The “Sellinger’s Round” is more stirring. Its theme is in a swinging 6/8 rhythm, running easily through the harmonies of the tonic, the super-dominant and the sub-dominant. It strikes one like an old legend, as in the first part of Chopin’s Ballade in F major, of which this piece is a prototype. The first variation retains the rhythm and only breaks the harmonies. Its gentle fugalisation is more distinctly marked in the third variation, which at the conclusion adopts running semiquavers, after Bird’s favourite manner, anticipating at the conclusion of the one variation the motive of the next. The semiquavers go up and down in thirds, or are interwoven by both hands, while melody and accompaniment continue their dotted 6/8, in a fashion reminding us of Schumann. In the later variations the quaver movement is again taken up, but more florid and more varied with runs which pursue each other in canon. This piece, perhaps the first perfect clavier-piece on record, which had left its time far behind, was written in 1580.
Alongside of William Bird stands Dr John Bull (1563-1628). These two represent the two types which run through the whole history of the clavier. Bird, the more intimate, delicate, spiritual intellect; Bull, the untamed genius, the flashing executant, the restless madcap, the rougher artist. It is noticeable how these two types stand thus together on the very threshold of the clavier-art.
John Bull, at nineteen, became organist of Hereford Cathedral, and at twenty-two a member of the Royal Chapel. In the following year he becomes Bachelor of Music of Oxford, three years later Doctor of Music of both Oxford and Cambridge. When, in 1596, Sir Thomas Gresham founded his College in London, he was made Professor in Music, and that without (as the statute demanded) lecturing in Latin. But he held this post no more than five years. We find him, “on grounds of health,” travelling in foreign countries. His playing created the greatest enthusiasm. The French, the Spanish, and the Austrian courts were in a furore. Like all later executants, he is the subject of myths. There is an anecdote that a kapellmeister of St Omer showed him, as an extraordinary curiosity, a piece in forty parts.[26] Bull, nothing daunted, added another forty parts to it. The kapellmeister stares, and takes him for the devil himself. After an absence of six years he returned to England, where, like his satanic prototype, he resists all authority. He resigned all academic positions, threw up his post in the Royal Chapel, and in 1613 again set out, without permission, for the Continent. Four years later he emerges as organist of Notre Dame in Antwerp, where he died in 1628.
John Bull, at the age of 26, after Caldwall’s engraving in Hawkins.
From these few biographical notices we figure him as a restless ambitious spirit. As the peaceful life of a mediæval painter is to the splendid existence of the seventeenth century artists, so is the relation of Bird to Bull. And Bull’s works exhibit many of the lineaments of an elegant faiseur.[27] He is not so fond as Bird of the primeval freshness of the popular songs and dances, nor does he work out his pieces with Bird’s virgin purity. The side-issue is often with him the main object; the figuration is often licentious, and both hands vie in the performance of the closest and most difficult passages. Often, indeed, his pieces assume a grotesque appearance, hard and antiquated harmonies, in which the leading note is conspicuous by its absence, being crossed with runs in semiquavers, dotted rhythms, rapidly intruded chords, four-fold imitations, syncopated grace-notes, mingled two and three-time passages in wild and bewildering confusion. The eye looks as it were on a specimen of Indian ornamentation, in which, among the confused lines, a pure human feature is almost indistinguishable. From the first piece of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Bull’s thirty “Walsingham” Variations, which later Bird treats so much more simply, the executant shines out in his whole personality. There are thirty studies on figure motives which in Bird are reduced to a dozen. The semiquavers run like will of the wisps in their most unsubstantial courses, resembling endless chains, which are here and there interrupted with leaps of a sixth or seventh, to knit them together in the self-same run higher up or lower down. The ornamentation is richer than with Bird, melting in its sfumato[28] the lines of the voice almost after the manner of Couperin. The clavier, even more than the organ, lent itself, with its isolated tones, to such trills, slurs, and mordents,[29] which give to the sound an apparently longer existence. It is these that, down to the time of the German classical music, give the stamp to the special physiognomy of the clavier-piece. I called them just now sfumato. As in painting the sharp outline of the body gradually gives way to greater truth to nature, and in Lionardo is replaced by the specifically pictorial obliteration of the sfumato, by which, so to speak, we see round the corners; so the ornamentation in these pieces, in which the clavier is seeking its own means of expression, assumes the habit of obliterating its thin outlines until finally the figures thus obtained regulate the lines of the melody as a fixed motif, or even become an end in themselves. It takes an inner effort before we can transplant ourselves into this old world of ornamentation. We must learn to feel it as it would be played by the old masters: we must, if possible, play it ourselves on old and lightly-responding spinets. Our heavy and serious pianos are unsuitable to them; they sound too forcibly and harshly. The average pianist cannot play them; and hence, in his new edition, Pauer has for the most part cut them out.
Doctor Bull’s flying fingers, utterly altering as they did many a church-tune and many a dance, were constantly making discoveries among the clavier-figures, just as the worst of executants has since done. Thus, in Bull’s somewhat bewildering forest, we find many a germ of future wealth: broken triads, which even in the contrary motion of both hands delight us in the midst of all kinds of consecutive fifths; broken octaves, of which Beethoven was so fond, a greater frequency of the crossing of the hands, by which the voice-part gained a wider field, and finally endless repetitions of the same note, either singly or in the middle of a passage,—this last a genuine clavier-device, for which later the new repeating mechanism was invented. Also, in harmonic relation, Bull seeks out many novelties, boldly bending the voice-part to his will; as he does in the truly stupendous Prelude No. 43, in the Virginal Book, or in the bold enharmonic modulation in Piece 51, an exercise in DO, RE, MI, FA, SOL, LA, a theme which appears a tone higher at each repetition, starting from G, in the midst of close figuration, until the C sharp simply changes to D flat.
There is a Lute Book of Bull’s in Vienna which gives us pieces like the following: “Miserere Mei,” “Galliard,” “La chasse du Roy,” “Salve Regina,” “Canon perpetuus, carens scriptura, notulis in systemati positis scriptus,” and so on. Let us not think too badly of them. The Virginal Book also has a variegated collection. In the time of variations, “variatio delectat,” there are collections for household use, which are not necessarily an indication of a want, on the part of the originator, of the sense of the characteristic in an instrument. At this epoch the instrument delivers men from the mediæval love of grouping instruments. And I even find that Bull in certain pieces has shown a noteworthy sense for characteristic. He has once a simple bag-pipe melody e f e d e f d c, called “Les Buffons,” with a series of variations in humorous style. There are at first chords with simple broken accompaniment, then hopping semiquaver figures, then a popular canon, then slurred sixths, and similarly right on to the conclusion, which is as usual fully harmonised, in the turns of which, of course, his want of plasticity, as contrasted with Bird, is clearly shown. More striking still is the working out of his best-known piece, the variations on the fresh delightful song, the “King’s Hunt,” giving us a romantic reminiscence of horns and trumpets. Something of this romance runs through his figures. He uses the horn-motive of the second part specially for a longer variation, which is simple and full of character. The flourish of runs in quavers, which he also uses in Galliard No. 17 of the Virginal Book, and the systematic answering of right-hand chords by the left hand, which appears also in Galliard 11, are here specially characteristic. We seem to see tramping horses and waving flags delineated in ancient technique. He was specially good in such hunting pieces. On the musical side, as his somewhat awkward variations on the fine “Jewel,” though among his best pieces, clearly show, he cannot be compared to the magical Bird; but his sense for characteristic and for technique has aided the advance of the clavier. Both of these superiorities are parts of his nature, which expressed itself most completely in this style. The clavier needed both types.