English Lute Songs. Book 1

This anthology of English Lute Songs is based on the 558 songs published by Stainer & Bell since 1920 in their series The English School of Lutenist Song Writers, later to become The English Lute Song. Tablature has been omitted to save space: a good lutenist should be able to play from staff notation, and a keyboard player cannot use tablature. The majority of these songs were intended for use in the home, to be performed by whatever voices or instruments were available. This suggests that it is false piety to insist that they should be performed with lute today. If the only instrument available is a piano, a guitar, or electronic organ, the songs can still give pleasure, and this was why they were written. In many of the songs, a cellist can play the bass line originally intended for viol.

Many of the poems were first re-published in the nineteenth century and immediately proved popular, long before the music was made available. They became even more popular when their original melodies were harmonised for piano by arrangers such as Frederick Keel in his two books of Elizabethan Love Songs. When the original accompaniments were restored by E. H. Fellowes and his successors it became clear that in a period of some twenty years after 1598, a group of English Poets and musicians had produced a body of high class work that, in John Dowland, England had a song-writer worthy of the company of Duparc and Hugo Wolf in the nineteenth century.