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William Lawes: Musick's maverick

King Charles I called him the 'Father of Musick', but William Lawes was just 43 when he died in battle. On his 400th anniversary, Bayan Northcott assesses his musical legacy

Friday 26 April 2002 00:00 BST
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It is not, exactly, as if the name of Lawes ever disappeared from British music. But usually it was Henry Lawes who was remembered for getting John Milton the commission for his masque Comus, and setting the songs for its first performance. Whereas all that kept the name of William, his younger brother by six years, green was the little tune he wrote to their mutual friend Robert Herrick's proverbial verses, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may".

Yet no British composer, not even Purcell himself, prompted a more heartfelt outpouring of grief from his contemporaries at his untimely death, than the 43-year-old William Lawes. Granted, this was partly owing to the circumstances. As an ardent servant of Charles I in the ever-worsening course of the Civil War, he seems to have thrown himself recklessly into a charge during the disastrous defence of Chester on 24 September 1645 and got shot. Almost immediately, the phrase was coined, "Will Lawes was slain by those whose wills were laws", and he became a Royalist martyr-figure. The King himself, who watched the rout from the city walls, "had a particular Mourning for him", we are told, "whom he loved when living, and commonly called the Father of Musick".

What was it about this musician, born – or at least, baptised – in Salisbury on 1 May 1602, that ultimately aroused such devotion from possibly the most cultivated monarch ever to sit on the English throne? The probable portrait of Lawes as a young man in the Oxford Music Faculty suggests much in the self-confident set of the head, the enigmatic half-smile, the jaunty angle of the great Cavalier hat; and, up to the Civil War debacle, his does seem to have been a charmed life. No doubt it helped to be born into the musical household of a Salisbury Cathedral choirman; helped still more to have a solicitous older brother whose musical reputation in influential circles evidently depended as much on his social graces as his talent as a songwriter.

And helped most of all to be taken up by the Earl of Hertford and apprenticed to his music master Giovanni Coperario. For all he may have been, as one later commentator tartly put it, "plain Cooper, but affected an Italian termination", Coperario was one of the most innovatory British composers of his generation, whose pupils also happened to include Prince Charles himself – so it is possible that Lawes and his future King were already playing gamba duets this early. In any case, the Lawes brothers were soon making their way in London, and in 1633 William was commissioned to write music for a vastly lavish masque, The Triumph of Peace, staged for the King by the Inns of Court – a success that led to his appointment as one of the King's personal chamber players, or Musicians in Ordinary, in 1635.

Lawes now found himself at the centre of one of the most sophisticated courts in Europe – the extravagant, sensuous ambience of Inigo Jones, Van Dyck, and such courtier-poets as Davenant, Lovelace, Suckling and Carew, all of whose verses he set to music. In particular, he seems to have been freely allowed to renew the English tradition of viol consort plus continuo with an almost unprecedented elaboration and boldness, presenting suites, or "Setts", of such pieces more or less under what we would now recognise as concert conditions in the King's Whitehall Palace theatre. But not for long. When Civil War broke out in 1642, the court withdrew to Oxford and Lawes went with it – perhaps impelled by the mounting anxiety to gather his works by genre into the series of big autograph manuscript volumes that, in the end, largely ensured their survival.

Even leaving aside such lost tranches of his output as the lute music and serious part-songs, the amount he left from little more than two decades of activity remains vast: centring on the great five- and six-part Setts, no doubt, plus the huge collection of fantasias and dances known as the Royall Consort, and sundry sets of "harp consorts", sonatas for one and two violins, and so forth; but also encompassing a vast array of vocal music, from psalm settings, masque scenes, and theatre songs to rude tavern catches. None of this was published in his lifetime, though his brother printed a posthumous set of psalms, and the publisher John Playford brought out sundry song and dance collections.

These remained popular through the Commonwealth years, when music-lovers famously preferred "to fidle at home, than to goe out, and be knockt on the head abroad", and, after the Restoration, Pepys and his friends still liked to sing through some Lawes from time to time. But the viol soon lost ground to the violin; musical tastes changed radically, and by the time the 18th- century music historian Dr Burney chanced upon an incomplete set of parts for the Royall Consort, he could only describe it as "one of the most dry, aukward, and unmeaning compositions I ever remember to have had the trouble of scoring". Not till the Early Music pioneer Arnold Dolmetsch began reviving the art of viol consort playing at the end of the 19th century and transcribing what Lawes he could find, was there a renewed flicker of interest.

And not till after the last war, when a scholarly American GI called Murray Lefkowitz began going through the Lawes volumes in the Bodleian, publishing the first monograph on him in 1960 and the first selection of his chamber works in 1963, was it possible once again to glimpse the full scope of his achievement. More recently, the instrumental output has acquired a burgeoning discography from such consorts as London Baroque, Fretwork, Phantasm and Concordia, with Jordi Savall's Hesperion XXI impending, while the vocal output, in all its variety, is at last about to achieve complete publication. What is it about Lawes that once appealed, and now so strongly appeals again, which the intervening centuries could not hear?

Towards the end of the 17th century, that cantankerous old Oxford antiquarian Anthony à Wood was already complaining of Lawes that "to indulge the ear ... he broke sometimes ye rules of mathematicall composition". And Burney, doubtless hoping to find at least pre-echoes of the kind of smoothness and balance the 18th century valued, could make nothing of Lawes's passionate irregularity. For if Lawes deferred somewhat to his brother Henry's greater finesse in the setting of English diction, and if his sacred music remains more modest in scope than Purcell's 40 years later, in instrumental and consort music, he was a rule-breaker. His grand fantasias tend to be conceived not by neatly worked-out paragraphs of counterpoint after the tradition of Byrd and Gibbons, but as majestically unrolling sequences of continuo harmony, upon which the contrapuntal parts may ride serenely one moment, grate harshly at another, or break up in jagged, mannerist fragmentation at yet a third.

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In fact, one could hardly imagine a stronger contrast with the greatest of his English consort music contemporaries, the long-lived country-house composer John Jenkins, whose lucidly argued, sweetly balanced and beautifully crafted string music is all that his own moody, complex, uneven, risk-taking writing is not. Yet, of all the obituarists, it was Jenkins who paid warmest tribute to the "Seraphick raptures" of the late-lamented William Lawes.

William and Henry Lawes are next week's Composers of the Week on BBC Radio 3, 9am, Mon to Fri. 'Musick Maverick', a documentary about Lawes, will be broadcast on BBC 4 on 5 May at 8pm

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