Purcell's Revenge by Concerto Caledonia

Our Revenge of the Folksingers project and album began as an exploration of Britten’s folksong settings, so when we were invited back to Aldeburgh for a ‘Return of the Revenge of the Folksingers’, it made sense for us to focus on another of Britten’s joyful explorations of British music history – his engagement with the music of Henry Purcell. Purcell’s music had many profound effects on Britten’s work, quite apart from his making the Rondeau from Abdelazer famous in his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. As composers they shared a great understanding of how to set the English language to music, and Britten’s forty realisations of Purcell songs with piano in a ‘performing edition for contemporary conditions’ show how much he admired and indeed emulated Purcell’s ‘mixture of clarity, brilliance, tenderness and strangeness’. However, now that we’re on the other side of history from the revolutions of the historical performance movement, our contemporary conditions are quite different, and when we step aside from musicological correctness, as Britten consciously did, the musical results will be different too.

It’s always good to question our assumptions about the performance of historical music, particularly since the early music movement has now been absorbed to a large extent into the classical music industry, albeit as a less well-subsidised subset of it. The revolutionary fervour of the 1960s and 70s was followed by a period of homogenisation, partly fuelled by the recording boom of the following decade, and now baroque groups who push the envelope tend to be the exception rather than the rule. There’s almost a generally accepted international style in which to play baroque music, an idea which would have seemed preposterous in the musically diverse Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

For singers, it’s even harder to break away from the currently accepted norms of baroque behaviour, because in order to earn a decent living from good fees, they have to work in opera houses and (usually) with modern orchestras in big venues, and to be successful at this they have to employ appropriate vocal resources to match. Unlike instrumentalists, singers can’t swap instruments from modern to historical versions or vice versa between gigs, so for very practical reasons, singing styles in baroque music, particularly in the UK, have tended to remain closely allied to more modern operatic techniques.

But there are other influences that can be brought into play. There are many singers today using the English language in effective and creative ways to tell stories and stir emotions with traditional material and with their own, often using microphones to allow for an intimacy that the opera house and concert hall don’t offer. The musicians of Purcell’s world moved in varied circles: his contemporary Francis Forcer, who ran Sadler’s Wells music house, had been the organist of Durham Cathedral, as well as a fiddler and a dancing master; Purcell’s theatre song ‘There’s not a swain on the plain’ turns up appended to the fiddle tune ‘Lads of Leith’ in James Oswald’s Caledonian Pocket Companion a few decades later; and when Purcell composed a hornpipe, it wasn’t an abstract musical form, but a dance associated with a particular group of real people.

A clear distinction between folk culture and high art was still over a century away, and the separation of classical from almost all other forms of music in the twentieth century was even more distant, but that’s not to say that all the music of Purcell’s time was considered equal. Thomas Brown in his Letters from the Dead to the Living of 1702 imagines Purcell writing to fellow composer John Blow from hell, where Nicholas Staggins (late Master of the King’s Music) now has ‘to compose Scotch tunes for Lucifer’s Bag-piper’. Some of Purcell’s own ‘Scotch Tunes’ are clearly derived from London stage parodies – ‘Within a furlong of Edinburgh Town’ is a particularly dreadful example, if it really is by Purcell and not Jeremiah Clarke – but others seem to be genuine Scottish and Irish tunes that were in circulation among musicians in the English capital. The more bawdy of Purcell’s vocal catches are also clear evidence that he was not averse to some unashamedly low culture from time to time.

What we present here is not intended to be an ideal answer to any of the questions that Purcell’s music and culture present to us. We don’t claim to be more historically informed than anyone else, and we won’t be setting the early music police on anyone who disagrees with what we’re doing. But what I hope we can do is to broaden the debate within the ongoing musical conversation about how seventeenth-century music might sound in the present. Without Britten’s contribution to this conversation, Purcell’s music would still be reaching a far smaller audience today.

© 2015 David McGuinness

music from Scotland of the past and the present

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