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printed in Bateson's Second Set of Madrigals, 1618
(see p. 48)

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QUEEN ELIZABETH
From an engraving by Thomas Geminus, 1559


























The
English Madrigal
By
EDMUND H. FELLOWEs
M. A., Mus. Bac. Oxford; Mus. Doc. Dublin
º
:
:
i
:
**
L O N D O N
O X F O RID UNIVERSITY PRESS
HUMPHREY MILFORD
I 9 2 5
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
English Madrigal Verse. Clarendon Press.
The English Madrigal Composers. Clarendon Press.
William Byrd : a short account of his
life and work. Clarendon Press.
Orlando Gibbons : a short account of his
life and work. Clarendon Press.
The English Madrigal School—the works
of the English madrigal composers
complete in 36 volumes. Stainer & Bell, Ltd.
The English School of Lutenist Song-
writers — the works of Dowland,
Campian, Rosseter, Ford, &c. Stainer & Bell, Ltd.
The three Masses of Byrd. Stainer & Bell, Ltd.
The three Masses of Byrd adapted for
use in the Anglican Church. Stainer & Bell, Ltd.
The ‘Great’ Service of Byrd complete. Clarendon Press.
The Short Service (morning and evening
canticles) of Byrd. Clarendon Press.
The Second and Third Services (evening
canticles) of Byrd. Clarendon Press.
The Short Service (morning and evening
canticles) of Gibbons. - Clarendon Press.
Printed in England
C O N T E N T S
PAGE
I. MUSIC IN THE ELIZABETHAN HOME 7
2. THE MADRIGAL . º g e . 26
a. Origin and etymology . e g . 26
b. Form and technique . e , , . 33
c. The Part-books . * e & . 42
d. Rhythm and underlaying . e . 5 I
e. Harmony . e g & . . 6o
3. THE WORDS . * * } e * . . 64
4. THE COMPOSERS . C. ſº gº . 8O
Alison, 8o ; Bateson, 81 ; Bennet, 82; Byrd, 83;
Carlton, 86; Cavendish, 86; Cobbold, 88; East, 88 ;
Farmer, 89; Farnaby, 90 ; Gibbons, E., 91 ;
Gibbons, O., 91 ; Greaves, 93 ; Hilton, J., sen., 93 ;
Hilton, J., jun., 94 ; Holborne, 94 ; Holmes, 95;
Hunt, 95 ; Johnson, 95 ; Jones, 96; Kirbye, 98 ;
Lichfild, 98 ; Lisley, 99 ; Marson, 99; Milton, 99 ;
Morley, Ioo ; Mundy, Io2 ; Nicholson, Io2;
Norcome, Io2 ; Pattrick, Io; ; Pilkington, Io; ;
Tomkins, 104; Vautor, Io; ; Ward, 106; Weelkes,
Io7; Wilbye, Io9 ; Youll, I Io.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Coat of arms of Arthur, Lord Chichester, printed in Bateson's
Second Set of Madrigals, 1618
Queen Elizabeth. From an engraving by Thomas Geminus,
I 559
Hengrave Hall. From Gage's History of Hengrave Hall
The Elvetham Entertainment. From the engraving in the
original edition printed by John Wolfe in 1591
A page from Bateson's Second Set of Madrigals
Title-page of Morley's Book of Ballets, 1595 .
Sir Philip Sidney
William Kempe. From Kempe’s Nine Daies Wonder, 16oo
. The Dedication to The Triumphes of Oriana .
Queen Elizabeth. From an engraving by Crispin de Passe,
I 592
Stondon Church. Photographs by Underwood Press Service .
PAGE
I I
23
43
49
67
73
77
77
87
I
Music in the Elizabethan Home
IT is sometimes asserted that a piece of music cannot be
properly appreciated unless the listener by an effort of imagina-
tion can picture to himself the surroundings and conditions in
which it was composed and first performed. For example,
there are those who consider that a string quartet by Haydn
or Mozart will give the listener greater enjoyment if he can
think of the music being performed in the late eighteenth
century with its characteristic features of furniture and dress.
It is an error to suppose that the actual merits of a musical
composition are in any real sense dependent upon secondary
conditions such as these. Opinions may differ about the relative
value of the various factors which make for beauty and artistic
merit in a piece of music, but if a composition belonging to
any period has the inherent power to enable it to pass the
prolonged tests of intelligent criticism and to establish its
claim to be acknowledged as a work of Art in the true sense,
it is entirely free from all considerations of date and from all
other extraneous associations, nor does even its nationality,
however strongly marked upon it, carry any weight in assessing
its artistic value. For the purpose of artistic valuation it is
just as little necessary to know the conditions in which a motet
of Palestrina or of Byrd, or a fugue of Bach, or a symphony of
Beethoven, was composed, as it is to be a creditable classical
scholar in order to be capable of appreciating the master-
pieces of Greek statuary.
On the other hand, it is true that music, in a greater degree
perhaps than any of the other arts, not excepting even painting,
carries with it the date of its composition, and in consequence
8 The English Madrigal
it must be admitted that it is helpful both to the performer
and the listener to know approximately the date or at least the
period to which a work belongs. And with the English mad-
rigals it becomes a matter of legitimate interest to know
something of the general conditions in which they were first
produced.
The English madrigal was essentially the product of the
English home. It is not always realized that in the sixteenth
century, and for some time afterwards, there were no such
things as public concerts; the performance of all secular music
at that time was limited to the home and was private. Nor is
it generally understood that before this period very little
secular music of an organized kind, composed on an artistic
and formal basis, had been produced at all. Not that there
had been none; primitive man must have discovered that he
had a singing voice as soon as he found that he could speak,
and possibly before ; and folk-song must be almost as old as
the human race. Moreover, popular tavern-songs were, of
course, no novelty in the sixteenth century. On the other
hand, the songs of the Trouvères, the Troubadours, the
Jongleurs, and the Frottole cannot be regarded as the formal
compositions of definite individuals designed on the principles
of what is known as art-song.
For thousands of years music had been developed on purely
melodic and monodic lines, but when the musicians of the
Western world made the great discovery that melodies could
be combined and that different notes could be sung simul-
taneously with beautiful effect, this new Art remained for
a long time in the hands of the clergy and was used almost
entirely in connexion with the services of the Church. Thus,
for many generations all the laws governing musical com-
position of the new kind were evolved by the clergy, and the
craft of serious and scientific composition was exclusively
Music in the Elizabethan Home 9
a clerical one. Some secular compositions were indeed pro-
duced on scientific lines from time to time in the fourteenth
century, and even earlier. Examples of these are the early
Florentine madrigals of Landino, Piero, and Zacharias, and
a century earlier John of Fornsete had written the famous
round Sumer is icumen in in Reading Abbey. These secular
pieces formed a very small proportion of the total output, and
cannot be said to represent the most serious efforts of which
the composers were capable. **
But music shared in the great movement towards expansion
and development which was so conspicuous a feature of the
sixteenth century throughout the whole of Europe; there
came an inevitable demand for a better type as well as a larger
quantity of secular music. The result was that, first in the
Low Countries and Italy, and later in the century in England,
leading musicians turned their attention to evolving that fine
secular form of composition which was known as the madrigal.
Shortly afterwards abstract instrumental music was beginning
to be written for the ‘consort ’, or combination of viols, and
also for the key-board instruments of the day and for the lute.
At the close of the century the instinct for self-expression led
to the evolution of the Art-song for a single voice, a feature
of which was the accompaniment, designed to constitute an
integral part of the composer’s work in contrast to the folk-
song, which was either sung without accompaniment or accom-
panied at the discretion and taste of any individual performer
with improvised harmonies.
All these forms of secular music were pre-eminently for the
home ; and in England, particularly, the performance of it in
the great houses, which were built in such numbers during
the later years of Elizabeth’s reign, was one of the leading
features of the domestic life of the period.
The last quarter of the sixteenth century had seen a great
IO The English Madrigal
growth of wealth and consequent luxury in England. In
certain directions this led to much vulgar display, a feature
that has at all times been almost inseparable from a sudden
access of wealth ; but fortunately the taste of the day was by
no means generally on the side of vulgarity; and does not the
term ‘Elizabethan stand for some of the noblest dramatic
and lyric poetry of all time : The fine taste that was inherent
in the Elizabethans resulted not only in the composition of
so much splendid music, but also in the widespread custom
of singing and playing it. So it was that the newly-rich as
well as the old nobility and gentry vied with each other in
including music among the many luxurious features of their
great houses. Famous composers were often engaged as
resident musicians, who occupied an important position in
these establishments, ranking with the steward and the master
of the household, and often enjoying the private confidence of
the members of the family circle.
A typical example of a musical household at this time is
Hengrave Hall near Bury St. Edmunds. This house, although
by no means one of the largest, is a beautiful and characteristic
example of a sixteenth-century mansion. It was built by
Sir Thomas Kytson, a wool merchant who had made a large
fortune trading with Antwerp. The magnificence of the
establishment was much increased by his son, Sir Thomas,
who married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Thomas Cornwallis,
of Brome Hall, not far distant over the Norfolk border. If the
elder Kytson was a self-made man, his son found his way into
first-rate society; moreover, his two daughters made excellent
matches, the elder one, Elizabeth, marrying Sir Charles
Cavendish ; and the younger, Mary, married Thomas, Lord
Darcy, who subsequently was raised to the Earldom of Rivers.
The heraldic embellishments of Hengrave are full of reference
to the alliances of the younger Sir Thomas and his daughters.
TITVIH GLAVNI ONGIH

I2 The English Madrigal
This Sir Thomas, and more particularly his wife, patronized
music extensively, and music was richly provided for in their
house. Most fortunately a large collection of documents and
letters accumulated at Hengrave during the time of the
Kytsons has been preserved. Among these documents are two
inventories; the first of these was made on the death of the
younger Sir Thomas in March 1602–3, and the second in
July 1621. The list of musical instruments and books in these
inventories is of remarkable interest :
In ye chamber where ye musicyons playe
Instrewments and Books of Musicke
Item, one borded chest, with locke and key, with vi
vialls e * © e * tº © . iiijli.
Item, one borded chest, with six violenns . tº . iijli.
Item, one case of recorders, in nomber vij . tº . xli.
Item, iiij cornutes, one being a mute cornute © . XJ.
Item, one great base lewte, and a meane lewte, both
wºhout cases & ſº e e tº we . XXXJ.
Item, one trebble lute and a meane lute with cases . xl.
Item, one bandore, and a sitherne with a double case . xxxx.
Item, two sackboots w” ther cases tº © © . XXX.5.
Item, three hoeboys wºn a curtall' and a lysarden 2 . xxs.
Item, two flewtes whout cases . tº . . . iis. Vjd.
Item, one payer of little virginalls e . XJ.
Item, one wind instrument like a virginall . º . XXJ.
Item, two lewting books covered with lether * e
Item, vi bookes covered with pchement, contë vj setts in ijs.
a book, with songs of iiij, v, vi, vij, and viij partes .
Item, v books covered with pchement contº iij setts in a
book with songs of v parts . © º tº . iijs.
Item, vi books covered with pchement contë ij setts in a
book, with English songs of iiij, v, and vi partes . iijs.
Item, v books covered with pchement, wº" pavines, gal-
liards, measures and cuntry daunces . * . VJ.
Item, v books of levaultoes and corrantoes . © vid.
* A short kind of bassoon. * A serpent, or bass cornet.
Music in the Elizabethan Home I3
Item, v old books covered wºn pchment wº" songes of v
partes e © ſe * ſº * vjd.
Item, v bookes covered with blacke lether . * ijs.
Item, iiij books covered with pchment w" songes of iiij
partes tº g g e & e tº . vid.
Item, v books covered with pchment w" pavines and gal-
liards for the consert . . iijf.
Item, one great booke wº came from Cadis covered w”
redd lether, and gylt . tº c © tº YJ.
Item, v books conté one sett of Italyan fa-laes . xviijd.
Item, one great payer of dooble virginalls. In the parlor Xxxs.
Item, one payer of great orgaynes. In the Churche . vli.
Item, hangings of blewe and yellow saye complete . iijs.
Item, one long bord with ij tressels © e ijs.
Item, one long ioyned forme and one playne forme ijs.
This splendid collection of instruments was at the disposal
of the ‘Master of the musicke’ for the use of the players
under his control. The ‘chamber where the musicyons playe’
was the chamber looking into the hall, the only part of the
house that has been altered since the time of the Kytsons.
It must be assumed that there was a small number of paid
musicians in the private band, some of whom would perhaps
hold other domestic positions in the house, while some would
live in the neighbouring town of Bury St. Edmunds, but their
number would be certainly supplemented from the many
retainers who lived in the house. With these ample resources
instrumental music would be performed either during supper
or after it, and also on any special gala occasion.
Next to the ‘musicyons' chamber ', or minstrel gallery, was
the chamber occupied by the resident ‘Master of the musicke ’,
a position held at Hengrave for many years by no less a person
than John Wilbye, the great madrigal-writer, who succeeded
Robert Johnson, another notable Elizabethan composer.
Edward Johnson was also at one time connected with Hen-
I4 The English Madrigal
grave Hall, possibly as an assistant to Wilbye. In the inventory
of 1602–3 this room is called ‘Willbee's chamber 2. It con-
tained :
Item, one playne borded bedstead corded . ę ijs.
Item, one matt and one fether bedd . ſº º \ …;
Item, two boulsters of canves and one of tyk © ſ XXJ.J.
Item, one payr of russett woollen blanketts . º W.J.
Item, one coverlett of blewe and redd woollen being
double and lyned with southege or canves . . iiijſ.
Item, one other coverlett of Ocknells lyned with canves . iijs.
Item, hangings of greene saye for ye chamber compleate iijs.
Item, one ioyned stoole and one borde with feete and
one playne forme e * g tº o ..} ijs.
Item, one latten plate for a candell
By 1621 Wilbye’s position had grown more important at
Hengrave and his room was more fully furnished ; the chair
was a noticeable addition.
In Willbee's Chamber
Item, One posted bedstead corde º e g is.
Item, One matt º ſº º © tº & is.
Item, One fether bed * dº e e © is.
Item, One bolster . . * * * * is.
Item, Twoe pillowes of twylle . ge & tº ijs.
Item, One payer of wº wollen blanckets e ſº is.
Item, One coverlet of red and blew duble stuff lynd with
canvis & is.
Item, One coverled of verders lynd with canvis is.
Item, One teastor of blew and yelow saye frengd with
blew and yelowe crewell © g i.e. tº
Item, Two curtains of grene and white Strypt mocado for
the bedd . tº º e {} © & . iijs.
Item, Three curtain rodds of Irone for the bedd . . iijs.
Item, One chayer covered with grene cloth frengd with
yelow crewell e & ſe * gº ijs.
Item, One great cushion of tapestrie . o e . . is.
iſ.
Music in the Elizabethan Home I5
Item, One curtayne of blewe and yelowe say for the win-
dowe * * e g g © º is.
Item, One curtayne rod of Irone for the windowe is.
Item, One Joynd cubbord . * e g tº is.
Item, One table with twoe trestells . ſº gº is.
Item, Twoe longe playne formes to sett trunckes o ijs.
Item, Twoe high ioyned stooles . * ſº & ijs.
Item, One pewter water pott . e º tº is.
Item, One staff to beate the bedd with * & is.
Item, Six bed staves . • • e tº © vis.
The household account books at Hengrave also contain
numerous entries which throw light on the musical features
of home life in Elizabethan days. For example, Elizabeth and
Mary Kytson were taught as children to play the virginal, and
the fee was a very handsome one compared with other charges
for music. “To one Cosen for teaching the children of the
Virgenalls from Christmas until Easter iijli.” The Winchester
College accounts show that Weelkes received no more than
13s. 4d. for a quarter’s stipend as the college organist. Other
instructive extracts from the Hengrave account books are :
1572. Item, x yards carsey . . . gyven by my mºº to the
musicians. & g e & . xxjs. Vjd.
Item, In rewarde to Maud of Norwich for amend-
ing the virgenalls . © & . iijs. iiijd.
Item, for a treable violin . e gº XXJ.
Item, In rewarde to Johnson the musician at
Hengrave e & XJ.
I 574. Item, For vij cornetts bought for the musicians iiijli.
* Some confusion has arisen about the musicians of the name of Johnson.
It is most improbable that Robert Johnson, the Hengrave musician at
this date, was identical with the Robert Johnson who flourished in 1626,
as stated in the article in the D. N. B. Nor must he be confused with the
Robert Johnson, “priest’, an early Elizabethan composer. There seem
to have been at least three musicians named Robert Johnson in addition
to John and Edward. -
I6 The English Madrigal
I575. Item, In reward to the musicians on new years
morning © e e te º . xli.
Item, Paid to Robert 1 the musician . . ijs. Vjd.
Item, For a trumpet e . xl.
Item, For a payer of virginales. . XXXJ.
Item, In reward to vi trumpetters at my mº his
comand" for sounding before his chamber on
twelfth day . º º º e . XJ.
Item, In reward to Johnson 1 the musician for
his charges in awayting on my L. of Leycester
at Kennelworth e e © o . XJ.
We now pass on to the great hall which was the principal
room in a Tudor house just as it was in the older baronial
castles. All meals were still taken in the hall, although towards
the end of the sixteenth century it was becoming the practice
for the family occasionally to have supper in the parlour.
The tables were arranged in the hall just as they are in modern
days in any college hall at Oxford or Cambridge. The family
sat at the high table on a raised dais. The master and mistress
alone would occupy chairs, which were still scarce in Elizabeth’s
reign, the rest of the family and the guests being accommodated
with stools. This statement is borne out by the Hengrave
inventory of 1602, which mentions no more than two chairs
in the list of furniture in the hall, while there were also ‘fower
and twenty hye joined stooles covered with carpet work'.
Long tables with benches were set along the sides of the hall
for the officers of the household, the yeomen, the servants and
other dependants, and if there were too many guests to sit at
the high table, some of them would sit at the upper ends of
the side tables, a “ salt being placed to mark the class dis-
tinction between them and the other occupants of the table.
At the ends of the hall ‘court-cupboards' stood, on which
the plate was displayed. The floor, whether of stone or wood,
* See note on p. 15.
Music in the Elizabetham Home 17
was strewn with rushes. The walls were hung with tapestry,
and the Hengrave inventories mention cushions and curtains
and other such modern luxuries as would have been unknown
a century earlier. After dark in the winter the hall was lighted
by candles, suspended from the roof on simple wooden or iron
coronas. The candles were usually made at home from the
fat accumulated in the kitchen. The Hengrave household
accounts have allusions to this detail : “For v days work in
making candle at vid. the daye . . . ifs. Vjd.’ and the amount
of candles burnt in the hall, apparently in a year, may be
judged from the following entry: “Candell of the last remaynt
ix.c. xxxviiijlb. whereof spent (i.e. burnt) at the hall coclb.”
In these surroundings the English madrigals were first per-
formed.
Some details of the daily routine of life in such a household
at this period must be added in order to complete the picture.
The day began early. The breakfast hour was commonly 6.30,
and after it the men would spend the morning in the sports
of the field and the ladies in embroidery and other domestic
occupations, though a few of them also indulged in the sport
of hawking, while the yeomen and servants went about their
various business. In the towns the serious affairs of the day
were also dealt with at an early hour ; for example, the House
of Commons assembled at 8 a.m. at this date. Dinner was the
principal meal of the day, and was taken at noon or sometimes
a little earlier. The afternoon was spent in the garden, in
games, or in country walks; a few of the largest houses could
boast a tennis-court; and a bowling-alley was found in every
garden ; bowls seems to have been played for small money
stakes, for in the Hengrave accounts we read : ‘Lost in play
by my mº at the bowles in Draps hall viijd.” Alternatives to
these things on wet days were chess and backgammon, cards,
and dice, and higher sums than 8d. were lost and won. Kytson’s
2535-46 B
I8 The English Madrigal
experience is recorded thus in another entry of the Hengrave
accounts : “Lost in play by my m" iijli.” But much time was
also spent by both sexes in reading and writing, and some in
playing the virginals and the lute, and in singing songs. The
lute was played by the ladies as well as by men at this time;
the Hengrave accounts mention the item “for stringing tuning
and fretting my m” lute . . . ijº. v.jd.”
The usual hour for supper was 5.30. It was after supper,
as Thomas Morley, writing in 1597, tells us, that the mistress
of the house, according to custom, was wont to serve out the
part-books and call upon her guests to join with the family
in singing madrigals. This would scarcely have been an
everyday occurrence, and it was, no doubt, varied sometimes
by a ‘consort of viols', or by the playing of the ‘musicyons'
in their gallery overlooking the hall, while the rival attractions
of cards or dice or chess must have frequently supplanted the
music even in the most cultured homes. In this connexion
the Hengrave inventory mentions ‘one chessborde with a bagge
of lether for the men’ being kept in the dining-hall. But
without doubt madrigals were frequently sung after supper.
Morley's authority in the opening pages of his Plaine and
Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke is often cited to show
that it was regarded as an essential part of a gentleman’s
education that he should be able to take part in a madrigal
at sight. The passage is so commonly misquoted that it is
necessary to refer to it once more here. The scholar was not
in the first place ‘asked to join in a song'; what exposed him
to adverse comment was his refusal, on the ground of ignorance,
to undertake the task of acting as umpire between two of the
guests who during supper were differing hotly upon a musical
point. The request to sing in a madrigal came later :
“Among the rest of the guests, by chance, master Aphron
came thither also, who falling to discourse of Musicke, was in
Music in the Elizabethan Home IQ
—–4
an argument so quickly taken up and hotly pursued by Eudoxus
and Calergus, two kinsmen of Sophobulus, as in his own art he
was overthrowen. But he still sticking in his opinion, the two
gentlemen requested me to examine his reasons and confute
them. But I refusing and pretending ignorance, the whole
company condemned me of discurtesie, being fully perswaded,
that I had beene as skilfull in that art, as they tooke me to be
learned in others. But supper being ended, and Musick
bookes (according to the custome) being brought to the tables,
the mistresse of the house presented me with a part, earnestly
requesting me to sing. But when, after many excuses I pro-
tested unfainedly that I could not : every one began to wonder.
Yea, some whispered to others, demaunding how I was
brought up.’
The implication, it will be seen, was that an educated man
ought not only to be able to take his part in a madrigal but
also to know the niceties of musical theory. Some allowance
must be made for the fact that Morley was, in a sense, writing
an advertisement of his own work as a music-teacher with
the express object of persuading people to study his book and
learn to sing. But even so the statement, as a contemporary
record, is a weighty one ; and Morley's evidence is supported
by that of Henry Peacham, who wrote in The Compleat Gentle-
man in 1622 that one of the fundamental qualifications of
a gentleman was to be able ‘ to sing your part sure, at first
sight, withall to play the same upon your Violl or the exercise
of your lute ’. Peacham here adds instrumental playing to
Morley's two requirements. There can be no doubt that
ability to sing at sight, which in the twentieth century is
somewhat exceptional, was very general among the educated
classes at the close of the sixteenth century, even though it
may have been far from being a universal accomplishment.
It must be remembered, too, that a family who were frequently
singing madrigals in their home would have their favourites,
and would not often have to read absolutely new compositions
B 2.
2O The English Madrigal
at sight. When the rest of the party were not trying some-
thing new it would not have been very difficult for a guest
to join in with the rest of the singers, even if he happened
to be only moderately proficient.
The list of madrigal part-books belonging to the Kytsons
has already been quoted from the inventory. At this date
scarcely more than half of the works of the English madrigalists
had been published ; among the important sets issued sub-
sequently were Wilbye’s second set, Byrd’s third set, and the
sets of Gibbons, Ward, Tomkins, and Bateson, to mention no
others. The Hengrave books do not appear to include any
duplicates, and more than one singer may have sung from
each of the single part-books. The pictures of the day always
represent several singers sharing a copy. It is regrettable that
the sets in the Hengrave inventory are not actually named,
but it may be noticed that several sets of part-books were
bound together; in one case as many as six were so bound.
In all there were at Hengrave at least fifteen sets or separate
publications of madrigals and ballets, not reckoning the instru-
mental part-books. One of the sets is definitely stated to
consist of Italian ballets, probably those of Gastoldi, and two
sets bound together were English madrigals. Some of the
books were no doubt manuscript collections. Unfortunately
no hint is given of the contents of the fine book from Cadiz,
valued at as much as ten shillings.
It has already been stated that the room in which John
Wilbye lived for so many years at Hengrave Hall can now be
identified by means of the inventories, which follow a definite
order through the house; and the list of the furniture is given
in such detail that we even know the colour of the curtains
and chair-coverings. Moreover, Hengrave Hall has been very
little altered since the sixteenth century; the portraits of the
Kytsons, of Sir Charles and Lady Cavendish, of Lord and
Music in the Elizabethan Home 2I
Lady Rivers, and of other relatives of the family, who were
also Wilbye’s friends and associates, still hang on the walls.
In addition to the inventories and household books, a remark-
able collection of original letters is still kept among the
treasures of the house; these include autograph letters of
Queen Mary, Elizabeth’s sister, Sir Philip Sidney, and John
Wilbye himself. Thus in Hengrave Hall a unique picture has
been handed down to us of the surroundings in which one of
the greatest of all madrigal writers lived and worked, and it
requires no great effort of imagination to reconstruct the scene
in which Sweet honey-sucking bees, Stay Corydon, Flora gave
me fairest flowers, or any of Wilbye’s other famous madrigals
were sung for the first time, when, supper at Hengrave Hall
‘ being ended and the Musicke bookes being brought to the
tables the mistresse of the house ’, Lady Kytson, presented
her guests and family with their part-books, and also manu-
script parts newly written in Wilbye’s own hand, ‘earnestly
requesting them to sing '.
Apart from the ordinary cultivation of music in the home
of which the preceding pages are intended to construct
a picture, there were special occasions in the life of the upper
classes at this period when festivities were organized, and
music almost always formed a special feature of these. For
instance, a wedding in a wealthy and prominent family was
usually accompanied by very elaborate festivities, and the
custom of providing a dramatic entertainment of an important
character was not uncommon on such occasions. It is generally
thought, for example, that Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s
Dream was first produced at some notable wedding festivities.
Various weddings have been suggested in this connexion, but
the most likely are thought to be either that of Edward, third
Earl of Bedford and Lucy Harington, or of William, seventh
Earl of Derby and Lady Elizabeth Vere. Wedding festivities
22 The English Madrigal
*
were often kept up for as long as a fortnight, and music held
an important part in the scheme of entertainment. Stow
describes a wedding which took place at this same period in
London, “where was as good cheer as ever was known with all
manner of Musick, . . . at night a goodly supper and then
followed a Masque until midnight. . . . The next day . . . after
Supper came in Masquers.’ The masques provided the musicians
with great opportunities, and many excellent compositions
were produced at them ; for instance, Campian wrote the
words and some of the music for several such masques.
There was a further opportunity for the composer in the
ceremonies designed for the entertainment of Queen Elizabeth
when she visited a country house. A contemporary printed
description of her visit to Lord Hertford’s house at Elvetham
in 1591 is full of interesting and highly amusing detail. It
was reprinted in the eighteenth century, not very accurately,
by Nichols in his Progresses of Queen Elizabeth. Prominent
among the features provided for her entertainment on this
occasion was the music, and it was music of the very best
class. On her first arrival, after she had been greeted with
a long Latin poem, ‘a sweet song of six partes' was sung by
six maidens representing “ the Graces and the Howres'. The
refrain of this madrigal was :
O beauteous Queen of second Troy
Accept of our unfeigned joy.
This composition was almost certainly Byrd’s six-part setting
of ‘This sweet and merry month of May ’. The words, which
may have been adapted for the occasion, were by Thomas
Watson, and Byrd’s madrigal had already been published in
Watson’s First set of Italian Madrigals Englished in 1590. The
difficulty of the tenor and bass voices would have been got
over by some singers being hidden in the adjacent bushes,
a device that was certainly employed on another occasion in
THE ELVETHAM. ENTERTAINMENT
From the engraving in the original edition printed by John Wolfe in 1591
-

