Thomas Morley
Thomas Morley's madrigals and balletts are among the most singable music of Elizabethan England: light, quick-moving part-songs that took Italian models and made them English. Choirs still reach for pieces such as Now is the Month of Maying and Sing we and chant it.
Morley was a leading figure of the English Madrigal School, writing secular vocal music that stays bright, dance-like and clear in texture. His well-known ballett Now is the Month of Maying shows the style at its most open and rhythmic; Sing we and chant it carries the same easy lilt into consort and choral programmes. Beside the madrigals he wrote sacred music, keyboard pieces and music for broken consort, and his Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke remains a key window onto how sixteenth-century musicians thought about composition and performance. On record his work often sits among other Renaissance part-songs, where its colour and forward motion still cut through.
Compositions by Thomas Morley appear on
The Emerald Leopard
Josie and the Emeralds pair acclaimed early-music soprano Josie Ryan with some of Australia’s finest viol players, the Emerald City Viols. Founded in 2011, the group is known for sophisticated performances and inventive programmes of Renaissance and contemporary works, including compositions and arrangements by director Brooke Green.