Magnificat and Nunc DImitis Thomas Morley
This rendition of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis is sung more like a psalm.
Thomas Morley (1557 – early October 1602) was an English composer, theorist, singer and organist of the Renaissance. 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."
Living in London at the same time as Shakespeare, Morley 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.
Morley was active in church music as a singer, composer and organist at St Paul's Cathedral. He was also involved in music publishing. From 1598 up to his death he held a printing patent (a type of monopoly). He used the monopoly in partnership with professional music printers such as Thomas East.
Life
Morley was born in Norwich, 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. He may have been a Roman Catholic, but he was able to avoid prosecution as a recusant, and there is evidence that he may have been an informer on the activities of Roman Catholics.
It is believed that Morley moved from Norwich to London sometime before 1574 to be a chorister at St. Paul's Cathedral. Around this time, he studied with William Byrd, whom he named as his mentor in his 1597 publication A Plain and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke. Byrd also taught Morley's contemporary, Peter Philips. In 1588 he received his bachelor's degree from the University of Oxford, and shortly thereafter was employed as organist at St. Paul's in London. His young son died the following year in 1589. He and his wife Susan had three more children between 1596 and 1600.
In 1588 Nicholas Yonge published his Musica transalpina, the collection of Italian madrigals fitted with English texts, which touched off the explosive and colourful vogue for madrigal composition in England. Morley 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, but 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 during the playwright's lifetime. However, given that the song was published in 1600, there is evidently a possibility that it was used in stage performances.
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 colour, 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" (which is actually a ballett); 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 broken consort, a uniquely English ensemble of two viols, flute, lute, cittern and bandora, notably as published by William Barley in 1599 in The First Booke of Consort Lessons, made by diuers exquisite Authors, for six Instruments to play together, the Treble Lute, the Bandora, 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 is still an important reference for information about sixteenth century composition and performance.
Thomas Morley was buried in the graveyard of the church of St Botolph Billingsgate, which was destroyed in the Great Fire of London of 1666, and not rebuilt. Thus his grave is lost.
Taken from Wikipedia
Through the Day Words by T Kelly (1769-1854) Music from Thomas Morley's First Book of Ayres (1600) adapted by Rev H W Sparking
The words are taken from an anthem for Compline, a service at the end of the day, set to music by Thomas Morley. It is set for two voices.
Through the day thy love has spared us;
Now we lay us down to rest;
Through the silent watches guard us,
Let no foe our peace molest:
Jesu thou our guardian be;
Sweet it is to trust in thee.
Pilgrims here on earth and strangers,
Dwelling in the midst of foe,
Us and ours preserve from danger,
In thine arms we may repose,
And when life's sad day is past,
Rest with thee in heav'n at last.
Thomas Kelly (13 July 1769 – 14 May 1855) was an Irish evangelical, known as a Church of Ireland cleric to 1803, hymn writer and founder of the Kellyites.
Life
He was the son of Thomas Kelly (1723–1809), judge of the Court of Common Pleas (Ireland) and Frances Hickie, daughter of James Jephson Hickie of Carrick on Suir, and was born at the family seat, Kellyville (formerly Derrinroe), Queen's County, on 13 July 1769. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1785, graduating B.A. in 1789. He was admitted to London's Middle Temple in 1786.
In Dublin, Kelly was influenced by John Walker (1769–1833), also a Trinity College undergraduate. He had been impressed with the views of William Romaine and the Hutchinsonians. Giving up on a legal career, he was ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1792; Walker was ordained too, by 1793. Two other friends were ordained at this period, Henry Maturin and Walter Shirley. Rowland Hill visited Dublin in 1793, and Kelly began to preach on grace in line with Hill's views. With others, he gave the Sunday afternoon sermons at St. Luke's Church, Dublin in early 1794. These provoked Robert Fowler, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, who inhibited them on doctrinal grounds.
Kelly reacted first by preaching in unconsecrated Dublin locations: one on Plunket Street, another the Bethesda Chapel (which for a time he was a trustee). He went on to Athy. In 1795 he married, and moved out to Blackrock, where he built himself a chapel of ease.
With his allies, Kelly spread his evangelical views widely in Ireland. In 1802 he founded the religious sect that became known as the Kellyites, with half a dozen congregations, recruiting some ministers from Scotland, where the same year the seminary run by the Haldane brothers, Robert and James Alexander, moved from Glasgow to Edinburgh and expanded. In 1803 he broke with the Church of Ireland. The same year, Walker had gathered a group naming itself the Church of God, and he was expelled as a fellow of Trinity College, Dublin in 1804.
Kelly died in Dublin on 14 May 1855, having acted as minister in Athy and Dublin for half a century. After his death, his congregation dropped away.
Hymn-writer
Kelly is believed to have written 765 hymns, published over 51 years; one of the most well-known is Look, ye saints, the sight is glorious.. A Collection of Psalms and Hymns (1802) contained 247, of which 33 were by Kelly. Hymns on Various Passages of Scripture (1804) ran to four editions, after which there was Hymns of Thomas Kelly, never before published (1815), followed by four further editions. He used unusual metres.
Family
In 1795, Kelly married Elizabeth Tighe, eldest daughter of William Tighe (1738–1782), of Rosanna, County Wicklow, MP for Athboy and a supporter of John Wesley, and his wife Sarah Fownes, daughter of Sir William Fownes, 2nd Baronet. She brought a fortune to the marriage. They had two daughters, Elizabeth, who married Reverend Edward Wingfield, a younger son of the 4th Viscount Powerscourt, and Frances, who married Reverend Thomas Webber, and was the mother of General Charles Edmund Webber.
Taken from Wikipedia
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