John Ward Phantasm

JOHN WARD Fantasies & Verse Anthems PHANTASM Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford JOHN WARD (c.1589–1638) Fantasies & Verse Anthems 1. Fantasia 2 a4 (VDGS 22) 2:13 2. Praise the Lord, O my soul 8:17 3. Fantasia 5 a4 (VDGS 25) 2:49 4. Mount up, my soul 7:04 5. Fantasia 1 a4 (VDGS 21) 2:53 6. Down, caitiff wretch (Part 1) 5:40 7. Prayer is an endless chain (Part 2) 5:27 8. Fantasia 3 a4 (VDGS 23) 2:25 9. How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord 4:51 10. Fantasia 4 a4 (VDGS 24) 3:11 11. Let God arise 6:13 12. Fantasia 6 a4 (VDGS 26) 2:53 13. This is a joyful, happy holy day 5:50 Total Running Time: 60 minutes 2 PHANTASM Laurence Dreyfus Recorded in the director and treble viol Chapel of Magdalen College, Oxford, UK, 6–9 May 2013 Emilia Benjamin Produced by treble and tenor viols Philip Hobbs (fantasies) and Jonathan Manson Adrian Peacock (anthems) tenor viol Engineered by Mikko Perkola Philip Hobbs bass viol Post-production by Julia Thomas with guests Cover image Emily Ashton Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales tenor and bass viols With permission from the President and Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford Christopher Terepin tenor viol Design by gmtoucari.com Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford directed by Daniel Hyde 3 Fantasies a4 & Verse Anthems In his ambitious and accomplished music for voices and viols, John Ward (c.1589–1638) offers a privileged glimpse of a special moment in English music history. Composed perhaps during the years 1609–16, these verse anthems and viol fantasies were penned by a young ‘gentleman’ composer attached to the household of a highly cultivated Italianophile, Sir Henry Fanshawe of Warwick Lane, London and Ware Hall, Hertfordshire. Fanshawe was an avid collector of musical instruments and works of art, an aristocrat linked (through his position as Remembrancer of the Exchequer) to the most aspirational and culturally alert member of the British royal family, the young Henry Frederick Stuart (1593–1612), Prince of Wales. Ward came to the Fanshawe family in 1607 after serving as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral before being admitted to its grammar school. Not only were consorts of viols cultivated in the prince’s entourage, but verse anthems – an inspired fusion of the polyphonic liturgical anthem, the anglicized Italian madrigal style and the native viol fantasy – were especially connected to the prince’s musical establishment. Had Prince Henry not died suddenly at the age of 18 in 1612, Fanshawe (it was later reported) would have succeeded to high office in the royal court, perhaps with John Ward in tow. Rejecting the fastidious and ever-changing vagaries of French fashion, he led his own lustrous court, complete with a separate musical entourage of leading composers, including Thomas Ford, John Bull, Robert Johnson and Thomas Lupo; the prince was even reputed to have been taught the viol by Alfonso Ferrabosco II. According to a posthumous memoir from 1634 by William Haydon, a former Groom of the Bedchamber, Henry especially ‘loved Musicke, and namely good consorts of Instruments and voices joined together’. 4 How striking, then, that this fondness is recorded in Ward’s anthem This is a joyful, happy holy day, composed most likely for the lavish Whitehall entertainments celebrating Henry’s investiture in 1610 as Prince of Wales1. On this festive day, all are invited ‘to sing in consort with sweet harmony of instruments and voices’ melody’. In its mention of a ‘consort’ and the combination of ‘instruments and voices’ the text alludes to its own setting. Listening to the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of textures in these anthems, one hears in each section how the viols foreshadow the sung melodies that introduce highlighted vocal solos in a serious and Italianesque madrigal style, full of generous word-painting. Finally the chorus enters, doubled by the consorts of viols, the assembled unity confirming and elaborating both text and melody. The mention of musical harmony in the context of Henry’s investiture as Prince of Wales might seem just a banal metaphor, but the documentary evidence suggests a tremendous expectation attached to Henry’s future: that view is retrospectively confirmed by the extraordinary outpourings of poetic and musical laments following his untimely death. William Byrd’s consort song on Henry’s death, Fair Britain Isle, for example, asserts that with the prince’s death there ‘died the hope of age of gold’. Moving backwards in time to 1610, one can reasonably guess that polyphonic music offered an idealized reflection of the wildly optimistic prediction that Henry’s future reign as king would usher 1 Though scholars seem unsure whether the piece was written for Henry in 1610 or his younger brother Charles in 1616, Fanshawe forged connections with Prince Henry’s entourage, and in fact died in 1616 several months before Charles’s investiture. Fanshawe’s son Thomas was apparently little interested in music, so it would seem odd that a piece by the gentleman John Ward, not otherwise attached to a royal household, would make its way to a court entertainment after Henry Fanshawe’s death. 