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In planning The Broken Consort, Locke drew partly on the fantasia suite tradition. Coprario and Lawes used a fixed sequence of fantasy–air–galliard, which Jenkins and others modified by replacing the galliard with the more modern corant. Locke added a second triple-time movement, so that duple-time and triple-time, grave and light, movements alternate. Earlier collections of fantasia suites had mostly been in sets of eight, often grouped by key in four pairs. Locke tightened the structure by reducing the number to six, by giving the odd-numbered suites imposing ‘slow introductions’, and by providing the Saraband of No 6 with an imposing duple-time conclusion or ‘drag’ to round off the set in a satisfying way. Thus, it can be performed as six individual suites, as three pairs (G minor/major, C major and D minor/major), or as a whole, providing about an hour’s music with the necessary pauses for tuning, conversation and refreshment.

Locke’s Broken Consort fantasias are largely conventional in structure, using a succession of unrelated contrapuntal ideas, though the provision of ‘slow introductions’ seems to have been his idea, and in the Fantasy of Suite No 4 he largely abandons counterpoint in favour of a freer madrigal-like idiom, which he doubtless thought particularly appropriate for violins. Locke’s part-writing is often delightfully angular and his harmony quirkily dissonant, though the feature of his music that most remains in the memory is his wonderful melodic sense, deployed most tellingly in the slow Airs of suites Nos 2, 4 and 6. Many of the elegant corants are memorable for the same reason—Locke was particularly fond of the dance and wrote that he ‘never yet saw any Forain Instrumental Composition (a few French Corants excepted) worthy an English mans Transcribing’—while most of the sarabands (still a fast and furious dance in Restoration England) exploit exuberant cross-rhythms.

Locke’s consort music has too often been thought of as an imperfect and immature version of the idiom perfected by Purcell. In fact, it is more useful (and certainly more historically appropriate) to see it as the culmination of a great tradition, started nearly a century before by William Byrd and his contemporaries. According to the writer Roger North, Charles II had ‘an utter detestation of Fancys’ and preferred music he could beat time to. As a result, the Broken Consort was soon superceded in the king’s private apartments by a detachment from the Twenty-four Violins, and its fine contrapuntal repertory passed into history.

from notes by Peter Holman © 1995