Interview, Laurence Dreyfus on the consort music of John Jenkins

One of the leading lights in today's early music scene, viol consort Phantasm have an enviable discography comprising Bach adaptations, collaborations with Magdalen College Oxford and more. Above all, though, they focus on the uniquely rich consort tradition of Renaissance England – Dowland, Lawes, Tye and of course John Jenkins, whose five- and six-part consorts they have previously recorded to great acclaim. Completing the set, then, is their latest album of Jenkins's consorts in four parts – works that in many ways combine the contrapuntal play of choral polyphony with the intimacy of chamber music.

I spoke to Phantasm's director, American musicologist and gambist Laurence Dreyfus, about Jenkins's consort works and how they fit into the broader musical and cultural society of the time.

These consorts, alongside your recordings of those for five and six parts, complete the set of Jenkins’s viol consort music, a key element of the English consort school. What distinguished that school – and why did it end up being England, rather than some other part of the world, where it took root and flourished?

One of the most striking feature of English consort music of the 17th century was its continued fierce allegiance to the tradition of independent voices that refused the kind of hierarchy of parts sparked by monody and opera in Italy. While Jenkins is not averse to borrowing some new ‘Baroque’ affects, such as harmonic surprise, his music of the 1620s shows his continued belief in the pure pleasure of rich contrapuntal interweavings, which show off both compositional skill and emotive depth. As an island nation, England certainly kept these older practices alive for longer, as did the fact of conservative musical establishments at the universities, inns of court, and at grand country houses, where one didn’t jettison venerable ideas just because of a change in fashion.

You refer to certain keys equating to particular moods for Jenkins. Was this correspondence unique to him, or was the idea of a given key conjuring up a specific set of feelings widespread in his time?

That’s a good question. Keys relate back to the old modes which, as a harmonic realm attached to moods and feelings, was already discussed by the Greeks. Where the remnant of the idea still lives on is partly regulated by older English 16th traditions, but even more striking is how many sharps or flats were found in the key signature. These ‘accidentals’ and the challenges they pose for the musicians of the time push the affective language – what they called ‘the air of a piece’ in new directions: for example, whereas a piece with one flat with a final on F looks old-fashioned, comfortable and pastoral, a piece with two flats – closest to what we would call C minor – feels modern, dark and complicated. There is a similar set of conventions at work up in the consorts of William Lawes and Matthew Locke, and Purcell is still playing with these connotations a half century later.

Intriguingly for those interested in music’s social dimension, the performance contexts of these consorts seem to have been rather egalitarian, with free mixing between the classes. Is there any evidence of this environment affecting political currents in society at large?

Not that I know of, which might account for people’s passionate engagement for this kind of music-making at the time – a privileged space virtually free from oppressive impositions of power and hegemony. Perhaps it’s not too farfetched, though, to see this kind ‘free mixing’ – which is rooted in the musical substance itself - as a foreshadowing of the challenges to hierarchical power that surface first in the English Civil War and the overthrow of the monarchy, even if most of the consort players themselves were staunch royalists!

Of course another irony of the historical evidence is that today’s players are even less socially ‘mixed’ than some of the ones I cite in my CD booklet, with ‘gentleman’ musicians dependent on ‘ladies’, servants, and tradesmen so as to engage in their favoured after-dinner entertainment.

Alongside class mixing, there was seemingly also an unexpected level of gender equality, with women violists able to perform with men on a somewhat comparable footing. Do we know of any female composers of this kind of music?

Alas, no. In Antwerp there was Leonora Duarte whose family had connections to English travellers, but there is no English equivalent of a Barbara Strozzi, a leading light in Italian music, of whom there is a striking portrait in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie with her clutching a bass viol. Yet even she didn’t compose any consort music.

A contemporary listener commented of Jenkins’s music that “these things were never made for words” – consort works are in a sense some of the earliest “absolute music” that we have. How did this kind of music for its own sake, not for an external purpose such as dance or worship, first arise?

Henry VIII imported some viol players from the north of Italy to serve at court entertainments, and I’m guessing that word about such good musicians playing relatively ‘soft’ instruments at court and performing for the monarch’s bedchamber ultimately filtered down and got copied by aristocratic circles, at the universities and by the gentry. Another impetus was 16th-century music written for choirboys at cathedrals and College chapels to help them become expert sight-readers in learning the ‘sol-fa’. This often involved playing viols as part of their musical education. Leading composers like Tye, Byrd and Ferrabosco started competing with one another to write instrumental (and non-singable!) works called an In Nomine based on a snippet of liturgical chant, and this led to composers experimenting with pieces called Fancies, where there were no longer any formal links to vocal music. Without dependence on words, on ‘ditties’, free imagination – that is, your own fantasy – ruled the roost. The rest is history!