In this episode of our podcast series, broadcaster and Continuo Connect Writer-in-Residence Simon Mundy chats with lutenist Sam Brown of Dowland's Foundry about how we interpret John Dowland, the formation of the ensemble around Dame Emma Kirkby's kitchen table, and an exciting project in the pipeline to record all four books of Dowland's songs for four voices. Plus, he tells us how fretted stringed instruments of all shapes and sizes are welcome in his North London musical community, The City Luters...

See Sam perform live with Dowland's Foundry in London (19 September), Kent (23 September) and Brighton (17 October).

Prefer to read this interview? View an edited transcript of this podcast below.

Simon Mundy: Dowland's Foundry – how did you come up with the word "Foundry"? How did you put it together?

Sam Brown: Well, actually, we took a line from Dowland himself, in the very first of his published songs, Unquiet Thoughts. There is a very striking metaphor inviting us to – what's the line – 'And you, my tongue, which makes my mouth a mint, and stamps my thoughts to coin them, words by art.' This is a very wonderful image of the body being used to turn thoughts into something physical. And by extension, it's possible to consider all of the elements of a performance, of a group – the instruments, voices, words – as being a workshop, a means of minting the abstraction of thoughts into something physical, something for us to sense and be moved by.

So you're forging Dowland anew, I suppose.

It's a very poetic way of putting it, but we like it.

The ensemble, though, is flexible, of course. One always thinks of Dowland as being a lute and a voice and not much else, but you're going much more for the consort idea, aren't you?

Yes, of course. One lute and a voice is very beautiful – we do a great deal of that as well. But it's a little bit of a misdirection. When this music was rediscovered, it became very prevalent in the Early Music revival, and the strongest image of a singer and an accompanist was someone playing to a piano. So it was very poetic to interpret this along the lines of the lieder tradition. But when we look at the repertory, yes, there are songs for one voice and a lute, but there's pretty much a majority for multiple voices – for four voices and a lute, or for two voices and two lutes, for voice, viol and lute. This is music that is intensely flexible, and that was part of its appeal in publication. Dowland, in his preface to the first book, remarks that these are songs of four voices, so made that all of the parts, or either of them severally, can be sung to the lute. And when we take him at his word, we can have four voices and lute, and this gives us a complete sort of technicolour.

But we also find that there is much more interplay between the voices than that. It becomes, rather than one person articulating their thoughts, more like a family argument – a group of people. In the best examples of this music, it almost feels like you have four different people all commenting on the same text, with the lute feverishly keeping order. And in this light, we have a much more discursive, very alive, often very argumentative attitude in the music, although we're all good friends.

I suppose it also shows Dowland the publisher trying to maximise his sales, in the sense that he wanted to sell not just to the person who could sing solos, but to the family group, or the bunch of aristocrats who would have an evening round the log fire after dinner with several of their lutenists in the household, and sing along. Dowland is really interesting because, unlike the songwriters who came very much from the theatre, like Robert Johnson, he was not just writing something for a character to sing to accompaniment – he was writing for that domestic market, or that aristocratic market, which he was serving. He wrote in many different contexts: we know that Dowland wrote music for court, he wrote for specific occasions, but his published songbooks were indeed written for a domestic audience, and household music-making was an incredibly popular domestic pastime. There are even collections of table knives with scores carved into them so that people would have some entertainment after dinner. Of course, his first book opened the floodgates for this particular genre, and it's very worth going with that domestic context, I think. We like to perform as an ensemble around a table – as this music was printed to be read around a table, one score goes in the middle and everyone can sit around and see their parts.

And this is very much what the Deller Consort used to do, isn't it? In the 1960s, the Deller Consort always operated like that.

I wasn't there at the time, but I believe so. This is a means of performing that most of our members were kind of brought up in, around the kitchen table, and with the long-running project, The Dowland Project. So we're very used to performing in this way, and it does give a different aspect.

Well, talking about kitchen tables – who's in the ensemble?

We are five members: myself on the lute. We have Gwen Martin, soprano; Clemmie Franks, alto; Daniel Thomson, tenor; and Timothy Dickinson, bass. Although I was flatteringly described earlier as the director of this group, we are all equally involved in the interpretation of this music – we don't 'direct'; the interpretation is collaborative. This very much makes sense of this music, I think, when we look at it as very much equal and warring voices. It's often cantus-led, but it's much more interactive than that, and you find moments of not just disharmony but outright disagreement occurring within the parts. Everyone interprets the content of the poem in their own light – sometimes in agreement, and sometimes very profoundly in a state of disharmony.

True democracy. You've only mentioned four voices and one lute – do you have other lutes?

We have not so far worked with other lutenists, although there are opportunities for that down the line – we'll be needing two lutes and a bass lute for various projects, more of that anon. We do, however, work with viol players now and again, and we're lucky enough to be recording next year with Harry Buckoke and Sarah Small, both fabulous viol players. This is very much part of the tradition of including other forces, other instruments – these would have been instruments that people had to hand, and if you didn't happen to have a bass with you, you might get out a bass viol and play your part on that.

