Music and Musicians on the London Stage, 1695-1705

Kathryn Lowerre

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351557610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

From 1695 to 1705, rival London theater companies based at Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields each mounted more than a hundred new productions while reviving stock plays by authors such as Shakespeare and Dryden. All included music. Kathryn Lowerre charts the interactions of the two companies from a musical perspective, emphasizing each company's new productions and their respective musical assets, including performers, composers, and musical materials. Lowerre also provides rich analysis of the relationship of music to genres including comedy, dramatick opera, and musical tragedy, and explores the migration of music from theater to theater, performer to performer, and from stage to street and back again. As Lowerre persuasively demonstrates, during this period, all theater was musical theater.

PART I
The Place and Function of Music in Dramatic Productions

Chapter One

Musical Approaches in Comedy

Comedies were the most common type of new productions in the theaters during the 1695–1705 decade and had the highest proportion of musical numbers, outside of explicitly musical works like masques and dramatick operas. They were integral to the success of both companies, particularly during the early seasons. William Congreve’s Love for Love was the first play staged at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and a triumph for the new company. A few months later, Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift did much to save the Patent Company’s 1695–96 season. Each became a regular part of its respective company’s repertoire during the following decade.

Musical Conventions in Comic Plays at the Turn of the Century

Scholars have advanced varied arguments regarding the changes in comedy during the 1695–1705 decade. While several analytic and descriptive labels have been applied: reform, sentimental, humane, and so on, the songs and other musical entertainments featured in comic productions are bawdy and sentimental by turns, and comedies from 1705 are as likely as those from 1695 to include titillating references to sex and plenty of broad humor. Comedies without musical events are virtually unthinkable in contemporary practice—only three play texts out of over ninety comedies and farces from this decade fail to indicate some type of music performed within the play—but the published texts vary enormously in their specificity about the music included.

In his 1728 Musicall Grammarian, lawyer and essayist Roger North tried to systematically divide the practice of music by ‘intent’: “1. Solitary, 2. Sociall, 3. Ecclesiasticall, and 4. Theatricall.” After describing the felicities of solemn, choral church music, North turns to theater music, which he divides into two parts: “first Comick, and the other, Opera.” Dramatick opera and musical tragedy are addressed in Chapter Two.

North, who lived for the most part in London between 1670 and 1700, identifies comic music by its performance and structure, as well as its effect on the body.

I mean the comon entertainement and interludes of plays, which in former times were dispersed abroad by the name of playhouse tunes; and of this sort is all our comon musick at feasts and celebrated rejoycings. There is not much to be observed of these, but onely that they are chiefly compounded of melody, and pulsation or time. The consort is not much heeded, and if the melody is ayery, or what they call pretty, the ground may be of a comon style, and the more vulgar, the better. And all the force of these consorts lyes in the upper part, to which all the rest and even the base sometimes is subservient. Therefore it is to litle porpose to crowd in accords by inner parts, for if they could have any melody care is taken, by doubling the superior, to drowne them; and the best accomplishment is by number and nois[e] … this sort of popular [theatrical] musick is most apt for driving away thinking, and letting in dancing; and the former of these [being] dispatched, all people’s members are apt to assume the other, and almost sencelessly to move one way or other, keeping the time as the pulses of the musick, wherein consists the cheif efficacy, incites.¹

North’s description of popular theater music of the comic sort focuses on these elements: the musical interest is in the melody and pulse, with the tune in the highest voice or instrument in the group (“consort”), the bass line (“ground”) is often simple and even “vulgar,” while the accompanying instruments flesh out the sound. Most ominously, this type of music encourages the audience to stop thinking and to move their bodies to the rhythm of the music, which has the strongest effect on its auditors. With a little updating, North could be talking about genres of Western popular music nearly three hundred years in his future.

Vocal Music and Instrumental Music in Comedies

The following section covers the types of songs, dances, and instrumental music commonly found in comedies, briefly outlining their essential characteristics and providing examples from contemporary productions revealing the ways in which such music was used. More detailed discussion of specific comedies appears in later sections.

Song Types

The majority of musical events indicated in the printed play texts are songs. They are also one of the most common types of surviving music not indicated in the printed text (see, for example, Farquhar’s Love and a Bottle, PC 1699), or only indicated generally (‘songs and dances here’). In many cases the musical setting of a specific song can be matched to its lyrics and positioning within the play. In other cases the placement of a song may depend on the association of its song type with a characteristic scene or situation. Songs may be reflective, pastoral, mad songs, ‘witty’ songs or parodies of the more serious types, ballad-style songs (often topical or patriotic, rustic, or “Scotch”), drinking songs, or serenades.

