Giles FARNABY |
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English composer. Like his father Thomas, Giles
was a ‘Cittizen and Joyner of London’. His mother, ‘Janakin alias Jane’,
perhaps of Huguenot descent, was buried at Waltham St Lawrence, Berkshire,
in 1605. She bequeathed £40 to the Dutch Reformed and French Protestant
congregations in London and ‘to poore maides marriages’; her nuncupative
will (PCC 36 Stafforde) strangely ignores Giles’s existence. According to
Anthony Wood, Giles was ‘of the family of Farnaby of Truro in Cornwall, and
near of kin to Tho. Farnaby, the famous schoolmaster of Kent’. Wood is at
times an unreliable authority, however, and so far no evidence corroborates
his statement. The registers of St Helen Bishopsgate record Farnaby’s marriage to Katharine Roane on 28 May 1587; the 1589 ‘parsons tythe’ shows that he was taxed only 2s. 9d., and was then residing in the parish. In 1590 he was listed as a feoffee of the Joiners’ Company. His cousin Nicholas, parish clerk of St Olave Jewry, was a professional joiner and ‘virginall maker’, and Giles may have been connected with a similar business. Neither could have been lucrative, since St Olave’s granted Nicholas a £2 annuity in 1596 on the grounds that he was ‘overcharged with children and his trade decayed’. Giles still owed his father £9 ‘suertye’ money at the latter’s death in 1595. Farnaby graduated with the BMus at Oxford on 7 July 1592. In that year Thomas East issued his best-selling Whole Booke of Psalmes, for which Farnaby – one of ten ‘expert’ contributors – provided nine settings; Barley and Ravenscroft subsequently adopted several of these harmonizations in their respective psalters. Farnaby’s own Canzonets to Fowre Voyces appeared in 1598. Dedicated to the influential courtier Ferdinando Heyborne, ‘groome of Her Majesties privie chamber’ and himself a composer, the collection includes commendatory verses by Anthony Holborne, John Dowland, Richard Alison and the recusant poet Hugh Holland. Surprisingly, only a few years later Farnaby was living in the rural setting of Aisthorpe, a village 10 km north of Lincoln. The 1602 Bishop’s Transcripts for St Peter’s church, principally compiled by ‘Egidius Farnaby’ himself, churchwarden, record the baptism of a second daughter named Philadelphia, the first of this name (b 1591) presumably having died. More revealing is an indenture of lease dated 1608 between Sir Nicholas Saunderson of Fillingham (a neighbouring village) and ‘Giles Farnabie … gent’. In return for musical tuition for Sir Nicholas’s children, and for his son Richard’s services as apprentice for seven years’ instructing of the children ‘in skill of musick and plaieinge uppon instruments’, Saunderson agreed to lease Farnaby some nearby properties at £16 a year for 20 years. The indenture is endorsed vacat consensu. Arrears in 1611 suggest the family may already have left the district. In any case, Richard married Elizabeth Sendye at St Peter Westcheap in London in 1614, a year before his apprenticeship was due to end. At some time between 1625 and 1639 Farnaby dedicated to Dr Henry King, ‘cheife prebend’ of St Paul’s Cathedral, a metrical psalter harmonized in ‘fower parts, for viols and voyce’, doubtless hoping the prelate would sponsor its publication; only the autograph cantus partbook survives. In 1634 the registers for St Giles Cripplegate mention ‘the house of Gyles Farnaby in Grub Street’, an area noted in a 1638 survey for its ‘extreme poverty’; the same registers record the burial of ‘Gyles Farnaby musitian’ on 25 November 1640. The style ‘musitian’, not ‘joiner’, is noteworthy. Of Farnaby’s five traceable children, at least two were musical: richard Farnaby, the composer, was born c1594; ‘Joyus [Joy] Farnaby s[on of] Gylles’ was baptized on 18 March 1599 at St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside. He was referred to as ‘musitian’ in 1636. Another son, Edward, was baptized at Aisthorpe in 1604. A joiner by training, Farnaby occupies a peculiar position among Elizabethan and Jacobean composers. Belated or intermittent musical instruction may help to explain the uneven quality of his work. He cannot match Byrd’s breadth or discipline, Morley’s fluency, Bull’s virtuosic sweep (though he could well have been a disciple), or Gibbons’s polish and intensity. Yet he was an instinctive composer with original ideas and sufficient conviction to put them across effectively. His music is correspondingly vital and telling; at its best it has a spontaneity and charm few of his contemporaries can rival. The 11 keyboard fantasias – none plainchant-based, one a canzonet transcription, two others apparently modelled on vocal pieces – contain some imaginative, highly idiomatic writing. Technically and temperamentally, however, Farnaby was less well suited to polyphonic genres than to variations, where his weakness in generating expansive paragraphs mattered little and his resourcefulness in presenting rich figurative detail and unusual textures counted for much. The many dances – several are arrangements – music from masques and folktune settings provide, with their sectional structure and reprises, ample evidence of this. The Alman For Two Virginals deserves mention, as does the group of fancifully titled ‘character sketches’, including Giles Farnaby’s Dream and His Rest. His Humour cleverly encapsulates several compositional techniques in four short strains. Such attractive miniatures – a further handful includes the haunting Tower Hill – rank among the more memorable in the entire keyboard repertory. Farnaby’s works seem to have circulated little; the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (GB-Cfm 32.g.29) has unique texts of 51 of the 53 ascribed pieces. Only Bonny Sweet Robin – often attributed to Bull or even Byrd – appears in several sources outside his circle of composers. The harmonizations in East’s Psalter, where the tenor, as customary, has the psalm tune, are rhythmically enlivened by free use of passing and dotted notes. Several settings incorporate distinctly melodious cantus parts. These straightforward harmonizations stand apart from the more elaborate workings in his own ‘double’ Psalter – whose pairing of text and tune mirrors Ravenscroft’s plan; here the cantus ‘lines out’ the melody, intervening rests suggesting imitative accompaniment. Nearly all 97 tunes have alternative settings. Farnaby’s secular vocal music, though influenced by Morley, retains a distinctive flavour. The canzonets adhere mostly to the conventional style and structure: the predominantly lighthearted texts are set to tuneful yet terse points of imitation interspersed with chordal stretches. The music gathers rhythmic momentum, frequently over a pedal point, when approaching the final cadence of the repeated second section. The collection contains some notable works, including the tautly constructed ‘instrumental’ setting in cantus-firmus fashion of the well-known ‘Susanna’ theme; the adventurously chromatic, sombrely madrigalian Construe my meaning; and the sonorous Witness ye heavens – a rare example of eight-part writing. |
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RICHARD MARLOW/ORHAN MEMED New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians 2nd edition © Oxford University Press 2003 |
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