The Mixed Choir of Jesus College Cambridge

Director: Duncan Aspden

Organ: Charles Harrison

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Sacred Songs of William Byrd

William Byrd (born not later than 1543, died 1623) stands out among European composers of his day as perhaps the most inventive and versatile of all those who wrote primarily for small scale music making in the domestic intimacy of his performers' own homes. In the wake of the final imposition of Reformation principles upon the English Church and people during the 1560s, the practice of music making - such little as remained - moved from the chancels and Lady Chapels of the Church to the private households of those who wished to remain its devotees. From the mid 1560s to around 1590, almost none among the English ecclesiastical hierarchy had time or tolerance for music, and within the Chapel Royal Byrd was content to leave to the likes of William Mundy the role of composer of such limited amounts of new music as were required; he himself wrote remarkably little for use in the context of the Prayer Book service of the English Church. His one major work for the vernacular liturgy, the Great Service, was written apparently in the early 1590s in quiet satisfaction at the then incipient rehabilitation of vernacular church music to a position of respect - and he matched it simultaneously with the three great settings of the Mass. By then, however, he had already written a substantial quantity of domestic music. This extended to lengthy keyboard pieces (of which tracks 4 and 7 are examples), instrumental consorts and the consort songs, but primarily to the many and varied unaccompanied vocal consorts, to both Latin and English vernacular texts. The fruits of his labour in the latter fields, accumulated over nearly three decades, were published in a rush in the years around 1590: the first and second books of Cantiones Sacrae composed to Latin texts (1589, 1591), and the two volumes of vernacular pieces, Psalmes, Sonets and Songs (1588) and Songs of Sundrie Natures (1589). The vocal items presented on this disc are taken mainly from the second volume of Cantiones Sacrae, supplemented by two (tracks 2 and 9) taken from the first.

As recent research by David Crankshaw has shown, the households of Catholic recusant families became particular strongholds of music making of the more elevated kinds at this period. Families such as the Herberts, Pagets and Petres counted Byrd among their personal friends, and it is likely that it was primarily for this clientele that he composed the domestic music that was forming almost the whole of his output. It is, therefore, probably inappropriate to describe the contents of Cantiones Sacrae as Œmotets'. There is indeed no reason why they should not have been so used in the course of clandestine Catholic services conducted in some highly musical recusant household - should anyone ever have deemed it worth the risk of detection. Primarily and essentially, however, they are settings for performance around the household fireside, not as entertainment but, both for those participating and for those listening, as diversion of a specially edifying and uplifting nature. It was a form of diversion, moreover, which could suffer no inevitable interpretation as evidence of religious non-conformity, subversive or not. Virtually all of the texts set in Cantiones Sacrae I and II are denominationally neutral, and could be sung with equal pleasure and edification by educated and open-minded protestant households for whom Latin was simply the natural language of intellectual discourse. Correspondingly, the religious pieces in the vernacular song books were set to texts so anodyne in expression that they could be enjoyed by the entire musical population, to whichever denomination their loyalty was committed. Indeed, Byrd was living in a protestant country, and he could not escape permeation by the prevailing preoccupations of its virtually Calvinist theological climate. Most of the texts set in both volumes of Cantiones Sacrae are as focussed upon the sinfulness and feebleness of mankind, his incapacity to do anything to redeem himself, and his need for the mercy and grace of God, as is any English volume of protestant sermons or theological debate of the period. Indeed, the almost total concentration of address direct to God, and the corresponding degree of exclusion of Jesus, Mary and the saints, bespeaks clearly a body of composition made in a protestant land.

At the same time, however, the projection - particularly in the second volume - of words which express the sentiments mentioned above through the medium of texts of exile and dispossession seems certain to have been chosen to contain and convey a concealed layer of meaning, significant only for Byrd's co-religionaries. To these, the biblical texts of lamentation over the fall of the Holy City Jerusalem and the adversities of its inhabitants could hardly convey anything other than reflection and commiseration upon the beleaguered condition of recusant Catholics seemingly abandoned in a protestant England in conflict with the Catholic states of Europe. In deference, however, to simple political reality, the texts chosen by Byrd were not those that cried to Heaven for vengeance, but those that besought divine pity for unexplained affliction.

