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Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: ’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 ; 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, 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 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 . 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 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 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 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/, 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 .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 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 —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. It is instead the meaning that we, in the course of interpretative historical acts of various sorts, come to believe its creators and audience invested in it” (115). Although clearly invested in the historical specificity of Dowland as revealed in the thorough and scholarly liner notes, Sting-as-Dowland masters this kind of authentic meaning. That is to say, Sting’s investedness (and his listeners’ investedness) approximates an authentic meaning despite the impossibility of being authentically authentic. The voice—as Sting sings and speaks—evokes in the listener (or attempts to evoke) a feeling of authenticity. He makes no attempt, for instance, to reconstruct Elizabethan pronunciation in either the songs or the spoken word passages. My point here isn’t that he should have done so (though it might have been interesting); rather, it is that listeners’ perceptions of authenticity appear to permit some anachronisms while rejecting others. In large part, it was Sting’s vocal instrument that set his recordings up as something not-quite authentic in the eyes of lay and professional reviewers. And this warrants some scrutiny.

2 Elvis Costello recorded a version of Dowland’s “” in 1995. This recording was included on the Rhino Records re- release of The Juliet Letters in 2006. But it is highly unusual to see a pop or rock performer releasing a full length CD based on 400-year-old material. 58 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

From the vantage point of early music performance expectations, Sting’s vocals are the most obviously inauthentic element of Songs from the Labyrinth. This discrepancy was given particular emphasis in Elizabeth Blair’s NPR feature on the recording. In addition to playing clips from Sting’s record, the NPR piece juxtaposed Sting’s performance with how Dowland’s lute songs are usually recorded—that is, by classically trained singers of early music. The discrepancy between Sting’s vocal style and the vocal style conventionally associated with performances of Dowland was noted by other professional reviewers.3 James Manheim writes on allmusic.com:

It is the great divide between rock […] and the European tradition: speaking in generalities, the former prizes “noise”—sound extraneous to the pitch and to the intended timbre of an instrument or voice—as a structural element, whereas in the latter it is strenuously eliminated. Sting’s voice has plenty of “noise.” The listener oriented toward classical music will object to its being there; the rock listener, noting that Sting is singing very quietly, may wonder why there isn’t more of it. (par. 2)

In Manheim’s formulation, then, Sting fails to satisfy both categories of listeners. However, Manheim was among the critics whose reviews approached Songs from the Labyrinth as important cultural capital. “In making Dowland‘s songs his own, Sting has accomplished something that really has never been done before, and perhaps he’ll show some of his own fans that is more than an accompaniment for silly jousting

3 Elizabeth Kenny explores the historically informed performance of lute songs specifically. She writes, “It is hard to square the sometimes articulated modern view that lute songs were intended for ‘natural’ voices with this flurry of concern over professional standards” (287). But what constitutes “natural” when it comes to lute song performance in the seventeenth century would be culturally determined and so, in large part, unavailable to modern listeners. 59 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

competitions—it is a labyrinth that leads us toward the roots of our own culture” (par. 3). Just as Sting defines his encounter with Dowland as a pull toward something spiritual, Manheim identifies in the recording a pull toward something cultural. Manheim’s quip about “silly jousting” is telling in itself: popular depictions of the re-enacted Renaissance routinely mock the practice of re- enactment.4 For example, even as they become more popular in America and abroad, modern-day Renaissance festivals are routinely disparaged in various media. As a comic foil to the legitimate enactment of Renaissance material (theatrical performances of Shakespeare’s plays, for example) there is something about the active personal engagement—something about the adopting of an identity—that generates skepticism and derision. Enacting an identity outside of the parameters of the theatrical space suggests impersonation rather than mimesis, and as such risks being received as something more superficial and less artistic than its mimetic cousin. However, as with dedicated Renaissance re-enactors, we see in Sting’s earnest re-enactment something highly intentional and historically informed.5 Sting commented on this in a 2006 interview with Nick Glass: “I think if your purpose is to move

