Thomas Morley

Music can draw the hearer in chains of gold to the consideration of holy things.   - Thomas Morley

The 1711 Sales Catalogue of the library of Sir Thomas Browne records a copy of Thomas Morley's A Plaine and easie way to make Musicke (1597) as once shelved at the Norwich physician and philosopher's home. Morley's book remained in print for over 200 years and is a valuable document upon the music-making of his era.

From his humble background as the son of a Norwich brewer, Thomas Morley (1557-1602) rose to the heights of organist at Saint Paul's cathedral and was privileged to study music under William Byrd. Morley's era, the second half of the sixteenth century, saw a surge in music-making in England, in particular a near craze for the accomplishment of skilled lute-playing among gentlemen, especially courtiers. Morley's era also witnessed the popularity of secular verse sung to complex harmonies known as madrigals, of which he was a prominent composer. Morley's musical skills also catered for instrumental music-making when in 1599 he published The first book of Consort Lessons, arrangements of his and various other composer's music for broken consort; the six instruments of the broken consort consisting of lute, flute, bandora, cittern and two viols, bass and treble. The viol  family of string instruments are precursors to the violin family. To modern ears a viol consort of three to five players, can sound slightly and deliciously 'creaky' with their wide compass of enharmonic overtones. Elizabethan music-making also included performances of the  masque, an elaborate form of early theatre from which ballet and opera evolved. Masques were often performed at  the Royal Court and involved singers and instruments. Lavishly produced, they featured spectacular costumes and stage-effects.

Thomas Morley

Morley's era was one in which the so-called 'Golden Age' of English music flourished. From roughly the 1560's until Purcell's death in 1695, English music developed and established a distinctive voice,  a  'Golden Age' of musical talent which would not occur in England again until the second half of the 20th century. Besides Thomas Morley, other Elizabethan composers of note include 'the father of English music' William Byrd (1540-1623), the melancholic lutenist John Dowland (1563-1626) and the keyboard player Thomas Tomkins (1572 -1656) who incidentally, owned a signed copy of Morley's Plaine and easie way to make Musicke. Of the later Jacobean era, William Lawes (1602-43) and the industrious and pious John Jenkins (1592-1678) who may have been acquainted with Sir Thomas Browne when resident in Norfolk, are all rewarding to listen to. Today, with the revival of interest in music which pre-dates J.S. Bach, the early music composers of England are frequently recorded and performed. There's much in the catalogue of early English music well worth hearing, including Morley's madrigals along with his First book of Consort Lessons.


One wonders whether Morley played any part in the music-making festivities when Queen Elizabeth I visited Norwich in 1578. A contemporary reported of her visit -

Herewith she passed under the gate.....and the musicians within the gate, upon their soft instruments, used broken musick...The next night...there was an excellent princely mask brought before her after supper, by Master Goldingham, in the Privie Chamber; it was of gods and goddesses, both strangely and richly apparelled...Then entered a consort of musicke; viz. six musicians, all in long vestures of white scarcenet girded about them, and garlands on their heads, playing very cunningly.

Queen Elizabeth's 'Royal Progress' to Norwich in 1578 is included in the English composer Benjamin Britten's opera Gloriana  which was written in the year of Queen Elizabeth II's Coronation in 1953.  Act Two of Britten's opera is set against the back-drop of the Guildhall at Norwich. Elizabeth I  is welcomed by the City Recorder and then a masque is performed which she and the Royal court watch. Six dances, including a Morris dance are performed. Personifications of Time and Concord are among the principle characters in the masque who, accompanied by a chorus of rustic country maids and fishermen conclude the entertainment with a homage to the Queen.

It was a neat device of Benjamin Britten's to include a visit to Norwich by 'good Queen Bess' in his opera Gloriana. It  must be nearly 40 years ago now, when a teen-age school-boy, if I remember rightly, that our rehearsal of Noye's Fludde, a medieval  mystery play set to music by Benjamin Britten was interrupted. It was the composer himself, who dropped in to thank the boys and girls for all their hard work rehearsing his work. Britten's cantata for mixed ensemble of amateurs was first performed in Orford church in June 1958, the composer insisting that no future performances were to be made in a theatre, but only ever in churches or Halls.

Its worth noting that Browne's edition of Morley's primer on music (Sales Catalogue Page 45 number 47) is a first edition when in fact a modern edition could have been easily acquired, evidence of Browne being the consummate bibliophile and collector of rare books.  One cannot resist noting that the frontispiece illustration  to Morley's book (pictured above) depicts not only the various muses associated with  music and learning, but also the sun and moon as deities. Finally, also at the very bottom of the frontispiece illustration  holding a staff-like caduceus, there can be seen the elusive god of travel and communication, ruler of traders and thieves alike and patron of alchemy, Mercurius.

