Broken Consort - History of The Term

History of The Term

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).