Robert Scheffler

English 204

Professor Marx

5/31/06

Sweet Sanctuary

My creative project was the performance and recording of John Dowland’s Renaissance song titled Come Away, Come Sweet Love. I initially had planned to incorporate some of my own arrangements into the score, but after actually sitting down and learning each individual part, I slowly realized that the song was very rich and full already. Since the original score is a four part vocal piece, I had to come up with a way to capture the powerful resonance of those four individual parts coming together to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Piano seemed to be the obvious backbone instrument, so I played each vocal track as a separate piano track. While recording I noticed that the song sounded better with each successive track placed on top of the others. New tracks added more depth to the song, and slowly the power of the original song was coming across in my own recreation. After laying down the first verse of the song with a four different piano tracks representing the four different voices, I decided to add a strings section to replicate some of the grandeur of the original score. Then I proceeded to learn, perform, and record the rest of the song in a similar fashion. I would play each piano track representing each vocal part, and then layer them on top of one another. I recorded certain sections over and over trying to make sure each layer was aligned properly with the rest. The song itself had some small nuances that posed as nuisances for me. It switches time signatures from four/four to three/four, it uses a few isolated sixteenth notes that are essentially unpaired and therefore hard to time properly with the rest of the song. Eventually though, I got the timing down and even added a small flute section to convey the Renaissance feel of the song.

My paper that I wrote on this song offers up some of the interpretations I gleaned from listening to and reading the song. But I managed to find a few more layers to the song after actually having to learn and perform it. The lyrics themselves are engrained in my head after listening to the song over forty times to better understand the small intricacies as well as the broad scope and underlying emotions. The poetic repetition of the song mirrors the musical repetition. Each verse of the song is repeated note for note, and the “Come Away” at the start of each new verse perfectly coincides with this notational redundancy. Moreover, I made sure the caesura between “Come Away” and “Come Sweet Love” was easily detectable while listening to my version of the song. This important poetic device emphatically conveys the speaker’s urgent plea for ecstatic union with his beloved. I also discovered that the song becomes freewheeling and exuberant during the “sweet rosy lips to kiss” section, an illumination that again likens the individual notes to the words and emotions of the song. The lover’s fantastical imagination and gleeful yearnings are perfectly expressed and accentuated through the fluttering of voices and quickened notes in this section. As my paper pointed out and this creative project reiterated, the musical scoring of this song perfectly captures the poetic emotions within the work.