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.
Why, then, does this album work well on the whole? The short answer is that
Sting took 20 years to think about how to interpret the refined melancholy of
Dowland songs like "Come, Heavy Sleep." His booklet notes tell the long story of how he happened to make this album, and it's quite an interesting one, involving a "labyrinth" of encounters with
Labèque, with the Bosnian lutenist
Edin Karamazov, who performs on this album, with a friend who gave
Sting a lute inlaid with a labyrinth design based on a pattern in the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France (
Sting later reproduced the maze in his garden at home), and finally with a Swiss voice teacher who schooled him in pitch precision and the occasional octave run.
Sting constructs two crossover points between this temporally remote music and his popular audience. First, he intersperses the songs with selections from
Dowland's letters. This has surely been done before, at Elizabethan dinners and the like, and for modern listeners it has the beneficial effect of situating
Dowland's music at the center of the social and political life of its time.
Sting's second crossover point is more radical: he replaces the melody line in a few of
Dowland's verses with multitracked harmonies, apparently consisting entirely of his own voice. These sections appear rather randomly, but they do break up the texture in a way that suggests an additional dimension of modern perspective.
Sting passes a key test for vocal music of any kind: he understands and means what he is singing. The real gloomfests among
Dowland's songs -- like "Flow My Tears" and the final "In Darkness Let Me Dwell" -- lose none of their power in
Sting's performances. And he brings something of his own sense of humor to the lighter ones; a certain smirk in his reading of "Come Again" suggests that he is aware an audience of
Dowland's time would have heard the line "To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die with thee again" as a sexual allusion. He sounds like himself, even while purging rock's blues-based treatment of pitch from his singing; he also takes a few turns on the large archlute. And
Karamazov proves an ideal collaborator, creating a sharp, edgy tone that stands up to
Sting's rough voice. In making
Dowland's songs his own,
Sting has accomplished something that really has never been done before, and perhaps he'll show some of his own fans that Renaissance music is more than an accompaniment for silly jousting competitions -- it is a labyrinth that leads us toward the roots of our own culture. ~ James Manheim