Regular episode • Season 2 • 7 • From Refugees to Millenary and the New King.

Artwork • Funeral of Queen Elizabeth I - April 28, 1603.

Published by janetwertman

Music • Drop, drop, slow tears. Sung by the Cambridge Chorale, in Ely Cathedral.

From a Poem by Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650), Composer is Orlando Gibbons 1583—1625).

Drop, drop, Slow tears, is a devotional reflection sung at Passiontide, but not specific to that season. Orlando Gibbons, joined text by the Jacobean poet and clergyman Phineas Fletcher to a hymn tune, Song 46, which was published in 1623.

Interestingly, the poet and composer are linked by their connection with King’s College Cambridge, where Gibbons was a chorister and Fletcher a student.

By the 1610s, Gibbons was the leading composer and organist in England.

His career was cut short when he died , aged 41, in 1625, which is thought to have been caused by the Plague.

Passiontide, in the Christian liturgical year, is a name for the last two weeks of Lent,

beginning on the Fifth Sunday of Lent, long celebrated as Passion Sunday, and continuing

through Lazarus Saturday.

It commemorates the suffering of Christ , Latin "passio" meaning is “suffering”.

Music 2 • Prevent Us, O Lord - Sung by Recordare Chamber Choir.

Composer William Byrd. c. 1540-1623

Manuscript: 1580 in Dow Partbooks, no. 58. The Dow Partbooks is a collection of five partbooks in Oxford around 1580. The collection includes choral and also instrumental pieces. Robert Dow was a trained calligrapher and the books are unusually easy to read among Tudor manuscripts.