What stylistic features make Flow My Tears a piece of Renaissance music?

Composed in 1596, Flow My Tears is a ‘Lute song’ - a style that emerged during the Renaissance period - typically consisting of a voice (a counter tenor or alto in this case) accompanied by a lute. It could also be accompanied by more than one instrument in what was known as a ‘mixed’ or ‘broken’ consort. This performance uses a bass viol. This can be seen as reminiscent of the development of the bass line in defining the harmonic structure of music that was occurring at the time (assuming even greater significance during the baroque era).

The texture is melody and accompaniment, however often with enough separate movement in the parts to be contrapuntal. An example of this is a four-part chord in the lute part which creates five parts with the voice in Bar 1 and playing six notes in Bar 16. This is indicative of the period because much of Renaissance music (including Lute songs) employed both homophony and counterpoint. Counterpoint itself developed strongly throughout the Renaissance and Baroque era, featuring heavily in the works of well known composers of the time such as Orlando Gibbons and William Byrd.

The tripartite structure of the song relates to the structure of the stanzas - verses 1 and 2 are sung to the same notes whereas verses 3 and 4 are sung to a different melody as is the 5th verse. Whilst the structure itself is not greatly indicative of the period, the through-composed nature of the piece is a prominent stylistic feature of the Renaissance period and that be found in most Madrigals (a type of secular song from the same period).

Both the tonal and harmonic features of Flow My Tears are highly Renaissance in style. The piece is in A minor, however it shows influence of the Aeolian mode. Section A and C finish with perfect cadences and Section B finishes with a Phrygian cadence. The harmonic vocabulary of the song is typical of the late Renaissance period. The majority of chords are in root position or first inversion and the descending fourth in the melody line is a recurring motif that also appears in the bass line. A false relation can also be heard between the soloist and lute in Bar 5 as well as a suspension in bars 6 to 7 - stylistic features known for their prominence in the Renaissance period, particularly in choral music. They also serve to accentuate the melancholy tone of the song. The fourth phrase ends with a tierce de Picardie, a common device of the Renaissance and Baroque eras.

Another stylistic feature that highlights the period of its composition is word painting, which can be observed in the setting of the word ‘happie’ which falls by a fourth - reflecting sadness - before it is repeated in a descending sequence. Dowland uses syncopation and irregular note values to accommodate the words so stresses of speech are naturally recreated, lending greater significance to important words such as ‘flow’, ‘fall’, and ‘live’ with longer note values.

In conclusion, stylistic features such as prepared dissonance, contrapuntal texture, imitation and particularly the tierce de picardie are all strong evidence to indicate the 16th Century origin of Flow My Tears. Furthermore, it is a typically Renaissance Lute Song in which the words were considered to be perhaps as important as the music itself. This suggests that it was composed during the movement towards the words of a piece assuming greater importance than had been the case previously and away from valuing intricate harmonies above all else which occurred during the Renaissance period (Ohime se tanto amate, for example, arguably places heavier emphasis on the words than the music).