Thomas Campion’s “It fell on a summer’s day”
Throughout September, the Daily Classical Music Post celebrates the music of 15th-, 16th-, and 17th-century England.
The English composer and poet (and physician) Thomas Campion (1567–1620) also trained as a lawyer but was never called to the bar. He was a true Renaissance man, in all senses of the phrase.
Campion composed masques, lute songs, and ayres. He wrote his own words and set them to music himself, which was unusual at the time. Campion also wrote a work on counterpoint, A New Way of Making Fowre Parts in Counterpoint By a Most Familiar and Infallible Rule, which was published in 1615.
Campion’s “It fell on a summer’s day” was published in Rosseter’s Book of Ayres in 1601. The article on “Poetry” in the Oxford Illustrated Companion to Medicine says, that “It fell on a summer’s day” is “among the miniature glories of English poetry and music. . . . The major preoccupation of poets in the Elizabethan age was amorous; . . . Campion excelled as [a writer] of love poems.”
Poets writing at the same time as Campion wrote Latin epigrams -- short sayings often with a hidden meaning -- and Campion did this as well. The epigram to accompany “It fell on a summer’s day” is a bit more “risque” than the actual poem, which often was the case with Latin epigrams and English poems.
My classical music post for today is Thomas Campion’s “It fell on a summer’s day.”
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