Why is william byrd famous

In and Byrd published two volumes of Gradualia , a large collection containing some pieces, and providing an extraordinary feast of sacred polyphony for a full catholic liturgical year. Excerpts from these liturgical cycles provide the musical thread that runs through How to Preserve the Health of Man: Five Faces of William Byrd , with each episode focusing on a particular feast-day and featuring music that links to that feast from the Gradualia.

These relationships, and the importance of them for Byrd, are illustrated musically through pieces that reflect these characters, either directly or indirectly. Tallis is dead, and music dies. The episodes will be available on BBC Sounds after initial broadcast. These intricate works combine voice and viols in magical union, the latter not simply a vocal accompaniment; they provide counterpoint-rich music of their own. Four minutes of choral heaven. Byrd carresses the words with his most beautiful and, in many ways, his most simple music.

He was born in England, and began what was to be an outstanding career in music, from a very early age. Byrd primarily enjoyed composing psalms, sonnets and songs, prodding religious themes and diaspora of the time in to these compositions. Although this period, often referred to as the Lincoln years, was marred with controversy, it also contributed significantly to some of the techniques Byrd familiarized himself with that he would put to good use in the later years of his professional career.

These compositions usually followed a similar trend of appreciating and handpicking thematic topics and arrangements from the Christian practice of Tenebrae, and demonstrating a genuine interpretation of Elizabethan Catholic practices and rituals. In the latter half of his life, Byrd gained precedence and stature partly as a result of his success as Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and his collaborations with the great Thomas Tallis in a joint publication of hymns and sonets, called Cantiones.

These positions provided him with the opportunity to widen his scope for musical composition, mainly refraining to the Protestant rituals and beliefs. Together they received in a license "to imprint any and so many as they will of set songe or songes in partes, either in English, Latine, Frenche, Italian or other tongues that may serve for musicke either in Church or chamber, or otherwise to be plaid or soong…. The proprietary fervor it inspired no doubt was a factor in the extraordinarily productive period which followed.

The music in these, along with that available only in manuscript, such as the important keyboard collection "My Lady Neville's Book," reflects his esthetic position as a transitional figure between medieval and modern times.

The very fact that these collections were composed and prepared for circulation in print furnishes one aspect of their modernity. And that the composer himself was launching these editions as a financial venture is another. Both these considerations relate to innovative features on the esthetic side, which in turn signalize several new developments in the musical culture of 17th-century England.

However, Byrd did provide for a glimpse of contemporary procedures in the circulation of music with his expressed resolve to expose untrue copies of his works then abroad. All this, music printing was to change.

In the body of the collection, one of the upper parts of pieces in all three categories indicated in the title is marked "the first singing voice. Presumably his motivation was to increase sales by appealing to a wider public, or at least to a greater number of performers.

On the whole, though, the effect of this procedure was to bring Byrd's compositions into alignment with the Italian madrigal, by then new only in England, and they are rather stiff and unwieldy part-songs compared to the livelier polyphonic works of the Italians.