Contributions
Born in Norwich and a pupil of William Byrd, Morley was organist of St Paul's Cathedral in London before joining the Chapel Royal as a Gentleman in 1592; in 1598 he in turn obtained the monopoly on music printing. He is the great architect of the English madrigal. Adapting the Italian model with sovereign skill, he published canzonets, madrigals and above all balletts with their dancing "fa-la-la" refrains — "Now is the month of maying," "My bonny lass she smileth" — which remain among the most sung pages of the entire Elizabethan repertory. In 1601 he gathered and directed The Triumphes of Oriana, a collective madrigal anthology in honour of Elizabeth I. He set "It was a lover and his lass," lines from Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It — one of the very few contemporary musical records of the playwright's words. His treatise A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), cast as a dialogue, would remain for nearly two centuries the standard teaching reference for English composition.
Significance
Morley is the man who naturalised the Italian madrigal in England and gave the signal for the whole English madrigal school. Where his master Byrd embodies gravity and depth, Morley brings light, briskness and immediate pleasure: his secular music is clear, melodic, made for singing in company, and it long set the English taste for light polyphony. His role as transmitter is crucial: through his collections, his editions and his printing monopoly, he spread and popularised a new genre, opening the way for Weelkes, Wilbye and Bennet. Yet his greatest legacy may be pedagogical. A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, the first major music treatise in English, teaches sight-singing, counterpoint and composition in a lively, accessible form; generations of Englishmen learned their craft from it, and musicologists still draw from it an irreplaceable knowledge of sixteenth-century practice. Composer, theorist and publisher, Morley shaped both the music of his time and the way it was learned.
Influence
He opened the way for the whole English madrigal school — Thomas Weelkes, John Wilbye, John Bennet — and his treatise trained generations of musicians and composers over nearly two centuries, while remaining a major source for performers of early music. He himself was formed by William Byrd, whom he revered as his master, and drew directly on the Italian madrigalists — Luca Marenzio and above all Giovanni Gastoldi, whose balletti he "anglicised."
Anecdote
Morley and William Shakespeare were neighbours: tax records list them both in the same parish of St Helen's, Bishopsgate, in London during the 1590s. From this proximity may have come "It was a lover and his lass," Morley's setting of a song from the comedy As You Like It — one of the only surviving contemporary tunes to Shakespeare's verse, as if, for the space of a song, the greatest poet and the most smiling of English madrigalists had joined their voices.