I just completed an edition of John Bartlet’s A Booke of Ayres (1606). This consists of 19 songs: 14 madrigals/lute songs, 4 vocal duets with lute,and one lute song with bass viol. These are lovely songs. The lute part is quite easy, and the quality is right up there with Thomas Campion. A couple of the songs are fairly well known: “Of all the birds that I do know” and “Whither runneth my sweetheart?“.
The bottom of the facsimile I used has been shaved off on some of the pages, meaning some text was missing from some songs, but luckily I was able to find the text online.
In the last piece, “Surcharged with discontent“, in bars 42-48, some of the lute part was shaved off, but with an intact bass line, it has been pretty easy to reconstruct it. If anyone has an intact source or edition of this song, I would love to see it in order to check my reconstruction.
I have taken the liberty of using modern spelling, punctuation and capitalization to clarify the meaning of the text..
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