3 Fugues on Biblical Subjects

- Four-part fugue: Since by man came death

- Three-part fugue: And I will write my law in their inward parts

- Four-part fugue: By the waters of Babylon

This composite recording – dedicated to Ailsa’s husband Brian - was made at home by Lynda Sayce during the coronavirus lockdown in April 2020, on her unique family of Renaissance lutes. Thanks are due to the Music Reprieval Trust for supporting this project.

These 3 fugues, previously unperformed, date from the later end of Ailsa Dixon’s composing years, and are referred to in her archive as ‘Fugues for plucked instruments’. In addition to manuscripts in regular notation, one was written out in lute tablature, and a note in her archive suggests that she wished to present it to the Lute Society in memory of its founder, Diana Poulton, who was her teacher in the 1950s (at the outset of the twentieth-century lute revival) and wrote the standard biography of John Dowland. Dowland is one clear influence on these pieces, whose winding chromatic subjects recall his lute fantasias. Trained in writing counterpoint at Durham, Ailsa Dixon was equally well versed in the formal technique of Baroque fugues and the freer contrapuntal flow of Renaissance polyphony. Her notes clipped to the score also refer to Purcell’s viol fantasias, which interested her for their use of passing dissonances or false relations arising naturally out of the counterpoint.

Each fugue is headed with a Biblical quotation: ‘Since by man came death’, ‘And I will write my law in their inward parts’ and ‘By the waters of Babylon’. A pencil note accompanying the scores explains something of their composition:

One does not pluck good fugue subjects out of the blue, so I took a sentence from the Bible for each piece, to help find a memorable rhythm and a meaningful shape to the subject and thus give what Bach and his contemporaries would have called ‘affekt’.

The second fugue is lighter in tone, with a playful countersubject quoting the folk song ‘Lavender’s Blue’. The final fugue seems to have been among the last things she wrote; on one copy of the manuscript she wrote out the opening lines of Psalm 137 which composers have long responded to as a song of exile : ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept; we hanged up our harps upon the willows: How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ and afterwards a dedication ‘To Lincoln Green’, her first married home, which she had built with her husband Brian and where she raised her family. Was this nostalgia for an old home felt as a signal to hang up her harp? The fugue’s halting close and half-resolution on a final mournful suspension seems especially poignant in this light.