O Mine Heart, hey, this is my Song.
Shall I go with You to Rumbelow Fair?
That Day, that Day, that Gentle Day.
Alas, that Samyn Sweet Face!
In are Mirthful Morrow.
And here some Dances:
- All Christian Men's Dance.
- Long Flat Foot of Garioch.
- The Lamb's Wind.
- Leaves Green.
- The Bace of Voragon.
- The Loch of Slene.
- The Bee.
- Shake a Trot, and
- The Vod and the Val.
The tunes to these were played at that day on four kinds of bagpipe (including a drone bagpipe), a trump, a recorder, a "fiddell," and a "quhissil"—which is the pleasantest way of spelling whistle I have yet seen. The melodies and words of most of them are, apparently, all now clean forgotten.
"Fa la la" (No. 210) is of a different kind, being one of hundreds of madrigals, "ayres" and ballets of which both the words and the music were written in England in the first twenty years or so of the seventeenth century. There is, of course, a hoard of learning that one may study on this English music—William Byrd's, John Dowland's, Thomas Ford's, Thomas Campion's, John Bartlet's, Philip Rosseter's, Robert Ayres' and others—which in its own day was as famous in the countries of Europe as English poetry is now. It was the coming of foreign music and musicians to England—the Italians and Handel and Mendelssohn—that put it ungratefully out of mind. To-day its dust has at last been brushed away. The Madrigals are being printed and sung again, and Dr. Fellowes has lately published a volume containing the words of hundreds of such lively, nimble and heart-entrancing rhymes—intended by their writers to carry with them a double charm—not only their own verbal melody, grace and beauty, but also their music's.
My own knowledge is scanty indeed, but I gather that a madrigal is intended to be sung, unaccompanied with instruments, by voices only—three to five, six, or seven, it may be, and men's and women's or boys', coursing, echoing, interweaving, responding and rilling together like the countless runnels and wavelets of a brook over its stones, or a wood full of singing birds at evening. An Ayre is different. It is for the voice—singing its melody to the accompaniment of lute, viol or virginal, as a nightingale may sing at dusk above the murmur of a softly-brawling brook. A Ballet, the most ancient of all three, went hand in hand and foot to foot with a dance.