Liturgy and Contemplation in Byrd's Gradualia

Kerry McCarthy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781138965249
• eBook ISBN: 9781135865634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

William Byrd's Gradualia is one of the most unusual and elaborate musical works of the English Renaissance. This large collection of liturgical music, 109 pieces in all, was written for clandestine use by English Catholics at a time when they were forbidden to practice their religion in public. When Byrd began to compose the Gradualia, he turned from the penitential and polemical extravagances of his earlier Latin motets to the narrow, carefully ordered world of the Counter-Reformation liturgy. It was in this new context, cut off from his familiar practice of choosing colorful texts and setting them at length, that he first wrote about the "hidden and mysterious power" of sacred words to evoke a creative response.

Liturgy and Contemplation in Byrd's Gradualia responds to Byrd's own testimony by exploring how he read the texts of the Mass and the events of the church calendar. Kerry McCarthy examines early modern English Catholic attitudes toward liturgical practice, meditation, and what the composer himself called "thinking over divine things." She draws on a wide range of contemporary sources — devotional treatises, commentaries on the Mass, poetry, memoirs, letters, and Byrd's dedicatory prefaces — and revisits the Gradualia in light of this evidence. The book offers a case study of how one artist reimagined the creative process in the final decades of his life.

1
The Gradualia Cycle

Genre and Presentation

The Renaissance music theorist Johannes Tinctoris sorted the polyphonic music of his day into three categories:

A Mass is a large piece of music, to which the words Kyrie, Et in terra, Patrem, Sanctus, and Agnus, and sometimes other parts, are set to be sung by several voices: others call this the Office.

A motet is a moderate-sized piece of music, to which any sort of words are set, but most often sacred.

A song is a small piece of music, to which any sort of words are set, but most often amatory.¹

This simple scheme can be traced back to the ancient hierarchy of literary genres and, more directly, to Cicero’s three genera dicendi or levels of rhetoric. ² Just as classical poetry falls into various categories (epic, lyric, pastoral), and classical rhetorical style into various degrees of elaboration (grand, moderate, humble), so musical compositions are either large (magnus), middlesized (mediocris), or small (parvus).³ The polyphonic Mass enjoyed the place of honor among Renaissance musicians, as the epic poem had among the ancient Greeks and Romans, for both aesthetic and ideological reasons. It accompanied the most important ritual act in Christian society, and it was adorned with the most complex and varied techniques available to composers. ⁴ Tinctoris’s definition of the genre includes not only the five well-known Mass movements—Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus—but interdum caeterae partes, “sometimes other parts.” By “other parts” he meant the constantly varying proper of the Mass, the pieces that change from one day to the next: the introit, offertory, and communion, along with some combination of gradual, alleluia, tract, and sequence, according to the season and the importance of the occasion. These proper items are interwoven with the Mass ordinary and are equally vital to the order of the service. William Byrd devoted most of his two volumes of Gradualia to music of this sort.⁵

The tradition of setting Mass propers “to be sung by several voices” is nearly as old as polyphony itself and includes some of the most intricate music of the Western polyphonic tradition. Perhaps most notable is the medieval repertoire of the Magnus liber organi, which began life in the later twelfth century at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris and was eventually transmitted as far afield as Spain and Scotland.⁶ The Magnus liber sets the solo portions of numerous graduals and alleluias to polyphony. These two pieces, the most elaborate in the chanted Mass proper, are sung together as a reflective interlude between the epistle and the gospel; their opening intonations and verses are traditionally assigned to skilled cantors, which makes them an obvious choice for multivoiced settings. The series of Notre Dame graduals and alleluias covers the medieval calendar in a systematic way, set out according to the order and liturgical rank of each occasion. Craig Wright has compared this music to other great works of an era that admired hierarchy, intellectual order, and the pursuit of encyclopedic knowledge: “That a single individual might attempt to apply polyphonic music to the liturgy on a systematic basis for all the major feasts of the Church year is harmonious with the tenor of the age. The one hundred or so organa in the Magnus liber organi of Leoninus constituted no less a summa musicae liturgicae than . . . the Summa of Aquinas.”⁷

