Dancing+Queen

1. The Folger Consort is an early music chamber group that plays music from between the 12th and 18th centuries. The two primary members are Robert Eisenstein and Christopher Kendall. It was founded by Robert Eisenstein, Julie's teacher!

2. The pavane was much slower than the others and more processional. The Pavane is also in duple meter. The Bransle and the Galliard are in triple meter. The Bransle is much more "folky" with the violin sounding more like a fiddle, whereas the Galliard is more in the Baroque style with many scalar movements.

3. Queen Elizabeth was the first known English person to wear a wrist watch, a gift from Robert Dudley. The Queen had over sixty palaces when she ascended to rule. Sometimes wine glasses, dishes, playing cards and trenchers were made out of a crisp modeled sugar called sugar-plate which would be elaborately decorated.

4. John Dowland was a 16th century composer famous for his lute compositions. He helped develop lute technique of the time and wrote over a hundred lute solos and songs. He was an avid performer of lute music and many think he had a near obsession with thoroughness.

5. A lute is any plucked string instrument with a deep round back. It differs from a guitar in that the back of a guitar is flat whereas the back of a lute is round. Also, the lute's neck is shorter and bends at a right angle away from the fretboard towards the player. Also, lutes have many more strings (ever string but the top string is a doubled with on being a low note and the other being the same note an octave higher).

6. Shakespeare and his family were directly linked to the gunpowder plot to blow up the English parliament. He wrote Macbeth as a piece of propaganda to clear his name, reflecting his own king, James I, in King Duncan in Macbeth. He changed history to make it seem like Duncan was a humble character of mythological qualities instead of the war-loving Neanderthal as he was. Shakespeare was also probably a closet Catholic, which was reason to be hanged during the Protestant-dominated years of 16th century England.

7. It is sung in act II scene iii of Twelfth Night. It is sung by Feste.

8. The song is first used in Othello when Othello locks Desdemona in her chamber because he believes that she was unfaithful to him. The recalls the song from a maid who was similarly abused by her husband. The song is also sung by Emilia as she dies from being stabbed by her husband Iago. As she dies, she criticizes Othello for killing his loving wife. The song is notable for its intense expression of sadness. It depicts a sorry woman sitting beside a river weeping beneath a weeping willow tree. This imagery is very pertinent to the female characters of Othello who are true victims to the mental and emotional strife of their husbands.

9. I think this song speaks to the idea that often people will often commit sins and wrong others in order to either avoid blame the blame of others or the blame of one's own conscience. In Vega's song, the soldier was probably one of the only people who had ever directly challenged her in the solitude of her palace. He pointed out her faults, the immaturity of her actions, and instead of receiving the soldier, she had him killed so that she could return to her previous self and attempt to erase the words of the soldier from her memory. The queen was probably much younger than the soldier, and yet she had to maintain her superiority to her subject even though the soldier made her feel like a small and helpless child. She simply erased her problems from being visible instead of dealing with them.