The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), also known as the Petrucci Music Library after publisher Ottaviano Petrucci, is a project for the creation of a virtual library of public domain music scores, based on the wiki principle. Since its launch on February 16, 2006, over 170,000 scores and 10,000 recordings for over 50,000 works by over 7,200 composers have been uploaded. The project uses MediaWiki software to provide contributors with a familiar interface. Since 6 June 2010, IMSLP has also included public domain and licensed recordings in its scope, to allow for study by ear.

History[link]

Overview[link]

The site was launched on February 16, 2006. The library consists mainly of scans of old musical editions out of copyright. In addition, it admits scores by contemporary composers who wish to share their music with the world by releasing it under a Creative Commons license. One of the main projects of IMSLP was the sorting and uploading of the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach in the Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe (1851–99), a task that was completed on November 3, 2008. Besides J.S. Bach's complete public domain works, all public domain works of Beethoven, Brahms, Canteloube, Chabrier, Chausson, Chopin, Corelli, Debussy, D'Indy, Dukas, Fauré, Ferroud, Handel, Huré, Magnard, Palestrina, Ravel, Roussel, Satie, Schmitt, Schubert, Schumann, Scriabin and Sibelius are available as well as a large percentage of Mozart, Liszt, and many others' works too.

Besides providing a digital repository, IMSLP offers possibilities as a musicological encyclopaedia, since multiple and historical editions of a single composition can be uploaded, and musicological analyses and historical commentaries accompany the scores. Also, pages on publishers provide valuable information, and the work pages themselves often contain a large quantity of information, e.g. roles in an opera.

IMSLP is recommended as a research tool by MIT,^[2][3] which also uses it extensively for providing scores for its OpenCourseWare courses.^[4][5] It is suggested as a resource by the Sibley Music Library^[6] and by libraries at other universities such as Stanford University,^[7] University of California, Los Angeles,^[8] Brown University,^[9] University of Pennsylvania,^[10] University of Wisconsin–Madison,^[11] Oberlin Conservatory of Music,^[12] Manhattan School of Music^[13] University of Maryland,^[14] University of Washington,^[15] University of Cincinnati,^[16] University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee,^[17] Appalachian State University^[18] in the US, McGill University^[19] in Canada, University of Oxford,^[20] University of Cambridge,^[21] University of Edinburgh ^[22] University of Bristol ^[23] in the UK, University of Melbourne ^[24] in Australia, and others.

Awards[link]

In 2009, IMSLP won the MERLOT Classics award for Music.^[25] It was named one of the Top 100 Web Sites of 2009 (in the "Undiscovered" subsection) by PC Magazine.^[26]

Closure and reopening[link]

On October 19, 2007 the IMSLP closed following legal demands from Universal Edition of Vienna, Austria.^[27] The cease and desist letter expressed concern that some works that are in public domain in the server's location in Canada with copyright protection of 50 years post-mortem, but which are protected by the 70 years post mortem term in some other countries, were available in those countries. The administrator of the website, known under the nickname Feldmahler, decided to close down the repository, but left the forums online so that discussions into the best way to proceed could be made:^[28]

On Saturday October 13, 2007, I received a second Cease and Desist letter from Universal Edition. At first I thought this letter would be similar in content to the first Cease and Desist letter I received in August. However, after lengthy discussions with very knowledgeable lawyers and supporters, I became painfully aware of the fact that I, a normal college student, has neither the energy nor the money necessary to deal with this issue in any other way than to agree with the cease and desist, and take down the entire site. I cannot apologize enough to all IMSLP contributors, who have done so much for IMSLP in the last two years.

—Feldmahler (project leader)

In response, director Michael S. Hart of Project Gutenberg offered support to keep the project online.^[29] This offer was declined by Feldmahler, who voiced concern about having the project hosted in the United States, and consulted the Canadian wing of Project Gutenberg.^[28] On November 2, 2007, Michael Geist, a prominent Canadian copyright academic, wrote an article for the BBC discussing the specifics and the wider implications of this case.^[30]

IMSLP went back online on June 30, 2008. Since its reopening, IMSLP has been using a strict copyright policy, where uploaded files are only made accessible for download after the copyright status for three most frequent copyright regimes has been reviewed by staff members. Although the server is located in Canada, files which are not public domain in the US were until July 2010 flagged [TB], for 'Technical Block' or 'Temporary Block', and could not be viewed. The FAQ posted in their forum stated, "Unfortunately, these 'temporary' blocks will be until further notice – possibly all the way until the expiration of term in the USA." ^[31] However, if a work is public domain in Canada and the EU but not in the US, it can be downloaded legally via the new EU server, so a work is now only blocked with [TB] if it is under copyright in both the US and the EU.

