The Parley of Instruments - Peter Philips - Consort Music (1988)

Peter Philips is the one first-rate English composer from the sixteenth and early seventeenth century who remains largely unknown today, even to specialists. His modern reputation has suffered from a form of musical chauvinism that works to the disadvantage of emigres: since he left England at an early age, never to return, he has been largely ignored by English musicologists, and equally he has been treated as a foreigner by their colleagues in his adopted country, the Spanish Netherlands — now Belgium. As a result, very little of Philips's music has found its way into print in this century, and still less of it has been recorded. Yet it is equal in quality to the best work of that richly productive period. His keyboard music invites comparison with Byrd, his consort music with Dowland, his motets and madrigals with Weelkes and Gibbons — or rather with Marenzio and Lassus, because his vocal music in particular belongs to the cosmopolitan European tradition. In his own time Philips exerted a considerable influence on composers in the Netherlands and Germany; his popular pieces like the 1580 Pavan and the Dolorosa Pavan were still being imitated and elaborated by followers like Nicolaus a Kempis as late as the middle of the seventeenth century.