A consort of instruments was a phrase used in England during the 16th and 17th centuries to indicate an instrumental ensemble. These could consist of the same or a variety of instruments. Consort music enjoyed considerable popularity at court and in the households of the wealthy in the Elizabethan era, and many pieces were written for consorts by the major composers of the period. In the Baroque era, consort music was absorbed into chamber music.
The earliest documented example of the English word 'consort' in a musical sense is in George Gascoigne’s The Princelye Pleasures (1576). [1] Only from the mid-17th century has there been a clear distinction made between a ‘whole’, or ‘closed’ consort, that is, all instruments of the same family (for example, a set of viols played together) and a ‘mixed’, or ‘broken’ consort , consisting of instruments from various families (for example viols and lute). [2]
Major forms of music composed for consorts included fantasias, cantus firmus settings (including In nomines ), variations, dances or ayres, and fantasia suites. [3]
Composers of consort music during the Elizabethan era include John Dowland, Anthony Holborne, Osbert Parsley, and William Byrd. The principal Jacobean era composers included Thomas Lupo, Orlando Gibbons, John Coprario, and Alfonso Ferrabosco. William Lawes was a principal composer during the Caroline era. Later 17th-century composers included John Jenkins, Christopher Simpson, Matthew Locke and Henry Purcell.
In modern times, a number of ensembles have adopted the term "consort" in their names:
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Early music generally comprises Medieval music (500–1400) and Renaissance music (1400–1600), but can also include Baroque music (1600–1750). Originating in Europe, early music is a broad musical era for the beginning of Western classical music.
The viola da gamba, or viol, or informally gamba, is a bowed and fretted string instrument that is played da gamba .. It is distinct from the later violin, or viola da braccio ; and it is any one of the earlier viol family of bowed, fretted, and stringed instruments with hollow wooden bodies and pegboxes where the tension on the strings can be increased or decreased to adjust the pitch of each of the strings. Although treble, tenor and bass were most commonly used, viols came in different sizes, including pardessus, treble, alto, small tenor, tenor, bass and contrabass.
Orlando Gibbons was an English composer and keyboard player who was one of the last masters of the English Virginalist School and English Madrigal School. The best known member of a musical family dynasty, by the 1610s he was the leading composer and organist in England, with a career cut short by his sudden death in 1625. As a result, Gibbons's oeuvre was not as large as that of his contemporaries, like the elder William Byrd, but he made considerable contributions to many genres of his time. He is often seen as a transitional figure from the Renaissance to the Baroque periods.
In Nomine is a title given to a large number of pieces of English polyphonic, predominantly instrumental music, first composed during the 16th century.
John Jenkins (1592–1678), was an English composer who was born in Maidstone, Kent and who died at Kimberley, Norfolk.
A fantasia is a musical composition with roots in improvisation. The fantasia, like the impromptu, seldom follows the textbook rules of any strict musical form.
Eugène Arnold Dolmetsch, was a French-born musician and instrument maker who spent much of his working life in England and established an instrument-making workshop in Haslemere, Surrey. He was a leading figure in the 20th-century revival of interest in early music.
Fretwork is a British consort of viols, established in 1985. It specialises in English music for viol consort from approximately the time of William Byrd to that of Henry Purcell, but also performs Renaissance and contemporary repertoire.
The term violone can refer to several distinct large, bowed musical instruments which belong to either the viol or violin family. The violone is sometimes a fretted instrument, and may have six, five, four, or even only three strings. The violone is also not always a contrabass instrument. In modern parlance, one usually tries to clarify the 'type' of violone by adding a qualifier based on the tuning or on geography, or by using other terms that have a more precise connotation. The term violone may be used correctly to describe many different instruments, yet distinguishing among these types can be difficult, especially for those not familiar with the historical instruments of the viol and violin families and their respective variations in tuning.
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), English art and high culture reached a pinnacle known as the height of the English Renaissance. Elizabethan music experienced a shift in popularity from sacred to secular music and the rise of instrumental music. Professional musicians were employed by the Church of England, the nobility, and the rising middle-class.
