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Antony Holborne
1645 - December 1, 1602
born in England, composed during the Renaissance period
Biography
A shadowy figure before the late 1590s, Antony Holborne was one of the most acclaimed and prolific dance composers of his period. Of his 150 works, about three-quarters of them are dances, many of them surviving in up to four different arrangements. Like many pop artists of the present day, Holborne enjoyed only fleeting acclaim. In the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, David Brown crisply illustrates the concept of damning with faint praise: "Although he cannot count among the major English composers of his time, he was a good artisan with a facility for producing well-written, attractive music of a sort that made him widely popular in his lifetime, but which was not of sufficient musical substance to maintain his reputation for long after his death." Yet Holborne pieces regularly appear on recorded anthologies of instrumental English Renaissance music, and to members of amateur Renaissance consorts his name is quite a familiar one. So the composer is safe from the dustbin of music history.

Despite occasional, mysterious references to a certain Holborne between 1588 and 1596, Antony Holborne did not enjoy a chance at archival immortality until 1597, when no fewer than 58 of his pieces appeared in a publication called The Cittharn Schoole.