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Linn Records Label of the Year ‘Linn is the very model of a modern record company, ensuring that the highest standards are maintained from the studio right through the company’s CKD 372 very impressive digital store.’ JAMES JOLLY, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, GRAMOPHONE LINN, GLASGOW ROAD, WATERFOOT, GLASGOW G76 0EQ UK t: +44 (0)141 303 5027/9 f: +44 (0)141 303 5007 e: [email protected] d Christe qui Lux es a4 (I) ...............................2.50 PHANTASM (CA. 1540~1623) f In nomine a5 (II) (‘on the sharp’) ...........2.32 WILLIAM BYRD LAURENCE DREYFUS director, treble viol g Christe qui Lux es a4 (II) ..............................2.42 WENDY GILLESPIE treble & tenor viols Complete Consort Music h In nomine a4 (II) .................................................2.35 JONATHAN MANSON tenor viol j Fantasia a6 (II) .....................................................5.08 MARKKU LUOLAJAN-MIKKOLA bass viol q Fantasia a3 (III) ...............................................................................1.04 k Miserere a4 ............................................................1.33 MIKKO PERKOLA tenor & bass viols w Browning a5 (The leaves be green) ...............................4.37 l Fantasia a4 (I) .......................................................2.22 EMILIA BENJAMIN tenor viol e Te lucis a4 ..........................................................................................2.20 ; Christe qui Lux es a4 (III) ............................1.07 Recorded at r In nomine a5 (III) ...........................................................................2.31 2) In nomine a5 (V) .................................................2.51 Merton College Chapel, Oxford, UK t Christe redemptor omnium a4 ..........................................3.16 2! In nomine a4 (I) ...................................................2.25 6–8 September 2010 y In nomine a5 (IV) ..........................................................................2.43 2@ Pavan and Galliard a6 ....................................3.57 Engineered by Philip Hobbs u Fantasia a4 (III) ...............................................................................2.08 2# Fantasia a6 (III) (‘to the vyolls’) ...............4.16 Post-production by Julia Thomas i Sermone Blando a3 ....................................................................2.02 2$ Pavan and Galliard a5 ....................................3.56 at Finesplice o Fantasia a5 (‘Two parts in one in the 4th above’) .....6.03 2% Sermone Blando a4 (II) .................................2.15 Design by John Haxby a Fantasia a6 (I) (A song of two basses) .........................3.38 2^ Fantasia a3 (II) .....................................................1.39 Photography by Marco Borggreve s Fantasia a3 (I) ..................................................................................1.47 2& Prelude and Goodnight Ground a5 ....5.40 www.phantasm.org.uk 2 3 Music’s glimpse of happiness is not only a gift of God, but boasts a psychic (CA. 1540~1623) WILLIAM BYRD advantage for man: as Hoby notes ‘it is a credible matter that it is acceptable Complete Consort Music unto Him, and that He hath given it unto us for a most sweet lightning of To experience William Byrd’s complete consort music at one sitting is to our travails and vexations’. Among the ‘chief conditions and qualities in a confront a richly textured portrait of one of the most acute thinkers of Courtier’ enumerated are the ability ‘to sing well upon the book’ (that is, the Elizabethan Age. For Byrd is a composer who relishes mastering and to sight-sing), ‘to play upon the Lute, and singe to it with the ditty’ and ‘to transforming the host of musical traditions handed down to him while ever play upon the viol and all other instruments with frets’. Fretted instruments anxious not to repeat himself. The result is a condensed if unparalleled are those whose necks are tied with seven adjustable strands of animal gut oeuvre of undeniable beauty composed over some forty years from the which guide the tuning of all pitches. These instruments are therefore ‘full early 1560s until the first years of the 17th century. of harmony, because the tunes of them are very perfect, and with ease may do many things upon [them] that fill the mind with the sweetness Consort music for viols was still a rarefied activity in 16th-century England and of music. And the music of a set of viols doth no less delight a man, for had yet to be transformed into the domestic ‘home entertainment centre’ it is very sweet and artificial’. If one adds to this mixture Byrd’s leaning it became in the early 17th century in the houses of well-to-do gentry. It was toward the serious side of life – he was ‘naturally disposed to Gravitie and rather at the royal court, at leading aristocratic houses, some cathedrals Pietie’ according to Henry Peacham (1622) – we can identify the goals of and theatres, and at Oxford and Cambridge where in Byrd’s day one would delight, sweetness, melancholy and technical artifice