Music for Awhile

Many composers have derived special satisfaction from setting texts in which music and music making are central themes. Think, perhaps, of the chordal anthem “What Sweeter Music” or Steven Samitz’s “I Have Had Singing.” This evening we hear two such meditations by Henry Purcell.

The first, “If Music Be the Food of Love,” cites one of Shakespeare’s most familiar metaphors. Colonel Heveningham, author of the song’s text, adapted the oft-cited opening line from Twelfth Night: “If music be the food of love, play on.” It inspired three different versions from Purcell; we will hear the third. Whereas the earlier versions are declamatory, the third achieves a wonderful balance between the melismatic and syllabic. The vocal ornaments recall the sensuality of 16th-century Italian song, yet the harmonic daring of the accompaniment keeps the song from succumbing to vapid scales. The piece opens with a sort of accompanied recitative, then grows more lyric with increasingly florid melismas at the words “sing on.” Purcell marks the shift to the second stanza with a change from duple to triple meter, a factor that accounts for much of the newfound animation. For the song’s final phrase he returns to the austerity of the opening.

Purcell composed “Music for a While” in 1692 as incidental music for a revival of John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee’s Oedipus. The song demonstrates Purcell’s effortless gift for melody. It unfolds over a short, repeating harmonic sequence heard in the bass (called an ostinato). The ostinato is played a dozen times in all, though the pattern’s rising harmonic motion helps to maintain a sense of forward impulse. Modulations also provide some variety. A few words receive special treatment, such as the flowing ornaments on “eternal” and the onomatopoetic, detached eighth notes that Purcell sprinkles around the ninefold repetitions of “drop.”
These songs offer only a tiny window into Purcell’s largely unknown body of secular vocal music, apart from Dido & Aeneas. They capture the air of Elizabethan song, an atmosphere of the muses being celebrated, of composition as both craft and sign of devotion.

(c) Jason Stell