For gravitas in confronting financial crime, Post subscribers could
do worse than turn to the Seventeenth Century, where the immortal words of
Fulke Greville in Sonnet 103, verses 1, 2, & 3 of his sequence, Cælica,
invoked below, were later set to chamber music for voyces and viols by
the frothy Renaissance composer, Martin Peerson:
O Falfe and treacherous Probability,
Enemy of truth, and
friend to wickedneffe;
With whothe bleare eyes
opinion learnes to fee,
Truths feeble party
here, and barrenneffe.
When thou hast thus
mifled Humanity,
And loft obedience in
the pride of wit;
With reafon dar’ft thou
iudge the Deity,
And in thy flefh make
bold to fafhion it.
Vaine thought, the word
of Power is,
And till the vayles be
rent, the felfe new borne,
Reveales no wonders of that inward bliffe,
Which but where faith
is, everywhere finds fcorne.
“Who therefore cenfures God with flefthly fp’rit,
“As well in time may wrap up infinite.
Meanwhile back in the Twenty-First Century,
those of us fortunate enough to peruse the Autumn 2012 edition of The Viol, the Viola da Gamba
Society of America’s VdGSA News
of December 2011, and that recent Viols
& Voices overleaf were cheered to find M.H. Feets hard at work
editing even more Martin Peerson pieces for the Twenty-First Century meantone
ear. We all remember his enthralling BASSVS
The firft fett, Of Italian Madrigalls Englished, not to the fenfe of the
original dittie, but after the affection of the Noate. Well, not since BASSVS has this neo-Rennaisance stringed musical artist been so
enthused about what is turning into his rather prodigious bequest to future
generations of appreciative violists.
And we’re sorry we called him a Mississippi river rat too.
Even if he is one.
