Musica Thulia

The source:
These suites have been selected and put together from a collection of 150 handwritten dance tunes from the end of the 17th century, English, French, and Dutch. They are bound at the back of a set of part-books which, apart from some other printed instrumental music from the same period, otherwise contain church music - simple sacred songs in four and five parts by Italian and German composers, used by the Cathedral choir of Växjö, 'Wexio' in Latin, in southern Sweden, and the books are in the county library there. The same musicians played both for special occasions in the church, and for town events, weddings and parties, and paper wasn't the cheap everyday commodity it is today: so it is perhaps less surprising to see the sacred and the secular cheek-by-jowl than a modern church musician might expect.

My purpose here is to offer a version of these delightful jewels which is flexible enough to be used in a variety of situations, which reflects the main aspects of the performance practice which was normal when the pieces were created, and yet which at the same time doesn't make unreasonable demands on today's musicians.

If you're prepared to screw up your eyes a little, you can play many of the pieces direct from the original notation: the file called 'facsimile' in this collection gives a page each of the two parts, treble and bass.

But many people have said they prefer things a bit tidier, and a bit larger; and indeed a number of people have said that when they read from the notes I've written, the music seems to play itself in some way...

Then again, I've added a third part - as was common at the time these pieces were first made. It's a second melody, which normally sits in the middle, under the first melody and above the bass, though at selected moments it can soar above the first for a special effect. In the 17thC. sources, sometimes the two upper parts are noticeably different, one more complex, the other simpler, clearly just an accompaniment; other times the two are much more equal; and sometimes the two players even take turns in playing the first and second melodies. The different parts were normally written out separately, as you can see in the facsimile here: scores, with all the parts written together, one above the other, were mostly used for learning harmony; and this is great today too - it makes you use your ears more than your eyes. But it does mean that if you want to exchange the two melodies, you have to write each out for each player.

I don't normally use scores for playing, but in this case I did so just to make this aspect easier. It also means you can play two parts on a keyboard instrument, the bass and one of the melodies, with a single-line instrument playing the other melody: then you can have a delighful duet between, e.g. a flute and a matching solo register of the organ.

Using the parts:
- these three parts have been made so that you can use any combination of them: two melody instruments, one melody instrument and the bass, or all three.
- in renaissance and baroque times, a player of a polyphonic instrument - keyboards, lute, guitar, harp etc. - learnt to improvise harmonies above the written bass; and then separate parts rather than chords;
- it's perfectly possible to learn that today too - in time my web-site will have something to help here - otherwise if you can be bothered to write them out, that's another possibility till you get the hang of it;
- you can also use a single-line bass instrument, like a viol or a cello, a dulcian or a bassoon, or even a sackbutt or trombone: either instead of the polyphonic instrument, or together with it, or as a part of a group, the improvising consort - more about this on the web-site in time ...

The composition of the suites isn't fixed in any way, they're just my suggestions: all 150 tunes are well worth bringing back to the light, and if you play them for dancing, use whatever suits the situation. But we perhaps need some way of grouping them for listening to, and I've followed various 17thC. models in making these groups...

The names of the dances aren't always clearly readable: those I couldn't make sense of I've simply represented as I saw them. I've worked a lot with manuscripts from this period, but I'm not a specialist in paleography, nor in the names of 17thC. popular dances, and I don't spend my time checking for concordances (versions of the same piece in other sources) - this is what the Wexio musicians played from, making their best guesses in doubtful cases: and the closest we can get to what it felt like for them is to do the same.

Keeping the pages. If you have access to A3 paper, the idea is that you copy the title page, by hand or with a photocopier, as the right-hand half of an A3 page:

These PDF files are only temporary - I don't have access to my original pages just now, and they are made from photocopies, some of which are a bit untidy: they're perfectly usable, but of course I'll redo them as soon as I can get to my originals...