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This chapter addresses US-born British composer David Bruce’s That Time With You (2013). This impressive cycle retains clear stylistic traces of Bruce’s American heritage. His basic idiom is tonal and strongly grounded, and also contains modal elements. It demands a well-schooled singer with a wide expressive range, stamina, and good breath control. The singer must also be calm and unflappable, so as not to be fazed by the relentlessly fast, irregular rhythmic patterns in the first and third songs. The vocal writing in general is warm, earthy, and womanly. The composer sensibly keeps within the voice’s richest and most rewarding middle range, avoiding extremes. This means that words can be heard easily, and a palette of sensual colours explored. Ultimately, the specially commissioned poems evoke an intuitive response. Bruce sees the cycle as belonging to the tradition of ‘sorrowful songs’ and, of course, the blues. In the first and third settings (‘The Sunset Lawn’ and ‘Black Dress’), the singer is the voice of Death, but in the other two (“That Time with You’ and ‘Bring me Again’), the outpouring of regret is more personal, yet somehow strangely distanced.

This chapter outlines the scope and critical approach of the book. It reviews the history of the idea of the lyric in early modern English verse, the impact of Ovid on Shakespeare and his contemporaries (especially through Arthur Golding’s English translation), the resonances of John Dowland’s work and career, and the possibilities of a meaningful order of play arrangement in the First Folio.

This chapter presents an approach to The Tempest as a play less about Prospero and his power than about Ariel and his instructions. It reads The Tempest as a play of commissioned performances, and examines closely the resonances between Shakespeare’s play and Dowland’s lyrics and prefaces (focusing on patronage and playing). It also argues for a mythic inheritance from Ovid’s story of Ceyx and Alcyone, in the Metamorphoses, as a tale of shipwreck and impersonation that informs the comic restorations of The Tempest.

This chapter explores The Winter’s Tale as the last of the Comedies in the First Folio, juxtaposing it with The Tempest as the first of those Comedies. It looks at how Winter’s Tale transforms the old language of pastoral into new comic languages of bawdry. It shows the figure of Autolycus as both a mythic heir to Ovid and a social participant in the new practices of ballad selling and performing in Jacobean England. It looks closely, too, at James I’s own ideals of kingship as performance, seeking to understand Leontes in Winter’s Tale as a challenged and challenging refraction of James’s ideals.

This chapter examines Dives and Lazarus. This impressive piece supplies a fresh slant to the traditional cantata on a biblical theme. It demonstrates the versatile gifts of the composer-pianist Matthew King. Christian faith is of great importance to him, and this deeply felt work has a rarefied spiritual atmosphere. Delicate ornamentation and arresting interplay between voice and piano are salient features. The piece runs in one continuous movement, with fluctuating time signatures and tempos. Discreet pitch cues guide the singer through changes of tonality, and dynamics and nuances are carefully judged. Harmonic relationships, including dissonances between voice and piano, need to be defined clearly. There are, however, many unisons and convergences on to tonal centres, especially at cadences.

Composers employed many rhetorical figures in both their lyrics and their music, and these devices often determined the structure of solo and part songs. This section concentrates not only on English lute songs of the early seventeenth century but also on those textual and musical figures that singers need to make manifest through their voices.

This chapter applies the principles of eloquent delivery to two works by John Dowland, “Sorrow stay” and “In darknesse let mee dwell.” In a prosopopoeia, the singer feigns the affections and nature of the imaginary person in the text, using tools of delivery derived from pronunciatio to transport listeners to that state of mind.

Music offered Philip Sidney and his milieu a unique form of communio, both in the sense of remote communication between souls and in the sense of social “community.” In The Defence of Poesy, in the eclogues of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, and in the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, Sidney envisions an open-ended, experimental mediascape that neither begins nor ends with writing. This interest in media interactivity resurfaces, in turn, in the compositions of William Byrd, Thomas Campion, John Dowland, and others who translated Sidney’s poetry and his musical legacy into the medium of print. After Sidney’s death, print became a means not to oppose or transcend performance but to activate new sites of music making in amateur and household contexts, opening up new forms of collaboration among poets, performers, and composers.

This chapter investigates the relationship between the fluid practices that frequently characterize the work of contemporary musicians, and the more solid roles of performer and composer that continue to hold sway in contemporary music. Focusing on a case study of the collaborative creation of Forlorn Hope for eleven-string alto guitar and electronics, by Gorton and Östersjö, the chapter analyses the processes that lead from research and experimentation with particular guitar tunings and playing techniques, through a more conventionally compositional phase, to the first public performance of the piece. The chapter demonstrates how the affordances of both the instrument in the hands of Östersjö and the particular tuning specified by Gorton combined with improvised discoveries, and the ‘filtering’ force of a piece by Dowland, result in a piece whose creative ecology is distributed across a variety of timescales and practices.