road(MacDonald and Co., 1982), p. 125, says that

Heseltines edition of theLachrimaeconsort pieces was the source of Segovias Dowland

transcriptions, but if this were true of this particular piece the notes between X and Y in Example 1

would be missing from Segovias recordings. They are not.

11The problem of these redundant notes is discussed by Diana Poulton in her bookJohn Dowland

(Faber, revised ed. 1982), pp. 369370.

12Peter Holman points out inDowland: Lachrimae (1604)(Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 9,

that although editions in table layout were widely used for vocal music, they were not so much used for

instrumental music. For consorts of bowed instruments, getting close enough to the book to read it left

insufficient space for bowing.

13See Diana Poultons bookJohn Dowland(revised ed. 1982, Faber), pp. 369370, for a discussion of

her interpretation of the lute part in bars 7 and 8.

Warlock Dowland and Segovia-libre

Documents

Transcript of Warlock Dowland and Segovia-libre