William Byrd and His Contemporaries: Essays and a Monograph (review)

This reprinting of Philip Brett's chief contributions to Elizabethan and Jacobean musical scholarship, together with two recent, lighter pieces, could well be new to many readers (even musical ones), given the comparative obscurity or high cost of the publications in which several items originally appeared. The important "Edward Paston: A Norfolk Gentleman" (1964), which presented major discoveries concerning the relationships among three dozen sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscript collections, might have found its way into the Journal of the American Musicological Society, had Brett been an American graduate student, not an English protégé of the brilliant but quirky Thurston Dart, who lodged the article in an obscure British bibliographical journal, where even Brett had trouble getting a hold of it in later years. To consult Brett's discussions of Byrd's Gradualia, on the other hand, readers either have needed very deep pockets to purchase relevant volumes of The Byrd Edition, or have had to visit a major library, where, even now, they may well encounter E. H. Fellowes's cursory comments in the old, outdated Collected Works of William Byrd, rather than the new edition, where Brett's prefaces appeared between 1989 and 1997.

This volume also offers readers an opportunity to reconsider instances in which Brett quietly and elegantly changed the way we think about this music. "The Two Musical Personalities of Thomas Weelkes" (1972) clarified important sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English distinctions between sacred and secular, church and chamber styles, which since the nineteenth century had often been subsumed under a more generic "Elizabethan Golden Age" style of polyphony. It also rescued several of Weelkes's most interesting, sacred works from cathedral choir lofts, where earlier British scholars had enshrined them and where they are commonly heard today, and returned them to a secular artistic milieu, where they had first belonged. "Word Setting in the Songs of Byrd" (1971–72) further clarified some of these important Elizabethan distinctions between sacred and secular, plain and Petrarchan styles, and English composers' responses to them, clearing a path that others such as Edward Doughtie continued to explore. In "Facing the Music" Brett cautioned against losing sight of the music in 1982, when details of "positivism" (as musicologists had begun to call it) seemed in danger of eclipsing the notes themselves. Even when historically contextualizing a single musical work in "English Music for the Scottish Progress of 1617" (which prompted a colleague to remark, "Philip, you're writing ethnomusicology") Brett always faced the music.

The Gradualia prefaces, culled from five volumes of The Byrd Edition and assembled here into a monograph, document Brett's continued, close engagement with Elizabethan studies at a time when he was becoming better known in the scholarly arena for work on Britten and aspects of the new musicology, most notably gender and queer studies. In the most important discussion of this repertory since Joseph Kerman's from twenty-five years ago, Brett not only rearticulated Byrd's ambitious liturgical plan for Gradualia, sorting out the composer's notoriously complicated, cryptic, at times inconsistent system for transferring musical sections from feast to feast, but also suggested a political plan for the collection: Byrd had begun with feasts most important for beleaguered recusants and Jesuits, then moved on to major Christian feasts. Brett's political observations regularly extended and illuminated ongoing discussions of the relationship of Byrd's motets, and Gradualia in particular, to the English Catholic community, elucidating the composer's careful espousal of post-Tridentine objectives, and bringing to bear in particularly useful ways commentaries from the Rheims New Testament (1582) and Douai Bible (1609–10), new to these discussions. The music itself was never eclipsed in the discourse, however, where insightful commentaries on specific works regularly enlightened close readers and potential performers. Performance advice was happily undogmatic, and perceptively marshaled internal musical details as well as externals of historical context...