By this categorization, reflective songs are those which depict an emotional or interior state. They are usually set in a more elaborate musical style and sung by a professional singer, rather than an actor-singer. These are the types of songs often ‘ventriloquized’ by a companion or servant for a high-status man or woman,² reinforcing their heightened dramatic focus. “Restless in thought,” from She Ventures and He Wins (LIF, 1695, discussed later in this chapter) is an excellent example of this type.

Pastoral songs cover a lot of territory, depending on the strictness of the definition. As with other kinds of texts, the pastoral at this period is probably best understood as encompassing a broad continuum marked by themes, names, language, and intertextual references. As Timothy Neufeldt has noted, the later eighteenth-century clichés of ‘pastoral’ style in music (for example, Handel’s “Pastoral Symphony” in Messiah) are not clearly established in English music during this decade.³ Witty songs about sexual politics and preferences which throw in a single reference to a “nymph” or mention the name “Amintor” are obviously several steps away from ones that explicitly reference a pastoral world or are sung by pastoral characters. The “pastoral entertainment” with music is one area of overlap between comic and tragic productions. Another is the mad song.

Mad songs, in their lyrics and overall structure, much resemble the mad rants often found at the end of tragedies, spoken as characters are dying. They exhibit grandiose, usually mythological delusions, extreme changes in mood and syntax, and recurrent images of flying, burning, or drowning. Composers set them to music in short, contrasting sections that reflect the moods and images of the text, as in Henry Purcell’s famous song “From silent shades,” commonly given the title “Bess of Bedlam.”

There are relatively few outright mad songs in comedies during this period, when compared to the number of songs overall, although they are among the most memorable. Actor-singers Anne Bracegirdle and John Bowman’s most famous mad songs were originally performed in the second part of Thomas Durfey’s Don Quixote (PC, 1694). However, Don Quixote is an exceptional case and not a straightforward comedy, written by an author whose earlier comedies were unusually musical.⁴ Another exceptional case is George Powell’s Imposture Defeated (PC, 1697), another highly musical and generically unstable work. Pastorals like The Fickle Shepherdess (LIF, 1703) and masques like Acis and Galatea (LIF, 1701) and Hercules (LIF, 1697) also include mad songs. While some reflective songs resemble mad songs in their use of short contrasting sections and depictions of varying emotional states, the delusional and mythological references are missing.

Ballad-style songs are typically performed by lower-status characters, or as entertainments by characters pretending to a status they do not merit. Ballads are strophic, using the same melody for each verse of text, and narrative. When printed they often lack a bass line, and may have been performed without one. While ballad quotations are a familiar feature in earlier seventeenth-century plays (Hamlet being only the most famous example), in comedies from this decade performances of entirely new ballad-style songs are most often indicated. Durfey is particularly fond of introducing ballad-like songs into his comedies. These stage ballads could travel from the theater into the street, as did John Eccles’s “A Soldier and a Sailor,” (Love for Love, LIF, 1695).⁵

Drinking songs, performed either by male characters or to entertain men, range from solo to the communal, with any number of voices. Like ballads, they are typically strophic with a simple tune, singable by an untrained voice, and are printed either without a bass line or with the most rudimentary (North’s “vulgar”) one. They appear frequently as quotations (see below) sung by one or two characters as they enter or exit, quickly telegraphing their condition. Drinking songs are also the most likely type of music within a play to be borrowed from pre-existing repertoire, as Joseph Harris does in The City Bride (LIF, 1696) when a group of sailors sing “Here’s a health to jolly Bacchus” (27), published five years earlier.

Songs for two voices are of two types, either two-part songs, in which the two voices share the same text and essentially the same music, and musical dialogues, where the two voices represent different characters or points of view and usually sing together only at the end of the piece. Two-part songs often feature the voices imitating one another, in ways which can be simple or elaborate. They are written on a range of topics, from love, “I tell thee Charmion,” (Love for Love, LIF, 1695) to drinking and fox hunting, “Away, ye brave fox-hunting race,” (The Bath; or, the Western Lass, PC, 1701). The range of musical styles and level of vocal training required...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Performance in the Long Eighteenth Century: Studies in Theatre, Music, Dance
• Contents
• List of Musical Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Prologue: Rival Crews: Music and Musicians in the London Theaters
• PART I: THE PLACE AND FUNCTION OF MUSIC IN DRAMATIC PRODUCTIONS
• 1 Musical Approaches in Comedy
• 2 Musical Tragedies and Dramatick Operas
• PART II: MUSIC AND MUSICIANS IN THEATRICAL COMPETITION
• 3 Initiation, 1695–1697
• 4 Competition, 1697–1700
• 5 Power Shift, 1700–1703
• 6 Realignment, 1703–1705
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1 Glossary of Musical Terms and Concepts
• Appendix 2 Composers Active in the London Theaters, 1695–1705
• Selected Bibliography
• Index of Persons