Thomas Morley
1559 — 1602
Thomas Morley was an English composer, theorist, singer and organist of late Renaissance music. He was one of the foremost members of the English Madrigal School. Referring to the strong Italian influence on the English madrigal, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians states that Morley was “chiefly responsible for grafting the Italian shoot on to the native stock and initiating the curiously brief but brilliant flowering of the madrigal that constitutes one of the most colourful episodes in the history of English music.”
Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Thomas Morley.
From the period sources
Thomas Morley, an English contrapuntist, was a pupil of Byrd and earned his Mus. Bac. from Oxford in 1588, later becoming a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1592, where he also served as Epistler and Gospeller, according to A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1900). His published compositions include “Canzonets, or Little Short Songs to three voyces” (1593) and “Madrigalls to foure Voyces” (1594), alongside “The First Booke of Ballets to five voyces” (1595). Morley was also a significant theorist; A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, Vol. 1 (1875) quotes his opinion that “The music which we now use is neither just diatonic, nor right chromatic,” offering detailed definitions of these ancient genera. His Introduction was published during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, a time when the writings of Greek harmonicists were so scarce that it was doubted if some were even extant in manuscript. In his Introduction, Morley also recounts his own musical education, noting that his master, Boulde, would carry a plainsong book and have Morley sing descant while walking in the fields. He vividly describes the “wrangling” between Boulde and another descanter, who would “contention, striving who should bring in the point soonest and make hardest proportions,” sometimes deriding each other for playing “Gregory Walker” or a “Coranta” in “new proportions” like “Sesquiblinda and Sesqui-hearken after.”