I’m going to be taking an online course on Renaissance music theory starting this week, and the teacher suggested that it would be helpful to look in advance at one of the major theory textbooks from that age, Thomas Morley’s A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (1597).
Walter Crane’s 1883 version of Morley’s “It was a Lover and his Lass,” from Pan Pipes.
Morley was one of the great composers of that golden age of English music, and a contemporary of Shakespeare. They may have known each other, for Morley wrote a setting of Shakespeare’s song “It was a lover and his lass” (from As You Like It) — a setting still much used in productions. Here it is with Jennifer Ellis Kampani and Voices of Music, redolent with spring and love and birdsong, silly and totally beautiful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eePvx9LPXYU
When I started reading Morley–in an online facsimile of the first edition–I found two remarkable things before even starting the music theory.
First was the dedication of the book “to the most excellent musician, Master William Byrd.” I’ve read hundreds of these Elizabethan dedications, and almost all are sycophantic begging letters to rich and powerful men who probably didn’t give a hoot about music, or poetry, or whatever some poor ink-stained scholar was slaving away about, but who might send a few coins in thanks for seeing his name on a bookstall outside St. Paul’s Cathedral.
This dedication is different. Although Byrd was by then well-known as a composer, he wasn’t likely to lay down a bunch of money on Morley’s desk. The dedication is a thank-you letter from student to teacher: Morley shows us that he is overwhelmingly grateful for what he has learned from Byrd. There are three sources of our creativity, Morley says: God; our parents; and our teachers.
Teachers are “those by whose directions the faculties of the reasonable soul be stirred up to enter into contemplation and searching of more than earthly things: whereby we obtain a second being, more to be wished and much more durable than that which any man since the world’s creation hath received of [i.e, from] his parents; causing us to live in the minds of the virtuous, as it were deified to the posterity.”
I hope all our teachers hear such praise of their work!
William Byrd (1540-1623) (I could not find a contemporary portrait of Morley)
The second thing that struck me was Morley’s description of the writing of the book. He began the project as a way to keep busy during an enforced quarantine: “the solitary life I lead [led?] (being compelled to keep at home) caused me be glad to find anything wherein to keep myself exercised for the benefit of my country.”
I don’t know precisely when Morley was compelled to keep at home, nor why (and being myself compelled to keep at home, I can’t get to the library to find out more)– but with a publication date of 1597, I’m guessing that it might have been the plague that ravaged London in 1592-93.
The theaters were closed, and Shakespeare turned from writing plays to writing poems (such as Venus and Adonis), and dedicated them to rich aristocrats.
Concerts were canceled, and Morley turned to writing a treatise about music theory.
Endearingly, he tells us that he sees it seemed like a lovely idea at first. Theoretically lovely. But it became something of a nightmare, as he was forced to dig through dozens of other theorists in a vain attempt to sort out their contradictory axioms about music.
“If I had, before I began it, imagined half the pains and labor which it cost me, I would sooner have been persuaded to anything, than to have taken in hand such a tedious piece of work, like unto a great sea, which the further I entered into, the more I saw before me unpassed.”
I know the feeling!