Thomas Morley - My Bonny Lass She Smileth
Channel: Classical Music
Date: 2022-08-24

Music from Renaissance period

🎵 My Bonny Lass She Smileth
🧑 Composer: Thomas Morley
🎶 Form: Madrigal
🎻 Instrument: Clarinet
👨 Performer: Matthew Hughes
⌛  Period: Renaissance

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My Bonny Lass She Smileth is a ballett (madrigal) for five voices composed by Thomas Morley. Its libretto was written by Michael Drayton. A ballett was the English form of the Italian balletto, a light, homophonic, strophic song for three or more singers, distinguished by dance-like rhythms and "fa-la-la" refrains. It is based on an Italian madrigal, published by Gastoldi in 1591. The madrigal by Morley was first published in 1595 in Balletts to Five Voyces, Book 1 (No.7).

Thomas Morley
Born: 1557, Norwich, East England
Died: October 1602, London, England

Thomas Morley (1557 – early 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. Referring to the strong Italian influence on the English madrigal, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians states that Morley was "chiefly responsible for grafting the Italian shoot on to the native stock and initiating the curiously brief but brilliant flowering of the madrigal that constitutes one of the most colourful episodes in the history of English music."
Living in London at the same time as Shakespeare, Morley 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.
Morley was active in church music as a singer, composer and organist at St Paul's Cathedral. He was also involved in music publishing. 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.
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 is still an important reference for information about sixteenth century composition and performance.

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