William Lawes (1602 - 1645)Consort Music For Viols, Lutes and Theorbos The sole surviving portrait of William Lawes, in the Faculty ofMusic at Oxford University, depicts a quietly self-confident cavalier dressed fashionablywith wide- brimmed hat, ornate lace collar, and slashed sleeves revealing a costly silkshirt. His eye has a shrewd and direct look, his mouth shows the beginnings of a wrysmile: this young man is clearly master of his art. The romantic notion of Lawes as adashing, headstrong member of Charles I's court is heightened by the tragic circumstancesof his death, fighting in the Royalist forces at the Siege of Chester in 1645. Althoughhis commission in the King's army should have kept him well away from the firing line,like many of his comrades he was involved in a surprise rout by Parliamentarian troops inwhat proved to be one of the most costly battles for the Royalists of the entire CivilWar. Some idea of the composer's importance in Charles' musical establishment may begained from the King's reaction as described by Thomas Fuller in 1662: 'hearing of the death of his deare servant William Lawes, hehad a particular Mourning for him when dead, whom he loved when living, and commonlycalled the Father of Musick.'Lawes' official appointment to the court as 'musician inordinary for the lutes and voices' dated from 1635, but he had already been involved forsome years before this in writing music for masques presented before the King, and it ishighly probable that he was a member of the inner circle of royal musicians led by theinfluential English composer John Coprario as early as the 1620s. This group, under thepatronage of Henry, Prince of Wales, and later of Charles, included some of the foremostcomposers of instrumental music in England, notably Orlando Gibbons, Alfonso Ferrabosco IIand Coprario himself. The two Princes also played viols with these musicians, and it is inthe context of this hothouse of new composition for consort that William Lawes mostprobably met his future employer and learned his craft. Lawes was apprenticed to Coprario,at the expense of Edward, Earl of Hertford, who had recognized the boy's musical talent atan early stage, but his earliest musical training must have been supervised by his family:Lawes' father Thomas was a bass singer in the cathedral choir at Salisbury, where Williamwas born in 1602, and his older brother Henry was a close collaborator and mentorthroughout his life.Although William Lawes was prolific in most musical genres ofmid-seventeenth century England, it was as a musical dramatist that he acquired hisgreatest fame, notably writing songs and other music for some 25 different masques andstage entertainments. His love for the melodramatic musical gesture spilled over into hisconsort music, which is characterized by wayward, often angular melodic lines, suddenchanges of texture, abrupt and unexpected harmonic shifts and highly charged dissonances.The seventeenth-century critic Anthony Wood rec