24 The English Madrigal
—–4
these Elvetham festivities. On the same evening after supper
‘ her Maiestie gratiously admitted vnto hir presence a notable
consort of six Musitions . . Their musicke so highly pleased
hir, that . . . she gaue a newe name vnto one of their Pavans,
made long since by maister Thomas Morley, then Organist of
Pauls Church.” On the next day there was a “variety of con-
sorted musick al dinner time ’, and after dinner an elaborate
entertainment was given on the lake in the Park; there was
much lively horse-play in this entertainment, but also a good
deal of music: ‘In the pinnace were three Virgines, which
with their Cornets played Scottish Gigges, made three parts
in one. There was also in the said pinnace another nymph of
the sea, named Neaera. . . . Neere to hir were placed three
excellent voices, to sing to one lute, and in two other boats
hard by, other lutes and voices to answere by maner of Eccho.
. . . The melody was sweet, and the shew stately.” Shortly
afterwards ‘the three voices in the Pinnace sung a song to the
Lute with excellent diuisions °.
On the following morning “three excellent Musitians, who
being disguised in ancient Countrey attire, did greete hir
with a pleasant song of Coridon and Phillida, made in three
partes of purpose ’. The words were by Nicholas Breton,
and may have been written expressly for the occasion ; the
only known setting of the words by any of the madrigalists is
that of Michael East, published in his first set of madrigals in
I6O4. East’s setting is for three voices, and possibly was the
one referred to. If this is so, he was a few years older than
has generally been assumed, but so little is known of his personal
history that the possibility cannot be ruled out. There was
a curious error in the title of this song as it appeared in the
original edition of 1591; but in the second edition, also of
1591, it was correctly printed by John Wolfe as The three mens
song; Nicholas, for some strange reason, perpetuated the
Music in the Elizabethan Home 25
original mistake, and has The plowmans ſong, and this error has
been copied into modern editions of Breton’s poems, generally
without comment.
On the day of the Queen’s departure there was another
‘song of sixe partes with the musicke of an exquisite consorte ’,
to words beginning Elisa is the fayrest Queene. During this
performance ‘the queene of Fairies . . . danced and sung
before hir Maiestie’, who insisted on the performance being
repeated three times over, and ‘ called for diuers Lords and
Ladies to behold it’. And finally, ‘ as hir Maiestie passed
through the Park gate, there was a consort of Musitions hidden
in a Bower, to whose playing this dittie of Come againe was
sung, with excellent division, by two that were cunning '.
“As this song was sung, hir Maiestie notwithstanding the
great raine, staied hir Coach, and pulled off hir mask giving
great thâks.” Both these last compositions are almost certainly
the work of Edward Johnson; they are to be found in British
Museum Add. MSS. 30480–4.
Enough has been said to show how active was the spirit of
music in the homes of merrie England in Shakespeare’s day,
when the Queen and her courtiers could sing and play instru-
ments with skill, and when music of all kinds was so much
loved and encouraged. Seeing the extensive part music played
in the lives of the Elizabethans, we have little surprise that so
splendid a school of composers should have flourished in
England at the time. English people are slow to-day in
recognizing how high was the position of English music in the
days of Shakespeare. Byrd, Wilbye, Morley, Dowland, and
Weelkes were all living and in the height of their activity in the
year 1600. It may be doubted whether any other nation has
ever been able to boast of five such great names in a group of
contemporary composers. Certain it is that these five alone
did enough to place England at the head of all the musical
26 The English Madrigal
countries of Europe at that day, and their names should stand
proudly among those of other great Englishmen who at different
periods have achieved great fame in Literature, the Drama,
Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture.
2
The Madrigal
a. Origin and Etymology
THE madrigal had its origin in northern Italy, perhaps as
early as the twelfth century, although the form of song to
which the term was first applied was very far removed from
the elaborate type of composition which it denoted in the
sixteenth century. The word first appears in literature as
a term of music in the early part of the fourteenth century,
when it was used by two writers, named Francesco da Barbarino
and Antonio da Tempo, in the Latin form matricale; but it
must be inferred that it was in common use in the northern
districts of Italy many years earlier than this. It was Scheler,
in 1873, when his dictionary of French etymology was pub-
lished, who first perceived and stated that all the traditional
theories as to the derivation of the word had become suspect
since the discovery of the word matrialia in the works of
a fourteenth-century Latin author, denoting a species of
musical composition. But Scheler did not pursue the subject
further.
The whole subject of the origin and etymology of the
Italian word madrigale, or English madrigal, is dealt with in
a most clear and convincing manner by Signor Leandro
Biadene, Professor of neo-Latin literature in the University of
Pisa, in a highly interesting essay contributed to the Rassegna
bibliografica della letteratura italiana, a Pisa quarterly magazine,
Origin and Etymology 27
in 1898. The problem of the derivation of the word was
undoubtedly solved by Signor Biadene, although it still
remains a subject for conjecture why the medieval Latin
word matricale came to be adopted to describe the primitive
songs of the Florentine rustics. Biadene put forward a sugges-
tion that seems a plausible one, namely, that the adjective
matricalis as used in conjunction with cantus, or the neuter
form matricale coupled with carmen, may have acquired
a meaning which was virtually synonymous with materna
when used with lingua ; and that just as lingua materna
means ‘mother tongue', so carmen matricale, or cantus matri-
calis, may have stood for “mother song', denoting the primitive
and spontaneous song of the country folk, in other words,
folk-song, and that it came to be associated subsequently with
Some special class of folk-song of individual character. Be
that as it may, it is nevertheless certain that early in the
fourteenth century Barbarino, in a work entitled De variif
inveniendi et rimandi modis, used the word matricale to denote
a particular kind of song, which seems to have been somewhat
more elaborate in character than an ordinary folk-song, for in
another instance about the same date a boy is described as
being able to sing ‘matrialia etiam difficillima ', a performance
that was evidently regarded as a feat of unusual skill on the
part of the boy; yet this passage suggests that these matrialia
or matricalia were of the nature of solo-song rather than works
written in two or more parts, and they may have represented
some sort of florid development of folk-song. In any case,
matrialia etiam difficillima must imply something that had
advanced beyond the primitive stages of development, even
though it fell very far short of the elaborate devices which
characterize the sixteenth-century madrigal. The fourteenth-
century madrigals, however, show us exactly what these early
developments were. Three specimens of such compositions,
28 The English Madrigal
definitely described as madrigals in the original manuscripts,
which are now in the Mediceo-Laurenziana library in Florence,
were printed in the second volume of The Oxford History of
Music. Among these is an extract from a fourteenth-century
madrigal, Tu che l'opera d'altrui, by Francesco di Landino,
which is also to be found in the present author's English
Madrigal Composers. Landino was born in 1325, and was the
leading musician of the Florentine school of composers in the
middle of the fourteenth century; he became totally blind
early in life, but for many years was organist to the church of
San Lorenzo in Florence. Landino’s madrigal was for two
voices only, but the voices follow each other with frequent
points of imitation, much in the manner of the sixteenth-
century madrigals, although single syllables of words were often
employed over very long passages of the music in the same style
as the church music of that date.
After Landino's time the development of the madrigal on
musical lines entirely ceased for a long period, during which
the term was kept alive in a modified form to denote a certain
type of short lyric of a pastoral character, much in vogue in
the fifteenth century in Italy. These little poems were com-
monly described by the term madriale and mandriale. But
when about the year 1533 those Flemish composers who had
migrated to Italy renewed the development of the secular
contrapuntal songs, employing the methods of Landino and
his contemporaries with far greater elaboration and skill, and
writing for four, five, and six voices in combination instead of
limiting themselves to two, as in the fourteenth century, they
revived the old term that Landino had used. Thus Verdelot,
Willaert, and Arcadelt described their compositions as madrigali
on the title-pages of their early sets of books, and thus set the
fashion followed by all the great Italian composers throughout
the sixteenth century. This naturally resulted in the word
Origin and Etymology 29
being adopted in England when the singing of Italian madrigals
first became the vogue early in Elizabeth’s reign ; and
although Byrd for some reason avoided the actual term in
his first two sets of secular compositions in 1588 and 1589,
while Morley's first set in 1593 were described as Canzonets,
Morley's four-part set in 1594 were issued under the title of
Madrigals, and the term was almost universally adopted by
the rest of the English composers in the following thirty
years in which the entire output of the English School was
produced. ~...~ *
ſ The madrigal, like a great many other products of the
Renaissance came to England direct from Italy. As the Italian
madrigal school dates from the second quarter of the sixteenth
century, it seems strange that the English School did not begin
to flourish until fifty years later. This was due to the fact
that the English musicians throughout the middle of the
century were chiefly pre-occupied by the religious upheavals
connected with the Reformation, and their energies were
almost wholly absorbed in the production of Church music
for both the Latin and English rites. But more secular music
was written in England in the middle of the century than is
\sometimes supposed, even if little of it was of much merit.
Even earlier, there was a considerable production for com-
bined voices, and soon after I 500 an important group of English
composers were writing music for three voices to secular
words. The work of Fayrfax dates from the close of the
fifteenth century, but in the early part of the reign of
Henry VIII the leading secular composer, if we may judge
from the scanty material that survives, was William Cornish, or
Cornysshe as the name is commonly spelt. Cornish was master
of ‘the Children of the Chapel’, and it is probable that many
of his secular compositions were written for masques. Other
men were Dr. Cooper, William Newark, Richard Davy,
30 The English Madrigal
Edmund Turges, and Henry VIII himself; but the author-
ship of several pieces attributed to the last is based wholly
upon the mention of his name at the top of a particular manu-
script, a position which may denote no more than ownership.
The greater part of this music was for three voices. The folk-
song strain was strongly stamped on it, and the style and
harmonies have a decidedly antique flavour that contrasts
in a marked way with the Elizabethan music ; and even the
gayer subjects were treated somewhat in the manner of church
music. Yet some of Cornish’s work has a beauty of its own,
notably his Adieu my heart is lost, Ah the sighs that come from
my heart, You and I and Amyas, and Ah Robin, gentle Robin.
In the middle of the century Tallis and Tye gave some of
their lighter moments to secular work, but although the
madrigal was being so finely developed in Italy in their day,
their secular style does not show any great advance upon that of
Cornish and his contemporaries. Richard Edwards's In going
to my naked bed, which was written certainly as early as 1564,
is almost a unique example among the English secular works
surviving from that date that can be regarded as truly madri-
galian and on a level with contemporary Italian work. It is
possible that Edwards, being a man of exceptional culture,
had travelled in Italy and come in contact with continental
composers. The Songes of three, fower, and five voyces of
Thomas Whythorne, printed in 1571, mark an important
development of the English madrigal, although they fall far
short of the work of Byrd and Morley, some twenty years
later. Whythorne was a man of means, and he, too, may at
some time have come under direct Italian influence.
This slight sketch will suffice to show that the continuity
of English secular vocal composition was maintained throughout
the sixteenth century, even though the progress in its develop-
ment was small.
Origin and Etymology 3I
The custom of singing madrigals in English homes was at
least as old as the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, and English
part-books containing some of the finest Italian madrigals of
that date survive as evidence of the contemporary liking for
them. This taste strengthened as the century advanced.
[A certain lay-clerk of St. Paul’s Cathedral, named Nicholas
Yonge, had done much to popularize the Italian madrigal in
this country for some considerable period before 1588, in
which year he published a set of part-books, entitled Musica
Transalpina, containing a varied and representative collection
of Italian madrigals adapted to English words. Yonge made
a practice of having music books sent to him at regular intervals
from Italy, so that he became familiar with all the most recently
published works of the kind ; and he formed a habit of gather-
ing round him at his house in the parish of St. Michael’s,
Cornhill, ‘a great number of Gentlemen and Merchants (as
well of this realme as of forreine nations) . . . for the exercise
of Musicke daily'. Yonge’s enthusiasm in thus starting what
was practically the first ‘madrigal society’ in this country is
greatly to be admired. Thomas Watson, the poet, was another
who did much to encourage the popularity of the Italian
madrigals, and in 1590 his First sett of Italian Madrigalls
Englished was published. Before this date Byrd had already
written some of the madrigals which were eventually printed,
for they exist in manuscripts of earlier date than 1590; but
it would seem that Yonge and Watson exerted an important
influence in turning his mind and that of Morley towards
the composition of madrigals, and once this was done the
flood-gates were opened through which that splendid torrent
of the finest English music so rapidly flowed.
We must now return to Signor Biadene’s exposition of the
etymology of the term madrigale. Matricale, as we have
already seen, stood for a form of musical composition. From
32 The English Madrigal
matricale to madrigale is a simple and obvious step, for it only
involves the substitution of the Italian d and g for the Latin
t and c, and without a shadow of doubt madrigale is the exact
counterpart of the Latin matricale. Early variants occurring
in Italian literature were marigale and madriale. In all the
standard dictionaries, Italian, French, and English, madrigale
is stated to be derived from the Latin mandra or the Greek
pºvěpa, meaning ‘a fold', and the Italian mandria, meaning
‘a herd'; and the dictionaries tell us that mandriale was the
earliest form of it, developing later into madriale, and finally
into madrigale.
Biadene, in the essay already mentioned, shows that this
line of succession is absolutely contrary to all the laws and
precedents of Italian etymology, and that neither the elimina-
tion of the m nor the insertion of the g can be explained by
any known rule. He goes on to show that the true line of
development has been exactly the opposite of this. Since the
Italian madrigale, as just stated, is the exact equivalent of the
Latin matricale used by Barbarino, marigale and madriale can
easily be explained as variants, because the elimination of the
d has its exact parallel in the case of such words as madre and
padre, which in the dialect of northern Italy commonly became
mare and pare ; thus, says Biadene, da Tempo as a Venetian
writing in the fourteenth century would naturally have used
marigalis for madrigalis. Then, again, there are numbers of
Italian words in which the g has been eliminated, for example,
legale and regale which become leale and reale; SO on similar
lines madrigale easily becomes madriale, while the reverse
process is unknown. It only then remains to account for the
curious variant mandriale, which in common with madriale
was certainly used in the fifteenth century to denote a short
pastoral lyric. This particular little problem lies outside the
direct line of the etymological development of the word
Origin and Etymology 33
madrigale, yet it is a matter of some interest here. Biadene
suggests that as mandria meant ‘ a fold ', and the word madriale
was already being used for these little pastoral poems, the
word mandriale was simply a fusion of those two words. In
any case both madriale and mandriale were dropped when the
original form madrigale was revived by the musicians, and this
lent some colour to the entirely erroneous idea that they were
earlier forms of madrigale.
As already stated, the word madrigal, and also the musical
form which it denotes, came to England from Italy; but it
may be recalled that in the first instance it was the Flemish
composers, Verdelot, Arcadelt, and Willaert, who brought it
to Italy when the form was revived in its vastly improved state
in the sixteenth century; and the Flemings in their turn
frankly admitted the debt which their own school of com-
position owed to the influence of the earlier English school
under the leadership of John Dunstable. It was the Flemish
theorist, Johannes Tinctoris, who did not hesitate to ascribe
to England the honour of being the fons et origo of musical Art.
Thus the wheel turned full circle; and the coming of the
madrigal from Italy to England, so far from damaging, does
something to strengthen, the claim that England in the days
of Dunstable, and still earlier in the days of that Reading
monk who wrote Sumer is icumen in, was the actual cradle of
modern music.
b. Form and Technique
The Elizabethans were very indiscriminate and vague in
applying a terminology to the combined secular songs of their
time. Besides madrigal they used a number of terms without
any exact definition. The most distinctive of them was Ballet,
meaning a composition of a comparatively regular rhythm in
which a fa-la refrain was indispensable. Other terms were
2535-46 C
34 The English Madrigal
Canzonet or little short Air, Pastoral, Neapolitan, Song and Air.
It might be supposed that a canzonet could be readily dis-
tinguished from a madrigal, but in point of fact the style of
composition is precisely the same in both, and in sets described
as ‘madrigals there are many pieces which are far shorter
and smaller in design than many of those described in other
sets as ‘ canzonets', and vice versa. The Pastoral and Neapolitan
are quite indistinguishable from the Madrigal in style; Byrd
used the terms Pastoral and Song, and Tomkins used the word
Song, for all their madrigalian works; many of the ſongs in
Tomkins's set should more precisely have been described as
ballets ; Orlando Gibbons used the term motet to describe
the compositions in his volume, which are undoubtedly
madrigals. .
Composers were not then concerned with petty distinctions
of nomenclature, nor yet with the stereotyped peculiarities
which might characterize this or that phase of musical form.
What they cared for was to express themselves and the thoughts
of the poets whose words they set in beautiful and forceful
music; and here they succeeded amazingly.
For these reasons the madrigal as a musical form cannot
to-day be defined in any concise form of words. In ordinary
usage it must be taken to mean that elaborate form of secular
song for several voices in combination which was first intro-
duced by the Flemish composers in Italy towards the middle
of the sixteenth century, and was brought to its full develop-
ment in the same century as the normal type of secular part-
song (to use that term in its most literal sense) by the Italian
and English composers. It may be further described as a com-
position for two or more unaccompanied voices singing in
combination, all the voice parts being of equal interest and
mainly designed from the same melodic material; the words
are treated in short phrases which are taken up by the various
Form and Technique 35
voices one after another in fugal imitation, and the succeeding
phrase is introduced usually after two or three repetitions of
the previous phrase, commonly overlapping the one it is dis-
placing, with the result that the introduction of a full close
was generally avoided. The subjects dealt with were of every
variety, according to the fancy of the composer; many of
the madrigals are pastoral in style, but by no means exclusively
so ; many are set to light lyrics and conventional conceits of
an amatory character such as the Elizabethans loved ; many
also are most serious, and a few of these, without being exactly
suited to church use, deal with semi-religious subjects. But
whatever the subject, the English madrigalists possessed a
wonderful faculty for matching the words with exactly the
right musical sentiment, and their feeling for verbal accentua-
tion was remarkable in its thoughtfulness and accuracy. They
could express every kind of mood, whether grave or gay, and
their resources were almost unlimited for expressing anything
in the nature of realism.
Those who have attempted to define the madrigal have
sometimes added that it was contrapuntal in style and modal
in character. The addition is superfluous, because this same
description belongs equally to all the music of the sixteenth
, century, and it does not in any way assist in the discovery of an
exact formula. Nor is any precise formula required ; for it
is an error to regard the madrigal as something as definite as
a fugue or a sonata or a symphony. The part-song has succeeded
and superseded the madrigal, and a modern composer, if he
chooses, is at liberty to introduce imitations and other elaborate
devices of polyphony into a modern part-song and produce
a piece of music bearing the stamp of true Art; but if he
thinks it necessary to confine himself to a pastoral subject, to
conform to the laws of academic counterpoint, and to the
tonality of the old ecclesiastical modes, he will not thereby
C 2.
36 The English Madrigal
turn his work into a madrigal, still less will he be writing in
the style of Wilbye, or Weelkes, or Orlando Gibbons. i is
just as much an artistic error for a modern composer to attempt
to write a madrigal in the Elizabethan manner as it would be
for a modern poet to attempt to express himself in the language
of Chaucer.
But to the Elizabethans, as well as to the Italian composers
of the sixteenth .# natural form
of self-expression, and in the hands of the Elizabethans, more
especially, it was peculiarly a thing of its own date, showing
characteristics which cannot be counterfeited to-day, because
it belonged to an epoch in which rapid and drastic changes
were taking place, both in available chords, and also in modal
tonality; for the old modes were in the final stages of the
process of giving way to those two modes which are commonly
Tinown as the major and minor scale) On these two points

