To Dowlandor not to DowlandMike Fentross — lute

1 3’43 Prelude Mertel 1615 Praeludium 230

2 6’14 Fantasia Mertel 1615 Phantasia 67

3 2’35 In te Domine speravi PL-Wrk 352 fol. 30r

4 6’45 La Batalla Barbarino p. 368 / Thistlethwaite fol. 60r

5 5’04 Fantasia Mertel 1615 Phantasia 29

6 2’10 Fantasia Mertel 1615 Phantasia 41

7 3’15 Prelude Hirsch fol. 15r

8 3’42 Fantasia Hirsch fol. 67v

9 4’20 Fancy Marsh p. 230

10 2’55 Preludium Cosens fol. 27r

11 2’10 Fantasia Dd.2.11 fol. 16r

12 2’58 Fantasia Hirsch fol. 65v

13 4’55 Fantasia Mertel 1615 Phantasia 19

14 5’55 Susanne un jour Wickhambrook fol. 13v

15 2’26 Preludium Cosens fol. 24v

16 3’43 My Mrs Farewell Board fol. 16r

To Dowland or not to DowlandMike Fentross lute

total time: 62’52

The pieces, recorded here, form merely the tip of a fascinating iceberg. When André Nieuwlaat initially shared his discoveries with me two years ago, I realised immediately

their importance. But at the time, I was actually unable to foresee the enormity of the

project. I have been riveted observing how André has been able, by thinking ‘outside

the box’, to make one revelation after another. All too often, it is easy to follow and

accept the conclusions of people that have paved the way in research, rather than

dare to pursue innovative horizons.

Every composer has his own musical signature. Trusting the experience that I have

gained throughout my thirty-year career as a professional lute player, and as Professor

of Lute at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague for the last 15 years, I started to make

a selection from all the pieces in the pertinent manuscripts. I let myself be guided by

musical intuition, by the essence and beauty of the pieces, and by constantly asking

myself the question: do I recognise Dowland’s hand in this? The overall quality of the

pieces to choose from was very impressive, and the answer to my question was: yes,

I recognise Dowland in these works, without a shadow of a doubt.

In my opinion, André’s research has opened up a musical treasure-trove that can be

a source of immense joy for both lutenists and their audiences. I feel blessed that

I have had the privilege of being the first lute player to record a minuscule part of

this wealth of repertoire.

— Mike Fentross

Tip of the iceberg

Possible portrait

of John Dowland.

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The publication in 1955 of David Lumsden’s dissertation “The sources of English lute music (1540-1620)” marks

the beginning of a renewed interest in English lute music,

which since its decline in the late 17th century had been

sadly neglected. This renewed interest manifested itself in

the establishment of the Lute Society in London in 1956,

and in an increasing number of articles and editions that

were published by such legendary pioneers as John Ward,

Robert Spencer and Diana Poulton. In the same period,

scholarly interest in Continental lute sources was also

growing rapidly, and it is not a coincidence that during

those years two landmark editions were published: Arthur

Ness’ edition of the works of Francesco da Milano (1970),

and Diana Poulton’s edition of the lute works of John

Dowland (1974). Although new sources have come to light

since then, those two editions are still widely used as the

standard editions.

Since the 1970’s, many important lute sources have

been published in facsimile editions, usually including

very detailed lists of concordances with other lute sources.

The name of researcher John Robinson deserves special

mention in this respect. His knowledge of lute sources and

their contents is quite unparalleled, and it is largely thanks

to the efforts and hard work of him and his predecessors

that we now have an ever-increasing number of

wonderfully detailed lists of concordances between lute

sources: not just English sources, but Continental ones

as well.

Despite all the invaluable work that has been done

during the last sixty years, there are, however, still many

questions to which no satisfactory answers have been

found. One of the major problems when studying lute

sources - perhaps the principal problem - is establishing

the nature and provenance, and, directly connected with

that, the accurate dating of these sources. Nearly all

surviving English lute sources are manuscript sources.