5 in a golden age of contentment and prosperity. Indeed, in a 1605 song by Thomas Ford dedicated to the 12-year-old Prince Henry, for example, the text defines a ‘commonwealth’ as ‘a well-tuned song where all parties do agree’. Coincidentally, 1605 was the same year in which Henry’s educational aspirations – not, apparently, supported by his hunt-loving father – brought the prince to Oxford, where he matriculated at Magdalen College and was assigned the tutor in Hebrew to look after him. (Henry went up to Magdalen rather than to Christ Church because his influential tutor, Sir Thomas Chaloner, who had set up an academy of aristocratic youths around Henry in 1603–4, was a Magdalen man.) He does not seem, however, to have stayed very long at Magdalen, though the college’s choir director (then as now the ‘Informator Choristarum’), Richard Nicolson, like Ward composed verse anthems with viols, some of which seemed to have been performed in chapel. It would be unthinkable that an Oxford college with a connection to a member of the royal family would not have performed music connected to its illustrious junior member. What is more, the considerable number of manuscripts of viol fantasies and verse anthems copied in Oxford attests to a lively interest in these genres during the years leading to 1627, when Nicolson was appointed the first Music Master in the university by the endowment of William Heyther (or Heather), with a collection of 40 music books and a chest of viols to be played at least once weekly in the university’s Music School. These considerations only bear on the final piece on this recording. But in addition to the celebratory work for the princely investiture, Ward’s verse anthems for voices and viols embrace psalm settings and devotional pieces with a decidedly Protestant bent, and in doing so reflect Prince Henry’s special interests. Ward’s verse anthems are remarkable for the clarity of their 6 text-setting: these works – more than, say, those by Orlando Gibbons – show a love of roving solos and duets which keep up the interest as ever new voices enunciate the words amidst the polyphonic swirl of the viols before choral repetitions hammer home highlighted lines of verse. The tone is decidedly serious, and what is astonishing is that the madrigalisms – or musical word-painting – create an effortless poetic effect and never raise ironic eyebrows in the way that secular English madrigals prompt a twinkling of the eye through their love of frivolity. Like Ward’s own serious collection of published madrigals (1613), which is dedicated to Fanshawe and notes its composer’s disdain for ‘Time-sicke humourists’, the anthems strike a sombre tone of piety; but it is one that revels in warmly lyrical outbursts, and never succumbs to puritanical restraint or censorious anxiety about music’s expressive gifts. The six-part Praise the Lord, O my soul (here reconstructed by Ian Payne) sets Psalm 104 (less its final verse) and is a song reimagining the story of Creation in Genesis. Ward’s madrigalian instincts seem to await such obvious musical tone-painting as ‘They go up, as high as the hills, and down to the valleys beneath’, with musical contours that aptly ascend and descend. But even here the composer does far more than just craft melodic shapes. The miraculous act of God that commands the inchoate waters of the earth to rise does so in image-laden stages in the music: first the waters ‘go up’ on their own, as if it is enough to admire that marvel; only thereafter do the musical waters climb ‘as high as the hills’, and then, as in a choreographed bodily gesture, move ‘down to the valleys beneath’. The imitative reiterations of clearly stated snippets of text act therefore almost as gestured incantations, which illustrate by constant rehearing the most salient poetic images. The literary voice is not merely that of the singular psalmist but of an angelic consort of musical praise. 7 In fact, Ward’s frequent repetition of musical ‘points’ or motives with their accompanying snippets of text has a way of inducing (mantra-like?) a mildly hypnotic state that both extends and enriches the listener’s experience. Ward also underscores passages of text by memorable instances of rhythmic declamation; that is, by forging melodic and rhythmic identities for the given words. So, for example, the opening lines of Psalm 104 are clearly anticipated by the wordless viols, who have already accented ‘Praise’, ‘Lord’ and ‘soul’ in naturalistic English without the words’ having yet been heard.

Load more