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Ariel's Corner
Music, dance

A conversation with Dr John Potter : music, text, and performance – an intermedial analysis of John Dowland’s music between tradition and modernity

Giuseppe Pantano

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1This article presents an interview I conducted in York with Dr John Potter, a distinguished performer and scholar specialised in early music. The interview is part of a broader research project on intermediality, focusing on the articulation between lyrics and music in the works of anglophone singer-songwriters.

2John Dowland emerges as a songwriter ante litteram, demonstrating a remarkable ability to universalise human emotions through music. His motto, Semper dolens, semper Dowland, epitomises the profound melancholia that permeates his compositions, an aesthetic that has deeply influenced songwriters across centuries.

3During the interview at Dr Potter’s home in York, we examined this theme from multiple perspectives : historical, compositional, performative, and educational. The historical discussion provided insight into how music was experienced in Elizabethan courts, how musical works were published, and the broader cultural significance of Dowland’s compositions. We also discussed the role of music in Shakespearean theatre and explored why only a few musical examples have survived to the present day. The compositional and performative aspects, closely intertwined, allowed us to examine Dowland’s poiesis, focusing on the dynamic interplay between text and music. We discussed how lyrics shaped musical structures and vice versa, as well as how performance, poetry, and even the act of reading were experienced in that era.

4The educational dimension of our discussion addressed how these insights remain relevant to modern songwriting. We considered how universities, conservatoires, and schools could incorporate Dowland’s music and early music more broadly as a means to deepen emotional expression and creative engagement. Furthermore, we reflected on how certain forms and themes in songwriting are both eternal and universal, reinforcing the idea that historical analysis can be a valuable tool for contemporary singer-songwriters.

Prelude

5The clock strikes 10 :26, the calendar reads 22 January 2025, and the GPS places me in York, England—the so-called most haunted city in the UK. I am visiting the city to have a conversation with Dr John Potter, a mythical figure in the world of early music. John Potter embodies a truly singular persona, being at once two exceptionally refined professional figures that would typically each require a lifetime to achieve : a performer and a scholar.

6John Potter has an eclectic discography, counting more than 150 titles, which include five gold discs. He is credited on more than 180 recordings, covering music that spans from Léonin to Led Zeppelin. As a scholar, Potter investigates vocal traditions, early music performance practices, and the evolution of singing. He is the author of several influential books, including Vocal Authority : Singing Style and Ideology (1998), Tenor : History of a Voice (2009), and Song : A History in 12 Parts (2023). Additionally, he edited The Cambridge Companion to Singing (2000) and co-authored A History of Singing (2012) with Neil Sorrell. He is currently working on a third book for Yale, Christmas Carols : An English Enchantment. These works showcase his ability to merge rigorous academic research with his deep understanding of vocal performance. Potter has held positions at leading institutions, including the University of York, and is widely recognised for his skill in bridging performance and academic inquiry.

  • 1 John Dowland (1563-1626), often considered the greatest of English songwriters, was a leading luten (...)

7In this conversation, Dr Potter and I focused on the articulation between lyrics and music, history and performance, and even lyrics, music, and persona. We aimed to unravel and theorise – as much as historical accuracy would allow – the figure of John Dowland1 and other composers of his time. Our discussion sought to illuminate the rich interplay between words and music, exploring how these elements shape not only historical understanding but also contemporary interpretations and educational approaches.

The interview

GPC : Good morning, Dr Potter. I'm absolutely thrilled to be here with you after spending many years listening to your music. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to interview you here in your hometown in York.

JP : I'm delighted to welcome you to my kitchen. I’ll pour you some English tea !

GPC : At what point in your career did you first encounter the music of John Dowland and how did it influence your work ?

  • 2 Ayres, described as, "the simplest of all musical forms then in vogue”, were accompanied songs feat (...)

JP : I think the first time I encountered the music seriously as a singer was when the Hilliard Ensemble made a polyphonic recording of Dowland Ayres2 and we had the American lutenist Steve Stubbs playing with us. Steve and I very much bonded over the music and later we did concerts together and he became the first lute player in my Dowland Project band. Steve, as well as being a fantastic player, thought like a singer. So, we didn't need to do a lot of basic rehearsal (that's something else there's not much evidence for in the past). We realised that there was no perfect performance but an infinite number of possible performances, all different from the one before. The Hilliard Ensemble eventually realised that too.

When Gordon Jones joined us after Paul Hillier moved on to become a conductor we became more of a cooperative, rather than being like a string quartet. A string quartet will find its repertoire, will rehearse something until it's perfect and then reproduce that in performance. We never did that. We rehearsed enough to know what was coming over the page (I’m slightly over-simplifying here) and the rest – the real music - would then happen in the concert. You have to do a lot of concerts for that to be able to work but the Hilliards did more than a hundred every year so we had plenty of practice. But Steve and I applied the same principles to lute song and it meant that we could feel that we were really making it up in the sense that Dowland or his contemporaries would have been seeing something for the first time. Everything was in a sort of state of flux, nothing was ever fixed. We'd all had a conventional musical education – you learn to sing in time and all this stuff and the notes are the notes, but we realised that lute song wasn't like that. In the lute part, a lot of the song is determined by how the song falls under the fingers of the lute player but there will be other things that individual lute players will add to the song. And quite clearly the singers too, particularly if you look at later versions of lute songs when they become continuo songs. If you look at the same Dowland song that appears in a mid-17th century manuscript (as opposed to one of Dowland’s prints) it would be completely different, with just a tune and a bass line with perhaps some scribbled ornaments. So that was my introduction to Dowland many years ago.

GPC : How do you imagine John Dowland approached the creative process for his compositions ? Do you believe he composed the music and lyrics simultaneously or might he have set pre-existing lyrics, prose or poetry to music ?

  • 3 John Dowland’s Flow, my tears, originally composed as the instrumental Lachrimae, first appeared in (...)

