De Do Do Dowland: Sting's Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres
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Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74. De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres Audrey L. Becker Marygrove Coillege Abstract This paper explores the relationship between a contemporary rock star and the historical persona of John Dowland; a relationship that results from Sting’s self-fashioning as he deliberately and playfully experiments with the interrelatedness of his identity and that of Dowland. In re-voicing and re-packaging Dowland’s ayres, Songs from the Labyrinth participates in discourses about alienation, national identity, nostalgia, and, especially, authenticity. Keywords Sting, John Dowland, Songs from the Labyrinth, identity, Englishness, authenticity, nostalgia, melancholy, impersonation, appropriation, popular music, historically-informed performance In the line notes on the inside CD cover to Sting’s 2006 album Songs from the Labyrinth, the rock star describes how “the songs of John Dowland [had] been gently haunting [him] for over 20 years.” In Sting’s first-person account, his growing acquaintance with the Dowland corpus was more than mere circumstance: it was a mystical destiny. Sting describes several successive and persistent encounters with (at first) the name John Dowland and then the music of John Dowland as he chronicles his developing awareness—from his initial generalized familiarity with Dowland and the Elizabethan/Jacobean context to a deepening fascination with and reverence for the composer. Upon hearing lutenist Edin Karamazov “play a few bars” of “In Darkness Let Me Dwell,” Sting realizes, “it was strangely dissonant and compellingly modern.” He suggestively writes, “I felt the labyrinth drawing me closer to its center.” 54 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74. What interests me is the dissonance and the consonance—not in musicological terms, per se—but in the relationship between a contemporary rock star and the historical persona of John Dowland, a relationship that results from Sting’s self-fashioning as he deliberately and playfully experiments with the nexus between his identity and that of Dowland. John Dowland, born in 1563, became interested in music at a young age and would later become one of the most celebrated lutenists and composers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He wrote solo lute music, song books, psalms, spiritual songs, as well as consort music. Much of what we know of his early years comes from Dowland himself who wrote autobiographically in his First Book of Songes or Ayres (1597): he claimed that he was drawn to “‘the ingenuous profession of Musicke, which from my childhood I have euer aymed at, sundry times leauing my native country, the better to attain so excellent a science’” (qtd. in Poulton 26). Raised a Protestant, Dowland converted to Catholicism while abroad in France and claimed in his lengthy 1595 letter to Sir Robert Cecil that it was specifically his religious affiliation that prevented him from receiving the court appointment which had been denied to him in 1594.1 Dowland returned to England in 1603, by which time “Dowland’s name was a household word” (Poulton 61). In 1612, he was finally appointed to a position as lutenist at court where he remained until his death in 1626. At first glance, Sting’s re-voicing of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century songs seems straightforward and simple: his personal interest in the material drives him to make a record that satisfies his attachment to John Dowland. “Re-voicing” stands as key term here because the Labyrinth record involves more than singing performances, it includes dramatic, spoken-word interludes. What is more, it is the particular qualities of Sting’s voice—and his willingness to graft his distinctive vocal style onto what is usually performed by singers with classically trained voices—that leads me to call Sting’s performance a “re-voicing,” rather than simply “singing.” 1 On Dowland’s conversion to Catholicism, see Poulton 40 ff. 55 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74. When discussing the properties of the singing voice—and its effect on listeners—one runs into the problem of describing something arguably subjective, contingent, and intangible. As Roland Barthes writes in “The Grain of the Voice,” “What I shall attempt to say of the ‘grain’ will, of course, be only the apparently abstract side, the impossible account of an individual thrill that I constantly experience in listening to singing” (181). And, later he asks of his response to one singer: “isn’t the entire space of the voice an infinite one?” (184). But the grain, as he defines it, is more than “merely […] timbre” (185). Barthes’ ultimate definition asserts the material properties of the voice: “The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs” (188). In re-voicing Dowland, Sting embodies the voice (or two