Unfortunately, many of them seem to provide hardly any

clues for solving the above problems. But as it has turned

out recently, for many English lute sources, satisfactory

answers perhaps can be found after all, by applying a

radically different approach to the sources. This approach

is based primarily on the study of concordances between

sources, and secondarily on any scribal concordances

between them.

John Dowland (1543-1626) was active professionally,

as a composer, as a performing musician, and as a

teacher for nearly forty years. The canon of his collected

lute works, as published by Diana Poulton, numbers

exactly one hundred pieces, which is far more than the

surviving lute output of any of his contemporaries. And

yet, when you think about his fame, the number of lute

pieces attributed to him is surprisingly small. His lute

output fits on four CDs, which is the equivalent of about

three hundred minutes of music; this makes an average

of about seven minutes of surviving lute music for each

year that he was active. What is even more remarkable is

the fact that only a handful of pieces in his handwriting

are believed to have survived, scattered among several

lute sources. And yet, on the other hand, we have this

huge corpus of anonymous English lute sources, dating

from the same period, containing pieces (often unica, as

in the case of the Hirsch Lute Book) of exceptionally high

quality. It is a situation worth considering: all those high-

quality manuscript sources, but as far as we know hardly

anything in Dowland’s handwriting ...

I am an archivist by profession and I first became

interested in lute tablature about thirty years ago. When

I started this particular research in 2015, I was faced with

something that had been puzzling me for some time. This

concerned the curious relationship between a fantasia,

attributed to Francesco da Milano (found in the lute

book commonly known as Dd.2.11 - see sources at the

end of this text - and included in the Ness edition as No.

83; in A minor) and a stylistically very different version

of that same piece, found in various other sources (in G

minor). As an archivist, used to working with 16th and 17th

century archives, I had acquired considerable experience

in establishing the relationships between items within

a particular archive (for instance that of a parish, or a

local government institution). What is needed in order to

reconstruct the original order in what initially appears to

be little more than a chaotic collection of unrelated items,

is a basic knowledge of how administrations are organised,

power of observation, and finally, an ability to apply logic

in order to find a plausible explanation for any incongruous

aspects. I was curious to find out whether the methods

and principles that I knew from my work as an archivist

(and from my earlier training as a philologist) could also

be applied to musical sources. And so I decided to apply

these methods, to see whether they could shed some light

on the question of the fantasia known as Ness No. 83 and

the pieces related to it. I was delighted to discover very

early on that applying these methods turned out to be an

extremely fruitful approach.

The CD that you are holding now contains only a small

selection of pieces that I believe can be safely attributed to

John Dowland. This booklet outlines some of my methods,

analyses and conclusions. However, my research very

much remains a work-in-progress and I am very much

looking forward to working with others to continue this

research and discuss the manifold questions that I still

have.

The 20th-century pioneers in lute scholarship were

quite literally starting from scratch. Very little was known

about the sources that they were dealing with; all they

had to work with were the manuscripts themselves. They

interpreted what they saw to the best of their ability at the

time, and wrote down their observations and conclusions.

Unfortunately, it appears that their interpretations were

not always correct or complete. I will give two examples

of this. Robert Spencer, in his introduction to the facsimile

edition of the Board Lute Book (1976), concludes that

the first section of that manuscript (about 30 folios in

all) is written by Margaret Board (b. 1600) who was a

pupil of John Dowland. From an archivist’s point of view

however, his interpretation makes very little sense. In fact,

there are numerous indications to suggest that Spencer’s

identification of Board as being the original scribe is

questionable, notwithstanding that her name is written on

the flyleaf of the manuscript. However, once you recognise

the Board Lute Book for what it really is, considering its

contents, the paper that was used and the concordances,

it all suddenly makes perfect sense. I propose that the

Board Lute Book was originally started by John Dowland,

probably in the early 1600’s and it was the book that he

used in his capacity as a lute teacher.

