Casual pronouncements are made every so often that the lute songs (the lute is a plucked stringed instrument, an early cousin to the guitar) and madrigals of Elizabethan and Jacobean England were the popular music of their day. And
Sting, who alludes to the likes of
Vladimir Nabokov in his lyrics, is hardly uneducated in the legacy of fine arts, and he has a certain cerebral, inward sadness that matches the dominant mood of English music around 1600 well enough. Thus some might easily have thought it would be a short leap from
Sting's own music to the lute songs of
John Dowland (1563-1626). But the leap is anything but short, and
Sting gets credit for having thought out fully the problems in making it. It is not just the issue of what pianist
Katia Labèque, one of the classical musicians who introduced
Sting to
Dowland's music, called his "unschooled tenor" --
Dowland's songs are not really difficult. It is the great divide between rock (and other traditions ultimately rooted in Africa) and the European tradition: speaking in generalities, the former prizes "noise" -- sound extraneous to the pitch and to the intended timbre of an instrument or voice -- as a structural element, whereas in the latter it is strenuously eliminated.
Sting's voice has plenty of "noise." The listener oriented toward classical music will object to its being there; the rock listener, noting that
Sting is singing very quietly, may wonder why there isn't more of it.