* *-*...*- nº. -- ~ *
it is necessary to say something a little more fully.
The entire history of music written for combined voices
up to the closing years of the sixteenth century had been
‘contrapuntal’, in the ordinary accepted sense of that term; in
other words it had been based on the principle of combining in-
dependent melodies, each voice having an equal share of the
melodic interest, which was not confined to the top voice
while merely supported harmonically by the lower voices.
The principle of combining melodies is of the first principle
of counterpoint. Church music led the way in this matter.
Thus, in early days some well-known church melody was
chosen, and a single melody, or ‘ descant ’, was added to it
for simultaneous use. In the first place the new melody was
added below the other and so was entitled bassus, the original
melody being called the tenor. This device added interest
to the single melody, in such a way that it led to the opening
up of those vast fields of the whole of modern music of the
Form and Technique 37
º
Western world. A further stage in the exploration of these
new fields was the addition of a second independent melody,
making, with the original melody, a third part. This third
part, which was written above the tenor, was called triplex,
a term which at a later date developed into treble. In adding
these independent parts it was quickly discovered that the
interest and beauty of the music were much increased if
Some characteristic figure in one voice-part was taken up
and copied in another, and thus the device of imitation was
evolved.
From the very first stages of these developments it was
recognized that certain combinations of sound produced
a good effect, and that others were less pleasing, while some
had definitely cacophonous results; in this manner a few
fundamental principles became established and regarded as
rules. The principle of treating each voice-part as an inde-
pendent melody continued to prevail at a later period even
when it became customary to write for five, six, or eight, or
more voices in combination, and, roughly speaking, it may be
said that the same rules and principles were generally observed
by all serious composers, whether of church or secular music,
until the close of the sixteenth century, when fresh ground
began to be broken by the discovery of new harmonic devices
and chords, when the development of the solo-song pointed
the way to opera and all the possibilities which were involved
in that direction. It was this new movement at the opening
of the seventeenth century which led to what has been known
as “harmony as distinct from what is called ‘ counterpoint ’.
The difference between these two styles of music may be
briefly summed up in the statement that ‘ counterpoint is
that kind which deals with the combination of melodies giving
to each individual part an equal importance in relation to the
structure as a whole; whereas ‘harmony is that which
38 The English Madrigal
ordinarily deals with no more than a single melody, the other
parts being subordinate and supplementary to it.
But it is not recognized as clearly as it should be that it
was no more than an accidental circumstance that the close
of the polyphonic period at the end of the sixteenth century
coincided with the invention of new chords, and that these
chords were in point of fact used by the polyphonic writers,
notably by Orlando di Lasso and Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa,
in Italy, and by Weelkes and Dowland in England, in addition
to Monteverde, who has generally been given the whole of the
credit for the harmonic novelties of the period. The discovery
and use of chromatic chords by the composers just mentioned,
as well as the free use of the dominant seventh and its inver-
sions, were the inevitable outcome of the spirit of adventure
and experiment so conspicuously present in European life at
that period, and they were merely the precursors of many
more similar discoveries in the succeeding centuries, just as
they were the inevitable successors of those of the fourteenth
century. The discovery of the major third and of the common
chord was just as revolutionary in its day as was the discovery
of the dominant seventh, and both alike were, in fact, harmonic,
and not contrapuntal, discoveries. As already stated it was an
accidental circumstance that the polyphonic style of com-
position was played out by about the year 1600, and that
new styles were taking its place just at the same moment
when these new chords were coming into use. The new
chords themselves had nothing whatever to do with the change
of style, but the chance that the two things happened approxi-
mately at the same period has resulted in a strange confusion
of ideas, and it has become the custom to classify all music
earlier than 1600 as ‘contrapuntal', and all subsequent to
that as ‘harmonic ’. Harmonic development has indeed pro-
gressed steadily from the fourteenth to the twentieth century,
Form and Technique 39
and it is still progressing, and counterpoint, in the true sense
of combining melodies, far from ceasing to exist in the year
I6OO, is as much alive in its modern harmonic clothing as at
any previous time in musical history. Harmony and counter-
point were of twin birth, and both were born at that great
moment when the principle of monodic music, which had
prevailed ever since the days of primitive man, gave place in
the western world to the principle of combining sounds.
It is very commonly stated that all music written before
the year 16oo is strictly modal, but this statement is not
borne out by a careful study of the facts. The principles of
modal tonality inevitably began to break down as soon as
music began to be harmonized, in other words as soon as the
principle of writing for two or more voices came into vogue,
for it immediately became necessary to introduce various
accidentals; and this innovation directly affected the charac-
teristic tonality of the individual modes. This individuality
had already begun to be seriously impaired by the use of
accidentals in the polyphonic music of the early part of the
sixteenth century, and, as the century progressed, so the
tonality of the music tended more and more in the direction
of the modern major and minor scales, while the rest of the
modes were becoming merged in these two. A large number
of the English madrigals may frankly be regarded as being in
modern keys rather than in the modes ; yet a few of them
are rather severely modal, and a large proportion are certainly
strongly influenced by modal tonality, even though great
freedom was used in the matter of accidentals. In this detail
more than in any other, we see to what a large extent the
conditions in which these composers worked were transitional.
Writing at a time of upheaval and transition, they were subject
in an exceptional degree to the spirit of innovation and experi-
ment in all directions; they were more free from conventional
4O The English Madrigal
practice than were the Italian madrigalists, who for the most
part had worked a generation earlier than the Elizabethans,
or, indeed, than any group of composers who had preceded
them. For this reason there are all manner of inconsistencies
to be found in their music, as judged by earlier—and later—
academic standards ; yet it scarcely ever lacked spontaneity,
and the stamp of individuality was so strongly impressed upon
it that each of the leading composers displays some distinguish-
ing characteristics which differentiate his work from that of his
contemporaries. In the face of these facts it will readily be
recognized that any modern attempt to counterfeit an Eliza-
bethan madrigal must be doomed to failure ; most of those
who in modern times have attempted the task would seem
to have lacked the necessary knowledge which should have
enabled them to distinguish between the styles of, say, Wilbye,
Morley, Gibbons, and Ward, to mention but four suggestive
examples; and they have complacently supposed that a know-
ledge of the modes and a proficiency in academic counterpoint,
as defined in the eighteenth century, formed an ample equip-
ment for their purpose.
A few further words are needed about the Ballet, the
distinguishing feature of which was the fa-la refrain. The
term was originally used exclusively with the dance, and it
would seem that in course of time it came to denote a species
of musical form in which singing and dancing both played
a part. In later times the dancing element dropped out, and
the ballet survived in the hands of the Italian and English
madrigalists as a formal composition for combined voices. In
the eighteenth century the minuet passed through a very
similar experience; for whereas it had formerly been used
exclusively as a dance measure, it was exploited by the great
classical composers and took shape as an abstract and separate
form of music. But the ballet of the madrigalists remained very
Form and Technique 4I
distinctive in style ; it retained much of the regularity of
rhythm which is so essential to the dance, and it has a clear-
cut character which is as a rule entirely absent from the
madrigal.
One other class of composition must also be briefly touched
upon here. The term Air, or Ayre, as it was very generally
spelt at the time, was used as an alternative to Canzonet, but
it was also used to denote another class of composition altogether.
As already stated, the Elizabethan musicians found their most
natural form of expression in what is known as the contra-
puntal style, according to which the voices entered successively
rather than simultaneously, and the verbal phrases were each
repeated several times. Towards the end of the century it
began to be felt by certain musicians that the constantly-
crossing and complex rhythms had a tendency to obscure the
meaning of the words, and that the sense of the poetry as well
as its beauty was apt to be spoilt by over-much repetition. It
was also found that madrigal-form made it difficult to treat
more than one stanza of a lyric in a single composition, although
there might be several stanzas belonging to it. A simpler form
was therefore followed enabling the poem to be sung right
through with scarcely any complexity, by repeating the same
music to each stanza. As the term implies, this form was
founded on the simple method of designing a melody, or Air,
for a single voice, and supporting it, either with other voices
supplying the harmonies in a manner somewhat resembling
the modern part-song, or with instrumental accompaniment
supplied by a lute and bass-viol. The well-known madrigal
of Gibbons, The silver swam, affords an excellent illustration of
a madrigal which is scarcely distinguishable in character from
the ‘ayres of the lutenist song-writers.
42 The English Madrigal
c. The Part-books
Neither in the printed editions nor in the manuscript copies
of the sixteenth century did musical compositions appear in
full score, with all the voice parts in their relative positions,
as in modern music. Manuscript collections, both for church
and secular use, were made in part-books, each of which con-
tained the single stave of music to be used by each voice.
Thus the ‘Cantus' book would contain the treble, or soprano,
part and no more. The origin of this custom may have been
due to economy, for certainly a small single part-book often
contains a very large number of compositions; paper was
expensive, and musical scribes none too numerous. Whether
for similar reasons or not, the printed vocal music was pub-
lished on the same plan. Fol ordinary purposes a complete
set of part-books would consequently number three, four, five,
or six, according to the maximum number of voices employed
in the set of compositions contained in it. This system was
applied to the secular music-books and those containing any
sacred pieces intended to be sung in the home. In the cathedral
and collegiate choirs ten part-books constituted a complete
set, because they provided for music written in five parts
(usually including two altos), and for choirs divided into two
sides, Cantoris and Decani. Thus, for example, in Durham
Cathedral the complete set of splendid manuscript folios (two
of which are unfortunately missing) consisted of the Medius,
Ist Contratenor, 2nd Contratenor, Tenor, and Bassus books for
the Cantoris side, and the same for the Decani side. Barnard’s
famous collection of cathedral music, entitled First Book of
Selected Church Musick, published in 1641, also consisted of
ten books of similar description ; the sections to be sung only
by the Cantoris side of the choir were not included in the
Decani books, and vice versa, so that the Decani and Cantoris
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44 The English Madrigal
books are not duplicate except in the ‘full' sections, and all
ten books are needed for the reconstruction of the score.
It seems certain that the composers at this date must have
written their works in full vocal score in the first instance, for
scores are known to have existed although scarcely any examples
have survived. But a score served no further purpose when
it passed from the composer’s hands, either into those of the
scribes who copied the single parts into the various manuscript
sets, or into the printer's, whose business it was to separate the
single parts and print them in part-books. No score was
printed, and it seems probable that the printer customarily
destroyed it, for no value was set upon autographs at that date,
nor was any sentimental interest attached to a composer’s
score, while the practice of conducting a work from the score
seems to have been unknown.
s It is remarkable that England was a very long way behind
Italy in the matter of printing music-books. This may partly
account for a fact that has already been mentioned, namely
that English composers wrote scarcely any madrigals of impor-
tance until the last decade of the century, whereas Italian
activity dates from half a century before that. In Italy there
was a steady output of printed music-books throughout those
fifty years. The earliest known set of English printed music
books was that issued by Wynkyn de Worde in 1530. It was
not followed by any further secular musical publication until
Thomas Whythorne's set of Songes of three fower and five voyces
were issued in 1571 ; Whythorne's was the only secular set
of English music books published between de Worde’s set in
1530 and Byrd’s first set in 1588. The publication of church
music in the same period was of very little more importance;
John Merbecke’s Booke of Common Praier noted can scarcely be
said to belong to this class of publications; and the only
other printed music books belonging to that period were
The Part-books 45
John Day’s Certaine Notes set forth in four and three partes
to be sung at the Morning, Communion and Evening Prayer,
which contain three services and about twenty anthems, were
published in 1560 and 1565, and the set of Cantiones Sacrae
issued jointly by Tallis and Byrd under their own special
patent in 1575. The granting of this special privilege, amount-
ing to a kind of printing monopoly, seems to have exerted
a most important influence upon English music. The Tallis-
Byrd cantiones were published in the same year that the royal
licence was granted to them ; for some years this licence
was a source of loss rather than profit, and it was not until
I588, the year of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, that the
great series of publications made under this monopoly was
begun ; but during the following thirty or forty years the
music books printed in England cover not only the whole
of the splendid English madrigal school, but also the Ayres
of Dowland, Campian, and the rest of the lutenists, and a large
amount of church music, including the two sets of Cantiones
sacrae, the two sets of Gradualia, and the three Masses of
Byrd, besides Leighton’s Teares or Lamentacions of a Sorrowfull
Soule, Amner’s Sacred Hymnes of 3, 4, 5, and 6 parts, East’s
Whole Booke of Psalmes, and several English anthems in the
madrigal sets. After the death of Tallis the printing rights
became vested solely in Byrd, and he assigned the right of
printing the books to Thomas East, whose name was also
found in the forms Este and Est. East produced a large number
of the madrigal sets; his dwelling-house was ‘by Paules
wharfe' in 1588, and by 1594 he had moved to ‘Aldersgate-
streete, at the signe of the black horse'.
Byrd’s licence expired in the year 1596, and two years later
Thomas Morley was granted a fresh patent; the printers he
employed being East, Short, and Barley. At Morley’s death
the patent passed into the hands of Barley, whose “shoppe
46 The English Madrigal
was in ‘ Gratious Street” ; but many of the madrigal sets con-
tinued to be printed by East. By the year 1609 East had
died, and his printing business was taken over by Thomas
Snodham, whose name first appears in Wilbye’s second set of
madrigals; after this date most of the subsequent madrigal
sets were printed by him, the last of them being Pilkington’s
second set in 1624.
This printing monopoly not only applied to music but also
to music paper, for it gave the holders the sole right to “rule
and cause to be ruled by impression any paper to serve for
printing or pricking of any songe or songes *, and to sell ‘any
bookes or quieres of such ruled paper imprinted . An example
of this music-paper may be seen in Thomas Hunt’s autograph
of his service written about the year 1600, each page of which
bears the imprint of East’s initials."
The Elizabethan part-books were well printed, and the
degree of accuracy which was secured is astonishing. Byrd
commented on the excellence of the printers’ work in the
‘Epistle to the Reader' at the beginning of his Psalmes Sonets
and Songs in 1588. Byrd was well aware that some of the
discords he had written would be new to those who would
sing from the part-books, and that they might be tempted to
explain them away as misprints; and so he wrote: ‘if ther
happen to be any jarre or dissonance, blame not the Printer,
who (I doe assure thee) through his great paines and diligence
doth heere deliver thee a perfect and true Coppie.’ This
publication was the first of the English madrigal publications,
but the high level of excellence which Byrd applauded was
maintained right through the series, and it is surprising how
few misprints are to be found in the part-books as a whole.
The contents of the part-books may be briefly described.
Each book in a set contained a duplicate of all the preliminary
1 Tenbury MS. 787.
The Part-books 47
matter, which consisted of a title-page and an elaborate form
of dedication to some special patron, and this was usually
printed on the back of the title-page. Sometimes laudatory
verses were included from the pen of the composer’s admirers.
A table of contents and an index were always put in.
Many of the title-pages were ornamented with borders of
lace design characteristic of the period, but more elaborate
designs in the Renaissance style were sometimes used. The
printers kept stock plates of these, and the design was not
specially drafted with reference to the contents of the book.
The Renaissance wood-cut used for Morley’s Plaine and Easie
Introduction to Musicke (1597) is also to be seen in Dowland’s
First Booke of Songes or Ayres (1597), but it was probably
made for neither of them. There is an interesting woodcut
border on the title-page of Ward’s madrigals, but this was
evidently designed for some book of sermons or theological
work. “Justice ’, ‘Mercy’, ‘Fortitude ’, and ‘Prudence'
have a place in the border, and at the foot of the page is the
picture of a preacher discoursing to his congregation. The
title-page of Morley’s Canzonets selected from Italian authors
(1597) was in the Renaissance style ; on the centre panels at
the sides are the initials P. S. for Peter Short the printer;
on panels at the four corners are four women in the attitude
of prayer, and at the top is a sacred emblem ; perched above
are two plumage birds. The inappropriateness of the design
does not seem to have been considered. The title-page of
Tomkins’s set in 1622 is inferior to these but also in Renaissance
style.
Morley’s Booke of Balletts (1595) bears a curious emblem on
the title-page showing a rake, a fork, and a scythe, bound
with a ribbon bearing the motto, sed adhuc mea mess is in
herba est. The device on the title-page of Byrd’s Psalmes,
Somets, & Songs (1588) has in its centre a hart, the crest of
48 The English Madrigal
Sir Christopher Hatton, to whom the set was dedicated. Some-
times the coat of arms of the composer’s patron was repre-
sented ; in Bateson’s second set (1618) the coat of arms of
Lord Chichester with fourteen quarterings, together with
supporters, crest, and motto, was printed on the back of
the title-page ; in this set the lace-border was of unusual
pattern.
The dedicatory addresses of the composers to their patrons
were always worded in a style of what we to-day would think
fulsome flattery, and in a deprecatory attitude towards the
merits of their own music which gives the impression of being
over-done. From this convention of the time it was not appar-
ently possible, even for men like Byrd and Gibbons, to depart.
These addresses frequently contain little pieces of information
about the personal history of the composers. “Addresses to
the Reader ’ were occasionally added ; these are always
interesting, and none more so than those of Byrd, who inserted
one in each of his three sets ; at the conclusion of that in
Songs of sundrie Natures, he signed himself ‘the most affectionate
freend to all that love or learne Musicke ’, a phrase that brings
him very close to musicians of all time. Byrd’s well-known
‘Reasons briefly set down by th’auctor, to perswade every
one to learne to sing were printed in addition to ‘The Epistle
to the Reader' in his 1588 set.
Laudatory poems were comparatively scarce in the madrigal
books, though they were more common in the song-books of
the lutenists. Tomkins was praised in verse by his brother
John, organist of St. Paul’s Cathedral. There are as many as
four short poems at the beginning of Farnaby's canzonets;
these include one by John Dowland and one by Richard Alison,
the madrigalist, and one in Latin elegiacs by Anthony Holborne.
Pilkington, in his second set, included two sonnets in his praise,
one by William Webbe and one by Henry Harpur. Lichfild’s
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50 The English Madrigal
set has two sonnets by Christopher Brooke, one to his patroness,
Lady Cheney, and the other ‘To the Author upon his Musicall
Muse’. In Morley's four-part madrigals was a poem in his
praise signed Incerto, and the lines ‘to the author’ in his
Book of Ballets, signed “M.D.’, are generally thought to be
by Michael Drayton :
Such was old Orpheus cunning,
That senseless things drew neere him,
And heards of beastes to heare him,
The stock, the stone, the Oxe, the Asse came running.
Morley ! but this enchaunting
To thee, to be the Musick-God is wanting.
And yet thou need'st not feare him ;
Draw thou the Shepherds still and Bonny-lasses,
And envie him not stocks, stones, Oxen, Asses.
The initial letters of each madrigal were often elaborate.
Some were ornamented with floral and symmetrical designs,
and occasionally set in small woodcut landscape scenes; these
were part of the printer’s stock-in-trade, and had no reference
to the subject of the madrigals. It was usual to occupy each
page of text with a single madrigal; more space was seldom
required, and each madrigal began on a fresh page even if
the previous page was only partially used. A set of part-books
was usually made up of between twenty and thirty madrigals.
There were no bars in the part-books. When a verbal
phrase was immediately repeated, it was the custom not to
print the words a second time but simply to put the figure ii
or the sign / under the succeeding group of notes. As
a rule the position in which the unprinted words were to be
placed under the notes was obvious, but occasionally when
there were more notes than syllables, it becomes a matter
for discretion to decide how the words were intended by the
composer to underlay the notes, and this calls for special
knowledge of the Tudor idiom, which, it is important to state,
The Part-books 5I
differs considerably in this detail from that of modern times.
To an Elizabethan singer this arrangement would have pre-
sented no difficulty. The part-books contain no ‘ expression
marks or directions as to tempo, such points being left to the
performers. No titles are given to the madrigals at the top
of each page, but only the reference number in accordance
with the table of contents. Nor are the names of the authors
of the lyrics ever stated in the part-books.
d. Rhythm and underlaying
A true understanding of the principles upon which the
English madrigal composers worked in the matter of rhythm
forms the true and only foundation for a right interpretation
of this music. This statement applies not only to the English
madrigals but also to the church music belonging to the same
period. Freedom of rhythm also characterized the polyphonic
music of the Flemings, the Italians, and the Spaniards in the
sixteenth century, but the English composers undoubtedly
worked with greater freedom in this respect than their con-
tinental contemporaries.
It is a strange circumstance that this marked character of
sixteenth-century music should have been replaced so com-
pletely before the close of another century by regularity and
square-cut design ; in some ways it is even more strange that
musicians should have ceased to recognize the rhythmic
freedom of the Elizabethan music, and that they should
have misinterpreted it, on the rare occasions when they per-
formed it at all, by imposing on it a regular and even flow of
accent, such as controlled the music of their own day, in
direct conflict with the true verbal accentuation and the
obvious intention of the Elizabethans.
It must be recalled that the course of English history during
the seventeenth century dealt a very hard blow at music, and
D 2
52 The English Madrigal
especially polyphonic music. The death of Elizabeth was the
first misfortune that befell it, for the accession of James I
brought to the court a meaner influence which made itself
felt in all grades of society, and music lost much of the valuable
support that the Tudor sovereigns had given to ity? Yet the
force of the great wave of musical enthusiasm which was at
its height at the turn of the century could not be spent in
a single moment, and its influence certainly continued to be
felt until the reign of Charles I. Then followed the great
political upheaval which so seriously affected all the Arts as
well as the domestic life of the country throughout the middle
of the century, and music suffered more than all its fellows;
music books and organs were ruthlessly destroyed, church
music was forbidden by authority, and fanatics in certain
quarters taught that all forms of music and dancing were
sinful.
With the Restoration came a great revival, and for a short
period towards the close of the seventeenth century England
seemed likely to reassert the supremacy in music that she had
held in Elizabethan days. Two great names stand out con-
spicuously, those of John Blow and his still more famous
pupil, Henry Purcell. But fine as their music was, it was
essentially different from that of the older school. No one
should deplore this fact, for music is nothing if it is not pro-
gressive ; but it is possible to be progressive without wholly
ignoring the merits of earlier work, and it happened that
musical England in the days of Charles II and his brother
James gave itself exclusively to the attractions of contemporary
production. The effect of this upon the practice of Tudor
music when attempts to revive it were made by small bodies
of enthusiasts in the eighteenth century was disastrous, for the
most important traditions connected with it had been hope-
lessly lost, and the life-giving source of it, namely, the true
Rhythm and Underlaying 5
3
principles of rhythmic interpretation, had disappeared in the
mists of obscurity. Revivals of madrigal singing throughout
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, praiseworthy as they
were, never proved a popular success for the sole reason that
the rhythms were misunderstood and false accentuation was
the result. Often the remedy was sought, not in more careful
study of the original text, but in shifting the words and other-
wise tampering with the text.
What then is rhythm And what were the special features
of rhythmic construction in the madrigals : Rhythm has been
cleverly defined as “melody stripped of its pitch ; in other
words, it is the shape of a melody as represented by the reitera-
tion of a single note. It has been said that any characteristic
melody can be readily recognized by the beating of its rhythm
with the finger on a table. If there are some first-rate melodies
which could not be identified, it is certainly true that many
can, and, incidentally, it makes a very good game for musical
children. The rhythm of the great classical period on the
Continent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was
regular in its periods. If the measure was duple, the accents
fell regularly on the first beat of a bar with a secondary accent
on the third ; if the measure was triple there was but one
accent in each bar. A melody consisted ordinarily of eight
bars, which were naturally subdivided into two measures of
four bars, subdivided again into measures of two bars each.
Within these limits any rhythmic figure was possible that
did not conflict with the regular periodic-beats; thus in

