Singing Spenser: The Shepheardes Calender set to music

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The great Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser has long suffered from the general impression that his lyrics are not suitable for singing. Yet one of his most famous works, The Shepheardes Calender (1579), is filled with musical imagery and descriptions of shepherds singing, including four lyrics that scholars generally acknowledge as “songs,” even though some doubt that they were intended for singing. In a new study, Ross Duffin attempts to show how Spenser’s lyrics can be set to music, using tunes from the metrical psalter. Whether this is a reconstruction of what Spenser had in mind for musical setting, or simply a conjectural setting of its poems to period music, Spenser’s pastoral masterpiece has now been brought to musical life for the first time in the modern era, and samples from the new reconstruction will be sung.