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Music Study

Safia Mateen

MUS100 Fundamentals of Music| Elizabeth Crain

June 21st 2020

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Music Study

For this music study, I will be comparing John Farmer’s Fair Phyllis and Act 1, Scene 2

of Don Giovanni by Mozart. John Farmer was born in England sometime around 1570, with his

exact birth date being unknown. In 1599 he moved to London and published his collection of

four-part madrigals, and is assumed to have died two years later in 1601. Wolfgang Amadeus

Mozart was a famous composer from the Classical period who was born in 1756 Austria. Don

Giovanni was written by him in 1787 at the age of thirty-one. This was near the end of his career,

as he would die an early death four years later in the year of 1791.

Fair Phyllis by John Farmer is an English Madrigal that features four voices singing

acapella and makes use of repeated sections. The piece starts off in a duple meter and as it

progresses it switches to triple and then back again. It is a lively, upbeat piece of music that has a

dancelike and diatonic melody. The texture of the song is varied; beginning monophonic and

ending homorhythmic with the final line. Fair Phyllis uses word-painting to tell a story, and this

is one of its strengths. The text is pastoral, meaning the words portray an outdoor scene that

involves shepherds. The soprano line that begins the piece represents Phyllis; a shepherd sitting

by herself, and as the other voices enter, we get an image of Phyllis feeding her flock with the

text “Feeding her flock near to the mountainside.”

Act 1, Scene 2, of Don Giovanni kicks off with a brief orchestral introduction that takes

us into a disjunct aria that outlines triads using numerous leaps. It alternates between soprano

aria, orchestra, and interjections from Don Giovanni himself as well as Leporello. It is made up

of two main sections with repeated variation, uses an accented duple meter, and features a

cadenza at the end. One of the strengths of this piece is its ability to express anger by sudden

dynamic shifts, quick tempo, and the changes in range. Mozart is able to convey Donna Elvira’s
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anger by using a disjunct melody line in both section A and section B. Another example of this

would be how half-way through Section A, Donna Elvira begins to say how “he broke his pledge

to me,” during which you can hear a dynamic shift in her voice and through the instruments

which express her frustrations.