bar of four crotchets length, and although it has a very dis-
tinctive shape, yet it is capable of strict treatment in con-
formity with the eight-bar system. On the other hand, the
following rhythmic figure taken from Thomas Morley's work
54 The English Madrigal
will not conform to the regular periodic flow of duple measure :
- 2 - . . . . . . . . . ~ 2.
fºL 69 69 C) GP " Gº & C
more especially as syncopated accent so common in the music
of Bach and Handel is quite out of the style of the madrigal
composers. The eight-bar scheme produced a beautiful
Symmetry and regularity of design, and it became a leading
feature of the sonata form as developed by the great classical
composers. But the method of the polyphonic composers
had no such regular basis ; the symmetrical scheme was
indeed beginning to shape itself in some of the ‘Ayres'
of the song-writers at the end of the sixteenth century :
and, moreover, many of the popular melodies of a still
earlier date fall into eight-bar lengths, as in the case of
more modern melodies. But the polyphonic music, with
the exception of the ballet, which in this particular is so
clearly differentiated from the true madrigal, were perfectly
free in this respect ; a very large measure of freedom in design-
ing rhythmic figures was possible for the sixteenth-century
composers, for they knew of no convention demanding that
the accentuation should conform to any regular pulsation of
alternate beats. This enabled each single voice part to progress
with perfect rhythmic freedom and with constant change of
measure in accordance with the true accentuation of the
words. It was thus also possible for each individual voice to
observe an absolute independence of the others' rhythm if
required to do so, instead of confining rhythmic variety to
changes in all the voice parts simultaneously. The immense
advantages of rhythmic freedom in a single voice part will be
obvious from one or two examples. The first is a simple
example from Wilbye’s Happy, O happy he


t
— LTIIL LTL’Ira T.I
. ºne-º --- 2=E-
Hap - py, O hap – py he,
Rhythm and Underlaying 55
There were, of course, no bars in the original part-books :
they are added in the examples by the present writer to indicate
the rhythmic outline of the passages; it will readily be seen
how these three changes of measure give freedom to the musical
recitation of the words. Another good example may be
quoted from Morley’s Hard by a crystal fountain :

O. *----, - }
W &P i-F-2-—2–~-F-A-2--|->= ~-- !---
(#EEEEEEEEEE====EEE
|TI 2 / | ' ' ' wº- L
el/ g pr º &
O ... ri - a - na the bright lay down a sleep - ing.
The wide possibilities of this system are obvious. A very
fascinating and suggestive example of freedom of rhythm is
to be found in the opening bars of East's Fly away, Care :

−s—º-——
Żºłż=HE”-a-Ez-Ez=
*} U. |→ T] | | i I E
Fly a - way Care, fly a – way Care, for
—º—
Tºº-Tº-T | c s | —l 3 - ==
} i | | || P---- 2––––º | |
We - nus goes a May - ing, fly a – way, fly a - way
fº 2
V -LE Z-2–a–
—— *EEI ! r ſº I
(ºr 2–f H- | | H
al/
Care, for Ve - nus goes a


Scarcely a madrigal exists in which the rhythm is not
frequently changed in all the voice parts, and even when it
may seem to be following a regular duple measure a stronger
accent may often be found on the third beat of a bar than on
the first, or the rhythm may be of six crotchets length with
accents on alternate beats. In passages of long sustained
notes, as well as in the more rapid passages, it will usually be
found after careful observation that some definite rhythmic
pattern is being followed. It cannot be too often repeated
56 The English Madrigal
that no bars at all were printed in the original part-books;
their insertion in modern printed scores is only intended to
give guidance to the eye, and they must not be regarded as
invariably controlling the rhythmic outline.
As already stated, it was possible for each voice part to
follow an independent rhythmic outline regardless of what
any other voice may have been doing. The system of intro-
ducing complex and overlapping rhythms may most simply
be explained by a chart showing the variety of grouping into
which a sequence of twelve equal notes may be divided :
- - - - - - - - - - - -
^–y-f *—r—’ S--—r S-r—” *—— S-->
Y- →-- __* ——
Further possibilities of a very complex kind are opened by
interweaving some of these four schemes of subdivision.
There is occasionally great complexity of rhythmic device to
be found in these madrigals, notably in Byrd’s The match that's
made for just and true respects, and in some of Farnaby’s
canzonets. But complicated rhythmic design can sometimes
go beyond the bounds of the highest kind of Art, and it was
this occasional extravagance which brought the simpler form
of the ‘Ayre' into popularity. Yet when skilfully handled
a fine effect is produced by the employment of complex
rhythms. A splendid example of such an effect is provided
by Byrd’s Though Amaryllis dance in green," in which the
rhythm sometimes changes in all the parts simultaneously, but
more often the 3 and the : rhythms run counter to each
other.
* Those who cannot perform the very difficult feat of singing this madrigal
may study its effects as recorded for the Gramophone Company (H. M. V.)
by “The English Singers'.
Rhythm and Underlaying 57
It will be seen at once how scrupulously careful the madrigal
composers were in the handling of their words; and it will
also become clear that the true accentuation of the words as
they would be pronounced when well spoken is the infallible
guide to correct rhythmic interpretation of the music of the
madrigals. Rhythm is without doubt the feature which above
all others characterizes and vitalizes Tudor music, and ability
to recognize it and to interpret it in all its subtle and varied
and, sometimes, elaborate forms is a quality which a madrigal
singer must of necessity be able to command.
Now since the true accentuation of the words is the only
real guide to correct rhythmic interpretation, it is necessary
to say something about the peculiarity of the principles followed
by the Tudor musicians in the matter of ‘underlaying the
words. The term ‘underlaying' has been borrowed, for lack of
a better one, from the Germans, who use the term unterlegten
with this special technical meaning, namely how each syllable
of the words is to be placed under the music notes for singing.
The Tudor convention was very different from that of later
days. In the part-books there are scarcely any instances at all
in which slurs were printed to show how the words were to be
grouped when more than one note was available for each
syllable of the words. The only indication on this point is
the position in which the words are placed in the books in
relation to the notes. For many generations it was supposed
that the printers were very careless in this matter, this being
the only explanation that could be offered by those who looked
for principles in word-underlaying similar to those with which
they were familiar in contemporary vocal music. Careful
criticism should have revealed the fact that these errors, as
they supposed them to be, follow a very definite principle,
seeing that the position of the words is remarkably accurate
in all the English printed part-books, and that close study of
58 The English Madrigal
the subject makes it abundantly clear that the Tudor musicians
had methods of their own which they followed uniformly. There
are indeed a few instances in which a word has been misplaced,
and the error can generally be detected by comparison with
identical phrases in the other voice parts; and sometimes the
type used for the words is too large in comparison with the
music type, and on this account ambiguity or uncertainty
may occasionally be met with ; but the high praise which
Byrd bestowed upon the music-printers is just as much earned
by their underlaying of the text as it is by their note accuracy.
The practices which a careful student of the madrigal part-
books must inevitably recognize are more clearly illustrated by
the manuscript part-books containing the church music of
the same period. For whereas there are almost no such marks
in the secular printed books, the church music manuscripts
are rather copiously marked with slurs. And the principles,
which are thus indicated beyond all possible doubt, agree
precisely with the placing that was used to be thought careless
in the printed books.
It will only be possible briefly to mention here some of the
characteristic features of Elizabethan underlaying. The com-
posers showed a strong reluctance to divide a group of four
equal notes into two equal pairs with a syllable to each ; their
custom was to detach the first or the fourth note of the group
and tie the other three ; for example in Wilbye’s Stay, Corydon:

— —-ºr--—-----
--ſ)- ESE===a+EEN====
--- -- CJ– n i – —-1– F-——
GºH =E====F ====EEEFE
---"
thy nymph is . . light and sha - dow - like
And in Byrd’s The greedy hawk

Rhythm and Underlaying 59
It was almost invariable to slur a triple phrase beginning with
a dotted note, as in this passage from Byrd’s I thought that love
had been a boy :

