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Thomas Morley

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Thomas Morley
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(born 1557/58, Norwich, Norfolk, Eng. — died October 1602, London) English composer, organist, and music theorist. He was educated at Oxford and studied with William Byrd. Though he composed a number of anthems and psalms, he is best known for his secular songs, including those published in the First Booke of Ayres (1600), and for the treatise A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musick (1597). By editing and printing several anthologies of Italian music (often reworked), he was instrumental in bringing the Italian madrigal to England. He also edited The Triumphes of Oriana (published 1603), the most significant collection of English madrigals.

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Music Encyclopedia: Thomas Morley
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(b Norwich, 1557-8; d London, early Oct 1602). English composer. A pupil of Byrd, he was master of the choristers at Norwich Cathedral (1583-7) before becoming organist of St Paul's Cathedral, London (by 1589), and a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal (1592). From 1598 he held the patent for music printing that had once been Byrd's. At some period he was also employed as a government spy. A most influential figure, as composer, music editor and theorist, he wrote service music, anthems, psalms and Latin motets as well as over 100 madrigals and lighter secular works (1593-7), accompanied solo songs (1600) and keyboard and other instrumental music. His editions and anthologies of Italian music, some with new English texts, were chiefly responsible for the Elizabethan vogue for Italian madrigals; and he edited the famous English madrigal anthology The Triumphes of Oriana (1601). His renowned Plaine and Easie Introduction (1597), a practical and lively treatise in dialogue form, was long popular.

works:
Sacred music

  • 3 services
  • service music
  • English anthems, psalms, Latin motets
Secular vocal music
  • c100 madrigals and canzonets, incl. Aprill is in my mistris face, Now is the month of maying
  • songs
Instrumental music
  • dances, variations, kbd
  • ensemble pieces

Biography: Thomas Morley
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The composer, organist, and theorist Thomas Morley (ca. 1557-ca. 1602) was the chief English exponent of the Italian madrigal tradition.

Thomas Morley was born about 1557 and, sometime between 1602 and 1608, died after a long illness. During his early years he studied composition with William Byrd and organ under Sebastian Westcote. In 1588 Morley received a bachelor of music degree from Oxford and took the position of organist at St. Giles, Cripplegate. In 1591 he became organist at St. Paul's, joining the Chapel Royal the following year. About this time Morley married; he and his wife, Susan, had three children between 1596 and 1600.

During this period Morley, like Byrd a Roman Catholic, encountered trouble as a recusant. Charles Paget, an agent, had intercepted letters which held enough incriminating evidence for him to have had Morley hanged. He repented so abjectly, however, that Paget let him off.

In 1598 Morley applied successfully for the license to print music. But by then his health had begun to fail, and the new outlet proved more burdensome than productive. He had already published his Canzonets to Three Voices (1593), Madrigals to Four Voices (1594), Ballets to Five Voices, and Canzonets to Two Voices (both 1595), and his Canzonets … Selected out of … Italian Authors, Canzonets to Five and Six Voices, and his treatise A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (all 1597). Between 1598 and 1601 he produced and published a new collection each year and also reedited a great many of his earlier publications. He also left a great quantity of unpublished music, including ten motets, four services, five anthems, keyboard music, and viol consorts.

Morley has been called the father of the English madrigal. He was the earliest and the chief figure in the wholesale transplantation of the Italian madrigal tradition to England, and the quick assimilation of Italian styles and forms into a burgeoning English tradition was largely of his doing. Single-handedly he translated the Italian canzonet into a native form, the English short ayre, in his Canzonets of 1593 and 1595. In the latter collection he also included nine two-part instrumental fantasias, which, though bearing fanciful Italian titles, are marvelous examples of a new and sprightly English counterpoint. In these canzonets, as in the Madrigals to Four Voices and Ballets to Five Voices, Morley obviously patterned his works after Italian models, even paraphrasing a few, but he surpassed these models in harmonic variety and tonal sophistication.

Morley's sacred music is more deeply serious and moving than the canzonets and madrigals. But these sacred works show no greater contrapuntal skill, no more elegant finish in the new English style than the hundredodd secular pieces he had composed on models straight from late Renaissance Italy.

