Lecture: Two Englishmen Abroad

John Dowland and Thomas Simpson were two prominent English musicians who spent much of their working lives abroad. Dowland, seemingly passed over for a court appointment at Elizabeth’s court because of his Catholic religion and connections, worked first in Germany, then at the court of Christian IV of Denmark, and, between 1606 and 1609, apparently at some unknown continental court.

Simpson (1582–?1625), a bowed string player, left England at an early age, working from 1608 to 1610 in the service of the Elector Palatine in Heidelberg and then at the court of Count (later Prince) Ernst III of Schaumburg and Holstein-Pinneburg at Bückeburg near Hannover. Simpson received a post at the Danish court when Ernst III died in 1622; he worked in Copenhagen until 1625, the probable year of his death.

In this paper, musicologist and founder of Leeds Baroque Peter Holman will discuss Simpson’s remarkable consort arrangements of Dowland in the context of the Anglo-German consort repertory. Opusculum neuwer Paduanen (1610) includes Simpson’s five-part arrangements of three Dowland pavans, each supplied with a thematically related galliard. Taffel-Consort (1621) includes five pieces attributed to Dowland, all in up-to-the-minute arrangements for two equal treble parts, tenor, bass and continuo, apparently made for a group of English musicians at Bückeburg. Three of them are known Dowland pieces, including a version of Mistress Nichols Almand, though the other two, a volta and a large-scale pavan, are not known elsewhere.

He will discuss the possibility that this pavan is Simpson’s elaboration and completion of a partly lost Dowland lute piece. A tell-tale sign of this is the use in the last strain of a striking descending cambiata sequence used by Monteverdi in ‘Laudate pueri’ from the 1610 Vespers and elsewhere. Simpson may have encountered it through his friend Michael Praetorius, who wrote about Monteverdi’s 1610 collection in his Syntagma musicum III (1619).