A term coined by Thurston Dart to denote a characteristic English song form of the late 16th and early 17th centuries for solo voice or voices and an obbligato accompaniment for instruments, by implication, a consort of viols. Although confined in contemporary use to a number of songs for four voices in the lutenist tradition accompanied by a standard mixed consort of six instruments (in William Leighton's Teares or Lamentations, 1614), the term has generally been accepted because it captures the intergration of the genre's ensemble characteristic and its aesthetic values, and provides a useful parallel to the (equally modern) expression ‘lute song’. With the addition of a vocal chorus the form expanded, and its major offshoot was the verse anthem, which may usefully be distinguished from the consort song by its ecclesiastical function, its reduced accompaniment and its frequent use of prose texts (see Anthem, §I, 3). It should be noted, however, that many verse anthems were originally ‘consort anthems’ designed for domestic or occasional use and later suited for church by substituting an organ for the viol accompaniment. The musical importance of the consort song rests largely on its adoption and development by Byrd, who regarded it as the standard means of setting vernacular poetry. Historically, it represents the chief manifestation of a sturdy native musical tradition which withstood the onslaught of the italianate madrigal and the English lute ayre, and by a fascinating process of assimilation and expansion emerged triumphant after these forms had enjoyed their brilliant but short-lived ascendancy.
Consort songs first appear in the retrospective manuscript collections of the 1580s, but many of them must date from an earlier time, perhaps as early as 1550. The origins of the form remain obscure. Attempts to link it to the Tenorlied are at best tentative owing to the lack of documentary evidence and to the great differences in style. The instrumentally accompanied solo songs of France, particularly the chanson rustique settings of Antoine de Févin and his contemporaries, may have had some bearing, though probably an indirect one. Indeed, it seems likely that the origins of the consort song owe less to foreign models than to the effect of practical considerations on the flexible performing possibilities of the early Tudor song tradition. The two most important of these practical considerations are the growing popularity of the consort of viols after 1540 when an Italian consort made its appearance at the English court, and the preference after Henry VIII’s reign for court entertainments performed exclusively by boys.
The other song form current in England during the infancy of the consort song was the four-part chanson-like partsong that appears, for instance, in the Mulliner Book (GB-Lbl Add.30513). Both share an emphasis on the highest voice and a new kind of phrase structure that sets them apart from earlier Tudor songs. It is possible that the consort song first arose from solo performances of these partsongs. A few early four-part consort songs survive, but five-part texture seems to have been standard almost from the inception of the form. When Henry Disle published Richard Edwards’s collection of courtly verse in 1576 under the title The Paradyse of Daynty Devices, it was probably consort settings he had heard that led him to advertise the contents as ‘aptly made to be set to any song in 5 partes, or song to instrument(s)’. This verse anthology provides the texts for what appear to be among the very earliest consort songs, most of them simple strophic settings, with one syllable to a note, and no repetitions other than the customary one involving the final line or couplet of each stanza. Sometimes they are enlivened by antiphonal effects between voice and viols, as in the anonymous setting of Hunnis’s In terrors trapp'd. A further development, found in Robert Parsons’s Enforced by love and fear and Strogers’s Mistrust not truth, is the half-canonic dialogue that develops between treble and solo voice when the former takes the highest position in the ensemble, a technique that Byrd continued to exploit.
Another kind of consort song in the early repertory (which is almost all to be found in MB, xxii, 1967) is the lament, or ‘death song’ as Peter Warlock appropriately called it. Many examples appear to have come from the Senecan plays performed by choirboy companies at court and elsewhere, especially in the earlier part of Elizabeth I’s reign. These songs are not only lugubrious but also highly stylized; indeed, they are simply a musical extension of the set speeches in which the plays abound, usually beginning with an appeal to the divine powers, and ending with reiterated statements about the character’s impending demise in a manner that Shakespeare ridiculed in the Pyramus and Thisbe episode of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The songs are through-composed, but instead of building them on imitation between voice and instruments, composers generally sought a flexible, self-generating accompaniment, based largely on stock figures passed from one instrument to another and a harmonic style heavily spiced with false relations. This pleasantly decorative but rather discursive idiom is most successful in Richard Farrant’s laments, and in the fine anonymous settings of O Death, rock me asleep and Ah, silly poor Joas.
