Antony Holborne

There is no known portrait of this composer: the one commonly used on CD covers and the like is actually a portrait of Thomas Elyot, Knight by Hans Holbein the Younger, dating to about 1532, which is at least a decade or more before our man was actually born! Accordingly, this site uses one of its 'anonymous' images as a graphical placeholder for him.

The New Groves lists this composer with the first name 'Antony', but allows for 'Anthony' (with an 'h') as a bracketed variant spelling. His Wikipedia article uses the 'h' variant as its primary one, relegating the h-less Antony to a mere bracketed option, despite also including an image of the title page of the one work he's really well-known for: his 'Short Airs both Grave and Light' publication, dating from 1599 whilst he was still alive, clearly spells his name as 'Antony'. Since that seems quite compelling evidence as to how he would have spelled his own name, I'm running with him and the New Groves on this occasion: Antony it is!

The confusion as to the spelling of his name repeats when anything about his life is discussed: we don't really know when he was born, precisely; he may have been the 'Anthony Holborne' married at St. Margaret's, Westminster in 1584; he may have been the composer of a piece referred to by Munday in A Banquet of Daintie Conceits in 1588. He may be the 'Anthony Holburne' who matriculated at Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1562. But we don't know any of those things for certain. All that can be said with certainty is that The Cittharn Schoole of 1597 included 58 of his pieces and that this is the first, firm evidence of his existence that we have. We also know he had a brother, William, whose biographical obscurity matches Antony's, though the New Groves declares William's compositions to be 'as feeble as they are brief'!

Feeble is not the adjective to describe Antony's own work, however: his 1599 publication of Pavans, Galliards, Almains … in Five Parts contained 65 separate compositions by him and all were recognised at the time (and since) of being of high quality. His reputation was such that Dowland dedicated the first song in his second book of lute songs to “the most famous Anthony Holborne”. Three of his dances were also included in a 1600 publication in Heidelberg, so his reputation wasn't confined to England, either.

It is believed that that he was in the service of Sir Robert Cecil (chief minister to Elizabeth I) by the 1590s: there is evidence that he was tasked with carrying state letters to the Netherlands in 1598. An Elizabeth Holborne (presumably, Antony's wife) wrote to Cecil in November 1602 to report that her husband was mortally ill. By December 1st, she is described as a widow.

About 150 compositions by Holborne exist; three quarters of them are dances. New Groves says of him that, “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”. Sparkle and dazzle, therefore, but no great profundity.