JP : Well, that's a very interesting question. There is no answer to that, but I strongly think he would have been confronted with the poem first because what the composer – the musician – is doing is enhancing the music. There are occasions where certainly ideas for pieces like Flow My Tears3 might have come first, especially that sort of falling motif, but for most songs I'm sure he had the text in front of him and worked it from there. But that's only a guess.

GPC : Therefore we can imagine that the creative process implied a simultaneous composition of music and text : while creating the music the composer is also using the text to mould the music.

JP : I think it's quite likely that a player might have certain sorts of patterns under his fingers that then become a song, which is often how a modern singer-songwriter might work. When I asked Genesis's keyboard player, Tony Banks, to write lute songs, I sent him some texts by poets like Campion to give him some idea, and he said he’d never ever set a text. For him, the music had always come first or at the same time and, remarkably, I think, it turned out that he could set it perfectly well, and the songs have recognisable ‘Genesis’ elements that probably derive from Tony’s keyboard technique. But I don't think Dowland would have worked in quite that way. I think he would have been geared towards the literature, and he would be working in an environment where people read aloud, not silently as we do today. In the 16th and 17th centuries, everyone read aloud and would declaim a text based on their background in rhetoric and oratory. So texts are performative just in themselves, and the musician, the singer, then amplifies that. That's why a lot of the songs work : if you speak the texts, then quite often you'll find yourself doing a similar kind of speech pattern to what the composer actually wrote.

GPC : Flow My Tears could be considered one of the top hits of John Dowland, even inspiring the title and the form of a book by Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). What is the compositional secret behind this beautiful song ?

JP : Well, I think if you knew the answer to that then you'd know how to making a million dollars. (We both laughed). Lots of people have speculated as to why it works but that sort of falling figure, which then rises and falls again - you could do some kind of psychological analysis of that and probably work out the effects on the brain in some way. And the whole structure of the piece is beautifully put together.

GPC : Which is also quite peculiar in relation to the song form of that time, right ? It’s an AABBCC form.

JP : It is, yes. Of course we don't know how he would have performed it. When dealing with the form of things again what you often see when you look at later sources is that form changes because people will perform things in different ways. That's another reason why you can't ever consider the printed score definitive because if it was definitive at any time it was only while the ink was drying on the page. As soon as it was performed it then had a life of its own. The Flow my tears’ figure comes in so many different forms of arrangement it must have had this attraction for people.

  • 4 Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares Figured in Seaven Passionate Pavans, with Divers Other Pavans, Galiards (...)

GPC : The music of Flow my tears predates its vocal version, it originally existed as an instrumental piece titled Lachrimae4. Why do you think after exploring the recurring motif in the various versions found in Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares, Dowland decided to incorporate a text into the composition ?

JP : Again, what we don't know is whether he knew the text or wrote it before. Was he then inspired to write an instrumental piece before he found the text ? It's impossible to know.

  • 5 A tetrachord is a descending succession of four notes spanning the interval of a perfect fourth. Th (...)

GPC : The concert music collection Lachrimae or Seven Tears explores various compositional possibilities of the descending tetrachord5 in its melody. This compositional feature, which effectively conveys sorrow in music, mirroring the lyrics, proved to be an exceptionally powerful tool. A similar approach was later employed by Claudio Monteverdi in his famous madrigal Lamento della Ninfa. This technique, referred also as basso di lamento continues to be used in many modern pop and rock songs. As mentioned earlier, the text was eventually added to the music. Do you think that Flow My Tears would have achieved the same enduring success and timelessness if the text had never been added ? If it was just an instrumental song ?

JP : That's a very interesting question. Well, the fact that there were so many instrumental versions suggests that it probably would have survived perfectly well. You could also say the same about plenty of other pieces of Elizabethan keyboard music. You can't tell why particular songs survive beyond the life of their creators. It often depends on tangential things like publishing. In the case of Purcell, for example, the editor Playford was very instrumental in keeping tunes going into the 18th century. And you need charismatic performers. I think a lot of people know about Dowland because of Sting. Were they then tempted to look further into early music ? Who knows ?

GPC : But most likely, Sting would not have performed it if it wasn't a text.

JP : No, exactly. No, he wouldn't.

  • 6 In Darkness Let Me Dwell is one of Dowland’s most mature and frequently reproduced works, represent (...)

GPC : Why did Dowland adapt pre-existing lyrics rather than composing his own for his other renowned piece, In Darkness Let Me Dwell6, which features lyrics by another English Renaissance composer, John Coprario ?

JP : Well, the answer to that is that there was no idea of copyright or the sense that the work is in any way owned by its creator. In medieval times composers were anonymous because there was no sense of ownership in music. You weren't identified with your music and you just borrowed music from anywhere. Dowland would have no compunction about borrowing text or tune or whatever, in the same way that Bach would borrow Vivaldi.

  • 7 The history of early music often raises historiographical challenges, particularly concerning the r (...)

GPC : Could this choice reflect a lesser sensitivity to text given that he was maybe not a singer7, while simultaneously highlighting his belief in the power and necessity of lyrics to ensure lasting success of his compositions ? Can we imagine that, he was aware that the text was good for the song to survive or to get spread, but at the same time, if he wasn't a singer, maybe he was less sensitive to writing lyrics to a song and more focused on writing the music and playing the lute ?

JP : That's another hard one. He had many motives for doing what he did. The publishing was very important, for example. So he had to end up with a product, if you're thinking in 21st century terms. But on the other hand, all his music must have started out with his own sort of musings with his instrument. And, again, one doesn't know what he thought that the publication of the books meant to him, apart from reputation and a certain income, possibly. He presumably didn't play from his own publications. He would have just played from memory, I guess, because he knew the stuff in the first place. So he was free to continue to put his own sensitivities into the piece as he sang it (if he sang it). What his thoughts might have been on other people before him we cannot know. Presumably most of the buyers of his books would have been gentrified ladies, who probably didn't play them terribly well. I don't know what he thought of that. When you're confronted with the publication, the facsimile or whatever, and you see this artefact, beneath that is the sensitivity that must have started the whole thing off in Dowland’s brain. So it's very hard to know.

GPC : Who knows then if he really was a singer or not.

