Joyne hands

Few composers had as much impact on the musical scene of Elizabethan England than Thomas Morley. He helped birth the genre of the English madrigal from its Italian parentage, he authored an important treatise on the science and art of music in the English language, and he contributed to the English church music. In addition, he collected and printed a large and important collection of English instrumental music, the First Booke of Consort Lessons. This anthology presents English music for the so-called "broken" consort of instruments. Rather than the more widely spread practice of writing for a group composed of all viols or all recorders, for instance, Morley here collected music for the peculiarly English mixed ensemble of three plucked and three melody instruments: flute, treble viol, and bass viol and plucked cittern, bandora, and lute. It was apparently a kind of music which had a fad in Shakespeare's London; the Bard himself refers to such "broken music" in Troilus and Cressida, Henry V, and As You Like It. Within the collection, the only piece which can be attributed to the pen of Morley himself, however, is the song entitled Joyne Hands.

Morley's Joyne Hands is an instrumental arrangement of his own song, See, see myne own sweet jewell. He published the original song as a canzonet for three high voices, though he also released a version for solo voice and lute. In Joyne Hands, he provides a mostly literal arrangement of his own music, though he reflects the common division of the broken consort into functional choirs of instruments by assigning the original three-voice parts to the three melody instruments and composing full harmonic support for them in the plucked group. The ABCC' canzonet form, the intricate and often syncopated rhythms, and the playful imitative interchanges of the original voices are thus preserved in the upper voices. They are also given a fuller and more complete musical color both by the added ornaments and the accompanying chords. Though the "whole" consort, especially the whole consort of viols, would eventually eclipse such music in Britain, Morley's publication—and his composition(s) within the book—testify to the broken consort's popularity and potential.

© Timothy Dickey, All Music Guide