if music and sweet poetry agree: thomas ford's `since first i saw your face

If Music and Sweet Poetry Agree: Thomas Ford's `Since First I Saw Your Face'Author(s): Reynold SiemensSource: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Summer, 1968), pp. 153-161Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2859545 .

Accessed: 04/12/2014 07:12

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press and Renaissance Society of America are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Renaissance Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 4 Dec 2014 07:12:46 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rsa

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2859545?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


If Music and Sweet Poetry Agree: Thomas Ford's 'Since First I Saw Your Face'

by REYNOLD SIEMENS

LIZABETHAN song-writers commonly strove to achieve a

just rapport between the conventions of the music and the mean-

ing of the words. For them the expressive aspect of the music was in-

separable from the significance of the verse, and the success of a song depended heavily upon the extent to which verbal sense and musical sound echoed one another. A statement of this notion of reciprocity is found in Thomas Morley's A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke:

... dispose your musicke according to the nature of the words which you are therein to expresse, as whatsoever matter it be which you have in hand, such a kind of musicke must you frame to it.... For it will be a great absurditie to use a sad harmonie to a merrie matter, or a merrie harmonie to a sad lamentable or tragicall dittie. You must then when you would expresse any word signifying hardnesse, crueltie, bitteresse, and other such like, make the harmonie like unto it, that is, somwhat harsh and hard but yet so it offend not. Likewise, when any of your words shal expresse complaint, dolor, repentance, sighs, teares, and such like, let your harmonie be sad and doleful.

... Moreover, you must have a care that when your matter signifieth ascending, high heaven, and such like, you make your musicke ascend: and by the contrarie where your dittie speaketh of descending lowenes, depth, hell, and others such, you must make your musicke descend ... you must not make a close ... till the full sence of the words be perfect: so that keeping these rules you shall have a perfect agreement, and as it were a harmonicall concent betwixt the matter and the musicke, and likewise

you shall bee perfectly understoode of the auditor what you sing, which is one of the

highest degrees of praise, which a musicion in dittying can attaine unto or wish for.1

Keeping in mind these principles of song-writing together with the fundamental and by now conventional tenets governing verse rhythm (determined by qualitative or accentual stress) when juxtaposed with musical rhythm (determined for the greater part by quantitative stress or lengthening),2 I plan in this essay to examine the relation of music

I. Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, intro. E. H. Fellowes, Shakespeare Association Facsimiles No. 14, ed. G. B. Harrison (Oxford, 1937), pp. I77-I78; first published 1597.

2. Although the great debate between quantitative and stressed metrical scansion was still being waged in Elizabethan criticism we can assume, looking at the results of that debate retrospectively, that the quantitative rhythmical analysis had a practical validity

[153 ]



RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

7-* II: Ij. jJ JI J.L4 J J-2 J, i Since first I saw your face I re-solved To hon - our and re -

If now I be dis - dain - ed I wish My heart had never

i *-;

r- r 1 ^ -r r : - I J j i J r T r r

" r 7 rF IJ J 11:- J. I we be - gin to wran - - gle? No, no,

1 I J I J ,I J. r1 I 7-J J j F J l ;rj

L . h 1 l I J J. M 1 I I I I :11 TI - '

- ' - w 0 4*

no, myheart is fast, And can - not dis - en - tan - - gle.

9: rF)r. £J :rjr: r J -

154

A



FORD'S 'SINCE FIRST I SAW YOUR FACE'

and lyrics in one of the most famous of Elizabethan airs, 'Since First I Saw Your Face' by Thomas Ford.3

Ford (ca. 158o-I648), who is believed to have been a poet as well as a composer4 and therefore the author of the verse in his songs, recog- nized subtle possibilities for enhancing verse through musical expres- sion. In 'Since First I Saw Your Face' a happy reciprocity between text and music is evident; conforming in tone and rhythm to the musical conventions he has established in the first stanza Ford creates compelling diversity throughout a song in which all three stanzas of text are entirely compatible with the repeated stanzas of music.5 But we may note, too, that he is composer enough to have here produced music which the absence of a text cannot maim. A piece such as this is self-sufficient and

perfectly beautiful in its own right, its artifice concealed by a musical

artistry effecting an illusion of effortless grace and simplicity. Since first I saw your face I resolved

To honour and renown ye. If now I be disdained I wish

My heart had never known ye. What, I that loved and you that liked

Shall we begin to wrangle? No, no, no, my heart is fast,

And cannot disentangle.

If I admire or praise you too much, That fault you may forgive me.

