Excerpt from Old Scores and New Readings: Discussions on Music Certain Musicians

Was as great as Palestrina or merely great amongst the English - whether a lord amongst wits, or simply a wit amongst lords. For the most part he has been left comfortably alone, and held to be - Iike his mighty successor Purcell - one of the forerunners of the great English school of church composers. To have prepared the way for Jack son in F - that has been thought his best claim to remembrance. The notion is as absurd as would be the notion (if anyone were foolish enough to advance it) that Palestrina is mainly to be remembered as having prepared the way for Perosi. Byrde prepared the way for Purcell, it is true but even that exceeding glory pales before the greater glory of having written the Cantiones Sacrae and the D minor Mass. In its way the D minor Mass is as noble and complete an achieve ment as the St. Matthew Passion or the Messiah, the Choral symphony of Beethoven or the G minor symphony of Mozart, Tristan or the Nibe lung's Ring. It is splendidly planned it is per fectly beautiful and from the first page to the last it is charged with a grave, sweet, lovely emotion. The reason why Byrde has not until lately won the homage he deserves is simply this: that the musical doctors who have hitherto judged him have judged him in the light of the eighteenth-century contrapuntal music, and have applied to him in all seriousness Artemus Ward's joke about Chaucer he couldn't spell. The plain harmonic progressions of the later men could be understood by the doctors: they could not understand the freer style of harmony which prevailed before the strict school came into existence. Artemus Ward, taking up Chaucer, professed amazement to find spelling that would not be tolerated in an ele mentary school; the learned doctors, taking up Byrde, found he had disregarded all the rules rules, be it remembered, formulated after Byrde's time, just as our modern rules of spelling were made after Chaucer's time and as Artemus Ward jocularly condemned Chaucer, and showed his wit in the joke, so the doctors seriously condemned Byrde, and showed their stupidity in their uncon scious joke. They could understand one side of Tallis. His motet in forty parts, for instance: they knew the difficulties of writing such a thing, and they could see the ingenuity he showed in his various ways of getting round the difficulties. They could not see the really fine points of the forty-part motet: the broad scheme of the whole thing, and the almost Handelian way of mass ing the various choirs so as to heap climax on climax until a perfectly satisfying finish was reached. Still, there was something for them to see in Tallis; whereas in Byrde there was nothing for them to see that they had eyes to see, or to hear that they had ears to hear. They could see that he either wrote consecutive fifths and octaves, or dodged them in a way Opposed to all the.

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