JP : I think the fact that you occasionally come across references to other people singing his songs suggests that maybe he wasn't. At court, for example. Because you'd expect him to sing his own songs. But we don't know.

GPC : Could the title of singer-songwriter, despite maybe not being a singer, instead reflect his mastery of unifying music and text within the song form and its broader influence over modern music ? Nowadays, if we speak to singers, let's say singers in music academies that are not researchers, they would definitely say that John Dowland was an English Renaissance singer-songwriter.

JP : With a lot of singer-songwriters, particularly if they compose at the piano, for example, there is often a kind of upbeat feel where you can sense that they're putting their hands on the instrument and a song starts. And there's this very close connection between the singing and the piano part. And also with guitarists. You get a lot of songs that are in some keys rather than others because that's the key that the instruments have to work in. The singer-songwriter is a modern concept : you can only think of Dowland as something much more broadly generic, like a musician, say. Or call him a singer, where singer doesn't mean somebody who just sings, but is another word for musicianwhich is often the case because everybody sang and everybody played. If you look at the previous century in Italy, the court in Ferrara for example, you'll find that the choir, such as it was, is filled with what we now think of as composers and they were hired as singers. And it was the singing that was more important at the time, but obviously that's not survived, whereas the compositions have. If Dowland gets called a singer-songwriter it's because we see a guy with a lute who writes songs, therefore he's a singer-songwriter. It's such a modern concept. A singer-songwriter like Billy Joel, for example, I can see him thinking, maybe, in a way that Dowland might have thought, but we will never know.

GPC : A profoundly rooted sense of musicianship, a true craftsman of songs.

JP : And the harmonies, in the case of Billy Joel, generated from the instrument, and the tune maybe coming out of the harmonies somewhere.

GPC : We can say chord-generative, maybe.

JP : Yesthe other thing that's different is that nearly all modern singer-songwriters think of it as a vertical thing. It's made up of chords. Whereas, I think the concept of chords in our modern sense doesn't really happen until a little bit later. Caccini songs, for example, have no counterpoint – just bass lines that need chords and passing notes.

GPC : The basso continuo.

JP : Exactly, so he's thinking that there is this vertical element, which is a chord. Dowland, I think, because Renaissance lute playing is a sort of linear activity, still has a more horizontal approach.

GPC : Counterpoint.

JP : Yes, exactly. I've sung a lot of Franco-Flemish counterpoint of the 15th century. It’s very hard, but it's also very hard to know how they could possibly have composed it, because basically they are all simultaneous tunes. We hear it as chords, we hear it as harmony, but I don't think they heard it like that at all and they certainly composed it in a completely different way. You had a few rules where you had to look at the verticality of it to make sure you didn't compromise the modes but apart from that it was a linear process.

GPC : Would be a musician or composer the best way to describe him ?

JP : Well, I don't think he's ever called a composer at the time, is he ? I don't think the concept was there. He might have been called a maker of some sort. But it's just what musicians are expected to do : everyone sang and probably played several instruments ; no one was just a composer. In that 30-year period of the English lute song school, I don't doubt there were hundreds of other singing lute players who just didn't publish anything or perhaps just improvised.

GPC : It’s also about friendship and about connection in the courts.

JP : It’s a very sociable activity. And it's not about performance in our modern sense either.
I mean, you have to try a bit harder if you're performing for the king, but for anybody else, it's what you do instead of watching TV in the evenings. That's another reason why you don't need an operatic technique. Most lute songs were first sung in a room not much bigger than this.

GPC : The melody of Flow My Tears served as the basis for an extraordinary collection of concert music. It first appeared unauthorised in William Burley's A New Book of Tablature, London, 1596. Later, in 1604, Dowland published his authorised instrumental version with John Wyndott under the title of Lacrimae or Seven Tears. However, the version with texts had already been published earlier, in 1600, in the second book of Songs and Ayres. Could you help us unravel this intricate sequence of publications and explain how the melody transitioned across these contexts ?

JP : It was obviously a big hit. And, you know, he didn't want to lose momentum and so he did what he could to maximise the effect of it. But again, this is something we just can't know. And it's very frustrating. When I wrote a chapter about Dowland in Song the publisher asked me to write another book entirely about Dowland, but I said there’s nothing else to be said otherwise someone would have written it. We know the very few facts about his life and music, so unless new sources appear research is problematic and very speculative. I could write a book on Dowland, but it wouldn't say anything new. It's exciting to try and unravel this stuff but we're unlikely to be able to come to any conclusions. You could put the problem to six different Dowland scholars and they would have come up with six different versions.

  • 8 Richard Barnfield (1574–1627) was an English poet associated with the Elizabethan era, known for hi (...)

GPC : How might the process of transforming poetry – such as Richard Bonfield's works8 –into lyrics have unfolded ? Could this creative process be seen as a precursor to the collaborative practices later formalised in Opera, continued in the Tin-Pan Alley tradition, and still prevalent in contemporary musical performances ? Did poets and composers work together ?

JP : Well, then again, we don't really know because. I don't think we know who wrote any of Dowland’s texts. For some composers we know the poets, but most of them we don’t. We don't know whether they wrote their own texts.

GPC : Are there famous couples like George and Ira Gershwin or Rodgers and Hart ?

JP : No. You do get someone like Campion, for example, who very famously wrote both his poems and his music. But no, again, I think it's because it was all one. I don't know if there are any references to Dowland as a poet, but you could call him a poet in the sense that a musician is a poet. You know, they're both expressing human emotions in a

GPC : …in a universal way.

JP : Yes. That's the case, I think, with all of the music really. There was no concept of ownership in the sense that we have it. It doesn't happen until Wagner insisted that what he wrote was his music. And then with Verdi, you get the whole copyright business and it literally becomes a huge industry. But at this time, nobody owned music in any way. You could own a painting, but owning a Dowland print didn’t mean you owned the music.

GPC : It brings light also to nowadays process. Sometimes the questions about plagiarism arise, but most of the time, really, especially in pop, the solutions are limited. It’s quite normal to borrow forms, words and pieces of melodies because some of these patterns are very old.

