Description
Amid all the technical fireworks, Fortune my Foe is the album's moment of stillness. A simple melody, centuries old, that gets by entirely without spectacle. No virtuosity required, none offered.
It almost certainly began as a song before it was ever written down, passed from mouth to mouth and player to player, shifting slightly with each pair of hands it passed through. John Dowland, the English composer, was among the first to commit it to the page, sometime around the close of the sixteenth century, giving something essentially fugitive a fixed form for the first time.
The title is not merely atmospheric. In England, this melody was used as accompaniment at public executions. And yet it also remained, quite separately from that association, simply a tune that people played; at home, in the street, without any particular weight attached to it. The same music, carrying entirely different meanings depending on who was listening and why. Some melodies are like that.
