Henry Lawes: Cavalier Songwriter.(Review)

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Henry Lawes: Cavalier Songwriter. By Ian Spink. (Oxford Monographs on Music.) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [xix, 172 p. ISBN 0-19-816556-0. $70.]

With some 430 songs to his credit, Henry Lawes was by far the most important and prolific English songwriter of the mid-seventeenth century, and a detailed study of his work has long been overdue. A full-length survey, by Willa McClung Evans, was published in 1941 (Henry Lawes: Musician and Friend of Poets [New York: Modern Language Association of America; London: Oxford University Press; reprint, New York: Kraus, 1966]), but Evans was primarily a literary scholar, and since then there has been almost nothing. (In recent years, Lawes's younger and musically more versatile brother William, killed at the Siege of Chester in 1645, has enjoyed a good deal of scholarly attention.) It matters not that Ian Spink did not quite make it in time for the quatercentenary of Henry's birth in 1995; a fine scholar, sensitive not only to the musical import of the notes as such, but also to the poetic nuances of the verse, he is the ideal person for the job, and his book is as comprehensive an account of the composer's life a nd work as we are ever likely to get. It is also beautifully written and thoroughly readable, a model for Ph.D. candidates and, dare one say it, some practicing musicologists too.

As for the music itself, much of that is, as the author himself is obliged to admit, something of an acquired taste for present-day listeners. By no means all the songs are simple strophic ditties, easily absorbed by a half-tuned ear; many, indeed most, are serious and involve a declamatory element, which, being neither recitative nor air, commands attention, and a rather sharper focus on both text and music than what is currently habitual. It was a quality that many of his contemporaries greatly admired, none more so, it seems, than those poets such as Thomas Carew, William Cartwright, Robert Herrick, Edmund Waller, Richard Lovelace, and John Suckling, whose verses Lawes set. And some, indeed, voiced their appreciation in poetic form, most notably, of course, John Milton, who went somewhat over the top in suggesting that it was our "Harry, whose tunefull and well measur'd song First taught our English Music how to span Words with just note and accent" (p. 6, quoted from ...