Early Music

After waiting almost four centuries for his own conference, England's premier Renaissance composer has been treated to two in as many years. Following the meeting at Leeds University in September 2004 on Byrd's Englishtexted output (see EM, xxxii (2004), pp.640-41), the International William Byrd Conference at Duke University, 17-19 November 2005, marked the first full-scale academic event devoted to exploring the composer and his music. The plaudits for this achievement go to Kerry McCarthy at Duke University's music department, not merely for hosting a successful conference, but for the impressive feat of assembling the majority of scholars responsible for five decades of Byrd research together in one place. The three days comprised 23 papers arranged into six loosely themed sessions, the surface of which will be skimmed here.

Byrd's contrapuntal practice was confirmed as a hot topic in a session featuring papers by James McKay, John Milsom, Julian Grimshaw and Davitt Moroney. Although all four speakers had different methodological concerns, a recurring emphasis on pre-compositional planning in the Latin sacred music helped to reveal how these fascinating polyphonic textures were constructed from raw musical material. Consensus was evident regarding the inadequacy of the term 'imitation' in this context, and John Milsom furthered his support for the adoption of fuga as a more suitable label for the processes at work. (See his encounter with Lassus in EM, xxxiii (2005), pp.305-20.). As this speaker also pointed out, investigating Byrd's craft in this way may promote its relevance to the wider history of musical composition, and enable us to link the composer's art to that of other figures in the canon.

The issue of modality versus tonality was the focus of discussion following a pair of papers from William Mahrt and Jessie Ann Owens. Mahrt examined Byrd's use of commixtio, the juxtaposition of interval characteristics from different modes, in order to shed light on the expressive qualities of his melodic lines. In contrast, by posing the question 'Does Byrd have a lament key?' Jessie Ann Owens invited us to leave modal theory behind and concentrate solely on concepts of key. Whether the choice is as simple as this is perhaps a moot point, and it could be argued that the music will accommodate both approaches; the fact that both papers offered valuable insight into Byrd's sound-world at least makes any decision less urgent.

Kerry McCarthy presented a revealing discussion of the significance of the Byrd-Tallis 1575 Cantiones Sacrae, and also found time to deliver a paper from Timothy Day on changing trends in 20th-century Byrd performance. Tackling issues of text-setting were contributions from David Trendell on Byrd's musical recusant language in the 1589 and 1591 Cantiones Sacrae, Jason Gersh on rhetorical and deictic text-painting strategies in the earlier volume, and John Harley on the relationship between musical and literary grammar in Tui sunt coeli from the 1607 Gradualia.

Byrd's instrumental output was covered in papers on the nature of the keyboard canon from the 19th century to the present day (Richard Turbet), stylistic distinctions in My Ladye Nevells Booke (Walter Kreysig) and the problematic status of keyboard pieces originally conceived for viol consort (David Crook). The opening of the conference, meanwhile, had seen the spotlight on the recusant community, as two papers on the Paston manuscript collection (Samuel Schmitt and myself) were followed by a study of Catholic meaning in the texts of Byrd's consort songs (Rebecca Redman).

In a particularly engaging paper Oliver Neighbour focused on the significance of a recently recovered antipopish chant-setting ascribed to one 'Birde'. Neighbour explained that the musician responsible could in fact have been our William as a young Protestant, who at some point underwent a conversion to the old religion. This led to the intriguing suggestion that the personal devotional nature of the three masses and Gradualia might in fact bear traces of the composer's experiences of Protestant piety in the 1540s. Also reinterpreting the early stages of Byrd's career was Roger Bowers, whose discussion of the composer's years at Lincoln Cathedral included...