Music in London:

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CHAPTER 37

• Music in London
• Henry Purcell

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• Seventeenth-century England experienced great
  political and social upheavals. Two kings were
  deposed throughout the century, while a civil war
  broke out at between the royalists and those
  forces supporting the Parliament. By the end of
  the century, England had established a broadly
  representative government unprecedented since
  antiquity.
• The weakening of the royal courttraditionally,
  the most affluent patron of the artshad
  consequences for music as well. While London
  remained the capital of English artistic
  production, public houses and theaters replaced
  the court as the center of music for the stage.

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• Henry Purcell the chief English composer of the
  seventeenth century. He served as organist at
  the royal court and in Westminster Abbey.
  Running the gamut of musical theater genres,
  Purcell was particularly prolific as a composer
  for the stage, writing incidental music and
  simple songs for plays, semi-operas, and a fully
  sung opera.
• Masque an elaborate courtly entertainment using
  music, dance, and drama to portray an allegorical
  story that often celebrated the royal family.
• Semi-opera a spoken play in which the more
  exotic, amorous, and supernatural moments in the
  plot were sung or danced.

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Purcell's Dido and Aeneas

• Based on Virgil's Aeneid, it received its first
  performance in 1689 in a school for girls in
  London. It narrates the story of the Trojan
  soldier Aeneas who seduces Dido, queen of
  Carthage, only to abandon her in order to fulfill
  his destiny as the mythic founder of Rome. The
  tale ends with Dido's death, preceded by her
  famous lament.

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Dido's Lament

• Ground bass a bass line that repeats over and
  over (equivalent to the Italian basso ostinato).
  Dido's lament in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas is an
  aria built on such a ground bass. The first part
  of the ostinato pattern outlines chromatically a
  descending tetrachord (G-D), a musical emblem of
  lament.

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• Ode a multi-movement composition containing
  instrumental introduction, choruses, duets, and
  solo arias. English composers traditionally
  employed this genre when writing for the royal
  court (birthdays, weddings, etc.). Purcell
  composed twenty such odes, six of which mark the
  birthday of Queen Mary.
• Countertenor the male falsetto voice. In
  Purcell's day, countertenors sang the alto part.
• Flat trumpet a slide trumpet whose sliding tube
  extended backward over the player's left
  shoulder, rather than forward from the right as
  in the trombone.