The Court of James VI of Scotland (1566-1625) and its Reception of Italian Musical Modes

Ascending on the throne of Scotland at a very early age, James VI invested much of his time and energy in the first years of his reign creating a circle of poets, musicians and translators with whom he worked at renovating Scottish culture, drawing from contemporary French and Italian examples; some of the writers of this group translated from Du Bartas, Petrarch, Ariosto, Machiavelli. James himself was a poet and translator, and at the age of eighteen wrote a literary treatise, Reulis and Cautelis (1584), fundamental for modern scholarship to understand his cultural agenda. While much effort has been devoted to exploring the literary output of this coterie, less attention has been paid to music: yet some of its members, such as the brothers Robert and Thomas Hudson, were musicians, and some of the poets, such as Robert Ayton, used translation as a way of exploring different literary and musical modes, as can be seen in his translation of Giovanbattista Guarino’s Concorso di occhi amorosi, possibly influenced by Luca Marenzio’s setting of this piece, which appeared in Nicholas Yonge’s collection Musica Transalpina. Another member, William Fowler, also signals his preference for poetry to be set to music: he follows the suggestions of contemporary Italian music in a manuscript fragment, the Lamentatioun of the desolate Olimpia, based on the characters in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Ariosto had been frequently set to music, and five of the pieces in Musica Transalpina are English versions of Ariosto’s stanzas. If Ayton chose a madrigal, Fowler here seems to work on another beloved Italian musical form, the lamento, popular among Italian musicians (like the above-mentioned Luca Marenzio), from Claudio Monteverdi to Adriano Banchieri, who had also chosen Olimpia as the protagonist of one of their compositions; in Fowler’s fragment Olimpia’s lament is treated as a separate lyric piece, rather than as part of a more complex epic as it was in Ariosto. Starting from these instances I explore the hitherto unknown musical efforts of the Renaissance Scottish court, and its relationship with Italian models imported in northern Europe.