On 21 April 2011, the Music Publishers Association (UK) issued a DMCA takedown notice against the IMSLP. Go Daddy, the domain name registrar for the IMSLP, removed the domain name "imslp.org", leaving it inaccessible.^[32] The MPA's argument was similar to that made in 2007 by Universal Edition. In particular, the MPA claimed that Rachmaninoff's 1913 choral symphony The Bells violated US and EU copyright.^[33] According to the IMSLP, the action is without any merit.^[34] Almost 24 hours later, the MPA (UK) announced on Twitter that they had asked Go Daddy to reinstate the domain name.^[35]

EU server[link]

On July 10, 2010, a forum thread^[36] announced the opening of a new server, located in the Netherlands. This server allows works which are public domain in Canada and the EU to be downloaded legally, even if they are under copyright in the US. The server is run by an unaffiliated European organization. Files on the EU server are flagged (EU).

US server[link]

A similar, also unaffiliated US server allows users to download works public domain only in the US. Unlike the other servers, this one can only be contributed to by administrators and users who have asked for the privilege, though the files are freely accessible for download.

WIMA merge[link]

On August 23, 2011, an announcement^[37] was made that the Werner Icking Music Archive would merge with IMSLP. WIMA had announced the merge on its own site five days before in an open letter to contributors.^[38] After working out some technical issues, IMSLP decided to officially commence the merge on August 28. Once the merge is completed, virtually the entire collection of WIMA will form part of IMSLP.

Current operation[link]

IMSLP states on its site^[39] that it is owned by Project Petrucci LLC. Physical contact information is provided, listing only an address in the United States.

Similar projects[link]

• Choral Public Domain Library: focused on choral and vocal music.
• Musopen: focused on recordings.
• Mutopia Project: focused on typeset scores.
• Werner Icking Music Archive: contains mainly early music. (It was merged with IMSLP)

See also[link]

• List of online music databases

References[link]

External links[link]

• Website (Alternate addresses: http://petruccimusiclibrary.org, http://petruccilibrary.org)
• Wiki Homepage
• EU Server Portal
• US Server Portal
• International Music Score Library Project Raises Copyright Concerns, New York Times, February 22, 2011
• Music copyright in the spotlight. BBC News 2 November 2007

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2010)

Erik Satie
Born	Éric Alfred Leslie Satie (1866-05-17)17 May 1866 Honfleur, France
Died	1 July 1925(1925-07-01) (aged 59) Paris, France
Occupation	Pianist, Composer
Partner	Suzanne Valadon

Éric Alfred Leslie Satie (pronounced: [eʁik sati]) (17 May 1866 – Paris, 1 July 1925; signed his name Erik Satie after 1884) was a French composer and pianist. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde. His work was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music, and the Theatre of the Absurd.^[1]

An eccentric, Satie was introduced as a "gymnopedist" in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopédies. Later, he also referred to himself as a "phonometrician" (meaning "someone who measures sounds") preferring this designation to that of a "musician", after having been called "a clumsy but subtle technician" in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911.^[2]

In addition to his body of music, Satie also left a remarkable set of writings, having contributed work for a range of publications, from the dadaist 391 to the American culture chronicle Vanity Fair. Although in later life he prided himself on always publishing his work under his own name, in the late nineteenth century he appears to have used pseudonyms such as Virginie Lebeau and François de Paule in some of his published writings.

Early life and training[link]

Satie house and museum in Honfleur

Satie was the son of Alfred Satie and his wife Jane Leslie (née Anton), who was born in London to Scottish parents. Erik was born at Honfleur in Normandy; his home there is open to the public. When Satie was four years old, his family moved to Paris, his father having been offered a translator's job in the capital. After his mother's death in 1872, he was sent, together with his younger brother, Conrad, back to Honfleur, to live with his paternal grandparents. There, he received his first music lessons from a local organist. When his grandmother died in 1878, the two brothers were reunited with their father in Paris, who remarried (a piano teacher) shortly afterwards. From the early 1880s onwards, Satie started publishing salon compositions by his step-mother and himself, among others.

