The Nightingale's Own Brother

The Elizabethan and Jacobean periods in England, roughly encompassing the years 1559 - 1625, are often described in the modern day as the Golden Age of English church music. This gilded epithet is an effective description; great volumes of beautiful, moving and influential music was being written by some of the greatest English-language composers in Western music history, as they responded enthusiastically and inventively to the rapidly shifting political, religious and social environments they lived through. The foundation of the Church of England and the consolidation of its authority over the course of the 16th century demanded a new music from English composers, despite many of them retaining their Catholicism on a personal level.

Even outside the new church, music and literary arts were flourishing. Collections of secular songs and madrigals were being published and found great popularity, poets and writers found themselves swept into a new movement spearheaded by…