English concert programme — Blow, Purcell & Boyce

John Blow (1649-1708)

The Self-Banished (before 1700)

Henry Purcell (1659-1695)

Music for a while (1692)

Thomas Ford (d 1648)

Since first I saw your face (before 1607)

William Boyce (1711-1779)

Song of Momus to Mars (1746)

A comparison between Blow and Purcell based on The Self-Banished and Music for a while would put the older composer at an unfair disadvantage. Blow was not only Purcell’s teacher and both predecessor and successor to his pupil as organist of Westminster Abbey but also a respected friend and musical collaborator. Unlike Purcell, however, Blow was not much interested in the theatre and was conspicuously more successful in liturgical than in secular music. But he did write over a hundred songs, duets and trios many of which he included in the Amphion Anglicus - his equivalent to Purcell’s Orpheus Britannicus - published in 1700. Perhaps the best known of them is The Self-Banished, a minuet song of much lyrical charm. If it lacks the magic of the Purcell song that follows, it is no less true to Edmund Waller’s modest verse for that. Written as one of several pieces of incidental music for a revival of Dryden and Lee’s Oedipus in Dorset Gardens in 1692, Music for a while was inspired by a text that offered the opportunity for both a soothing tribute to the healing powers of music and, in the middle section, a vivid evocation of the leader of the Furies, Alecto, with the snakes that garland her head and writhe like whips in her hands.

The earliest item in this group, the lute song Since first I saw your face, was published in Ford’s Musicke of Sundrie Kindes in 1607, where it appears in both solo and four-part versions. In its fresh simplicity it effectively offsets the sophisticated, Handelian comedy of another Dryden inspiration, the song addressed by Momus, god of laughter, to Mars, god of war, in the Secular Masque for which William Boyce wrote the music in 1746. It was published in the first volume of Boyce’s Lyra Britannica in 1747.