Thomas Weelkes

In a professional career spanning one of the most fertile periods in English musical history, Thomas Weelkes (c.1576-1623) excelled as a composer of church music and madrigals (part songs for unaccompanied voices). After a brief stint as organist of Winchester College (1598-c.1602), he spent the rest of his working life as organist and master of the choristers at Chichester Cathedral, though “drunkenness and outrageous blaspheming” led to his dismissal in 1617. Weelkes’ greatest strengths as a composer lay in the vividness with which he responded to the pictorial imagery of his texts (“Thule, the period of cosmography”), his love of experiment, and his ability to write complex, sonorous choral textures (“Hosanna to the son of David”). Many of his finest works are contained in his four volumes of madrigals published between 1597 and 1608. He not only mastered serious forms (as heard in “O care”, which plumbs the depths of despair), but also the lighter “ballett”, with its dance-like form and “fa-la” refrain (“Hark, all ye lovely saints”).