Byrd’s adoption of the consort song, probably in the 1570s after his arrival at court, immediately enhanced its musical stature. On first sight it seems puzzling that the same composer who delighted in the most high-flown rhetorical gestures in some of his motets should at the same time have largely rejected the madrigal in favour of a form that traditionally gave little occasion for musical illustration of the words. Characteristic of all Byrd’s consort songs are a strophic setting; the separation of the poetic lines in the music; the syllabic setting of the words, with a melisma on the penultimate syllable of a line in the more serious songs; and the lack of repetition, other than that of the final couplet or the occasional vocative or imperative phrase, such as ‘O Lord’ or ‘Come down’. The vocal melody is sturdy rather than ingratiating, and it matches the solemn iambics of the poetry with a measured alternation of semibreves and minims, or minims and crotchets. There is rarely any predetermined metrical scheme (Constant Penelope, a setting of hexameters, is an exception), but instead continual variation on a few patterns mostly involving syncopation as a means of avoiding the obvious. The only satisfactory conclusion to be drawn from Byrd’s preference for this sober kind of song is that he pursued it out of a sense of literary propriety: poems to Byrd, as to his contemporary the literary theorist George Puttenham, were not simply rhymed passages of prose but expressive forms shaped by number and proportion, and it is form that takes precedence over content and imagery in Byrd’s settings.
While this remains true throughout his career, Byrd nevertheless found increasingly more interesting ways of making the music ‘framed to the life of the words’ (to quote the title-page of his last song collection, the Psalms, Songs, and Sonnets of 1611). The early psalms, those surviving only in manuscript, are little advanced over the work of his predecessors, though some of them make use of a vocal chorus and are therefore among the earliest experiments leading to the verse anthem. Those in the Psalmes, Sonets and Songs of 1588, however, are much more rigorous in their use of imitation as a structural principle. It is as though Byrd was chiefly concerned at this stage to raise the musical level of the consort song by means of contrapuntal skill. And it is incidentally the thorough-going imitative technique that made it possible for him in publishing to add words to the instrumental parts and therefore appeal to a wider market. Even the lighter sonnets and pastorals admit some imitation, though here the emphasis is on providing the less serious verse with an appropriate musical counterpart, making use of more obvious musical devices such as rhyming cadences to match rhyming lines. The Songs of Sundrie Natures of 1589 contains a smaller proportion of consort songs, but it includes two carols with vocal burden and a fully-fledged consort anthem, Christ rising, that became one of Byrd’s most popular works in church circles. In the songs written after this time the accompaniment became increasingly flexible, recapturing some of the spirit of the old death songs (which Byrd occasionally parodied outright) but using its new-found freedom to support and elaborate on the text in ways that Byrd’s predecessors had simply never considered. This development can be followed in the few printed consort songs of the last period, but it is even more clear in a series of songs, some of them commissioned for family celebrations, found in the manuscripts emanating from the household of a Norfolk gentleman named Edward Paston. Many of these songs are anonymous in their sources, but bibliographical and stylistic evidence strongly supports their attribution to Byrd.
The style of these magnificent late songs had little or no effect on Byrd’s successors, but his example in cultivating the consort song ensured its survival during the period when the Italian madrigal dominated English musical taste. Indeed, several madrigal collections, like Byrd’s first two songbooks, contain consort songs disguised by the addition of words to the instrumental parts, and the influence of the style may be discerned in the work of even the most thorough-going madrigalists, as Kerman’s study shows. Byrd’s example may also have helped to crystallize composers’ conception of the consort song as an appropriate manner of setting occasional, serious, spiritual or (most especially) elegiac verse. Yet it continued also to find its place in the theatre for lighter music, as well as in those curious mixtures of quodlibet and comedy known as Street cries. In about 1600, the date when the phrase ‘fit for voices or viols’ first appeared on the title-page of a madrigal print, there seems to have been renewed interest in consort music, and this in turn led to a growing concern for what might be called the ‘verse’ idiom. Beginning about the time of Michael East’s influential Third Book (1610) there is a tendency for consort songs and anthems to turn up in many published collections, including those of Byrd himself (1611), Thomas Ravenscroft (1609, 1611 and 1614), Sir William Leighton (1614), John Amner (1615), Thomas Vautor (1619) and Martin Peerson (1620 and 1630), not to mention the further prints of the prolific East (1618 and 1624). And the ‘secular’ manuscript sources of the pre-Commonwealth period, as Monson shows, give an even stronger impression of the ascendancy of the consort song and anthem, and the decline of the madrigal.
The growth in popularity of the lute ayre after the appearance of Dowland’s First Book in 1597 may perhaps be connected with this process (see Air, §2). The four-part ‘ayres’ could, and must often, have been performed as solos with viol rather than lute accompaniment in the manner implied by Thomas Myriell’s copies (in B-Br II 4109). Greer has even gone so far as to assert that the serious contrapuntal ‘ayre’ was an offshoot of the consort song and that some ayres originated as real consort songs. His views pass over the distinction between the four- and five-part textures observed by those contemporary anthologists who made consort arrangements of lutenist songs (e.g. in GB-Lbl Add.17786–91 and 37402–6); but a close connection undoubtedly existed between the two forms, and some mutual influence.