4 There is a connection to be made here between Sting’s performance-as- reenactment and popular representations of Renaissance re-enactment found at festivals across the country. A recent case is the yet-unreleased (or never-to-be-released) romantic comedy All’s Faire in Love in which the main character is compelled to participate in a Renaissance festival as punishment for skipping class that is enforced by his English teacher. 5 Sting’s reverence for history appears in his memoir, specifically in the epilogue in which he recounts the historical details of his Lake House in Wiltshire: “The house was built in the reign of James II by a powerful wool merchant named George Duke, Esq. The Duke family, having fought on the side of the royalists in the English Civil War, found themselves not only defeated but also dispossessed of their property by the victorious parliamentary forces. After Cromwell’s accession they were transported to the West Indies as indentured slaves, and would live there in exile until the Restoration, when Charles II would restore them to their former stature and their ancestral home” (330). 60 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

forward, sometimes it’s important to look back and see what’s been done before. And it’s important to realize that you are part of a legacy…let’s look back and pay due homage” (Sting, Channel 4 interview). Emphasizing the synthesis between past and present, Songs from the Labyrinth becomes a theatrical and a literary production, and an historically informed one, at that: the liner notes offer thorough historical context as well as reproductions of Dowland’s letter to Cecil and the title page to Dowland’s First Booke of Songes. And it is here in the synthesis between past and present that we see the elegant consonance in Sting’s choice of subject matter. However, asserting that Sting’s performance is “historically informed” presupposes a consensus on what comprises or constitutes historically informed performance. Rather than being a stable, descriptive characterization, historically informed performance has continued to be a fraught and robustly debated concept. In Playing with History, John Butt reviews the timeline of the debate, locating its point of origin to “the seminal work of Adorno in 1950 through to important articles by Laurence Dreyfus and Robert Morgan in the 1980s.” Richard Taruskin emerged in the 1990s as a prominent figure in the debate. “Such is the success and sheer force of Taruskin’s writing,” Butt acknowledges, “that many within musicology and music criticism in general have perceived that the debate over [historically informed performance] is effectively closed, that there is nothing more to say” (xi). Butt challenges that notion of closure, demonstrating that Taruskin’s work enables future debate to continue. He strongly suggests that the reverberations of the debate continue to be heard. But why this concern with authenticity at all, especially as it relates to a historically real but now imagined Renaissance past? And what is it about the era of Dowland that captures modern imaginations? Charles Taylor introduces his Ethics of Authenticity by historicizing the concern with authenticity. Beginning with a statement of purpose to “write here about some of the malaises of modernity,” which are “features of our contemporary culture and society that people experience as a loss or a decline, even as our civilization ‘develops,’” Taylor explains that while some people locate the decline as beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century, “sometimes the loss is felt over a much longer historical 61 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

period: the whole modern era from the seventeenth century is frequently seen as the time frame of decline” (1). The term “early modern” does, after all, assert a continuity between the late fifteenth through mid-seventeenth centuries and the modern era. Sting’s Songs from the Labyrinth attempts to reclaim what modernity has lost (even as the artist himself asserts his own modern persona—it cannot, after all, be erased). This reclaiming involves imitation which was itself a Renaissance pursuit. In a chapter of his recent book The End of Early Music, author Bruce Haynes vigorously examines various “Ways of Copying the Past.” Haynes reminds us that “Imitating art works of the past is what the Renaissance was all about. Writers, historians, sculptors, painters, and architects studied and copied the models of antiquity, and the same kinds of issues that occupy Period musicians today were discussed at length then. The subject of imitation preoccupied thinkers and generated masses of writing” (138). Imitatio, Haynes asserts, involved “eclectic borrowing.” Sting’s imitation is just that; it emphasizes the eclectic, his idiosyncratic vocals suggestively contrasting the “authentic” lute. We must note that Sting is not the first to set Dowland’s music in a modern context. The singer and author John Potter, who performed with noted early-music for 17 years, formed a group called the Dowland Project which has to date released three CDs, the first of which was released in 2000. One of Potter’s recordings of Dowland was included on a compilation CD When Love Speaks, released in 2002. Julie Sanders points to the modernity of the instrumentation when she concisely describes Potter’s recording of Dowland’s “Come Again: Sweet Love Doth Now Invite”: “in the dialogue between tenor voice, lute, baroque violin, double bass, and soprano saxophone—the latter enjoying a striking solo section—Dowland’s music is made to discourse in a partly modern idiom, one aware of the history of adaptations of early modern texts and music” (185). Many of the foremost writers on early music welcome expanding approaches to the performing and recording of early music that depart from convention. Potter argues that new approaches keep early music vibrant and vital and although he does not specifically identify popular or rock singers in his discussion, his words remain instructive: 62 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

