Presents

DUFAY COLLECTIVE

To Drive the Cold Winter Away

with

Vivien Ellis – VoiceWilliam Lyons –flute, recorder, curtal, bagpipes

Jon Banks – Harp, guitarEmily Askew – Violin, recorder, bagpipes

5:00PMSunday, December 11, 2011

Christ Church Cathedral1117 Texas Avenue

4:15PM Pre-concert lecture

Dufay Collective members

Guests of Houston Early Music stay at the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

Houston Early Music is funded in part by grants from theCity of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance,

Texas Commission on the Artsand National Endowment for the Arts

Please turn off cell phones, audible pagers and alarm watches.

P R O G R A M

Swet Jesu is come to us Anon 16cLa bounette Anon Ritson MS 16c

Ther is no Rose of swych vertu Anon 15cZorziLa Rocha el fuso Anon c.1530

Grene growith the holy Henry VIII 1490 -1547, arr. LyonsLa morte de la ragioneLa traditora Anon c.1530

Ah Robin, gentle Robin William Cornysh d.1523

Piva After Joan Ambrosio Dalza fl1508Piva Calabrese Trad. Italy

- INTERMISSION -

Remember O Thou Man Thomas Ravenscroft Melismata Country dances pub. John Playford 1651

To drive the cold winter away Anon 17cCountry dances Playford 1651

This was the day when Cruell Herod Anon 17cLullay Lulla, thow little tine child Anon 16cOn the Cold Ground Playford 1651

Country Dances Playford 1651Blessed be that Maid Marie Anon 17c arr Lyons

Thys endere nyghyt I saw a syghyt Anon 16c arr Lyons

Christmas Dances Trad England

NOTES ON THE PROGRAM

In 1638 Thomas Nabbes’s masque The Spring’s Glory a duel between Shrovetide and Christmas, loudly echoing a recurrent theme in folk literature. Shrovetide commands his rival to resign and let “minced pies yield superiority to pancakes and fritters”. “Resign to thee,” splutters Christmas. “I that am the king of good cheer and feasting, though I come but once a year to reign over baked, boiled, roast and plumporridge, will have being in despite of thy lardship. Thou art but my fag-end, and I must still be before thee.”

Popular affection for Christmas, its customs and banquets gained wide currency during the medieval and early modern periods, resistant both to occasional attempts by the church to rein in the season’s excesses and to the more pressing force of the Reformation. At Christmas, princes doled out alms to the poor, noble hospitality extended its reach to beggars, games were played, decorations put up and Yule logs burned. The rites of Christmas, sacred and secular, attracted a rich musical accompaniment, from ecstatic dances for solo instrument and monophonic songs in the 13th and 14th centuries to elaborate polyphonic pieces in later times.

The medieval English carol shares common origins with the French carole, a widely popular form of round-dance in which all participants sing a recurring refrain, interleaved with stanzas sung by a leader. Contemporary literary sources, many of which pronounce against the diabolic nature of the form and its practice, make it clear that the carol was a popular, profane form of entertainment. “They serve the Devil with their voices as they sing, with their hands as they lead one another, and with their feet as they move in a circle. Whence their dance is called the Devil’s mill.” So observed one high-minded writer in a collection of sermons now housed in the library of Birmingham University. Such dance-songs for public consumption were perhaps the 13th century’s version of today’s club music, hypnotic and energetic, figuring at the centre of courtly entertainments and popular festivities. Scottish witchcraft trials cited “carolling” among the sins of the accused as late as the 17th century, while English Puritans attempted to ban the carol altogether.

Carols and Christmas songs gained high status during the late 14th and early 15th centuries. At Winchester College, for example, a statute was added to the community’s rulebook to ensure that members might sing and entertain their fellows with “poems, chronicles of kings, wonders of the world and other recreations appropriate to the clerical state”. These musical gatherings were held before the fire in the college hall after supper on major church feasts. A flavour of the Winchester repertoire is preserved in a manuscript

associated with the college, which contains one song about the Yule-log tradition. Around the turn of the 15th century, the monophonic carol gradually gave way to the polyphonic variety, initially for two voices, later for three. As Richard Greene points out, these were original works, not basedon existing folk tunes: “popular in destination” rather than “popular by design”. The snappy rhythms and generally consonant harmonies of the earlier polyphonic carols, such as Swet Jesu is cum to us, bear witness to their dance origins and close links with church processionals and civic ceremonies. In the 15th century’s closing decades, the carol form evolved to become freer and more complex in structure, yielding works of the quality of Ther is no rose of swych vertu.

Henry VIII and the composers under his patronage wrote carols as an adornment of the courtly song tradition, in which textual and musical conceit took precedence over the expression of sacred sentiments. The king’s musical prowess extended to the writing of dances and consort pieces. Grene Growith the Holy is a fine example of Henry’s disarmingly accomplished style of burden/verse composition, evoking the ever green holly as symbolic of the sincerity of his affection. Ah Robin William Cornysh is not a Christmas song per se, but is included as a fine example of the wistful melancholy of English early-modern verse. When Thomas Sharp’s Dissertations on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries, anciently performed in Coventry in 1825, its pages contained a poorly transcribed copy of the songs from the Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors, one of the mystery plays performed annually in Coventry since the 1390s on the feast of Corpus Christi (Thursday after Trinity Sunday). Part of the 16th century manuscript containing these plays was destroyed in a fire in 1879, leaving Sharp’s book as an important but corrupt source for the music of what modern editors have dubbed The Coventry Carol. Lully, lulla, thow lyttel tyne child sung towards the play’s end, as the holy family makes its escape; meanwhile, Herod’s soldiers arrive and carry out their orders to slaughter all young children. Remember O Thou Man originally published in 1611under the heading ‘A Christmas Carroll’ and clear survived as a popular seasonal song thereafter, being quoted in Thomas Hardy’s ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ in the late nineteenth century.

Ballads and social dances form the majority of the music in the second half of the concert. The ballad singer was a common visual and aural feature on the streets of England’s towns and cities, commonly setting topical or seasonal verse to popular tunes. ‘To Drive the Cold Winter Away’, ‘This was the day when Cruell Herod’ and ‘Blessed be that Maid Marie’ typical of the verses written for Christmas in 17th century England: joyful, rhythmic and in the case of ‘Cruell Herod’, viscerally graphic.

© William Lyons 2011