English composer

Byrd was the outstanding English composer of the Renaissance, notable both for the variety of forms and styles in which he composed and for the outstanding quality of the individual pieces within each genre. He was apparently the first English composer to understand fully the new technique of imitative polyphony as developed in the Netherlands, and he passed this understanding on to his students.

Area of Achievement Music, education

Early Life

Nothing definite is known of the early life of William Byrd (burdh). The year of his birth is assumed to have been 1543, since he described himself in his will of November 15, 1622, as being in his eightieth year. He may have come from Lincoln, but he must have been reared in London because he was reliably reported to have been a student of Thomas Tallis, composer and organist of the Chapel Royal . He may have been a Child of the Chapel Royal, but the records from this period are incomplete and the names of many of the boys are lost. Thomas Byrd, gentleman of the Chapel Royal in the 1540’s and 1550’s, may have been his father.

Byrd probably began composing music while still in his teens, and several compositions attributed to him are, if genuine, likely to have been student works. The motets “Alleluia, Confitemini Domino” and “Christus resurgens,” the latter published in 1605, are two texts from the Sarum liturgy and could possibly have been written before the death of Queen Mary in 1558, when Byrd was fifteen or sixteen. Both are cantus firmus motets with extensive use of canon in the older style of Tallis and his contemporaries. Several works for viol consort and for organ may also come from this period, although the exact dating of most of his compositions has not been established.

Life’s Work

The only portrait of Byrd comes from the early eighteenth century and is not reliable. He seems to have had strong convictions and a tenacious character. He was a staunch Roman Catholic at a time when this was strongly discouraged, and he repeatedly paid fines for his own and his family’s recusancy. That he retained his Chapel Royal position to the end of his life is a tribute to his skill both as an organist and as a composer. He was somewhat courageous, willing to publish settings of the forbidden Mass Ordinary carrying his own name on each page. He was also a diligent and not altogether sympathetic litigant in numerous cases involving property during his later years. From his own compositions one derives the impression that he had great energy and organizational skills and was imbued with both a sense of artistic purpose and deep personal convictions.

In March, 1563, Byrd was appointed organist and master of the choristers at Lincoln Cathedral, a post that involved teaching the boys as well as composing and directing music. In 1568, he married Juliana Birley, who died around 1586, and the first of his five children from two marriages was baptized in 1569. Byrd was given an unusually large salary, and the cathedral continued to pay him at least a portion of it until 1581, when he had been in London for more than a decade, in return for his continuing to send occasional compositions to Lincoln.

During his time at Lincoln, Byrd seems to have set out to master a variety of musical styles and forms. He looked principally to Tallis, Christopher Tye, John Redford, Robert White, and Alfonso Ferrabosco, the Elder , for models, sometimes borrowing specific musical ideas from their works. He composed settings for organ based largely on Latin hymns and began his lifelong interest in writing music for the virginals (an early smaller form of the harpsichord). He wrote a number of “In nomine” settings for instrumental consort, presumably intended for viols, and these seem to have been widely circulated in manuscript copies. He also wrote the first of his so-called consort songs for solo voice and viol consort, of which some are settings of metrical psalms and others of the sort of alliterative poetry popular at the time. Some of these pieces have simple choruses at the ends of stanzas and prefigure the development of the verse anthem, a form developed fully by Byrd’s students Orlando Gibbons and Thomas Tomkins, in which music for solo voice or voices alternates with that for chorus, to an accompaniment of organ or viol consort.

Most of Byrd’s music for the new Anglican liturgy seems to have been written at Lincoln and includes anthems, litanies, preces, suffrages, two Evening Services, and the so-called Short Service, based on a similar work by Tallis. Ironically, this music, which formed only a small portion of Byrd’s output, survived in the repertoire after his death and carried his fame into the eighteenth century.

His Latin motets from this period appear to have been attempts to master both the older style of cantus firmus writing and the newer style of pure, imitative polyphony as developed in the Netherlands by such composers as Josquin des Prez in the early sixteenth century and only just being imported into England. Cantus firmus motets such as “Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna” and purely imitative ones such as “Attollite portas” are unlikely to have been sung at Lincoln in the 1560’s, but they probably served as good advertisements for the young composer by demonstrating his grasp both of various styles and of large-scale formal planning.