One of the consequences of the stylistic fragmentation of classical music has been the proliferation of singing styles associated with early music. Early music is unlike any other variety in that it purports to work within a stylistic framework that does not belong to the present and cannot (yet?) be part of a living tradition in the sense that, say, opera or rock music are. […] There are also signs that singers are having the courage to break away from slavish adherence to musicological dogma and are beginning to think more like their medieval and Renaissance predecessors (who, the evidence suggests, generally preferred the delights of emotional self indulgence to the musicology of their own day). (Cambridge Companion 3)

Sting’s re-voicing of early English song, his studious imitatio of Dowland’s compositions, shows us the possibilities for merging the old with the new. Further, Sting’s appropriation of Dowland’s persona deinstitutionalizes early music performance, making it instead a pursuit of the individual.6 He is simultaneously patron and performer; liberated from the market-driven demands of the . What elements of Dowland’s persona does Sting appear to identify with or embrace? Potter’s phrase “the delights of emotional self indulgence” is particularly apt when discussing Sting. In recent years Sting, born Gordon Sumner, has become emblematic of the pretentious musician. “Sting-baiting is practically a national pastime among British journalists,” writes Neil McCormick. “[H]e is often described as being humourless, perhaps

6 Gina Bloom, in Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England, reminds us that “To the Romans the term ‘persona’ referred to a mask worn by actors. In addition to producing a visual effect, the mask (used by the Greek theaters as well) helped amplify the actor’s voice via a resonating chamber in its forehead. Thus, the origins of theatrical role-playing are etymologically and performatively based in the production of voice” (212, note 86). 63 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

because he strikes a very subtle balance between taking himself and the world seriously and being all the time aware of the inherent strangeness of his place in the world” (par. 9). These tropes of melancholia and alienation align well with what we know of John Dowland, who was himself (in the words of Susanne Rupp) “consciously fashioning himself as the man of melancholy, a public persona that allow[ed] him to achieve visibility and distinctiveness” (117). Of course, melancholy was an enormously popular trope in the period. “Not only in poetry, but in painting and in music too the spirit of melancholy became one of the age’s most characteristic features, producing, in addition to the trivia which any artistic movement generates, the most profoundly serious expressions of the contemptus mundi theme” (Hall 514). Writing in the twentieth century, Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols declaims this contempt as a national rather than an individual trait: “The Brits love wallowing in their misery. I have to say it. They love their phone system not working. They love British Rail being as goddamned awful as it is . [. . .] They love to see their idols and stars take a good kicking from the press. Everybody gets their turn” (qtd. in Lydon, Zimmerman, and Zimmerman 120). In addition to melancholy, Songs from the Labyrinth expresses deeply the feelings of loss and alienation. These feelings, too, appear in Sting’s autobiographical writing. In Sting’s memoir, Broken Music, the author describes feeling alienated from friends and family after being selected to attend St. Cuthbert’s, a prestigious grammar school in Newcastle: “As a result there is an increasing sense of alienation from my erstwhile compadres [. . .] who are doomed to the academic ‘poorhouse’ of the secondary modern, where the thresholds for achievement and opportunity are depressingly low” (64). As Sting recounts, prestige and education set him apart further from his family:

Two terms at the grammar school will isolate me even further from my parents. Neither of them has ever read a book to speak of […]. I, on the other hand, learn to conjugate Latin verbs, write in basic French, tackle the rudiments of physics and chemistry, read literature, and 64 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

study poetry. I may as well have been sent to the planet Neptune for an education [. . .]. (77)

