Music for a While

"Music for a While" is a da capo aria for voice (usually soprano or tenor), harpsichord and bass viol by the English Baroque composer Henry Purcell.

Based on a repeating ground bass pattern, it is the second of four movements from his incidental music (Z 583) to Oedipus, a version of Sophocles' play by John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, published in 1679.

While Mr Purcell modulates away from the home key of g minor, it is not written as a Da Capo composition.

[2] Interestingly, the principal ground bass phrase, played before the entrance of the voice, is three bars long instead of the far more usual four.

During the coronavirus lockdown in 2020, The King's Singers invited Polish countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński to collaborate on a remote performance which subsequently received over a million views on Youtube [6]