—a- | – T
2.4-F—F-H === —|-|-2-2 -es E | *-* -
V i | | | f | T] ~ | *Tºt Zº
2–-I-23–ºf–2–HFa-ºr- SUT = T, -*m--
– •
by do - ting age that dies for cold.
The following example from Weelkes's A ſparrow-hawk proud,
illustrates two points : first, the custom of throwing back
a syllable to the end of the previous bar instead of introducing
a new syllable on a strong rhythmic position ; and secondly,
that of giving a long phrase to a single unimportant syllable :
C) ~~ →--a
# ========
the hawk re me - º plied

The avoidance of the consonant on the strong position of the
phrase overcomes the slight interruption which the pronuncia-
tion of a consonant cannot avoid, and the prolongation of the
short syllable excites an expectation which gives emphasis to
the strong syllable when it is finally reached.
The slur-marks in the early manuscript part-books in
Durham Cathedral and Peterhouse are very copious ; the
practice of introducing syllables on the weak rhythmic position
by preference seems occasionally to be carried to the verge of
excess in those particular books, and it is not impossible that the
convention became exaggerated at Durham in the seventeenth
century. This passage in Farrant’s Magnificat in A minor
(printed a tone lower by Boyce) suggests an extravagance in
this detail :

T i T]
A_\ …” *-ºs-
24–2–Hz−º-FEEC–F–F i t
6–2.É.- |-- *E*=====E2–~~
JT
L P L
- —T
and to his seed for e - Ver.
6O The English Madrigal
But many similar examples undoubtedly representing general
practice are accurately reproduced in the Carnegie edition of
Tudor Church Music, and the reader is referred to these. It
is unfortunate that the large majority of nineteenth-century
editors showed a complete disregard for the characteristic
manner of sixteenth-century singing ; the madrigals and
church music alike lose a large part of their flavour if the
position of the words and the rhythmic pattern are changed
in accordance with modern convention. It is not a question
of what we may prefer or what we are accustomed to, but of
what the Tudor musicians deliberately intended to be sung.
e. Harmony
The highly technical subject of the harmony and counter-
point of the Elizabethan musicians has been discussed in the
present writer’s English Madrigal Composers, and still more
fully in Mr. R. O. Morris’s Contrapuntal Technique in the
Sixteenth Century ; it will therefore be unnecessary to give
more than passing attention to it here. Mr. Morris has rightly
observed that ‘harmonic purity and rhythmical freedom are
the most important lessons we have to learn from the sixteenth
century', and it must be stated at the outset that the use of
chromatic harmonies by the madrigalists was comparatively
exceptional ; some composers made more use of them than
others, but whenever they were introduced it was with a view
to producing a special effect, as when a painter reserves the
use of a particular pigment of telling qualities for a single
point in his picture. The use of chromatic harmonies by the
Elizabethan composers had until recently been entirely over-
looked, and since attention has been drawn to them there are
signs of some tendency to over-emphasize their importance;
for example, there are people who, having been shown the
amazing chromatic harmonies used by Weelkes in O Care, thou
Harmony 6I
wilt despatch me : Cease, sorrows, now : Thule : and other of
his madrigals, will affect “not to recognize the real Weelkes”
in his more diatonic work. Taken as a whole, the harmony
of the madrigalists is of a diatonic character and of the purity
of a crystal stream. Nevertheless, when all the isolated examples
of chromatic harmony are collected from the English madrigals
and tabulated, it is certainly surprising to note how many
so-called modern chords are actually to be found in the music
of this date. The chord of the augmented fifth was by far
the most used of all the chromatic chords by the madrigalists.
It was scarcely ever used by the austere Byrd, and never at
all by the merry-minded yet scholarly Morley, but it is not
infrequently found in that other severely dispositioned musician,
Orlando Gibbons, in the great stylist, John Wilbye, in the
imaginative and unconventional Weelkes, and in many of the
minor lights. A few examples also occur of chords of
the augmented sixth, of the Neapolitan sixth, and even of the
diminished seventh.
The dominant seventh was also freely introduced by these
composers, often without preparation. The following cadence is
not uncommon in Byrd’s church music as well as in his madrigals:
|
EZ-4------
{} ––
*º [ zºº
Cºº’ | Q-º"
© –62–
Cº T
|
|
[
Z2SN:
\\0 &
N-7
Gº
H
And all these composers were fond of the beautiful cadence :
—- –

62 The English Madrigal
the free resolution of the dominant seventh in this instance
is usually explained on the ground of the omission of the
sixth in the chain of passing notes. The dominant seventh
was used as an ordinary passing note in almost every cadence,
but in no instance was the chord of the dominant seventh
used as an independent chord in a strong rhythmic position
as it was after the turn of the century, nor was it used in any
other than the root position by the madrigalists; that par-
ticular harmonic discovery properly belonging to Monteverde
and the Italians.
Although Byrd seldom showed any taste for chromatic
harmony, he was one of the most original and unconventional
of all the Elizabethans in introducing what he himself described
as “jarre and dissonance'. Not all these effects are satisfactory
to modern ears, but the actual clash of the major and minor
thirds, and many of those progressions which involve what
later theorists called false relations, would have fallen less
harshly on the ears of the Elizabethans, to whom the prin-
ciples of equal temperament were practically unknown. Kirbye
and Carlton were two other madrigalists who followed Byrd
in this particular direction.
— A very individual style of harmony was developed by Ward ;
his treatment of suspensions is unlike anything else in the work
of the English madrigalists, and in his five- and six-part madrigals
some very massive harmonic effects are produced by double
and triple suspensions. For example in Out from the vale of
deep despair :

Harmony 63
In the matter of progressions examples of the step of almost
every interval are to be found in the works of the madrigalists;
for instance, the augmented second is occasionally found, and
such intervals as :



as well as skips of a tenth occur, while F ====
1s quite common. * -º-m--—--------, --- -
Dealing with the conventional rules, Morley in his Plaine
and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke forbade the use
of consecutive fifths and octaves, and very few, if any, breaches
of this rule are to be found in the works of Morley himself,
or in those of Byrd, Wilbye, Weelkes, and Orlando Gibbons;
yet none of these had the slightest hesitation in writing con-
secutive fifths or octaves on similar beats of a bar with a single
chord in between, though this practice was sternly forbidden
by the eighteenth-century theorists, and many similar rules
evolved by the later contrapuntists are not supported by the
practice of the Elizabethans. Giles Farnaby seemed to have
no scruple in writing actual fifths occasionally, and instances
of such progressions as these occur at times in the madrigals
of most of these composers; it cannot be supposed that they
are all due to oversight, still legs to incompetence, and their
existence affords additional evidence of the spirit of non-
conformity in musical matters which was so prevalent at this
period.
Enough has been said to indicate the individuality of the
technique of the English madrigalists and to show that their
music is very far from being academic or conventional. On
the contrary it is intensely imaginative and original, although
64 The English Madrigal
preserving in the main # harmonic purity which Mr. Morris
so wisely commends. Whatever vein they wrote in, whether in
gaiety, lighthumour, satire, vigour, tenderness, sadness, emotion,
or religious expression, their music responds to all demands, with
perfect fitness and never-failing dignity. For this reason it ranks
as first-rate art and is as full of vitality to-day as it was three
hundred years ago.
3
The Woyds
THE madrigal composers had the incalculable advantage of
having an unlimited fund of first-rate poetry to set to music,
since they were the contemporaries of Shakespeare and of those
other dramatists and poets who with him made the Elizabethan
period the golden age of English literature. As previously
stated, the names of those who wrote the words of the madrigals
were never recorded in the part-books; but it has been possible
to identify the authorship of a small proportion of the poems,
because some of them are to be found elsewhere than in the
madrigal books in a connexion that provides indisputable
evidence of authorship. Often the text of the music-books, .
which has the value of being contemporary with the poets’
work, varies in important details from the text which has been
handed down to us from other sources, and this lends an
additional interest to it. The variants seldom suggest that the
text of the song-books is the most authentic, and it would
seem that the words were often carelessly transcribed, or else
that the composer wrote them down from recollection with
the natural result that inaccuracies crept in. But in handling
the text of the song-books a principle must be observed which
is not always quite clearly recognized by those whose interests
in this matter are solely literary, namely that although truer
The Woyds 65
and more authentic text may be available from other sources,
the text, as it appears in the music books must be retained
whenever it is reproduced specifically in connexion with or in
reference to music.
A good example of the textual corruption which is occasion-
ally to be found in the song-books may be quoted from Martin
Peerson’s motets No. II, where the word flect occurs. This
is clearly a mistake for flesh, which is found in Greville’s poem
elsewhere ; yet flect—whatever it may have meant to him—
was undoubtedly the word which Peerson had before him,
because it is deliberately so printed in all the separate part-
books of this composition. Again, it has been suggested in
Bennet’s short madrigal on falconry that die, fearful ducks
should properly be dive, fearful ducks ; the suggestion may be
right, yet it remains a fact that all four part-books read die,
and no modern editor would be justified in altering it ; more-
over, no other text of this line is known to exist. An interesting
example of this kind of textual criticism is provided in Bate-
son’s Sadness, sit down. The second line is difficult to construe,
and the meaning turns largely on the punctuation. The best
punctuation seems to be Tear up thought’s tomb, a numbed
heart. The composer has divided up the phrase thus: Tear
up thoughts, tomb a numbed heart, which seems to make no
sense at all, and he treats the word tomb as a verb. This is
not merely a question of punctuation in the madrigal, for the
two limbs of the sentence are each repeated separately in all
the parts, and several beats’ rest divide them in the music.
It is one of those cases which cannot be judged and settled
solely from a literary standpoint, nor without due regard to
the musician’s very deliberate construction with all its peculiari-
ties and difficulties. But a large number of alterations of
a minor kind were intentionally made by the musical com-
posers. One reason for this was that a whole line of poetry
2535-46 E
66 The English Madrigal
was generally too long for the kind of short musical phrases
which characterized the structure of a madrigal, and conse-
quently a verbal phrase had sometimes to be split up ; the
natural result of this was that the musician would sometimes
transpose words, and these very often became more isolated
from their context owing to their being repeated several
times in accordance with the structure of the music. This
indeed led to another type of verbal alteration, because the
imitative entries often had the effect of making the musical
phrases longer in some voice-parts than in others, and some
verbal padding was required ; further repetition of a single
word or two generally met this requirement, but certain
composers did not hesitate to add fresh epithets or small
interjections on their own account when they needed more
verbal material for a musical phrase. None of the English
madrigalists exercised so much freedom in this matter as
Morley, but a few examples of this practice are to be found
in the work of the majority of them.
Among the poets whose words were set as madrigals were
Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Robert Greene,
Christopher Marlowe, Michael Drayton, Thomas Campian,
Walter and Francis Davison, Joshua Sylvester, Greville Lord
Brooke, John Donne, Sir Edward Dyer, Francis Kindlemarch,
Vere Earl of Oxford, Walter Raleigh, Samuel Daniel, Chideock
Tichborne, Nicholas Breton, and others. There is no known
example of any of Shakespeare’s words being set as a madrigal,
though the authorship of The Passionate Pilgrim in Barnefield’s
Miscellany used at one time to be attributed to Shakespeare;
Weelkes set three stanzas of the poem My flocks feed not from
The Passionate Pilgrim, and it is interesting to notice that this
madrigal was published in 1597, two years before Barnefield’s
Miscellany appeared. The fact that the authorship of the
poems has been identified in so many cases leads to the inference
The Words 67
that many more of the poems used by the madrigalists must
be by the same authors; and it is perhaps not too much to
suppose that all the poets of the day, including Shakespeare,
must be represented in the large anonymous collection of
English verse which has been preserved in the madrigal part-
books. The whole of
the poems of the mad-
rigals were collected
and edited by the
present author, and
published under the
title of English Mad-
rigal Verse."
The taste of the
madrigalists in select-
ing their words varied
very much. Byrd and
Orlando Gibbons,
both of whom were
of an especially serious
disposition, with
scarcely any exception
chose poetry of the
first order. It is SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
sometimes stated that
Gibbons’s reference to Sir Christopher Hatton in his dedica-
tion implies that Hatton wrote the words of his madrigals :
but that this was not so we know, because several of the lyrics
are indisputably by other authors—four by Joshua Sylvester,
two more from Spenser's Faerie Queene, one usually attributed
to John Donne, and another to Sir Walter Raleigh. It is
possible, on the other hand, that Hatton chose the poems for
* Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.

E 2
68 - The English Madrigal
Gibbons. Ward was another composer who wrote several
madrigals to words whose authors can be identified ; he seems
to have had a special fancy for the words of Michael Drayton,
possibly a personal friend of his ; but his book also includes
poems by the Davisons and Sidney, who was indeed a favourite
with many of these composers.
The poetry set by the madrigal composers deals with every
variety of subject and all the phases of the life of the period.
The pastoral treatment of the love-making and dancing of the
nymphs and shepherds naturally finds a large place in this field;
but, being the most conventional of subjects, it provides the least
interesting poetry, and sometimes the words for these conceits
are little more than doggerel, made up with rhymes of cruel and
jewel, or anguish and languish. Sometimes, it is true, reputable
authors were responsible for these jingles; Francis Davison, for
example, wrote the following lines set by Robert Jones :
Your presence breeds my anguish,
Your absence makes me languish,
Your sight with woe doth fill me,
And want of your sweet sight, alas, doth kill me.
But sometimes these conventional love-lyrics were prettily
turned, as in this example from Lichfild’s set :
I always loved to call my lady Rose ;
For in her cheeks do roses sweetly glose,
And from her lips she such sweet odours threw
As roses do ’gainst Phoebus' morning view.
But when I thought to pull’t, hope was bereft me,
My Rose was gone and nought but prickles left me.
This is, of course, a long way behind Campian’s beautiful lines
which were set by several musicians of the period :
There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies grow ;
A heavenly paradise is that place
Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.
The Words 69
There cherries grow that none may buy
Till ‘cherry ripe themselves do cry.
Any of the well-known Elizabethan poets might have written
the words of the two following madrigals of Bateson, which
remain anonymous :
Have I found her ? O rich finding !
Goddess-like for to behold,
Her fair tresses seemly binding
In a chain of pearl and gold.
Chain me, chain me, O most fair,
Chain me to thee with that hair.
And
Sister, awake, close not your eyes,
The day her light discloses;
And the bright morning doth arise
Out of her bed of roses.
See the clear sun, the world’s bright eye,
In at our window peeping,
Lo, how he blusheth to espy
Us idle wenches sleeping.
Therefore awake, make haste, I say,
And let us without staying
All in our gowns of green so gay
Into the park a-maying.
The May-day revels to which this last lyric refers were kept
up with great gaiety in Elizabethan days. The custom of
going ‘a-maying was a very ancient one, and is said to be
founded on the Roman Floralia, or floral games, which began
on April 28th. In Elizabethan days it was customary for the
entire populace to go out at an early hour and gather flowers
and hawthorn blossom ; the festivities included much dancing
and merry-making, and the final ceremony of bringing home the
May was brought to a climax by the choice of the fairest maid
of the village as May-Queen. Every house in the village was
decked out with May-blossom and the evening ceremonies
centred round the May-pole, which was a permanent fixture
70 The English Madrigal
in the village. It is recorded that Henry VIII and Catherine
of Arragon went from Greenwich one May morning to greet
the London folk who had come out to gather May on Shooter’s
Hill. Chaucer in his Court of Love wrote: “Forth goeth all the
Court, both most and least, to fetch the flowers fresh.” May-day
is finely described by Spenser in the Shepherd’s Calendar :
Is not thilke the merrie month of May,
When love-lads masken in fresh aray :
How falles it then, we no merrier béne,
Ylike as others, girt in gawdie gréene
Our blonket liveries bene all too sad
For thilke same season, when all is yolad
With pleasance, the ground with grasse, the woods
With gréene leaves, ye bushes with bloosming buds.
Youthes folke now flocken in every where
To gather May-buskets, and smelling Bréere :
And home they hasten the posts to dight
And all the Kirke pillers ere day light,
With Hawthorne buds, and sweete Eglantine,
And girlonds of Roses, and Sops in wine.
Siker this morrow, ne lenger ago,
I saw a shole of shepheards out go,
With singing, and showting, and iolly cheere :
Before them yode a lustie Tabrere,
That to the manie a horne pype plaide,
Whereto they dauncen each one with his maide.
To sée those folkes make such iouisaunce
Made my heart after the pype to daunce.
Tho to the gréene wood they spéeden them all,
To fetchen home May with their musicall:
And home they bringen in a royall throne,
Crowned as king : and his Queene attone
Was Ladie Flora, on whom did attend
A faire flocke of Faeries, and a fush bend
Of lovely Nymphs. (O that I were there
To help the ladies their Maybush to beareſ)
The Words 7I
The madrigals are, of course, teeming with May-day subjects.
May-day is the theme of Morley’s famous ballet, Now is the
month of Maying, and there is another typical May-day madrigal
in Weelkes's six-part set :
Why are you ladies staying
And your lords gone a-maying?
Run, run apace and meet them
And with your garlands greet them ;
'Twere pity they should miss you
For they will sweetly kiss you.
Hark! hark I hear some dancing
And a nimble morris prancing.
The bagpipe and the morris bells
That they are not far hence us tells.
Come let us all go thither
And dance like friends together.
The morris dancers provided another favourite subject.
Morley’s boisterous Ho / who comes here P is perhaps the finest
example of this kind, but Weelkes's Lo / country sports gives
another gay picture of similar scenes. Wedding festivities
also provided good matter for the madrigal. A most picturesque
and brilliant representation of wedding revelries is to be found,
for instance, in Morley's Arise, get up, my dear:
Arise, get up, my dear, make haste, begone thee!
Lo where the bride, fair Daphne, tarries on thee!
Hark! yon merry wanton maidens Squealing :
‘Spice cake, sops in wine, see now a dealing.’
Then run apace,
Get a bride-lace
And a gilt rosemary branch while yet there is catching,
And then hold fast for fear of old Snatching.
Alas, my love, why weep she
O fear not that the next day keep we.
Hark yon minstrels | List, how fine they firk it !
And see how the maids jerk it !
72 The English Madrigal
With Kate and Will,
Tom and Jill.
Now a trip,
Then a skip,
Finely set aloft,
Now again as oft.
Heigh ho! fine brave holiday !
All for fair Daphne's wedding day !
Closely associated with the May-day festivities were the
Robin Hood games, the principal actors in which were chosen
from the community by popular vote. Refusal to obey the
call was punishable by fines and other penalties, a system
whereby notable people sometimes found themselves in an
undignified position. The plight of Francis Bothwell early
in the sixteenth century is quaintly described in Napier’s
Memoirs of john Napier of Merchistoun ; it is stated that
Bothwell, when a baillie of Edinburgh in 1518, declined to
take the part of ‘Litil John’ for which he was elected, as not
being agreeable to his habits and tastes, and he was actually
obliged to petition “my Lord Erle of Aranis’ to “excuse him
fra the office of litil Johne'. Arran replied: ‘President,
ballies and counsall of Edinburgh we greit you weill; It is
understand to us that Maister Francis Boithwell your nichtbour,
is chosin to be litil Johne for to mak sportis and joscositeis in
the toune, the quhilk is a man to be usit in hiear and gravar
materis . . . quharfor we request and prayis, and als chargis
you that ye hald him excusit at this tyme.” The traditional
scenes connected with Robin Hood, Little John, Maid Marian,
and Friar Tuck were roughly enacted on the village greens,
and not a little horseplay was introduced, in which the whole
of the community joined. In Elizabethan times the Robin
Hood characters were often impersonated by the parties
of mummers on their visits to the villages and the large
houses.
The Woyds 73
One of Weelkes's Ayeres or Phantasticke Spirites carries an
allusion to the Robin Hood games :
Since Robin Hood, Maid Marian
And Little John are gone-a,
The hobby-horse was quite forgot
When Kempe did dance alone-a.
The Kempe mentioned here was a well-known actor, who
played Dogberry at the first production of Much Ado about
WILLIAM KEMPE. From the woodcut prefixed to
Kempe’s Nine Daies Wonder, 1600
Nothing; and his name, both in the Quarto and Folio texts
of that play (Act V, Sc. 2), was accidentally substituted for
that of Dogberry. He was also the original performer of the
part of Peter in Romeo and juliet. He shared with Richard
Tarleton a great reputation for improvisation, and their ten-
dency to “gag’ is thought to be referred to in Hamlet (Act III,
Sc. 2): “And let those that play your Clowns speak no more
than is set down for them.” Kempe was even more famous
for his dancing, and his Nine Daies Wonder gives a remarkable

