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William Byrd and his Contemporaries: Essays and a Monograph.

Article Excerpt
William Byrd and his Contemporaries: Essays and a Monograph. By Philip Brett; edited by Joseph Kerman and Davitt Moroney. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. [xiii, 252 p. ISBN-13 978-0-520-24758-1. $39.95.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographic references, index.

William Byrd and his Contemporaries is one of two posthumous collections of Philip Brett's work published by the University of California Press. Its companion volume, Music and Sexuality in Britten, also appeared in 2006. The essays in the present book span four decades, from Brett's student days in the early 1960s to his untimely death in 2002. Most of them will be familiar to those who study early English music, but some of them have been tucked away in relatively obscure sources, and this volume will be a welcome and convenient addition to libraries.

The first half of the book is a collection of articles on assorted Tudor and Stuart topics, ranging from Weelkes and Taverner to the music that adorned King James's ceremonial return to his native Scotland in 1617. Brett invites the reader to look at old repertoires in a new and different light, most notably in his 1982 article "Facing the Music," which begins as a review of Striggio's forty-part motet Ecce beatam lucem and turns into a heart-on-sleeve polemic, an appeal to musicians to shed their timidities and preoccupations and to exercise "imaginative efforts of understanding" (p. 29) as they think about music. He certainly followed this advice in his own scholarship. One fine example in this book is his essay on "Word Setting in the Songs of Byrd." This is an account of Byrd's treatment of English poetry--music of great subtlety which has sometimes been given short shrift among historians dazzled by the innovations of the Italianate madrigal, unwilling or unable to engage with the composer's ingrained conservatism and what Brett calls his...