upon which Byrd set play viols. Still, composers leapt at the chance to develop a range of music his musical sights. His achievement, though forgotten after his death, is genres freed from secular poetic texts (or ‘ditties’) and church liturgy while never less than remarkable. also devising ways to evoke references to verbal poetry and the spirituality of sacred music. Like drawing, painting, fencing and dancing, the playing Only two of Byrd’s consort works found their way into print in his own day – of ensemble music was hailed as a pursuit to be cultivated by courtiers the Fantasia a4 (I) and the Fantasia a6 (III) in the Psalms, Songs and Sonnets and gentlemen as well as by their female counterparts, though to a lesser (1611), though even these works – stamped with the composer’s seal of extent. In 1561 – just as Byrd was beginning to compose his consort music approval – must have been written much earlier. For a chronology of the – Sir Thomas Hoby published an influential English translation of Baldassare entire corpus, one can infer a dating based on the still authoritative analyses Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528) where we read that ‘just as bodily of Oliver Neighbour, whose monograph from 1978 still best illumines exercise maketh the body more lusty’, music ‘brings into us a new habit that the history, context and construction of these marvellous works. Based is good, and a custom inclining to virtue which maketh the mind more apt on Neighbour (though without his consent!), I offer a rough, speculative to the conceiving of felicity’. chronology for Byrd’s forty years of experimentation. 4 5 POSSIBLE DATE The implied time line suggests that Byrd began with the polyphonic TRACK WORK OF COMPOSITION enhancement of devotional hymns (measured out in semibreves) from the 8 Sermone Blando a3 1560 dusk-to-dawn offi ces of Vespers, Compline and Lauds before moving to the 12 Christe qui Lux es a4 (I) 1560 equally venerable tradition of the In nomine, a mystical consort rhapsody 14 Christe qui Lux es a4 (II) 1560 on a famous snatch of sacred vocal music (by John Taverner) in which the 17 Miserere a4 1560 cantus fi rmus sounds in breves – twice as slow as in the hymns – and can no 3 Te lucis a4 1561 longer be related to the words of the original plainsong. From there, after 19 Christe qui Lux es a4 (III) 1561 a dense early experiment in Fantasia a6 – which fi nally ‘fugues’ on a Tudor 15 In nomine a4 (II) 1562 fi ve-note motto called ‘Praise him praiseworthy’ – Byrd tried his hand at 21 In nomine a4 (I) 1562 contrasting sets of highly artifi cial variations (or ‘descant divisions’) on bass 10 Fantasia a6 (I) (A song of two basses) 1563 grounds or popular tunes such as ‘The leaves be green’ in which the subject 4 In nomine a5 (III) 1564 keeps migrating between parts and keys. He then takes on the mimetic 6 In nomine a5 (IV) 1564 gestures of dancing in writing stately pavans and elegant galliards – some 20 In nomine a5 (V) 1564 further works a5 might still be salvaged from his keyboard music – before 5 Christe redemptor omnium a4 1565 developing a sectional fantasia which unexpectedly quotes popular ballads 13 In nomine a5 (II) (‘on the sharp’) 1565 25 Sermone Blando a 4 (II) 1565 (‘The Sick Tune’ or ‘Greensleeves’) as well as including forays to the dance 27 Prelude and Goodnight Ground a5 1569 fl oor with the easily recognised leaps of the galliard. The question of how to 24 Pavan and Galliard a5 1572 end these fantasies and grounds seems to have plagued Byrd enough that 2 Browning a5 (The leaves be green) 1577 he devises a novel instrumental apotheosis as a worldly equivalent to the 7 Fantasia a4 (III) 1585 ‘Amen’ in his sacred polyphony (for example, Track 16, 4:30 and Track 27, 16 Fantasia a6 (II) 1586 4:50), thereby raising the tonal register and the value of the genre. Finally, 9 Fantasia a5 (‘Two parts in one in the 4th above’) 1590 at the end of his compositional travels in writing for consort, Byrd strips 18 Fantasia a4 (I) 1590 away every sign of the outside world – dancing, song, religion – in the three- 23 Fantasia a6 (III) (‘to the vyolls’) 1590 voiced fantasies, and, in the most compressed form imaginable, crafts three 1 Fantasia a3 (III) 1595 musical jewels. Here, following Thomas Morley (1597), ‘more art may be 11 Fantasia a3 (I) 1603 shown than in any other music because the composer is tied to nothing, 22 Pavan and Galliard a6 1603 but may add, diminish, and alter at his pleasure’. In taking a succession of 26 Fantasia a3 (II) 1603 unmarked ‘points’, each laden with its own refi ned gradients of character, 6 7 Byrd ‘wrests and turns [the point] as he wishes’, forming a kaleidoscope of Some Textual Notes: intense yearning and delight. At times it is hard to believe there are only The Fantasia a6 (I) exists in a later version as a Latin motet Laudate pueri three voices. (and even later as an English anthem Behold now praise the Lord) from which we’ve taken Byrd’s ‘improved’ dotted figure in one rising ‘point’ of Our recording – which in its eighty minutes omits only the spurious or imitation.