Or if my hands had strayed but a touch, Then justly might you leave me.

confined almost exclusively to music. An interesting experiment in joining music with quantitative verse is Thomas Campion's 'Come, Let Us Sound With Melody.' Here the poet-composer matches the half- and quarter-notes of the melody respectively with the long and short syllables of the verse. See John Murray Gibbon, Melody and the Lyric From Chaucer to the Cavaliers (London, 1930), p. 93.

3. Thomas Ford, Musicke of Sundrie Kindes, in The English School of Lutenist Song Writers, ed. E. H. Fellowes, ist Ser., No. 3 (London, 1921), 30-3I; Musicke of Sundrie Kindes first published 1607.

4. See, for instance, Gibbon, p. 16. 5. Lyrics which are independent of their juncture with music derive their meaning

from the particular application of words and generic conventions, but when they are set to music they also become expressions of musical sounds in temporal motion. That is, they now have a function beyond their denotation and expressiveness in a purely poetic context, and the listener's attention is divided between an appreciation of their meaning and their fuller significance when joined with the music. Ford's elementary yet direct vocabulary and diction makes the listener grasp the denotative meaning of a word with ease, allowing the verse to be 'perfectly understoode of the auditor' while he is also re- sponding to the aesthetic effect of the song as a whole.

155




I asked you leave, you bade me love, Is't now a time to chide me?

No, no, no, I'll love you still What fortune e'er betide me.

The sun whose beams most glorious are

Rejecteth no beholder; And your sweet beauty past compare

Made my poor eyes the bolder. Where Beauty moves and Wit delights

And signs of kindness bind me, There, 0 there, where'er I go,

I'll leave my heart behind me.

Turning to an analysis of Ford's air (see the musical transcript, p. 154) one notices that the verse line moves according to an iambic pattern6 while the musical line proceeds correspondingly in duple time. Both the verse and the music begin with a weak qualitative stress or 'up-beat,' thus making the initial accent fall on the word 'first.' An accent again appears two beats later on the E quarter-note (in the case of the music), or two syllables later (in the verse), on the word 'saw.' The verse, of course, does not proceed according to a regular iambic pattern when sung with the music. It must follow the rhythmic quantitative irregu- larities dictated by the melodic line, as seen in the lengthened syllable 'first' at the opening of the song. When compared, however, with the general accentual pattern of the music, the verse rhythm in this particular song corresponds fairly closely to the quantitative rhythm and the metrical accents of the music, every bar except the first, fifth, and last having an overall total of two iambic feet of verse. The final '-nown' of 'renown' in bar 5 has been lengthened to two beats by its association with the music, but this slight instance of forced metrical irregularity in the verse is compensated for by two larger expressive gains. Briefly, they are these: the lengthened syllable '-nown' helps to reinforce the

6. The first four lines in the verse may be scanned as follows: inc

_ _._ _. __y_

Since first I saw your facea I I resolvedb

To honour and renown¢ ye. ld

If now I be disdained I wishb

My heart had never known ye. aclausal juncture. b anapest. c imperfect rhyme with 'known' in line 4. (In lines 6 and 8 the rhymes also are found in the third strong stress. The same pattern appears in stanzas 2 and 3). d complete syntactical juncture.

156




feeling of finality at the cadential7 ending of the first phrase of music; furthermore this special stress on 'renown' underscores the emphasis from lengthening already received by the very important noun 'honour' which appears just before it, thereby heightening the main notion of the lover's adoration of his mistress' beauty. As with 'first' in line I, 'now' is lengthened in line 3 to one and one-half beats. The remaining words important to the meaning of lines 3 and 4 are 'disdained,' 'heart,' and 'known.' In 'disdained' emphasis is not achieved through lengthening, for the composer already has given prominence to the word by placing it at the melodic crest of the first half-phrase (as he did with 'face' in line I); the '-dain-' of'disdained' is a G in the melodic line, the highest note in this repeated phrase of music. 'Heart' and 'known' in turn are given emphasis in the musical line in a way similar to that of 'honour' and' renown' in the first phrase. 'Heart' receives greatest prominence in the phrase (as does 'honour' in line 2), not only because it is lengthened and appears at the top of the phrase but also because it is

preceded by a leap of a perfect fifth (from 'wish' to 'my,' as from '-olved' to 'To' in the first phrase; musically from D to A), the largest melodic leap in the phrase.