Byrd was sworn in as a gentleman of the Chapel Royal in February, 1570, and as joint organist with Tallis in December, 1572. This necessitated a move to London, where he occupied himself both with his Chapel Royal duties and with acquiring influential patrons. In 1575, Queen Elizabeth granted Byrd and Tallis a monopoly on the printing and selling of both part-music and lined music paper. In the same year, they published their Cantiones, quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur, a collection of Latin motets seventeen by each composer for from five to eight voices. The volume was dedicated to the queen, and it is possible, but by no means certain, that some of or all the contents had been sung in her Chapel Royal, where the singing of Latin texts was still permitted.

The 1575 collection gives the impression of being an anthology of what Byrd considered to be his best work to that date, together with several newly composed pieces. The newer works, primarily penitential in character, demonstrate Byrd’s mastery of the Netherlands style and his debt to Ferrabosco. The most famous of these works is the motet “Emendemus in melius.” At this time, Byrd also continued writing instrumental music, his most famous works being his Browning variations for five-part consort, the Walsingham variations for keyboard, and a series of dances (pavans and galliards), also for keyboard.

Beginning in 1581, with the discovery of a Jesuit plot to kill the queen and the subsequent brutal executions of Father Edmund Campion and other Jesuits , life for English Catholics became more difficult. Byrd maintained his Chapel Royal position and even composed works for official celebrations, including Look and Bow Down to words by the queen herself, written to celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. He seems to have reacted to the persecution of his Catholic brethren by composing a series of deeply personal penitential motets, some lamenting the Babylonian captivity of Jerusalem, others petitioning for the coming of God and the deliverance of the faithful. The most famous of these works is the motet Ne irascaris, printed in the first of his two retrospective collections of Latin motets titled Cantiones sacrae, published in 1589 and 1591, respectively. Whether these motets were meant to be sung in a liturgical context or merely circulated in support of Roman Catholicism is not clear. The penitential texts seldom have a specific liturgical function and seem to have been chosen, by Byrd or his patrons, to make a religious and political point one, however, which was not so obvious as to warrant their suppression.

In 1588, Byrd published his first collection of settings of English texts, titled Psalmes, Sonets, and Songs of Sadness and Pietie for five voices. This work contained mostly earlier consort songs, slightly reworked and with words added to the original accompanying parts in an attempt to capitalize on the new vogue for the Italian madrigal . The most famous piece from this collection was “Lullaby,” while the most striking was perhaps “Why Do I Use My Paper, Ink, and Pen?,” a setting of the innocuous first verse of a well-known seditious text concerning the execution of Father Campion.

In 1589, Byrd published Songs of Sundrie Natures for from three to six voices. This contained, in addition to material similar to that in the 1588 volume, a consort song in its original form (“And Think Ye, Nymphs”), two carols, and the verse anthem “Christ Rising Again.” Byrd then contributed two madrigals to Thomas Watson’s First Sett of Italian Madrigalls Englished (1590), but he was in general not much influenced by the newer Italian style that so permeated the music of his student Thomas Morley and that of the other composers of the younger generation, especially John Wilbye and Thomas Weelkes.

Byrd’s second collection of 1591 was the manuscript of keyboard music entitled My Ladye Nevells Booke, which preserved the best of his virginal music to that date. It included pavans and galliards, two new settings on a ground bass, some newly composed fantasias, and a number of earlier works, some of them extensively revised. Byrd’s so-called Great Service , his largest and most outstanding contribution to the Anglican liturgy, may also date from around 1590.

Beginning at about this time, Byrd’s attitude toward English Catholicism and the role in it of his own music seems to have changed. In 1593, he moved to Stondon Massey, Essex, near the seat of his patrons, the staunchly Catholic Petre family, at Ingatestone. After this date, he seems to have spent progressively less time in London and instead to have immersed himself in the life of the recusant Catholic community that surrounded the Petres. Instead of highly personal nonliturgical and penitential texts, Byrd began to set purely liturgical texts in a more emotionally restrained and less grandiose style. This music was apparently designed to be sung at clandestine Catholic services at Ingatestone Hall and elsewhere.

Byrd eventually gathered together this body of liturgical settings and published it in two collections, each entitled Gradualia, in 1605 and 1607; they were reissued together in 1610. The more than one hundred items included in these two volumes can be recombined in a variety of ways to provide the Mass propers for all the major feasts of the Catholic liturgy, including Marian feasts and votive masses. To provide the Mass ordinary texts, Byrd created settings for three, four, and five voices, of which the one for four voices is the most remarkable and that for five voices the most immediately accessible. These settings he had printed in the early 1590’s, without title pages but with his own name clearly printed on each page.

