S Songbooks

Songbooks

Old volumes of songs and music often show more wear and tear than other genres of book because, as tools for musicians, they are opened to their fullest extremity, flattened and perched on music stands – all at great peril to their spines and stitching. Fortunately, some copies come through these ordeals, as in the case of two books of great interest in the College’s keeping.

The first is a very rare Elizabethan Psalm book dating from 1579 and entitled The Psalmes of David in English meter. Its musical settings were composed by ‘Guilielmo Daman’ (c.1540-1591). William Daman’s origins are obscure, with some authorities linking him with Liège in Wallonia, and others with Lucca in Italy. What is certain is that he was a member of Queen Elizabeth I’s Recorder Consort, an ensemble background that equipped him to provide parts for the Psalms in ‘Tenor’, ‘Bassus’, ‘Treble’, and ‘Contratonor’. The title page shows King David in his two roles as shepherd-poet and king, presiding over a female orchestra of viol, trumpet, flute, tambourine, clavier, lute, recorder and triangle. The positioning of the Tudor coat of arms between the two images of David allows readers to draw flattering comparisons between the exemplary Old Testament king and Queen

Elizabeth. Daman’s Psalm texts derive from the metrical translations of Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, two reformers from the time of Henry VIII. Designed to be memorable, the translations were criticised by later commentators for their heavy metre: the Royalist Thomas Fuller described Sternhold and Hopkins as ‘men whose piety was better than their poetry; and they had drunk more of Jordan than of Helicon’. Fuller was correct in detecting a Genevan tone to their Psalms: Daman’s book was published by the Calvinist John Day and sponsored by John Bull, a puritan goldsmith.

We turn from sacred music to secular song with a three-volume set of popular arias and airs from the mid-18th century, Clio and Euterpe, or British Harmony: An Admired and Rare Collection of the Most Celebrated English and Scotch Songs. Originally published in 1739 as Calliope, or English Harmony, the book reached its fullest form in 1762, the date of the College’s set, when it offered no fewer than 600 songs. Compiled by the publisher Henry Roberts, who engraved the book’s charming headpieces, Clio and Euterpe was a compendium of songs from the shows, whether pieces from light opera, patriotic crowd-pleasers, songs from Shakespeare or comic ditties by popular singers of the day. The resulting anthology ranges from Purcell and Handel to songs from pantomimes and risqué farces, something reflected in the song titles: ‘Rule Britannia!’, ‘Come, Britannia, Shake thy Lance’, ‘Kindness Preferred to Beauty’, ‘Colin and Dolly’, ‘A Favourite Air in The Tempest’, ‘The Lass of the Mill’, ‘Beer-Drinking Briton’, ‘By a Prattling Stream’, ‘Ye Tell Me I’m Handsome’, etc. The book was a joint publishing venture by Roberts, who owned a bookshop across the road from the Opera House on Haymarket (now Her Majesty’s Theatre), and John Welcker, proprietor of a musical instrument shop in Soho. Welcker’s trade card, preserved in The British Museum, tells us that he stocked ‘a catalogue of vocal and instrumental music printed and sold wholesale’. Many of the engraved headpieces in Marlborough’s set of Clio and Euterpe have been tinted with watercolour.