Dowland, John (EN)

Dowland, Doland, Doulande, Dulandt John *1563, †20 (?) or 21 (?) January (?) 1626, buried 20 February 1626, London, English composer and lutenist. Dowland’s place of birth is sometimes given as Dalkey (near Dublin) in Ireland, but this is not confirmed by documents; Westminster is more likely. In 1580, Dowland left for France in the service of the ambassador, where he was able to perfect his artistry as a lutenist. In 1582 or 1584, he returned to England. On 8 July 1588, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in music from Christ Church College, Oxford. In 1594, he unsuccessfully applied for the position of court lutenist to Queen Elizabeth. After this failure, he set off on a journey across Europe. He stayed at the court of Henry Julius, Duke of Brunswick, in Wolfenbüttel, and then at the court of Maurice, Landgrave of Hesse, in Kassel. In 1595, he stayed in Venice, Padua, Genoa, Ferrara, and Florence, where he performed before Ferdinando I de’ Medici and had the opportunity to meet representatives of the Italian musical avant-garde, including G. Caccini. From Florence, Dowland decided to return to England; in November 1595, he passed through Nuremberg, but it is not known whether he actually carried out his intention to return. At the end of 1596, he was again at the court of the Landgrave of Hesse; at that time, he again hoped to obtain position as lutenist at the English court, but was disappointed once more. In 1597, he stayed in England. In 1598, he became a lutenist at the court of the Danish king Christian IV, where he remained until 1606; during this time, he visited London at least twice. In 1606, Dowland returned to England permanently. Among other things, he continued to publish his works and translated A. Ornitoparchus’s treatise. In November 1612, during the reign of James I, he finally received the coveted position of royal lutenist, which he held until his death. From 1621, Dowland is referred to in sources as Doctor of Music.

Dowland achieved great fame and popularity during his lifetime. Praise for his virtuoso artistry and compositional skills can be found in numerous prints of the era, mainly in occasional poems accompanying music collections. His lute compositions are included in many anthologies of international repertoire, and the titles of his songs appear repeatedly in the dialogues of English plays. Today, music historians also consider Dowland to be one of the most outstanding composers of English lute music and vocal lyrics of the Elizabethan era, and some of his songs to be among the greatest achievements in this field.

Dowland’s songs show considerable diversity in terms of texture, expression, and instrumentation, which is treated with the freedom typical of the time. Book 1 contains the notation for four vocal parts and lute parts for all the songs, with the title page noting that the songs are “made so that all the parts together or each of them separately can be sung with the lute, orpharion, or viola da gamba.” It is now believed that only the highest voice is suitable for solo performance, as the others, especially the middle ones, are much less independent, and the layout of the print indicates a closer connection between the highest voice and the lute. In the next three books, 40 songs are notated in the same way, and although the title pages of these prints do not offer an alternative to the instrumentation as in book 1, there is no reason to reject it. Based on the presence or absence of text under the melodic lines of the individual voices of the remaining songs, it can be concluded that in the 61 works mentioned, the vocal parts could also have been doubled or replaced by violas. The way the text is signed, and sometimes the specification of a particular instrument, indicate that in these remaining 24 songs, various vocal and instrumental combinations of soprano (1 or 2) and bass parts are most often provided for, always accompanied by the lute. Sometimes, within a single piece, the number of voices is increased, and in sections of a refrain-like nature, there are up to five voices. Such internal variation is typical of the dialogues from masques, included in each of John Dowland’s collections, except for Book 1. In the dialogues, the composer uses various arrangements – from a vocal solo accompanied by the lute alone to a 5-voice choir doubled by 5 violas accompanied by 2 lutes (tenor and bass). Many of Dowland’s songs were also known as pieces for solo lute; sometimes the lute part is given in sources as a separate piece, which does not appear separately in Dowland’s print, but as an accompaniment to the vocal line; in many cases these are probably foreign arrangements, hence the difficulty in determining their exact number when compiling a list of lute pieces.

