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  • Verse and Voice in Byrd’s Song Collections of 1588 and 1589 by Jeremy L. Smith
  • Kerry McCarthy
Verse and Voice in Byrd’s Song Collections of 1588 and 1589. By Jeremy L. Smith. pp. xii + 325. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music. (Boydell Press, Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 2015. £60. ISBN 978-1-78327-082-8.)

This volume is a systematic account, piece by piece, of Byrd’s first two English songbooks. It continues a project begun four decades ago when Joseph Kerman and Oliver Neighbour undertook a detailed exploration of Byrd’s works. It is an even more specialized study than theirs, dealing with two specific printed sources rather than a broad type of composition. It also shows a very different way of approaching Byrd’s music.

Kerman wrote in 1981, while introducing a substantial group of Latin motets, that ‘they will be discussed chronologically or in some other order that promises to provide the most illuminating juxtapositions, and not, of course, in their order of publication or preservation’ (The Masses and Motets of William Byrd (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981), i. 56). The casual ‘of course’ speaks volumes. Kerman was aiming to disentangle the strictly musical content of Byrd’s work (in all its supposed purity) from the interference caused by the composer’s way of presenting it.

For Jeremy Smith, the medium is in fact the message. He does not see Byrd’s own editing and publishing practices as complicating factors [End Page 502] that obscure the true nature of the music. He sees them as a crucial part of Byrd’s creative project. He states his ‘central claim’ on p. 9. It is an audacious claim: ‘Byrd placed . . . all eighty-two of the numbered songs he first published in 1588 and 1589 into a continuous sequence, one where each song contributes to the unfolding of an extensive (technically “grand”) narrative that possesses all the standard components of plot, theme, character, setting, and point of view.’

Byrd was clearly fascinated by the possibilities of complex sequential organization. In some cases, such as his numbered sequence of pavans and galliards in My Lady Nevell’s Book, the cycle seems to have been arranged—at least to some extent—after the music was composed. In other cases, most notably his two books of seasonal Mass Propers published in 1605 and 1607, what Smith calls the ‘idealistic structure’ (p. 282) seems already to have been in place in the formative stages of the project. Smith views the two songbooks of the late 1580s through a similar lens. He interprets them as a single ‘unadvertised narrative’ (p. 12) focused on Queen Elizabeth and a number of her contemporaries, above all Sir Philip Sidney, ‘who was depicted semi-fictionally as the tale’s main protagonist’ (p. 10). He discusses each individual piece within that framework.

Complex sequences of ‘songs’ and ‘sonnets’ were certainly familiar to Elizabethan readers of literary works such as Sidney’s own Astrophil and Stella, Spenser’s Amoretti, and Watson’s Hecatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Love. Careful ordering of individual pieces was often an important part of the author’s art. Byrd had considerable freedom to order his songs as he saw fit. This was especially true in his 1588 Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs, which contained only five-part music and thus was not subject to the traditional rule of ordering a collection by number of voices. (He and Tallis had in any case taken extensive liberties with that rule, to the point of obscuring it almost completely, when they published a book of motets together in 1575.)

Byrd chose a tripartite scheme in 1588, which he set out clearly in his title and even more clearly in the book’s internal headings: Psalms, followed by Sonnets and Pastorals, followed by Songs of Sadness and Piety, the last of these concluding with the Funeral songs of that honorable Gent. Sir Philip Sidney. In 1589 he included pieces for three, four, five, and six voices, and he adhered to tradition by publishing them in separate sections. If he intended every song in this second book to be part of an ‘intricate sequential narrative’ (p. 166), his...

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