JP : Yes, and there are only 12 notes…

GPC : With this number it comes to my mind your book Song : a history in 12 parts. Is there any connection between this number and the chromatic scale ?

JP : I should have thought of that ! No…

GPC : Really ?

JP : It's a very good point. 12 because there are 12 notes in the chromatic scale. Yes. There are lots of great reasons for calling it that. But the book came about completely by mistake anyway.

GPC : What do you mean ?

JP : Well, I hadn't intended to write that at all. During lockdown, I'd written a kind of a memoir. I've quite often been asked if I would write the same thing that I wrote in Vocal Authority if I were writing it again today. The answer is that if I were to write anything about the way singing works, I'd want to locate it in real life, not in theory. So I wrote a kind of memoir which was basically about stuff I’d done over my career. Because it's not academic, Cambridge University Press (the publisher of Vocal Authority) agreed that I should take it somewhere else because it would be not right for their catalogue. Since I'd done something for Yale about the tenor voice, I sent it to them as they prefer material that's much more appropriate for general readers, My editor there liked it a lot, and I had the most fantastic rejection letter I've ever had…but he said they’d publish it if I make it less like a memoir so it would fit their catalogue.

GPC : Which reminds me of the title of a musical, I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change.

JP : Yeah, exactly. And I said, no, I don't want to do that because I don't want to write another academic book. I want to write a book that people are going to read. And then he said, okay, well, look, write me a book on song because I need a book on song, and you can write it in whatever style you choose…and let's call it Song : a History in 12 Tracks. I said, well, no, it can't be 12 Tracks because they'd all have to be recordings. So that's how that came about. But your version's a much cleverer one.

GPC : Earlier you already gave me a little of an answer about this, but I would kindly ask you to expand more about this topic. Is Dowland so famous nowadays within the singer-songwriters’ world because Sting did an entire album about him or just because of his music ?

JP : He’s definitely more famous today and I think the reasons for that are probably quite complicated. A lot is to do with the record industry, for example. And the fact that these things first started to be recorded during the LP era. Most of what we now sing was first recorded in the era of LPs (78’s even) and was then recorded again for CD. So basically people bought again the music they already owned in a different format. But it meant that by the time of the CD the market had segmented into what sold and what didnt. And what sold was a name and complete works. With Dowland, you could easily record an album of one of his books, or anything up to the complete works. One of the reasons that an enormous amount of medieval and even Renaissance music doesn't get heard is because it's anonymous, and anonymous doesn't sell records. You need a musician’s name because – sadly, perhaps –people often relate to the name just as much as to the music itself. If I say to you, here's this great song by Dowland, and I play you the song, and I say, here's this anonymous piece, what you're going to take away from that is a memory that includes the name of Dowland, whereas you’d be less likely to remember the other piece because you can’t remember the composer. Dowland would be what sticks in your head. Additionally there's a lot of him compared with the other lute songwriters who mostly wrote just one book. Lots of recordings by particularly successful and charismatic performers also helps. Alfred Deller, for example, recorded Dowland with this extraordinary voice. The alto voice was the kind of voice you heard only in cathedral choirs. There were no male alto soloists anywhere at the time of Deller, and he was hugely successful. But the reasons why musicians become popular are complicated, and you don't really know. Having said that, I think in a lot of ways with modern boy bands, for example, and with AI, you can create something that people will buy. But that's a different kind of process from getting at the human spirit.

GPC : Apparently there remain many unanswered questions about early music. If you had the opportunity to witness a performance from that era, which performance would you choose to attend, and why ?

JP : Well, we have a video of Andrew Parrott's production of the Florentine Intermedi, recorded from the TV which we watch every Christmas. It's a bit clunky because it was made in the 1980s, but it's incredibly evocative of late 16th century music making. I was away with Hilliard so had to turn down an invitation to take part. I would quite like to have been at an Italian court in the 1590s.

GPC : Only a small amount of the music performed during Shakespeare's time has survived, with two notable examples found in The Tempest. Why do you think so little of the music played during the theatrical performances of that era survived through history ? This is bizzarre because we have publications of the music of that time, but we don't have the music they used to play during the performances.

JP : Well, I think possibly a lot of it was made up on the spot, which actors could easily do with a basic lute-like instrument, like a gittern or something like that.

GPC : Songs with simple chord progressions on which they could sing and improvise melodies based on the lyrics, for example ?

JP : You don't ever need anything very complicated. The reason for the music being there is either to pause the action or to move it on in some way or to create a particular scene, but very rarely is it central to the plot. And it was all very ephemeral. We're lucky to have the Shakespeare texts, let alone the music. It was very much an oral art. We have all the lute-song books, for example, but we don't know what position they hold within a fundamentally oral culture.

GPC : You mean the use of it ? The fruition of those books ?

JP : Well, taking the example of Christmas carols that I’m working on at the moment : we know that there are certain carol manuscripts, let's say of the 15th century, of polyphonic music. And then 100 years before that, there were an enormous number of carol manuscripts without any music. And we just don't know what that means. Sometimes the sources suggest that they are meant to be sung, and sometimes they’ll suggest the name of a tune that would fit, and very rarely you find the odd monophonic tune in notation. But there must have been a whole oral culture that we simply don't have access to. I think that kind of aesthetic is what informs the way that music works in Shakespeare’s plays – there’s this whole oral dimension that we’ll never be able to know. It's a problem for us because we want to know it now, but I don't think it was a problem for Shakespeare’ actors

GPC : Maybe there were forms, like pre-constructed music form applicable to certain topics, subjects, theatrical circumstances and so on.

JP : Yes, well, in Italy, there are lots of song forms that work like that. I don't know if there were similar templates in England, but I don't see why it shouldn't have been like that.

GPC : The next question arose while reading one of your articles. Do you think there has been sufficient exploration into how Dowland and his contemporaries conveyed their music in performance, or has the focus primarily been on the composer's written works ? Should more attention be given to performance practices and related speculations ?

  • 9 In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was common to attend opera performances where male singers sang (...)

