Evelyn Tubb, Anthony Rooley ELEGIES

The Elegiacal Muse tends to provide the deepest inspiration. It was said, in the Jacobean England of John Dowland's day, the Lady Musick (a semi-deity seated on a cloud halfway between Heaven and Earth with a lute and song book in her hands) was happiest when men and women below sang songs of deep melancholy, for these plangent harmonies went deep into the hearts of listeners and changed the more sensitive souls permanently, the more dolorous the music, the more sustaining the food for the soul. 

Funeral lamentations gave rise to the earliest song cycles in the English language, two by John Coprario: Funerall Teares (1606), a cycle of seven laments for Lady Penelope Devereux on the death of her lover, Charles Mountjoy, and then in 1613 the musical setting of the great cycle of poems written by Thomas Campion grieving at the untimely death of Prince Henry, The Songs of Mourning. These two cycles were the direct inspiration for this present sequence of elegies and laments, a modern 'anthology' of sorrow- ful plaints which range in time from the Jacobean Grief keep within [3] and the Regency At thy lone tomb [9] - a 200 year legacy of passionate poetry and meditative music.

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