Travers: Eighteen Canzonets for Two and Three Voices

Series: Classical Era  Publisher: A-R Editions
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John Travers
Eighteen Canzonets for Two and Three Voices

Edited by Emanuel Rubin

C074 Travers: Eighteen Canzonets for Two and Three Voices
978-0-89579-567-0 Full Score (2005) 9x12, xxii + 89 pp.
$66.00
In stock
SKU
C074
John Travers's Eighteen Canzonets for Two and Three Voices (1746) is a delightful collection of part-songs with continuo for social singing. This charming music made a key contribution to the growth of social singing that culminated in the latter half of the eighteenth century with the English glee. The pieces are for the most part settings of poems by England’s outstanding epigrammatist, Matthew Prior, whose wit has rarely been equaled and probably never excelled. Craftily contrapuntal and chordal by turns, Travers’s settings capture the clever epigrams with music that sticks in the memory and challenges the voices without overwhelming them. These songs were popular enough to be reprinted several times during the eighteenth century, but the change of style at the end of that period relegated them to the libraries of antiquarians. Today, after some 250 years of lying fallow, they appear for the first time in a modern critical edition, allowing us to enjoy once again the music of England’s Georgian composers.
Canzonet 1. I, like a bee
Canzonet 2. Whilst our joys
Canzonet 3. Thus to the muses
Canzonet 4. When Bibo thought fitt
Canzonet 5. I, my dear, was born to day
Canzonet 6. Why thus from the plain
Canzonet 7. Says Pontius in rage
Canzonet 8. Whilst I in prison
Canzonet 9. Cease, Leonora
Canzonet 10. Poor Hall
Canzonet 11. Reading ends in melancholly
Canzonet 12. Haste, my Nanette
Canzonet 13. Soft Cupid
Canzonet 14. He is not numb’red with the blest
Canzonet 15. Beauty should please
Canzonet 16. Pleasure’s enchanted ground
Canzonet 17. Fair and ugly
Canzonet 18. Old I am