Homage to Taverner in Byrd's masses

Abstract

Byrd's settings of the Ordinary of the Mass are a special phenomenon in 16th-century music. For one thing, there are only three of them: set beside the dozens of Mass settings by each of his Continental peers, these works take on extra significance as the single response of a great composer to the traditionally most important genre. For another thing, they are the only 16th-century English works of any consequence to have been published without any identification-no title-page, colophon or dateother than the composer's name. Not until Peter Clulow made his definitive bibliographical study of the original editions did we know for sure that they belong to the years 1592 (or early 1593) to 1595, the four-part mass being issued first, followed by the three-part and then finally the five-part.' Observers with stylistic sensibilities have always wanted to place the publication of the masses closer to Gradualia (1605 and 1607), whose musical characteristics they certainly prefigure. But Joseph Kerman has reconciled stylistic considerations with bibliographical facts in an eloquent and convincing way by linking the appearance of the masses with Byrd's removal to Stondon Massey, where at last he was able to enjoy the benefits offered by a comparatively secure Roman Catholic community headed by his old friend and patron, Sir John Petre.2 This move, as Kerman points out, marks a new phase in Byrd's Latin music, a phase which the masses inaugurated. In place of the exuberant conquering of difficult musical problems in the 1575 Cantiones sacrae, and the intense and often extravagantly poignant expression of a 'political' and personal point of view as a Catholic in a Protestant country that characterizes the 1589 and 1591 collections, this last phase marks the realization of an ambitious plan to set major portions of the Roman liturgy to music-music that is as restrained in style as it is profoundly spiritual in content. In comparing the dissonance-laden and anxious dona nobis pacem of the four-part mass with the serene setting of its five-part successor, Kerman has furthermore symbolically pin-pointed Byrd's