Undergirding the relationship between rock musician and Renaissance musician is the fact of Sting’s, and Dowland’s, considerable fame: when he was in his twenties, Dowland “was already considered to be one of the most famous musicians of his time” (Rupp 120). Sting’s Dowland project attains more cultural currency because of his celebrity status, and his privileged access to the “labyrinth.” In other words, Sting’s immense wealth and fame renders his Dowland project more authentic rather than less authentic. And ownership of the labyrinth is key. But what is the labyrinth? Specifically, the labyrinth of the title refers to an actual garden maze on Sting’s estate and it functions as an emblem for Sting as he recounts: “The labyrinth, based on the design on the floor of Chartres Cathedral, had become something of an obsession of mine in recent years, so much so that I’d had one constructed as an earthwork in my garden in England. It measured over 40 feet in diameter, and I would walk there every day, telling people it calmed my mind” (line notes of CD cover). The image of the garden labyrinth (reproduced on the cover of the Journey and the Labyrinth CD/DVD) is connected to an image of a custom-made “eight-course lute” commissioned by and made by Klaus Jacobsen as a gift for Sting. Sting points out, “The ‘rose’ at the centre of the soundboard is in the shape of a labyrinth, not the normal Renaissance design.” It is the same labyrinth design as the one from the floor of the Chartres Cathedral. This iconic association (the labyrinth, the rosette, the earthwork) suggests the aristocratic privilege which John Dowland sought in his lifetime, and which he finally achieved with an appointment to the court of James I. According to Rupp, “Dowland want[ed] to secure himself a prestigious position as lutenist at court, and his continued failure to do so force[d] him to develop new strategies for marketing himself” (117). Ultimately, Dowland does secure the highly sought after appointment in the Jacobean court, although this coincides with his less prolific period. In the case of Sting’s historically informed performance, he too is developing a new strategy to market himself by marketing 65 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

Dowland. Sting demonstrates both his desire to achieve the symbols of aristocratic privilege and to show Dowland’s art as accessible to audiences in the mainstream. Once again we note a paradox. In many contexts, discernable marketing efforts lead to musicians being considered inauthentic. But in the case of Songs from the Labyrinth, this is yet another Dowlandesque concordance. Sting’s approach to Dowland’s oeuvre is not simply that of the musician covering the songs. Rather—as in ’s compelling re-enactment of Judy Garland’s triumphant 1961 Carnegie Hall concert—Sting merges identities with that of his model. Sting-as-Dowland, then, exhibits dual self-fashioning: Sting and not-Sting, self and other. This duality—this self and otherness—is crucial to an understanding of Songs from the Labyrinth and may be thought of as a distinctive feature of the genre. Daniel Fischlin, writing on the indeterminacy in the love ayre, offers a complex formulation for the relationship between the speaker, the subject, and the composer:

[T]he poet writes a text in which a persona of several personae are formulated, usually within the relationship between lover and beloved, and then the composer must “interpret” the poetic text, using a nonverbal medium. Further interpretive stages are then enacted by the performers, who must interpret both the words and the music and who thus appropriate an alien self or selves while nonetheless presenting themselves as themselves in performance. Thus the opportunities for rendering fictional postures of self are manifold in the love ayre. (400)

Fictional posturing carries over from Dowland’s love ayres to Sting’s interpretations of those ayres: the resonances are multivocal. On the Labyrinth recording, Dowland’s songs are occasionally separated by spoken interludes, the text of which comes from Dowland’s 1595 letter to Sir Robert Cecil. These interpolated, spoken passages intensify the sense of identification with Dowland that Sting creates. Of course it falls short of what we might call impersonation. Sting can recreate Dowland’s metonymic “voice” 66 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

