John Adson
English musician and composer
John Adson (c. 1587 – 29 June 1640) was an English musician and composer. Little is known about his early life; the first certain reference to him comes in 1604, when he was in service to Charles III, Duke of Lorraine as a cornett player. Some time around February 1614 he married Jane Lannerie and at least two of their sons went on to become musicians themselves.
After relocating to London, Adson joined the City Waits and remained a member until his death. He is also associated with theatre music, being referenced in plays by the King's theatre company in 1634 and 1639. He became royal wind musician in November 1633.
His best-known work is his Courtly Masquing Ayres (1621), a collection of 31 lively dances for a variety of instruments in five- and six-part consorts. It is uncertain how much of this collection is his original work, and how much is arrangements of existing masque dances. Besides this work, only four other pieces attributed to Adson are known.
“John Adson” enters the record as english musician and composer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Adson and English can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“John Adson” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, John, Adson and English provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 26, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1384420. VIAF identifies the subject as 102479442. The Library of Congress control number is n86047930. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1587, 1640, 1604 and 1614.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Adson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.