Program Notes


    In his time William Byrd occupied a position in the world of music comparable 
to that of Shakespeare in the realm of letters.  The brilliance of Byrd's gifts is 
displayed in the five-voice motet Libera Me, Domine.  A work of his early maturity--
published when he was barely 32--it is an excellent example of his deep and exhaustive
engagement with a text.  In one of his prefaces he wrote of his belief in "the profound
and hidden power of sacred words;...to one thinking upon things divine, and diligently
and earnestly pondering them, all the fittest numbers [musical ideas] occur as if of
themselves..."  The gravely serious, inwardly-turned spiritual intensity of this work
may well result, in part, from Byrd's employment of this approach.
    The music of the opening phrase, "Libera me", winds upward in entreaty and con-
currently in inversions downward in despairing sorrow.  The mood of supplication turns 
to one of hope and rising spirits in the faith that with God's help the speaker will
prevail against the hand of any foe.  However, the second section returns to the dark
night of the soul.  Its music in expressing distraction and inner torment is dense,
complexly interwoven, restlessly active polyphony, whose power and relentlessness 
presage somewhat the sacred music of Bach.  Despite a prevailing pensive mood, there is 
a return to hope and a measure of accepting serenity brightening the close of the piece.
    In the context of the time, Catholics like Byrd lived in terrible moral conflict 
between their fealty to a Protestant sovereign, and the loyalty of their consciences
to the Church and the pope (and therefore the pledge of their souls to God).  The 
choice of texts such as "Libera Me" must be read as a plea to the Lord for religious 
restoration and an assertion of faith that it would be granted.

    Byrd's single set of Lamentations of Jeremiah are an early work, written when the
composer was in his early twenties, and were almost certainly inspired by the reknowned
examples in this genre by his teacher, friend, and colleague, Tallis, as well as by 
those of his older contemporary, Robert White.  The young composer's essay accords him 
full equality with these two; indeed the raptly introspective profundity of Byrd's music
and its harmonic inventiveness break new ground--his ability and intention to surprise
and delight the ear are already fully manifest.
    The texture is broadly melismatic, with much free polyphony in the manner of the 
older English composers; such imitation as does occur is treated rather casually and 
not developed as rigorously as in "Libera Me".  A slight inflection in the pervading 
mood of penitence and grief occurs toward the end at the exhortation to return to the
path of the Lord.  Here again is a work expressive of the "captivity", as seen by 
Catholics, of England under heretical Protestant rule and illegitimacy.  This rarely-
performed work survives in a single imperfect manuscript copy; the tenor part is 
missing in a few places and has been reconstructed, in a version that has achieved 
general acceptance, by Thurston Dart.  Originally for very low mens' voices, we perform 
it transposed up a fourth.  The tessitura is still low, and we trust that any loss in
sepulchral resonance is made up for in clarity and intensity.
    The motet Laudibus in Sanctis, published in Byrd's Cantiones Sacrae of 1591, 
exemplifies his fully-ripened artistic powers.  The text is a paraphrase of Psalm 150
in Latin elegiac verse, cast in the form of a sonnet.  It is a high-spirited expression 
of praise and celebration, employing elevated ranges, with two soprano parts, in all 
five voices.  There is much reliance on chordal textures in syncopated rhythms, with 
appropriate illustrations of words like "cantate", "alta", "agili", "cymbala", etc., 
and dancelike triple rhythms for "laeta chorea pede".  A broadening and powerful
conclusion occurs in which the last phrase of text rides the music to lofty heights.

    Byrd wrote only a few madrigals in the Italian style; most of his songs were based 
on a simpler native tradition of English verse.  The rise of the Italian madrigal 
proper, a phenomenon which pervaded Elizabethan cultural life toward the end of the 
16th century, is the musical expression of the avid emulation in sophisticated circles 
of foreign arts and letters--at times an almost faddish subservience rather 
embarrassing to later scholars of the "golden age" of Elizabeth.  There had been a 
whole generation of exposure to the Italian model (epitomized by Luca Marenzio) before 
a brilliant, distinctive English school arose.

