To Your Rude Health! [Physical CD]

Description

To Your Rude Health! is a collection of 17th and 18th century catches, canons and drinking songs by Henry Purcell and his contemporaries. The songs feature themes of drinking, love, sex, death, and they implore us to live in the present. Catches are rounds. Each singer enters with the same melody at intervals, the lines then intersect with each other creating harmony.

However, when the lines overlap in a catch, new (and usually very rude) meanings emerge. Rather than excluding unsavoury catches, as has been done in the past, they have been tagged here for the listener’s discretion.

From first hearing these songs, we were fascinated that a renowned composer like Purcell wrote such scurrilous verse. Many of these songs have been ignored due to their vulgar content and perception as “low” art. What might a performance practice of these songs be? Singing them in the same way that one might approach “serious” works from the same composer seems to totally divorce them from their original context. These catches would have been sung informally, at home and in the pub, with a drink in hand. Our performance aims to bring the drama and humous of the songs to life; we hope you enjoy the results!

CD in card digipak.