Lute Song

Lute song is the English form of solo vocal song accompanied by plucked lute, flourishing from roughly 1597 to 1622. Songs are settings of English poetry by writers including Thomas Campion, Philip Rosseter and unnamed court poets, for a single voice with lute tablature supplying the chord-and-counterpoint accompaniment. The texture is intimate — voice carries the melody, lute provides harmony and partial counterpoint underneath — and the dynamic is small, suited to a single room and one or two listeners. The lute's notes decay quickly, so the singer's phrasing depends on placing words inside that fading sound rather than against a sustained backing. Texts gravitate toward melancholy, love-lament and meditations on time, in keeping with the Elizabethan-Jacobean fascination with the melancholic temperament.

The genre crystallized around John Dowland (1563-1626), the era's most internationally famous English musician, who served the Danish court of Christian IV for years before returning to England. His four books of songs ('The First Booke of Songes or Ayres,' 1597; 'Second,' 1600; 'Third,' 1603; 'A Pilgrimes Solace,' 1612) defined the form, and his 'Lachrimae or Seven Teares' (1604, an instrumental work derived from his song 'Flow My Tears') became the most-quoted melancholy piece of the era. Thomas Campion was simultaneously England's most prolific song-text writer and a composer of his own settings. The form declined after the 1620s as English continuo-based song with theorbo and basso continuo replaced the lute song format.

The lute's decay envelope shapes the singer's phrasing — a plucked chord rings out, then dies; the next plucked chord arrives in time to keep the harmony moving but the spaces in between are real silence the voice has to articulate. Dowland's melodies tend to fall: 'Flow my tears' opens with a descending tetrachord that became a stock figure for grief in seventeenth-century music. Listen for how harmony tilts unexpectedly — Dowland's chromatic chord changes were modern for their time.

John Dowland's 'Flow My Tears' (1600), in Sting and Edin Karamazov's 'Songs from the Labyrinth' (2006) — Sting's lute-song album is a controversial but accessible entry — or in any of Andreas Scholl's, Mark Padmore's, or Anthony Rooley's Consort of Musicke recordings.

Dowland's song books were printed in a unique format that arranged the four voice parts of an ensemble version around the page so that all four singers could read from a single book placed on a table at the center of a room. The same publications also gave the solo-voice-with-lute version, making the books usable in two completely different performance configurations.