Thomas Morley Totally Explained

Everything about Thomas Morley totally explained

Thomas Morley (1557 or 1558 – October 1602) was an English composer, theorist, editor and organist of the Renaissance, and the foremost member of the English Madrigal School. He was the most famous composer of secular music in Elizabethan England. He and Robert Johnson are the composers of the only surviving contemporary settings of verse by Shakespeare.==Life== Morley was born in Norwich, in East Anglia, the son of a brewer. Most likely he was a singer in the local cathedral from his boyhood, and he became master of choristers there in 1583. However, Morley evidently spent some time away from East Anglia, for he later referred to the great Elizabethan composer of sacred music, William Byrd, as his teacher; while the dates he studied with Byrd are not known, they were most likely in the early 1570s. In 1588 he received his bachelor's degree from Oxford, and shortly thereafter was employed as organist at St. Paul's in London. His young son died the following year in 1589.
   In 1588 Nicholas Yonge published his Musica transalpina, the collection of Italian madrigals fitted with English texts, which touched off the explosive and colorful vogue for madrigal composition in England. Morley evidently found his compositional direction at this time, and shortly afterwards began publishing his own collections of madrigals (11 in all).
   Morley lived for a time in the same parish as Shakespeare, and a connection between the two has been long speculated, though never proven. His famous setting of "It was a lover and his lass" from As You Like It has never been established as having been used in a performance of Shakespeare's play, though the possibility that it was is obvious. Morley was highly placed by the mid-1590s and would have had easy access to the theatrical community; certainly there was then, as there's now, a close connection between prominent actors and musicians.
   While Morley attempted to imitate the spirit of Byrd in some of his early sacred works, it was in the form of the madrigal that he made his principal contribution to music history. His work in the genre has remained in the repertory to the present day, and shows a wider variety of emotional color, form and technique than anything by other composers of the period. Usually his madrigals are light, quick-moving and easily singable, like his well-known "Now is the Month of Maying"; he took the aspects of Italian style that suited his personality and anglicised them. Other composers of the English Madrigal School, for instance Thomas Weelkes and John Wilbye, were to write madrigals in a more serious or sombre vein.
   In addition to his madrigals, Morley wrote instrumental music, including keyboard music (some of which has been preserved in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book), and music for the uniquely English consort of two viols, flute, lute, cittern and bandora, notably as published in 1599 in The First Booke of Consort Lessons, made by diuers exquisite Authors, for six Instruments to play together, the Treble Lute, the Pandora, the Cittern, the Base-Violl, the Flute & Treble-Violl.
   Morley's Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (published 1597) remained popular for almost two hundred years after its author's death, and remains an important reference for information about sixteenth century composition and performance.

Compositions

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

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

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