A consort song was a characteristic

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

song A song is a musical composition intended to be performed by the human voice. This is often done at distinct and fixed pitches (melodies) using patterns of sound and silence. Songs contain various forms, such as those including the repetitio ...

form of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, for solo voice or voices accompanied by a group of instruments, most commonly

viol The viol (), viola da gamba (), or informally gamba, is any one of a family of bowed, fretted, and stringed instruments with hollow wooden bodies and pegboxes where the tension on the strings can be increased or decreased to adjust the pitc ...

s. Although usually in five parts, some early examples of four-part songs exist. It is considered to be the chief representative of a native musical tradition which resisted the onslaught of the italianate

madrigal A madrigal is a form of secular vocal music most typical of the Renaissance (15th–16th c.) and early Baroque (1600–1750) periods, although revisited by some later European composers. The polyphonic madrigal is unaccompanied, and the number o ...

and the English lute ayre, and survived those forms' brilliant but short-lived ascendancy . In contemporary usage, the term was confined to a number of songs for four voices accompanied by the standard mixed consort of six instruments, found in ''Teares or Lamentacions of a Sorrowfull Soule: Composed with Musicall Ayres and Songs, both for Voyces and Divers Instruments'' by

William Leighton Sir William Leighton (; c. 1565–1622) was a Jacobean composer and editor who published ''The Teares and Lamentacions of a Sorrowfull Soule'' (1614). He was also a politician. Family Leighton was first son of William Leighton (died 1607) of Pl ...

, published in 1614, but was first used in the modern sense by

Thurston Dart Robert Thurston ("Bob") Dart (3 September 1921 – 6 March 1971), was an English musicologist, conductor and keyboard player. Along with Nigel Fortune, Oliver Neighbour and Stanley Sadie he was one of Britain's leading musicologists of the post- ...

William Byrd William Byrd (; 4 July 1623) was an English composer of late Renaissance music. Considered among the greatest composers of the Renaissance, he had a profound influence on composers both from his native England and those on the continent. He ...

is recognized as the composer whose adoption and development of the consort song established its musical importance. He regarded it as a standard means to set vernacular poetry .

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