Benjamin Cosyn

Complete Keyboard Music

The addition of Benjamin Cosyn to Musica Britannica’s unrivalled collection of Tudor and Jacobean works for keyboard significantly enlarges our view of music-making in seventeenth-century England. A contemporary of Tomkins, and as long-lived, he wrote organ voluntaries, plainsong settings, pavans, galliards, grounds and secular song variations, plus alman-coranto-saraband suites of the type that were to characterise the Commonwealth and Restoration. Scholars have long been indebted to Cosyn as collector and copyist of pieces by Bull, Gibbons and others. Though owing much to Bull and Gibbons in particular, his own compositions show an individual spirit and bravura that suggest a formidable virtuosity and distinctive creative voice. MB107 includes items by Cosyn from the ‘Cosyn’ Virginal Book, his versions of pieces by Byrd and Bull from the same collection, works from other sources, and works unattributed or of likely authorship.