Instrumentale Konzeptionen in der Virginalmusik von William Byrd (review)

Martin Klotz begins the preface to his ambitious book with the following declaration: 'It is the purpose of this work to make a contribution through an examination of Byrd's virginal music to solving the question in what essential way instrumental music differs from vocal, and with what justification one can speak of an independent instrumental music originating in the sixteenth century.' The author characterizes vocal music as linear, whether melodic or contrapuntal, as opposed to instrumental music, which is distinguished by its Klanglichkeit. This term may require a little explanation. In her book Die Klanglichkeit in der englischen Virginalmusik des 16. Jahrhunderts (Tutzing, 1979), to which Klotz makes occasional reference, Genoveva Nitz defines it as signifying a static basic scheme such as that of the Summer Canon or Byrd's The Bells (based on a two-note ground). For Klotz, and as soon appears for Nitz herself, it has broader application, embracing any primarily chordal structure, and it has the advantage that it does not anachronistically suggest the presence of functional harmony (though passages coinciding with what is understood by that term sometimes occur). To distinguish correctly between the spheres of operation of the linear and chordal principles in a particular work is to reveal its deep structure. First impressions may be superficial, for instance passages in which short imitative points predominate may prove on closer inspection to be governed by a chordal conception, while vocal homophony must be seen as entirely distinct from instrumental thinking because as a form of declamation it is inseparable from the voice.

In the course of the book the author pursues this line of argument in great detail and with great singleness of mind. The contents are not easily summarized, even in severely pared down form. Klotz has obviously recognized that readers will need all the guidance they can get. He has divided his material with an appearance of neatness into three parts, each containing three chapters subdivided into several numbered sections. Each part, chapter, and section is headed with a title often consisting of two sentences, the second of which may take the form of a question. As a further aid to orientation the last twenty pages of the book are devoted to abstracts of every section.

Chapter 1 ranges widely. After an account of medieval concepts of instrumental music and their partial survival in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century German organ tablatures, a Binchois song is compared with the version in the Buxheim Organ Book. The type of figuration encountered there is then contrasted with that found in two elaborate cantus firmus settings in the Mulliner Book; in one, a setting of Gloria tibi trinitas by Blitheman, the figuration gives at times an impression of chordal texture, though without disturbing the linear basis of the piece. There follow a review of other theories of the emancipation of instrumental music and a brief comparison of keyboard music in Italy, Spain, and Germany with that of the English virginalists. Many writers having stressed superficial elements of English style such as figuration and approximations to functional harmony, which appear in more developed forms in Byrd's younger contemporaries Bull, Farnaby, and Gibbons, Klotz illustrates what he perceives as the novelty and individuality of Byrd's instrumental thinking in an analysis of Pavans F1 and F2 (Musica Britannica, Vols. 27, 28, nos. 59a and 60a), showing the interplay and synthesis of the chordal principle with the contrapuntal.

In Chapter 2 he demonstrates that a number of instrumental pieces that have no vocal origin (Parsons's five-part In Nomine and the arrangement of it attributed to Byrd, preludes from the Ileborgh tablature and the Buxheim Organ Book, a ricercare by the elder Cavazzoni) are nevertheless essentially linear, and contrasts them with a couple of chordally based Byrd pieces. Some change in emphasis in these two chapters and in the one that follows might have been necessary if early French and Italian...