JP : Well, the problem is, we are stuck with the literary evidence, and so inevitably, that's what gets studied. When I grew up and was taught how to do this stuff as a classical singer, it was assumed there was a right way to do things, and that was how you were taught, then you just did it. If the Early Music movement had somehow been started by jazz singers, let's say, rather than by academics and classical singers, I think you'd have a completely different and much more realistic idea of what early music was all about. The whole aesthetic of jazz is so different from modern classical and is far closer to how a pre-Wagnerian singer would have thought. It would be possible to write a history of music that went from the beginning up to the 18th century, to the Castrati9, who were then ornamenting and improvising the hell out of everything they did – to the extent that sometimes Rossini couldn’t recognise his own music because of what the singers were doing to it – and then instead of going to Wagner you go to the beginnings of jazz, and you would discover a direct link from the improvisations of the castrati to Ella Fitzgerald. That would give you the whole idea that the music is the property of the performer while they're performing it, which is how jazz works and how all music worked until Wagner. As music history is more usually written, after Wagner you get the modern concept of the composer, ending up with the avant-garde (which in many ways the early music was a reaction to). I once had to understudy Stockhausen’s opera Donnerstag at Covent Garden. During rehearsals I sat behind Stockhausen who was behind his mixing desk. The hero is triple cast as a singer, a dancer and an instrumentalist ; the dancer’s fingertips were choreographed in the score, an effect that surely no one in the audience could possibly have seen. Peter Bogdanov was directing it, but basically it was Stockhausen's creation and what he said went. The idea that a composer should have that much control over fellow musicians is about as far away from a Renaissance aesthetic as you can get. That's what the old avant-garde got to, where the composer was thought of as a kind of God. I went along with that for ten years of my life, putting myself entirely in the service of composers to do their bidding. And eventually I realised that was no way to pay the bills and I got fed up with singing to six people and a dog, the same ones each time. Jazz is not like that and nor is Renaissance music : the two are much more like each other than post-Wagnerian classical music.

GPC : In one of your many essays and books about singing, I read an article about castrato singers and teachers, as well as their pupils, who sometimes became tenor singers of the time. Among them, you wrote about Rauzzini and his teaching methods Solfeggi. You quote him as saying that a singer should not imitate another, especially a star singer, because singers should find their own individual style. In singing early music and the repertoire of John Dowland, how far can one go in interpreting the music without being historically incorrect in the performance ? I think you already answered this question. Let's delve into it.

  • 10 Here, Dr Potter refers to the fact that in her recording, Maria Pia De Vito does not improvise the (...)

JP : The short answer is that you sing the music however you like. And if someone wants to listen to it, that's great. From my own point of view, I suppose when I first started singing, I sang it in the way that I sang everything else. But then when I realised that there was no Renaissance concept of singing pedagogy, none of what I'd been taught was relevant to the lute song ; it changed the whole thing. I would much rather hear someone like Maria Pia De Vito singing Cipriano than hear either an early music specialist or an opera singer. But, you know, other versions, if they work, they work. She doesn't actually apply any improvisatory freedoms, but just reproduces Rognoni's10 version which is probably a written out improvisation. That makes it as close as we're going to get to what a Renaissance singer would sound like. Maria Pia de Vito has a wonderful freedom of delivery, as though she's making it up as she goes along. It’s the Renaissance concept of Sprezzatura in action. The first time I heard it was during a rehearsal break when I was doing a Monteverdi Vespers. Bruce Dicky, the cornetto player, said come and listen to this. He got out his laptop and played the Maria Pia De Vito recording ; it was just an absolutely electric moment. For the first time, I heard how it really should sound. I'm not a jazz singer, and I had all this baggage of classical pedagogy behind me ; I had a lot to learn.

GPC : Might the magic be also related to the delivery of the lyrics, right ?

Jp : Yes, absolutely.

GPC : Because in her aesthetics the pronunciation and articulation is clearer, and the lyrics are conveyed more similarly to the way we speak. In this way they are easier to understand.

JP : Yes, that’s another problem, particularly with English, actually, because I speak with what we call received pronunciation, (known as RP, or the King's English or BBC English) which is a class accent, not a regional accent. It dates back King George I, who was German and couldn’t say the English short ‘a’ so he would say bath (/bæθ/) instead of bath (/bɑːθ/), which most of us would have said. Before court English became the standard pronunciation everyone would have spoken and sung in their own regional accent. That's a problem for singers of lute songs, because nobody would have sung in a modern accent. But of course, as soon as you start singing in some kind of reconstructed accent, people just hear accent and don't hear the music anymore. It’s an absolutely unsolvable problem that all singers of English lute song struggle with.

GPC : Sometimes, the music suggests that a word should be pronounced differently. Let’s say there is a figure that wouldn’t work with a certain pronunciation—this can be extremely challenging for a non-native speaker but also incredibly thrilling to explore, as it challenges the singer to deliver it properly.

JP : It can be a problem because in most lute songs, the composer only underlaid the first verse, leaving the singer to fit the other verses (which may not have the same line lengths) as you think best.

GPC : In modern lyrics writing, the stressed syllables of the words sometimes don’t align with the melody’s accents, which can be frustrating for listeners as it makes the meaning of the lyrics harder to grasp.

JP : That's one of the reasons why I think the published lute books basically only set the first verse. It's not just saving materials in terms of paper and type, but it leaves the problems of the rest of the text to be solved by the performer in whatever way they think fit. You have to go with meaning first.

  • 11 Robert Johnson (c. 1583–1633) was an English composer and lutenist, best known for his work as a mu (...)

GPC : Early music, particularly the repertoire of singer-songwriters such as John Dowland and Robert Johnson,11 is often performed with operatic approaches. In Songs from the labyrinth, for instance, pop-rock singer-songwriter Sting adopted a style distinct from his usual way of singing, modifying his vocal technique to create a rounder, more classic effect in his vowel pronunciation. Do you believe this reflects a historically informed approach to early music performance ?

JP : Well, I think it reflects the modern Early Music movements' thoughts about the fact that singing is, let's say, stylised compared with speech. We would have learned more from Sting if he had not sought advice on this, but had just done his own thing.

