Byrd Mass in 5 parts

 Day 61

Byrd Mass in five parts

Oxford Camerata

Jeremy Summerly

I was prompted to listen to this after a recent visit to Lincoln Cathedral, where there is a plaque commemorating Byrd’s appointment as an organist. Byrd was certainly covered in music history at University and I suspect that I must have heard some of his music at that time but I don’t have any strong memories of any particularly pieces.

Byrd wrote three settings of the mass - in 3,4 and 5 parts respectively. They are late works, dating from the  1590s. There is something of air of mystery about them. They were written for a catholic family at a time when anti-catholic sentiment predominated in England and were published without any title page or dedication. It is thought that they were written for performance by a small group of singers in a private celebration of the Catholic Mass in a private house rather than a cathedral. Hearing them sung by a cathedral or college choir may give a quite different impression of how they originally would have sounded.

There is a timeless quality to this mass. Mostly it is serene and contemplative but there are passages of more impassioned music and the occasionally surprisingly dissonance. The music is more syllabic than I might have expected - there are no long melismatic phrases on a single word. There must have been a time when this sort of music seemed new but now it seems as if it must have existed forever, so thoroughly is our aural image of what church music should sound like associated with this sort of polyphonic style. So it is really odd to think that in fact there was, as I said above, something almost ‘under the counter’ about these masses - the last thing Byrd actually wanted to do was to advertise his catholic leanings in a Protestant cathedral.