1543–1623 · United Kingdom
William Byrd was an English composer, organist and harpsichordist who died in 1623. He served in the Chapel Royal under Queen Elizabeth, wrote sacred and secular vocal music, and left pavans, galliards and variations for keyboard. The site has two of his piano pieces at the intermediate plus level.
Byrd's birthplace was London, and his family was both musical and fairly prosperous. Thomas and Margery Byrd had several sons, and William was the third to survive childhood. Symond and John, his elder brothers, went into trade as London merchants, while one of his four sisters wed an instrument maker. Few details of Byrd's early life are known, and no papers survive about his schooling or first music lessons.
Thomas Tallis is named as Byrd's teacher, and the 1575 volume that the two men issued jointly points to this. Among the earliest works that survive are exercises from his student days, such as the consort piece Sermone Blando and a Miserere. The psalm In exitu Israel for four male voices was probably another early venture, composed together with the Chapel Royal singers John Sheppard and William Mundy towards the close of Queen Mary Tudor's reign. Such pieces suggest that polyphony formed part of his early training.
Byrd was given his first known post in 1563, as organist and choirmaster at Lincoln's cathedral, and he stayed there until 1572. The music he wrote for the local Anglican services was modest in scale. His Short Service, setting the Anglican morning, communion and evening services, most likely belongs to these Lincoln years: it seems to have been meant to give the clear words and plain texture that the Protestant reformers asked for.
Lincoln was not entirely smooth for him. On 19 November 1569 the cathedral's dean and chapter called Byrd to account over some accusations and stopped his pay. A second order, of 29 November, laid out in detail how the organ was to be used in worship. Because Puritan views carried weight in Lincoln, the objections may have been aimed at overly lavish choral polyphony or organ playing.
Byrd's wedding took place on 14 September 1568 at St Margaret-in-the-Close, a Lincoln church. The bride, Juliana, belonged to the Birley family of Lincolnshire. Baptism entries name two children, Christopher and Elizabeth, yet the couple had no fewer than seven in all.
Byrd also advanced as an instrumental composer in these years. Seven In Nomine settings for consort, at least one of the consort fantasias and a group of weighty keyboard pieces are thought to come from Lincoln, including the Fantasia in A minor and probably the earliest of his big pavan-and-galliard sequences. When he left the city, the chapter kept him on a smaller payment, provided that he went on sending the cathedral new compositions.
In 1572 Byrd succeeded to a Gentleman's place in the London Chapel Royal, England's biggest choir of the kind, after Robert Parsons drowned in the Trent on 25 January. The post was held for life and paid well. From early on he is described as organist, even though the chapel had no formal office of that name; it was a task open to any member able to do it.
A royal grant of 1575 gave Byrd and Tallis the sole right to print music and ruled music paper for 21 years. They put it to use in a shared book titled Cantiones sacrae, which held 34 Latin motets for the Queen herself. Each composer contributed 17 of them, matching the number of years she had reigned. The printer was Thomas Vautrollier, a French Huguenot living in England.
The book brought losses. By 1577 Byrd and Tallis were obliged to appeal to the Queen for assistance, and afterwards they received lands in East Anglia and the west of the country on a 21-year lease. Byrd's early motets show the mark of Alfonso Ferrabosco, an Italian composer active at the English court on and off from 1562 to 1578, from whom he learned how to shape expressive motets.
Byrd's family was probably Protestant, yet during the 1570s he drew ever closer to Catholics and became a more and more fervent one. The family lived in 1577–1592 at Harlington, west of London, where first the composer's wife and later Byrd himself were entered on the lists of recusants, who would not go to Protestant church services. She was listed from 1577, he from 1584.
Trouble came in 1583, when Byrd's friendship with Lord Thomas Paget, a man suspected of taking part in the Throckmorton Plot, brought him under suspicion. His Chapel Royal membership was, it seems, put on hold for a time; limits were set on where he could go, and his house was listed for searches. In 1586 he joined a meeting at a country house, in company with the priest Henry Garnett, later put to death over the Gunpowder Plot, and with Robert Southwell, a poet of the same faith.
Between 1575 and 1591 Byrd composed roughly fifty Latin motets. Scholars believe that the motets of the 1580s mark a shift in tone: he purposely picks scriptural words about the oppression of God's chosen, about exile in Babylon and Egypt, and about hoped-for rescue. Deus venerunt gentes, which sets the first four verses of Psalm 78, is commonly tied to the 1581 execution of Edmund Campion, an event that horrified Catholics in England and the rest of Europe.
