Premiere: 17 October 2013 at Nuovo Restaurant, Worcester, MA.
Members of the Worcester Chamber Music Society (violinists Krista Buckland Reiser and Rohan Gregory, violist Peter Sulski, and cellist Joshua Gordon)
Duration: 8’
Instrumentation: string quartet
Performance note:
Semper Dowland, semper dolens is the title of a consort piece by the great Elizabethan composer and lutenist John Dowland. It’s also the name of my second official composition for string quartet, one that incorporates material that would otherwise have been lost from my now-withdrawn Lachrymae (2005).
In the earlier work, I utilized Dowland’s lachrymae “If My Complaints Could Passions Move” rather prominently and I wanted to salvage some of that quartet’s striking moments (most of which involved this tune). I also wanted to expand the material from the earlier work and found, much to my amazement, that Dowland’s consort song perfectly fit the bill: it shared (or could be made to share) several harmonic and motivic gestures with “If My Complaints,” and thus seemed an ideal basis for this new adaptation of some very old music.
My Semper Dowland, semper dolens falls into two parts. The first, brisk and sometimes violent, presents shards of the lachrymae as well as one full statement of its melody under a vertiginous accompaniment. The second, slower and mostly in a quintuple meter, declaims the consort song, though, as it reaches its climax, material from the first half reasserts itself and an uneasy tension ensues to the end.
Semper Dowland, semper dolens is dedicated to the memory of my grandparents, Edwin H. and Edith A. Waldvogel.