The "Dump" or "Dompe"
The word “Dump” has a meaning now unfamiliar to us commonly
found in the titles of English music from the renaissance
era (sometimes in other forms, such as "dompe" or “doomp”).
It has been suggested that it may imply melancholy and
could derive from the French "tombeau" (lament), or from
German "dumpf" (dull or dazed). However in Shakespeare's
'Romeo and Juliet' Act 4. Scene 5 we see:
"O, play me some merry dump,
to comfort me, ....."
and a few lines later:
"When griping grief the heart doth wound,
And doleful dumps the mind oppress..."
This may (as Percy Scholes suggests in his 'Oxford
Companion to Music') be ‘one of Shakespeare's “little
jokes"’ but it does suggest that the meaning of the word
was somewhat wider, perhaps similar to the modern usage of
'the blues'.
The word does remain in the language in the plural in the
phrase 'down in the dumps' but it is difficult to know what
word to use in its place today. Dumps are usually
instrumental pieces based on a simple ground and they are
very different from sung laments and instrumental tombeaux
of this and later periods. Considering the nature of the
music in this and other dumps I have chosen 'reverie' as a
related word that, to me, conveys something about this type
of piece.
A letter from Chris Goodwin in "Lute News" (the Lute
Society magazine) 71, Oct 2004 refers to an earlier article
on this topic and makes a somewhat similar suggestion.
The music scholar Michael Fink has published a playing
edition (for lute) of the extant English lute dumps
entitled ‘Down in the Dompes’ (LGV Publishing 2008,
www.lgv-pub.com) listing 24
pieces (including some variants).
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