    Together with Thomas Weelkes, John Wilbye (originally Willoughbye) exemplifies the 
heights of this rich native flowering.  He, above all others, fully comprehended and 
creatively assimilated Marenzio, and yet his own personality is always distinctly in
evidence: melancholy, poetic, extremely sensitive, and imaginatively resourceful.  Though
none of our three selections is among his more large scale creations, together they 
afford a good summary of his skills.
    All pleasure is of this condition opens lightly, as a pastoral madrigal.  There is
much "word painting", which in his hands never succumbs to naivete, as so often in 
others: the word "pricks" is presented in notewise-ascending staggered entries, the 
syncopated notes "poking through" the others.  An impressive aural effect is created 
for the "humming" of the bee: other inner voices buzz tightly up and down in fast notes 
while gathered into a "hive" of long static notes in soprano and bass.  The "wound" of 
the "sting" is heard as downward leaps of a seventh (very rare in Renaissance music) with
surprising accidentals that engender "near-misses" and pleasantly painful augmented
and diminished intervals.  (The sexual allusions in the text are obvious, almost risque.)
But with "gnawing grief and neverending smart". the composer gradually ends the mood
of playfulness with incremental shifts toward sobriety and melancholy reflection--a most
typical Elizabethan turn of thought.
    If the preceding piece turns rather lightly to melancholy at the close, Weep, weep, 
mine eyes finds its only note of hope at the conclusion.  It is Hero's lament for 
Leander, her lover who swam the Hellespont every night to be with her; when he drowns, 
she resolves to join him in death, hurling herself into the waters.  Here Wilbye's 
ability to sustain a sensitive and subtly inflected melancholy is wonderfully 
exemplified.  The grafting on of a Christian idea, the resurrection, is suggested in the 
final phrases of text.
    In antipodal contrast is the six-voice Lady, when I behold: a light, amorous text 
based on the simplest of conceits, set forth in delightfully airy and carefree music in 
the best tradition of the pastoral madrigal--a perfect evocation, in spirit, of 
Springtime.

    John Dowland's reknown as a lutenist spread to the courts of Europe, where he 
traveled extensively, taking an important post in Denmark and visiting at length in 
Germany and Italy.  His reputation today is based largely upon his four books of songs, 
or ayres, solo songs with lute accompaniment which can also be presented as four-part 
ensemble songs, as in our program this evening.  Dowland achieved a further prominence 
as one of the most flagrant and colorful exponents of the Elizabethan "cult of 
melancholy" ("Semper Dowland, semper dolens", as he declared of himself.)  Many of his 
songs are tuneful, light, even cheerful in spirit, however.  Fine knacks for ladies, a 
case in point, is in the rhythm of the almain, a quick dance, in this instance.  The 
lowest trees have tops is a good example of the typical ayre--strophic, only 
superficially polyphonic, but melodically centered and conscientious in text declamation.
Humor, say begins as a dialogue between high and low solo voices, rounded off at the end 
by a refrain for four-voice chorus.  The play of words on "humor" evoke a light and 
playful irony.  From the references in the text this piece may have been intended for 
presentation before Elizabeth.

    Of the Scottish composer Robert Ramsey's life and personality very little is known.
His some 46 extant compositions display a talent of sensitivity and resource, embracing
early Baroque continuo songs as well as Latin motets in the old polyphonic style.  
Although the harmonic vocabulary of his six-voice madrigal Sleep, fleshly birth locates 
it more in the 17th century, in terms of style it is well within the circle of the 
Renaissance tradition of the English madrigal.  It is a funeral elegy for a child, 
expressing the tenderest and most heartfelt sentiment, perfectly evoking the mood of 
"a grief past all outward grieving", of unbearable loss that somehow is accepted and 
endured.  The only measure of solace is in the promise of Christian resurrection which 
concludes the piece.

    Orlando Gibbons was a leading figure in the development of a distinctly Protestant 
style of Anglican church music, and wrote fine music for keyboard as well as for voices 
and viols.  He published a single book of madrigals in 1612.  What is our life? is a 
setting for five voices of a poem by Sir Walter Raleigh.  There is a tradition that 
Raleigh wrote the poem on the eve of his execution, but this is impossible, as that 
dismal termination occurred four years after Gibbons published his madrigal setting.  
(It is possible that Raleigh may have believed when he wrote it that he soon would be 
beheaded or hanged, as James I regarded him as an enemy and kept him locked up in the 
Tower for most of the last ten years of his life.)  The poem is an elaborated simile 
on an idea very like that expressed by Shakespeare: "All the world's a stage, and all 
the men and women merely players."  Again, we have an instance of Elizabethan 
"melancholic" (perhaps somewhat tongue in cheek)--and probably better Gibbons, on the 
whole, than Raleigh.
    Luminously beautiful, The silver swan, from which our program takes its title, is
Gibbons' best-known composition today.  Based on a tiny bit of poetry expressing the 
long- held but apocryphal belief that swans find their only voice just before death, 
the metaphor shifts sideways into a sharp jab at the talkative folly of the men of 
the time.  The joke is in the composer's "straight", i.e. still sweet and serene, 
setting of those words at the end.

    Thomas Morley, Byrd's most illustrious pupil, was the founder of the English school
of madrigalists.  Thoroughly steeped in the Italian tradition, he brought to the native
idiom all of the lightness and delicacy of melody, texture, and feeling of the Italian
idyllica madrigal and canzonetta.  Though a rather extended work for six voices, Hard by
a crystal fountain is entirely in the spirit of the canzonet, the English version which
he made popular.  The "political" text is mere fluff: nymphs and shepherds in a bucolic
idyll, in chorus singing praises to Oriana, Elizabeth's conventional proxy in poetry.
The music however is full of flowing airy melodiousness and charm.  Fyer, fyer! is 
another light piece, in this instance in a jocular vein.  For some singers, fa, la, la 
refrains are the curse of the English light madrigal repertoire; these by Morley rise 
well above the average, being set out in a complex and thoroughgoing polyphonic texture.



                                                                  -- Joel van Lennep