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BYRD IN HIS TIME AND OURS

Byrd retained a fondness for the jog-trot "plain style" poetry of the 1560s all through his life, from the earliest consort songs up to the pieces he wrote for Leighton. This may serve as a reminder that, although he composed steadily throughout Elizabeth's reign

and well into James's, he was essentially an early Elizabethan figure. Decorum, solidity and a certain reticence of expression were qualities that were prized in his formative years, qualities that came to him

naturally.

He belonged to the pioneer generation that built Elizabethan culture. In music, Byrd did this alone, for unlike Tallis before him and Morley after, he had no immediate contemporaries of any stature (except of course Ferrabosco). The essential work was completed by the time of the Armada, as he himself seems to have acknowledged by his retrospective anthologizing at that time. He lived to write some of his greatest music later, but his younger contemporaries could not learn from this in the same way that they had from the earlier path-breaking compositions.

In recording his death, the ordinarily laconic Cheque Book of the Chapel Royal described him as "a Father of Musick". To another contemporary admirer he was "Brittanicae Musicae Parens". While Byrd's versatility as a composer is often mentioned, and quite rightly, it is less often pointed out how much he indeed fathered for English music. With his motets, first of all, he achieved nothing less than the naturalization of the high Renaissance church style. The true power and expressiveness of imitative counterpoint had never been channelled in native composition before his motets of the 1575 Cantiones.* As has been remarked, he rather stood back from the madrigal; but he was the first English composer who employed word illustration extensively - in motets of the 1580s. He found the English song in the 1560s in a dishevelled state* and pulled it together to produce a rich and extensive repertory of consort songs, a form that was very personal to Byrd and found no serious imitators. Its influence on the lute air, however, was palpable, and an offshoot of the consort song, the verse anthem,* might be said to constitute Byrd's most lasting legacy to English music, in the sense that other composers could and did follow his lead and the music was sung widely during his lifetime and after it. He kindled English virginal music from the dryest of dry wood to a splendid blaze which crackled on under Bull and Gibbons and even set off some sparks on the Continent. Even his later music for consort, which was overshadowed at the turn of the century by the new fantasias of Coprario and Alfonso Ferrabosco, provided a seminal idea of considerable importance. The crystallization of dance movements out of the sections of Byrd's two six-part fantasias looks forward to the fantasy suites of the 1620s and beyond.

Byrd's earlier music for consort represents a culmination of an older tradition. Brought up during the reign of Queen Mary, perhaps even in her Chapel Royal, he had live roots in Tudor soil. Traditional elements live on in his music along with innovatory ones. There are pieces in which these features have to a large extent been filtered put, such as Siderum rector from the 1575 Cantiones and the four-part mass, but Byrd deliberately returned to a more archaic,



rougher technique as better suited to the grain of his musical personality. Sometimes he turned archaic features to exquisite effect.

Byrd's musical mind is as hard to characterize in a few words as that of any other of the great composers. He is probably to be regarded as one of the most intellectual of composers, and yet he also had a magic touch with sonority. One admires, perhaps, the manifold ways he had of moulding a phrase, a period or a total piece. Line, motif, counterpoint, harmony, texture, figuration can all be brought into play, and they are brought not singly but in ever new combinations. Form was expression for Byrd, and the extraordinary variety of effect that he obtained in his pieces stemmed from his fertile instinct for shape, for musical construction.

In the six-part fantasia, and in another similar work in manuscript, Byrd worked out a remarkable large-scale form consisting of what are in essence linked movements, contrasting with one another and culminating in a galliard* followed by a coda. The manuscript fantasia also includes snatches of pre-existing melodies - Greensleeves* and perhaps others - as also happens in several other of the consort and keyboard pieces. This phenomenon should be considered along with Byrd's celebration of popular songs in his variation sets. He was closer to "folksong", it would seem, than any of the other great composers of early times.

Byrd's late keyboard music is full of new fantasy and new subtlety. He turned to writing mostly pavans* and galliards, though three of the most imaginative variations also appear to date from after 1590. When at last he found occasion to have some keyboard music published, in Parthenia, c. 1612/13, jointly with Bull and Gibbons, he included only pavans and galliards and some short matching preludes.

The linear and contrapuntal articulation of this superb dance pair is no less cogent than in earlier works, but beyond this keyboard texture is now used in a more integral fashion. Keyboard figuration, too, became more flexible in the late years, no doubt under the impetus of younger members of the English virginal school which Byrd had founded. Two of the greatest pavans refer to specific works by Morley and Bull respectively.

Morley and Tomkins were his pupils. If, as seems likely, Philips, Weelkes and Bull should be added to this list, Byrd's direct impact on English composition can be seen to have assumed almost Schoenbergian proportions. Much of his teaching must surely be preserved in Morley's Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, 1597, which also contains some of the many remarkable tributes to Byrd known from the period. His contemporary reputation was not as commanding as, say, that of Sidney* in another artistic field or Josquin* in another century. But it was still something new in English music, and there can be little doubt that it went along with a sense of artistic mission on Byrd's part that was also new. The modern revival of this music dates essentially from 1901-24.

A complete edition was undertaken by Fellowes* late in life (1937-50): at last virtually all of Byrd's music was made available in one place, in a form designed to encourage performance.

From: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1057


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