William Byrd: A Celebration, edited by Richard Turget - MusicaSacra

“Blame Not the Printer”: William Byrd’s Publishing Drive, 1588–1591 — 19
embarrassing “association” with the Catholics, nor the whole appropriation of him as an enemy
of the state by eager latter-day Catholics, will quite do.
However considerable the temptation to plunge straight into the debate on Byrd’s political
and social status, I wish to defer consideration of such larger matters for the moment in order
to consider a material aspect of Spenser’s life and career to which Montrose draws attention,
and which also bears thinking about in relation to Byrd. He writes: “We may understand
Spenser’s own publication process, unfolded over the last two decades of the sixteenth century,
to have been as calculated as [Ben] Jonson’s in its appropriation of the resources of the printed
book to shape a distinctive and culturally authoritative authorial persona.” 4 Contrasting Spenser
with courtier-soldier-scholars like Sidney and Raleigh, Montrose demonstrates the need of the
socially subordinate Spenser “to construct and to sustain an authorial persona in a corpus of
generically varied printed poetry books.” 5
Constructing and sustaining an authorial persona is a very different thing in music than in
poetry. Byrd could not project himself as a Colin Clout, nor adopt any other direct autobiographical
persona. But there are other ways of asserting authority, and Byrd was the first English
musician to realize the power of print as a decisive factor in doing so. The nature of English
history virtually guarantees that no such categorical statement will survive unmodified: the
eccentric and marginal Thomas Whythorne published a single-authored set of songs in 1571,
well before Byrd started on his infinitely more ambitious program. With grant of the monopoly
of printed part-music and music-paper in 1575 to Byrd and Tallis, however, a new era
dawned. Byrd, who must have been the driving force behind the enterprise, saw that nothing
less would do than a prestigious initial publication dedicated to the Queen—partly in gratitude,
partly with a view to establishing himself, his aged teacher, and English music on a new footing,
as the highly patriotic prefatory matter makes clear. The language of highest status, Latin,
was necessary for such a venture, and music of the highest order to match it, displaying plenty
of what Byrd would later reveal as his chief artistic criteria, “depth and skill.” Hence both composers
contributed elaborate canons, as well as other ambitious pieces revealing their mastery
of various polyphonic idioms. But a problem arose because much of Tallis’s contribution, especially,
had been written for the Roman Catholic office observed in Henry VIII’s and Mary I’s
reigns; so the book was, perhaps on that account, coyly entitled “Songs which are called sacred
on account of their texts.” A numerical conceit rounded out the symbolic nature of the publication:
seventeen numbers by each composer reflected the seventeenth year of Elizabeth’s reign
and suggest that the work was presented to her as dedicatee on Accession Day, the seventeenth
of November.
Much has been made of the commercial failure of the 1575 Cantiones, and the monopolist’s
subsequent petition for more support from the queen in 1577. Yet these “Latin songs,” several
of them later metamorphosed into English anthems, together with a sizeable repertory that
Byrd wrote specifically for the Anglican service, helped to establish the composer’s preeminence
in his own time, and to preserve his memory for succeeding generations of English musicians.
4 Montrose, p. 83.
5 Montrose, p. 84.