Broken consort

A broken consort in English early Baroque musical terminology refers to ensembles featuring instruments from more than one family, for example a group featuring both string and wind instruments. A consort consisting entirely of instruments of the same family, on the other hand, was referred to as a "whole consort", though this expression is not found until well into the seventeenth century (Boyden 1957, 229). The word "consort", used in this way, is an earlier form of "concert", according to one opinion (Scholes 1970), while other sources hold the reverse: that it comes from the French term concert or its Italian parent term concerto, in its sixteenth-century sense (Boyden 1957, 228). Matthew Locke published pieces for whole and broken consorts of two to six parts as late as 1672 (Scholes 1970).

Though historically the term only came into use in the late seventeenth century and with reference only to English music, some more recent writers have applied the term retrospectively to music of earlier periods and of different nationalities, and—through a confounding of the terms "broken music" with "broken consort"—more specifically to a six-part instrumentation popular in England from the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, contemporaneously referred to as an "English consort" (Kennedy and Kennedy 1994).

In late sixteenth-century England the word "consort" on its own was normally applied to groups of diverse instruments coming from different families (Boyden 1957, 228–29), and the sense of the term "broken" in the Elizabethan period refers primarily to division, the "breaking" of long notes into shorter ones (Edwards 2001, §3). "It is the shimmering effect of this ‘sweet broken music’ that so delighted audiences then and continues to cast its spell today" (Harwood 1978, 611).

As constituted during the time of Queen Elizabeth I (called an "Englisch consort" by Praetorius in 1618 (Edwards 2001), and more recently a "mixed consort" or "consort-of-six" (Harwood 1978, 609–13), or a "Morley consort" (Sealey 2007)), it typically featured three plucked string instruments (lute, cittern, and bandora, called "Pandora" by Morley), two bowed instruments (treble viol or violin, and bass viol), and a recorder or transverse flute. Such consorts became quite popular during the Elizabethan era and often accompanied vocal songs.

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