74 The English Madrigal
description of his dance from London to Norwich, where he
arrived successfully amid scenes of great gaiety and enthusiasm.
On the title-page he is shown, with his taborer, in the complete
outfit of a morris-dancer with napkins and bells, the former
being fastened either to the shoulders or wrists of the dancer
and used for the purpose of gesture.
Field sports, too, naturally find a place among the madrigals.
Byrd, whose choice of words bears testimony to his fine taste
in literature, wrote several madrigals containing allusions to
sports. Some refer to hawking ; this for example:
The greedy hawk with sudden sight of lure
Doth stoop in hope to have her wished prey.
So many men do stoop to sights unsure
And courteous speech doth keep them at the bay.
Let them beware lest friendly looks be like
The lure whereat the soaring hawk did strike.
Thomas Churchyard’s lines—‘Compel the hawk to sit that
is unmanned were also set by Byrd ; and another of this com-
poser’s madrigals was “If women could be fair and never fond ’,
a poem by Vere, Earl of Oxford, the second stanza of which
has in it several hawking terms. There is no gayer hunting
scene in all the madrigal literature than that in Bateson’s
Come, follow me, and this is one of those madrigals in which
the musician by his imaginative and pictorial handling of his
resources adds not a little to the work of the poet.
Come follow me, fair nymphs ; hie | run apace
Diana, hunting, honoureth this chace.
Softly for fear her game we rouse
Lodged in this grove of briars and boughs.
Hark how the huntsmen winds their horns !
See how the deer mounts o'er the thorns !
The White / the Black / Oho, he pinched thee there !
Gowen ran well, but I love killed the deer.
The Words 75
A typical Elizabethan conceit clothed with the phraseology
of the law courts was set by Michael East as a madrigal :
My Hope a counsel with my Love
Hath long desired to be,
And marvels much so dear a friend
Is not retained by me.
She doth condemn my foolish haste
In passing the estate
Of my whole life into your hands
Who nought pays for’t but hate.
And not sufficed with this, she says
I did release the right
Of my enjoyed liberties
Unto your beauteous sight.
Legal terms are also employed in several of Byrd’s madrigals,
notably in Where Fancy fond for Pleasure pleads and Sir Philip
Sidney’s O you that hear this voice ; and the conventional gibe
at the lawyer has not undergone much change in three centuries,
as we see in the following stanza from Byrd’s What pleasure
have great princes in reference to shepherds :
For lawyers and their pleading
They esteem it not a straw ;
They think that honest meaning
Is of itself a law.
Where conscience judgeth plainly
They spend no money vainly.
Writing on the subject of madrigals some eighty years ago,
that great enthusiast, Robert Lucas de Pearsall, himself the
composer of many fine part-songs of a rather madrigalian
kind, attempted to define the madrigal form, and named gaiety
as being among its essential features. This statement is in
76 The English Madrigal
agreement with what many others have said both before and
after Pearsall's time. Yet a cursory glance through the poetry
of the English madrigal will show at once that it is at variance
with the facts, and that it imposes a narrowing limit on the
madrigal which the Elizabethan composers were very far
from recognizing. The erroneous idea may have been based on
the very limited material which for generations was available
for the formation of a reasoned judgement on the subject.
And it chanced that such madrigals as had come into use
after the first revival in the middle of the eighteenth century
and until as late as the last decade of the nineteenth, were
almost entirely of a bright character. For example, most of
The Triumphes of Oriana were known and enjoyed by the old-
established madrigal societies, and formed a very large pro-
portion of their English repertory; some twenty or thirty
other favourites which may, at a liberal allowance, be said to
have completed this repertory, were all drawn from among
the gay numbers ; typical of these were Wilbye’s Flora gave
me fairest flowers : Sweet honey-sucking bees : Lady, when
I behold : Morley’s I follow lo the footing : Bateson's Sister,
awake, and several of the ballets of Morley and Weelkes.
More serious favourites were Gibbons’s The silver swan, and
Bennet’s Weep, O mine eyes, which incidentally they changed
to Flow, O my tears (modern words by Thomas Oliphant),
for the sole reason that they also sang Wilbye’s Weep, O mine
eyes. The really serious madrigal was almost wholly neglected
and unknown. Yet some of the very finest madrigals in exist-
ence are those set to words which would not possibly be
described as bright or gay. It may be partly on account of
this neglect that the outstanding merit of the Elizabethans
has not until lately been recognized, and that the relative
position of some of the principal madrigal composers has been
TO THE RIGHT Hö. THE LORD PO SVI DEVNM
Charles Howard Earle of WCotingham, Bar- AD1 VTOREM MEVM
GRoNEWICLAE.
M. D. KXXIII •
vºl. xix, grrr.
NATA
ANnſ
-*. § º
º º º, sº
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§: s S㺠N
ron of Effingham, Knight of the Noble order of the
carter, Lord high Admirall of England,ſre-
land,and (Wile,6t.And one of her
Majcſtics moſt honorable
Priuc Counſcll.
rofit,re
RIGHT HO.
i Haue aducntured to dedicate theſe few diſcordant tune;
# to be cenſured by the ingenious diſpoſition of your Lord-
& ſhips Honorable rare perfeótion,perſwading my ſcife, that
% theſe labours,compoſed by me and others,(as in the ſur-
Yuey hercof.your Lordſhip may well perceiue) may not by
any meanes paſſe, without the malignific of ſome malit:-
ous Momtºs,whoſe malice (bcing as toothſomc as thc Ad.
ders ſting) couched in the progres of a wayfayring mans
paſſage, might makchim retire though almoſt at his iourncyes cnd.Two ſpeci-
all Motiues hauc imbouldened mc (right Honorable) in this my procecding.
Tirſt,for that I conſider,that as thc body cannot bec without the ſhadow: ſo
Homer (the Prince of Poets) may not be without a 20iliff.The ſcCond & laſt is
(the moſt forcible motiuc) I know, (not onely by report, but alſo by experi-
ment) your Lordſhip,to bec not onely Philomuſu; a loucr of the ... Of
learning : but Philomathcs, a perſonage alway deſirous, (though in all Arts
ſufficiently ſkilfull) to come to a moie high perfeótion or Summum bonum. I
will not trouble your Lordſhip with to to tedious circumſtances, onely I
humbly intreat your Lordſhip (in the name of many) to patronage this work
with no leſſe acceptance, then I with a willing and kinde hart dedicatc it. So
ſhall I think the initium of this worke not oncly happely begun, but to bec
fnited with a morc happic pcriod.
Your Honours dcuoted in all dutie,
#:
. -: *
* ... *
g 'Eºfºrt, cº-ANG FRANHIBET VERG'KEGINA
Thomas Morley º Giſr 15-IIANAE PROPVGNATRIX ACERRIMA-Cºo
The Dedication to The Triumphes of Oriana From an engraving by Crispin de Passe, I 592

















78 The English Madrigal
sometimes misjudged. Many even of Wilbye’s subjects were
of a serious character, the finest, perhaps, being :
Happy, O happy he, who not affecting
he endless toils attending worldly cares,
With mind reposed, all discontents rejecting,
In silent peace his way to heaven prepares,
Deeming his life a scene, the world a stage
Whereon man acts his weary pilgrimage.
The author of these lines is unknown, but they are remini-
scent of Shakespeare’s All the world's a stage, and also of
Raleigh's What is our life 2 the setting of which by Orlando
Gibbons is one of the finest examples of a serious madrigal in
existence. Another of Wilbye’s severer madrigals is :
There is a jewel which no Indian mines
Can buy, no chimic art can counterfeit.
It makes men rich in greatest poverty,
Makes water wine, turns wooden cups to gold,
The homely whistle to sweet music’s strain.
Seldom it comes ; to few from Heaven sent—
That much in little, all in nought, Content.
Both Gibbons and Byrd by disposition preferred the severe
subject to the conventional Elizabethan conceit, though both
wrote superb examples of the latter—Gibbons with his Dainty,
fine bird and Ah, dear heart, and Byrd with Though Amaryllis
dance in green and This ſweet and merry month of May, among
several others. Nothing could well surpass this beautiful
elegy of Gibbons, the authorship of which is unfortunately not
known :
Nay let me weep though other’s tears be spent ;
Though all eyes dried be, let mine be wet.
Unto thy grave I’ll pay this yearly rent,
Thy lifeless corse demands of me this debt.
I owe more tears than ever corse did crave;
I’ll pay more tears than e'er was paid to grave.
The Woyds 79
Ne'er let the sun with his deceiving light
Seek to make glad these watery eyes of mine.
My sorrow suits with melancholy night :
I joy in dole, in languishment I pine.
My dearest friend is set ; he was my sun
With whom my mirth, my joy, and all, is done.
Yet if that Age had frosted o'er his head,
Or if his face had furrowed been with years,
I would not so bemoan that he is dead ;
I might have been more niggard of my tears.
But O, the sun, new-rose, is gone to bed
And lilies in their spring-time hang their head.
Several fine examples of the ethical type of madrigal are to
be found in Byrd’s three sets :
Retire, my soul, consider thine estate,
And justly sum thy lavish sin’s account,
Time’s dear expense and costly pleasure’s rate;
How follies grow, how vanities amount.
Write all these down in pale Death’s reckoning tables
Thy days will seem but dreams, thy hopes but fables.
Byrd also wrote a number of very fine madrigals which are
semi-religious in character ; a few works of a similar mood
occur in the sets of other madrigalists, but in this particular
class Byrd easily excelled the rest. Among his finest pieces is :
Why do I use my paper, ink and pen
And call my wits to counsel what to say :
Such memories were made for mortal men;
I speak of Saints whose names cannot decay.
An angel’s trump were fitter for to sound
Their glorious death, if such on earth were found.
There are three stanzas in the part-books, but only the first is
set with the music. The complete poem has as many as thirty
stanzas ; it was written by Henry Walpole as ‘An Epitaph of
the Life and Death of the most famous Clerk and virtuous
Priest Edmund Campion ”.
8O The English Madrigal
One other type must be mentioned, and it may best be
described as a sad or mournful song. Such are Byrd’s Come,
woeful Orpheus, and O Care, thou wilt despatch me by Weelkes,
the latter treated with such superb imagination and marked
by such original harmony that it is considered by many to be
the finest secular composition in the whole range of sixteenth-
century music.
Enough has been said to show the importance of the more
serious class of madrigals in a survey of the work of the English
school as a whole ; those who ignore it, or confine their taste
exclusively to the gay madrigals, are clearly attaching to the
word a meaning which was not present in the minds of the
Elizabethan composers themselves. In their gay moods they
certainly expressed themselves with matchless brilliance, but
it was their superlative work in all styles and all varieties of
subject that marks the outstanding excellence of this wonderful
group of the English madrigal school.
4
The Composers
Richard Alison
OF Alison, one of the minor lights among the English
madrigalists, nothing at all is known by way of personal history
except that he was a Londoner, living at one time in a ‘house
in the Duke's place neere Alde-gate ’. This fact is stated on
the title-page of his Psalmes of David, published in 1599. His
madrigal writings are contained in a volume published in 1606,
under the title of Am Houres Recreation in Musicke, apt for
Instrumentes and Voyces. Framed for the delight of Gentlemen
and others cohich are wel affected to that qualitie, All for the most
part with two trebles, necessarie for such as teach in priuate
The Composers - 8I
families, with a prayer for the long preseruation of the King and
his posteritie, and a thankesgiuing for the deliuerance of the whole
estate from the late conspiracie. It was dedicated to Sir John
Scudamore.
Alison’s style is more homophonic than that of any other of
the English madrigalists, and his music is not of first-rate
interest, though his choice of words was uniformly good.
There is a curious bugle-call in Though Wit bids Will to blow
retreat which may have been founded on a recognized call of
the time. Behold now praise the Lord, an anthem included in
this set, is on a far higher plane than anything else in the book.
A few more compositions of Alison’s survive in manuscript.
Although flourishing at the time, he made no contribution
to The Triumphes of Oriana. Alison wrote a short poem in
praise of Farnaby which was printed in that composer’s book
of canzonets.
Thomas Bateson
Bateson was born about the year I 570, though the exact
date is not known. In 1599 he was appointed organist of
Chester Cathedral, and lived and worked there for nine years;
his house stood at the top of the North Cloisters, and was one
of those which were reconstructed at the dissolution from the
monks' dormitory, but no trace of it is now left. Bateson left
Chester in 1608, when he became organist of Christ Church
Cathedral, Dublin, then known as the Cathedral of the Blessed
Trinity. The rest of his life was spent in Dublin, and he
died there in 1630. He took the degree of B.Mus. at Trinity
College, Dublin, in 1615.
Bateson has enjoyed a great reputation as a madrigal writer,
yet his work is not quite on the same level as that of Wilbye
and Weelkes. But Bateson wrote many very fine madrigals,
and he chose his words wisely as a rule. Cupid in a bed of roses
2535.46 F
82 The English Madrigal
is one of his best works; it is a very picturesque madrigal with
many realistic touches which reveal the hand of a true artist.
Sister, awake has always been a favourite, and deserves to
retain its popularity. Hark / hear you not P is another general
favourite ; and Come, follow me, fair nymphs, with its hunting
metaphors, is a very effective madrigal for three voices. Bateson
made some interesting harmonic experiments, examples of
which are quoted in the author's English Madrigal Composers.
His contribution to The Triumphes of Oriana arrived too late
for inclusion in that collection, but that madrigal and Orianaes
farewell were published in his first set.
Bateson’s First Set of English Madrigals to 3. 4. 5. and 6.
voices was published in 1604, with a dedication to Sir William
Norres, and contains twenty-nine madrigals. His Second Set
of Madrigales to 3. 4.5. and 6. Parts : Apt for Viols and Voyces
was published in 1618. It was dedicated to Arthur, Lord
Chichester, and contains thirty madrigals.
john Bennet
Nothing is known of this composer’s personal history. He
dedicated his Madrigalls to Fovre Voyces in 1599 to Ralph
Assheton, of Downhams in Cheshire, a property still owned
by this family, stating in his dedication that Assheton was
‘many waies a principall patron of my good ; this may
imply that he was in his service, or at least that he lived in
the same locality. Bennet wrote one of the most effective of
all the madrigals in The Triumphes of Oriana ; more homo-
phonic than the rest, it is yet very brilliant and gay, with some
subtle touches of realism. His four-part madrigals are all of
a quiet character, delicate and charming ; Come, shepherds,
follow me and the well-known Weep, O mine eyes are typical
of his work. There are seventeen madrigals in the set.
Bennet also contributed in 1614 six numbers to Thomas
*
The Composers 83
Ravenscroft’s A Briefe Discourse of the true (but neglected) vse
of Charact’ring the Degrees . . . in Measurable Musicke . . .
Examples whereof are exprest in the Harmony of 4. Voyces,
Concerning the Pleasure of 5. vsuall Recreations. I. Hunting,
2. Hawking, 3. Dauncing, 4. Drinking, 5. Enamouring. Only
two of these are strictly madrigalian in style; of these the
Falconer’s song is fresh and vigorous, and the little Elves’ Dance
is perfect in its daintiness and delicacy.
JWilliam Byrd \)
Byrd was the outstanding figure in the great group of
Elizabethan musicians, and indeed takes a high place among
the world’s composers. It is the versatility of Byrd’s genius
that so especially marks him out, for he excelled in every branch
of composition known in his time. His Latin church music
stands with that of Palestrina as representing the high-water
mark of excellence in the polyphonic style. In this depart-
ment alone Byrd is represented by three masses and con-
siderably more than two hundred motets that have survived
to the present day. The masses and a great part of the motets
were printed in his lifetime, but more than fifty motets survive
in manuscript. His work for the English rites of the Church
is almost as remarkable, including two morning services,
together with Venite, Kyrie, and Creed, and four evening
services, besides nearly a hundred anthems. The ‘Great
service is of equal merit with the masses, and must be ranked
as the finest English service that exists. Only a small pro-
portion of Byrd’s English church music was printed in his
time.
Byrd was also a great pioneer in writing for keyboard
instruments and for strings.
As a madrigal composer Byrd has been much misunderstood
F 2
84 The English Madrigal
and his work undervalued, partly because he only wrote
a small number of madrigals in a light vein, and partly also
because musicians from soon after Byrd’s day until our own
have tended to limit their taste for madrigals to those of
a bright character; thus the serious madrigals, of which Byrd
wrote so many fine examples, have remained until recently
neglected by singers and unknown to critics. Perhaps the
finest of Byrd’s serious madrigals is Why do I use my paper, ink,
and pen P a madrigal characterized by great dignity, which
works up to a splendid climax. Retire, my soul is another fine
work of this class ; and of rather different character is the
beautiful elegy, Come to me, grief, for ever. But Byrd also
excelled in the more conventional kind of madrigal; the six-
part setting of This sweet and merry month of May is as brilliant
as anything in The Triumphes of Oriana, and although Byrd
made no contribution to that collection, this madrigal may,
in a sense, be regarded as his tribute to the praise of Elizabeth,
or ‘Oriana'. Though Amaryllis dance in green is another very
fine madrigal dealing with a conventional Elizabethan conceit ;
Byrd’s style is here in marked contrast to that of any of the
other English madrigalists, but the true madrigalian spirit
characterizes every bar of the music. Come, woeful Orpheus
represents in Byrd’s work that type of madrigal of which
Wilbye, for instance, wrote several—that which deals with
the subject of disappointed love. And in the lightest manner
there are such things as I thought that Love had been a boy,
Come, jolly swains, and some others which prove the falsity of
the assertion that Byrd could not excel in the light vein. It
is true that, being a man of austere disposition, he preferred
to express himself seriously, but that is not to say that he failed
in other subjects.
Some of the madrigals in the 1588 set were, as Byrd informs
us in the prefatory ‘Epistle to the Reader’, ‘originally made
The Composers 85
for Instruments to expresse the harmonie, and one voyce to
pronounce the dittie’. These were, therefore, some of the
’, an experiment which
very earliest experiments in ‘Art-song
was brought to perfection by Byrd in his lovely cradle song,
My little sweet darling.
Byrd’s madrigals were published in three sets, each of which
contained a certain proportion of church music. The first of
these was published in 1588, and entitled: Psalmes, Sonets, and
Songs of Sadnes and Pietie, made into Musicke of five parts . . .
for the recreation of all such as delight in Musicke. There
followed in 1589, Songs of sundrie natures, some of grauitie, and
others of myrth, fit for all companies and voyces. Lately made
and composed into Musicke of 3. 4. 5. and 6. parts, and published
for the delight of all such as take pleasure in the exercise of that
Art. The last set was not published until 161 I ; it was
entitled : Psalmes, Songs, and Sonnets : some solemne, others
joyfull, framed to the life of the words : Fit for Voyces or Viols
of 3. 4. 5. and 6. Parts. Byrd’s patrons for these publications
were Sir Christopher Hatton, Henry Lord Hunsdon, and
Francis Earl of Cumberland ; there is a total of a hundred and
fourteen compositions in the three sets.
Byrd was born in 1543. He was a pupil of Tallis and became
organist of Lincoln Cathedral in February 1562–3, when he
was scarcely twenty years old. In 1569 he was appointed
a gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and he left Lincoln in 1572.
Shortly after this he went to live at Harlington, near Uxbridge,
and in 1593 moved to Stondon Place, near Ongar in Essex,
where he spent the rest of his life. He died on July 4th, 1623,
and was buried in Stondon churchyard. He married while at
Lincoln and had four children. His wife predeceased him and
was buried at Stondon. His property passed to his daughter-
in-law, widow of his son Christopher, and then to his grandson
Thomas.
86 The English Madrigal
Richard Carlton
Carlton seems to have been born about the year 1558; he
took the degree of B.A. at Clare College, Cambridge, in 1577.
He was subsequently ordained and became a minor canon of
Norwich Cathedral, holding at the same time the office of
master of the choristers. He was also vicar of St. Stephen’s,
Norwich, and later he held the living of Bawsey-cum-Glosthorp
in Norfolk. His interests were centred in Norfolk, for the
patron to whom he dedicated his Madrigals to Five voyces was
a Norfolk gentleman named Thomas Farmer, and his madrigals
include an elegy in memory of Sir John Shelton, the head of
an old Norfolk family. The date of Carlton’s death is not
known, but it will be noticed that he was well into middle-age
when his volume of madrigals was published in 1601. This
may account for a certain peculiarity in his style which shows
in a marked degree the influence of modal training, and in
this detail it is unlike the work of any other of the English
madrigalists. The frequent simultaneous use of the major
and minor third are reminiscent of Byrd.
There are twenty-one madrigals in Carlton’s set, and he
also contributed to The Triumphes of Oriana.
Michael Cavendish
Born about the year 1565, Cavendish was the third and
youngest son of William Cavendish of the manor of Cavendish
Overhall in Suffolk; his grandfather was George Cavendish,
the faithful adherent of Cardinal Wolsey. Lady Arabella Stuart,
to whom he dedicated his volume of Airs and Madrigals, was
his cousin. This elder branch of the Cavendish family became
extinct; the younger branch is now represented by the Duke
of Devonshire.
Of Cavendish’s Airs and Madrigals only one copy, that in
STONDON CHURCH
William Byrd was buried in the churchyard, see page 85

