Thomas Campion [Thomas Campian] Biography

English composer and poet. Although he did not earn his living solely by writing poetry and music, it is clear that both played a prominent role at every stage of his life, including his days at Peterhouse, Cambridge ( 1581 – 4 ); at Gray's Inn, where he studied for the legal profession; and during his practice as a London physician—he received his MD in France, at the University of Caen in 1605 .

Campion regarded his English ayres as less serious than his Latin poems—‘superfluous blossoms of his deeper Studies’—yet he is primarily remembered as a fine English poet, whose literary output is inseparable from the other art in which he excelled, music. His treatise on metre, Observations in the Art of English Poesie (London, 1602 ), for instance, is subtly influenced by his musical mind, and the result is more than simply an exposition on ‘quantity’ and an attack on rhyming metres. His purely musical treatise, A New Way of Making Fowre Parts in Counter-Point (London, ?1614 ), was one of his best-known works in the 17th century; in it he recognized, much ahead of his time, the harmonic function of the bass part. He also outlined a scale system closer to the modern major–minor form than the old hexachord, and an embryonic pattern for related keys which became standard in the Baroque era.

His music, all for voices, is immediately attractive. It is especially tuneful, restrained though rarely melancholic, and marked by sectional repetition and the occasional sequence. His masques are distinguished by their musical and poetic content, especially the first, the Lord Hayes ( 1607 ), where music and poetry not only adorn the masque but also direct the whole movement of the work. Herein lie the seeds of opera, which unfortunately Campion did not nurture. In his later masques, Lords ( 1613 ) and Somerset ( 1614 ), music and poetry are incorporated in a more formal manner into the now conventional Jonsonian design, and Campion seems to have lost interest. In his ayres the vocal line is all-important, the lute acting very much as an accompaniment—in contrast to, say, some of Dowland's or Daniel's songs. In his five books of ayres, and other single examples, can be found a perfect union of music and poetry.

Bibliography and More Information about Thomas Campion [Thomas Campian]

• C. Wilson , Words and Notes Coupled Lovingly Together: Thomas Campion: A Critical Study (New York, 1989)

Christopher Wilson