The five three-part (SSB) and nine four-part (SSTB) dances in this edition represent the complete surviving consort music of Maurice Webster. Webster, a skilled composer with a distinctive style, appears to have been the main catalyst for introducing the 'string quartet' scoring in dance music to England in the 1620s. The development of this idiom had a significant impact on the music of his contemporaries such as Simon Ives, Charles Coleman and William Lawes, who fully embraced it by the 1630s.