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

Abstract

COMPOSER STUDIES Byrd and his Contemporaries: Essays and a Monograph. By Philip Brett; edited by Joseph Kerman and Davitt Moroney. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. [xiii, 252 p. ISBN-13 978-0-520-24758-1. $39.95.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographic references, index. Byrd and his Contemporaries is one of two posthumous collections of Philip Brett's work published by the University of California Press. Its companion volume, Music and Sexuality in Britten, also appeared in 2006. The essays in the present book span four decades, from Brett's student days in the early 1960s to his untimely death in 2002. Most of them will be familiar to those who study early English music, but some of them have been tucked away in relatively obscure sources, and this volume will be a welcome and convenient addition to libraries. The first half of the book is a collection of articles on assorted Tudor and Stuart topics, ranging from Weelkes and Taverner to the music that adorned King James's ceremonial return to his native Scotland in 1617. Brett invites the reader to look at old repertoires in a new and different light, most notably in his 1982 article Facing the Music, which begins as a review of Striggio's forty-part motet Ecce beatam lucem and turns into a heart-on-sleeve polemic, an appeal to musicians to shed their timidities and preoccupations and to exercise imaginative efforts of (p. 29) as they think about music. He certainly followed this advice in his own scholarship. One fine example in this book is his essay on Word Setting in the Songs of Byrd. This is an account of Byrd's treatment of English poetry-music of great subtlety which has sometimes been given short shrift among historians dazzled by the innovations of the Italianate madrigal, unwilling or unable to engage with the composer's ingrained conservatism and what Brett calls his positively Spenserian historical (p. 20). Revisiting this article gives us yet more cause to regret the loss of Brett's promised but unwritten book on Byrd's English-texted music. Another welcome reprint is his 1964 account of the Paston collection, that unusually rich tangle of Elizabethan and Jacobean music manuscripts, first published in Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society and now restored to its rightful place in the music stacks. The crux of this volume is the short essay at its center, William Byrd: New Reflections, written in Brett's final year and left incomplete at his death. His words here might surprise those familiar with his work on Byrd's musical identity as a persecuted Catholic in post-Reformation England: The work of uncovering this persecution story and revealing Byrd's music as a kind of counterdiscourse has largely been done, and done powerfully and well. It is perhaps time to move on to consider other issues that might move us closer to a more complex understanding of Byrd's position and its ramifications, (pp. 124-25) This is an invitation to step beyond our two familiar images of Byrd: the political activist, unleashing his righteous anger on the English musical marketplace, and the stubborn recusant, tucked away in rural Essex with his elaborate liturgical schemes, indifferent or numb to the world outside. There is of course much truth to both of these portraits, but neither can do full justice to his artistic development or to his obviously complex interior life. Brett suggests a revised model of Byrd's career as a process of inward transformation: acquiring a deeply rooted sense of musical tradition and decorum during his apprenticeship, at least partially losing that decorum as he responded to traumatic public events in his middle years, and finally regaining it near the end of his life, as he took on a strict liturgical ethos and cultivated a creative tension between form and content (p. 126). The parallel with Spenser is drawn once again, to winning effect: the consummate English Renaissance artist, fashioning himself in a changing and often perilous climate. …