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ISSN: 1089-747X
Volume 27 (2021) No. 2
The Harmonious Musick of John Jenkins. Volume Two: Suites, Airs and Vocal Music. By Andrew Ashbee. London: Toccata Press, 2020. [311 pp. ISBN 978-0-907689-47-8.]
Reviewed by Alon Schab*
1. Overview
1.1 The second volume of Andrew Ashbee’s The Harmonious Musick of John Jenkins, published almost three decades after the first,[1] provides a comprehensive introduction to Jenkins’s music, with a focus on the suites and the airs. In his first volume Ashbee dealt with Jenkins’s fantasias, whereas here he dedicates a chapter to each of the lighter genres that Jenkins’s corpus comprises: fantasia-suites (divided into eight “groups” according to their scoring), airs (also grouped according to scoring), music for lyra viol, and vocal music. The rhetoric of the blurb on the back cover is that of a reference book; the volume purports to survey the repertoire. In fact, it achieves more.
1.2 Jenkins’s vast creative output is often misleading. Those who study or perform his music are often surprised to learn that, unlike Byrd’s or Purcell’s works for consorts, Jenkins’s fantasias in four, five, and six parts are but the tip of the iceberg. Jenkins’s consort music contains hundreds more pieces, and they are harder to classify according to number of parts alone. One must also consider the makeup of the consort: the instruments (viol? lyra viol? with or without organ?) and the deployment of parts (how many trebles? how many basses?).
1.3 Jenkins’s generic titles—such as Corant or Air—are also a source of confusion; only a handful of pieces have unique names such as “Newark Siege” or “A New Year’s Gift to T.C.” Thus, when a single source might contain a dozen “Corants” in G minor (as does, for instance, Christ Church Mus. 1005), one must resort repeatedly to the Viola da Gamba Society’s Thematic Index of Music for Viols (https://vdgs.org.uk/thematic/; hereafter VdGS) for the identification of pieces. Ashbee’s two books offer a much-needed bird’s-eye view of Jenkins’s works. Both performers and scholars can use these books to orient themselves within Jenkins’s rich corpus.
1.4 For each group of pieces, Ashbee strikes a balance between discussion of the sources and of the musical structures. In some cases, like “Group VII” of fancy-air sets, he does not need more than a paragraph on the sources and a short commentary on the musical forms, accompanied by three music examples. Other groups of works, however, require a more comprehensive exploration. In the case of the four-part airs (without organ), for example, a detailed discussion of the primary manuscript (Christ Church Mus. 367–70), including a three-page table of contents, precedes an examination of the musical forms and scorings within that group. The discussion of the solo divisions, “technical exercises of little musical worth” (p. 157), begins with a historical survey of relevant division tutors, from Diego Ortiz to Christopher Simpson (pp. 149–53).
1.5 The tables in the book are comprehensive and helpful. Thus, for example, the list of lyra viol pieces organized by their tunings (p. 183) offers important insight as to how Jenkins perceived the abilities of the instrument, which tunings he found more appealing, and in which contexts. These are all issues that are very hard to tackle just from reading the sources or editions of the works.
1.6 Jenkins’s vocal music “occupies a distinctive and interesting place in his output” (p. 197), and the last chapter in the book examines that corpus in detail. Discussion of the texts set to music takes up much of the chapter, but the few music examples are well chosen and highlight both Jenkins’s careful text setting and the essential difference from his instrumental style. For example, the excerpt from Jenkins’s elegy “No, no, he is not gone for ever” (p. 205) reveals the composer’s highly adventurous word painting and chromaticism in a manner very few of his other pieces do. In general, the choice of examples in the book is very convincing. Perhaps the most impressive is the choice of passages that demonstrate the typology of divisions in Christopher Simpson’s Division-Violist of 1659 (pp. 154–57).
2. Appendices
2.1 As expected in compendia of this kind, the appendices are of prime importance. Ashbee compiled an exhaustive list of sources, a list of works, a bibliography, and a discography. Going over the list of manuscript sources is somewhat frustrating, as one realizes that only a few of the primary sources are digitized and readily accessible to scholars—an issue of genuine urgency in these Covid-struck times. The list of works is based on the VdGS index and is very accessible and user-friendly.
2.2 The book’s short postscript outlines Jenkins’s posthumous reception, from the last years of Charles II’s reign all the way to projected volumes of the Musica Britannica series. This is, of course, indeed just a postscript: as recent reception studies of other composers show, centuries of antiquarianism and nationalism can seriously affect the way we view a composer’s image.[2] Moreover, the renewed interest in Jenkins’s music clearly reflects a particular element of the mid-twentieth-century early music movement: the revival of the viol. One need not revive all the various instruments listed in the Orfeo print to facilitate a Monteverdi revival, but a Jenkins revival would be inconceivable without the viol.
2.3 The discography alone, based on thirty-seven albums including Jenkins’s music, justifies the three-decade wait for this second volume. Streaming services (still inconceivable when the first volume was published) allow one to access recordings of Jenkins’s music easily, but a list of thirty-seven albums alone would be of limited help to the reader. Ashbee therefore provides concordances to individual airs and suites, allowing the reader to easily find recordings of movements discussed in the text. The discography also demonstrates how much of Jenkins’s music is yet to be recorded: of the fifty-three four-part airs without organ, only eight are reported to have been recorded. While discographies age quickly (new recordings of Jenkins’s music have already appeared since the publication of the volume), this one is organized so neatly that readers might be tempted to make their own addenda in pencil.
3. The Reading Experience
3.1 I will conclude this review by reflecting on my own subjective reading experience of a short passage. While reading the chapter on Jenkins’s music for bass viols, I encountered an impressive example: a seven-bar passage from a fantasia-suite (VdGS Group III, no. 1) that demonstrates all of Simpson’s “Five ways of Breaking a Note” (p. 154). It is indeed an impressive feat on Ashbee’s part to find such a short passage that perfectly demonstrates several paragraphs from a seventeenth-century treatise.[3] Intrigued, I quickly turned the pages to the appendices, where I very easily found the work, its sources, and the catalog number of a recording of the piece. The appendices helped me to find the recording on Spotify in seconds so I could listen to the piece. When I got to those seven bars that appear in the example, I suddenly realized that Ashbee filtered out the treble and the second bass viol parts, putting the spotlight just on those details in the score that were relevant to the discussion. With all my attention drawn to the two parts in the example, and specifically to the way in which the first bass viol ornaments the organ bass, I was able to appreciate Jenkins’s subtle artistry better than I could a minute earlier. Ashbee simply enriched my listening experience. If other readers, like me, learn to appreciate Jenkins better by reading Ashbee’s book, then The Harmonious Musick of John Jenkins is indeed more than a reference book, and it achieves much more than it sets out to do.