Despite the formidable precedent of the Magnus liber, there was no similar tradition of polyphonic Mass propers in the later Middle Ages. The strictures of Pope John XXII’s early-fourteenth-century decree Docta sanctorum, which banned (at least in theory) all but the simplest liturgical polyphony, could hardly have helped reverse this decline.⁸ When the genre began to resurface in the fifteenth century, it did so only in certain circumstances. Polyphonic settings of the Mass ordinary flourished in almost every place with sufficient resources to support them. Proper settings were rare by comparison. The main reason was, of course, a practical one: the five movements of the ordinary are fixed and suitable for almost any liturgical occasion, but the proper is specific to a single event in the calendar, which makes it something of an extravagance rather than a practical addition to a choir’s everyday repertoire. Given the resources and labor needed to produce polyphonic music, especially before the easy availability of print, it is no surprise that composers and their patrons turned away from constantly varying texts in favor of unchanging ones.

The existing repertoire of Mass proper cycles in the Renaissance can be split roughly into two categories, divided by the liturgical reforms during (and, to some extent, preceding) the mid-sixteenth-century Council of Trent. One of the most important changes at the Counter-Reformation was a radical pruning of votive Masses, various services sung ad libitum in place of the usual Mass of the day. The Tridentine decrees restored the existing calendar of feast days to primary status, eliminating many votive Masses and restricting the use of the remaining ones. This was a major departure from late medieval custom. Up to the early sixteenth century, the Mass proper for Pentecost, Trinity, or even Easter was often adopted for the ordinary Sundays during the year; the Virgin Mary was traditionally commemorated on Saturday, the Holy Cross on Friday, and the Eucharist on Thursday; the Requiem Mass was, of course, ubiquitous. Fifteenth-century manuscripts such as Trent 88, which transmit polyphonic votive cycles rather than systematic settings for the liturgical year, offer an accurate snapshot of the church’s priorities at the time they were compiled. ⁹ Musicians also had pragmatic reasons to concentrate on votive offices at the expense of individual feast days, just as they preferred the more stable Mass ordinary over the less stable Mass proper. Votive music could be recycled once a week, or even more frequently, while music for a particular festival was limited by the demands of the annual calendar.

Almost all of the few surviving proper settings from pre-Reformation England were intended for votive Masses—more precisely for the Missa Salve, or Lady Mass, the regular commemoration of the Virgin that was a staple of English choral foundations. The Lady Mass in the Sarum liturgy was provided with a different alleluia for each day of the week, which became a favorite place for polyphonic elaboration. Despite the wholesale destruction of English liturgical materials in the course of the sixteenth century, there are extant alleluia settings by a number of early Tudor composers: Nicholas Ludford, John Sheppard, John Taverner, and even the young Thomas Tallis.¹⁰ The tradition eventually resurfaced with Byrd, whose Gradualia includes a full set of music (though following the Roman missal rather than the Sarum rite) for these votive services.

