Thomas Weelkes

Thomas Weelkes (1576 (?) – November 1623) was an English composer and organist. He became organist of Winchester College in 1598, moving to Chichester Cathedral. His works are chiefly vocal, and include madrigals, anthems and services.

Life Early life

There is no documentary evidence about Weelkes's early years. According to the biographer David Brown, circumstantial evidence points to the possibility that Weelkes was a son of John Weeke, rector of Elsted in Sussex and his wife Johanne. If this was so, the boy was the Thomas Weeke baptised at Elsted on 25 October 1576; he had at least five siblings. Brown adds that there is no firmer evidence about Weelkes's childhood and musical training, although one piece of information is found in the preface to Weelkes’s collection Ballets and Madrigals (1598), where he states that he had been in the service of "his master Edward Darcy Esquire, Groom to her Majesty’s Privy Chamber".

Early musical career, organist at Winchester College In the preface to his first volume of madrigals (1597) Weelkes states that he was a very young man at the time of their composition – "my yeeres yet unripened" – which, in Brown's view, confirms that he was born in the middle or later 1570s. By 1597 Weelkes, by his own account, had enjoyed the "undeserved love, and liberall good will" of George Phillpot, who lived at Compton, near Winchester. Towards the end of 1598 he was appointed organist of Winchester College at a salary of 13s. 4d. a quarter, with board and lodging.

Only a small amount of instrumental music was written by Weelkes, and it is rarely performed. His consort music is sombre in tone, contrasting with the often gleeful madrigals.

Weelkes was friendly with the madrigalist Thomas Morley who died in 1602, when Weelkes was in his mid-twenties (Weelkes commemorated his death in a madrigal-form anthem titled A Remembrance of my Friend Thomas Morley, also known as "Death hath Deprived Me"). Some of Weelkes's madrigals were reprinted in popular collections during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but none of his verse anthems were printed until 1966, since when he has become recognised as one of the most important church composers of his time.