‘Well sorted and ordered’: sociable music-making and gentlemen’s recreation in the era of Byrd and Weelkes

Sociable music-making from notation had become a marker of status by the time of Byrd’s and Weelkes’s printed anthologies of part-songs. However, there was ambivalence about its suitability for gentlemen in a time when ideas of manhood were undergoing redefinition and when both gender and class were reinforced through display. Men of wealth and leisure were encouraged to balance musical recreation with more physically or intellectually demanding pursuits, not let it distract from necessary obligations nor be used for excessive devotion to women. Performing music among same-sex social equals in the context of other pastimes satisfied these conditions and reinforced friendship, collaboration, healthy competition and gamesmanship. Part-songs suggesting such strenuous cooperative ventures as warfare and hunting especially bridged the gentlemen’s domains of action and intellect. Single-sex performance also provided an opportunity to contest yet reinforce masculine ideals and to play a range of gender roles among social intimates, especially through compositions which encoded notions of manliness and effeminacy or which bridged the sensory domains of sight and sound.