Consort Music

Complementing their achievements as composers of Italianate vocal music represented elsewhere in the series, this volume brings together consort works by two English Catholics who left England for the continent. Philips belonged to a generation that focused on stylised dance rather than fantasia, and many of his five-part consort dances exist also as keyboard pieces. Dering was born a generation later. Whereas his five-part fantasias were core repertoire for early 17th-century viol players, interest in the stylised dance had by then begun to wane. Several of Dering’s pavans and almaines survive in a single source only, and lack outer parts, which have been completed by the editor.