Thomas Weelkes

Thomas Weelkes (1576 (?) – November 1623) was an English composer and organist. He became organist of Winchester College in 1598, moving to Chichester Cathedral. His works are chiefly vocal, and include madrigals, anthems and services. Life Early life There is no documentary evidence about Weelkes’s early years. According to the biographer David Brown, circumstantial evidence points to the possibility that Weelkes was a son of John Weeke, rector of Elsted in Sussex and his wife Johanne. If this was so, the boy was the Thomas Weeke baptised at Elsted on 25 October 1576; he had at least five siblings. Brown adds that there is no firmer evidence about Weelkes’s childhood and musical training, although one piece of information is found in the preface to Weelkes’s collection Ballets and Madrigals (1598), where he states that he had been in the service of “his master Edward Darcy Esquire, Groom to her Majesty’s Privy Chamber”. Early musical career, organist at Winchester College In the preface to his first volume of madrigals (1597) Weelkes states that he was a very young man at the time of their composition – “my yeeres yet unripened” – which, in Brown’s view, confirms that he was born