Thomas Morley, in his own introduction to the printed Ballets (1595), gives some idea of the dance-like nature of the genre as he understood it: these are "another kind of ballets, commonly called fa las...a slight kind of music it is, and as I take it devised to be danced to voices." Morley, participating in the Elizabethan craze for all things Italian, was in the midst of a fad for translating Italian music into English madrigals of several varieties. For his Ballets, the model was either Giovanni Gastoldi, many of whose pieces Morley merely reworded, or Luca Marenzio. Morley's general practice of "Englishing" in this collection is to recompose the "fa la" dance sections, and to re-fit the verse texts to a new English poem (most likely one he himself wrote). In the case of a piece such as Fyer, fyer, Morley was so successful at fitting English words that it is difficult to imagine the Italian predecessor. The predecessor does exist, though: Morley cleverly adapted the Italian madrigal A la strada, published by Marenzio in 1585.

Morley's popular English version seems polished enough to be the original. Its text is fairly simple: minus the (extensive) fa la sections, the lovesick protagonist says, "Fire, fire, my heart; o help! I sit and cry me, but none comes nigh me." Yet Morley invests this trite poem with a great amount of energy and musical interest. From the outset, he uses rhythm to fuel the intensity, juxtaposing groups of voices at high speed, and following their cries with a characteristically robust and polyphonic fa la. After a repetition of the first music, he sets the calls of "O help!" to a similarly frenzied and choppy style, limiting it to the upper voices for more stridency. This contrasts heavily with the almost tongue-in-cheek weight of the "ay me" music, which uses long notes, mock-tragic suspensions in a chain, and even a pathetic rest in all voices. The final fa la section offers a lengthy imitative playing-out of a syncopated motive, as if to deny the poor burning-hearted fool any rest until the very last cadence.

© Timothy Dickey, All Music Guide