William Lawes.(Sound Recording Review)

William Lawes. Collected Vocal Music. Edited by Gordon J. Callon. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 120-123.) Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, Inc., c2002. [Pt. 1, Solo Songs: abbrevs., p. vii-viii; gen. pref., p. ix-xii; introd., p. xiii-xxv; texts, p. xxvi-xxxvi; score, 70 p.; crit. report, p. 71-83; appendix, p. 85-91. ISBN 0-89579-513-2. $49. Pt. 2, Dialogues, Partsongs, and Catches: abbrevs., p. viii-ix; gen. pref., p. xi-xiv; introd., p. xv-xxii; texts, p. xxiii-xxxv; 5 plates; score, 116 p.; crit. report, p. 117-31; appendix, p. 133-97. ISBN 0-89579-514-0. $85. Pt. 3, Sacred Music: abbrevs., p. vii-viii; gen. pref., p. ix-xii; introd., p. xiii-xxiii; texts, p. xxiv-xxxiv; 9 plates; score, 207 p.; crit. report, p. 209-32; appendix, p. 233-40. ISBN 0-89579-518-3. $110. Pt. 4, Masques: abbrevs., p. vii; gen. pref., p. ix-xii; introd., p. xiii-xxvii; texts, p. xxviii-xxxi; 3 plates; score, 68 p.; crit. report, p. 69-78. ISBN 0-89579-520-5. $50.]

The names John Dowland and Henry Purcell often serve to frame seventeenth-century England's vast song tradition, as in the title of the standard work on the topic, Ian Spink's English Song: Dowland to Purcell (New York: C. Scribner's Sons; London: B. T. Batsford, 1974; reprint, New York: Taplinger; London: Batsford, 1986). But the ground between these early- and late-century figures is vast and much less thoroughly explored. William Lawes (1602-1645) and his brother Henry Lawes (1595-1662) are by far the strongest candidates to occupy the top tier of midcentury song-writers. Henry was in fact the more prolific songwriter, having composed over four hundred songs, and has certainly received more attention in this capacity to date. William, on the other hand, is better known as a composer of instrumental works, particularly music for the viol consort, and for the dramatic, final details of his biography: a loyalist to Charles I, he died at the siege of Chester, apparently killed by an errant bullet. (The evidence of Lawes's death is surveyed in the general preface to the volumes under review here, reprinted in all of them [p. x in the first].) We are now in a much stronger position to assess freshly William Lawes, the vocal composer, as a result of Gordon J. Callon's efforts to bring Lawes's complete vocal music together in a single four-volume set.

On the whole, the edition is clearly and logically organized. Part I, Solo Songs, contains fifty-eight songs (three in two versions) for solo voice and continuo, most of which derive from Lawes's autograph song-book, British Library Add. MS 31432, the copying of which Callon dates to ca. 1639-41, although it includes items composed as early as 1633. Part 2, Dialogues, Partsongs, and Catches, brings together sixty-six secular works for multiple voices (again some variant settings included), organized by Callon into four genres: dialogues ("musical settings of a short, somewhat dramatic incident, involving two or more characters" [p. xv], not always named, though often involving standard mythological or pastoral figures); partsongs (shorter two- and three-voice works, which Callon points out parallel the solo songs in terms of their stylistic range); "solo plus chorus" songs (solo songs with a two- or three-voice "attachment" [p. xvii], normally at the conclusion); and catches (the bawdy rounds favored by many seventeenth-century English composers and certainly intended for tavern-use only). It should be emphasized that these distinctions are musical not textual, some of the dialogue and partsong texts here having been set elsewhere as catches (such as John Suckling's "A Health to the Northern Lass," which was later set by Purcell). Part 3, Sacred Music, includes three anthems (one incomplete), a sacred song, the so-called "Oxford" psalms (twelve settings of Lawes's composed psalm verses, to be sung in alternation with verses to the common tunes from Thomas Sternhold's and John Hopkins's Whole Book of Psalms [first published London: John Day, 1575]), and a group of some forty works from Choice Psalmes Put into Musick, for Three Voices (London: James Young for Humphrey Moseley, 1648), compiled by Henry Lawes as a memorial to his brother (and including music by both brothers, along with elegies by others on William's ...