Group+Three+(Khrisha)

 Music in the Elizabethan Theatre by W. J. Lawrence. The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Apr., 1920), pp. 192-205 the Diary of Philip Julius, Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, as kept during his visit to London in 1602 by his tutor and secretary, Frederi Gerschow. After a visit with the Duke to the selct theatre in the Blackfriars, Gerschow wrote in substance: 'For a whole hour preceding the play one listens to a delightful musical entertainment on organs, lutes, pandorins, mandolins, violins and flutes, as on the present occastion, indeed, when a boy {cum voce tremulo} sang so charmingly to the accompaniment of a bass-viol that unless possibly the nuns at Milan may have excelled him, we had not heard his equal on our journey. The King's men >>>The Blackfriars children Confining ourselves, therefore, strictly to the period of 1577-1603, it must be admitted that there is very little proof of music between the acts in the early common theatre and nothing to show the observance of any regular principle. So widespread is the belief in uninterrupted representation, that some investigators, forgetting that the old theatre musician had other duties besides playing in the intervals, have gone the length of saying that the earliest common playhouses, the Theater and the Curatin, made no use of music. Dumb shews formed a distinguishing characteristic of the Elizabethan Drama from its infancy, and it cannot be lost sight of that these brief pantomimic interludes were invariably accompanied by music. (Shakespeare refers to this combination when he makes Hamlet say the groundlings are capable of nothing but "inexplicable dumb shew and noise," for, offensive as is the collocation to us, noise was a common Elizabethan expression for music. The Southwark Waits were noted for the excellence of their music, and as the Globe wherein Shakespeare played was the leading theatre of that distrcit, it seems not unlikely that the Southwark Waits were associated for long with that house. One recalls in this connexion that the instruments known as Wayts derived their name form the musicians who played on them, and that they were in reality a species of hautboy of verying pitches. Although it would be an unwarranted assumtion to infer that the sixteenth and seventeenth century Waits played no other sort of instrument, it is possible that here we hae a clue to the frequency with which hautboys were emplyed, in processions and other ways, in the common playhouse. Obviously a high-class band, such as the Lord Mayor's, would be conversant with other instruments. An organisation of this order would probably consist of six instruments, two viols (one treble, one bass), one flute, a cithern, (i.e. and "English guitar," strung with wire), a treble lute, and a pandora. This was the combinbation for which Morley wrote his {Consort Lessons} in 1599, and it suggests the instruments which would have been employed in the intermissions, could we feel assured of their occurrence and of some agreeably filling-up of the gaps in the common playhouse. Because of this general tendency to leave ragged ends at the close of an act, to break off abruptly in the middle, the skilled select-theatre dramatist often attempted to justify the intrusion of inter-act music by allying it in some way with the action. This led to an artistic relevancy altogether lacking in later times, as in the eighteenth century, when a writer complained that at the end of every act, the audience, {carried away by a jig of Vivaldi's, or a concerto of Giardini's lose every warm impression relative to the piece, and begin again cool and unconcerned as at the commencement of the representation.} Long before the French had invented the priciple of the {melodrame}, thus paving the way for Wagner's {leit-motiv}, the Elizabethan players had demonstrated the potency of incidental music as an intesifier of the emotional possiblilities of a touching situation. Relative to the textual direction, it must be recalled that the normal position of the muscians was then in an elevated curtained box in the centre of the tiring house. The source of the music was therefore unseen, a circumstance which considerably heightened the effect. Finally, the equation of still-music with recorders settles a much disputed point.