Biography
Thomas Campion pursued an unusually wide range of professions, working as an English composer, poet, author, lutenist, music theorist, and physician. Lute songs accounted for most of his musical production. In a departure from contemporary practice, he supplied the lyrics for every one of these pieces. That choice, however, left the artistic value of the music itself unchanged. His melodic lines avoided improvisation yet managed to bring out the sense of the words. In the end, his writings on music may have carried more weight than the works he composed. The treatise “A New Way of Making Fowre Parts in Counter-point, by a most Familiar, and Infallible Rule” remains noteworthy because it observes that, in his own time, the other voices of a four-part texture were derived from the bass line, whereas earlier music had kept those voices strictly dependent on the tenor. Campion also played a leading part in the masques staged at the court of James I.