It is the third phrase that is musically and poetically the most expressive in the song. Harmonically there is a sudden wrenching to A major from the two placid preceding phrases of unmodulated C major. The A major tonality is sustained for only two beats and we find that A major merely served as the dominant of D major. Two beats later D major is seen to have been but the dominant of G major, and G major in turn proves to be the dominant of C major. Thus we find ourselves to have somersaulted through a series of harmonic progressions within the space of six beats, arriving at the key of the tonic, C major. But the tonality soon shifts again; two beats later appears the relative minor key, A minor, the first minor key thus far in the song. A bar later there is another modulation, now to the key of the dominant, G major.

What relation has this busy and complicated modulation to the words of the fifth and sixth lines of the verse and to the melodic features of the music? The previous four lines of the song have proceeded very tran- quilly; in the verse the singer has made two statements, one professing

7. The cadence appearing at the end of the first phrase of this air is actually a 'feminine cadence,' that is, a cadence in which the final chord comes on a weaker beat than its predecessor. The feminine cadence in this instance emphasizes the rhyme found in the final strong stress of lines 2 and 4 (i.e., 'renown' with 'known').

157




his adoration of his beloved's face, the other contemplating the sorrow and regret he will feel if he is rejected. The music has correspondingly been quiet and simple. Suddenly, with the fifth line, the lover passion- ately proclaims the earestness of his love and the cruel disinterest of his lady's 'liking'; he fears that wrangling dissension will be the outcome of his devotion. Here Ford, in an attempt to 'expresse any word signifying hardnesse, crueltie, bittemesse, and other such like,' has made 'the harmonie like unto it, that is, somwhat harsh and hard but yet so it offend not.' Thus, in the first bar of this third phrase he puts the exclamatory 'What, I' in the new and surprising key of A major. The 'I' gains further prominence by receiving one and one-half beats, as does 'you' in the next bar. Actually the entire second bar almost identically parallels the turbulence of the first bar; in both there is impassioned exclamation ('What, I that love' in opposition to 'and you that like'); both have parallel melodic sequences (A, F#, D in the first bar; G, E, C in the second); and in both there exist similar patterns of harmonic change. The fact that the melodic and harmonic structure of the second bar is placed a tone lower than the first serves to bring out a slight emphasis in meaning in the verse at this point. The lover, probably concerned more with himself than with his mistress, is given the first and more promi- nent bar. The second bar, a tone lower than the first and musically a re- flection of it, is slightly subservient, and therefore in keeping with the lesser real importance of the object of the lover's cries. If this distinction seems overly subtle, one need only go to the third bar to see how force- fully and consciously Ford now converges the 'you' and the 'I' into 'we.' The melodic line here leaps a full octave into 'we,' the only melodic leap larger than a fifth in the entire song. The extreme expressiveness of this leap is dramatically reinforced by the A minor chord, of which the word 'we' (as C), comprises the melancholy minor third. But Ford does not allow the tone of emotional urgency and anguish to be sustained for long, as the minor chord is immediately followed by a major third. Only in the fourth and final bar of the phrase is there heard another faint murmur of harmonic unrest, now in the form of an aug- mented fourth in the lute, a device possibly used by Ford to reinforce the verbal pathos of the word 'wrangle.'

In the fial two lines of the song a rapid diminution of the passionate intensity seen in the preceding phrase is noticed, for now the lover's fervor becomes softened to a placid acceptance of his position as bond- man to his mistress. The whole melodic line is an elegantly sustained

158




'dying fall' accompanied by appropriate drooping intervals. Beginning with an A, the melody descends step by step to E, there raising itself briefly only to come to a final repose on low C. The opening words 'No, no, no' still possess a faint exclamatory echo-but no more than an echo. Their possible forcefulness has been destroyed by the lilting pretty pattern of broken descending thirds to which they are joined. This pattern is immediately followed by another descending melodic line, now a slow and stately diatonic progression, coupled here with the lover's quiet admission that his heart 'cannot disentangle.' Thus Ford makes a 'full close,' but not 'till the full sence of the words be perfect.'

If Ford had written only one stanza of verse and music, the fame of this song would have been assured. But his supreme gift as song-writer is even more impressively demonstrated in the second and third stanzas. It is not entirely infrequent for a song-writer to wed verse and music successfully in the first stanza, only to have the words of following stanzas fit less intimately with the music. When the writing of a song is not the work of a poet-musician but a collaborative effort between a poet and a composer this is the more likely, for then the poet and composer may work closely together only on the first stanza of the song. Succeeding stanzas of verse may not fit the music as well as the first in spite of whatever intrinsic poetic merit these following stanzas may have.

