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Chelys 7 (1977), article 4
at the centre of their major key music a wonderfully serene episode,
descending from the heights and filling out as it progresses. One feels that
Wagner ought to have known about these when writing the prelude to
Lohengrin; they capture so well the mood of rapture he wanted!
Structurally, they correspond with the light episode, usually a tripla, which
Jenkins often introduced after the divisions in his fantasia-suites, though the
lightness here is achieved by the scoring, the basses being rested.
Beyond an inherent melodiousness, I do not think it is true to say that
these six-part works take much from the dance idiom of the time; in my
view Meyer makes too much of this idea in his book English Chamber
Music. 7 However, the occasional example can be found, as Example XV
shows. After the initial balanced phrases the
Ex. XV. Extract from Fantasia no. 5 (bars 37-9) and (b) Almain a4, no. 4
pattern becomes irregular in both works, but in the fantasia the dance
element is submerged in elaborate counterpoint. 8
Fantasias nos. 1 & 5 both have a double-bar, a feature unique to these
two pieces alone in all Jenkins’s viol fantasias of from three to six parts.
We believe these double-bars merely mark the end of the first section in
each work at a point where there is a very clear cadence and change of
mood. To repeat the first section would seem to upset the balance of both
pieces: Fantasia no. 1 is the longest of all Jenkins’s fantasias anyway. In
Fantasia no. 5, a completely new idea takes over at the double-bar and, at
first glance, the same might appear true in Fantasia no. 1. However, close
examination shows that the new section here still derives from the
opening theme, but Jenkins has cleverly disguised this by inversion, by
changing to the tonic major key and by introducing a different texture of
a predominantly homophonic nature—though soon to be confounded by
an exuberant outburst of bass divisions and syncopations. I do not know
whether Jenkins’s tendency to write such bass divisions in his fantasias
derived from the fact that he would have been the one to play them in the
first place, or whether this simply acknowledged the technique as a
normal part of bass viol writing—probably the latter.
7 Ernst H. Meyer: English Chamber Music (London, 1946), p. 219.
8 The almain is published complete in Musica Britannica, XXVI, no. 46.