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Composed by Robert Johnson (c.1583-1633). From New York Public Library, MS Drexel 4041, ff. 25r-26v.

Joseph Cornwell, tenor
The Parley of Instruments

"Arm, arm! the scouts are all come in!" by Johnson appears in John Fletcher's The Mad Lover (1617). Here the intent is to cure madness by requiring the character to recount the scene of war that had caused his mental distress. Ian Spink describes it as "the nearest thing to stile rappresentativo in English music of the period." Short, disjointed text statements are set to music that emphasizes sudden changes of phrase length, rhythm, and harmonic direction. As a result of this out-burst, the character undergoes a Freudian catharsis and becomes free to resume his normal course of action. — Enrique Alberto Arias, Reflections from a Cracked Mirror: Madness in Music and Theory of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries-An Overview, 2001

With an abundance of gifted melancholics, England was ripe for stile molle. It is more surprising that Jacobean composers made use of something very like stile concitato, since Monteverdi claimed that he'd invented it in 1624. Robert Johnson, the most talented composer of Jacobean theatre music, wrote Arm, arm for John Fletcher's The Mad Lover (1616-eight years before Monteverdi's I combattimento), in which an old soldier recalls an exciting battle.

The singer impersonates a tattoo (Dub-a-dub-a-dub) and a fanfare (Tara-rara-rara) with rapid syllables on a single note, as if he himself were the drummer and the bugler, as well as the archer and the cavalryman-like Monteverdi's testo, he assumes the imaginative burden of the whole battle. An especially Monteverdian touch occurs at the end, as the music switches from stile concitato to stile molle. Mournful descending scales toll the passing bell for Diocles and the rest of the dead. Johnson was also sensitive to the special kind of stile molle, based on a descending tetrachord, that Dowland had developed: in Orpheus I am, another song from The Mad Lover, Orpheus's lament drips with lachrymae-figures straight out of Dowland.— Daniel Albright, Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres, 2007