Richard Thompson with Phil Pickett and Musicians of the Globe in NUTMEG AND GINGER - Spicy ballads from Shakespeare's time - Cadogan Hall, London 2010.12.06 Hi-MD SP aud master


Skytonics stereo tie clip mic/MZ-RH1 Hi-MD SP/Sonic Stage to wav via USB/adobe audition >Tracks>fades>Flac 6


A magnificent evening's music unfortunately as a pretty low volume, so it was necessary to drop the applause level substantially.
Richard Thompson needs no introduction. Information about Phil Pickett and the Musicians of the Globe is here:

http://www.newlondonconsort.com/MoG_biography.html

Details of RT's renaissance guitar are here:

http://www.newlondonconsort.com/RenaissanceGuitar.htm

From the programme written by Peter Holman & Phil Pickett:

Over the last hundred or so years we've become accustomed to a highly fragmented musical culture. Despite attempts at crossover or fusion, musicians involved in the creation and performance of serious or classical music, jazz, folk music and modern popular music largely inhabit separate working environments, have sharply contrasted aesthetic concerns and, by and large, do not share a common repertory.

It was not always so. There are obvious differences between the repertoire and modus operand! of street musicians and court musicians in 16th- and 17th-century England, but English musical culture at that time was essentially a continuum: the repertoire of popular music belonging to the street musicians and ballad singers contained versions of pieces that had filtered down from the court repertoire, just as composers such as Byrd and Dowland were not ashamed to write sets of highly sophisticated variations on tunes they would have heard being scraped, blown or bawled-out in the streets.
The main vehicle for the creation and dissemination of Elizabethan and Jacobean popular music was the broadside ballad. Broadside ballads were sets of verses printed on single folio sheets of paper ["broadsides"]. Like modern newspapers, they were the product of an urban environment [they were mostly written and printed in London], though they were circulated throughout the country by itinerant ballad mongers who advertised their wares by singing them.

Also like newspapers, their huge variety of subjects ranged from commentaries on politics, religion and affairs of state, through natural disasters, crime and fine works by great poets [so appreciated that they were circulated as ballads], to scurrilous doggerel written specially for the broadsides on the eternal themes of sex, love, fidelity and betrayal.

But although there appears at first to be an embarrassment of riches, putting together a programme like this can prove far from easy. Too many of the ballads popular in the early 17th century are long - VERY long! And it's difficult to avoid dull, blow-by-blow accounts of political and religious events or polemic. And while hundreds of ballad texts survive, many of them were sung to the same tunes - and there are far fewer of those.
Broadside ballads only rarely included the music, though the intended tunes were often identified by their common titles, which can enable us to match the texts [sometimes a challenging exercise] to melodies [or variants of melodies] found in contemporary song books and collections of instrumental music. Many broadside ballads subsequently passed into oral tradition, and were eventually collected as folk-songs by 19th- and early 20th-century folklorists who were often unaware of their urban, literate origin.

Some broadsides just published and popularised art songs, often elaborating or corrupting them in the process. A good example is the beautiful love song Go, swjf note, which seems to have been written in the 1590s. possibly by the poet and composer Thomas Campion, in a version beginning with the words What if a day or a night or a year, though it was later elaborated into the version performed here - and further versions of it also circulated as broadsides.

That's it - my scanner has just packed up!!




Songs/tunes performed listed in the programme. Not many were announced and probably not performed in the same order, so I'm not guessing. I put applause, and where necessary banter in separate tracks. Personally I prefer to leave that out of my burning copy.

All in a Garden green
Goddesses/ Heartsease
Go silly note [What if a day]
Green Garters
Dido was the Carthage Queen
Dargason / Greenwood
How can the tree
Packington's Pound
Watkins Ale [There was a maid this other day]

INTERVAL

The Wooing of the Baker's Daughter [The Miller]
Musician introductions
Daphne / Tickle my toe
Lie still my dear
The Queen's Dumpe
Dulcina
Cuckolds all awry / Picking up sticks / The old mole
John Faustus, Doctor of Divinitie
Light o'Love Have over the water [To Warr]