Ford, however, in the role of both composer and poet, constructed the verse of the second and third stanzas so as to correspond to the structure of the music as closely as the first. By applying the explicative principles used in examining stanza I, one can see how Ford succeeded in again having words and music reinforce one another. In the first phrase of stanza 2 the words 'I,' 'praise,' 'fault,' and 'forgive' are brought out by the contour of the musical line. The third line of song is not quite as successful as are the preceding two lines, for musical stress is placed early in the line on a word of lesser priority in the context, 'if,' and the important word 'hands' is lost in the middle of the first bar. But in the fourth line appropriate emphases are given, now to 'justly' and 'leave.' In the fifth and sixth lines the intense dramatic quality of the music once more supports the exclamatory nature of the words. 'I asked you leave' is here musically as well as syntactically parallel to 'you bade me love,' (cf. 'What, I that loved' and 'and you that liked' in stanza I). As in stanza I, the fifth line is an anguished interrogation, reinforced by the 'sad and doleful' A minor harmony and the emotionally descriptive

159




octave leap in the melody. In the seventh and eighth lines the lover's passionate outcries again resolve into a mood of quiet and yielding devotion.

Of the three stanzas the most glorious is the third. The radiant comparison of the beaming sun to the loved one's quintessential beauty, the melodious praise of the beloved's virtues, and the lover's mournful yet eloquent declaration of unending devotion to the object of his love possess a wonder rarely found even in Elizabethan song. In line I 'sun' and 'glorious' gain prominence by means already described in stanzas I and 2. The word 'glorious' appears at the peak of the first half-phrase of music, as 'face' and 'praise' did in stanzas I and 2; but its impact on the ear is further strengthened in a way in which 'face' and 'praise' were not, the three syllables of 'glorious' being matched exactly with the three-note melodic fragment G, F, and E. This fragment contains the eighth-note passing-notes F and E, the only pattern of two consecutive eighth-notes in the whole melody. In line 3 Ford assigns the two eighth- note passing-notes to the one syllable 'com-' of 'compare,' thus bring- ing out the idea of superlative beauty in 'beauty past compare' and un- derlining the notion of'glorious' beauty seen in line I. Looking at the first stanza, line I, we see this pattern of falling melodic notes (including the note D) hurriedly accommodates the three words 'face I resolved,' which, if taken by themselves, are not closely connected either by a strong poetic device or by meaning. In line 3 the aesthetic effect of the song is actually unpleasing, for now the melodic line must oblige '-dain-ed I wish.' Stanza 2 likewise does not make the most of the expressive possibilities of these four notes. Only in stanza 3 does Ford capitalize on the innate flowing quality of the musical pattern by unit- ing it meaningfully with the purport and the liquid syllables of lines I and 3 in the verse.

Moving to line 5, we again have the lyrical intensity found in the same line of the previous two stanzas, but here the sense of the verse ac- quires a greater breadth than found in the corresponding parts of the first two stanzas. There is already a hint of a more universal character in line I (seen in the comparison of'glorious sun' with 'your face'). Now in line 5 the lover considers the objective personifications of Beauty and Wit, and forgets for the instant the subjective 'I,' 'me,' 'you,' 'we' of stanzas I and 2. Only at the end of line 6 does the lover relate this Beauty and Wit to his own state of feeling. In line 6 the obvious poetic device is the hidden alliteration, its lavishness more evident here than

160




anywhere else in the song. Line 7 is also expressively superior to its earlier counterparts, 'There, O there' having a radiant fulness not found in the more curt-sounding 'No, no, no,' of the previous stanzas. The liquid r's of'There, O there' ripple elegantly down the melodic line of broken thirds into 'where'er' (linked with 'there' by both rhyme and hidden alliteration); and when the phrase pauses at 'go,' the long 'o' faintly reminds the listener of the 'o' which appeared earlier in the line. Finally in the eighth line 'leave' and 'behind' (probably retarded at the terminal cadence) give a note of completeness and repose to the last strophe of the song.

No composer of the lute-song has with more grace and seeming ef- fortlessness created music which flowed so inevitably from the text. Possessing a sophistication unsurpassed even by Morley, Ford condi- tioned his music in 'Since First I Saw Your Face' 'according to the nature of the words which' he wished 'therein to expresse.' With his Mu- sicke of Sundrie Kindes the art of the air in England was at its zenith; but this form was soon to begin its rapid decline. In I612 John Dowland's A Pilgrim's Solace appeared as the final major example of the same class of composition. In our own age, when notions of harmony and unity seem more absent than ever, it may well be a better guide to look back to the triumphs of the Elizabethan composers than to seek the possibilities of another such glorious marriage of verse and melody in modem practices. UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA, EDMONTON

161



if music and sweet poetry agree: thomas ford's `since first i saw your face

Documents