The Well-Tun'd be aware was first released in 1982. Minnesota Archive variants makes use of electronic expertise to make long-unavailable books once more obtainable, and are released unaltered from the unique college of Minnesota Press editions.
The years 1957–1651 marked a interval of excessive success within the heritage of tune. In The Well-Tun'd notice Elise Bickford Jorgens stories altering musical conventions of English music on the subject of new styles in poetic flavor from the overdue Elizabethan period during the Jacobean and Caroline years, basing her paintings at the premise that any musical surroundings of a poem is an interpretation of the poem itself. hence by means of 1625, she contends, solo music in England had passed through a said swap in musical kind, from the lute track of previous a long time to the monophonic continuo track. the looks of John Donne and particularly Ben Johnson and the Cavalier poets marked the dying of the Elizabethan lyrical mode that had encouraged composers like John Downland, Thomas Campion, John Danyel, and Robert Jones.
Jorgen's establishing chapters describe and illustrate components of the craft of poetry and the musical conventions that could signify them. Her presentation is either transparent and thorough, and may be specially worthwhile for college students and students of English literature who're now not unavoidably musicians. She then discusses 4 significant different types of music: Measured tune, Dance Songs and Tuneful Airs, English Monody, and Pathetic Airs, and notes that impact upon them of Continental track types. yet her significant attempt is to tell apart among them via mentioning their numerous attribute attitudes in the direction of the musical illustration of poetic texts. All 4 teams convey styles of switch in the course of the first half the 17th century.
Jorgens concludes that the prestigious union of the "sister arts" for which Elizabethan music used to be well known was once more and more tricky to keep up after approximately 1610. Poets not preferred these parts of poetic kind which may in flip produce enjoyable musical kinds. Solo songs grew to become, with continuo composers like Henry and William Lawes, Nicholas Lanier, and John Wilson, both notated recitations of poetry or uncomplicated friendly trifles.