The distinguishing features of the Jacobean consort song result from composers’ attempts to make some sort of synthesis between the native and the imported forms and styles. Thus the stage songs and other light numbers from the Ravenscroft collections and the Oxford manuscripts (Lbl Add.17786–91, 17797 etc.), and the brief pieces of Peerson’s first collection, capture the simpler and more ingratiating manner of the lute ayres. On the other hand, the more serious consort songs and anthems of East, John Ward, Ravenscroft and William Simmes (whose Rise, O my soul seems indispensable to every anthologist of the period), and those of Peerson’s later collection, generally attempt to impose expressive elements from the madrigal upon the traditionally contrapuntal style of the indigenous form. Thus pictorial word-setting, expressive harmony and even contrasts of scoring find their place in these works, which nevertheless keep some of the native idiom’s solemnity. The most distinguished upholder of the older tradition is of course Gibbons, whose consort anthems rank next to the songs of Byrd in the repertory. Gibbons was conservative in many respects but he was alive to new possibilities in the handling of the words, and he imparted a quality of his own to the idiom, as can be seen, for instance, in the remarkable welcome song, Do not repine, fair sun, composed for the Scottish Progress of 1617, as well as in the better-known sacred pieces.
It needed another set of influences from France and Italy to produce the extended musical forms of the Restoration period, the verse anthem and occasional ode, and it would be dangerous to make excessive claims for the effect of the earlier consort song upon them. Yet the consort anthems of Gibbons and his contemporaries were still being performed in Restoration times and beyond, and there can be little doubt that they played their part in shaping the more grandiose genres of this later age.
KermanEM
Le HurayMR
G.E.P. Arkwright: ‘Early Elizabethan Stage Music’, MA, i (1909–10), 30–40; iv (1912–13), 112–17
G.E.P. Arkwright: ‘Elizabethan Choirboy Plays and their Music’, PMA, xl (1913–14), 117–38
E.J. Dent: ‘William Byrd and the Madrigal’, Musikwissenschaftliche Beiträge: Festschrift für Johannes Wolf, ed. W. Lott, H. Osthoff and W. Wolffheim (Berlin, 1929), 24–30
A.J. Sabol: ‘Two Songs with Accompaniment for an Elizabethan Choirboy Play’, Studies in the Renaissance, v (1958), 145–59 [incl. score]
A.J. Sabol: ‘Ravenscroft’s Melismata and the Children of Paul’s’, RN, xii (1959), 3–9
P. Brett and T. Dart: ‘Songs by William Byrd in Manuscripts at Harvard’, Harvard Library Bulletin, xiv (1960), 343–65
P. Brett: ‘The English Consort Song, 1570–1625’, PRMA, lxxxviii (1961–2), 73–88
D. Greer: ‘The Part-Songs of the English Lutenists’, PRMA, xciv (1967–8), 97–110
P. Brett: ‘Word-Setting in the Songs of Byrd’, PRMA, xcviii (1971–2), 47–64
C. Monson: ‘George Kirbye and the English Madrigal’, ML, lix (1978), 290–315
J. Morenen: ‘The English Consort and Verse Anthems’, EMC, vi (1978), 381–5
P. Brett: ‘English Music for the Scottish Progress of 1617’, Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: a Memorial volume to Thurston Dart, ed. I. Bent (London, 1981), 209–26
C. Monson: Voices and Viols in England, 1600–1650: the Sources and the Music (Ann Arbor, 1982)
E. Doughtie: English Renaissance Song (Boston, 1986)
J. Heydon: Martin Peerson’s Private Musicke: a Transcription, Edition, and Study of an Early 17th-Century Collection of English Consort Songs (diss., U. of Oregon, 1990)
J. Bryan: ‘Anthemes for versus and chorus … apt for viols and voyces. the Development of the English Consort Anthem, with some Approaches to Performance Practice’, Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought, ed. J. Paynter and others, ii (London, 1992), 1079–97
D. McGuinness: ‘Gibbons' Solo Songs Reconsidered’, Chelys xxiv (1995), 19–33
J. Kramme: ‘William Cobbold's New Fashions: some Notes Concerning the Reconstruction of the Missing Atto Part’, John Jenkins and his Time: Studies in English Consort Music, ed. A. Ashbee and P. Holman (New York, 1996), 137–59
PHILIP BRETT