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Word-Setting in the Songs of Byrd

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Philip Brett
Philip Brett*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

The vocal music of William Byrd consists of the Latin Masses and motets, a comparatively small amount of Anglican church, music, and a substantial body of ‘secular’ compositions. Among the latter, settings of psalms and spiritual texts abound, but they were designed for a secular context and rarely taken over for church use; their musical style confirms their non-liturgical character. The numbers of works involved, though approximate on account of doubtful attributions and incomplete sources, are nevertheless instructive: there are three Masses and about 180 motets; the Anglican works comprise two complete services, two evening services, some smaller liturgical items and probably no more than twenty anthems; the secular vocal music amounts to almost 160 pieces. Often extending to two or more sections, the motets generally dwarf the songs, many of which are single-stanza settings. Even so, this last number indicates a degree of involvement sometimes not appreciated by those who comment on Byrd's music.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 98 , 1971 , pp. 47 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © 1972 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

1 For an account of the form, see my article, ‘The English Consort Song, 1570–1625’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, lxxxviii (1961/62), 73–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Consort Songs for Voice and Viols, ed. Philip Brett (The Collected Works of William Byrd, rev. edn., xv), London, 1970, Nos. 34, 38, 40, 41, and 35, 36 and 39.Google Scholar

3 The Compleat Gentleman, London, 1622, p. 100.Google Scholar

4 William Byrd, 2nd edn., London, 1948, pp. 153, 244, 161 and 133.Google Scholar

5 A General History of Music, London, 1776–89, iii. 122n.Google Scholar

6 Festschrift fur Johannes Wolf, Berlin, 1929, pp. 24–30; his findings also appear, much condensed, in ‘Musical Form in the Madrigal’, Music & Letters, xi (1930), 230–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Literary critics, however, have for some time differed on the question of the ‘mainstream’ of English poetry; see Yvor Winter's review of C. S. Lewis's English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, reprinted in The Function of Criticism, London, 1957, and his articles on “The 16th Century Lyric in England', Poetry, liii and liv (1939), reprinted (somewhat revised) in Forms of Discovery, Denver, 1967; also Douglas L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne, Princeton, 1967.Google Scholar

8 Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance, p. 86.Google Scholar

9 E.g. in The New Oxford History of Music, iv (London, 1968), 200.Google Scholar

10 The Elizabethan Madrigal, p. 254.Google Scholar

11 Consort Songs, ed. Philip Brett (Musica Britannica, xxii), London, 1967.Google Scholar

12 Features of this kind, common in the strophic settings (see also Exx. 2 and 3), make it difficult to agree that Byrd's voice parts either concentrate ‘on following the sense and intonation of the words’ or are ‘an expression of their meaning’, views expressed by Richard J. McGrady in his literary and musical survey, The English Solo Song from William Byrd to Henry Lowes, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Manchester, 1963, pp. 34 and 51.Google Scholar

13 Two exceptions prove the rule: in ‘Though Amaryllis dance in green’ (Collected Works, xii, No. 12) only the last line is repeated, because it is a refrain; in ‘Come, pretty babe’ (Collected Works, rev. edn., xv, No. 16) because the opening words of the couplet, ‘Come lullaby’ prompt an unusual six-fold repeat. In a thoroughly misleading discussion of the songs (in The Technique of Byrd's Vocal Polyphony, London, 1966, pp. 263–6), H. K. Andrews claims that Byrd ‘seems to make little effort to match poetic structures with comparable musical forms’ largely on the grounds that the repeat of the final couplet in settings of the English type of sonnet turns the sestet into an eight-line section, ‘thus destroying the essential “octave/sestet” construction’. So it may appear on paper; but in performance the listener has no difficulty in hearing it in its proper function as a repetition, reinforcing rather than extending or destroying the poetic form.Google Scholar

14 See Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court, pp. 17–18, 37, 100–101 and 104–5.Google Scholar

15 See Pattison, Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance, pp. 150–54, concerning this last feature, which is characteristic of the lutenists' poetry, but not of that set by Byrd.Google Scholar

16 Psalmes, Sonets and Songs, 1588, No. 31. Francis Pilkington's setting of the first stanza (Second Set of Madrigals, 1624, No. 19) emphasizes by comparison the ‘literary’ nature of Byrd's approach. Pilkington's version is madrigalian in a superficial sense, with chromatic passages thrown in for good measure, but it bears no discernible relationship, expressive or formal, to the words, which appear to have been slapped beneath the notes as an afterthought.Google Scholar

17 Op. cit., p. 107.Google Scholar

18 Consort Songs (Musica Britannica, xxii), Nos. 1–11.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., Nos. 17–23.Google Scholar

20 This preoccupation with poetic form throws into question the relationship of the consort song to humanist theories about the expression of sense and emotion that Edward Doughtie briefly proposes in the introduction—the best recent essay on music and poetry of the period—to his authoritative edition of Lyrics from English Airs, 1596–1622, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970, p. 19. Byrd's quantitative settings (the 1588 set, Nos. 23 and 34) raise more precisely the question of humanist influence. They are isolated examples, probably undertaken as a result of Byrd's contact with the Sidney circle, and they did not alter his preference for a more rhythmically flexible vocal line.Google Scholar

21 See Collected Works, rev. edn., xv, pp. viii-ix et passim, and my article, ‘Edward Paston (1550–1630): a Norfolk Gentleman and his Musical Collection’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, iv (1964), 51–69.Google Scholar

22 Gradualia, Book I, 1605, i, No. 26, and Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets, 1611, Nos. 25, 28, 31 and 32.Google Scholar

23 The Elizabethan Madrigal, p. 111.Google Scholar

24 ‘Porro, illis ipsis sententijs (ut experiendo didici) adeo abstrusa atque recondita vis inest; vt diuina cogitanti, diligenterque ac serio peruolutanti; nescio quonam modo, aptissimi quique numeri, quasi sponte accurrant sua; animoque minime ignauo, atque inerti, liberaliter ipsi sese offerant.’Google Scholar

25 William Byrd, 2nd edn., p. 133.Google Scholar

26 Stephen Orgel, ‘Affecting the Metaphysics’, Harvard English Studies, ii (1971), 238.Google Scholar

27 See Frank Kermode's review of Pattison's book, Review of English Studies, xxv (1949), 266.Google Scholar

28 My guide on this subject has been Rosamund Tuve's scholarly study, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics, Chicago, 1947.Google Scholar

29 The Arte of English Poesie, ed. G. D. Willcock and Alice Walker, Cambridge, 1936, p. 64; the book is thought to have been drafted up to twenty years before its publication in 1589.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., p. 143.Google Scholar

31 Quoted in K. E. Gilbert and H. Kuhn's A History of Esthetics, New York, 1939, p. 141.Google Scholar

32 Op. cit., pp. 83 and 149.Google Scholar

33 Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, Oxford, 1925–52, i. 133.Google Scholar

34 See my article, ‘The Two Musical Personalities of Thomas Weelkes’, Music & Letters, liii (1972), 375–6.Google Scholar

35 Gibbons's approach to his texts is discussed in an important but little-known article by John Stevens, ‘The Elizabethan Madrigal: “Perfect Marriage” or “Uneasy Flirtation”’, Essays and Studies, new series, xi (1958), 17–37.Google Scholar

36 The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture, London, 1969. pp. 14–15.Google Scholar