Lachrimae

Type: Project
“John Dowland’s most famous composition was the evocatively titled Lachrimae pavan. In addition to the several versions for which he was personally responsible, there are countless other settings for virtually every scoring of the time, testifying to the work’s potent resonance in the atmosphere of Elizabethan and Jacobean melancholy. The piece was highly influential on German composers of the 17th century in particular, and spread quickly as part of a larger migration of the English pavan across Europe. Both at home in England and on the Continent, Lachrimae spawned a number of imitations and ‘paraphrases’ that are often of much interest in their own right. As part of a pilot study for the ECOLM research project, encodings of as many versions as possible of the Lachrimae pavan, together with their cognates and imitations, have been assembled in order to carry out a comparative analysis of a type impossible before the advent of computers.”(from the abstract of a paper given by Michael Gale and Tim Crawford at the IMS 17th International Congress (2002) in Leuven)

Cluster was created on the 24th of July, 2003 and was subsequently modified on the 27th of January, 2004