John Dowland's First Booke of Songes or Ayres of 1597 has long been considered a cornerstone in the development of all English song. Dowland's music mingled many different styles of secular music, including the madrigal, the consort song, the solo "Broadside Ballad," and various dance musics of the Elizabethan courtly scene. One reason for the immediate commercial success of the book is that the volume's novel "table format" allowed performances by a versatile number of ensembles: solo lute, lute and voice, voice and viol consort, vocal quartet. Both the manifold styles and the diverse performing forces can be embodied in any single song; that is certainly the case in his If my complaints could passions move. Earlier instrumental versions of the piece exist, proving its origin in dance tunes; later arrangements support a variety of performance contexts.

A dance-song for lute was apparently the earliest version of If my complaints could passions move. Specifically, Dowland's piece was first a Galliard, his favorite dance. As such, the music proceeds in a stately triple meter, with frequent cross-rhythms in the inner voices. The overall structure of the piece reveals an utterly elegant balance of phrasing. In three repeated segments, each concludes with the same hemiola rhythm. The middle phrase relaxes into a more major harmonic region, though only briefly; the final phrase opens with a striking melodic leap upwards. Perhaps it was the combination of these features with the very surprising third pitch of the Galliard melody that led Dowland to associate the text of a hopeless lover with it in the First Booke. At least seven manuscripts contain the lute Galliard, so that the tune was already well-known. With the text, the Galliard is transformed into a courtly ballad, its elegant proportions well-suited to chamber performance.

Yet it is only the third version of the piece that gives one precious detail of its genesis: If my complaints began life as a musical tribute to a pirate! When Dowland published a later version of the Galliard in his Lachrymae (1603), the print calls the piece "Captaine Digorie Piper his Galliard." No information survives to suggest how Dowland became acquainted with the young pirate captain Digory Piper, but it seems likely that the Galliard was made before Digory's early death in 1590. Several other pieces in the First Booke carry similar ascriptions to famous patrons.

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