FIG. 17-8 Detail from the huge painting The Wedding at Cana (1562) by Veronese, which now faces Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona
Lisa in the Louvre, Paris. The players of the viols were secret portraits of the painter and his colleagues, the size of the
instruments they play corresponding to their ages: Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) is at left, bowing a tenor viol held lute-style.
Opposite him, the aged Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) is sawing away at a gigantic bass viol. Between them, holding a little viol on his
shoulder, is Veronese himself (real name Paolo Caliari).
Byrd’s songs were representative. Little of the English song literature that circulated in manuscript
during the sixteenth century was set for vocal ensembles, but consisted rather of instrumentally
accompanied solo “ayres,” either with “consorts” of viols or with lute as backup. Whether for viols or for
lute, the accompaniments were often contrapuntally intricate, the texts melancholy, the style basically
motetlike, but respectful of the structure of the poem in a way that the madrigal was not.
The most important sixteenth-century composer of English verse settings untouched by madrigalian
influence was not Byrd but the lutenist John Dowland (1563–1626), like Byrd a recusant Catholic who,
upon being refused the post of lutenist to the court of Elizabeth I in 1594 (because of religious
discrimination, he claimed) went abroad and spent the early years of the seventeenth century at various
German and Danish courts, returning to England in 1609 and finally securing appointment as one of the
King’s Lutes at the court of James I in 1612.
Dowland was a supreme virtuoso of his instrument, who could write for it in a very strict contrapuntal
style. For this reason he found it easy to arrange his lute ayres, most effectively, for publication as vocal
ensembles after the madrigal had caught on in England. But his work belongs to the earlier tradition, a
tradition that goes back (like most pre-madrigalian continental vernacular genres as well) to the strophic
dance song. Most of Dowland’s ayres are cast in the form of one of the two main ballroom dances of
Elizabeth’s time: the stately duple-metered pavan and the lively triple-metered galliard with which the
pavan was often paired in the ballroom, characteristically full of lilting “hemiola” syncopations. Both
pavan and galliard consisted formally of three repeated “strains” or cadenced phrases, the middle
cadence (or half-cadence) being on a contrasting harmony.
The pavan was originally an Italian dance called paduana after Padua, its putative city of origin.
(There is also a theory, no longer much believed, that it was originally a Spanish dance named after the
pavón or peacock because of its proud movements.) The most famous of all pavans is Dowland’s song
“Flow My Tears” (see Ex. 17-21 for its first strain), which he not only arranged as a part-song but also
transcribed for five-part consort of viols without voice under the title “The Lachrymae Pavan”
(lachrimae being Latin for tears), in which form he published it in 1604 together with six more pavans all
based on the same head motive: a falling tetrachord, traditionally emblematic of lamenting (Ex. 17-22).
The galliard was also originally a north Italian court dance; its name derives from gagliardo, Italian
for “robust.” Dowland’s galliard songs are wonderful examples of expert English text-setting. They are