Download Music for Small Ensemble

Music for Small Ensemble
Holborne: Pavane ‘The image of melancholy’ and Galliard ‘Ecce quam bonum’ (p.191)
Context
 Published with, other pieces for consort by Holborne, in 1599.
 Intended for domestic performance by amateurs in well off Elizabethan houses,
not for public concerts, which did not exist at the time.
Instrumentation
 Not composed for any specific instruments, but covers a range from treble to
bass (3 1/2 octaves in total)
 Could be performed by a consort of viols (as in the recording) or recorders or
by a mixture of instruments (referred to as a ‘broken consort’)
Structure
 Pavane and Galliard a common pairing of courtly dances during the 16th
century.
 Pavane is slow and in duple time
 Galliard is fast and in triple time
 Both pieces comprise three sections, each one repeated
Melody and Rhythm
 Melodic lines move generally by step, with few large leaps – similar to vocal
music, especially in the Pavane
 Opening motive of the Pavane (descending 4th from tonic to dominant, starting
from a long note) is a symbol of melancholy in Elizabethan music. See
Dowland’s song Flow my tears on p.347 of the Anthology, which starts with the
same idea
 Galliard is rhythmically more complex, especially in the opening section, with
its syncopations (see line 4)
Texture
 Contrapuntal – somewhat like a civilised conversation between the five players:
each part has a melodic line of its own
 Imitation between the parts
 Lines cross over each other at times – bars 34-7 of the Pavane involve the three
top parts overlapping at the same pitch, for example – so that the overall effect
is of a closely woven musical cloth
 The bottom line is generally less active than the others, forming a bass line and
restricted largely to the root or third of the harmony; even so, it does have its
moments, as in bars 50-2 of the Pavane
 Pavane contrapuntal throughout. Galliard largely homophonic in middle
section
Harmony and tonality
 Diatonic and basically consonant – based on triadic harmony
 Dissonances are carefully prepared and resolved as suspensions – a note is held
over from one chord to become a dissonance in the next, then falls to become a
consonance in the new harmony. The D played by part 2 in bars 3-4 is an
example: it forms part of a D major chord in bar 3 and becomes a suspended 7th
over an E in the bass in bar 4, falling via a decorative pair of quavers to C sharp
 False relations occur when two different versions of the same note are found in
close proximity. See bar 11, where the third line plays C sharp on the first beat
and the top part has a C natural later in the bar
 Pavane in D major. Middle section cadences on dominant (A major)
 Galliard in D minor (despite the lack of a B flat in the key signature). Cadences
on D major (tierce de Picardie) at the end of first and third sections, A major in
the second.