The Lady Mass was cultivated enthusiastically in England up to the Reformation. Musicians in some other areas of Europe had already started, in the generation before Martin Luther’s reforms, to move away from the late medieval emphasis on votive Masses and to concentrate instead on the proper services for Sundays and feast days. The trend toward liturgical integrity gained momentum under the influence of John Burchard, papal master of ceremonies to Innocent VIII and the notorious Alexander VI, who issued a reformed Ordo Missae in 1502 as a humanistic tidying-up operation on what he saw as an overgrown liturgy. Burchard’s Ordo had a considerable impact on its early-sixteenth-century admirers, who started almost at once, especially in German-speaking circles, to cut down on the proliferation of votive offices.¹¹ Perhaps most noteworthy in this context are the Mass propers set by Heinrich Isaac under the commission of Constance Cathedral and the imperial chapel— a tradition carried on through the sixteenth century by Isaac’s student Ludwig Senfl and his successors at the Munich Hofkapelle, up to and including Orlando de Lassus.¹² Manuscript sources such as Jena 30 and Weimar A began to set out the propers of the year in a comprehensive cyclic format.¹³ The Lyons Contrapunctus, published in 1528 and the first printed book of Mass propers to appear on the European market, is a yet more orderly cycle for major feast days: more than 80 percent of its texts match the contents of the Gradualia, and the anonymous composer uses a system of musical transfers similar to the more elaborate one adopted by Byrd.¹⁴ The midcentury series of Officia by Mattheus le Maistre is organized in much the same way.¹⁵ Other collections, such as Costanzo Porta’s 1566 Musica in introitus missarum—excerpted alongside Byrd’s own motets in an Elizabethan manuscript (BL Add. MS 47844)—and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s 1593 Offertoria totius anni, were devoted to settings of a single Mass proper item, such as the introit or the offertory, for the whole church year.

The Counter-Reformation repertoire of polyphonic propers, like its remote medieval ancestor in the Magnus liber, shows a commitment to cultivating and adorning the liturgical year in its full integrity. Such a commitment cost more in the sixteenth century than it had in the twelfth or thirteenth. Unlike the avant-garde urban musical culture of the Parisian cantors, this second wave of interest in the Mass proper could lead composers into an unfashionable cul-de-sac. Musicians of the late Renaissance, intoxicated by new possibilities of both sacred and secular expression, were not the most likely candidates for turning out large, often repetitive, and usually chant-based collections of liturgical polyphony. A real interest in ritual propriety, whether the patron’s interest or the composer’s, was one of the few things that could inspire a shift from overtly affective material to the systematic grind of the large-scale liturgical cycle. David Fallows notices a similar change in perspective during Guillaume Dufay’s residence at Cambrai in the 1440s, where he wrote the Mass propers preserved in Trent 88: “After a youth of display and, one is bound to add, musical arrogance, he appears to have tried to consolidate and to adopt a plainer, more devotional style, conceivably for a grand project of music for the Mass and Office.”¹⁶ The comment would be equally true if Byrd’s name were substituted for Dufay’s.

Nothing about Byrd’s early career suggested he would go on to pursue a “grand project” of this sort. There is little in his earlier work, beyond a few juvenile efforts and a group of settings from the Office of the Dead in the 1575 Cantiones, that suggests any interest in systematic liturgical or quasi-liturgical composition. Joseph Kerman notes that the younger Byrd chose ritual texts, when he did, on their own rhetorical merits and not because of their importance in the calendar: he concentrated on “occasions such as Lent. . . and midsummer Sundays; this is not the sort of thing that a liturgically-minded composer spends his time with, as appears from the output of Sheppard and Tallis.”¹⁷ Although he must have been familiar with the impressive repertoire of Latin Office polyphony those two composers produced in the 1550s, there is no trace of any similar music for the proper of the Mass. Given the enthusiastic copying activities of scribes such as John Baldwin and Robert Dow, and their remarkable salvage of so much of the Office cycle, it is unlikely that a parallel Mass cycle was passed over entirely in silence.¹⁸ Byrd may even have seen Continental Mass propers at some point—one notable possibility is the group of Porta introits in Add. MS 47844—but there is no evidence that he had contact with any full-scale proper cycles of the kind he went on to write himself.

There is also no real precedent among Byrd’s vernacular works. The reformed order of worship left room for freely composed sacred music in the form of the English anthem, but it had no place for specific feast-day pieces of the sort he set in the Gradualia. A substantial percentage of the Roman ritual was kept intact by the Reformers, but the Mass proper was not part of it. The eucharistic liturgy in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer retained four-fifths of the old Mass ordinary: the Kyrie (as a congregational response to each of the Ten Commandments), the Credo (between the lessons and the sermon), the Sanctus (though with a pointed omission of the Benedictus), and the Gloria (as a post-communion hymn of thanksgiving). The Elizabethan Prayer Book also kept an annual cycle of scripture readings, collects, even “a proper preface, according to the time” for several major feasts and their octaves—but all five items of the old proper cycle were rejected.¹⁹ There must have been few English professional musicians by 1605, whatever their religious beliefs, who even remembered such a tradition.