Following the early deaths of Robert White and Robert Parsons, Byrd was a composer virtually without contemporaries, and the style of the works of his middle age necessarily drew on insular traditions from the immediate past, moderated and informed by what he could learn of contemporary composition in Italy, Southern Germany and the Catholic Low Countries. When composing to a text on the scale of Infelix ego he proved able to sustain interest and momentum throughout a setting comparable in size (if in not a lot else) to the pre-Reformation English votive antiphon. The text, which had circulated in England since its inclusion in local printed Primers from the 1530s onwards, is taken from the opening of a meditation upon Psalm 61 (Anglican), said to have been composed by Girolamo Savonarola a little before his execution in 1498. Byrd may have been acquainted with the setting by Willaert (published 1556), or that by Lassus (1566). The settings of Haec dicit dominus and Ne irascaris, Domine share with Infelix ego the accommodation of a lengthy text by division into sections which, when desired, could be performed as self-contained units. Both were taken from the Vulgate Old Testament. The former employs a text (Jeremiah xxxi. 15-17) in which the Lord assures the afflicted on earth that their sorrowing is not unnoticed; there is recompense for their distress, and even a promise of hope for the future. Its sentiments contain resonances of optimism that are wholly lacking in the impassioned and despairing words of Ne irascaris, Domine (Isaiah lxiv. 9-10), pleading for the Lord's victimisation of his people to cease now that the destruction of Jerusalem is complete.

Both of these are clearly texts capable of interpretation as reflecting upon the condition and prospects of the recusant community, and it may have been its corresponding expression as from the mouths of 'we, the exile sons of Eve' that commended to Byrd the text of the Salve Regina. This text is wholly exceptional in the overall context of the two volumes of Cantiones Sacrae. It alone had no existence other than as an item of the prohibited Roman liturgy; its expression is almost quintessentially Catholic in content, and its address to Mary as advocata nostra was expressly repugnant to anyone of the reformed persuasion. Its inclusion in the 1591 volume seems certain to have caused Thomas East, Byrd's printer, no few palpitations. In contrast, however, though the two books contain several more settings of texts taken directly from the Catholic liturgy, just about all of the remainder had respectable biblical antecedents (in particular the psalms) and were denominationally neutral. Haec dies falls into this category; it was one of the psalm-antiphons for the Catholic office on Easter Sunday, but it had a prior and uncontroversial existence as a simple psalm-verse (Psalm 118 v23). Miserere mei, Deus existed in the liturgy as the text of the Offertory at High Mass on Tuesday in the second week of Lent, but carried no such implications in its prior guise as Psalm 51.v1.

To all these predominantly melancholy texts Byrd's prevailing musical style appears detached and cool, sombre indeed but essaying little or no borrowing from the repertoire of emotive harmonic devices applied to settings of texts of comparable degrees of melancholy and distraction occurring in the work of contemporary Italian madrigalists. The polyphony is elegant and spacious, Œframed to the life of the words' indeed, but largely in terms of overall mood and, not least, of the performers' own subjective perceptions, (One contemporary, indeed, found no incongruity in fitting the words of a joyous Christmas narrative to the music of Ne irascaris, Domine.) A different ethos prevails in the case of the three remaining vocal works on this disc, for Byrd had neither compunction nor inhibition about adopting for his few choices of joyful text a vigorous and extrovert style strongly reminiscent of madrigalian techniques for conveying sentiments of rejoicing and exhilaration. Vigilate is indeed among Byrd's most patently madrigalian compositions in any genre, the expansive vigour of the polyphony for Vigilate (Œbe wakeful') and an gallicantu (Œor at cock-crow') lying in sharp contrast both to the abrupt little point composed for repente (Œsuddenly') and to the somnolent progress of the harmonic rhythm at dormientes (Œsleeping'). In both the Easter Day text Haec dies and Laudibus in sanctis - Psalm 150 in a metrical paraphrase of apparently unidentified origin - Byrd employs another characteristically madrigalian device, namely resort to interior passages in a proportioned triple rhythm. In the performances recorded here an attempt has been made to interpret the rhythm at these points in accordance with the detail of Byrd's own notation, in preference to the guesswork to which resort is not uncommonly made. Given their destination as informal domestic music, Byrd evidently composed his Latin-texted sacred vocal consorts with no particular performing medium in mind. Unlike music destined for performance by formally constituted liturgical choirs, these pieces (in common with the productions of the English madrigal composers) observe no pre-determined patterns of cleffing and vocal scoring. The composer envisaged performance by whatever vocal resources happened to be available, of whatever timbre and resulting sounding pitch. In contrast with the church music of this period, therefore, there is no special insight into compositional preconceptions and method to be gained by endeavours to recover and reconstruct some single ensemble and ambience for which the composer expressly imagined his work, since none in particular existed, either in practice or in his mind. While performance by a substantial SATB chorus may not have been among the media particularly envisaged by the composer, therefore, such a rendering was not wholly unthinkable either; its use today is neither more nor less appropriate than many others, and is one of several that appear valid as a means of achieving restoration of the sound of William Byrd's music.
Roger Bowers 1995.

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