"I care not for these ladies" and other Elizabethan lute songs

OMOS001 Lance Eccles I Care not for These Ladies and Other Elizabethan Lute Songs.

In addition to the title piece, this collection of six Elizabethan lute songs contains arrangements of such familiar tunes as "Misteresse Mine" of Thomas Morley and John Dowland's "Fine Knacks for Ladies." They are all scored for soprano, alto at pitch, tenor and bass.

Each arrangement consists of playing two or three times through the melody, with the repetitions becoming progressively more ornate, as the original lutenist may have embellished the tune. In addition to the written-out ornamentation, changes in key and meter also provide variation.

The melody always appears in the soprano voice, which consequently is the easiest part. The lower three voices have quite a bit of independent movement, and the most ornate line is that of the bass, whose running eighth-note passages make it the most interesting and challenging. In fact, the arrangements would work well for an intermediate-level class in which only the teacher plays bass, thereby giving everyone including the instructor something interesting to play.

The pieces are minimally edited, leaving breathing and phrasing to the performers' discretion. The edition is legible, with only one piece in the score requiring a page turn; however, the key changes are so subtly marked that they are easy to miss when sight-reading.

This edition is the first in the new Orlando Series of Orpheus Music publications. According to the liner notes, the series "comprises arrangements for recorders of existing works by known composers.... In the Orlando Series the structure and content of fully composed pieces will be maintained, though there is always room for the arranger's individuality to shine through."

Orpheus Music's web site reveals that Lance Eccles was born in 1944 and recently retired from teaching Chinese at Macquarie University in Sydney. He played with the Reluctant Consort and has done extensive composing and arranging of recorder music for Orpheus.

Anne Fjestad Peterson, American Recorder, November 2008.