Sellenger's Round: A Song History

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"Sellenger's Round," also spelled "Sellinger's Round" and sometimes called "The Beginning of the World," is a sixteenth-century round-dance tune in 6/8 time; the Traditional Tune Archive, drawing on Kidson's entry in Grove, describes it as a popular dance of the 1500s and 1600s by an unknown composer.[1] Kidson and a later writer cited there both take the original title to have been "St. Leger's Round," pointing to Sir Anthony St. Leger, who took office as Henry VIII's Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1540, but the Archive's sources disagree on where and when the tune began, one placing it in Ireland around 1590, while Kidson thought it started out as a maypole dance.[1] Thomas Morley mentioned it in 1597, and Thomas Tomkis's play Lingua, first staged in 1602, accounts for the "Beginning of the World" name.[1]

A pen drawing of many villagers holding hands in a wide circle dance in a field, with a church and village behind.

A Country Dance, Netherlandish, pen and brown and black ink, ca. 1520. Villagers in a ring dance about 1520, shown for the kind of round dance the tune served; it has no connection to the tune.

William Byrd made a keyboard setting of the tune, which is among the 42 Byrd pieces in My Ladye Nevells Booke, a manuscript the scribe John Baldwin completed on 11 September 1591 and which passed to the British Library in 2006.[2] Byrd's setting was also copied into the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Cecil Sharp drew on it for his Country Dance Tunes of 1909, and Glenn Gould and Davitt Moroney are among those who have recorded it.[1] For Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, six composers, Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Britten, Arthur Oldham, Humphrey Searle, Michael Tippett and William Walton, jointly wrote Variations on an Elizabethan Theme (Sellenger's Round) for string orchestra, which was first performed at Aldeburgh on June 20, 1953.[3] Mark Gilston includes it in English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 2, a book of his dulcimer arrangements of old English dance tunes, which he publishes himself.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Sellenger's Round"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Sellinger's Round (1)".
  2. National Heritage Memorial Fund: "Outstanding Elizabethan music manuscript saved for the nation".
  3. IRCAM Brahms: "Variations on an Elizabethan Theme (Sellenger's Round) (1953)".
  4. Mark Gilston: "English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 2".
  5. Image: A Country Dance, Netherlandish, pen and brown and black ink, ca. 1520. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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