only through conjecture. In reciting excerpts from the letter, Sting not only performs the man’s music, but enacts Dowland. This facet of the recording was rather scathingly received by some critics. Clark Collis, writing for Entertainment Weekly, gave the album a C+, claiming “The often hymnlike songs are tolerable enough, thanks largely to the exquisitely skilled contributions of lutenist Edin Karamazov. But when Sting simply reads excerpts of a Dowland- penned letter, the shadow of Spinal Tap looms over the proceedings” (par. 1). Collis’s quip about Spinal Tap is telling: there is a discomfort generated in the process of the homage, the danger of the too-serious emulation resulting in unintentional humor and bathos. But Sting’s reading of Dowland’s letter is arguably the most palpable evidence of the rocker’s identification with the early modern composer. The act of the performative reading of the letter heightens another aspect of association between Sting and Dowland: namely, English identity. I argue that Songs from the Labyrinth is as much an expression of nostalgia for Renaissance England as it is an expression of personal passion. Importantly, the letter excerpted and read by Sting is one which Dowland writes while living abroad, remote from the court and from England. In a discussion of nostalgic Englishness and the Kinks, Nick Baxter-Moore examines “tensions inherent in [Ray] Davies’s representation of a particular sense of English identity—caught between tradition and modernity, between nostalgia and realism, and between competing sense of class and nation” (145). After exploring theories of the Britpop subgenre, Baxter-Moore concludes that “In extreme cases, sometimes it may take only the threat of loss, or a deep sense of pessimism that good times cannot possibly continue, to trigger the resort to the past which is the basis of nostalgia” (156). A modern or postmodern yearning for historical meaning motivates historically informed performance, argues Butt: “[An] historical revival such as [historically informed performance] may in part be an attempt in a postmodern world (i.e. one which I shall provisionally define as having largely completed the task of modernization) to restore the sense of history that is otherwise lacking” (143). In both Baxter-Moore’s and Butt’s formulations, the nostalgic overtures derive from either personal or cultural crises of the modern self. 67 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

Songs from the Labyrinth expresses an implicit nostalgia for England, early modern and modern. In a web-exclusive outtake from an NPR interview, Sting discusses English identity as a notable characteristic of Dowland’s music: “I think it’s got something to do with the economy of his music. There’s nothing wasted, all of the lines are absolutely precise. And there’s a lot of silence and space in his music, and it just conjures up what I think of as quintessentially English. We tend to keep our emotions under wraps. There’s definitely passion in these songs, but it’s restrained passion” remarked Sting (my emphasis). Sting has explored these ideas of Englishness before, in an earlier era. Sting’s song “” from the album Nothing Like the Sun (1987) —which is a line taken from Shakespeare’s famous and is itself a reference to Renaissance poetics of the highest order7—takes the idea of the displaced Englishman and emphasizes the theme of alienation in the song’s chorus: “I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien / I’m an Englishman in New York.” Dowland, too, was a displaced Englishman, driven to continental Europe in 1594 in response to a failed attempt to secure an appointment in the court of Elizabeth I. In his 1595 letter to Sir Robert Cecil, Dowland “reveals his resentment at the thwarting of his ambition to secure a post at Elizabeth’s court” (Poulton, “Dowland’s Darkness” 518). Dowland wrote:

Then in time passing one Mr. Johnson died & I became an humble suitor for his place (thinking myself the most worthiest) wherein I found many good and honourable friends that spake for me, but I saw that I was like to go without it, and that any may have preferment but I [. . .]. Whereupon my mind being troubled I desired to get beyond the seas [. . .]. (qtd in Poulton 518)

7 Sting set Shakespeare’s to music more fully in “Like a Beautiful Smile” on Inside the Songs of , 2003). 68 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

This same excerpt is recorded by Sting as a spoken passage on Songs from the Labyrinth. Comparatively, the pre-chorus in “Englishman in New York” asserts the singer’s masculinity as a condition of being an alien or an “Other” (as featured prominently in Sting’s video, the persona of the song is English writer Quentin Crisp):

If “manners maketh man” as someone said Then he’s the hero of the day It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile Be yourself no matter what they say (track 6)

On his recent concert tour—a 2010 concert tour in which Sting was front man to the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra—Sting gave this last line additional emphasis in performance, chanting it as if a self-empowering mantra with audience participation.8 Whether as a conscious choice or not, Songs from the Labyrinth appears to reassert Sting’s Englishness, identifying himself as a specifically English artist—one expressly derived from a “quintessentially” English tradition. Indeed, Diana Poulton emphasizes the characteristic Englishness of Dowland’s songs: “With Dowland’s visit to France at the age of seventeen it would not be surprising to find traces of French influence in his song writing and indeed, in the early songs this influence is there to some extent, but in my opinion his deep roots in English traditional song cannot be overlooked” (191).

