The great Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser has long suffered from the general impression that his lyrics are not suitable for singing. Indeed, only a few of them were set by period composers, almost exclusively as single stanzas from strophic poems set as polyphonic madrigals. As with John Donne, this lack of settings has been explained as Spenser’s poetry being music in itself. Yet one of his most famous works, The Shepheardes Calender (1579), is filled with musical imagery and descriptions of shepherds singing, including four lyrics that scholars generally acknowledge as “songs,” even though some doubt that they were intended for singing. 

     In a new study, Ross Duffin attempts to show how Spenser’s lyrics from The Shepheardes Calender can be set to music, using tunes from the metrical psalter. Indeed, notwithstanding its pastoral setting, The Shepheardes Calender has been seen as having a religious perspective that favors the Anglican church of the Elizabethan Settlement. This chimes with Spenser’s admiration of Clément Marot, founder of the French metrical psalm repertoire—whom he specifically identifies as a model in this work—as well as his personal association with English divines, exiled during Mary’s reign, who used the French psalter as a basis for psalms in English. Whether this is a reconstruction of what Spenser had in mind for musical setting, or simply a conjectural setting of its poems to period music, Spenser’s pastoral masterpiece has now been brought to musical life for the first time in the modern era, and samples from the new reconstruction will be sung.

     The Stanford Camerata, Renaissances at Stanford, and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages are excited to host Dr. Ross Duffin as part of our Musica Transdisciplinas lecture series, where we place music studies in conversation with other disciplines.