Byrd’s last published collection, the Psalmes, Songs, and Sonnets of Sadness and Pietie of 1611 , was a miscellany, including both full and verse anthems to English texts, consort songs, madrigal-like songs for three to five voices, and instrumental fantasias. He subsequently included a number of his keyboard pavans and galliards in Parthenia: Or, The Maydenhead of the First Musicke That Ever Was Printed for the Virginalls (1613), a joint publication with the composers John Bull and Orlando Gibbons, both of whom were probably his students. His last published works were four sacred songs included in Sir William Leighton’s Teares or Lamentacions of a Sorrowfull Soule (1614). His works continued to circulate in manuscript, the most famous collections being those of the Catholic Paston family of Appleton Hall, Norfolk, and the three volumes compiled between 1609 and 1619 by Francis Tregian, the first popularly known as The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book.

Byrd continued to live at Stondon Massey, his last years increasingly troubled by lawsuits over his various property holdings. His second wife, Ellen, died sometime around 1606 and he, himself, died there on July 4, 1623, and is presumably buried in the churchyard, according to his own wishes. The Old Cheque-Book: Or, Book of Remembrance of the Chapel Royal, from 1561-1744 (1872), noting his passing, called him “a Father of Musick.” His son Thomas, also a musician, survived until about 1652.

Significance

William Byrd was one of the four greatest composers of the High Renaissance, the others being Orlando di Lasso, Tomás Luis de Victoria, and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina . Byrd surpassed all except Victoria in the emotional fervor of his music and all but Lasso in his variety of forms and styles. If Byrd was less able than Lasso and Palestrina to come to terms with the new style of the Italian madrigal, he surpassed them both in his command of instrumental forms.

Byrd is that rare example of a composer who was at once the consolidator of older traditions and the instigator of new ones. If Byrd’s initial efforts in various genres are based more directly on earlier models than had previously been thought, his achievements are not lessened thereby. He appears to have been the first English composer to understand and successfully employ Netherlands imitative polyphony, and he thereby established the dominant style for his successors. Although he wrote comparatively little Anglican church music, his Great Service was the crowning achievement of the Elizabethan period; many of his smaller works survived the Commonwealth and, together with English contrafacta of some of his Latin works, formed the basis of the Tudor style as copied by such Restoration composers as Henry Purcell and William Croft and eulogized by eighteenth century writers on music.

Byrd made only a few fleeting efforts at writing in the new and popular style of the Italian madrigal. Instead, he developed the older, more sober form of the secular consort song to its full maturity and created from it the form of the verse anthem, initially either secular or sacred, which was to dominate English church music for nearly two hundred years. He essentially created a genre and repertoire of keyboard music from the slimmest of beginnings, polished it over a period of some fifty years, and bequeathed it to his successors Bull and Gibbons. His compositions for viol consort are more conservative in character and were overshadowed by the newer Italian fantasias at the turn of the seventeenth century, but they were still influencing native composers some twenty years later.

Byrd was the most influential musical composition teacher of his time, producing such disparate pupils as the forward-looking Morley, the brilliant émigré composer Peter Philips, the keyboard virtuoso John Bull, and the conservative and essentially serious Tomkins and Gibbons. The teaching style employed in Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597) can probably be taken as Byrd’s own. He appears as quite a modern figure, both in his attitude toward composition and in his tendency to revise his own works, collect them into anthologies, and then carefully supervise their publication.

Throughout his life, Byrd’s consuming passion was his faith, and it is in his Latin church music that his greatest works are found. His early works are notable for their size and scope, his works of the 1580’s for their penitential intensity, and his later works for their formal sweep and inner confidence. Although Byrd was capable of writing pedestrian music, his best works are unsurpassed, displaying a sense of technical command and personal conviction which set him apart as a great composer.

Further Reading

Related article in Great Events from History: The Renaissance & Early Modern Era

1567: Palestrina Publishes the Pope Marcellus Mass; 1575: Tallis and Byrd Publish Cantiones Sacrae; 1588-1602: Rise of the English Madrigal; 1590’s: Birth of Opera; October 31, 1597: John Dowland Publishes Ayres; 1599: Castrati Sing in the Sistine Chapel Choir.