Thomas Morley

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Elizabeth ushers in Peace and Plenty. Detail from the Family of Henry VIII: An Allegory of the Tudor Succession, c.1572, attributed to Lucas de Heere.

Thomas Morley (1557 or 1558 – October 1602) was an English composer, theorist, editor and organist of the Renaissance, and the foremost member of the English Madrigal School. He was the most famous composer of secular music in Elizabethan England, and the composer of the only surviving contemporary settings of verse by Shakespeare. Morley's madrigals, which were loosely based on the Italian madrigal form, became an important secular vocal music in England due to his ease of melodic writing which he generously taught to others in a treatise on singing and composing.

Morley was one of the first composers of madrigals who utilized the practice of musical imitation to express the poetic narrative of the text. This practice would eventually influence composers of the Baroque era to utilize musical components such as melody and harmony to express specific meanings or affectations in their works.

Biography

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.

It has been speculated that in his youth Morley converted to Roman Catholicism while under the tutilage of his mentor, William Byrd. However, in 1591 he defected from the church, for having committed espionage with English Roman Catholics in the Netherlands.

Publishing career

Chronologically Morley's compositions can be divided in two distinct styles. While a pupil of William Byrd his early works reflect the English style of polyphonic writing. From the 1590s his music began to exhibit a mastery of the Italian madrigal style that is characterized by a more direct expressiveness, lighter, jaunty rhythms, and textural clarity.

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

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

Madrigals

A defining characteristic of music of the Baroque era was that composers became increasingly concerned with human emotions (passions and affections) and created music to "imitate" these emotions through tonal organization. Looking to the writings of Descartes and Sauveur who, in their investigation of man's psychological makeup, began to "objectify" certain emotions, Baroque composers developed the practice of expressing specific emotions through musical means in significant ways.

However, the practice of imitation can be found in the early madrigals of the Renaissance. As music historian Richard Taruskin observes, the madrigals of the middle part of the sixteenth century "were hotbeds of musical radicalism and experimentation" as musical devices such as dissonance and chromaticism were often utilized to express the poetics of a particular text.

Paraphrasing the Italian music theorist Geoseffo Zarlino (1517-1590) in his treatise, Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke published in 1597, Morley puts forth the following assertion regarding assigning musical imitation to a text or libretto: "It not followeth to show how to dispose your music according to the nature of the words which you are therein to express, as whatsoever matter it be which you have in hand such a kind of music must you frame to it. You must therefore, if you have any grave matter, apply a grave kind of music to it, if a merry subject you must make your music also merry, for it will be a great absurdity to use a sad harmony to a merry matter or a merry harmony to to a sad, lamentable, or tragic (text.)

Morley's madrigals are predominately 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.

Instrumental and keyboard works

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.

Legacy

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.

Morley's Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke 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.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Morley, Thomas; Morehen, John, Thomas Morley, London: Stainer & Bell, 1998. ISBN 0-852-49800-4
• Reese, Gustave, Music in the Renaissance, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4
• Sadie, Stanley, ed., "Thomas Morley" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-561-59174-2
• Slaughter, James, Music of Thomas Morley, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Foundation, 1987. OCLC 18203538

Further reading

• The University of Reading Library featuring: Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke. London, 1597 [1]
• Philip Ledger (ed) The Oxford Book of English Madrigals OUP 1978

External links

• Free scores by Thomas Morley in the Werner Icking Music Archive Retrieved August 16, 2007.

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