The Bagpipe Society

Concerning Mr Tollett

A while ago, I was relistening to the fine CD ‘Love and a Bottle’, by the Bagpipe Society’s president Jon Swayne, and accordionista Becky Price. It is a fine CD, and one track in particular caught my ear, Mr Tollett’s Hornpipe, a 3/2 hornpipe (see over).

The frontispiece of the 1701 edition of Apollo's Banquet, which contains Tollet's Hornpipe. The tune continued to be published after his death

A man who writes such a fine tune, must have more up his sleeve, how is it that we don’t hear more of him? I had seen his name once before. In John Playford’s ‘Division Violin’, second ed, 1685, there is Tollett’s Ground, a set of divisions. Curiously, further in, we find ‘Mr George Tollet’s divisions on a ground’. Were there two Tollett’s?

Thomas Tollett (Tawlett,Tollit) was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1630, and died in London in August (?)1696. Four members of the Tollett family, Thomas, John, George, and Charles, served as city musicians in Dublin between 1669 and 1688. This explains the second Tollett, George.

Tollett wrote a mixed bag of work, much as other composers of the time did, with chamber music, vocal music, and music for restoration comedies, including a funeral piece on the death of Queen Mary (Maria Stuart) ‘The Queen’s Farewell’ in 1694. Here transcribed for three bagpipes in’D’.

Other works included music for ‘Love for Money’ with Thomas D'Urfey (1691) ‘Bonny lad prithee lay thy pipe down’, song, from the play The Marriage-Hater Matched by Thomas D'Urfey (1692), ‘Henry the Second’ by John Bancroft (1692), ‘The Volunteers’ by Thomas Shadwell (1692), ‘The Cheats’ by John Wilson (c. 1693), ‘The Sages of old’ , song from Thomas D'Urfey's play The Virtuous Wife (1694), ‘The Lover's Luck’ by Thomas Dilke (1695), ‘The Generous Enemies’ by John Corye ( c1696). A Consort of Musick of 3 Parts (1692), Suites and individual airs (1691), ‘Such command o'er my fate’, a song (1693) He also seems to have been responsible for many short tunes and exercises. Researching another project, I found tunes by Tollett in George Bingham’s ‘Airs Anglois’ vols 1-4, and ‘The Sprightly Companion’, a tutor for the Hautboy, published, unsurprisingly, by Playford, in 1695, as well as Apollo’s Banquet (Playford).

I have transcribed all the works I have found, and found that they are quite bagpipe friendly, should you play Swayne or French types of chromatic pipes with a good range.

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