Gradualia II (1607), Christmas to Easter, and: Gradualia II (1607), Ascension, Pentecost and the Feasts of Saints Peter and Paul (review)

William Byrd. Gradualia II (1607), Christmas to Easter. Edited by Philip Brett. (The Byrd Edition, 7a.) London: Stainer & Bell, c1997. [Gen. pref., p. v; pref., p. vii-xv; editorial notes, p. xvi-xx; facsims. and trans., p. xxi-xxix; texts and trans., p. xxx-xxxv; score, p. 1-155; index of first lines, p. 156. ISMN M-2202-0298-8; ISBN 0-85249-369-X; B259. £60.]

William Byrd. Gradualia II (1607), Ascension, Pentecost, and the Feasts of Saints Peter and Paul. Edited by Philip Brett. (The Byrd Edition, 7b.) London: Stainer & Bell, c1997. [Gen. pref., p. v; pref., p. vii-xvii; editorial notes, p. xviii-xxiii; texts and trans., p. xxiv-xxvii; score, 1-162; extant copies, p. 163; index of first lines, p. 164. ISMN M-2202-0299-5; ISBN 0-85249-824-1; B824. £60.]

Admirers of Philip Brett's edition of William Byrd's Gradualia I (1605) for The Byrd Edition--and it was greeted with universal warmth when its three volumes appeared in stages between 1989 and 1993 (vol. 5, The Marian Masses [1989]; vol. 6a, All Saints and Corpus Christi [1991]; and vol. 6b, Other Feasts and Devotions [1993])--will be equally satisfied with its two-volume successor, Gradualia II (1607), published in 1997 (vol. 7a, Christmas to Easter; and vol. 7b, Ascension, Pentecost, and the Feasts of Saints Peter and Paul). Byrd and his printer Thomas Este labored hard to make the original edition useful, error-free, and handsome; Brett and his publishers, Stainer & Bell, have followed their example. Through their efforts, the huge complexities of Byrd's great project have now been sorted out, and in a manner that truly serves the needs of both the scholar and the performer. Decades have passed since this editorial project was begun in 1976, but the final outcome has been well worth the wait. Other volumes of The Byrd Edition may need revision in the future, but the Gradualia editions will not be among them.

For books that are so rich in intellectual content, it may seem perverse to start with a comment on their physical appearance. But The Byrd Edition has changed its looks. The engraved quality of the printed page has been replaced by cleaner, computer-generated setting, and the text now stands out boldly on paper that is much whiter than before. Small as these changes are, they enhance the sense of spaciousness, and everything is easier on the eye. New too is the laminated finish of the familiar red covers, although they look more robust than they actually are. Libraries will still need to replace them with proper bindings.

Turning to the editorial method in the music itself, the new volumes introduce no changes or surprises. Book 2 of the Gradualia, like its predecessor, exists only in a single edition (the 1610 "edition" is in fact a reissue of the 1607 with new titlepages), and very few manuscript sources exist, all of them derived from the print. Because of this, no critical commentary is needed, and Brett's footnotes record all printing errors, stop-press corrections, and the occasional liturgical or textual observation that will be useful to the reader or performer. There is great reassurance to be had from a layout in which all relevant information is brought together on the same page. Other editors (and publishers) could do worse than follow the example of The Byrd Edition.

As we have grown to expect from the earlier Gradualia volumes, Brett's prefaces build an original and important superstructure upon the foundational researches of James Jackman and Joseph Kerman, and are full of new insights into historical and liturgical aspects of these politically-charged motets. Where issues of recusant history are involved, Brett is not only fully up to date in his reading, but so shrewd in his reasoning that he...