GPC : Therefore you can you imagine a pop, jazz or rock singer interpreting Dowland’s repertoire ?

JP : Definitely.

GPC : In announcing the foundation of Red Byrd Ensemble in collaboration with singer and professor Richard Weissreich, you stated, “the point of singing music of the past is to illuminate the present.” Could you elaborate on this statement and discuss how this concept might resonate within today's musical and cultural landscape ?

JP : Well, I suppose the best example of that is my current band Alternative History. Our ECM Amores Pasados album, which has both early music and music by rock musicians, where for us, it's all just music ; it's the same thing. These are songwriters, or whatever you care to call them, from different eras who are basically having the same sort of thoughts about music and poetry. I don't like hearing modern songs sung with operatic voices either.

GPC : And which academic fields or disciplines, like English literature, musicology, performance studies, pedagogy, and which types of students could benefit the most from engaging in early music research ? How might these disciplines intersect with the study of early music ? Do you think early music might be a tool to learn Early Modern English, or to learn English literature, or simply to attract people to culture ?

JP : Well, the answer is that anyone can learn anything from anyone. And the more interdisciplinary thoughts one can have, the more you're likely to illuminate whatever you're working on. Last year I was helping out a student at the university here where he was researching language pronunciation. He was working on a song and wanted examples of how it might be sung in various different dialects and accents. He was looking at it from all sorts of viewpoints : dialectology, psychology, a whole range of disciplines, which were all informing what he was doing. My contribution to it was a tiny aspect that just filled in a few gaps for him. But I think the more people study around the topic, the better. There's no point in not knowing something.

GPC : The freedom you mentioned previously in our conversation could be a feature of early music that might attract more the younger generations to, let’s say, cultivated music or more generally speaking culture and literature ?

JP : Yes, but there is a kind of neutral enemy in institutionalisation generally. It’s one of the reasons I left the university : in the end, the performing life is very, very different from the academic life. Academia has conventions and boundaries and limits, which you have to keep within to make the whole system work. Performing is completely the reverse of that. There are no limits, and you're always looking for somewhere else, something else to go, something else to do. With academia, you have this baggage of stuff that you have to know and you have to organise and treat in a certain way. Early music suffers from that as much as anybody else does, any other discipline. I think the thing about postgrad study, for example a doctorate, even though you're focusing on something more intellectual and academic than previous study, you're on the way to being liberated from it, because you are becoming your own institution, if you like. You are the expert in your topic. And you take it wherever it will go. No one's going to ‘teach’ you anything : you're going to do research and then apply it. And you can absorb material from any academic discipline.

GPC : Do you believe the early music repertoire could serve as an inclusive teaching tool for young students in middle or primary school settings ? I've introduced 11-year-old students to Dowland’s Come Again, and they responded enthusiastically. How might this repertoire, as essentially song-based material, be effectively presented to younger audiences in an engaging and contemporary manner by educators and performers ? And did you ever, in the early stages of your career, present these songs to young students ?

JP : No, the closest I got was with one of my granddaughters. When the 14-year-old was 7 or 8, the headmistress asked me to come into the school and talk about my job, which was singing. We sang a bit and they absolutely loved it. And even now, Emily, my granddaughter, would say : “a friend of mine remembered the day when you came to school, she's going to be a singer ! But to your point, children don't distinguish between old and new. They have none of the hang-ups that we have. It's just something new to explore. So, yes is the answer to your question !

GPC : I'm working on finding a contemporary way to present this material, steering away from the overly stylised and operatic performance style, so it can serve as inspiration for creating new lyrics and music, as well as for performances and educational purposes.

JP : Well, children aren't going to have that operatic thing, they just sing naturally. Get them doing it rather than listening to it.

GPC : To let them sing that repertoire ?

JP : Yes, yes. And there are plenty of ways in which you could do that. It needn't be complicated, If you wanted to use Dowland’s, there's plenty of fairly straightforward Dowland tunes that would work.

GPC : Thank you so so much Mr. Potter.

JP : Please call me John !

GPC : Okay. Thank you, thank you so very much John.

Conclusion

8Far from being a conversation aimed at unraveling some still-hidden secrets of early music and John Dowland’s career, this discussion seeks to relaunch further inquiries into the articulation between lyrics and music in a diachronic manner. As Dr Potter explained, the music of the past might help us illuminate the present. Forms and structures that are taken for granted in contemporary songwriting are rooted in the practices and compositions of the past. At the end of the conversation – not out of lesser importance, but because these questions needed to follow after setting all the theoretical and historical premises – I asked John about the pedagogy of early music. What emerged strongly from his words is that pedagogy should not be focused on stylised performances but on pure, actual fruition. Poetry and song share the power of words, sound, repetition, form, and many other elements. They did so hundreds of years ago, just as they do today. Studying the articulation between them could be a powerful tool in teaching students how to express their creativity and emotions through music and literature. Furthermore, a society capable of analysing, delving into, and conveying emotions is one that can more effectively understand depression, melancholy, abstraction, loneliness, alienation – all feelings that afflict today’s schools, universities, academies, and, in general, the youth, leading to a depressed, smartphone – and social media-addicted society. This dialogue is intended to be the first in a series of discussions focusing on understanding the power and resourcefulness of examining the articulation between lyrics and music, music and literature in all its forms, and how all of this can contribute to pedagogy, both in terms of inclusion and the development of language, musical repertoire, and creative expression.

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Bibliography

Anderton, H. O. Early English Music. Musical Opinion, 1920.

Barblan, Guglielmo. I Rognoni Musicisti Milanesi. In Festschrift A. Van Hoboken, Mainz, Schott, 1962.

Barnfield, Richard. The Complete Poems of Richard Barnfield. Ed. A. B. Grosart. J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1876.

Bonds, Mark Evan. A History of Music in Western Culture. Pearson, 2013.

Charteris, R. John Coprario : A Thematic Catalogue of His Music, with a Bibliographical Introduction. Garland Publishing, 1977.

