The poet Phineas Fletcher (1582–1650) was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, before being ordained priest in 1611. Most of his poetry was written in Cambridge before 1615. His output includes political works, mourning and celebratory odes on the deaths and accessions of monarchs, and a work (in English and Latin—The Locusts) on the Gunpowder plot, which combines Protestant and patriotic history in epic form. Fletcher left Cambridge in March 1615 when his play Sicelides: a Piscatory was performed, but in the absence of James I: he was heartbroken that the King had not heard it, and felt that he had thus missed out on preferment. We perhaps see some of this emotional introspection in the stark beauty of Drop, drop, slow tears. Entitled A Litany, it appears in the 1633 collection Poetical Miscellanies.

Gibbons’ Song 46 was originally set to the text ‘As on the night before this blessed morn’ in Wither’s Hymns and Songs of 1623. Some musicologists believe that it may actually bear some of Wither’s own adaptations, as this replaces Gibbons’ own Song 47. This hymn only has the first strain of Song 46, and the now-famous marriage of text and tune came much later. Martin Peerson’s Private Musicke of 1620 makes clear that Gibbons’ tunes and bass lines can be performed in a variety of ways, including with the virginals or lute.

from notes by The Revd Dr James Hawkey © 2014

Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625) is one of the giants of early church music. He sang in the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, between 1596 and 1598 at the same time that his brother Edward was Master of the Choristers. He became a student at the University in 1599 and by 1603 was singing in the Chapel Royal in the reign of James I. By 1615 he was an organist there; by 1625 he had become the main organist (his assistant being Tomkins) and was listed as such at the funeral of James I in that year. He was also noted as being organist at Westminster Abbey, having succeeded Parsons in 1623.

On 1 May 1625 Charles I married Henrietta Maria by proxy—this had happened in Paris and the King had been in London. Once married, Henrietta set sail for England with four thousand courtiers and servants. James, not wishing to appear to meet her on anything less than an equal footing moved his whole court to Canterbury where the two courts were to meet. The court included all the choir, vestments, books and ornaments from the Chapel Royal. Whilst waiting for Henrietta and James I to arrive back from Dover, Gibbons died of ‘an apoplectic seizure’. His death is recorded in the Chapel Royal cheque-book as follows: ‘Mr Orlando Gibbons organist, died the 5th of June, being then Whitsunday at Canterbury, where the King was then to receive Queen Mary, who was then to come out of France and Thomas Warwick was sworn in his place organist the first day of July following.’ Gibbons was buried in Canterbury Cathedral the next day. It was rumoured that he had died of the plague—a story denied by the doctors, but which was quite likely, the denial probably being to protect the retinue from desertion in the face of a major state event.

The hymn Drop, drop, slow tears is the first strain of the tune known as ‘Song 46’, the beautiful words being by Phineas Fletcher.

from notes by William McVicker © 1997

There were a number of editors in the twentieth century who reacted against the flood of sentimental writing of the nineteenth and followed Robert Bridges and The Yattendon Hymnal in searching for hymns that had both literary and musical qualities. The example was set by Percy Dearmer (1867–1936) in The English Hymnal (1906) where among the hymns on the Passion he placed this exquisite meditation on the tears of the sinner before the Cross by the learned, literary clergyman of the first half of the seventeenth century, Phineas Fletcher. It may well not be suited to general congregational use, but it makes a fine, simple anthem, and the words lead to private prayer.

The reticent tune by Fletcher’s contemporary, Orlando Gibbons, the finest musician of his day, enables the words to speak for themselves.

from notes by Alan Luff © 2002