8/16: Early English: Music of Bond, Blow, and Purcell

“A composer close to my heart,” says Baroque Band director Garry Clarke, “is Capel Bond [1730-1790] — although born in Gloucester, he lived, worked, and is buried in the city I am from, Coventry.” Bond was the organist of two major Coventry churches, Holy Trinity and St Michael and All Angels, which would become Coventry Cathedral. By his organization of both instrumental and choral concerts, his encouragement of the Musical Society of Coventry, he’s credited with sparking a new musical awareness in the English region known as the Midlands, where the music Handel was creating for London audiences was unknown until Bond introduced it.

Bond’s only surviving compositions are a set of six church anthems plus “Six Concertos in Seven Parts,” of which Number Four is a Concerto Grosso in C Minor. The concerto grosso was a favorite Baroque genre, contrasting two or more solo players with a small group of supporting players. This one has four movements, arranged in the slow-fast-slow-fast sequence of many other Baroque instrumental works; they are labeled Largo; Tempo Giusto – which means In Strict Time — Largo Andante; and Con Spirito — fast and spirited.

A much more famous church musician of an earlier generation was John Blow (1649 to 1708), who was trained as a boy chorister in the prestigious Chapel Royal and who served as the principal organist at both Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral during an illustrious career as a leader of London’s musical life in the second half of the 17th century. He was a slightly older contemporary of Purcell and served as a mentor to his younger colleague; both held positions with the Chapel Royal, and Blow’s “Venus and Adonis,” an opera with a lot of dancing as well as singing, was an inspiration for Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas.”

Blow composed organ music and a great many choral works: for church services, for royal birthdays, and for coronations. Among his rather few surviving non-keboard instrumental pieces is a Chaconne in G Major for two violins, viola, and continuo. The Harvard Dictionary of Music defines a chaconne as “a continuous variation form of the Baroque…based on the chord progression of a late 16th-century dance imported into Spain and Italy from Latin America.” A repeated pattern — not, in practice, necessarily based on the harmonies of the original dance — forms the foundation for the variations. Blow’s Chaconne is notable for its rhythmic as well as melodic interest.

Henry Purcell (1659 to 1695) was the leading composer of the English Baroque period, and one of the nation’s most important composers of any period. He wrote music in all the major genres of his time: stage works, keyboard pieces, chamber sonatas, and choral music both sacred and secular. His music for the theater includes one opera, “Dido and Aeneas,” plus what are known as semi-operas, pieces that include singing, speaking, and dancing. He also wrote incidental music for plays, and in that realm one of the best-known suites is the one for “Abdelazer, or The Moor’s Revenge.” There are nine movements: Overture, Rondeau, Aire, Aire, Minuet, Aire, Jigg, Hornpipe, and Aire. The memorable theme of the Rondeau movement, with its majestic rhythm and mood, is the one chosen by Benjamin Britten as the basis for his “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.”