Now O Now I Needs Must Part (The Frog Galliard)
By Paisleyfrog on May 3, 2026 2:35 am
Let's do some Renaissance music. For real this time!
Image is an inside view of my oud (that the bridge exploded off of). Another repair project...
Last week's song really got renaissance music stuck in my mind. I've spent a LOT of time at ren fairs, the Celtic band I was in had a fair number of early music pieces in the setlists, and I’m currently in an early music group. I've recorded arrangements for other projects before, and have been wanting to do that for Weekly Beats. Yet again I had little time for music, so I thought it might be nice to take the writing pressure off and do an arrangement of a piece I knew.
In deciding what to play, I looked at an unfamiliar Dowland piece called Now O Now I Needs Must Part (1599)...and discovered it shared a melody with a piece I HAD played before - The Frog Galliard (a dance piece Dowland had written in 1597. Reduce/reuse/recycle!) I've done a recording of that before, but never used any of those lyrics. Plus come on...Frog Galliard? I had to do a new arrangement of it.
The version I used had the recorder lines (which I mixed and matched), but nothing else. I wanted to keep the arrangement relatively simple with some guitar or bass. I don't currently have a classical guitar, but the FrankenGuitar I made last summer worked nicely (I had cut out the broken sound board and replaced it with a metal serving tray. More subtle and muted now.) Thought about adding bowed upright bass but ultimately left it alone. Also ran out of time. And hey! No midi this week, all tracks recorded live.
Vocals were a bit of a challenge - I don't like the key of G. Really had to work on opening up and not pinching, this is sort of high for me and I’m still feeling the effects of my cold. The melody isn't exactly right for Now O Now, and I made up my own harmony, but that's OK…this is my own arrangement. 
Everything got pretty much done in a few hours - recorded the instrumental in an hour and a half on Friday evening, and then finished it off in a couple hours late that night. This was fun.
There are three verses to this song, but I only did the first and the refrain. I wanted to split the feel between the song and the Galliard…also didn’t do as many repeats on the sections as would be as written. A bit of a slice and dice into its own structure.
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The recorder/lute combo sounds great! Excellent work!
