X-Nico

3 unusual facts about Thomas Morley


Broken consort

There are also twenty-five surviving compositions for this type of consort by several composers in a collection published by Thomas Morley (1599/1611).

Music in the Elizabethan era

Thomas Morley, a student of William Byrd's, published collections of madrigals which included his own compositions as well as those of his contemporaries.

Preces

There are many musical settings of the text, ranging from largely homophonic settings such as those by William Byrd and Thomas Morley, to more elaborate arrangements that may even require organ accompaniment.


Ellis Gibbons

Ellis Gibbons was evidently counted as having promise by his contemporaries: at the age of 28 he became the only composer, other than the editor Thomas Morley himself, to contribute two madrigals to The Triumphs of Oriana, a collection of 25 madrigals published in 1601, although the American musicologist Joseph Kerman (in his 1962 comparative study of the English madrigal) states that "possibly one of the two is by Edward Gibbons."

Watkins Shaw

He also reconstructed and reinstated preces and responses by William Byrd, Thomas Morley, William Smith and Thomas Tomkins.


see also

English Madrigal School

One of the more notable compilations of English madrigals was The Triumphs of Oriana, a collection of madrigals compiled by Thomas Morley, which contained 25 different madrigals by 23 different composers.