8 Robin Montagne, a former student, emailed me as I was concluding my work on this article. She wrote that she went to see Sting on tour with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra on July 16, 2010 in Detroit, Michigan: “What an extremely moving experience! I was thinking about the question you posed as to whether or not Sting is pretentious, and I think the answer is that he is not pretentious, but authentic. The reason I believe this is because when he performed ‘Englishman in New York’ he continued the line ‘Be yourself no matter what they say’ for at least 20 minutes (partly for audience participation) or longer” (personal email July 23, 2010). 69 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

In an astute political analysis, Martin Cloonan speaks to the relationship between and national identity:

In the case of pop it is clear that some commentators have sought to impose national identities upon popular musicians, while others have suggested that such musicians have an important role to play in defining national identity. At a minimum it seems that popular music has a continuing role to play in constructing national identity. At one level this is mere marketing or scene-making, but at another popular musicians have been said to encapsulate something about the nation. Nation-States need to foster allegiances and pop has been one of the sites where such allegiances have been sought and articulated. (203)

If pop music has “a continuing role to play in constructing national identity,” Songs from the Labyrinth participates unquestionably in that endeavor. There have recently been fine studies of Dowland’s music and lyricism.9 My aim here has been to reflect on the meanings generated by the appropriation of Dowland by Sting, by interrogating responses to the recording; responses which reveal a specific tension between populism and elitism. In our age of hip hop and manga Shakespeare—that is, in an era when adaptations and appropriations of canonical material from the Renaissance are highly marketable—Sting’s Dowland record makes meaning by its sheer multivocality of purpose. At once a statement of an individual, personal, national, musical, and cultural attachment, Songs from the Labyrinth reminds us of the always absent voices from the past, and the possibilities—through the processes of recording, reproducing, and role-playing—of restoring those inaccessible, but imagined, voices.

9 See Holman and Fischlin in “Further Readings.” 70 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

Works Cited All’s Faire in Love. Dir. Scott A. Marshall. Perfs. Christina Ricci, Ann-Margaret, Cedric the Entertainer. Patriot Pictures, 2009. Amitropa. “For Those Who Know Nothing of Period Music.” Customer review of Songs from the Labyrinth. 18 Mar. 2008. Amazon.com. Web. 19 Mar. 2009. Barthes, Roland. “The Grain of theVoice.” Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. Image/Music/Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 179-189. Print. Baxter-Moore, Nick. “‘This is Where I Belong’—Identity, Social Class, and the Nostalgic Englishness of Ray Davies and the Kinks.” Popular Music and Society 29.2 (2006):145-165. Print. Bloom, Gina. Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007. Print. Butt, John. Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print. Cloonan, Martin. “Pop and the Nation-State: Towards a Theorisation.” Popular Music 18.2 (1999): 193-207. Print. Collis, Clark. Review of Songs from the Labyrinth. 6 Oct. 2006. Entertainment Weekly. EW.com. 19 Mar. 2009. Web. 20 Mar. 2009. Fischlin, Daniel T. “ ‘Tis like I cannot tell what’: Desire, Indeterminacy, and Erotic Performance in the English Ayre.” Modern Language Quarterly 56.4 (1995): 395-431. Print. ____. “‘Sighes and Teares Make Life to Last’: The Purgation of Grief and Death through Trope in the English Ayre.” Criticism 38.1 (1996): 1-25. Print. Haynes, Bruce. The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music for the Twenty-First Century. Oxford University Press, 2007. Print. Hunter, James. Review of Songs from the Labyrinth. 30 Oct. 2006. . Web. 19 Mar. 2009.