Robin

Enjoying the late return of Summer for several cloudless days now, with the temperature touching 27 degrees Celsius, I spotted a Robin in my garden. They really are exceptionally tame birds. For a full 20 minutes he hopped back and forth from fence to ground in search of food, occasionally singing, curious at my watching him. The secret to observing nature's wonders is quite simply stillness and silence, two commodities increasingly in short supply in the world today. 

William Lawes

Today (September 24th) is the anniversary of the death of the English composer William Lawes (1602-43). William Lawes was composer in residence to King Charles I and during the English civil war he enlisted in the Royal army; however in 1643 he was shot and killed during the siege of Chester, aged just 41. Lawes death prompted King Charles I to declare a period of mourning and to honour him with the title of 'Father of Musick'. William Lawes is chiefly remembered today for his Viol Consort Setts for 5 & 6 viols, his music being characterized by lyricism, a wide variety of keys, experimental harmonies and varied moods. 

One of Lawes last works was a fantasy on a penitential psalm entitled, 'I am weary of my groaning'. With William Lawes death English music lost potentially one its greatest composers. However his Consort Setts are today frequently recorded and performed, notably by Fretwork, the foremost musicians associated with the revival of  music for viols. 

Michael Jarvis

Today the sad news that Michael Jarvis, one of Newmarket's top race-horse trainers for 40 years has died aged 73 of cancer. The master of Kremlin House Stables began training race-horses way back in 1968; his major wins include Eswarah winning the Oaks in 2005, Ameerat winning the 1000 Guineas in 2001, Holding Court winning the French Derby in 2000, Rakti winning the Prince of Wales Stakes and  Queen Elizabeth II Stakes and Carroll House winning Europe's most prestigious race, the Prix de l' Arc de Triumphe in 1989. He also won big Group 1 races in Italy, Germany, France and the Topkapi Cup in Istanbul, Turkey.

Michael Jarvis was first and foremost a real gentleman, modest and soft-spoken. I had the pleasure of congratulating him at Yarmouth race-track in August 2007, with the first time out win of Ancien Regime, a 2 year old owned by Sheikh Mohammed. Jarvis belongs to a generation of true sportsmen, highly successful as a race-horse trainer for decades and much respected in the Flat horse-racing world.

Here's a photo of Jarvis with his long-serving 'in-house' jockey Philip Robinson in the parade ring at Yarmouth race-track on a cold April day in 2008.
  

Vitruvian Man

Recently, when speculating upon whether the German mystic Hildegard von Bingen's manuscript illustration of Universal Man  is in any way related to the Italian artist Leonardo Da Vinci's well-known image of Vitruvian man, I found that Sir Thomas Browne once owned a book entitled L'Architettura di Vitruvio (Venice 1641) complete with a commentary by the Italian humanist Daniele Barbaro (1514-1570) [1]. But in fact its highly improbable that the writings of Vitruvius could have been re-discovered in Germany in the 12th century, the rediscovery of Vitruvius usually being credited to the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini in 1414. It was Vitruvius who noted of the proportions of the human body that-

Just so the parts of Temples should correspond with each other, and with the whole. The navel is naturally placed in the centre of the human body, and, if in a man lying with his face upward, and his hands and feet extended, from his navel as the centre, a circle be described, it will touch his fingers and toes. It is not alone by a circle, that the human body is thus circumscribed, as may be seen by placing it within a square. For measuring from the feet to the crown of the head, and then across the arms fully extended, we find the latter measure equal to the former; so that lines at right angles to each other, enclosing the figure, will form a square. [2]

It's quite possible that Browne also once owned books by Italian Renaissance painters, including those of Da Vinci. The 1711 Sales Catalogue advertises Books of Sculpture and Painting with choice manuscripts for sale, but as the American scholar and editor J.S. Finch noted, no such books arrived at the auction-house having mysteriously disappeared. 

It's in Plato's philosophical discourse the Symposium that the idea of an original, androgynous, double-natured man can be found -

The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word "Androgynous" is only preserved as a term of reproach. In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three;-and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round: like their parents.

while in Sir Thomas Browne's discourse The Garden of Cyrus (1658) one reads-

Nor is the same observable only in some parts, but in the whole body of man, which upon the extension of arms and legges, doth make out a square, whose intersection is at the genitals. To omit the phantastical Quincunx, in Plato of the first Hermaphrodite or double man, united at the Loynes, which Jupiter after divided.

Plato's Original Man bears some resemblance to the Biblical account in Genesis in which God, taking a rib from Adam when asleep, forms a companion for him, naming her Eve. (Gen.2: 21-22)

Nevertheless an interesting  correpondence between the geometrical design of Hildegard's Universal Man and Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man is evident; while Sir Thomas Browne's own highly original interpretation of the Platonic archetypes can be detected throughout  The Garden of Cyrus

[1] 1711 Sales Catalogue page 39 no.18
[2]  Vitruvius - On Architecture Book 3, i, 3