Philippe de Monte, music director to the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, mailed Byrd a motet in 1583 on the first lines of Psalm 136, Super flumina Babylonis. Its final words asked how the Lord's song could be sung on foreign soil. A year later Byrd answered with a motet of his own, Quomodo cantabimus, starting from exactly that question. Each piece has eight parts, and Byrd's contains a canon for three voices by inversion.
Byrd brought out two books of English songs in 1588 and 1589, and two more books of Latin motets, both called Cantiones sacrae, in 1589 and 1591. Together the motet books hold 37 pieces and are inscribed to prominent noblemen, Edward Somerset, fourth Earl of Worcester, and John Lumley, first Baron Lumley. Researchers see the publications as an effort to repair his standing at court after the turbulent 1580s.
England's first printed madrigals appear in the 1588 book. A good many of its songs began as solo pieces with a string accompaniment, which Byrd made fully vocal by fitting words to the instrumental lines. He moved in the literary circle of Sir Philip Sidney, set three poems from Astrophel and Stella, and added two laments for Sidney, who died at Zutphen in 1586. A lullaby, Lullay, lullaby, became the best-loved number.
In the 1590s Byrd and his family left Harlington for Stondon Massey, a little Essex village near Chipping Ongar. What drew him there seems to have been the nearby home of his patron, Sir John Petre, a rich Catholic landowner. Petre had Masses celebrated in secret, with music from his own servants, and spies and paid informers kept watch on them. Byrd knew the Petres from 1581 at the latest, and spent a fortnight with them over Christmas 1589.
Byrd's Catholic faith kept bringing him problems. Time and again he appeared before the local quarterly courts, he was reported to the archdeacon's court for staying away from his parish church, and the fines he paid were heavy. From 1605, in the days of the Gunpowder Plot, a time of struggle against Catholicism, certain works of his could no longer be performed in England without risking prison.
At Stondon Massey Byrd produced the church music held to be his finest. It comprises three Mass settings, for three, four and five voices, and the Gradualia, a pair of large collections of proper chants in three to six parts. London printed the Gradualia in 1605 and 1607, and they cover much more than graduals: introits, alleluias, tracts, offertories and communions are there too.
Later on Byrd added further consort songs, among them laments for notable people: the Earl of Essex (1601), the Catholic Viscountess Montague, Magdalen Dacre (1608), and Prince Henry (1612). Another collection, Psalmes, Songs, and Sonnets, came out in 1611. He died on 4 July 1623, with heart failure given as the cause. Fines never stopped, yet he left a large fortune, and at the time he had rooms in the Earl of Worcester's London house.
Byrd's output spans nearly all the genres of Tudor England: church and secular vocal polyphony, keyboard pieces and consort music. He counts as the father of the English virginalist school. He began writing for the keyboard in the mid-1570s.
His keyboard works were gathered in two renowned manuscripts, the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book and My Ladye Nevells Booke, the latter entirely his own music. John Baldwin completed the copy on 11 September 1591. It has 42 pieces, and it was probably prepared under Byrd's eye. Its dedicatee is Lady Elizabeth Neville. Pavan-and-galliard pairs and assorted variations, grounds among them, make up the biggest share of Byrd's keyboard output.
There are ten pavans with galliards in My Ladye Nevells Booke, each in the standard three-section shape with decorated repeats, along with two huge grounds, big variation sets, and fantasias and voluntaries that run from strictly contrapuntal to lighter pieces with an Italian flavour. No liturgical plainchant settings are included. In the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book the first pavan carries a note saying it was the first Byrd ever wrote.
Pieces with descriptive titles, often imitating sounds, are also important. Best known are The Battell (MB 94) and Carman's Whistle (MB 36). The sections of The Battell follow the stages of a fight, starting with a march to the field and ending with a galliard celebrating victory. Among the variation sets, A Lament for Walsingham (MB 68) and the one on Sellinger's Round are prominent. Scholars refer to the keyboard pieces by the letters MB and a number from Alan Brown's complete edition.
Byrd's church music takes in three Masses, the Gradualia and the Anglican Great Service for choir and organ, which was probably sung at the Chapel Royal and, as the manuscripts show, was performed in the early seventeenth century in York, Durham, Worcester and Cambridge. He also wrote consort songs, madrigals and music for consort, including a big set of twenty variations known as the Browning.
The site has two Byrd pieces for solo piano, both at the intermediate plus level: William - Fantasia and My Ladye Nevells Grownde. You can begin with either of them.