Dowland’s polyphonic songs include both polyphonic pieces, some of which make extensive use of imitation techniques, and chordal pieces. The latter are mostly simple dance songs (galliards, allemandes, and courantes) in Book 1, while in later books they are generally more declamatory in character and have a much richer harmony. Frequent combinations of chords related by a chromatic third or the same chord with a change of mode are associated with chromatic progressions or the creation of oblique sounds. This type of harmony and declamatory style predominates in duets and solo songs. Dowland generally uses such means to highlight the melancholy of texts focused on love-related distress. In all voices of the songs, careful attention to correct word accentuation is evident. The publication of Book 1 became a model not only for Dowland’s subsequent prints, but also for many other English composers, both in terms of casting possibilities and graphic layout. Dowland published only three of his own works for solo lute among his songs, nine have survived as his autographs or manuscripts by others, but with the composer’s own signature, and ten were included in anthologies by Robert Dowland. The composer’s statement that many of the other transcriptions were made without his knowledge and present the works in a highly distorted form may apply to many of the other transcriptions.

Dowland’s fantasias are multi-part works. Some are dominated by imitative sections, while others feature improvisational and virtuosic passages (such as those found in Dowland’s prelude). There are also sections in which the composer uses instrumental figure progressions. The four fantasies contain short or very elaborate sections in triple meter, which is quite common in the fantasies of virginalists and vihuelists. The use, throughout the entire fantasia (of the “In nomine” type), of a structure featuring a cantus firmus in longer note values is exceptional in the entire lute repertoire. Among the earliest examples of the transfer of musical rhetoric from vocal music to purely instrumental music are Dowland’s two imitative fantasias (also preserved anonymously in the so-called Krakow lute tablature), based on chromatic progressions, with the emotional charge of these phrases reinforced by the programmatic titles of the pieces: Farewell and Forlorn Hope Fancy.

An important part of Dowland’s lute works are his arrangements of popular ballad melodies, which the composer presented in the form of variation cycles. These are a clear equivalent of the variations of virginalists. The cycles consist of 2 to 8 parts, with the number of parts being inversely proportional to the length of the melody being arranged. Dowland achieves the uniformity of the cycle by repeating the melody of the ballad itself in successive variations, with an unchanged bass line and the entire harmonic structure, or just the harmonic progression. Variety is achieved, among other things, by ornamenting the melodic line, introducing various instrumental figures, often characteristically rhythmic, by increasing the movement alternately – once in the upper register, once in the lower (analogous to the division between the right and left hands when playing the virginal), and finally by changing the meter and varying the texture from homophonic-figurative to contrapuntal. The architectonics of the cycle becomes complex in longer ballads. The form of Dowland’s dances does not deviate from the patterns commonly used in his time, but their internal structure is characterized by a variety of sophisticated rhythmic and textural ideas, interesting melodic lines, relatively frequent imitations and pseudo-imitations, and a highly developed technique of instrumentation, manifested especially in the varied repetitions of individual parts. In some dances, especially those with programmatic titles with a melancholic tone, Dowland uses interesting harmonic phrases and related tonal oscillations, as mentioned in relation to his songs.

Dowland’s Other Necessary Observations, included in Varietie of Lute-Lessons, concern string tension, fret placement on the fingerboard, and lute tuning. The discussion of the second of these issues is particularly interesting, as it allows us to draw detailed conclusions about the interval sizes used by the eminent lutenist as well as the correspondence of this tuning to the Pythagorean and equal-tempered systems.

