John Bennet

John Bennet was a Renaissance-era British composer, known for his madrigals, his most well-known being Weepe, O mine eye. Little is well known about Bennet’s lifestyle, his birth time, place of delivery, and various other vital details getting issues of conjecture. It appears likely he was created in the Northwest component of Britain, perhaps in Lancashire, as the composer devoted his 1599 initial level of madrigals to 1 Ralph Assheton, a civil servant who resided in Lancashire and Cheshire. Bennet was most likely born right into a successful family members and received his initial contact with music being a choirboy. Without doubt he previously advanced education in music and by his early twenties acquired produced these level of 17 madrigals for four voices. At around that same period Bennet designed four psalm configurations and a prayer for the 1599 Barley’s psalter. Though Bennet’s design showed the impact of Wilbye, Weelkes, and Dowland (Weepe, O mine eye was probably motivated by Dowland’s Flowe my tears), his ideal debts was to Thomas Morley. Chances are that Bennet acquired strong cable connections in high areas in English culture: a lot of his madrigals had been created for festive events held at Courtroom or in personal residences of rich customers in London. His madrigal Eliza, her name provides honour was one of the madrigals created for the feted visitor at a special event, in cases like this Queen Elizabeth. At such occasions, choirboys from your Chapel Royal had been typically the presented performers. Bennet most likely wrote a reasonably substantial quantity of madrigals and additional vocal functions, but few reached publication or survived in manuscript. Besides his 1599 attempts, he added a madrigal towards the 1601 collection The Triumphes of Oriana, and made up six secular tunes and an anthem for Ravenscroft’s 1614 anthology A Briefe Discourse. Chances are that Bennet passed away in 1614 or soon afterward.