Maurice Webster

Maurice Webster (also Morris Webster) was an English lutenist, viol player and composer active in the first decades of the seventeenth century. The son of George Webster, lutenist with a company of English actors and musicians who toured Germany around 1600, his unusual name may suggest that he was born in Kassel, as he may have been named after the Landgrave Maurice of Hesse-Kassel. His birth is placed around 1600 and his death around 1635, although both dates are uncertain.

His first documented reference places him at the court of Count Ernst III of Schaumburg-Lippe, in Bückeburg, where Thomas Simpson also worked. There he contributed four pieces to Simpson's Taffel-Consort (1621). After the count's death in 1622, he travelled to England, probably for the first time, and in June 1623 he was appointed royal lutenist. He received allowances for viol strings and lute strings, which suggests that he played both bowed and plucked instruments. He also worked for William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, whose inventory includes three books of divisions, probably for bass viol. In 1636 he was succeeded at court by the viol player Theodore Steffkin, so it is likely that Webster had died shortly before.

Nothing survives of his music for lute, and only two sets of divisions for viol have been preserved. His pieces in the Taffel-Consort, among them a mascarade in the courtly Jacobean style, employ the string quartet scoring developed in Bückeburg and the Anglo-German idiom of Brade and Simpson. The ten consort pieces attributed to him follow the same line, which suggests that he helped to spread this idiom among composers at the English court, such as Charles Coleman and William Lawes. His importance therefore lies in being a link between the German school and English courtly practice of the string consort.