Day, J. Vaughan Williams. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Grosart, A. B., ed. The Complete Poems of Richard Barnfield. J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1876.

Hischak, T. S. The Tin Pan Alley Song Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press, 2002.

Hogg, R., ed. The New Oxford History of English. Oxford University Press, 2006.

Jenkins, L. Early Music. Naxos, 2007.

Jonson, Ben. The Devil is an Ass. H. Holt and Company, 1905.

Kite-Powell, Jeffery, ed. A Performer’s Guide to Renaissance Music. 2nd ed., Indiana University Press, 2007.

Nadal, David. Lute Songs of John Dowland : The Original First and Second Books. Dover Publications, 1997, pp. 58–60.

Lass, R., ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language : Volume III 1476–1776. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Monteverdi, C. Claudio Monteverdi : Life and Works. Ed. K. Dale. Oxford University Press, 1952.

Piston, W. Harmony. W. W. Norton & Company, 1941.

Potter, John. Vocal Authority : Singing Style and Ideology. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

---. Tenor : History of a Voice. Yale University Press, 2009.

---. Song : A History in 12 Parts. Yale University Press, 2023.

Potter, John, and Neil Sorrell. A History of Singing. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Randel, D. M., and W. Apel. The New Harvard Dictionary of Music. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986.

Rauzzini, V. Twelve Solfeggi or Exercises for the Voice. Musikverlag Sybille Ott, 1808.

Rognoni, Francesco. Selva de Varri Passaggi. Milan : Filippo Lomazzo, 1620.

Shakespeare, W. The Oxford Shakespeare : The Complete Works. 2nd ed. Eds. S. Wells and G. Taylor. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Tagg, P. Everyday Tonality II. The Mass Media Music Scholars Press, 2014.

White, R. The Second Booke of Songs or Ayres. London, 1600.

Wistreich, R. The Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

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The Norton Anthology of Western Music. W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.

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Notes

1 John Dowland (1563-1626), often considered the greatest of English songwriters, was a leading lutenist and composer of the late Renaissance. His motto, Semper Dowland, semper dolens, reflects the recurring theme of melancholy in many of his songs. Dowland also contributed to music theory by publishing a translation of Andreas Ornithoparcus’s Micrologus. While few biographical details are definitively known, much of what we understand about his life comes from his own writings and references made by his contemporaries. See Peter Warlock, The English Ayre, Oxford University Press, 1926, 12–19; Mark Evan Bonds, A History of Music in Western Culture, Pearson, 2013; John Potter and Neil Sorrell, A History of Singing, Cambridge University Press, 2012; John Potter, Song: A History in 12 Parts, Yale University Press, 2023.

2 Ayres, described as, "the simplest of all musical forms then in vogue”, were accompanied songs featuring lute tablature notation. The music was printed in folio books, with the principal voice part and the lute accompaniment presented on the left-hand page. Ayres were designed for flexible performance, allowing a single singer to accompany themselves on the lute or for multiple singers to perform together, each with a distinct vocal part. See Peter Warlock, The English Ayre, Oxford University Press, 1926, 12-19. According to, The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music, ayre is the medieval spelling of air, describing a type of English song less contrapuntal than a madrigal, more similar to a strophic song with vocal or instrumental accompaniment, often using a lute. These songs were typically printed in large folio books around which performers could gather. See Michael Kennedy and Joyce Bourne Kennedy, The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music, 5th ed., Oxford University Press, 2007, 33. Also, “The term initially referred (as in France with the air) to a singable piece, later to an artistic (or even popular) melody generally accompanied by instruments such as the lute or harpsichord, and finally, around 1600 in opera, to the grand aria, a fundamental element of every lyrical composition”. See Larousse de la Musique, Éditions Larousse, 1957, 80.

3 John Dowland’s Flow, my tears, originally composed as the instrumental Lachrimae, first appeared in print with lyrics in 1600 in The Second Book of Songes or Ayres of 2, 4, and 5 parts: With tablature for the Lute or Orpherian, with the Violl de gamba. However, the piece was composed earlier, as evidenced by its inclusion in William Ballet’s manuscript collection of lute music, dated 1594 (now preserved in the library of Trinity College, Dublin). The composition, structured as a pavan (also spelled pavane), is a slow, stately dance that was popular in European courts during the 16th and early 17th centuries. It attained extraordinary popularity in the early 17th century, becoming a household name as both a song and an instrumental work. See Peter Warlock, The English Ayre, Oxford University Press, 1926; Peter Holman, Dowland: Lachrimae (1604), Cambridge University Press, 1999; John Potter, Song: A History in 12 Parts, Yale University Press, 2023.

4 Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares Figured in Seaven Passionate Pavans, with Divers Other Pavans, Galiards, and Almands, Set Forth for the Lute, Viols, or Violons, in Five Parts (1604) by John Dowland is a significant example of Renaissance consort music, showcasing a theme closely tied to the period’s association of melancholy with tears. This iconic melody was first published as an instrumental lute solo in William Barley’s unauthorized A New Booke of Tabliture (London, 1596), later appearing in Johannes Rude’s Flores Musicae (Heidelberg, 1598, 1600). The song version, with lyrics, was included in Dowland’s Second Booke of Songs or Ayres (1600), while instrumental consort arrangements followed in works like Thomas Morley’s Consort Lessons (London, 1599) and Jean-Baptiste Besard’s Thesaurus Harmonicus(Cologne, 1603). In his 1604 preface to Lachrimae, Dowland acknowledged the prior unauthorized publications of his lute compositions, noting his intent to release a definitive version with his own, “foil and polishment”. See K. Dawn Grapes, John Dowland: A Research and Information Guide, Routledge, 2019.