voices, simultaneously) through performances which engage various tropes of diachronic meaning. The difficulties multiply when historicizing vocal performance: Widely-received ideas of what singing voices would have sounded like in Dowland’s day involve conspicuous conjecture. John Potter cautions that “singing is a visceral activity, the voice is the only instrument which is directly expressive of mind and body [….] making the re-creation of historical styles something of a compromise,” (“Reconstructing Lost Voices” 311). As such, insistence upon what singers contemporary to Dowland would have sounded like is an exercise in historical reconstruction that can only take us so far. “For singers,” Potter continues, “academic research, geared as it is to the quantifiable, is inevitably inconclusive and more than usually speculative” (“Reconstructing Lost Voices” 311). In re-voicing and re-packaging Dowland’s ayres, Songs from the Labyrinth plays with multivocality and asks us to consider Dowland from multiple perspectives and, as it does so, it participates in discourses about alienation, national identity, nostalgia, and, especially, authenticity. “The authenticity question has acquired the status of a major cultural phenomenon” wrote Robert P. Morgan in 1988. “Although interest in authentic performance has been with us for some time, and is tied to strands of western thought stretching back several centuries, the concern for authenticity as presently encountered is an essentially modern development that has taken root only since the early years of the twentieth century” (57). 56 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74. Discourses about authenticity have matured throughout the twentieth century as the question of authenticity has engaged philosophers, sociologists, literary critics, art critics and historians, musicologists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, and pop psychologists. However, the term authenticity remains subjective, malleable and challenging to define. Songs from the Labyrinth reflects the persistence of the “authenticity question,” projecting those questions from the record in myriad ways. “Authenticity,” write Phillip Vannini and J. Patrick Williams, “may be seen as some sort of ideal, highly valued and sought by individuals and groups as part of the process of becoming” (3). While Vannini and Williams’ recent volume of essays examines authenticity from a broad sociological perspective, Allan Moore investigates the meaning of authenticity in a specifically rock music context. He writes, “the term [authenticity] has frequently been used to define a style of writing or performing, particularly anything associated with the practices of the singer/songwriter, where attributes of intimacy […] and immediacy (in the sense of unmediated forms of sound production) tend to connote authenticity” (210-211). Additionally, Moore explains, the performer’s motives are also grounds for determining authenticity. Commercial motivations are routinely deemed inauthentic. But has Sting achieved this elusive authenticity with Songs from the Labyrinth? Customer reviews from Amazon.com—at present there are 189 of them—reveal a discomfort about the question, addressing authenticity as a vexed objective that brings populism and elitism into conflict. Listeners’ expectations of the record’s authenticity to Dowland (or to classical music more generally) frequently emerge as contentious assertions. J. Sterling (who gives the recording four stars) writes: “Who purchased this recording expecting High Art? If so, your disappointment is of your own making. What made this album appealing to me and so many others is that it was NOT a stuffy, academic endeavor with ‘pure pronunciation’ or ‘exquisite diction’ or an aloof operatic feel.” That is, what Sterling responds to in the album is what the reviewer perceives as a categorical rejection of conventional recordings of early music which are—in Sterling’s subjective estimation— ”stuffy” and “aloof.” 57 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74. In contrast, another Amazon.com reviewer faults Sting for overreaching, in this excerpt from a one-star review: “Sting is superb when he stays within his purview, but here he is like Barbra Streisand trying to sing Led Zeppelin—an embarrassment. For those who are familiar with music of this period, his performance is cringeworthy. For those who have no way of realizing that, it will be merely an oddity” (Amitropa). It is an oddity, perhaps.2 But not all responses insisted upon restraints or limitations to what a celebrity musician could or should attempt. Sting is not necessarily striving for a thoroughgoing authenticity. To employ a distinction introduced by Gary Tomlinson in his essay “The Historian, the Performer, and Authentic Meaning in Music,” Sting aims at authentic meaning, not necessarily at authenticity. Tomlinson writes: “the authentic meaning of a musical work is not the meaning that its creators and first audience invested in it.