‘Full of Art, and Profundity’: The Five-Part Consort Pavan as a Medium for Sophisticated Musical Expression and Compositional Cross-Reference in Late Renaissance England

In 1676, when Thomas Mace (1612/13-?1706) looked back at the music he had played with stringed consorts to the organ in his younger days, he included the following description: ‘Pavines, are Lessons of 2, 3 or 4 Strains, very Grave, and Sober; Full of Art, and Profundity, but seldom us’d, in These our Light Days’.1 Despite late essays in pavan writing by John Jenkins, William Lawes, Matthew Locke and Henry Purcell, the genre was apparently coming to the end of its useful working life in the keyboard and consort pavans by Thomas Tomkins, several of which are dated in autograph and contemporary sources from between 1647 and 1654. The pavan’s heyday, when composers did indeed use it as a vehicle for presenting a musical discourse that was ‘full of art and profundity’, was in the years around and following 1600. The publications in London of Anthony Holborne’s Pavans, Galliards, Almains, and other short Aeirs (1599) and John Dowland’s Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares figured in Seaven Passionate Pavans, with divers other Pavans, Galiards, and Almands (1604) were swiftly followed by a number of continental anthologies that included pavans by English composers, as well as manuscript collections at home and abroad.