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The English Madrigal School was the intense flowering of the musical madrigal in England, mostly from 1588 to 1627, along with the composers who produced them. The English madrigals were a cappella, predominantly light in style, and generally began as either copies or direct translations of Italian models.
Fair Phyllis (also Fair Phyllis I saw, Fair Phyllis I saw sitting all alone) is an English madrigal by John Farmer. The music is polyphonic and was published in 1599. The madrigal contains four voices and uses occasional imitation. It also alternates between triple and duple beat subdivisions of the beat in different parts of the work.
Artistically, the madrigal was the most important form of secular music in Renaissance Italy, and reached its formal and historical zenith in the later-16th century, when the form also was taken up by German and English composers, such as John Wilbye (1574–1638), Thomas Weelkes (1576–1623), and Thomas Morley (1557–1602) of the English ...
Weelkes remained at the college for three or four years, and, according to Brown, during this period he composed his finest madrigals. [3] They appeared in two volumes (1598 and 1600); Brown calls the second – works for five and six voices – "one of the most important volumes in the English madrigal tradition." [3]
It contains words and full music for some 60 of the madrigals and songs of the English Madrigal School. When selecting works for this book, Ledger decided to represent the major composers of 16th-century English music such as William Byrd and Thomas Morley with several madrigals, alongside individual works by lesser-known composers.
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).
Thomas Watson (1555–1592) was an English poet and translator, and the pioneer of the English madrigal. His lyrics aside, he wrote largely in Latin, also being the first to translate Sophocles 's Antigone from Greek.
A madrigal was the most common form of secular vocal music. “The poetic madrigal is a lyric consisting of one to four strophes of three lines followed by a two-line strophe." [8] The English Madrigals were a cappella, light in style, and generally began as either copies or direct translations of Italian models, with most being for four to six ...