Thomas morley composer biography

Thomas Morley (1557 or 1558 – October 1602) was an Englishcomposer, theorist, editor and organist of the Renaissance, and the foremost member of the English Madrigal School.

He was the most famous composer of secular music in Elizabethan England and an organist at St Paul's Cathedral. He and Robert Johnson are the composers of the only surviving contemporary settings of verse by Shakespeare.

Life

Morley was born in Norwich, in East Anglia, the son of a brewer.

Most likely he was a singer in the local cathedral from his boyhood, and he became master of choristers there in 1583. However, Morley evidently spent some time away from East Anglia, for he later referred to the great Elizabethan composer of sacred music, William Byrd, as his teacher; while the dates he studied with Byrd are not known, they were most likely in the early 1570s.

In 1588 he received his