Five Pieces

These five pieces by Francis Pilkington were originally composed for the lute, and have here been transcribed for the guitar by Brian Jeffery from the original tablature.

(Note: this is simple A4 sheet music, without cover).

Contents, all of them dances:

Curranta for Mrs. Elizabeth Murcott
Mrs. Anne Harecourt’s Galliard
Pavane: George Pilkington’s Funeral
Galliard: Mr. T. Wagstaff’s Content of Desire
The Spanish Pavane

As well as his madrigals and lute songs, Francis Pilkington is known to have written some fifteen lute solos: see his Complete Works for Lute, edited by Brian Jeffery (Oxford University Press, 1970). Five of them are here transcribed for guitar. None of the four dedicatees – Mrs. Elizabeth Murcott, George Pilkington, Mr. T. Wagstaff, Mrs. Anne Harecourt has been positively identified. Pilkington is known to have had a brother, who may well be the George Pilkington for whom the strange and sad George Pilkington’s Funeral was written. The others are likely to have been members of families in Cheshire, where the composer lived and worked. Curranta is of course a variant spelling of Coranto, the dance form. In the Content of Desire, bar 35, second beat, all three treble notes are on the top string in the original, thus losing some polyphony which Pilkington may have intended. The Spanish Pavane differs from the normal pavane form in that it consists of a set of variations associated with a pre-existent bass sequence.

This collection is one of a series of seven titles of lute music arranged for guitar by Brian Jeffery.