The Cries of London

Description

Passamezzo Edition by Tamsin Lewis: The Cries of London for 5 treble instruments/voices

A new composition based on text from the Cries of Rome of 1609. The text for this edition comes from he Cries ofRome that was produced and edited by Dr Eva Griffith for a production of Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece in 2005 to celebrate the 400^th anniversary of the Red Bull Theatre, where it was originally performed. It has been performed subsequently for festivals in London’s Borough Market.

The Cries of Rome was printed without a score and no contemporary setting of the entire song has survived. Fortunately almost all of the cries within it can also be found in the surviving early seventeenth century viol fantasias of Gibbons, Weelkes, Dering and Anonymous or in rounds of the time. It is thus possible to use these sources to produce an arrangement which whilst it is conjectural would not have been discordant to seventeenth century ears.

RP059

ISMN-M-708067-80-1