Sacred and secular

Abstract

Peter Philips (1560/61–1628) and Richard Dering (1580–1630) were English-born composers whose Catholicism forced them to spend most of their careers abroad, largely in the Spanish Netherlands. Philips travelled to Italy in 1582, settled in Antwerp in 1590, and in 1597 obtained a job as organist to the archducal court in Brussels, where he remained until his death. Dering followed a broadly similar trajectory 20 years later: he travelled to Italy in 1612, and by 1617 had obtained a job as organist at a convent of exiled English Benedictine nuns in Brussels, returning to England in 1625. Both composers therefore worked as organists in Brussels from 1617 to 1625, and they may well have known each other. Their careers also brought them into more direct contact with the stylistic innovations of the early Italian Baroque than most of their English contemporaries, and they adapted their own musical output to match, composing Italian-texted madrigals and Latin motets, some with basso continuo parts at a time when these were a rarity in England. Philips is well known to keyboard players due to the inclusion of several of his compositions and arrangements in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (his complete keyboard music, also edited by David J. Smith, appears in Musica Britannica vol.75). Dering is better known among viol players, though little of his consort music has been recorded. Some of his motets have entered the choral repertory, with Factum est silentium for six voices being particularly popular on record. Two recent volumes of Musica Britannica present sacred music by Dering (vol.98) and music for instrumental consort by both composers (vol.101), offering the opportunity to consider these expatriate musicians’ work in relation to each other and to their complex historical circumstances.