The English Nightingale QUARTET

Description

This AK Music arrangement of The English Nightingale SE-07 (b) for recorder quartet is a significantly re-worked and transposed version of  AK Music SE-07, originally for 5 players.

The melody which became known as ‘The English Nightingale’ almost certainly has its origins in England, possibly first heard in Thomas Campion’s The Lord’s Masque in 1613. In this work, ‘The Nightingale’s Response’ forms the song of Orpheus’s silver nightingale, responding to his master’s enchanting harp playing. 

This particular Nightingale tune was to become hugely popular, featuring in various keyboard, cittern and lute collections of the period and becoming a fashionable broadside ballad. This setting for recorder quintet takes anonymous keyboard settings from the seventeenth century, as well as Van Eyck’s famous solo recorder variations, as inspiration.

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