Barbara Haggh has remarked that full polyphonic cycles of feast-day propers after the time of Dufay were cultivated only at the courts of royalty and Holy Roman Emperors.²⁰ Her claim is problematic when applied to the Gradualia (though Byrd continued to enjoy some level of royal patronage while producing his Latin liturgical music), but her general point remains valid: the polyphonic Mass proper was a luxury item that could only be produced in a supportive atmosphere. This makes Byrd, as a staunch and sometimes beleaguered Catholic in voluntary retirement from court, a doubly unlikely author for such a project. Given the apparent lack of outside precedents, it is useful to turn to the internal evidence of his two Gradualia volumes, especially his own statements in the 1605 and 1607 dedicatory prefaces. What did he have to say for himself as he presented this music to the public?

The Evidence of Byrd’s Prefaces

Byrd began each of his books with a first-person dedication, to which he often added a note to the reader, or other explanatory material. The only exceptions are the three Mass ordinaries of the 1590s, which seem to have been printed under some political duress and lack even title pages.²¹ Byrd’s prefaces serve a number of functions. They address the person honored in each collection, mixing the traditional clichés of patronage with occasional flashes of warmth and even intimacy. They speak to the needs of the musicmaking public: Byrd emphasizes (in 1611) the need for thorough rehearsal, explains (in 1605) how to find pieces in the index, and warns (in 1588) that “if there happen to be any iarre or dissonance, blame not the Printer.” They also provide a valuable window into his musical and political identity, especially in his later years as a Catholic liturgical composer.

With the rise of single-composer prints in the course of the sixteenth century, musicians began using the dedicatory pages to speak publicly about themselves and their work. At first these prefaces were written by the printer or compiler; such introductions are common all the way back to Ottaviano Petrucci’s Odhecaton. No true composers’ prefaces survive from the early part of the century. The first one appeared in 1532 with the printed works of Carpentras, and they quickly became a commonplace in music publishing.²² In a printed collection, the composer was speaking in a more or less indirect manner, through the voice of his music; the first-person dedication was a unique opportunity to address his patron or reader and fashion his own artistic persona in their eyes.

The literary critic Stephen Greenblatt has defined “self-fashioning” as “a characteristic address to the world, a consistent mode of perceiving and behaving.”²³ Self-fashioning in early modern England most often involved a highly charged relationship to authority—civil, religious, artistic, or any mixture of the above—and a cultivation of the creative project, most often the written word, as an extension of the self. Greenblatt’s case studies from Renaissance England involve both creative artists and religious polemicists, all of whom were embroiled in the same broad set of conflicts that surrounded Byrd. He includes only one Catholic, Henry VIII’s ill-fated chancellor Thomas More, who was an admirable but somewhat unrepeatable prototype for religious dissidents of Byrd’s generation. It is worth testing the model of active self-fashioning on a later Catholic subject, one who also had a painfully close involvement with a number of conflicting authorities and interests.

What was Byrd’s mode of “characteristic address to the world” in his Latin publications? His project may be easier to define in negative terms than in positive ones. The contemporary name for a Catholic loyalist in England, which modern scholarship has taken up, was recusant—from the Latin recusare, “to refuse.” The recusants refused to transfer their allegiance from Rome to the state church, with all that implied in terms of public conformity; they refused to take part in established worship, or be ministered to by the established clergy. The concept of recusancy, for better or for worse, defines members of a group in terms of what they will not do. Some of the most valuable evidence for t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Gradualia Cycle
• 2 “Meditate These Wel”
• 3 Liturgical Practice and English Catholic Identity
• 4 Text Types and Settings
• 5 Chronology and Narrative
• Notes
• Bibliography