Revival of the grittiest Severall Friends performs “Ballads and Bards”
SEVERALL FRIENDS PERFORMS “BALLADS AND BARDS”
Would you buy a ballad? Well, you might do so today by streaming a ballad — essentially, a popular song — or downloading one, or conceivably purchasing a CD of one. In Shakespeare’s day, you would have bought your ballad in the form of a broadside, a cheaply printed wisp of paper that bore original lyrics, possibly with a notation identifying a well-known tune that the words could hang on. The technology for printing music was certainly available at that time, but it involved a time-consuming, costly process. Why would anyone go to such expense for a popular song that might be forgotten a month hence? Just printing the words would suffice, along with an indication that they would fit with the melody of “Greensleeves” or “Fortune My Foe” or any of dozens of other melodies that were common currency at the time.
“Lyrics floated among various tunes, and tunes floated among various lyrics,” said viola da gamba virtuoso Mary Springfels, whose Severall Friends ensemble offers two performances this weekend of a program titled “Ballads and Bards: Songs and Sounds of Shakespeare’s Day and Plays.” “On the whole, there were a lot fewer tunes than ballads, so the tunes got heavy use. And then there are the truly maddening pieces — broadsides of lyrics with the heading ‘To a New Tune.’ Very unhelpful. We have no idea what melodies those would be.”
The broadside ballads Severall Friends has selected for its concert have direct connections to Shakespeare. Some are sung in full in his plays, some are excerpted, some are merely mentioned. Many ballad-singers populate his pages. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom hopes that Peter Quince will write a ballad called “Bottom’s Dream.” In Othello, Desdemona takes comfort in ballads as she senses her imminent doom. In Hamlet, Ophelia’s mind skips from one to another when her sanity crumbles. Perhaps the most memorable among Shakespeare’s balladeers is Autolycus, the peddler in A Winter’s Tale, a scurvy knave and “snappertrifles” up of unconsidered who hopes to sell whatever tumbles out of his pack. “My traffic is sheets,” he says, and it becomes clear that at least some of his sheets are broadsides. “He sings several tunes, faster then you’ll tell money,” remarks a servant. “He utters them as he had eaten ballads, and all men’s ears grew to his tunes.” “Here’s one,” says Autolycus, “to a very doleful tune, how a usurer’s wife was brought to bed of twenty money bags at a burthen, and how she long’d to eat adders’ heads, and toads carbonadoed.” Some ballads are simple love songs or commentaries on historical incidents, but many exhibit sensationalism of this sort — here a preposterous tale of a monstrous birth — alongside tales about crime or sexual exploits. “As we experience them in Shakespeare’s plays,” Spingfels said, “ballad-mongers can often seem a little dicey. Broadside ballads were printed alongside lots of trashy stuff, accounts of how somebody with three hands was found, and that sort of thing — the National Enquirer material of its day.” “Is it true, think you?” asks Mopsa, one of the peasants, about the song concerning the usurer’s wife. “Very true, and but a month old,” responds Autolycus, plying on both her credulity and her taste for the latest, most fashionable musical goods. It turns out Mopsa is a step ahead of him. She and her friend Dorcas, she says, had learned it already a month before, such that they are able to sing it with Autolycus in three-part harmony. Even in class-conscious England, the repertoire of ballads seems to have been embraced at all levels of society. “It’s important to recognize that a ballad is not a folk song,” Springfels observed. “It is not orally
“Ballad-mongers can often seem a little dicey. Broadside ballads were printed alongside lots of trashy stuff, accounts of how somebody with three hands was found — the National Enquirer material of its day.” — Mary Springfels, viola da gamba
transmitted, like a folk song, but rather is printed for a literate audience. It assumes that a lot of working-class people can read. Evidently, the level of literacy was high in Shakespeare’s England.”
Many of the songs are on subjects that were ripped from the headlines at the time but are now obscure. Quite a few use vernacular language that leaves modern listeners scratching their heads. In assembling this program, Severall Friends has dealt with those challenges by simply avoiding them. “You can’t really give a concert with footnotes,” Springfels said. Still, the repertoire is so vast that the group found plenty of winning examples that listeners will connect with easily, forgotten favorites like “Joan Come Kiss Me Now,” “Robin Is to the Greenwood Gone,” and “The Friar and the Nun,” which is referenced in Romeo and Juliet. The last one, Springfels said, was a favorite at Elizabethan-era weddings. Its topic? “You don’t need to ask.”
Ballads are meant for singing, and that role will be principally entrusted to Drew Minter, who appeared with the group two seasons back in a recital of music from Dante’s Italy. “I’m delighted he could join us for this program,” Springfels said, “because if anyone can put over a text in a way that not one word is lost, it is Drew.” Three other musicians will assist with the singing, but mostly they will provide instrumental support: Springfels on the viol, Shira Kammen on violin, and Mark Rimple playing the cittern. “That will be the most unusual instrument for the audience,” Springfels said. “The cittern was sort of the equivalent of what the ukulele was in the 1920s, an instrument for casual music-making in popular songs. Eventually, it morphed into the flat-backed mandolin. Like the ukulele, it uses re-entrant tuning.” That means the strings are not tuned sequentially low to high, like violins or guitars or most string instruments today, but rather with the strings being pitched in a less obviously ordered pattern. As an aside for music theorists: The distinctive result is that the instrument escapes from a constant succession of root-position chords.
“There is some difficult music for cittern,” Springfels said, “but mostly, you just strum it and whack out chords. It was an instrument for hanging out and playing for fun.” That seems to be the goal of Severall Friends’ program overall — sitting back and enjoying some very old oldies that promise to bring alive the everyday music of Shakespeare’s day.