Elena Hylton

Challenges Entered: Solo Performance Challenge

Project: Singing Pastime With Good Company

This is my first time dipping a toe into period music. While I played cello and guitar when young and had several years of vocal lessons in high school (opera and Broadway mostly) I am only recently getting back into singing after taking over a decade off, and I have not done anything with it in the SCA. As someone who loved Renaissance Faires in high school and college most of my exposure to “renaissance” music is actually post-SCA period with a few period pieces mixed in, and my knowledge on the topic when I started was a mix of things picked up from A&S displays by performers and things from a few BBC specials on Tudor and Elizabethan music.

I chose to perform a song thought to have been written by King Henry VIII, “Pastyme with good companye.” It is found in the Henry VIII Songbook, believed to be written around 1518, and includes 20 songs and 13 instrumental pieces ascribed to ‘The Kynge H. viij’. An image of the work can be seen at https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/pastime-with-good-company-composition-by-henry-viii#

And the text that I used came from https://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item101064.html

It was written with three parts designed to be sung together, but I am signing only one. A recording by BBC Teach of the three parts sung together can be found at https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/history-tudors-music/zm4gvk7

I have known the song since hearing it sung in high school, but the way in which I learned it was not grounded in period singing. My background is being a soprano, but as I learned more about the ways this type of piece should be sung I learned that might be a bit of a challenge, “Sopranos need to be willing to use the middle and low ranges of their voices.. it is useful to be able to float high notes with ease and without excessive vibrato or volume” (Hargis 4). After not singing for a decade the top of my range isn’t what it used to be so going lower is fine, but it turns out avoiding vibrato is harder for me than I thought. I practiced over the last month by trying to sing some other modern works without vibrato while accompanying myself on the piano (I have been self-teaching it for the past year and a half) and have learned that as soon as I stop paying attention “excessive vibrato” is exactly what my voice defaults to. After recording and thinking that I did a great job avoiding the vibrato I listened to it and realized this is definitely something I should work more on to be a technique I can control.

Several articles and books I read mentioned the importance of being able to clearly hear the words being spoken, so I tried to focus on clear enunciation throughout, “clarity in delivery, that is, words uttered distinctly and sentences articulated carefully, to enable listeners to assimilate the sense of the text easily” (Toft 109). I did however include a few of the trills/ornamentation often encouraged in period music. “Early modern music was highly improvisatory in nature and belonged as much to oral custom as to notational practice” (Austern 129).

Overall I still have a lot to learn, but this was a very fun introduction to the world of period music!

Austern, Linda Phyllis. “Women’s Musical Voices in Sixteenth-Century England.” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 2008, vol. 3.

Hargis, Ellen. “The Solo Voice in the Renaissance.” A Performer’s Guide to Renaissance Music. ed. Jeffery Kite-Powell. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2007.

Toft, Robert. With Passionate Voice: Re-Creative Singing in Sixteenth-Century England and Italy. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015.