A consort song was a characteristic English

song A song is a musical composition performed by the human voice. The voice often carries the melody (a series of distinct and fixed pitches) using patterns of sound and silence. Songs have a structure, such as the common ABA form, and are usu ...

form of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, for solo voice or voices accompanied by a group of instruments, most commonly

viol The viola da gamba (), or viol, or informally gamba, is a bowed and fretted string instrument that is played (i.e. "on the leg"). It is distinct from the later violin family, violin, or ; and it is any one of the earlier viol family of bow (m ...

s. Although usually in five parts, some early examples of four-part songs exist. It is considered to be the chief representative of a native musical tradition which resisted the onslaught of the italianate

madrigal A madrigal is a form of secular vocal music most typical of the Renaissance (15th–16th centuries) and early Baroque (1580–1650) periods, although revisited by some later European composers. The polyphonic madrigal is unaccompanied, and the ...

and the English lute ayre, and survived those forms' brilliant but short-lived ascendancy . In contemporary usage, the term was confined to a number of songs for four voices accompanied by the standard mixed consort of six instruments, found in ''Teares or Lamentacions of a Sorrowfull Soule: Composed with Musicall Ayres and Songs, both for Voyces and Divers Instruments'' by William Leighton, published in 1614, but was first used in the modern sense by

Thurston Dart Robert Thurston Dart (3 September 1921 – 6 March 1971) was an English musicologist, conductor and keyboard player. Along with Nigel Fortune, Oliver Neighbour and Stanley Sadie, he was one of Britain's leading musicologists of the post-World W ...

William Byrd William Byrd (; 4 July 1623) was an English Renaissance composer. Considered among the greatest composers of the Renaissance, he had a profound influence on composers both from his native country and on the Continental Europe, Continent. He i ...

is recognized as the composer whose adoption and development of the consort song established its musical importance. He regarded it as a standard means to set vernacular poetry .

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