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

“Blame Not the Printer”: William Byrd’s Publishing Drive, 1588–1591 — 21
Ariosto: it was included incongruously among the translated madrigals of Musica Transalpina,
an indication that as monopolist Byrd took a managerial interest.
The aim of Byrd’s musical settings was not to mirror the images or syntax of the poetry, but
literally to express its form. Like a medieval musician he works with the individual lines of verse,
often providing matching cadences to mirror their rhymes. His settings are syllabic and
strophic; they do not aim to connect specific verbal images and musical figures, but rather to
make a positive link between musical and poetic shape. If they are expressive of anything, it is
the form of the poems they set. The connection with medieval insular culture is even more specific,
because one of the most well-known songs in the collection, the famous “Lullaby,” is to
all intents and purposes a medieval carol, replete with a refrain to each of its stanzas and an
intervening burden. The aesthetic behind these songs derives from ideas which Aquinas had
articulated. The luster with which Byrd’s settings adorn their serious verse enables the ear to
accept the good things that may then more easily enter the mind—or to make the lover’s rhetoric
more acceptable to his adored object. It is a feature of music that in our day has been used
more by capitalism than by religion or moral philosophy; but its efficacy has never been in
doubt, and Byrd was never more supreme as an artist than in this impersonalized but important
role.
[Example 1: What Pleasure Have Great Princes, stanza 1; see page 23]
Unlike the Cantiones of 1575, Psalmes, Sonets & Songs was an immediate success. We know
this for two reasons. One is that East printed two further editions of the partbooks, both dated
1588. In the review of the 1588 editions now proceeding as part of the work of The Byrd
Edition, we are asking whether these were in fact two full editions—East may have had to make
up an incomplete set of sheets with one of them. In the impoverished musical climate of mid-
Elizabethan England, however, even two editions in one year was something of a miracle, and
a testament to the sure business sense that this new combination of monopolist and printer
brought to the enterprise. The other fact is that Byrd was able to publish a second book of songs
in the following year, referring in his dedication to the public’s “good acceptance of my former
endeuors.” Songs of Sundrie Natures (1589) is by no means as unified and well-articulated a collection
as its predecessor, but it lets us see into Byrd’s workshop, for he must have ransacked his
drawers to find sufficient material for such a large collection. Another group of psalms in an
unknown verse translation heads the list, which presents a slightly more heterogeneous set of
love songs, sententious verses, anthems—and even this time several carols or carol-like songs
presented in their original format as instrumentally accompanied songs with interspersed choruses.
The collection concludes with one of Byrd’s most celebrated creations, the verse anthem
“Christ Rising,” originally conceived for Morning Prayer on Easter Day in the Anglican
Church. This collection also ran into a second edition, not immediately, but about five or six
years later.
There are two further publications of Byrd’s secular music during this period that indicate
the contradictory and varied nature of his musical persona. One is a celebratory song in two
sections entitled “A gratification unto Master John Case, for his treatise lately made in Praise
of Musick.” A setting of a poem by the learned Thomas Watson, it pays tribute the ideas of
the Oxford Don who had endeavored to argue for the importance of music in history and present
culture. It was published in 1589. A year later, Byrd made an appearance in another madrigal
collection, this time one by Thomas Watson, who announced that the madrigals he was