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Consort music is an English term applied
to late-16th- and 17th-century English chamber music. Consorts
may be "whole"--in which all the instruments, although
of different sizes, are of the same family, such as a consort
of viols or a consort of recorders--or they may be mixed,
or "broken," using instruments of more than one
family together. Early consort music, such as Thomas Morley's
First Booke of Consort Lessons (1599), contained many fantasias,
or "fancies," in a contrapuntal style. Later consort
music more closely resembled the suite, containing not only
fantasias but airs and dances, such as the courante and the
sarabande. William Leighton's The Teares or Lamentacions of
a Sorrowfull Soule (1614) includes a number of "consort
songs" for voices accompanied by a broken consort. Matthew
Locke's Little Consort of Three Parts (1656) is one of the
last examples of consort music to be so called.
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