88 The English Madrigal
the British Museum, is known to exist, and it was only recently
brought to light. The title-page is badly damaged and the
exact title remains unknown. There are eight madrigals and
twenty ‘Ayres', or lute-songs, in the book. Among the
madrigals is Come, gentle swains, which has the refrain of the
Oriana madrigals ; it is the only madrigal in The Triumphes of
Oriana which had been previously printed, for Cavendish’s
book was published in 1598. The madrigal was re-written for
the Triumphs. The most distinctive madrigal of these eight is
Wandering in this place.
William Cobbold
Cobbold was born in Norwich in 1560 and became organist
of Norwich Cathedral in 1599. Nine years later he resigned
this office and became a lay-clerk, retaining this position until
his death in 1639. He expressed a desire to be buried in
Norwich Cathedral, where his wife and his son Francis already
lay, but for some reason which remains unknown he was buried
at Beccles. Cobbold’s five-part madrigal, With wreaths of rose
and laurel, was included in The Triumphes of Oriana. A few
other madrigalian compositions by Cobbold survive in manu-
script, but he published no complete set.
Michael East
East, or, as his name was variously spelt, Easte, Est, and Este,
is generally thought to have been a son of Thomas East, the
printer, who was responsible for producing so many of the
madrigal part-books. But little is known of his personal
history. The date of his birth may be conjectured at about
I580, and he was perhaps little more than a youth when his
madrigal, Hence stars / too dim of light, was written for The
Triumphes of Oriana. This madrigal was printed again with
a few slight alterations in his second book of madrigals. East
The Composers - 89
held the degree of B.Mus., and for many years was organist
of Lichfield Cathedral. He died probably about the year 1640.
A prolific composer, he published as many as seven sets of
books, but only two of these were exclusively madrigalian.
The first set, published in 1604, was entitled Madrigales to
3. 4. and 5. parts : apt for Viols and voices. It was dedicated
to Sir John Crofts, and contains twenty-four madrigals. Among
these is a setting of Breton’s lyric, In the merry month of May,
which, as stated in a previous chapter, may have been sung
before Queen Elizabeth during her visit to Elvetham. The
Second set of Madrigales to 3. 4. and 5. parts : apt for Viols
and voices followed in 1606, containing twenty-two madrigals,
and among them is the popular How merrily we live. The
words of the second book fall short of the standard of the first
book, but both books consist exclusively of conventional
conceits such as were in vogue at that date. East’s second
patron was Sir Thomas Gerard. The Third Set of Bookes :
Wherein are Pastorals, Anthemes, Neopolitanes, Fancies, and
Madrigales, to 5. and 6. parts : Apt both for Viols and Voyces
was published in 1610. It contains only seven strictly madri-
galian compositions. The Fourth Set of Bookes, Wherein are
Anthemes . . . Madrigals, and Songs of other kindes to 4.5. and
6. Parts : Apt for Viols and Voyces bears the date 1619. There
are sixteen madrigals in this set. The beautiful rhythm of
Fly away, Care, which is to be found here, has already been
referred to. The patrons of these two books were Henry
Willoughby of Risley, co. Derby, and Robert Earl of Essex.
East’s last three sets of books contain no madrigals.
john Farmer
Farmer was probably born about the year 1565; the earliest
known fact about him is that he published a short musical
treatise in 1591. In 1592 he was a contributor to East’s
90 The English Madrigal
Whole Booke of Psalmes. He became organist of Christ Church
Cathedral, Dublin, in 1595, but his career there was far from
satisfactory, and he seems to have left Dublin finally in 1599
or shortly afterwards. He is believed to have died in London
about the year 1605. His First Set of English Madrigals : to
Fouré Voices was published in 1599. It was dedicated to that
patron of the Arts, Edward Earl of Oxford, and contains
seventeen numbers, the last of which is one of the very few
English madrigals written for eight voices. There is great
charm in Farmer’s work; Fair Phyllis I saw sitting all alone
is a perfect little madrigal, in which there are some charac-
teristic touches of realism. His contribution to The Triumphes of
Oriana was the six-part madrigal, Fair nymph, I heard one telling.
Giles Farnaby
Farnaby, it may be conjectured, was born about the year
1560; his marriage is recorded in the registers of St. Helen’s,
Bishopsgate, in 1587, and he took the B.Mus. degree at Oxford
in 1592. His Canzonets to Fowre voyces with a Song of eight
parts were published in 1598; there are seventeen pieces in
the set, which is dedicated to ‘Maister Ferdinando Heaburn,
groome of her Maiesties priuie chamber'. No fewer than
four small laudatory poems were printed at the beginning of
the canzonets, one by Anthony Holborne in Latin elegiacs
and the other three by John Dowland, the famous lutenist,
Richard Alison, the madrigalist, and Hubert Holland. It may
be judged that Farnaby was held in high esteem, and the fact
that he was not a contributor to The Triumphes of Oriana seems
to point to his having died about the year 1600. As a writer
for the virginals his work was of a very high standard, ranking
second only to that of Byrd. Farnaby’s canzonets are very
similar in calibre to the madrigals of Bennet and Farmer. The
most interesting number is Construe my meaning, the harmony
The Composers 9I
of which is unusually chromatic and original, and Some time
she would is another attractive work. Much of Farnaby's
writing is complex and difficult to sing with good effect ; yet
several of the canzonets well repay careful study.
Ellis Gibbons
Ellis Gibbons, an elder brother of the more famous Orlando,
was son of William Gibbons of Cambridge, a member of the
town Waits, and was born at Cambridge in 1573. He died in
May 1603, leaving a widow but no children. The traditional
statement that he was organist of Salisbury is entirely dis-
proved by the account books of the ‘Clerk of Fabrick’ as
well as the Chapter Act Books. Nor is his name to be found .
in the Cathedral Registers. John Farrant, succeeding Richard
Fuller in 1598, was Cathedral organist till 1615. Ellis Gibbons
occupies a unique position among the contributors to The
Triumphes of Oriana, for he alone, with the exception of Morley
who compiled the work, contributed two madrigals. Long live
fair Oriana is for five voices, and Round about her charret is
for six. The old English word charret, or charet, was in general
use at this date, chariot being a later use ; but until the nine-
teenth century chariot was pronounced in two syllables.
Orlando Gibbons'
Orlando Gibbons was born at Cambridge in 1583 and
baptized at Oxford in the same year. His eldest brother
Edward was at one time Master of the Choristers at King’s
College, Cambridge, and Orlando became a chorister under
him in 1596. Edward is stated by Boyce, following Wood
and others, to have been Minor Canon and Precentor of Bristol
Cathedral, but the cathedral records, which cover this period
with complete detail, contain no record whatever of his name.
In 1604 Orlando became organist of the Chapel Royal, and in
92 The English Madrigal
I606 took the B.Mus. degree at Cambridge. In 1623 he was
appointed organist of Westminster Abbey. In 1625 all the
members of the Chapel Royal choir, and Gibbons among them,"
were summoned to attend the meeting of Charles I with his
Queen at Canterbury, the marriage having already taken place
in Paris when Charles was represented by proxy. During
this visit Gibbons was attacked by apoplexy, and died on
June 5th. He was buried in the cathedral, and a mural
tablet, surmounted by his bust, was erected to his memory.
His son Christopher was a musician of some note; he was
successively organist of Winchester Cathedral, the Chapel
Royal, and Westminster Abbey.
As a composer of church music, Gibbons stands very high
among the Tudor School, to which by his style he properly
belongs, although he was scarcely more than a youth at the
date of Elizabeth’s death. But with his church music we
are not primarily concerned here, nor yet with his instrumental
compositions. - As a madrigalist he is among the greatest of
the English School. His style was severe, and in general
temperament he must have closely resembled Byrd. His
finest madrigal, without question, is What is our life? the words
of which are almost certainly by Sir Walter Raleigh ; in its
own kind no madrigal can be said to surpass it. The silver
swam is very different, but for beauty it also stands almost
alone in its own class ; in structure it approaches very closely
to the ‘Ayre' of the lutenists, and it could with very little
adaptation be sung as a solo-song. Ah, dear heart and Dainty
* Historians have sometimes recorded this incident in terms that suggest
that Gibbons alone was chosen for the special honour of carrying out the
musical arrangements of the wedding. An entry in the Chapter Acts of
St. George's Chapel, Windsor, records the granting leave of absence for
a fortnight to Nathaniel Giles, the organist, to attend the ceremonies at
Canterbury with the rest of the gentlemen of the Chapel Royal.
The Composers 93
fine bird are of another kind again, and of great beauty and
finish. The gay type of madrigal seems to have had no attrac-
tion for Gibbons. His First Set of Madrigals and Mottets of
5. Parts : apt for Viols and Voyces was published in 1612 ; it
contains twenty compositions, and was dedicated to the
younger Sir Christopher Hatton, in whose house Gibbons
states “they were most of them composed '. The dedication
address tells us that Hatton ‘provided the language they (the
madrigals) speake ’, and this seems to imply that he selected
the words rather than wrote them, seeing that in eight cases
out of the twenty the authorship can be identified, and includes
the names of Sylvester, Spenser, Raleigh, and Donne. The
opening words of the dedicatory address, from the pen of
Orlando Gibbons, deserve to be written in gold in every school
and college of music or Art : It is proportion that beautifies
everything.
Thomas Greaves
Nothing is known of the personal history of this composer
except that he was lutenist to Sir Henry Pierpoint, to whom
he dedicated his Songes of sundrie kindes in 1604. Lady Pier-
point was Frances Cavendish, sister of Sir Charles, Wilbye’s
patron, and cousin of Michael Cavendish the composer. There
is a curious similarity in the general character and make-up of
the song-books of Cavendish and Greaves; both are in folio,
and both contain a mixture of lute-songs and madrigals.
There are six madrigals in Greaves’s book, and much the best
of these is Come away, sweet love, and play thee.
john Hilton (the elder)
Recent research has proved beyond doubt that there were
two composers of this name. Mr. Arkwright has rightly
treated them separately in the second edition of Grove’s
94 The English Madrigal
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, but the notice in the
Dictionary of National Biography is in error on this point,
although the writer of that notice seems to have been puzzled
by some of the dates. In an early seventeenth-century manu-
script his six-part anthem, Call to remembrance, is described in
the part-books as being by ‘John Hilton senior'. Hilton was
probably born about the year 1560, or perhaps a little earlier ;
he was for some years a lay-clerk of Lincoln Cathedral and
became organist of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1594. It
would seem that he died in 1612, the year in which his successor,
George Mason, was appointed. He contributed the madrigal
Fair Oriana, Beauty’s Queen to The Triumphes of Oriana. In
early manuscripts the anthem, Lord, for thy tender mercies' sake,
is generally ascribed to him, and there seems to be very little
reason to dispute his authorship. He also wrote other church
IIlllS1C.
john Hilton (the younger)
Hilton was born in 1599, and was almost certainly the son
of the organist of Trinity. He took the B.Mus. degree at
Cambridge in 1626. In the later years of his life he was organist
and parish clerk of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, in which
church he was buried. He died in 1657. In 1627 he published
a set of Ayres, or, Fa las for Three Voyces. There are twenty-
six of these, but few of them are of much merit. The Ayres
were dedicated to Dr. William Heather. In 1652 Hilton
published a collection of catches and rounds under the title
of Catch as catch can.
William Holborne
William was brother of Anthony Holborne, who in 1597
published a book entitled The Cittharm Schoole. At the end
of this were added sixe short Aers Neapolitan like to three
voyces, without the Instrument, by William Holborne. The
The Composers 95
preface states that they were published because “incorrect and
unauthorized coppies are got about ’. They are, however,
very slight, little pieces. Nothing is known concerning William
Holborne's biography. The Cittharm Schoole was dedicated to
Thomas, Lord Burgh.
john Holmes
John Holmes was organist of Winchester Cathedral at the
time when he contributed his madrigal, Thus Bonny-boots the
birthday celebrated to The Triumphes of Oriana. He would
thus have been a near neighbour of Weelkes when the latter
was organist of Winchester College, and both left Winchester
in the same year, 1602, Weelkes for Chichester and Holmes
for Salisbury. Holmes succeeded John Farrant as organist of
Salisbury, and held the post till his death in 1638. He wrote
a good deal of church music, much of which was included by
his pupil, Adrian Batten, in his autograph organ-book, now at
St. Michael’s College, Tenbury. There were two other con-
temporary composers of the name of Holmes.
‘Thomas Hunt
Hunt wrote the six-part madrigal, Hark / did ye ever hear 2
for The Triumphes of Oriana. Nothing is known of his personal
history, but it is possible that he was organist of Wells Cathedral.
He wrote some church music, among which is a complete
morning and evening service for four voices, including Responses,
Venite, Kyrie, and Creed. A contemporary manuscript of
this service, believed to be in Hunt’s autograph, is in the
library of St. Michael’s College, Tenbury.
Edward johnson
Edward Johnson is mentioned in the Hengrave manuscripts
as having been in the service of the Kytsons at Hengrave Hall.
96 The English Madrigal
It is possible, therefore, that he may have been a relative of
Robert Johnson and succeeded him. One Robert Johnson
was certainly the household musician there in 1572–5, though
the Hengrave Robert cannot possibly be identified with Robert
Johnson the lutenist and composer who was flourishing at the
end of the reign of James I and during that of Charles I.
This Robert was son of John Johnson, one of Queen Elizabeth’s
lutenists, 1581–95. “Robert Johnson, priest’, an earlier six-
teenth-century composer, makes the third musician of this
name, besides John and Edward; and that there should be
some confusion is not surprising. Edward Johnson composed
a six-part madrigal, Come, blessed bird for The Triumphes of
Oriana. The dates of his birth and death are unknown, but
he took the B.Mus. degree at Cambridge in 1594, and was
a contributor to East's Whole Booke of Psalmes in 1592. It is
possible that on leaving Hengrave he became household
musician to Lord Hertford, because his settings of Eliza is the
fairest Queen and Come again are almost certainly those written
for the visit of the Queen to Lord Hertford at Elvetham,
described in an earlier chapter. In Meres's Palladis Tamia
(1598),” Edward Johnson is named as one of the leading English
composers.
Robert jones
Jones, a composer of considerable importance, is always
reputed to have been a fine performer on the lute. The large
majority of his compositions were lute-songs, of which there
are extant five books containing in all over one hundred ‘Ayres'
or songs. But Jones was also a madrigal composer. His First
Set of Madrigals, of 3.4. 5.6.7.8. Parts, for Viols and Voices,
or for Voices alone : or as you please, was published in 1607;
it contains twenty-six madrigals, and was dedicated to Robert,
* See Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
The Composers 97
Earl of Salisbury. The words of the four-part numbers and
of the first three of the five-part, deal with bird subjects;
but Jones was fond of good words both for his madrigals and
for his lute-songs, and this set includes lyrics by Francis Davison
and Campian. The last two numbers form one whole, but
the first section is for seven voices and the second for eight;
this is one of the very few examples of an English madrigal for
more than six voices. Unfortunately, no complete copy of
Jones’s set of madrigals is known to exist to-day. The author
wishes here to correct a statement made by him in his English
Madrigal Composers on information derived from a credible
source, but which could not be verified owing to the conditions
prevailing during the war and for some time after it. There
is no complete copy of the printed set in the Royal Library at
Brussels, but seven of the madrigals are to be found there in
manuscript part-books of an early date, copied with evident
care from the original printed books. The Cantus and Bassus
books of the set are in the British Museum, and the two final
numbers are complete in manuscript part-books in the Bodleian
Library." Jones was evidently a Welshman, for, apart from
his name, the use of leri deri dam as an alternative for fa-la-la
is distinctively Welsh. Morley appears to have chosen several
cathedral organists to contribute to The Triumphes of Oriana,
and it is possible that Jones was organist of one of the Welsh
cathedrals. His contribution to the Triumphs was Fair Oriana,
seeming to wink at folly. As a madrigal writer he is by no
means in the same rank with the great ones of the English
School, yet his work provides ample evidence that he could
write more serious music with real ability as well as the lighter
lute-song. He took the B.Mus. degree at Oxford in 1597.
* Bodl. MSS. Mus. f. 25–8.
2535-46 G
98 The English Madrigal
George Kirbye
The date of Kirbye’s birth is not precisely known. He was
a contributor to East's Whole Booke of Psalmes in 1592, and
he may have been at least five-and-twenty years old at that
date. He became household musician to Sir Robert Jermyn
at Rushbrooke Hall in Suffolk. In later life he lived in Whiting
Street, Bury St. Edmunds. Here he died in 1634, and was
buried in St. Mary’s Church, where for some years he served
as churchwarden. In 1597 he published his First set of English
Madrigalls, to 4. 5. & 6. voyces. The set contained twenty-
four madrigals, and was dedicated to Jermyn's two daughters,
Anne and Frances. The most beautiful of Kirbye’s madrigals
is perhaps the six-part setting of Sleep now, my Muse. His
madrigals were highly praised by Burney, who regarded him
as one of the best of the English composers ; but he remained
almost wholly unknown, except by his Oriana madrigal, until
Mr. Arkwright published his whole set. Certain harmonic
peculiarities characterize his work; like Byrd, he sometimes
introduced a type of dissonance which may seem to modern
ears to be harsh and jarring, and some of his harmonic experi-
ments are interesting and original. There are two versions of
the words of the madrigal which he wrote for The Triumphes
of Oriana, though the music is identical in both cases. This
curious fact points to there having been two editions of the
Triumphs, both published in 1601.
Henry Lichfild
Nothing is known of the personal history of Lichfild except
that his First Set of Madrigals of 5. Parts : apt both for Viols
and Voyces, published in 1613, was dedicated to Lady Cheyney,
or Cheney, of Toddington (pronounced Tuddington), near
Luton. Lady Cheney was the widow of Lord Cheney, who
The Composers 99
was one of the Peers at the trial of Mary Queen of Scots, and
Lichfild was in her service in some capacity. At her death in
I614 she left a legacy to Lichfild. There are twenty madrigals
in this set ; they are smoothly written and pleasant to sing,
although none of them are of outstanding excellence. I always
loved to call my lady Rose is typically madrigalian, and Injurious
hours has some touches of realism of a conventional kind.
john Lisley
Lisley wrote the six-part madrigal, Fair Cytherea presents
her doves for The Triumphes of Oriana. Nothing else whatever
is known about him.
George Marson
Marson contributed The nymphs and shepherds danced to
The Triumphes of Oriana. He was born about 1570, and became
organist of Canterbury Cathedral in 1597 or 1598, where he
remained till his death on February 5th, 1631–2. The cathedral
burial register states that he was formerly one of the minor
canons. He married at Canterbury in 1599. Some anthems
and a Service, with Preces, are in the Barnard MSS. in the
Royal College of Music.
john Milton
Milton was father of the poet. He was the son of Richard
