By Ross W. Duffin

Lost music—thwarting the performance of something that otherwise is obviously worth hearing—has long been a fascination of mine, and I’m drawn to projects with some missing feature that I might supply. Since retiring from university teaching in 2018, I have often found myself on the trail of music for poetry collections that were originally intended to be sung, but for which little or no evidence has survived of their tunes. The roots of that interest extend back into my work on songs in early modern English plays, including Shakespeare and his contemporaries. And it was while tracing further theatrical tunes that I ran across Gude & Godlie Ballatis (first published 1565), the first of three poetic collections I noticed that were crying out for musical attention.

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