The book seems to have become the property of Board

soon after Dowland gave up teaching in the 1620’s. The

one piece in the Board Lute Book that is generally believed

to be in John Dowland’s handwriting (an Almande by his

son Robert Dowland on fol. 12v) is actually not in his hand.

It is in fact the handwriting of Robert Dowland who was

contributing to the book that his father was using as a lute

teacher. Therefore, it was John Dowland who wrote an

alternative ending to his son’s piece, and added that to the

manuscript.

Another example of an incomplete research topic is

the famous collection of musical manuscripts that was

compiled under the supervision of the 17th-century English

recusant Edward Paston. His last will states that his music

collection contained a number of lute books, in Italian

and in French tablature. But as the scholar Philip Brett

pointed out in his article on Paston (Transactions of the

Cambridge Bibliographical Society Vol. 4, No. 1 (1964),

pp. 51-69), only the lute books in Italian tablature seem

to have survived: no lute books in French tablature are

known, and they are therefore presumed lost. This is

repeated by Francis Knights in his thesis on the Paston

collection (1999), and again by Matthew Spring in “The

Lute in Britain” (2001). However, I have found various

concordances in the Hirsch Lute Book which provide

essential clues to identify an already known lute book as

having originally been part of the Paston collection. This is

the Brogyntyn Lute Book.

This leads me to the importance of having accurate

and detailed lists of concordances between sources. The

vast majority of English lute sources have two things in

common: they were compiled in roughly the same period

(late 16th, early 17th century), and in the same region (the

Southwest of England). This manuscript tradition implies

that much of the music was probably copied from one

source to another. It is inevitable that this practice would

leave traces in the concordances between sources,

especially when more than one piece was copied. If this

is so, then it should be possible to find patterns in the

concordances, patterns which indicate that the manuscript

sources are closely related. And closer study shows that

there is indeed an abundance of such patterns, patterns

that are often so striking that a direct connection between

the lute sources involved is evident.

Facsimile editions usually include a detailed list of

concordances which are indispensable appendices to any

editions. They are far more than simple lists of concordant

pieces. They provide us with the raw basic material

which can help establish the nature and provenance of

the sources involved - and, possibly, even their scribes.

The amount of information that is hidden in any list of

concordances is simply staggering. On the basis of those

lists, I have attempted to establish the nature of some of

those key sources and find out how they are related. From

this, other concordances suddenly started to make sense

as well and to new lines of research presented themselves.

At that point, the lists of concordances stopped being

simply lists but began to tell stories in a very literal sense.

To use an analogy: one could think of the English lute

sources as separate pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. How

do all those pieces fit together? The only way to solve

that puzzle is to study as many as the sources possible as

a whole. Then other pieces of the puzzle start falling into

place and research becomes progressively easier.

When trying to establish the connections between lute

sources, the handwriting that is used in those sources

is of course extremely important. But establishing such

connections on handwriting alone is problematic and

full of pitfalls. In modern times, a person’s handwriting is

considered something very personal and individual, but in

the 16th century this was only partially true. In those days,

learning to write meant that you learnt to write different

scripts, in much the same way that a printer would make

use of a variety of fonts. Instruction books on the art of

writing were published by professional pen-masters,

explaining how the different scripts (and there were many)

should be properly executed. When the same script is

executed with great care by different scribes of equal skill,

it is often very hard to distinguish who wrote what: in both

cases, the script will appear to be identical. It is mostly

when the scribe is writing at considerable speed (when

for instance jotting down something for personal use) that

individual traits begin to show themselves.

There are several other factors which add to the

difficulties in trying to distinguish scribes on the basis

of handwriting alone. Some lute sources, such as the

Welde Lute Book, were quite clearly compiled over a

very short period of time. The Welde Lute Book shows

every sign of having been commissioned and it is

therefore not surprising that it was written with great

care, with a uniform lay-out throughout the manuscript.

