Byrd by Kerry McCarthy (review)

William Byrd’s music tells the story of his life. It documents his maturing skill and artistry, his changing musical interests, the shifting concerns of his time and place, and the practical pressures and conditions of musicians and music making. Kerry McCarthy follows the trail of the music, beginning with Byrd’s first forays into Latin psalmody, climaxing with his magisterial Gradualia (his mature homage to the Catholic liturgy he cherished), and closing with a postscript that includes a few last songs and instrumental works. Byrd’s own writings, such as the prefaces to his printed collections and other documentary evidence, flesh out the account. From her own fluid knowledge of the period, its sources, and its music, McCarthy supplies a rich, densely-populated background for her portrait of one of England’s most revered composers. Her book illustrates just how broadly and vividly music can represent an entire culture as well as the life of the composer who created it.

Published as a part of Oxford’s Master Musicians Series, Byrd invites readers from a wide swath of interests and musical knowledge to consider Elizabethan and Jacobean England as Byrd experienced it: the religious instability of his first decade as a composer, followed by the reactionary religious and musical strictures after the brief Catholic interlude of Queen Mary’s reign; music preserved and circulated in sources created by printers, scribes, and private copyists; patrons ranging from the Church, to the Queen, to a friend among the nobility. Readers with interests in history, England, music history, the Renaissance, and biography will savor McCarthy’s sympathetic but clear-eyed view of Byrd navigating his world. Her seemingly effortless prose shows us Byrd’s persistent religious conviction despite opposition from law and social practice, his varied professional career, and his individual musical style—vocal and instrumental, sacred and secular—within the tastes and practices of his day. Illustrative music examples detail specific compositional practices and style traits. McCarthy interprets the music so as to reveal the nature of the musical genres of the period, Byrd’s approaches to compositional problems, and the influence of Byrd’s contemporaries on his music. Commentary by Thomas Morley, England’s preeminent writer on music, frequently places Byrd’s practice in perspective, as in this description of the Fantasia: “a musician taketh a point at his pleasure and wresteth and turneth it as he list, making either much or little of it according as shall seem best in his own conceit” (p. 29).

Each chapter takes its theme from Byrd’s musical activity. His first position at Lincoln Cathedral testifies of his prowess at a young age—and of the tension that his virtuosity elicited. In Lincolnshire, he met his wife and they began to have children. Chapter 5, “Royal Patronage,” describes the wealth of musicians as well as artifacts flowing to the royal court in the late 1530s after Henry VIII closed the abbeys, monasteries, and chantries. Byrd’s entry into the royal court in the 1570s, during Elizabeth’s reign, thus placed him within the richest musical establishment in England, and brought to him and Thomas Tallis the lucrative patent for music printing and an occupation in the business side of music. Chapter 8 centers around two motet books printed in 1589 and 1591—“among Byrd’s greatest achievements” (p. 102). In Protestant England, these Latin motets would have had no public currency, thus they offered an opportunity to consider the private taste of “skilled musicians of all sorts: Catholic and Protestant, male and female, courtly and bourgeois” (p. 104). Morley understood that sacred music should “draw the hearer, as it were, in chains of gold by the ears to the consideration of holy things” (p. 167). Chapter 9, “My Lady Nevell’s Book,” affords a glimpse of a single source, its accomplished scribe (who also makes a later appearance in the book), a significant patron, the taste of aristocratic amateur musicians and music...