The World Encompassed has an ambitious concept: to represent Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the globe between 1577 and 1580. Drake took along a viol consort of four men (one was known only as George, a Musician) for his crew's entertainment and spiritual needs, and accounts of the voyage state that they encountered the music of Africans, Native Americans, Javanese, and others during their travels. The program, devised by British composer Orlando Gough, consists of narration by Simon Callow plus three types of ...
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The World Encompassed has an ambitious concept: to represent Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the globe between 1577 and 1580. Drake took along a viol consort of four men (one was known only as George, a Musician) for his crew's entertainment and spiritual needs, and accounts of the voyage state that they encountered the music of Africans, Native Americans, Javanese, and others during their travels. The program, devised by British composer Orlando Gough, consists of narration by Simon Callow plus three types of pieces. First there are the sacred and secular English 16th century works that the travelers would have known and that the consort would have performed for foreigners. Second is music that the foreigners themselves would have played in return. The annotations by Richard Boothby rightly stress how unthinkable such music must have sounded to Englanders whose musical horizons extended no farther back than a few decades and no farther out than Western Europe. The idea is not that the viol...
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