Description
Video
Duration
Premiere
4 May 2013
The Cell
New York, New York
Instrumentation
Program Notes
The Lachrymae of the English Renaissance composer John Dowland holds a very special place for me. Sometime in the early 2010s, I settled on the quixotic idea of arranging the full cycle for nonidiomatic instruments – I wanted to make the piece mine. By late 2013, two of the set had been completed: this work, based on ‘Sir Henry Umpton, His Funerall’, and a second (which was completed first), a two-minute showpiece for two pianos, based on Captain Digorie Piper, his Galliard (‘Can She Excuse My Wrongs’).
It would be wrong to call this work an arrangement, it is more of a fantasy, retaining the structure of the model – the twofold repetition of each section – while wandering off in more personal directions, touching on other pieces of Dowland and others. After Dowland was written for pianist Augustus Arnone.
-TT