Byrd
Kerry McCarthy
(c) Oxford University Press 2013
ISBN 978-0-19-538875-6
McCarthy's biography of the English Renaissance composer William Byrd is an almost breezy primer on the composer's life and times but given how opaque Renaissance choral music can be this is one of the book's several strengths. It may be that we can't entirely describe what happened in Byrd's musical life and times in terms of tonality as taught in US or UK music pedagogy; on the other hand, framing Byrd's recusant Catholicism in light of how much religious non-conformity cost other people in the Elizabethan era is not so hard to understand. We will learn from McCarthy, for instance, that once Catholic music was banned any proof of owning Catholic liturgical music within Elizabethan England was regarded as evidence of potential or actual sympathy to political intrigues against the crown.
As long as you're moderately comfortable reading scores the book isn't very taxing for a reader, although it helps a great deal if you have heard, for instance, Byrd's masses and some of his keyboard music. This is a biography that is geared for a lay reader who, while musically literate, is not going to be steeped in Renaissance liturgical practices among Protestants and Catholics and all of that. In other words, you don't have to have gotten a seminarian's education on the one hand or anything beyond undergrad level music-reading to be able to get benefits from reading this book. As Byrd has been one of my favorite composers for decades I had a lot of fun reading this biography. It also brings up a few points I have discussed here over the years about polystylistic exchange within musical eras and the role that improvisation in then-contemporary or even popular styles used to play in the music pedagogy of this or that era.
Byrd, though Catholic, clearly mastered composing music for the newly Anglican era and, perhaps paradoxically, wrote English language works such as the Great Service while he was writing Latin works going through the Propers of the Catholic Mass in his Gradualia books I and II over the course of his life. McCarthy points out how little we have by way of biographical accounts of Byrd himself but we can learn from his library of books he was conversant in law and real estate. It turns out he was litigious and also, as McCarthy recounts it, a possessive and vindictive landlord who benefited from getting eight estates from Elizabeth's command that were expropriated from dissident families. Byrd seemed to straddle the line between being personally against the new Anglican church but not in such ways as would get him arrested as a Catholic usurper as some of his friends were.
Byrd is also revealed as someone who improvised often as a young church organist in his first post, apparently more than his supervisors wanted him to. McCarthy grounds Byrd's improvisation in the pedagogy and practices of church music from the pre-Anglican era. Improvising over long-note plainchants was part of vocal and instrumental pedagogy. This tradition of improvised two-voice polyphony where a singer and budding musician/composer would learn how to improvise over long, drawn-out notes of a plainchant was functionally quashed by the new Calvinist regime of music.
That Calvinists came and demolished the arts is, in some ways, a bit of a canard that I have heard from Lutherans and some Anglicans over the years .... but suffice it to say for the moment Richard Taruskin's volume 1 of his Oxford History of Western Music highlights that the magisterial Reformers were not actually against music or the arts as such, neither Luther nor Calvin nor even Zwingli. Zwingli was a gifted multi-instrumentalist, for instance. What the Reformers were against was art that was propped up by the system of indulgences that they regarded as corrupt beyond salvage and so there were varying degrees of rejection of art forms that reflected that financial system.
A way to translate the tenor of the polemic into terms twenty-first century American readers might be able to understand might be to say that the Reformers rejected arts that expressed views they believed were wrong at the behest of a financial/patronage system they regarded as terrible ... perhaps you can think of it as reformers objecting to the superhero movie as an exemplar of American imperialism where American imperialism is substituted with the Roman Catholic church as a power broker in the geopolitical scene of the early Reformation era. For those of us who live five centuries on the art won't have those associations that Reformers made between art X and patronage/regime system Y. That is a topic I might have to touch upon later at some other time.
Where Byrd's life and times were concerned Catholic liturgical music became the most underground of underground music. McCarthy's book makes a simple, blunt but fascinating point about how bad musical life was in Elizabethan England. Thanks to the survivorship bias of the music of Byrd and Tallis we could think of musical life in Elizabethan England as a golden age. It wasn't. Reformers purged a lot of the musical life out of the Church of England as part of reforms but many churches had under-funded and under-tended cadres of musicians anyway. Musical life was a golden age on the very big "if" if you were connected to the Elizabethan court and courtiers of the day but the rest of the more rank and file churches didn't have a particularly vibrant musical life. To put things even more starkly, William Byrd and his predecessor Thomas Tallis had been granted an exclusive royal monopoly on music publishing so OF COURSE they were able to make the most of it!
That improvisation was a crucial part of the pedagogy and practice of church music prior to the Elizabethan era Calvinist reforms is something that might seem pedestrian but in light of contemporary discussions and debates about music education and musicology, and by this I mean different battles between largely self-identified poptimists and traditionalists, within the United States, it's interesting to see how pervasive improvisation on stock materials has been throughout the history of Western music UNTIL we get to more recent regimes of music education. See pages 23 and 24 of McCarthy for a summary of how church music since Henry VIII at the regional level had gone into a spiral of neglect and how Byrd, early in his career, seems to have done a lot of improvising. See page 47 for the important role of creative improvisation on a fixed melody in music education.
Composers will want to note an observation McCarthy makes at page 88 about songs in strophic form. She points out that when you build a song around a recursive melody you don't want to have the melody fit too perfectly to any single verse of your text. I can give an example, "Greensleeves" isn't the kind of melody that does a lot of text-painting for any given verse. The melody gives us a mood and a mood that pervades the verses of the text but that's it. Sometimes a brilliantly written song can be functionally strophic and have a melody that is at an ironic, detached relationship to the text. A superb example of this from contemporary song would be Stevie Wonder's neo-galant accompaniment and vocal melody for his song "Village Ghetto Land" from Songs in the Key of Life.
Why might I mention that? Because, as McCarthy points out throughout her biography, William Byrd was clearly as conversant in the popular song forms of his day as he was in the sophisticated techniques of polyphonic liturgical music. McCarthy points out that even in Byrd's most serious instrumental works he reveals an interest in the popular song styles of his day and in a fantasia in G minor for viols he builds up an increasingly complex set of variations that abruptly becomes a lively take on the chorus from Greensleeves.
As is well-known for those who have studied the Mass as a genre in Renaissance music, most masses from the Renaissance were based on already existing musical ideas (McCarthy, page 135). Parody technique was commonplace. You took a piece of polyphonic music and reworked it into a new piece by drawing upon a new text, or the text you needed to use to have yourself a polyphonic mass. McCarthy points out, too, that composers advertised their borrowings openly, even when the musical material borrowed was originally used for vulgar, salacious, obscene and scatological content. By the end of the sixteenth century, McCarthy writes, MOST polyphonic masses were based on this kind of musical transformation yet parody technique never caught on much in England, and that is some important background for why Byrd's masses for 3, 4 and 5 voices are so unlike the works of his contemporaries. What it also suggests is that, to put this in terms pertinent to contemporary music, that entire polyphonic masses were built around what could amount to the full-scale borrowing and re-purposing of existing melodic ideas (i.e. sampling) is axiomatic among scholars of Renaissance music.
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