Thomas Robinson New Citharen Lessons (1609)

Thomas Robinson's New Citharen Lessons is one of the most important collections of citharen music printed during the late English Renaissance. Now available in a modern edition, Robinson's work contains a collection of pavans, galliards, almains, grounds, fantasias, instrumental psalms, and arrangements of popular tunes for the four-course cittern and the archcittern, a larger instrument with additional strings.

The present edition is based upon the work of Dr. William Casey, who transcribed all of Robinson's cittern pieces from the composer's tutor for the instrument. It presents the music in both tablature and modern keyboard notation and also includes information concerning the life of Thomas Robinson and the role of the cittern in the English Renaissance.

Designed and produced to lie flat on the music stand, this edition will appeal to performers and scholars of Elizabethan music. In addition, since some of the pieces are based on popular broadside melodies, the appeal will extend to folklorists and students of English literature.

From the original dedicatory epistle of the 1609 work:

Gentlemen,... at last I have given you the sweetest Cornell of my conceited Cithering. For first, you shall have strange lessons with strange tunings for the foure stringed Citharen, the like neuer found out before for sweetnes and goodnes to play... alone, also lessons for two to play together, & withall a third Citharen; (which invention was first begun by an Italian in Italy, but altered, and strings augmented by me.) Containing fourteene course of strings: most full, sweete and easie.... Your musicall friend.

Alfredo Colman is Assistant Professor of Music at Southwestern University at Georgetown, TX. He received the Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Texas at Austin in summer 2005, where he held an Assistant Instructorship in the Musicology/Ethnomusicology Division of the School of Music. He has also held faculty posts at the Universidad Evangélica del Paraguay. He published articles in Musical Life of Latin America and Composers of Latin America: a Biographical Dictionary.

The late Dr. William Casey was chairman of the Music Education Deprtment at the University of Michigan from 1967 to 1984, and Director of the Collegium Musicum at Baylor University from 1967 to 1988. He edited Thomas Morley's First Book of Consort Lessons, which was published by Baylor University Press in 1982.