Musicke’s Cordes Samuel Breene, baroque violin
Jeffrey Noonan, baroque guitar Early Music

Missouri’s March 2020 concert featured the duo Musike’s Cordes in a program of works for violin associated with England. The concert included a sonata by Daniel Purcell but the final set of the concert opened with a miniature by the other Purcell—Henry. The New Grove Dictionary of Music describes Henry Purcell (1659 – 1695) as “one of the most important 17th-century composers and one of the greatest of all English composers.” Purcell’s accomplishments appear all the more remarkable when we consider their breadth and his short career. Appointed to the court at eighteen, he already had years of experience as a chorister in the Chapel Royal and as an assistant court organist. His teachers included Christopher Gibbons, John Blow and Matthew Locke. Purcell composed secular and sacred song, numerous court odes and anthems, catches and rounds, incidental music for plays, songs and dances for semi-operas, and the opera Dido & Aeneas as well as solo keyboard music, suites and sonatas for string ensembles. His death at thirty-six was a stunning loss to England’s musical patrimony. While he composed a significant amount of music that employed the violin in orchestras and chamber ensembles, unaccompanied violin pieces like this simple but expressive “Prelude” remain rare in Purcell’s output. The program closed with one of the baroque era’s most iconic musical tropes. The early folia developed on the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth century, probably as an improvised song/dance for theatrical performances. An early seventeenth-century description characterized it as a noisy and rambunctious Portuguese dance, accompanied by guitars and tambourines, its title meaning “empty-headed” or “mad.” Early versions displayed a variety of rhythms and chord progressions, but by the mid-seventeenth century, the folia achieved a standardized format that featured a simple binary structure and a minor mode progression in three. In addition to the numerous folia variations for plucked instruments, famous versions from the baroque era include settings by Corelli for solo violin, Marin Marais for viola da gamba and Vivaldi for two violins.

Seventeenth-century French composers played an important role in standardizing the folia and the version on today’s program, while published in England, is credited to a Frenchman. Born and trained in France, Michel Farinel (1649 – 1726) led a peripatetic career, with studies in Rome and travel to England and Portugal in his late twenties. In 1679, Farinel settled in Spain with his harpsichordist wife where they worked for the Spanish queen. He returned to France in the late 1680s and played at the French court, but settled shortly after in Switzerland. His set of variations on folia appeared in 1684 in John Playford’s The Division Violin. The Playford family played a major role in English musical culture through the seventeenth century, producing instruction books, song books and numerous of collections of popular song and dance tunes. Farinel’s version of folia appeared in a violin anthology that features variation sets on English and continental tunes, an appropriate and entertaining conclusion to our program.

Back to Videos