John Dowland, born according to his own account probably in 1562/63, buried on 20 February 1626, composed, adapted, quoted and improvised music for a wide variety of ensembles. For the 600th anniversary of his death, a catalogue of his works should finally be compiled that declares the verified and / or presumed proportion of music associated with him.
What is so difficult about compiling a DowlandWV?
Diana Poulton's groundbreaking edition "The Collected Lute Music of John Dowland", published in 1974 and available in two expanded new editions in 1978 and 1995, includes all pieces for solo lute that are associated with Dowland in sources. These include misattributions and obviously corrupted versions. Diana Poulton was very aware of this fact and also declared it in the edition and, above all, presented very differentiated accounts of the transmission of individual pieces in her 1972 book "John Dowland".
John Ward's "A Dowland Miscellany" in the Journal of the Lute Society of America, Vol. X (1977) discusses many of the problematic questions of attribution.
This generation of musicologists and lutenists was therefore well aware of the problems.
In 2020 Dawn Grapes published her catalogue "John Dowland. A Research and Information Guide", in which the Poulton numbers were used as the basis for the list of works.
The approach of many of today's musicians tends to leave aside the differentiation that the previous generation of researchers lived with, so that differentiation can no longer be expected automatically. It is also clear that the Poulton numbers that Grapes continued to use will probably remain stadard for decades. Therefore, Dowland's part in the music associated with him must already be recognisable in the abbreviation of a future catalogue raisonné.
In addition, the world of musicology and the world of lutenists playing from tablature have diverged in recent decades. The ground-breaking new edition of Dowland's works by John Robinson (primarily the solo works) is not included in Grapes' catalogue. Between 2010 and 2018, Robinson edited no fewer than 540 surviving editions and thus laid the foundation for a complete edition of the surviving transmissions - rather than an edition of "complete works".
Robinson thus stands for the growing realisation since the 1990s that there can be no "Urtext" for many works of the 16th/17th century, but that music is in a constant process of adaptation and that the manuscripts (and also a large proportion of the prints) only represent a snapshot of musical practice in dealing with a piece. For this reason, knowledge of the entire spectrum of tradition and the distillation of the "scope of formulation" of good musicians of the time is fundamental for today's new performances - but also a laborious and time-consuming process.
During my preparations for the symposium "John Dowland's activities on the Continent", which took place at the Hochschule der Künste Bremen from 22 to 24 April 2022, I became very aware of this gap between musicology and knowledge in the lute community and therefore worked on my topic "Dowland and France - searching for traces" less than I had hoped due to lack of time and instead tried to lay the foundation for a future DowlandWV by systematically cataloguing Robinson's very scattered published editions and combining Grapes' catalogues of her "Primary Sources" and "Works List" in a relational database and adding new findings.
In the current phase, the aim is to form a team of experts to check this database, which certainly contains various errors, and above all to add the relevant findings on the individual sources and pieces. Please contact me if you are able and willing to take on this work.
The aim is to have the database revised and updated to the latest state of knowledge by 2026 and to install an official DowlandWV.
In addition, the structure is to be put in place so that new knowledge about Dowland can be reviewed by experts and, following their positive assessment, incorporated into the database and the DowlandWV.