An Introduction to Finch, Music, and Song
Anne Finch’s writings reveal her familiarity with the full spectrum of contemporary vocal music. On one end of that spectrum were the street cries of London vendors carrying their wares from street to street, calls she quoted late in her life in "A Ballad to Mrs: Catherine Fleming in London from Malshanger Farm in Hampshire" (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, volume 2: 130–33). 1 While in the country, she has exchanged peaceful silence “For jarring sounds in London streets, / Which still are passing by; / Where cowcumbers with Sand ho meets, / And for loud mastry vie” (lines 22–25). The poem suggests Finch’s fondness for the bustle of London, its cacophonous liveliness. A bit further along the musical spectrum, the tunes of popular ballads were continually set to new lyrics reflecting social and political concerns. 2 At the close of another late-life ballad (“A Ballad to Mrs Catherine Fleming at the Lord Digby’s at Coles-hill in Warwickshire,” CEAF2: 232–35), a transcriber has noted that it should be sung to “the tune of to you fair Ladies now at land,” presuming the reader’s knowledge of the popular setting.
But aside from music that might be heard on the streets, Finch was keenly aware of developments in devotional music. In her lifetime, while chanted psalms still took precedence, hymns were gradually being reinstated in Anglican services. 3 Finch paraphrased a number of psalms, including Psalms 119, 137, and 146, and composed hymns such as “On Easter Day” (CEAF1: 296–97) and “An Hymn of Thanksgiving after a Dangerous Fit of Sickness. In the Year 1715” (CEAF2: 114–16). While no musical settings survive for these, her hymns most often conform to stanzaic patterns found in the authorized Anglican hymnal first composed by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins (1600) and could well have been sung in private services (CEAF1: lxxviii). All her devotional poems suggest Finch’s belief in the appropriateness of pious musical expression. 4 Like many contemporaries, she was fond of the ode, at the far end of the musical spectrum from street cries. The ode was considered the most sublime verse form, suitable for august secular and religious occasions. 5 Based on ancient religious choral celebrations, early modern English odes were occasionally set to music, as were the well-known St. Cecilia’s Day odes of John Dryden. Finch’s “An Ode Written upon Christmasse Eve in the Year 1714 upon These Words And Again They Said Alleluia” (CEAF2: 189–94) exemplifies qualities of the late seventeenth-century ode, and although there is no evidence of its being set to music, the poem’s repeated chorus (“Alleluja Sing again”), and her reference to Richard Elford (bap. 1677, d. 1714), a singer famed for his performances at St. Paul’s Cathedral, 6 suggests the potential for such a setting.
Secular music was also of keen interest to Finch, as it was to her contemporaries. As Maid of Honor to Mary Beatrice, Duchess of York, from 1682 to 1684, Finch was privileged to hear the finest English and Continental musicians at a Stuart court renowned for its patronage of the arts (CEAF1: lxviii–lxix). Charles II and his brother James encouraged painters, dramatists, actors, dancers, composers, musicians, and singers to exemplify cultural refinement comparable to that of rival foreign courts, and to reject the recent Interregnum government’s discouragement of secular arts and pastimes. Courtiers were often musically educated and composed lyrics for the professional composers of the day. Songs formed a major portion of courtier-poets’ compositions. Their songs were performed privately, in homes and during courtly gatherings, and publicly, in plays, concerts, and music-meetings. Mary Beatrice, who married James, Duke of York in 1673, had grown up in a famed musical center; she welcomed Italian musicians to court and encouraged the latest continental musical fashions, both in her chapel and in theatrical productions such as opera. 7 In the court while Finch served, musical entertainment was ubiquitous, sophisticated, and practiced by courtiers and professionals alike.
It is therefore unsurprising that many of Finch’s earliest dateable compositions are songs. Although no record survives of a courtly performance, most of Finch’s lyrics counter the crude, misogynistic themes and language of song lyrics by contemporary male courtiers. One song, for example, warns ladies to rebuff advances by drunken suitors (“The Nymph in vain, bestows her pains, / That seeks to thrive, where Bacchus reigns,” CEAF1: 74, lines 1–2). Another, “Whilst Thirsis, in his pride of youth,” counsels prudence: “Who make the hearts of men their care, / Shall have their own, betray’d,” CEAF1: 70, lines 11–12). Such lyrics contrast sharply with the Earl of Rochester’s celebrations of wine and seduction.
Finch’s lyrics—particularly those whose speakers embrace a playful libertinism—seem designed as possible interludes for contemporary plays. No comedy or tragedy of the period would have seemed complete without at least one song. Dramatic songs performed various dramatic functions, such as reflecting the play’s central theme, illuminating its characters, and perhaps furthering its plot. 8 Such songs might be credited to professional or courtly poets and composers, if not to the playwright herself. For each of her two manuscript plays, Finch provided songs revealing her characters’ states of mind, as when Marina, disguised as the page Carino, laments her disappointment in love in Act 2 of The Triumphs of Love and Innocence and commands a melancholy song (“Love, give thy traine of Slaves away”; CEAF1: 141). The ubiquity of songs within plays probably accounts for those lyrics by Finch in which a speaker endorses libertine love instead of marriage: such songs resemble the sentiments of many stock anti-heroes in contemporary plays, such as Willmore in Aphra Behn’s The Rover, and may have been intended for possible performance in a dramatic production. While there is only one instance in which we know that one of Finch’s songs was performed in a play— “A Song” (Love, thou art best) —it is not unreasonable to imagine some of her songs being sung in productions that remained in manuscript, as “A Song for a Play Alcander to Melinda” might suggest.
A number of Finch’s songs were set to music, included in printed collections in her lifetime and throughout the next century, although few of these have recently been performed or recorded. This digital archive, however, provides an opportunity to hear six of Finch’s songs performed, some for the first time since the eighteenth century. Our musicians are vocalist Teresa Radomski and harpsichordist Peter Kairoff. To hear the songs, select this link.
Claudia Thomas Kairoff with Peter Kairoff
1 Unless indicated otherwise, quotations of and references to Anne Finch’s poems are from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, 2 Volumes, general editor, Jennifer Keith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019–21). In this essay, CEAF1 refers to Volume 1 of The Cambridge Edition, Early Manuscript Books, edited by Jennifer Keith, with Claudia Thomas Kairoff (assoc. ed. Jean I. Marsden); CEAF2 refers to Volume 2 of The Cambridge Edition, Later Collections, Print and Manuscript, edited by Jennifer Keith, with Claudia Thomas Kairoff.
2 For an extended discussion of the contemporary contexts of Finch’s songs, see CEAF1: lxxxv–lxxxviii.
3 See Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), for the history of psalm paraphrases in the seventeenth century. He describes the many purposes of psalm translations throughout the era (51, 144).
4 See John Knapp, “Isaac Watts’s Unfixed Hymn Genre,” Modern Philology 109, no. 4 (2012), 463–82. Knapp describes the flourishing and variety of hymn writing in the early eighteenth century (469).
5 For an extended discussion of Finch’s odes in context, see CEAF1: lxxxiii–lxxxv.
6 Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson, “Elford, Richard” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online .
7 Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 149–50, 262.
8 Ian Spink, English Song: Dowland to Purcell (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 153, 185.
