Henry Purcell (b. Westminster, London, England (?), September 10, 1659; d. London, November 21, 1695) was the finest and most original English composer of his day – and for a long time to come. Music for the court and Chapel Royal, including brilliant ceremonial music, birthday odes and funeral music, filled the main part of his career, while music for the Restoration theater dominated the last five years, until his tragically early death at 36. His Fantasias were written for private use (1680), while his only opera, Dido and Aeneas (1689) was for performance by Josias Priest’s Chelsea boarding-school for ‘young gentlewomen’ (and invited tenors and basses). 

Matthew Locke (b. Exeter, England (?), 1621–3; d. London, August, 1677). English composer and organist whose consort music forms the most substantial part of a large output in most of the sacred and secular genres of the time. The Fantazie comes from Locke’s Consort of Fower Parts, which parliamentarian and historian Roger North described as “a magnifick consort of 4 parts, after the old style, which was the last of the kind that hath bin made.”

John Dowland (b. London, England (?), 1563; bur. London, February 20, 1626) was a noted lute player, appreciated more abroad (causing him much irritation) than at home, until an appointment as one of the King’s lutes when almost 50. Dowland transformed the traditional themes of Elizabethan poetry into unsurpassed songs for performance by a single singer, or as partsongs, with lute or with viols, thanks to his brilliantly devised printed table format for his three Books of Songs or Ayres. 

Thomas Tomkins (b. St. Davids, Pembrokeshire, 1572; d. Martin Hussingtree, Worcestershire., bur. June 9, 1656), pupil of William Byrd, organist at the Chapel Royal and composer of much church music, madrigals, keyboard and consort music. 

William Byrd (b. London, England c.1540; d. Stondon Massey, Essex, July 4, 1623) remembered for outstanding and influential Latin and Anglican church music. A lifelong Catholic in the resolutely Protestant England of Elizabeth I, he was nevertheless granted a royal publishing monopoly, allowing him to print collections from his 600 compositions, including richly textured vocal and consort music for viols in his pioneering publication Psalmes, Sonets and Songs of 1588.

Robert Johnson (b. London (?), c.1583; d. London, ca. November 26, 1633) lifelong royal lutenist and composer of incidental theater music, including working with Shakespeare for some of his later plays at the Blackfriars Theater.

—Composer notes by Keith Horner