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Thomas Morley (1557 or 1558 – October 1602) was an English composer, theorist, singer and organist of the Renaissance. He was one of the foremost members of the English Madrigal School. He was also involved in music publishing, and from 1598 up to his death he held a printing patent (a type of monopoly). He used the monopoly in partnership with professional music printers such as Thomas East. Living in London at the same time as Shakespeare, he became organist at St Paul's Cathedral. He was the most famous composer of secular music in Elizabethan England. He and Robert Johnson are the composers of the only surviving contemporary settings of verse by Shakespeare. ==Life== Morley was born in Norwich, in East England, the son of a brewer. Most likely he was a singer in the local cathedral from his boyhood, and he became master of choristers there in 1583. However, Morley spent some time away from East England. He was working as a singer in London in the 1570s and appears to have studied with William Byrd at that time, he later referred to him as his teacher; while the dates he studied with Byrd are not known, they were most likely in the early 1570s.〔Foster, Michael W.. "Morley, Thomas (b. 1556/7, d. in or after 1602)." Michael W. Foster in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., edited by Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/19292 (accessed November 18, 2014) Subscription or UK public library membership required.〕 In 1588 he received his bachelor's degree from Oxford, and shortly thereafter was employed as organist at St. Paul's in London. His young son died the following year in 1589. 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 obviously found his compositional direction at this time, and shortly afterwards began publishing his own collections of madrigals (11 in all). Morley lived for a time in the same parish as Shakespeare, and a connection between the two has been long speculated, but never proven. His famous setting of "It was a lover and his lass" from ''As You Like It'' has never been established as having been used in a performance of Shakespeare's play, though the possibility that it was is obvious. Morley was highly placed by the mid-1590s and would have had easy access to the theatrical community; certainly there was then, as there is now, a close connection between prominent actors and musicians. While Morley attempted to imitate the spirit of Byrd in some of his early sacred works, it was in the form of the madrigal that he made his principal contribution to music history. His work in the genre has remained in the repertory to the present day, and shows a wider variety of emotional color, form and technique than anything by other composers of the period. Usually his madrigals are light, quick-moving and easily singable, like his well-known "Now is the Month of Maying" (which is actually a ballett); he took the aspects of Italian style that suited his personality and anglicised them. Other composers of the English Madrigal School, for instance Thomas Weelkes and John Wilbye, were to write madrigals in a more serious or sombre vein. In addition to his madrigals, Morley wrote instrumental music, including keyboard music (some of which has been preserved in the ''Fitzwilliam Virginal Book''), and music for the broken consort, a uniquely English ensemble of two viols, flute, lute, cittern and bandora, notably as published by William Barley in 1599 in ''The First Booke of Consort Lessons, made by diuers exquisite Authors, for six Instruments to play together, the Treble Lute, the Bandora, the Cittern, the Base-Violl, the Flute & Treble-Violl''. Morley's ''Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke'' (published 1597) remained popular for almost two hundred years after its author's death, and remains an important reference for information about sixteenth century composition and performance. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Thomas Morley」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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