Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Jan Smaczny: The stuff of life' - aspects of folksong in the fabric of art music in the British Isles

Rownde. A number of other pieces in the collection include allusions to folk or popular songs as follows: (4) The Battell; (5) The Galliarde for the Victorie; (6) The Barleye Breake; (8) The Huntes Upp; (10 and 11) The Firste Pavian and Galliarde; (21) The Sixte Galliarde; (25) The Passinge Mesures: The Nynthe Galliarde; (29) A Lesson of Voluntarie. In all, at least sixteen of the pieces in Ladye Nevells Books are based on, or make allusion to, popular sources. In some pieces the quotation or use of a folksong might have a significance greater than popular allusion. In the case of the set of variations on the song 'Walsingham' (used also for a set of variations by John Bull, copied as the first number in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book), with its allusion to the Marian shrine at Walsingham (dissolved in 1538), the use of the melody would have had significance for Byrd's fellow Catholic recusants during the reigns of the Protestant monarchs Elizabeth I and James I. Also, folk melodies, or parts of them, could turn up in the texture of keyboard pieces which did not bear the title of a particular song. Two examples are to be found in Byrd's Barleye Breake, a depiction of a game for couples involving a mock battle; Byrd introduced the bare melodic outline and harmony of the well-known folksong 'The leaves be greene'

8 at the start of his second section and concluded the piece with another well known melody, 'The Bells of Osney' (for further information about Byrd and his use of folksong see Oliver Neighbour, The Consort and Keyboard Music of William Byrd). The content of a series of collections of keyboard music after the heyday of the virginalists (Bull, Gibbons and Byrd were all dead by the mid 1620s) shows that the interplay of folk and art music continued, if at a much less sophisticated level, for several decades and surfaces again in keyboard collections, notably Purcell's Musick's Hand-maid ('A New Scotch Tune' and 'A New Irish Tune': London, 1689), at the end of the seventeenth century. The folk/popular impulse was, of course, present again in such works as John Gay's enormously popular The Beggar's Opera (1728),and, as we have seen above, was a powerful presence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 8 The text of the opening of the song was: 'The leaves be green, the nuts be brown, they hang so high they will not come down'. Though well known as a song in its own write, this melody was also the basis for music for viol consorts known as 'Brownings' of which genre Byrd produced a famous example. 35