Fretwork

Put Away Forbidden Playthings, for voice and four viols. 1994.

Lyrics by Elvis Costello:

Put away forbidden playthings
Amusements and distractions
And dismantle the contraption and carry it away
In time as beauty dissolves into glamour
It slips from your heart and falls under the hammer.
Put away forbidden playthings…
And never return to pluck out that jewel
Or find the thrill that slumbers still
While suffering the dream of disobeying.
Put away forbidden playthings…

As a new convert to the notated form, I still receive most of my musical education from records. When approached to write this piece, my twin listening passions happened to be Dowland & Purcell. Although I had not previously encountered the Purcell Fantazias, I quickly acquainted myself with them. I learned about the sound of the instruments through these and other works of Byrd, Gibbons, Jenkins and Lawes - both Henry and William - on recordings which were often of Fretwork.

If there exists an exquisite seam of blue melancholy in Dowland’s viol music, then I believe its last highly developed echo can be heard in some of the slow sections of Purcell’s Fantazias. However, it is possible that the contemporaneous music of the aural tradition carried this feeling into American folk music, re-emerging as part of blues and jazz. Musicologists may debunk this, but I believe this is why I am able to imagine the Duke Ellington Orchestra playing the opening of Fantazia No.5.

Put Away Forbidden Playthings is in two sections: an instrumental introduction that returns at the end of the second part, which is a song for countertenor. The text laments the interrupted access to the musical possibilities of the music of Purcell’s time.

Commissioned by The South Bank Centre. First performed 7th March 1995, The Purcell Room, London.

(Not published)