Literature: E.H. Fellowes The English Madrigal Composers, London 1921, 2nd ed. 1948, repr. 1958; P. Warlock The English Ayre, London 1926; E.H. Fellowes The Songs of John Dowland, “Proceedings of the Musical Association” LVI, 1929/30; R.J. Manning Lachrymae, a Study of John Dowland, “Music and Letters” XXV, 1944; O.H. Mies Dowland’s Lachrymae Tune, “Musica Disciplina” IV, 1950; B. Britten Lachrimae. Reflections on a Song of Dowland, London 1951; W.R. Davis Melodic and Poetic Structure: the Examples of Campion and Dowland, “Criticism” IV, 1962; U. Olshausen Das lautenbegleitete Sololied in England um 1600, Frankfurt 1963; V. Duckles The English Musical Elegy of the Late Renaissance, in: Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music, New York 1966; D. Greer The Part-Songs of the English Lutenist, “Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association” XCIV, 1967/68; D. Poulton John Dowland, London 1972 (includes a catalogue of works); R. Henning A Possible Source of „Lachrimae”, “The Lute Society Journal” XVI, 1974; I. Spink English Song, Dowland to Purcell, London 1974, 2nd ed. 1986; A. Rooley John Dowland and English Lute Music, “Early Music” III, 1975; J.M. Ward The So-Called „Dowland Lute Book” in the Folger Shakespeare Library, “Journal of the Lute Society of America” IX, 1976; J.M. Ward A Dowland Miscellany, “Journal of the Lute Society of America” X, 1977; L. Nordstrom A Lute Duet of John Dowland, “Journal of the Lute Society of America” XII, 1979; R. Charteris Manuscript Additions of Music by John Dowland and his Contemporaries in Two Sixteenth-Century Prints, “The Consort” XXXVII, 1981; J. Meadors Dowland’s „Walsingham”, “Journal of the Lute Society of America” XIV, 1981; P. Frank A New Dowland Document, “Musical Times” CXXIV, 1983; A. Rooley New Light on John Dowlands Songs of Darkness,
“Early Music” XI, 1983; M. Lindley Lutes, Viols, and Temperaments, Cambridge 1984; E. Doughtie English Renaissance Song, Boston 1986; W. Maynard Elizabethan Lyric Poetry and Its Music, Oxford 1986; D. Greer A Dowland Curiosity, “The Lute” XXVII, 1987; K. Sparr Some Unobserved Information about John Dowland, Thomas Campion and Philip Rosseter, “The Lute” XXVII, 1987; R.H. Wells John Dowland and Elizabethan Melancholy, “Early Music” XIII, 1985; D.T. Fischlin „The Highest Key of Passion”. Inexpressibility and Metaphors of Self in John Dowland’s First Booke of Songes or Ayres, “Journal of the Lute Society of America” XX–XXI, 1987–88; M. Pilkington Campion, Dowland, and the Lutenist Songwriters, London 1989; D. Leech-Wilkinson My Lady’s Tears: A Pair of Songs by John Dowland, “Early Music” XIX, 1991; R. Spencer Dowland’s Dance Songs: those of his Compositions which Exist in Two Versions, Songs and Instrumental Dances, in: Le concert des voix et des instruments à la Renaissance, eds. G. Patrick, J.M. Vaccaro and P. Vendrix, Tours 1991; U. Sommerrock Das englische Lautenlied: (1597–1622). Eine literaturwissenschaftlich-musikologische Untersuchung, Regensburg 1990; J.M. Ward Music for Elizabethan Lutes, Oxford 1992; R.H. Wells Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry, Drama and Music, Cambridge 1994; D. Pinto Dowland’s Tears: Aspects of Lachrimae, “The Lute” XXXVII, 1997; R. Spencer Dowland’s Can she excuse? The Case for Reinstalling the B flat, in: La Musique de Tous Les Passetemps Le Plus Beau: Hommage à Jean-Michel Vaccaro, Paris 1998; P. Holman Dowland: Lachrimae (1604), Cambridge 1999; C. Kelnberger Text und Musik bei John Dowland, Passau 1999; M. Spring The Lute in Britain. A History of the Instrument and its Music, Oxford 2001; P. Hauge Dowland in Denmark 1598–1606: A Rediscovered Document, “The Lute” XLI, 2001; P. Hauge Dowland’s Seven tears, or the Art of Concealing the Art, “Dansk Årbog for Musikforskning” XXIX, 2001; K. Gibson „So to the Wood Went I”: Politicizing the Greenwood in Two Songs by John Dowland, “Journal of the Royal Musical Association” CXXXII, 2007; M. Nahajowski Kategoria melancholii w pieśniach Johna Dowlanda, “Muzyka” LII, 2007; P. Hauge John Dowland’s Employment at the Royal Danish Court: Musician, Agent and Spy?, in: Double Agents. Cultural and Political Brokerage in Early Modern Europe, eds. M. Keblusek and B.V. Noldus, Leiden 2011; J. Bryan „Their last foile and polishment”: aspects of compositional refinement in the consort dances of Dowland and Holborne, M. Gale John Dowland, celebrity lute teacher, K. Gibson John Dowland and the Elizabethan courtier poets and P. Hauge Dowland and his time in Copenhagen, 1598–1606, in: “Early Music” XLI, 2013; K. Dawn Grapes John Dowland: A Research and Information Guide, Routledge 2019; R.W. Duffin Shakespeare: Songs & Sonnets, “Music and Letters” CIII, 2022.