2010 Program Notes
This year’s concert is an unusually diverse one, covering almost half a century of Byrd’s career. The oldest pieces on the program are Domine quis habitabit and the Lamentations of Jeremiah, two rather audacious works which seem to date from his early twenties. Byrd never published either one. If it were not for a few ambitious Elizabethan collectors who liked unusual, slightly old-fashioned music, they would have been lost forever. In the case of Domine quis habitabit, printing would have been impractical: Byrd composed it for nine different voice parts, including three bass parts, an embarrassment of riches which he could hardly have crammed into the format of a normal 16th-century motet book. All nine voices are heard almost all the time. The result is a constant onslaught of dissonance and elaborate musical interplay. Byrd wrote later in life that “there is not any Musicke of Instruments whatsoever comparable to that which is made of the voyces of Men, where the voices are good, and the same well sorted and ordered”. His sheer delight in the sound of the human voice is easy to hear in this motet.
The Lamentations are monumental in a different way. Byrd was a student of Tallis, and it is not surprising to see him emulating his teacher when he came to write his first really ambitious vocal work. There was a well-established English Renaissance tradition of setting the Lamentations of Jeremiah to music. Tallis’s version became the best-known of them all. Much of what we hear in Byrd’s setting is a colorful and quite individual reworking of the Tallis Lamentations. There is the distinctive dark sound, for a five-part choir without sopranos; there is the slow and deliberate pace (Byrd takes a good twelve minutes to get through a few verses); there are the elegant, rather abstract settings of the Hebrew letters; and there is the willingness to explore different keys and use surprising chords. Especially near the end of the piece, we find liberal scatterings of flats and sharps not usually seen outside the workshops of the more extreme Italian connoisseurs. The arresting final cadence is a direct quotation from Tallis.
Another group of motets is taken from Byrd’s 1575 book of Cantiones sacrae, the large collection he produced jointly with Tallis and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. This is slightly later music. Some of it takes a decided turn toward the conservative: the boldness and occasional roughness of the earliest works has been smoothed out in many places. A few of these pieces were not originally intended to be sung at all. Laudate pueri, and perhaps Memento homo as well, began life as a fantasia for strings and was given a Latin text later on. This may have been a practical decision, made to fill out the younger composer’s half of the Cantiones. The smooth harmonies and symmetrical phrases occasionally feel a bit unsuited to the words, whether exuberant (“praise the name of the Lord”) or gloomy (“remember, man, that thou art dust”). Diliges Dominum also has the feel of an exercise, if a brilliant exercise. It has four parts, each designed to be sung backward and forward simultaneously, creating an eight-voice canon — a tour de force which would have delighted any number of twentieth-century composers. The original partbooks offer it in an ingenious format. This is the first (and last) phrase:
Da mihi auxilium, also from the 1575 Cantiones, is a different sort of motet. It looks forward to the more overtly expressive style Byrd would go on to cultivate in middle age. Almost half the music is taken up by his dramatic setting of the last four words, ut plangam iuventutem meam. There are few people more earnest than a still quite young artist who has taken it upon himself to lament the sins of his youth, and Byrd made the most of the opportunity.
The rest of our program comes from the 1605 book of Gradualia, Byrd’s collection of practical music for the Catholic liturgy. This year’s music, somewhat unusually, is not intended for one particular day in the calendar: it was written for the so-called votive Mass of the Virgin Mary, a special commemorative service which could be celebrated throughout the year. (Careful listeners may recognize at least one interchangeable bit which is also used in our annual Assumption Mass on August fifteenth. The older Byrd rarely wrote two different pages of music when one would do.) This particular set of music is especially designed for the votive Mass during Advent, and it is full of the imagery of the season: the heavens rain down justice, the everlasting doors are lifted up, and (in the communion antiphon, perhaps the loveliest music of all) a virgin gives birth to a son named Emmanuel. Salve sola Dei genetrix is a companion piece to these, a setting of the familiar Hail Mary paraphrased in neoclassical Latin verse — much the same as the anonymous poet did with Psalm 150 in Byrd’s lively Laudibus in sanctis. It is scored for four high voices, in an ethereal style well suited to the words.