5 A tetrachord is a descending succession of four notes spanning the interval of a perfect fourth. This concept forms the foundation of ancient Greek musical theory, where the four notes were divided into different genera. The three main genera—diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic—determined the specific arrangement of intervals within the tetrachord. The beginning of Flow My Tears consists of a diatonic tetrachord, (two whole tones followed by a semitone), spanning from A to E. Immediately afterward, another tetrachord follows, creating a melodic sequence or progression. This second tetrachord starts on C and moves to G♯, arranged as a semitone, a whole tone, and another semitone. The second part, or B section, of the song introduces another tetrachord, this time from C to natural G. The third section, or C part, presents a tetrachord with ascending motion, creating a motus contrarius (“contrary motion”), compared to the previous descending motifs. See Mark Evan Bonds, A History of Music in Western Culture, Pearson, 4; David Nadal, Lute Songs of John Dowland: The Original First and Second Books, Dover Publications, 1997, 58–60.

6 In Darkness Let Me Dwell is one of Dowland’s most mature and frequently reproduced works, representing the culmination of the melancholic persona he meticulously crafted throughout his career. The lyrical subject can also be traced in the C part of Flow My Tears: “Hark, you shadows that in darkness dwell”. The lyrics, originally set to music by John Coprario, were reimagined by Dowland, who reshaped them with his own composition. This piece was later featured in A Musicall Banquet (1610), a collection compiled by Dowland’s son, Robert Dowland, often referred to as his Fourth Book of Ayres. See K. Dawn Grapes, John Dowland: A Research and Information Guide, Routledge, 2019.

7 The history of early music often raises historiographical challenges, particularly concerning the reliability and availability of sources. While there is no evidence that suggests that John Dowland performed his own songs as a singer, there is documentation of him accompanying other singers on the lute during performances of his compositions. K. Dawn Grapes writes, “Even though Dowland is always referred to as a singer-songwriter, he most probably never sang his songs. There are no records of him singing his tunes; he is referred to only as a lutenist and composer”. See K. Dawn Grapes, John Dowland: A Research and Information Guide, Routledge, 2019.

8 Richard Barnfield (1574–1627) was an English poet associated with the Elizabethan era, known for his lyrical poetry and his admiration for notable figures of his time, including musicians and poets. He is the author of the sonnet, If music and sweet poetry agree, which explores the fruitful relationship between music and poetry. In 1598, this sonnet, dedicated in part to John Dowland and the poet Edmund Spenser, was published alongside the lyric, As it fell upon a day, in a work titled, The Encomion of Lady Pecunia; or, The Praise of Money—quærenda pecunia primum est virtus post nummos. This work was printed in London by G. S. for John Jaggard and sold at his shop near Temple Bar at the sign of the Hand and Star. See: The Complete Poems of Richard Barnfield, by Richard Barnfield (1574–1627), Roxburghe Club; edited by Alexander Balloch Grosart, London, J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1876.

9 In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was common to attend opera performances where male singers sang in the soprano register. One of the most celebrated of these was Farinelli, the stage name of Carlo Broschi (1705–1782). The most significant roles in the typical opera seria were written for castrati. For example, in the original 1724 production of Handel's Giulio Cesare in London, the roles of Julius Caesar, Sextus, Ptolemy, and Nireno were all performed by castrati. Nowadays, this practice is obviously regarded as cruel and brutal, but 300 years ago, it was seen as an acceptable sacrifice, given the success and financial rewards the greatest castrati achieved—comparable only to modern-day pop stars. John Potter, in his A History of Singing, writes, “Castration eliminates or arrests many of the effects of puberty, so that boys retain their pre-pubescent voice into adulthood. The larynx remains of childlike size and flexibility, though it does continue to develop […] The body of the castrato, deprived of sufficient testosterone, would develop elongated limbs and a much larger rib-cage and lungs than normal; these were generally big, impressive men by the time they reached adulthood. The resulting male soprano would therefore have huge breath capacity, powering a small, flexible larynx. Such a physical make-up was perfect for the division repertoire: castrati could create extended runs of very fast notes without needing to pause for breath, or could linger far longer on sustained notes than a soprano or tenor.” See: Potter, John, and Neil Sorrell, A History of Singing, Cambridge University Press, 2012; Bonds, Mark Evan, A History of Music in Western Culture, Pearson, 2003.

10 Here, Dr Potter refers to the fact that in her recording, Maria Pia De Vito does not improvise the vocal ornaments on Cipriano de Rore’s madrigal but instead reproduces the ornaments written by Riccardo Rognoni (c. 1550–1620), an Italian composer, violinist, and violist, serving in 1592 as a musician at the court of the Governor of Milan. The only surviving printed work attributed to Rognoni is Passaggi per potersi essercitare nel diminuire terminatamente con ogni sorte d’instromenti (1592). His Passaggi includes elaborate divisions on Cipriano de Rore’s Ancor che col partire, illustrating the Renaissance practice of embellishing existing compositions to enhance expressive and technical possibilities. Francesco Rognoni, Selva de varii passaggi, Milan: Filippo Lomazzo, 1620. See Jeffery Kite-Powell, ed. A Performer’s Guide to Renaissance Music, 2nd ed., Indiana University Press, 2007. Barblan, Guglielmo, I Rognoni musicisti milanesi, in Festschrift A. Van Hoboken, Mainz, Schott, 1962. Potter, John, and Neil Sorrell. A History of Singing, Cambridge University Press, 2012.

11 Robert Johnson (c. 1583–1633) was an English composer and lutenist, best known for his work as a musician for Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men. The son of John Johnson, a lutenist in the service of Queen Elizabeth I from 1581 until his death in 1594–95, Robert inherited his father’s musical legacy and became one of the most significant composers of English lute songs and theatre music of the early 17th century. His compositions include settings of Shakespearean lyrics, such as Full Fathom Five and Where the Bee Sucks from The Tempest, as well as music for Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale. See Anderton, H. Orsmond. Early English Music. Musical Opinion, 1920.

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References

Electronic reference

Giuseppe Pantano, “A conversation with Dr John Potter : music, text, and performance – an intermedial analysis of John Dowland’s music between tradition and modernity”Miranda [Online], 31 | 2025, Online since 02 June 2025, connection on 22 June 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/66494; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/141n3

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About the author

Giuseppe Pantano

European Joint PhD Researcher
Université de Lorraine/Università degli Studi Roma Tre
giuseppepantano@hotmail.it

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