2011 Program Notes

This year’s festival celebrates the 400th anniversary of Byrd’s last songbook, his 1611 Psalms, Songs and Sonnets. He published it in a year that saw a number of other artistic triumphs, including Shakespeare’s Tempest and the King James Version of the Bible. Byrd’s collection of Psalms, Songs and Sonnets is — as the title suggests — a rather eclectic book. There are some light-hearted little songs featuring a cast of nightingales and shepherds; there are also some grave and complex pieces which can really be called vernacular motets. Byrd seems to have assembled the whole thing as a sort of retrospective, with a broad variety of musical styles (“to content every humour”) and a mixture of new and old material. It is the most diverse of all his songbooks. It even includes some music for stringed instruments, something he had never dared to publish in earlier years. There is very little sign that his creativity was waning as he entered his eighth decade. He said as much himself in the dedication: The natural inclination and love to the art of music, wherein I have spent the better part of mine age, have been so powerful in me, that even in my old years which are desirous of rest, I cannot contain myself from taking some pains therein. He went on to describe his 1611 book as his “last labors” and “final farewell”, and quoted a line from the Stoic philosopher Seneca which his European colleague Orlando di Lasso had also used in his last musical publication: “The sun’s light is sweetest at the very moment of its setting”.           

Byrd had not published any English songs since his 1589 Songs of Sundry Natures. A lot had changed in the intervening two decades. Late-sixteenth-century England had seen an onslaught of imported Italian music and a brief vogue for composing Italian-style madrigals. By 1611 the English madrigal had more or less run its course, and Byrd seems to have been relatively unaffected by it. Much of the music in his Psalms, Songs and Sonnets sweeps along magisterially as if the recent Elizabethan fashion for rustic fa-la-las had never happened at all. A few of his 1611 pieces can justly be called madrigals: the most obvious example is probably This sweet and merry month of May, which had in fact been printed twenty years earlier as a sort of bonus track in an imported Italian madrigal collection. Sing we merrily is the most madrigalian of psalm settings, full of breezy and virtuosic illustrations of instruments such as the “shawm”, the “tabret”, the “merry harp”, and the “trumpet”. The garish modulations in Come woeful Orpheus, reflecting the “strange chromatic notes”, “sourest sharps”, and “uncouth flats” of the text, may well be a dig at the chromatic excesses of some English madrigals. As a younger composer, Byrd had been driven to a similar display in the motet Vide Domine quoniam tribulor — down the circle of fifths to A-flat and D-flat, back up again to pungent and quite unrelated chords — by sheer emotional involvement with his work. At this point the tone is decidedly more tongue-in-cheek. Byrd must have sympathized in many ways with his fellow-musician Thomas Campion, who began his 1601 Book of Ayres with a withering attack on the music written by his English contemporaries: where the nature of every word is precisely expressed in the note, like the old action in comedies, when if they did pronounce memini [I remember], they would point to the hinder part of their heads, if video [I see], put their finger in their eye. But such childish observing of words is altogether ridiculous.            

Some of the more substantial pieces in the Psalms, Songs and Sonnets are anything but frivolous. By the end of his career, Byrd was (at least in some cases) writing larger-scale music in English than he was writing in Latin. The elaborate rejoicing of This day Christ was born, or the almost baroque majesty of Arise Lord into thy rest, is a long way from the tense concision of Byrd’s masses and Gradualia. A serious and thoroughly polyphonic piece like Turn our captivity is in many ways the real heir to the old expressive laments of his motets. It was a remarkable shift of perspective. Byrd’s new English motets — no other term describes them as well — were in a style widely appreciated by the next generation of musicians, younger composers such as Tomkins and Weelkes who spent their time writing long, introspective, rather manneristic works. (The famous Jacobean laments over the biblical figure of Absalom, more than a dozen in all, are the first to come to mind.) Such pieces were in many ways the real heirs to the melancholy and gravitas of the Elizabethan motet. If Byrd had lived a little longer, he would surely have written some more of his own.           

Unlike Byrd’s earlier songbooks, which he kept on revising and re-releasing, the Psalms, Songs and Sonnets only went through a single edition. By this point in life, he seems not to have cared much about matters of reputation or profit. There was also no real need for corrections in the 1611 book. It was almost flawlessly produced, with only a handful of small errors, most of them fixed in the printer’s shop. Byrd was aware of his own high standards, and he expected others to share them, as we can see in his preface to his songs. Only this I desire, that you will be but as careful to hear them well expressed, as I have been both in the composing and correcting of them. Otherwise the best song that ever was made will seem harsh and unpleasant, for that the well expressing of them, either by voices or instruments, is the life of our labours, which is seldom or never well performed at the first singing or playing. He goes on to say something more profound: Besides, a song that is well and artificially [i.e. skillfully] made cannot be well perceived nor understood at the first hearing, but the oftener you shall hear it, the better cause of liking you will discover. Anyone who listens to music, and loves music, will recognize the truth of that statement. It is a surprisingly moving insight from a composer in his early seventies who had lived through so many changes in musical practice and style. It is not far from the exhortation in the preface to Shakespeare’s famous First Folio, published in 1623, the year of Byrd’s death: “…read him, therefore, and again and again; and if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him.” That line was written by two of Shakespeare’s editors, who were making the claim on behalf of their beloved and recently deceased playwright. The difference in Byrd’s case, of course, is that he was speaking on his own behalf. It would be an awfully arrogant statement if it were not so true.           

Byrd remained in touch with the court and with his fellow musicians until the end of his working life. He only produced a few more works after his 1611 Psalms, Songs and Sonnets: a handful of devotional ditties, one or two beautiful solo songs, and a memorable last group of keyboard pieces which appeared in the anthology called Parthenia. Just like his first printed works, this music appeared in collaborative volumes alongside other people’s music. He was now the revered senior partner, and a younger contemporary such as Thomas Morley, who had long since moved on to a lighter, more fashionable Italian style, was still eager to praise Byrd for his “deep skill” in music. That is a remarkably accurate two-word description of his talent. There was no shortage of skill in English Renaissance music — the furious virtuosity of John Bull’s keyboard style, the brilliant word-painting of a Weelkes madrigal — but Byrd exercised his skill with a depth which rewards almost endless listening and study. “The oftener you shall hear it”, as he himself said, “the better cause of liking you will discover”.