William Young (??? - 1662) was an English viol player
and composer of the Baroque era, who worked at the
court of Ferdinand Charles, Archduke of Austria in
Innsbruck. The sonatas which he published in 1653 were
some of the earliest sonatas produced by an English
composer.
The details of Young's origins are unknown. By 1652 he
was a chamber musician at the Innsbruck court, where
"the Englishman", as he was called, was a highly
regarded viol player and composer. The design of his
English...(+)
William Young (??? - 1662) was an English viol player
and composer of the Baroque era, who worked at the
court of Ferdinand Charles, Archduke of Austria in
Innsbruck. The sonatas which he published in 1653 were
some of the earliest sonatas produced by an English
composer.
The details of Young's origins are unknown. By 1652 he
was a chamber musician at the Innsbruck court, where
"the Englishman", as he was called, was a highly
regarded viol player and composer. The design of his
English-made viol influenced that of some of the viols
built by Jakob Stainer, the Austrian luthier. In 1660
Ferdinand Charles granted permission for Young to visit
England, but there are no traces of his reappearance
there. He is not to be confused with William Young
(died 1671), another musician, who played violin and
flute at the court of Charles II of England from
1661.
During the late 16th century and the first half of the
17th a number of English musicians took up employment
in Germany, Denmark, Austria, the Low Countries and
Spain. Among them were six virtuoso violists: William
Brade, Thomas Simpson, Walter Rowe, Daniel Norcombe,
Henry Butler and William Young. They had a major effect
on the development of continental viol playing,
Rousseau declaring that it was the ‘English who were
the first to compose and play chordal pieces on the
viol, and who exported their knowledge to other
Kingdoms’. Brade and Simpson both published
collections of consort music; Simpson's volumes include
many dances by his English contemporaries, e.g. Robert
Bateman, John Dowland, John Farmer, Alfonso Ferrabosco,
Robert Johnson, Peter Philips and Thomas Tomkins, as
well as works by German composers. The pavan was the
form that particularly attracted Anglo-German composers
to display their most sustained and complex musical
ideas, corresponding to the role held by the fantasia
in England. German composers such as Valentin Haussman
and Melchior Franck published instrumental music which
began to show idiomatic string characteristics. Other
volumes of dance music, such as Schein's Banchetto
musicale (Leipzig, 1617), group the dances into suites
(Padouana, Gagliarda, Courente, Allemande and Tripla).
The viol is designated in some of the progressive
three- and four-part Canzoni e concerti (1627) by the
Polish violinist Adam Jarzebski. In 1649 Johann
Hentzschel published a canzona for eight bass viols and
continuo in a solemn, contrapuntal Venetian style using
double choir writing. David Funck's Stricturae viola di
gambicae, ex sonatis, ariis, intradis, allemandis
(Leipzig, 1677) for four bass viols exploits the viol's
full three-octave range. The divisions composed by
Daniel Norcombe and Henry Butler, who worked in
Brussels and Spain respectively, were warmly commended
by Christopher Simpson as models ‘worthy to be
imitated’. Butler's 13 surviving sets are of grand
proportions, exploring the range of the instrument with
taxing virtuosity and developing up to 49 variations.
The first published sonatas by an Englishman were
William Young's Sonatae à 3, 4, e 5 for two to four
violins, obbligato bass viol and continuo (Innsbruck,
1653). The virtuosity displayed by the British
expatriates was taken up by their continental pupils,
most notably Johann Schop (i), Nicolaus Bleyer and
Gabriel Schütz. Young and Henry Butler (an English
viol player working at the Spanish court) were the
first English composers to call their works sonatas.
However, Butler died in 1652 with his three sonatas
unpublished. Young's 11 sonatas for two, three, and
four parts and continuo, published in Innsbruck in
1653, are known to have reached England. In modern
times, the 11 sonatas were rediscovered by William
Gillies Whittaker. He found them in manuscript in
Uppsala University Library in Sweden, and published
them in 1930.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Young_(composer)
).
Although originally created for 2-4 Violins, Obbligato
Bass Viol and Continuo, I created this Interpretation
of the 11 Sonatas from "Sonatae à 3, 4, e 5" for Solo
Piano.
SHEET MUSIC