Further Reading

Morley's A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music was edited by R. Alec Harman and contains a brilliant foreword by Thurston Dart (1952). In the absence of a monograph on Morley, the following readings are suggested: Peter Warlock, The English Ayre (1926); Edmund Horace Fellowes, English Cathedral Music (1941; rev. ed. 1970), and The English Madrigal Composers (1948); and Joseph Kerman, The Elizabethan Madrigal: A Comparative Study (1962).

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Thomas Morley
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Morley, Thomas, c.1557-1603, English composer; pupil of William Byrd. He was gentleman of the Chapel Royal to Queen Elizabeth I and organist of St. Paul's Cathedral. He set to music some of Shakespeare's songs. Morley's works include motets, music for Anglican services, madrigals that are among the most charming examples of this form. He wrote a unique guide to 16th-century English musical practice, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597, new ed. 1952).
Artist: Thomas Morley
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  • Period: Renaissance (1450-1599)
  • Country: England
  • Born: ca. 1557 in Norwich, England
  • Died: 1602 10 in London, England
  • Genres: Chamber Music, Choral Music, Miscellaneous Music, Vocal Music

Biography

Thomas Morley, though born the obscure son of a Norwich brewer, rose over the course of his life to centrality in nearly every aspect of Elizabethan musical culture. Though no records of his early training survive, he apparently studied with William Byrd, as the dedication of his theoretical treatise A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597) calls Byrd his "Master." His professional career included service at the Cathedral of Norwich (1583 to July 1587), a Bachelor's degree in Music from Oxford in 1588, service as organist at St. Paul's in London from 1589, and a position as Gentleman of the Chapel Royal as of 1592. From 1593 until his death (apparently in 1602), he presented a total of eleven musical publications - compositions, arrangements, and writings -- which brought him to the forefront of national attention. He may have been friends with Shakespeare.

Many of his own compositions, especially those for the Church, betray the influence of his teacher Byrd. A small number of Latin motets, and a selection of Anglican anthems abound in severe (and well-wrought) counterpoint; three full Anglican services and a setting of the Funeral Sentences, however, display more clarity and simplicity of texture. His keyboard works and consort music demonstrate skill and fluency in an inherited idiom.

The most influential of Morley's varied musical activities was his effort on behalf of the madrigal; indeed, he was a prime force in the adoption of this quintessential Italian form into the world of Elizabethan England. In 1595 he printed a volume, with parallel English and Italian editions, of canzonets and one of balletts, adapting and arranging these lighter Italian pieces by Anerio and Gastoldi to English usage; these were followed by two more anthologies of Italian music in 1597 and 1598. A large number of his own English madrigals were also printed; many of which are artful rearrangements of Italian models, such as Sing we and Chant It, which expands Gastoldi's A lieta vita, while others broach original themes in the style, including his best-known madrigal April is in my Mistress' Face, from the first book of madrigals of 1594. His very last publication, the Triumphs of Orianna (1602), presents a collection of his own and others' madrigals which honor the Queen. Throughout these works, Morley concentrates on lighter forms, avoiding the more "serious" devices of word-painting and chromaticism.

In addition to his work as organist, church composer, madrigalist, editor, and music printer, he assumed the Crown Monopoly on music printing first awarded to Byrd. In 1597 Morley authored a "Practicall" treatise on the notation and composition of music ("that in our vulgar tongue which of all other things hath been in writing least known to our countrymen"). The volume is passionate and quite readable, demonstrating its author's deep researches into the development of music, especially Italian music, and his desire to make his knowledge available to the public.

~ Timothy Dickey, All Music Guide
Wikipedia: Thomas Morley
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For other persons named Thomas Morley, see Thomas Morley (disambiguation).

Thomas Morley (1557 or 1558 – October 1602) was an English composer, theorist, editor and organist of the Renaissance, and the foremost member of the English Madrigal School. He was the most famous composer of secular music in Elizabethan England and an organist at St Paul's Cathedral. He and Robert Johnson are the composers of the only surviving contemporary settings of verse by Shakespeare.

