William Byrd@400: the Choral Works

I. Wake; Watch

Exsurge

Vigilate

II. Cities laid waste

Tribulationes civitatum

Ne Irascaris Domine

Turn Our Captivity

III. Joyful Noise

Laudibus in Sanctis

Haec Dies

Sing We Merrily Unto God

Rejoice, Rejoice

IV. Words; Wit

Of flattering speech

Wedded to will is witless

V. Mercy; Peace

Agnus Dei a 5

Tristitia et Anxietas

Miserere Mei Deus

In the preface to his first volume of Gradualia (1605), a sixty-five-year-old William Byrd testified: 

In the words themselves (as I have learned from experience) there is such obscure and hidden power that to a person thinking about divine things, diligently and earnestly turning them over in his mind, the most appropriate musical phrases come, I know not how, and offer themselves freely to the mind that is not lazy or inert.

Our selections today hopefully illuminate many such “most appropriate musical phrases,” among the most expressive and beautiful ever to flow from Byrd’s pen. 

In his thirties, Byrd and his mentor Thomas Tallis were granted a music publishing monopoly. Together they released a volume of motets in 1575, seventeen apiece, in honor of Queen Elizabeth I (who granted them the patent). Surviving snippets of documentation—prefaces of later published volumes, legal proceedings, and anecdotes—suggest Byrd was a composer who created somewhat painstakingly, honed his compositions over many years, and offered them up for publication scrupulously. In the preface to a 1588 collection of “Sundry Songs,” Byrd alluded to forthcoming publications full of “other things of more depth and skill.” Two volumes of Cantiones Sacrae, released in 1589 and 1591, delivered on that promise. In the preface to the 1589 volume, Byrd bemoans some colleagues and collectors’ copying out his shared motet drafts before he had truly finished them and admits to taking them “back to the lathe” before publishing his own definitive versions. And for good reason. Within the works in the 1589 and 1591 collections (and all the other volumes he likewise meticulously oversaw into publication) one struggles to find a phrase whose music is misaligned with the lyric it was designed to convey or whose impact is perfunctory. 

The motets of the Cantiones Sacrae volumes illustrate Byrd’s distinctive compositional style at its most impactful. By the 1580s, the joint volume with Tallis behind him, Byrd had fully digested the harmonic idiosyncrasies and melismatic freedoms of the Pre-Reformation and mid-century Catholic motets written during the brief reign of Mary when he was a chorister, and had reconciled that decidedly English style with the suave polish of the Continental polyphonic style. In many passages, Byrd constructs his polyphony geometrically, cutting the five or six voice-part facets at equal angles, bringing each to the fore in its turn. Each line has rhetorical independence but gains depth and dimension only by virtue of arrayment in the matrix to every other. The extended motets—Tribulationes Civitatum, Ne Irascaris Domine, and Tristitias et Anxietas showcase a particular lapidary artistry. The ache and longing of these terse texts summon a ruminative approach, wherein Byrd relentlessly but not wastefully tumbles a few short words round and round again in the polyphonic texture to a clearcut polish. So perfectly honed are these passages, as mesmerizing as slowly rotating gems, that the occasional surprise moments of homophony, all opaque big-block marble, are devastating in their effect. 

The decade or so during which Byrd was working on the motets in the 1589 and 1591 Cantiones volumes saw suspected so-called recusant Catholics (those refusing to attend Protestant worship in their parishes, Byrd among them), surveilled, fined, and imprisoned. These extended motets have non-liturgical texts rife with ardent pleas for rescue from tribulation, studded with laments for the destruction of “Jerusalem” or “holy cities,” ready-made for allegorical allusion to the plight of Catholics stranded in Protestant England. And while we can’t definitively surmise a causal relationship between Byrd’s political/religious strife and his artistic output, scholars have demonstrated persuasively links between the sentiments the motet texts express and the recurring themes of contemporary Jesuit literature widely circulated among recusant Catholics. Those power of those images, especially set to Byrd’s music, would have been felt acutely. Byrd biographer Kerry McCarthy deems the Cantiones “a display of sustained earnestness that is probably unequalled in any other Renaissance motet book.” I stand in awe at the way their exceptional directness and intensity, four centuries later, still registers, still summons the struggle and heartache of contemporary communities facing exile, persecution, and destruction of their homeland. 

But it’s not all desolation and nostalgic longing. The madrigalisms animating Vigilate vividly depict the necessary vigilance and paranoia of the secret Catholic communities to which Byrd belonged (and the best cock-a-doodle-doo ever set to music). Laudibus in Sanctis, a setting of Psalm 150 in elegiac Latin verse, captures the joyously clamorous music of the ancient Temple, bidding us praise “in the highest” with the full battery of bells and whistles available to Bronze Age worshippers: the “warlike trumpet,” “Pierian lyre,” “resounding timbrels,” “lofty organs,” “melodious psalteries,” cymbals. It culminates: “let everything in the world that feeds upon the air of heaven sing Hallelujah for evermore.”  

The two Agnus Dei movements come from settings of the Catholic Mass Byrd published (without a title page) in the 1590s after he had retired from court and public life, intended for use by small communities of recusants, clandestinely celebrating Mass in private homes. In contrast to the extroversion and breadth of the Cantiones motets, these are works composed on a more intimate scale befitting their likely performance forces. The extraordinary “dona nobis pacem” from the Mass for Four Voices seems to distill a lifetime’s worth of longing into some eighty seconds of music. 

Byrd published Psalmes, Sonnets, and Songs in 1611 at the tail end of a remarkably 

long career. He admits: “The natural inclination and love to the art of music, wherein I have spent the better part of mine age, have been so powerful in me, that even in my old years which are desirous of rest, I cannot contain myself from taking some pains therein.” In the preface, he dedicates it, his final publication, “to all true lovers of music,” describes the contents as “some solemn, some joyful, framed to the life of the words,” asks the performer to put as much care into singing them as he did in creating them, and makes a case for returning to his music again and again. “The oftener you shall hear it, the better cause of liking you shall discover.” As biographer McCarthy points out, it's as though Byrd, reflecting on his life’s work, had the insight, indeed, the audacity, to assert confidently, if obliquely, that he knew his works were very, very good—that, over time and over many hearings, we’d not bore but marvel at their perfect marriage of music and word. And so the question hangs there, 400 years on: was he right? We hope your experience immersing in his works this evening, and throughout the Byrd celebration, brings a resounding, satisfied yes.