Milton of Stanton St. John, near Oxford, and was educated
at Christ Church. He was born about 1563. After leaving
Oxford he was disinherited by his father on account of his
religious views, and had a hard struggle for life, working in
London as a scrivener. He wrote four anthems for Leighton’s
Teares or Lamentacions of a Sorrowfull Soule. For The Triumphes
of Oriana he wrote the six-part madrigal, Fair Orian in the
morn. He died in 1647, and was buried at St. Giles, Cripplegate.
G 2
IOO The English Madrigal
\
Thomas Morley N.
Morley was without doubt the leading personality of the
English School of madrigal composers. He was born in 1558.
In 1588 he took the B.Mus. degree at Oxford, and was at the
time organist of St. Giles, Cripplegate. Very shortly after-
wards he became organist of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and in 1592
was appointed to the Chapel Royal. During his later years
he was living at a house in the parish of Little St. Helens.
He resigned his office in the Chapel Royal in the autumn of
1602, and died in the following year.
In 1593 he published his Canzonets or Little short songs to
three voyces. This set followed an old convention in being
for three voices, but the style, in marked contrast to the work
of Cornish and the other English pioneers, was absolutely
modern and of its own date. There are twenty-four numbers
in this set, which was dedicated to Mary, Countess of Pembroke,
Sidney’s sister. These canzonets are all of a bright kind, and
include the characteristic Good morrow, sweet ladies of the May,
the brilliant Arise, get up, my dear, and the little ballet, Though
Philomela lost her love. In 1594 there followed Madrigalls to
Four Voyces newly published by Thomas Morley the First Booke.
The first edition contained twenty madrigals, but two more
were added in the second edition of 1600. The set is unique
among this class of Elizabethan publications in not being
dedicated to any patron ; it was the earliest English set to
bear the title of Madrigals. The wonderful Morris-dance
madrigal, Ho / who comes here P is in this set, and also the
popular little April is in my mistress’ face. The First Booke of
Balletts to Five Voyces, published in 1595 under the patronage
of Sir Robert Cecil, afterwards Lord Salisbury, was the earliest
set of English ballets; there are twenty-one numbers in the set,
The Composers IOI
and among them Now is the month of Maying, which is probably
the best-known piece in the entire English Madrigal School.
The last composition in the set is written in dialogue form for
two choirs. In the same year Morley’s First booke of Canzonets
to two Woices was published and dedicated to Lady Periam.
These lovely little canzonets are unlike anything else in the
English Madrigal School, and perhaps display Morley’s genius
better than any of his other works. Nine instrumental fantasies
were included with the twelve canzonets.
Morley’s fifth madrigalian set was entitled Canzonets or
Little short Aers to five and sixe Voices. It was published in
1597 and dedicated to George, Lord Hunsdon. The beautiful
O grief / even on the bud : I follow, lo, the footing, and Hark!
Alleluia are among the twenty-one compositions in this book.
Apart from his original work Morley edited two sets of
Italian madrigals adapted to English words, and in 1601 he
issued the famous set of Madrigales, The Triumphes of Oriana
to 5. and 6. voices composed by divers severall aucthors. The
work was dedicated to Charles, Lord Howard of Effingham ; it
contained twenty-five madrigals by twenty-three English
composers, including the editor, and each one ended with the
same refrain in praise of Queen Elizabeth as personified in
Oriana.
Some of Morley’s five-voice canzonets were adapted by him
as solo-songs with lute accompaniment, but he also published
a distinct set of lute-songs in 16oo ; only one copy of this set
is known, and it is now in the possession of an American
collector. In addition to his vocal publications he produced
in 1599 his First Booke of Consort Lessons made by divers exquisite
Authors for sixe Instruments to play together, and in 1597 was
published his famous treatise, A Plaine and Easie Introduction
to Practicall Musicke.
IO2 The English Madrigal
john Mundy
John Mundy was son of William Mundy, who was also
a composer of considerable distinction. John was born about
I560, and became organist of Eton College in 1585; shortly
afterwards he held a similar appointment at St. George’s
Chapel in Windsor Castle. He died at Windsor in 1630 and
was buried in the Cloisters.
As a madrigalist he was early in the field, for in 1594 he
published a set of Songs and Psalmes composed into 3. 4. and
5. parts, for the use and delight of all such as either love or learne
Musicke. This was the next year after Morley published his
first set, and Byrd and Morley were alone before him. Mundy’s
patron was Robert, Earl of Essex. There are thirteen actual
madrigals in the set and several of them are distinctive and
attractive, notably Were I a king ; My prime of youth, and
Heigh ho l’chill go to plough no more. Mundy contributed the
madrigal Lightly she whipped o'er the dales to The Triumphes
of Oriana. He wrote a good deal of church music, but the
early manuscripts freely confuse the work of the father and son.
Richard Nicholson
Nicholson was born about 1570. He became organist of
Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1595, and remained there until
his death in 1639. He held a musical lectureship in Oxford
founded by Dr. Heather in 1626. He was represented in
The Triumphes of Oriana by his five-part madrigal, Sing,
shepherds all. Several of his madrigals and some church music
survive in manuscript.
Daniel Norcome
Norcome, or Nurcombe, as the name is spelt in the Windsor
registers, was a minor canon of St. George's Chapel in Windsor
The Composers IO3
Castle, where his father, John, was a lay-clerk. Daniel was
born in 1576. He died before 1626. He contributed the
five-part madrigal With angel’s face and brightness to The
Triumphes of Oriana.
Nathaniel Pattrick
Songes of Sundrye Natures whereof some ar Divine, some are
Madrigalles and the rest Psalmes and Hymnes in Latin composed
for 5. and 6. voyces and one for 8. voyces by Nathanaell Pattrick
sometyme Master of the children of the Cathedrall Churche of
Worcester and organist of the same was the title of a set of books
entered at the Stationers' Hall in 1597. No copy is known to
exist, and it is possible that the work was never published,
especially as the composer died in 1595. The date of his
birth is unknown, but he was certainly a young man at the
time of his death. He was buried at St. Michael’s, Worcester,
and his widow married Thomas Tomkins, the famous madri-
galist and composer of church music, who succeeded him as
organist of Worcester Cathedral.
Francis Pilkington
Pilkington was born about the year 1562. He may have
been connected with the Lancashire Pilkingtons, but there is
no precise evidence on the point. He was ordained in 1614,
and became a Minor Canon and Precentor of Chester Cathedral,
having been formerly a lay-clerk. He was at the same time
vicar of Holy Trinity in Chester. Pilkington would have been
a contemporary of Bateson at the cathedral. He took the
B.Mus. degree in 1595, and died in 1638. His First Set of
Madrigals and Pastorals of 3. 4. and 5. Parts was published in
1614. It was dedicated to Sir Thomas Smith of Hough,
co. Chester, and contained twenty-two madrigals. The Second
Set of Madrigals, and Pastorals, of 3. 4. 5. and 6. Parts : Apt
IO4 The English Madrigal
for Violls and Voyces followed in 1624. It included twenty-
seven compositions, twenty-three of which were madrigals.
This set was dedicated to Sir Peter Leigh of Lyme. In style
Pilkington follows Wilbye more nearly than any of the other
English madrigalists; and although his work is manifestly
inferior to Wilbye’s, yet it often reaches a high level. O softly-
singing lute is in the first rank. Have I found her P is another
excellent madrigal built on smaller lines. Care for thy soul,
a serious madrigal in the manner of Byrd, is a very remarkable
piece of music; it must be remembered that it was published
twenty-four years after Weelkes's O Care, thou wilt despatch
me, yet in the light of the subsequent 250 years of musical
history, Pilkington’s chromatic writing in this composition
stands out as a very notable bit of work. Pilkington was,
perhaps, a little unfortunate in challenging comparison with
Morley by setting some of the same words, notably I follow, lo,
the footing, a type of madrigal of which Morley was a con-
summate master. O praise the Lord in the second set is a fine
anthem.
Thomas Tomkins
Tomkins was one of the most distinguished of the English
madrigalists, but the fact that he belonged to this great School
has been obscured to some extent by the lateness of the date
at which his music was printed. His church music, for example,
was printed after his death, but much of it must have been
written early in the seventeenth century and some of it earlier,
for he was organist of Worcester Cathedral as early as I 596,
and perhaps two years before that. In the same way some of
his madrigals, would have been written quite twenty years
before they were published. Tomkins was born about 1573,
his father being at that time a lay-clerk at St. David’s Cathedral.
He succeeded Nathaniel Pattrick as organist of Worcester
The Composers IO5.
Cathedral and married his widow. He took the B.Mus.
degree at Oxford in 1607. In 1621 he was appointed one of
the organists of the Chapel Royal, but retained his position
at Worcester. He lived to a great age and, dying in 1656,
was buried at Martin Hassingtree in Worcestershire. With
his church music we are not here primarily concerned, but it
should be stated that he was one of the greatest of the English
church musicians belonging to the polyphonic school.
The younger Thomas, and not his father, was the composer
of the madrigal, The fauns and satyrs tripping, which was
one of The Triumphes of Oriana. There are twenty-eight
compositions in Tomkins's Songs of 3. 4. 5. and 6. parts
published in 1622. The set was dedicated to William, Earl of
Pembroke, but each number in the set has a separated dedica-
tion. Four of the numbers are set to scriptural words, and of
these David’s lament for Absalom is by far the finest—a beautiful
and highly impassioned piece of music. Weep no more, thou
sorry boy and When I observe those beauty’s wonderments are
two madrigals that can scarcely be matched by Wilbye or
Weelkes. Music divine is another madrigal having a splendid
sense of style and much originality of treatment ; there is
a fine effect in the quaver runs at the word harmony that was
quite novel at this date.
Thomas Vautor
Vautor was born about 1590, or possibly a little earlier. The
first fact known about him was that he took the B.Mus. degree
at Oxford in 1616, and in 1619 he published his First Set:
Beeing Songs of divers Ayres and Natures, of Five and Sixe
parts : Apt for Wyols and Voyces. At that date he was domestic
musician to Sir George Villiers, father of the famous Duke of
Buckingham, to whom the book was dedicated. The date of his
IO6 The English Madrigal
death is unknown. Vautor’s set consists of twenty-two com-
positions. He has a very distinct style of his own, and several
madrigals in this set are very attractive. Sweet Suffolk owl is
excellent, in style quite unlike the work of any other of the
English composers, and in form particularly interesting. The
three ballets at the beginning of the set are distinctive in
character, and there is a fine swing in Mother, I will have
a husband, which is more or less in rondo-form.
john Ward N |
Very little is known of the personal history of Ward. In
I613 he published his First Set of English Madrigals to 3. 4. 5.
and 6. parts apt both for Viols and Voyces. With a Mourning Song
in memory of Prince Henry. There are twenty-eight madrigals
in the set, and it is dedicated to Sir Henry Fanshaw, in whose
household Ward held office of some kind. In Batten’s organ-
book he is described as a ‘gentleman', implying that he was
an amateur rather than a professional musician. There is
a small amount of his church music surviving in manuscript.
As a madrigal writer Ward takes a very high place in the
English School although, with the exception of Die not, fond
man, his work has been almost entirely neglected until recently.
The three- and four-voice madrigals in the set are pleasantly
written without any very marked distinction. Most of the
three-part numbers are suitable for female voices, and among
these My true love hath my heart should be a favourite. But
it is in his bigger works that Ward shows his true genius.
A feature of his writing is his employment of double and even
triple suspensions; some very massive and splendid effects
are produced by this device, notably in Out from the vale and
If the deep sighs. Other first-rate madrigals in this set are
Upon a bank of roses ; O divine Love, and I have entreated.
The Composers IO7
Ward was a man of fine taste and culture; the lyrics he
chose provide good evidence of this, for four are by Sidney,
four by Michael Drayton, two by Francis and one by Walter
Davison, while several of the anonymous poems in the set are
on quite as high a level.
Thomas Weelkes
The date of Weelkes's birth can only be approximately
guessed at 1575, nor are the early facts of his life known. It
is possible that he was a chorister at Winchester at either the
cathedral or the college. The earliest known fact about him
is that he was organist of Winchester College in the year 1597,
lived in college during his tenure of office, and left for Chichester
Cathedral in 1602. There he remained for the rest of his
life. He took the B.Mus. degree at Oxford in 1602. He died
near St. Bride’s Church, London, on November 30th, 1623,
while on a visit to a friend named Drinkwater, and he was
buried at that church on the following day. He left a widow
and children at Chichester. Weelkes is possibly the greatest
madrigal-writer not only of the English School but of all
nationalities. There are, however, many who will prefer the
claims of the great stylist, John Wilbye ; and the question of
Supremacy is, after all, of comparatively small moment. The
genius of Weelkes is especially conspicuous in his boldness and
originality in discovering new possibilities of harmonic usage,
for he was one of the first to use chromatic chords freely ; and
these new harmonic devices enabled him the more readily to
exercise his wonderfully fertile imagination and to express his
ideas through the medium of his music. He was also able to
write fine strong passages in terms of the simplest and purest
harmony when occasion demanded it. Nothing is so remark-
able in the whole realm of polyphonic music as O care, thou
IO8 The English Madrigal
wilt despatch me, not only because of the amazing harmonic
treatment but also because it reveals the composer's poetic
imagination expressing itself with a rare subtlety of touch.
Examples of Weelkes's broad diatonic style are to be seen in
Like two proud armies and Mars in a fury. In another style,
Take here my heart, is a beautiful expression of tenderness,
while a fine humour is shown in Three virgin nymphs ; The
nightingale, and many more. As a writer of ballets, too,
Weelkes was supreme: On the plains ; Hark, all ye lovely saints,
and Sing we at pleasure cannot even be matched by Thomas
Morley.
Weelkes was a prolific composer. His Madrigals to 3. 4. 5.
& 6. voyces were published in 1597. It contained twenty-four
numbers and was dedicated to George Phillpot. The Balletts
and Madrigals to five voyces, with one to 6. voyces followed
a year later. Edward Darcye was patron of this set, which
also consisted of twenty-four numbers. The Madrigals of
5. and 6. parts apt for the Wiols and voices, published in 1600,
really consisted of two sets; for, although there was only
one title-page, the five-part and six-part works were separated,
and each section had a separate patron ; the two patrons were
Henry, Lord Windsor and George Brooke, and each section
contained ten madrigals. This was the earliest example of
the use of the phrase ‘apt for viols or voices , which was
used almost universally in the later sets of the madrigalists.
Weelkes's remaining set was dedicated to Edward, Lord Denny;
it was entitled Ayeres or Phantasticke Spirites for three voices.
There were twenty-six pieces in this book, mostly of a light
or satirical kind, but the final piece is a beautiful and highly
imaginative elegy in remembrance of his friend, Thomas
Morley. Weelkes contributed the well-known As Westa was
from Latmos hill descending to The Triumphes of Oriana.
Weelkes was a great church musician, a fact that has generally
The Composers IO9
been overlooked. Eight or nine services and nearly forty
anthems by him are known to exist, although the text of none
of the services has as yet been found complete. Hosanna to
the Son of David is a magnificent specimen of broad and dignified
writing in the polyphonic style.
john Wilbye
Wilbye was born at Diss in Norfolk in 1574. His father,
Matthew Wilbye, was a tanner by trade but a keen amateur of
music. As a child his gifts seem to have brought him to the
notice of the family of Sir Thomas Cornwallis of Brome Hall
and so to the Kytsons of Hengrave Hall, for Lady Kytson was
a Cornwallis. About the year 1593 he was appointed house-
hold musician to the Kytsons, and he lived at Hengrave Hall
until 1626. Sir Thomas Kytson died in 1602, but his widow
maintained the establishment in full state until her death in
1626. Wilbye then retired to Colchester and lived at the house
of his life-long friend Lady Rivers, whom he had known in
childhood as Mary Kytson. The house is described in Morant’s
History of Colchester as the “great brick-house' opposite the
west end of Holy Trinity Church, and it is still standing.
Here Wilbye died in 1638; he was buried in the adjoining
church. In 1613 Lady Kytson had granted him the lease of
the best sheep-farm in the district as a reward for faithful
Service, and at his death he left a considerable fortune.
Apart from his madrigals scarcely any music of Wilbye’s
has survived, and it is probable that he wrote but little church
music ; but fortunately he published two large sets of madrigals,
and in this class of composition he reached the very highest
levels. He and Weelkes, considered as madrigalists alone,
stand without question at the head of the English School.
Some will prefer one and some the other, but all will agree
IIO The English Madrigal
on their joint supremacy. Wilbye lacked something of the
daring originality of Weelkes, yet he was very far from being
conventional, for he used chromatic harmonies freely in many
of his madrigals, notably in Happy, O, happy he and Oft have
I vowed, but no other composer treated the conventional
Elizabethan conceit with such quite perfection of style and
dignity as Wilbye. A noticeable feature of his music is the
varied manner in which he scored his work, harbouring his
resources and varying the ‘colour just as an orchestral com-
poser does, repeating phrases with different groups of voices
and holding others in reserve. A well-known example of this
is to be seen in the popular Sweet honey-sucking bees, and again
in Stay, Corydon, a beautifully scored work.
His First Set of English Madrigals to 3. 4. 5. and 6. voices
was published in 1598, and the dedicatory address to Sir Charles
Cavendish was dated from Austin Friars, where Kytson had
his London house. There are thirty madrigals in the set.
There were thirty-four numbers in the Second Set of Madrigales
to 3. 4. 5. and 6. parts apt both for Voyals and Voyces. This
was published in 1609 and dedicated to Lady Arabella Stuart.
Both Wilbye’s patrons were connected with the Kytson
family, and were frequent visitors at Hengrave. The Lady
Oriana, Wilbye’s madrigal for The Triumphes of Oriana, is
a fine specimen of his writing.
Henry Youll
Nothing whatever is known of the personal history of this
composer except that he may have been in the service of one
Edward Bacon, to whose three sons he dedicated his Canzonets
to Three Voyces, published in 1608. There are twenty-four
canzonets in this book, and many of them should become
popular, for they are attractive and admirably vocal ; some of
The Composers III
them, too, are quite distinctive in style. One of the best is
a setting of Ben Jonson’s Slow, slow, fresh fount, the music of
which is well fitted to the words. Pipe, shepherds, pipe is
gayer in character and full of charm. The last six in the set
are ballets, and they are among the best things of their kind
for three voices. Considering the excellent quality of Youll’s
work, it seems strange that he has been neglected so com-
pletely and that his name was almost unknown even in musical
circles until this set of canzonets was published complete in,
the English Madrigal School Series.
PRINTED IN ENGLAND
AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
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