John Bennet

John Bennet (fl. 1599-1614), (also spelt Bennett), English composer, chiefly of madrigals. Most of his surviving music is contained in the collection Madrigals to Four Voices, published in London in 1599. His description of the madrigals in his preface as “the endeavours of a young wit' suggests that he was then at the start of his career; their dedication to a patron with associations in Lancashire and Cheshire suggests that he may have come from the north-west of England. Otherwise, nothing is known of his life.

The collection shows that Bennet was well acquainted with the works of his contemporaries, notably Thomas Morley. Several of the madrigals are settings of poems previously used by other composers, including the well-known “Weep, O Mine Eyes”, which has a text previously set by John Wilbye (and music that quotes the famous Lachrimae motif by John Dowland). Bennet also contributed the celebratory five-voice madrigal “All Creatures Now are Merry-Minded” to the anthology The Triumphs of Oriana (1601), and some simpler songs to the treatise by Thomas Ravenscroft, A Brief Discourse (1614). His other surviving works include psalm settings, two consort songs with viols, and a verse anthem, O God of Gods, identified in one source as 'composed for the king's inauguration' (presumably the coronation of James I in 1603).