71 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

Iovan, Sarah. “Performing Voices in the English Lute Song.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. 50 (2010): 63-81. Print. Kenny, Elizabeth. “The Uses of Lute Song: Texts, Contexts and Pretexts for ‘Historically Informed’ Performance.” Early Music 36.2 (2009): 285-298. Print. Lydon, John, Keith Zimmerman, and Kent Zimmerman. Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs: The Authorized Autobiography Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. New York, Picador: 1994. Print. Manheim, James. Review of Songs from the Labyrinth. Allmusic.com. Web. 20 June 2010. McCormick, Neil. “What’s Wrong with Being Pretentious?” The Sydney Morning Herald. 11 Nov. 2003. Web. 20 Mar. 2009. Montagne, Robin. Email to author. 23 July 2010. Moore, Allan. “Authenticity as Authentication.” Popular Music. 21.2 (2002): 209-223. Print. Morgan, Robert P. “Tradition, Anxiety, and the Current Musical Scene.” Authenticity in Early Music. Ed. Nicholas Kenyon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 57-82. Print. Nixon, Scott. Review of In Small Proportions: A Poetics of the English Ayre, 1596-1622. By Daniel Fischlin. The Review of English Studies, New Series. 50.199 (1999): 380-382. Print. Potter, John. Cambridge Companion to Singing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print. ____. “Reconstructing Lost Voices.” Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music. Ed. Tess Knighton and David Fallows. Berkeley and Los Angeles, U of California P, 1992. 311-316. Print. Poulton, Diana. John Dowland. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972. Print. ____. “Dowland’s Darkness.” Early Music 11.4 (1983): 517-519. Print. Rupp, Susanne. “John Dowland’s Strategic Melancholy and the Rise of the Composer in Early Modern England.” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 139 (2003): 116-29. Print. Sanders, Julie. Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2007. Print. Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover, NH: Wesleyen UP, 1998. Print. 72 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

Spink, Ian. English Song: Dowland to Purcell. New York: Taplinger, 1974. Print. Sterling, J. “Ignore the Academic Backlash against All Things Popular.” Customer review of Songs from the Labyrinth. Aug 28, 2008. Amazon.com. Web. 19 Mar. 2009. Sting. Broken Music: A Memoir. New York: Dial, 2003. Print. ____. “Englishman in New York.” Nothing Like the Sun. A&M, 1987. Music Video. Dir. David L. Fincher. YouTube. 20 June 2010. ____. Songs from the Labyrinth. Music by John Dowland. UMG Recordings, Inc. 2006. ____. “Sting’s ‘Labyrinth’: 16th Century Pop Music.” Interview by Elizabeth Blair. Morning Edition. National Public Radio. 16 Oct. 2006. Web. 20 Mar. 2010. ____. World: Sting Releases Lute Album. Interview with Nick Glass. 27 Sept. 2006. Channel 4 News. 27 Sept. 2006. Web. 20 Mar. 2009. Symonds, Dominic. “The Corporeality of Musical Expression: ‘The Grain of the Voice’ and the Actor-Musician.” Studies in Musical Theatre 1.2 (2007): 167-181. Print. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Print. Tomlinson, Gary. “The Historian, the Performer, and Authentic Meaning in Music.” Authenticity in Early Music. Ed. Nicholas Kenyon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. 115-136. Print. Vannini, Phillip, and J. Patrick Williams. Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Print. Wells, Robin Headlam. “John Dowland and Elizabethan Melancholy.” Early Music 13.4 (1985): 514-528. Print.

Further Readings Fischlin, Daniel. In Small Proportions: A Poetics of the English Ayre, 1596-1622. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998. Print. ____. “‘The Highest Key of Passion’: Inexpressibility and Metaphors of Self in John Dowland’s The First Booke of Songes or Ayres.” Journal of the Lute Society of America. 20-21 (1987): 46-86. Print.

73 Audrey L. Becker. “De Do Do Dowland: Sting’s Re-Voicing of Early English Ayres.” LATCH 5 (2012): 54-74.

Holman, Peter. Dowland: Lachrimae (1604). Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print. Lindholm, Charles. Culture and Authenticity. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2008. Print. Sherman, Bernard D. Inside Early Music: Conversations with Performers. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Print. Taruskin, Richard. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Print.

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