09-Aug / Tis now dead Night CD / 0 COMMENTS

 

As Earl Christy and I have been building and working on our programme  for ‘Tis now dead Night’ CD, I felt very strongly that the song ‘Author of Light’ by Thomas Campion should be represented in the new CD, set in between John Coprario’s Songs of mourning . It’s a song we’ve performed together the longest. The first time we ever worked on it was in 2010, as part of our programme A Dialogue on a Kiss: A lute song journey through the ways of love. Then it seemed to me as a kind of meditation. My character throughout the performance was quite extraverted, and this song was the first quiet place, where she could stop being this shiny, only showing her happy side type of person, and start looking inwards.

 

Thomas Campion was a composer, a poet and a physician. He wrote over a hundred lute songs and many other composers at the time composed lute songs to his words. His songs circle around themes of great depth, like religion and inner reflection, and yet he also wrote songs with perfectly naughty subjects. I can’t really fathom the personality of a man who is able to describe so beautifully the most inner wishes of humanity and then, in another song, a light scene of tong and cheek, but I would have like to know him.

 

Somehow the full realism of the human experience he describes in his poems and in his music struck a chord with me. The scenes he writes, little lute songs that they are, are so clear, and the people he depicts are so transparent, that one might overlook his subjects. But that’s exactly the thing- that’s his genius. It’s so easy to hit and miss with such translucent material. This repertoire requires work that is equal to soul searching.

 

Author of Light

Thomas Campion

I

Author of light revive my dying spright,

Redeeme it from the snares of all-confounding night.

Lord, light me to thy blessed way:

For blind with worldly vaine desires I wander as a stray.

Sunne and Moone, Starres and underlights I see,

But all their glorious beames are mists and darknes being compar’d to thee.

II

Fountaine of health my soules deepe wounds recure,

Sweet showers of pitty raine, wash my uncleannesse pure.

One drop of thy desired grace

The fainte and fading hart can raise, and in joyes bosome place.

Sinne and Death, Hell and tempting Fiends may rage;

But God his owne will guard, and their sharp paines and griefe in time asswage.