Thomas Tallis (c. 1505 - 1585)

Thomas Tallis was one of the most important English composers of sacred music before William Byrd. His style encompassed the simple Reformation service music and the great Continental polyphonic schools whose influence he was largely responsible for introducing into English music. Tallis was one of the first composers to provide settings of the English liturgy.
Among his Latin pieces two in particular are often cited as demonstrations of Tallis’s supreme mastery of the art of counterpoint: the seven-part Miserere nostri, an extraordinary feat of canonic writing, involving retrograde movement together with several degrees of augmentation; and the famous 40-part Spem in alium, considered a unique monument in English music.

William Byrd (c. 1539 - 1623)

Wiliam Byrd was an English organist and composer of the Shakespearean age who is best known for his development of the English madrigal. He also wrote virginal and organ music that elevated the English keyboard style. His virginal and organ music brought the English keyboard style to new heights.
He is often considered along with John Dunstaple and Henry Purcell as one of England's most important composers of early music.

Orlando Gibbons (1583 - 1625)

Orlando Gibbons was an organist and composer, and one of the last great figures of the English polyphonic school.
Gibbons’s full anthems are among his most distinguished works, as are the “little” anthems of four parts. His Madrigals and Motets of 5 Parts was published in 1612. This collection contains deeply felt and very personal settings of texts that are, for the most part, of a moral or philosophical nature. It shows Gibbons’s mastery of the polyphonic idiom of his day and contains many masterpieces of late madrigalist style.
Gibbons was famous as a keyboard player, and toward the end of his life he was said to be without rival in England as an organist and virginalist.

Thomas Weelkes (1576 - 1623)

Thomas Weelkes was an English organist and composer, considered one of the most important composers of madrigals.
Nearly 100 of his madrigals survive, of which his finest work is in the two books of madrigals, of five and six parts, respectively, that appeared in 1600.
He also wrote music for virginal, viol, and organ. His sacred compositions, most of which were written before his appointment at Chichester in 1601, are largely unpublished.

Thomas Morley (c. 1557 - 1602)

Thomas Morley was a composer, organist, and theorist, and the first of the great English madrigalists.
It is highly probable that Morley converted to Roman Catholicism early in life, perhaps under the influence of his master, William Byrd. By 1591, however, Morley had defected from the church, for in that year he engaged in espionage work among the English Roman Catholics in the Netherlands.
Among his works are a considerable proportion of Italian madrigals. Morley’s compositions are written in two distinct styles that may be chronologically separated. As a pupil of Byrd he was trained in the premadrigalian English style of broad and strong polyphony; his volumes of the 1590s, however, exhibit his mastery of Italian madrigal style and are characterized by a direct effectiveness and gentle harmonic warmth.