A four-hundred page source like the Barbarino lute book

(also referred to as Krakow 40032) on the other hand

was quite clearly compiled over a long period of time

with great variation in the handwriting. This variation

led musicologists Dieter Kirsch and Lenz Meierott

(in their description of the manuscript in ‘’Deutsche

Lautentabulaturen in Krakau’’) to distinguish no less than

five scribes. Another musicologist, John Griffiths, takes

a view that in my mind is much more realistic. He allows

for considerable variation in the writing of any one scribe,

taking into account the fact that several sections of

Krakow 40032 seem to have been written down at great

speed, and he works on the assumption that the work is of

a single scribe. I am also convinced that this is correct.

Sometimes, the tendency to distinguish different scribes

on the basis of small differences in handwriting has led

to questionable conclusions. One such example can be

found in Robert Spencer’s edition (1982) of the Hirsch Lute

Book. He distinguishes five scribes. One of the criteria that

he uses is the way in which the letter ‘’e’’ is formed. One

scribe writes it in a similar way to modern script, another

one uses an older form: two semi-circles placed diagonally

above each other. A third scribe uses a combination of

both. Taking variations of handwriting into account, it is

very likely that there is only one scribe for this source and

not three or even five.

When the different scripts in Krakow 40032 (assuming

that they can all be attributed to a single scribe, working

over a long period of time) are compared to the scripts

found in other sources like the Siena, Raimondi and San

Francisco Lute Books, the similarities are quite striking. Of

course, it is always possible to find minor differences, but

I believe that those differences do not justify an absolute

conclusion that different scribes were responsible for these

manuscripts. When scribal similarities far outweigh any

differences, it makes sense to work from a hypothesis that

those sources were in fact compiled by the same scribe.

And as it turns out, quite often very firm support for this

hypothesis can be found in the repertoire contained in the

sources.

Scholars sometimes write about John Dowland’s

‘very distinctive way of writing tablature’. But if there is

anything distinctive about it, it is that he kept changing it

throughout his life. As I have been able to establish, he was

a trained scribe, already at a very early age (when he was

in his mid-twenties, around 1587, and became secretary

to Edward Paston), but certainly not a professional one,

as can be seen in the Cosens Lute Book. In it, he uses a

wide variety of different scripts, especially in the titles

of the pieces, but it was quite clearly his intention to use

one particular script for the tablature throughout the

entire manuscript. Occasionally however - quite often,

in fact - he slips up and suddenly switches to the use of

a different script (especially for the letters ‘’b’’ and ‘’f’’):

one that he had used in earlier lute books. It is as if old

habits rear their ugly head. A moment later, he realises his

mistake, and continues in the script that he had in mind

when he first started the compilation. This phenomenon

can be observed literally dozens of times, throughout the

manuscript.

This is not the right place (nor is there enough room)

to explain in any detail which lute sources I believe can

safely be attributed to John Dowland, or on what grounds.

I intend to do that, step by step, in the months to come. At

the same time, I am well aware that an enormous amount

of work is still waiting to be done. This fascinating research

has lived with me for several years now and I am delighted

that the first fruits of my labours result in Mike Fentross’

wonderful renditions of the pieces on this CD.

— André Nieuwlaat

Lute sources referred to in the text:

Barbarino lute book : PL-Krakow, Biblioteka Jagiellonska,

Ms.Mus.40032

Board lute book : GB-London, Royal Academy of Music, Robert

Spencer Collection, Margaret Board Lute Book

Brogyntyn lute book : GB-Aberystwyth, National Library of

Wales, Brogyntyn Ms.27

Cosens lute book : GB-Cambridge University Library, Add.3056

Dallis lute book : EIRE-Dublin, Trinity College Library, Ms.410/1

Dd.2.11 : GB-Cambridge University Library, Ms. Dd.2.11

Hainhofer lute books : D-Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek.