Contents

Life

Morley was born in Norwich, in East Anglia, the son of a brewer. Most likely he was a singer in the local cathedral from his boyhood, and he became master of choristers there in 1583. However, Morley evidently spent some time away from East Anglia, for he later referred to the great Elizabethan composer of sacred music, William Byrd, as his teacher; while the dates he studied with Byrd are not known, they were most likely in the early 1570s. In 1588 he received his bachelor's degree from Oxford, and shortly thereafter was employed as organist at St. Paul's in London. His young son died the following year in 1589.

In 1588 Nicholas Yonge published his Musica transalpina, the collection of Italian madrigals fitted with English texts, which touched off the explosive and colorful vogue for madrigal composition in England. Morley evidently found his compositional direction at this time, and shortly afterwards began publishing his own collections of madrigals (11 in all).

Morley lived for a time in the same parish as Shakespeare, and a connection between the two has been long speculated, though never proven. His famous setting of "It was a lover and his lass" from As You Like It has never been established as having been used in a performance of Shakespeare's play, though the possibility that it was is obvious. Morley was highly placed by the mid-1590s and would have had easy access to the theatrical community; certainly there was then, as there is now, a close connection between prominent actors and musicians.

While Morley attempted to imitate the spirit of Byrd in some of his early sacred works, it was in the form of the madrigal that he made his principal contribution to music history. His work in the genre has remained in the repertory to the present day, and shows a wider variety of emotional color, form and technique than anything by other composers of the period. Usually his madrigals are light, quick-moving and easily singable, like his well-known "Now is the Month of Maying"; he took the aspects of Italian style that suited his personality and anglicised them. Other composers of the English Madrigal School, for instance Thomas Weelkes and John Wilbye, were to write madrigals in a more serious or sombre vein.

In addition to his madrigals, Morley wrote instrumental music, including keyboard music (some of which has been preserved in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book), and music for the broken consort, a uniquely English ensemble of two viols, flute, lute, cittern and bandora, notably as published by William Barley in 1599 in The First Booke of Consort Lessons, made by diuers exquisite Authors, for six Instruments to play together, the Treble Lute, the Pandora, the Cittern, the Base-Violl, the Flute & Treble-Violl.

Morley's Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (published 1597) remained popular for almost two hundred years after its author's death, and remains an important reference for information about sixteenth century composition and performance.

Compositions

Thomas Morley's compositions include (in alphabetical order):

  • April is in my mistress' face
  • Arise, get up my deere,
  • Cease mine eyes
  • Crewell you pull away to soone
  • Doe you not know?
  • Fantasie: Il Doloroso
  • Fantasie: Il Grillo
  • Fantasie: Il Lamento
  • Fantasie: La Caccia
  • Fantasie: La Rondinella
  • Fantasie: La Sampogna
  • Fantasie: La Sirena
  • Fantasie: La Tortorella
  • Flora wilt thou torment mee
  • Fyre and Lightning
  • Goe yee my canzonets
  • Good Morrow, Fair Ladies of the May
  • Harke Alleluia!
  • Hould out my hart
  • I goe before my darling
  • I should for griefe and anguish
  • In nets of golden wyers
  • It was a lover and his lass
  • Joy, joy doth so arise
  • La Girandola
  • Ladie, those eies
  • Lady if I through griefe
  • Leave now mine eyes
  • Lo heere another love
  • Love learns by laughing
  • Miraculous loves wounding
  • My bonny lass she smileth
  • Nolo Mortem Peccatoris
  • Now is the month of maying
  • O thou that art so cruell
  • Say deere, will you not have mee?
  • See, see, myne own sweet jewel
  • Sing we and chant it
  • Sweet nymph
  • 'Tis the time of Yuletide Glee
  • VI. God morrow, Fayre Ladies, (down a fourth)
  • What ayles my darling?
  • When loe by break of morning
  • Where art thou wanton?

See also

References and further reading

External links


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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Music Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Music. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.  Read more
Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
Artist. Copyright © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. Content provided by All Music Guide ®, a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
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