complete with falas, from both pieces.
Morley’s publications are a fitting conclusion to a chapter all about early musical entrepreneurship.
Once he got the commercial ball rolling, there was no stopping it, or so it seemed. Between the mid-
1590s, when Morley began, and the early 1620s, when Thomas Tomkins (1572–1656) published his last
madrigal book, about fifty prints containing madrigals or “madrigals” (that is, songs the English called
madrigals but which the Italians would have called something else) were issued, by almost as many
composers, some of whom were remarkable musicians indeed, fully worthy of their transalpine forebears.
Emblematic of the whole movement was a collection published by Morley in 1601: The Triumphes of
Oriana, consisting of madrigals by 21 composers, all in praise of Queen Elizabeth and ending with a
common refrain, “Long live fair Oriana.” Thus nationalism, public relations, and entrepreneurship
conjoined to turn the century’s most quintessentially Italian musical genre, or at least a lightened variant of
it, into a genre the English accepted as their own.
The most eminent English madrigalists, or at least the most serious, were the three W’s: John Ward
(1571–1638), John Wilbye (1574–1638), and Thomas Weelkes (1576–1623). They combined the kind of
musico-literary imagination that marked the best of the Italian madrigalists with outstanding contrapuntal
techniques, making them absolutely the last composers whose work exemplified the sixteenth-century
polyphonic style as a living, rather than an embalmed, tradition. To illustrate their work, Ward’s Upon a
Bank (Ex. 17-25), published in 1613, makes an apt counterpart to Monteverdi’s A un giro sol (Ex. 17-18).
It is based on the very same kind of overall “Petrarchian” antithesis—a jolly description of nature
followed by a lament—and features a wealth of delightfully subtle imagery in the opening pictorial part.
Here is the text of that part, with the words most ingeniously “painted” set in italics:
Upon a bank with roses set about,
Where pretty turtles [i.e., turtle doves] joining bill to bill,
And gentle springs steal softly murmuring out,
Washing the foot of pleasure’s sacred hill.......
EX. 17-24A Thomas Morley, “Now is the month of Maying”