Article 128 dealt with the heinous murder of musicologist Lenka Hlávková in Prague. I was invited to participate in a memorial concert on 25 February 2024, but had to decline because that was the eve of a flight to Japan. The piece recorded here is what I would have wanted to perform. May it serve as a small memorial.
Thomas Tomkins’ “Sad Paven for These Distracted Tymes” was written in commemoration of another senseless killing: the beheading on 30 January, 1649 of King Charles I outside of Inigo Jones’ Banqueting House in Whitehall Palace. Tomkins composed it on 14 February, within a few days of the news arriving in Worcester.*
This “paven” is sad, but in my view also regal; not sentimentally depressed, but a processional march for a funeral cortege with flat trumpets and sackbuts, like Purcell’s for Queen Mary II, familiar from Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange”. Usually an effigy of the deceased sovereign in wax or wood, a few of which survive to this day, would be placed atop the coffin. There was none for the hasty burial of Charles I at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor.
The official British royal funeral pace of 75 beats per minute, faster than a slow march and slower than a quick one, could recently be observed at the cortege for Elizabeth II. I don’t know how long that has been established, but the English can usually be relied upon to maintain certain traditions. Beethoven ordained a metronome mark of 80 to the eighth note for the funeral march in his 7th Symphony. I take a similar tempo – and I stick to it, in defiance of recent trends.
Readers who know this little masterpiece may be surprised – not to say outraged – at some modifications I have made to the text. I think Tomkins may have been a little distracted by recent events himself when composing it. The autograph manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Rés. 1122) looks very shaky, even by the standards of the late entries. Some notes and accidentals are missing, the bar-lines are chaotic, and the ending has been crossed out and reworked. Had he gone back to the beginning, I think he would have reworked it too. A parallel can be found in Tomkins’ 1647 commemoration of an earlier judicial victim of the Long Parliament, the pavane “Earl Strafford”. The first draft is a mess; a few days later Tomkins re-barred it, and added varied repeats. These are missing in the “Sad Paven” – another sign that Tomkins never returned to the piece.
Be this as it may, I have brought the first entry of the point of imitation into line with later ones. This change also makes sense of Tomkins’ first bar line, and conforms the beginning of the first strain to Thomas Morley’s dictum: “In [a pavane] you must cast your musicke by foure [-bar units].”
After those first four breves** Tomkins allows himself freedom to depart from the strict rules of pavane composition*** – understandably in such a special work. In fact, the first two strains both contain 13 breves, possibly touching on a very old superstition.**** The third and last is longer, because it incorporates the outburst of grief followed by resignation, which according to Quintilian is an essential component of a funeral oration, and which is found is almost every musical lament of the era.
My thanks to John Koster for our illuminating discussions regarding the “Sad Paven” – a favorite work of us both. My wife and colleague Naoko Akutagawa recorded it on her iPhone in my home studio; a suitably domestic farewell (with a few flubs) to all recording efforts, and to the most distracted times of my entire life. My right hand, lamed since a stroke, refused to play the ornaments. Shameful enough, but I wanted to give my divergent view of the piece, and an idea of what the memorial performance might have sounded like.
R.I.P.
April 27, 2024
* Tomkins began the new year in January, according to the fashion of the Scottish king, James I – not in March, as was official in England until 1752. February 1749 “old style” would have been 1750 – more than a year after the execution.
** Not semibreves, as in the misguidedly halved note-values of “Musica Britannica”.
*** Morley: “A straine they make to containe 8, 12, or 16 semibreves as they list.” (“A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musick” (1597, p.181) Before Tomkins’ time keyboard pavanes were being composed with irregular strains.
**** The theme of the first strain also appears 13 times, the last iteration inverted. Cornwallis’ band played “The World Turned Upside-down” as the British army exited Yorktown. A ballad of that title was published in 1647 with the subtitle, “A briefe description of the ridiculous Fashions of these distracted Times.” It was sung to the tune of a Cavalier ballad of the Civil War, “When the King enjoys his own again”. Each strophe ends on those words, and that fragment of the melody may have suggested the material for all three themes of the “ Sad Paven”.
click  to listen (m4a file)
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