Let's talk about some of those projects coming up. I know you're recording in February next year – what are you recording, and what's the project?

Well, this is the start of a very exciting project: to record, or re-record, Dowland's complete songs for four voices. This is a major undertaking – it was last fully achieved by The Consort of Musicke in the 1980s. Those recordings are absolutely wonderful, but of course a lot has changed in the last forty or fifty years, and we feel we have something new to contribute. So in February we're kicking off the project with the first CD in the collection, which will be Book One. We've been lucky enough to find the funding for that CD, and we're sending invites to the donors in question, but we're looking for continued funding for the rest of the project – so if any of your audience are interested, we would be very grateful to hear from them.

You said that's Book One – how many books are there, and how many CDs are there?

There will be four CDs, because there's the first book, the second book of songs, the third and last book of songs, and then, maybe a decade later, a final publication which Dowland couldn't jolly well call the fourth book, so he entitled it A Pilgrim's Solace – which, as one of my colleagues points out to me, has the initials 'APS'.

Now, you don't just, as Sam, do your Dowland's Foundry work, do you? You have another group – and this is all lutes.

Yes – well, as most musicians, I have many strings to my bow –

No, no, no, you don't use a bow!

Yes – I have many strings to my fingers, in that case. To my lute. I think you might be talking here about my ensemble, The City Luters. This is very much a personal project, an ensemble aimed at non-professional musicians. I was very lucky as a musician to have a musical upbringing with a very active guitar society, like most lutenists – I started as a classical guitarist, and I was essentially brought up by the West Sussex Guitar Club and by Sasha Levtov, who sadly passed away last year. Sasha was a genius at creating spaces for shared music-making, and as part of my studies with him, I was on a very regular basis performing for others, playing with others, and sharing in a musical community. From my own experience, I fully understand just how important that is to develop as a musician when you're learning an instrument, and so, in order to pay this forward, I set up my own group along these lines, as a sort of informal consort assortment for pluckers.

And where do you play, and what do you play?

We meet in Hampstead, at Heath Street Baptist Church. I arrange music for the ensemble, and it's a very diverse spread of pieces – at the moment we have players on theorbo, on baroque lute, on renaissance lutes, all in different tuning systems and in different temperaments. So understandably there isn't really much of a pre-existing repertory, so I'm very active in the process of arranging music for this ensemble. But so far we've been playing music by Monteverdi, Dowland, a few anonymous pieces, some Holborne – all of this wonderful and godly repertory.

It's interesting – I was talking, for Continuo Connect, quite recently, to Nigel North, and Nigel had very firm views on what were acceptable lutes and what weren't, what were actually modern accretions to the genre. I wondered whether you have very strong ideas about what should be the original lute and what is acceptable in an ensemble.

That's a very astute question, and naturally I have opinions. I suppose where that question begins is: what is historical performance, and why do we do it? What's the benefit of doing this? For me, the answer is very straightforward, in that the past is, famously, another country, according to LP Hartley – 'they do things very differently there.'

We learn extremely valuable things from the past: quite how little changes, and quite how much changes, when we look on ourselves as people. And for me, the value of that process is truest when the past is able to speak in its own terms.

So when we play instruments that are essentially modern instruments – and there are a few very fine players who use them – we are filtering history through a modern lens and essentially playing with a modern aesthetic. As we do that, I feel that the value of what the past has to say to us is diminished, because it's no longer speaking in its own accent – it's speaking in our dialect and in a contrived way. So for me personally, I do play lutes with a great deal of organology behind them, and in my ensemble, thus far, I've not had to be selective in ousting unwelcome additions. But that would be my take on the question.

Just to quickly go through some of the concerts you've got coming up during the autumn and into early next year – give me a quick rundown of where you expect to be playing.

Well, as always, all over the shop. Dowland's Foundry are performing next month for Islington Proms and for Music at Malling, where we'll be playing a programme called Signs and Secrets – music based on Dowland's first two songbooks and built around his sort of dubious relationship with the world of courtly intrigues. Later on in the year we are performing for the Brighton Early Music Festival – we're lucky enough to be having our BREMF debut – there we're running a programme called Nightly Cares, built around A Pilgrim's Solace, Dowland's last book of songs, very rarely done. It has a nocturnal theme: lots of nocturnal imagery, religious content, Italianate and air de cour style songs, which we have decided to pair, we think very appropriately, with San Juan de la Cruz's Dark Night of the Soul, which is going to be read by a very brilliant actor in front of us, Will Keen. For that programme, we'll also be premiering a couple of very excitingly contemporary lute songs, written by a Brighton-based composer and, again, dear friend of ours, Barry Mills – including what we believe is the first contemporary part-song written for this ensemble. So we're very excited by that.

Lovely. Thank you, Sam. Thank you so much, and good luck with it all. And I look forward to hearing the CD when it appears, probably sometime next year.

Thank you very much, Simon. I'll keep you posted.

Intro and outro music: John Dowland: The Frog Galliard (performed by Sam Brown).