for recorder, counter-tenor, theorbo and baroque cello

Due for premiere December 2023 with Ensemble 1604.

Programme Note:

In Renaissance England, melancholy was considered an illness caused by an imbalance of the humours, which were thought to be four fluids: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. In A Treatise of Melancholy (1586) Timothie Bright says melancholy is caused by a surplus of black bile, describing that humour as:

Cold and dry, thick, black, and sour, begotten of the more feculent part of nourishment, and purged from the spleen, is a bridle to the other two hot humours, blood and choler, preserving them in the blood, and nourishing the bones. These four humours have some analogy with the four elements, and to the four ages in man.

Semper Melancholia sets this text, and fragments from Sonnett 45 by William Shakespeare which is about melancholy:

The other two, slight air and purging fire,
Are both with thee, wherever I abide;
The first my thought, the other my desire,
These present-absent with swift motion slide.
For when these quicker elements are gone
In tender embassy of love to thee,
My life, being made of four, with two alone
Sinks down to death, oppressed with melancholy;
Until life’s composition be recured
By those swift messengers return’d from thee,
Who even but now come back again, assured
Of thy fair health, recounting it to me:
   This told, I joy; but then no longer glad,
   I send them back again and straight grow sad.