page_title: Martin Peerson
section_title: Music
hierarchical_section_title: Martin Peerson / Music
context_page_description: Martin Peerson was an English composer, organist and virginalist. Despite Roman Catholic leanings at a time when it was illegal not to subscribe to Church of England beliefs and practices, he was highly esteemed for his musical abilities and held posts at St Paul's Cathedral and, it is believed, Westminster Abbey. His output included both sacred and secular music in forms such as consort music, keyboard pieces, madrigals and motets.
context_section_description: Peerson's powerful patrons enabled him to print and publish a considerable quantity of his music, although little remains today. The only four extant keyboard pieces – "Alman", "The Fall of the Leafe", "Piper's Paven" and "The Primerose" – appear in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (c. 1609 – c. 1614), one of the most important sources of early keyboard music containing 298 pieces from the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. He also set to music some of William Leighton's verses, written by the latter while in prison for debt. Together with works by other composers, these were published as The Teares and Lamentatacions of a Sorrowfull Soule in 1614. This was followed two years later by Tristiae Remedium, with texts assembled by the Reverend Thomas Myriell mainly using psalm texts in the English language.
  In 1620 Peerson's collection Private Musicke was published. It contained secular music, including madrigals and consort songs, for one or two voices accompanied by viols or virginals. He published some metrical psalter tunes in Thomas Ravenscroft's 1621 work The Whole Booke of Psalmes with the Hymnes Evangelicall and Songs Spirituall, and then a group of Motets or Grave Chamber Musique in 1630 with English texts and the then-fashionable keyboard continuo; the latter work contains two very fine songs of mourning.
  Thereafter, despite changing musical trends, Peerson's music showed significant roots in Renaissance polyphony. However, he was adept in the use of then-modern compositional procedures; this is evident in his often daring use of chromaticism, especially seen in word painting. Some of his finest music is contained in his set of 15 Latin motets, which was probably composed around the turn of the century. Existing only in a single copy, it originally consisted of five part-books but the Cantus book is lost. Richard Rastall, professor of historical musicology at the University of Leeds, spent 12 years reconstructing the missing part. The complete Latin motets have been published by Antico Edition, and a recording of their performance by Ex Cathedra entitled Peerson: Latin Motets was produced by Hyperion Records in 2005.
caption: A virginal, probably English, c. 1750, from Frederick Litchfield's Illustrated History of Furniture from the Earliest to the Present Time (1892?). Peerson's keyboard music would probably have been played on such an instrument.
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