Cod.Guelf. 18.7/8.Aug.20

Hirsch lute book : GB-London, British Library, Ms.Hirsch M.1353

Marsh lute book : EIRE-Dublin, Library of Archbishop Narcissus

Marsh, Ms.Z3.2.13

Mertel 1615 : Elias Mertel, ‘Hortus Musicalis Novus’, Strasbourg 1615

ML lute book : GB-London, British Library, Add.38539

Montreal lute book : CDN-Montréal, Conservatoire de Musique et

d’Art Dramatique, Ms. without shelfmark

Paris Rés. 429 : F-Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,

Département de la Musique, Rés.429

Raimondi lute book : I-Como, Biblioteca Communale, Ms.1.1.20

San Francisco lute book : US-San Francisco, Frank V. De Bellis

Collection of the California State University

and Colleges, Ms.M2.1.M3

Siena lute book : NL-The Hague, Nederlands Muziek Instituut,

Ms.28.B.39

Thistlethwaite lute book : GB-Edinburgh University Library,

Ms.Dc.5.125

Welde lute book : GB-Private Collection of Lord Forester, Welde

Lute Book

Wickhambrook lute book : US-New Haven, Yale Music Library,

Rare Ma21, W632

Lutenist and conductor Mike Fentross has earned his credits as an early music specialist. He has worked all over

Europe as a conductor, soloist and basso continuo player

and he is professor of lute and basso continuo at the

Royal Conservatory in The Hague. In 2006 he founded the

Baroque orchestra La Sfera Armoniosa.

About the opening concert of the Musica Antiqua Festival

in Brugge the press wrote: He is a true conductor, not only

in his movements, but also and especially in his musical

thought, developed and original, which distinguishes

him from many of his colleagues who are considered

to be ‘primus inter pares’. Besides a technically perfect

performance of his orchestra, his reading of ‘Membra

Jesu Nostri” is ravishing for its intensity and its theatrical

performance: Fentross increases the contrasts, uses rubati

rarely heard in this repertoire and builds powerful nuances

which brings to the music a supplementary dimension of

sound. Ton Koopman said in an interview with the German

music magazine Concerto: I have found in Mike Fentross

an incredibly gifted basso continuo player. I don’t know any

one that plays as musical and intelligent continuo as him.

Mike Fentross has conducted in many festivals and

concert halls like the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. the

Festival van Vlaanderen, Festival d’Ambronay, Festival

Oude Muziek Utrecht, Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci,

Paradiso Amsterdam, Monteverdi Festival Cremona,

Festival de Musica Portico de Zamora, Festival Musica

Antiqua Brugge, Vantaa Early Music Festival, Bayreuth

Barock and Muziekcentrum Vredenburg in Utrecht. He

has had the honour to conduct in the presence of Queen

Beatrix of Holland twice.

Mike Fentross graduated from the Royal Conservatory The

Hague where he studied with lute pioneer Toyohiko Satoh

in 1988. In 1994 he won the Van Wassenaer Competition

in Amsterdam with the violinist Helene Schmitt. He played

chamber music with musicians including Yo-Yo Ma, Ton

Koopman, Janine Jansen, Marion Verbruggen, Sonia Prina,

Maria Bajo, Wilbert Hazelzet, Bruce Dickey, Lucy van Dael,

Andrew Lawrence-King, Philippe Jaroussky, Andreas

Scholl, Eduardo Lopez Banzo, Skip Sempé and Gerard

Lesne. Mike has recorded more than eighty CDs during his

career.

Recorded at the Zeeuwse Concertzaal, Middelburg, October 20 2017,

December 29 2017, April 3 & 4 2018

Recording and editing by Concertstudio (NL), Jakko van der Heijden, Walter Calbo

Mastering: Walter Calbo

Seven-course lute by Sebastián Núñez 2004 after Dieff opruchaer 1550

Cover: from ‘Thistlethwaite manuscript’, Edinburgh University Library, Dc.5.125, pen trial

Photography: Ribalta Luce Studio

Liner notes: André Nieuwlaat

Design: Meeuw

The scores that were used for this recording were prepared by Göran Crona,

Frank Gerbode and André Nieuwlaat.

Special thanks: Maria Christina Cleary

Villa Dorothy B&B Middelburg, Fransje Frohn & Tonnie Hugens

www.lasfera-armoniosa.com

www.zefi rrecords.nl