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Remembered today for two or three of the songs in his early publication Musicke of Sundrie Kindes (1607), such as ‘There is a lady sweet and kind’ and ‘Since first I saw your face’, the lutenist Thomas Ford (c.1580–1648) was a member of the Private Music—the domestic music establishment—of James I’s two sons Henry and Charles while each was Prince of Wales, and subsequently of that of Charles as king. His music appears not to have circulated widely, and much of it remains unpublished; it reveals a more ambitious and versatile composer than his slender reputation suggests. The thirty-five songs for three voices and continuo edited here survive in a manuscript probably dating from the early 1630s; they are diverse in topic and character, including settings of scriptural extracts and paraphrases as well as serious and lighter secular verse, and ranging from essays in imitative motet style to examples of affective word-setting in an adventurous and up-to-date idiom. Particularly rewarding are the eight dialogues alternating solo verses and choruses, some of which set vivid and evocative poems by anonymous authors. The editorial continuo parts provide adequate harmonic and rhythmic support as they stand, but can be further elaborated or entirely replaced. For three voices: TTB or ATB and continuo. xviii + 140 pages. ISMN 979-0-57039-202-5.
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1. Hail! holy woman, whosoe’er thou be
2. Are women fair?
3. Yet if his majesty, our sovereign lord
4. Sigh no more, ladies
5. Say, bold but blessed thief
6. Fire! Fire! Lo here I burn
7. Come, let us here enjoy the shade (‘A Diologue’)
8. Strike, Lord (‘A diologue’)
9. Come forth, my dear
10. Now sleeps my love
11. What greater joy can bless my soul
12. O thou, whose love I prize
13. Oh how my soul is ravished with the joys
14. Who ever smelt the breath of morning flowers
15. At night lie down
16. My sins are like the hairs upon my head
17. Go, wounded soul
18. My love is like a garden full of flowers
19. What curious face is this?
20. Strike thou the anvil
21. My griefs are full
22. Praise the Lord, O my soul
23. O praise the Lord
24. Hear my prayer, O Lord
25. O clap your hands together
26. Forsake me not, O God
27. Bow down thine ear, O Lord
28. Why art thou so heavy, O my soul?
29. Glory be to the Father
30. Sweet, yet cruel, unkind is she
31. Grief, keep in
32. What’s a woman but her will?
33. How sits this city, late most populous
34. Let not thy blackness move thee to despair
35. Our life is nothing but a winter’s day.
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