Thomas Lupo was an English composer and viol player of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Along with Orlando Gibbons, John Coprario, and Alfonso Ferrabosco, he was one of the principal developers of the repertory for viol consort.
Cetra, a Latin word borrowed from Greek, is an Italian descendant of κιθάρα (cithara). It is a synonym for the cittern but has been used for the citole and cithara and cythara.
In English early Baroque music, a broken consort is an ensemble featuring instruments from more than one family, for example a group featuring both string and wind instruments. A consort consisting entirely of instruments of the same family, on the other hand, was referred to as a "whole consort", though this expression is not found until well into the seventeenth century. The word "consort", used in this way, is an earlier form of "concert", according to one opinion, while other sources hold the reverse: that it comes from the French term concert or its Italian parent term concerto, in its sixteenth-century sense. Matthew Locke published pieces for whole and broken consorts of two to six parts as late as 1672.
In music, a trio is any of the following:
A consort song was a characteristic English song form of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, for solo voice or voices accompanied by a group of instruments, most commonly viols. Although usually in five parts, some early examples of four-part songs exist. It is considered to be the chief representative of a native musical tradition which resisted the onslaught of the italianate madrigal and the English lute ayre, and survived those forms' brilliant but short-lived ascendancy.
In the years centering on 1600 in Europe, several distinct shifts emerged in ways of thinking about the purposes, writing and performance of music. Partly these changes were revolutionary, deliberately instigated by a group of intellectuals in Florence known as the Florentine Camerata, and partly they were evolutionary, in that precursors of the new Baroque style can be found far back in the Renaissance, and the changes merely built on extant forms and practices. The transitions emanated from the cultural centers of Northern Italy, then spread to Rome, France, Germany, and Spain, and lastly reached England . In terms of instrumental music, shifts in four discrete areas can be observed: idiomatic writing, texture, instrument use, and orchestration.
Early music of Britain and Ireland, from the earliest recorded times until the beginnings of the Baroque in the 17th century, was a diverse and rich culture, including sacred and secular music and ranging from the popular to the elite. Each of the major nations of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales retained unique forms of music and of instrumentation, but British music was highly influenced by continental developments, while British composers made an important contribution to many of the major movements in early music in Europe, including the polyphony of the Ars Nova and laid some of the foundations of later national and international classical music. Musicians from the British Isles also developed some distinctive forms of music, including Celtic chant, the Contenance Angloise, the rota, polyphonic votive antiphons, and the carol in the medieval era and English madrigals, lute ayres, and masques in the Renaissance era, which would lead to the development of English language opera at the height of the Baroque in the 18th century.
Baroque music refers to the period or dominant style of Western classical music composed from about 1600 to 1750. The Baroque style followed the Renaissance period, and was followed in turn by the Classical period after a short transition. The Baroque period is divided into three major phases: early, middle, and late. Overlapping in time, they are conventionally dated from 1580 to 1650, from 1630 to 1700, and from 1680 to 1750. Baroque music forms a major portion of the "classical music" canon, and is widely studied, performed, and listened to. The term "baroque" comes from the Portuguese word barroco, meaning "misshapen pearl". The works of Antonio Vivaldi, George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach are considered the pinnacle of the Baroque period. Other key composers of the Baroque era include Claudio Monteverdi, Domenico Scarlatti, Alessandro Scarlatti, Alessandro Stradella, Tomaso Albinoni, Johann Pachelbel, Henry Purcell, Georg Philipp Telemann, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Arcangelo Corelli, François Couperin, Johann Hermann Schein, Heinrich Schütz, Samuel Scheidt, Dieterich Buxtehude, Gaspar Sanz, José de Nebra, Antonio Soler, Carlos Seixas, Adam Jarzębski and others, with Giovanni Battista Pergolesi being the most prominent Baroque composer of sacred music.
Les Voix Humaines is a Canadian viol ensemble based in Montreal, Quebec. The two principal members are Susie Napper and Margaret Little, two gambists. The group performs mainly Baroque music, in particular works by French composers.
Caroline Trevor is an English contralto, focused on early music and Baroque music in historically informed performance. She has been one of two alto voices in the award-winning ensemble The Tallis Scholars since 1982.
