The King’s Singers
Royal Blood: Music For Henry VIII
Musical Journal II
Feb. 9th
The King’s Singers is composed of six wonderful singers. In the concert, the singing group performed the music pieces composed during the period of King Henry VIII and his daughter Queen Elizabeth. During that period, the tension between the old Catholicism and the new Protestantism create religious art, and a climate of fear amongst those who wished to continue practicing ‘the old faith’.
William Byrd was a great composer in the region of Elizabeth I. and he was one of the Queen’s favoured musicians. As Elizabeth clamped down on illicit, secret recusant Catholic worship, Byrd was forced out of London, to live under the protection of a Catholic landlord. In a large country manor house, Byrd wrote some of his most emotionally charge music for the Catholic mass services which was taken place in secret. One of the work is “Ne irascaris, Domine”. In the second part of this piece: the first line ‘Civitas sancti tui facta est deserta’, it seems to have a hidden message of solidarity for other recusants. The second line‘Sion deserta facta est’, the text is sung only once with no repeat, and the texture is homophonic. The third line ‘Jerusalem desolata est’ uses both homophonic and polyphonic texture. ‘Jerusalem’ uses polyphonic and imitation, this word is repeated. ‘desolata’ is also repeated again and again, with a sense of Canon music style. ‘est’ is not repeated, all singers came to sing together in the same melody. The last two line translated to English is ‘Zion has become a wilderness, Jersalem has been made desolate’, using a metaphor, which in the eyes of Byrd, has been taken over by unholy powers and abandoned by God.
After Elizabeth I’s death in 1603, James I was crowned as England’s new monarch. James I’s first son – Henry Prince of Wales – became very popular with the nation, and was expected to be the king. However, he died of Typhoid Fever at the age of 18 in 1612, and there was a national outpouring of grief. Thomas Tomkins wrote “When David heard” to mourn the death of Prince Henry. Tomkins uses the biblical childhood death of Absalom and the grief of King David to mirror that of Henry and the grief of the whole nation. The music piece is slow and sorrowful. The third line of music text is ‘and thus he said: my son, my son, O Absalom my son’, the whole sentence is repeated six times, and the ‘my son’ is repeated for even above 20 times! The audience can feel the call of ‘my son’ with deep sadness again and again, and can imagine of a character – broken hearted James I. The forth (last) line is ‘would God I had died for thee!’ is also repeated with the whole sentence in different keys, and the texture is polyphonic. Different singers sang the same text with different melodic at different times again and again. Then, singers went back to sing the third line in the end, and the whole piece ended with ‘my son’. This strophic style illustrates the painful call from a mother and emphasizes the distress and pity.
All the pieces use imitation and strophic method, which is the characteristics of the music pieces during that period. Also, the words in the pieces are simple and easy to understand, the singers sing in a way that the audience can hear the words clearly.