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

“Blame Not the Printer”: William Byrd’s Publishing Drive, 1588–1591 — 25
right on the mark politically and socially with his commemorations of Sidney the great
Protestant hero. Byrd’s reputation for skill as well as, in Peacham’s words, for gravity and piety,
were greatly enhanced by the publication of his Latin songs, which only a few would see as subversive,
and all would acknowledge as representing European high art—the highest language
set forth in the most complicated polyphony. It is arguable that no English composer ever again
was able to rise to such a challenge on such a scale.
Yet in a sense this carefully constructed portrait of authority is undermined by the very
expressiveness that for later generations gives it such power. The beauty of Byrd’s English music
shows that there was no need for him to develop a sense of interiority. He could and possibly
should have stayed within the carefully chosen world of the indigenous lyricist, adventuring
into continental imitative polyphony only to create beautiful structures like the early works of
Lassus.
Interiority, a sense of inwardness: it comes into Tudor and Stuart culture through a variety
of means. One is the growing awareness of the body and its humors according to the theories
of Galenic medicine. Another is religious meditation, and it is here that we meet Byrd’s
dilemma. I am proposing that the strength of his reaction to the persecution of his fellow
Roman Catholics, and his identification with the Jesuit cause, drew him into modes of composition
and expression that undermine his classical poise just as they make him intriguing for us
today. It might be better to contemplate for a moment how dislocating all this must have been
for a composer attracted on the one hand to the general, not particular, expressive values of
medieval culture and on the other to strophic forms and abstract patterns (Byrd was equally an
instrumental composer for all his protestations about the superiority of the voice). Looked at
in this way, it is possible to assert that the crisis years, from the time his wife Julian and their
servant John Reason were first cited for recusancy in 1577 until Byrd made the decision around
1593 to retire to the Essex countryside, produced a very different composer from the one he set
out to be.
At Stondon Massey, close enough to the Petre establishment at Ingatestone, Byrd began a
very different project, that of adorning the Roman Tridentine liturgy with art that was clearly
meant to attain liturgical decorum as well as to promote the cause of the Jesuits and their
Catholic Reformation. As I argue in the several prefaces to my edition of Gradualia, decorum
was largely kept while more subtle ways were found to inject political messages into the printed
volumes, through such means as musical nuance or arrangement of contents. 9 I spend some
effort trying to contend with the theory that Joseph Kerman derived from the Catholic historian
John Bossy that Gradualia and the Masses represent a Augustinian retreat into some sort
of acceptance and acquiescence. But I would like to suggest that Byrd turned away from the
continental expressive “motet,” though he imbued it with as much intensity as any of his peers,
because it failed to satisfy some of his inbred aesthetic impulses and concerns. It had served as
a catalyst, perhaps even in a cathartic manner, enabling him to process and produce his feelings
in sometimes dramatic ways. But just as the keyboard pavan-galliard pair flowered because of
their strophic limitations, and his grounds and other variations could build to expressive heights
9 Reprinted in Philip Brett, William Byrd and His Contemporaries: Essays and a Monograph, ed. Joseph Kerman and
Davitt Moroney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 142, 143, 161.