Let the voices sing!
A subtle pavan that looks quite easy at first glance, but is a challenge to play musically and sustain the voices. At least we have only two musical lines to follow: the lutenist has three, but I have simplified the lower voices without, I hope, losing the spirit of the piece.
I have followed closely the musical format in the transcript (Poulton D, Lam B. 1995. The collected lute music of John Dowland. Faber Music, London), which does help to bring out the musical lines. Setting the temporary change of tempo to triple time in the second half of bars 12 and 13 was a bit of a challenge, so I hope it makes sense to you.
If I were a better sight reader I would be able to anticipate the fingerings well in advance, and use the most efficient ones – but as I'm not, I have pencilled notes on my printout. I have not included them here as you may well have your own solutions. At least a pavane is played at a slow tempo, which does help.
You will probably find that the motif in bars 2, 3 and 11 is the cadence that occurs in Le Roy's "Fantasia" (a generation earlier) and in many Dowland pieces, including "Solus cum sola".
It's one of those pieces where the more you play, the more you hear.
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| Dr John Case, surrounded by mementi mori. (Apologies to Latinists for converting "memento" into a noun.) You don't often get a child's skeleton in a portrait – all a bit creepy. |
The eponymous Dr John Case (c 1540 – 1600) was a Tudor polymath who wrote on Aristotelean logic, ethics, sociology and physics, as well as on music, praising Dowland. He was qualified as a medical doctor (hence, presumably, the bones). He was suspected of RC sympathies, which may have adversely affected his career, as it did Dowland’s. (Biography here.)
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