Overview

The Royall Consort has a major importance for 17th-century English music, being a collection of 67 dances and fantasies for strings grouped in Setts and formed in the 1630s by William Lawes (1602-1645). It is remarkable for the outstanding quality of its music, the precedent it set for composition in suite-form, and the significant evolution it underwent during the very process of composition. Lawes appears to have conceived the collection in two different versions, referred to by modern editors as 'new' and 'old', and composed them side by side. Without Lawes, the idiosyncratic styles of Matthew Locke, Christopher Gibbons and later writers (hence too Purcell) would have been very different. The extent to which Lawes' treatment of the scorings for the Royall Consort shaped the common coinage of theatre music from the 1650s on is yet to be decided, but it must be considerable. The setts of dances found in the Royall Consort mark the beginning of suite-form in England for any scoring: by suite is meant the aggregated chain of Alman-Corant-Saraband, to which the Jig was shortly added. In this form it persisted into the high baroque as part of a living tradition, however attenuated eventually became its contact with performed dance. It seems that Paris, and the publications of lutenists, mark the first coalescence of the suite by the year 1629; but Lawes and his colleagues in the service of English royalty were not far behind. About two thirds of all the Royall Consort dances survive in both 'old' and 'new' versions, the rest in either one or the other but not both. They are best described in terms of their scoring. The 'new' version specifies the top two parts for violins, whereas in the 'old' version (Fretwork Editions FE12) they are simply named 'treble'. In the 'new' version the the lower parts are for two ""breaking basses"" which means two bass viols which constantly cross over in tessitura, one playing a tenor part whilst the other plays bass and then vice versa. In the old version, these lower parts are named 'tenor' and 'bass' respectively, the tenor part having a wide range which occasionally even doubles the bass line. In the 'new' version, the 'continuo' is provided by theorbos which have a separate part. In the 'old' version, the theorbos nearly always double the bassline.

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