In 1879, Satie entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he was soon labelled untalented by his teachers. Georges Mathias, his professor of piano at the Conservatoire, described his pupil's piano technique in flatly negative terms, "insignificant and laborious" and "worthless".^[3] Émile Descombes called him "the laziest student in the Conservatoire".^[4] Years later, Satie related that Mathias, with great insistence, told him that his real talent lay in composing. After being sent home for two-and-a-half years, he was readmitted to the Conservatoire at the end of 1885, but was unable to make a much more favourable impression on his teachers than he had before, and, as a result, resolved to take up military service a year later. However, Satie's military career did not last very long; within a few months he was discharged after deliberately infecting himself with bronchitis.^[5]

Career[link]

Montmartre[link]

A caricature of Eric Satie by Santiago Rusiñol, 1891

In 1887, Satie left home to take lodgings in Montmartre. By this time, he had started what was to be an enduring friendship with the romantic poet Patrice Contamine, and had had his first compositions published by his father. He soon integrated with the artistic clientele of the Le Chat Noir Café-cabaret, and started publishing his Gymnopédies. Publication of compositions in the same vein (Ogives, Gnossiennes, etc.) followed. In the same period he befriended Claude Debussy. He moved to a smaller room, still in Montmartre (rue Cortot N° 6), in 1890. By 1891 he was the official composer and chapel-master of the Rosicrucian Order "Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique, du Temple et du Graal", led by Sâr Joséphin Péladan, which led to compositions such as Salut drapeau!, Le fils des étoiles, and the Sonneries de la Rose+Croix. Satie gave performances at the Salon de la Rose + Croix, organized by Péladan.

By mid-1892, he had composed the first pieces in a compositional system of his own making (Fête donnée par des Chevaliers Normands en l'honneur d'une jeune demoiselle), had provided incidental music to a chivalric esoteric play (two Prélude du Nazaréen), had had his first hoax published (announcing the premiere of Le bâtard de Tristan, an anti-Wagnerian opera he probably never composed), and had broken with Péladan, starting that autumn with the Uspud project, a "Christian Ballet", in collaboration with Contamine de Latour. While the comrades from both the Chat Noir and Miguel Utrillo's Auberge du Clou sympathised, a promotional brochure was produced for the project, which reads as a pamphlet for a new esoteric sect.

In 1893, he met the young Maurice Ravel for the first time, Satie's style emerging in the first compositions of the youngster. One of Satie's own compositions of that period, the Vexations, was to remain undisclosed until after his death. By the end of the year he had founded the Eglise Métropolitaine d'Art de Jésus Conducteur (the Metropolitan Church of Art of the Leading Christ). As its only member, in the role of "Parcier et Maître de Chapelle" he started to compose a Grande messe (later to become known as the Messe des pauvres), and wrote a flood of letters, articles and pamphlets showing off his self-assuredness in religious and artistic matters. To give an example: he applied for membership of the Académie Française twice, leaving no doubt in the application letter that the board of that organisation (presided by Camille Saint-Saëns) as much as owed him such membership. Such proceedings without doubt rather helped to wreck his popularity in the cultural establishment. In 1895 he inherited some money, allowing him to have more of his writings printed, and to change from wearing a priest-like habit to being the "Velvet Gentleman".

Move to Arcueil[link]

By mid-1896 all of Satie's financial means had vanished, and he had to move to cheaper and much smaller lodgings, first at the Rue Cortot,^[6] and two years later, after he'd composed the two first sets of Template:Pièces froides in 1897, to Arcueil, a suburb some five kilometres from the centre of Paris. During this period he re-established contact with his brother Conrad for numerous practical and financial matters, disclosing some of his inner feelings in the process. The letters to Conrad made it clear that he had set aside any religious ideas.

From 1899 on Satie started making money as a cabaret pianist, adapting over a hundred compositions of popular music for piano or piano and voice, adding some of his own. The most popular of these were Je te veux, text by Henry Pacory; Tendrement, text by Vincent Hyspa; Poudre d'or, a waltz; La diva de l'"Empire", text by Dominique Bonnaud/Numa Blès; Le Picadilly, a march; Légende californienne, text by Contamine de Latour lost, but the music later reappears in La belle excentrique; and many more, many of which have been lost. In his later years Satie would reject all his cabaret music as vile and against his nature,^[7] but for the time being, it was an income.

Only a few compositions that Satie took seriously remain from this period: Jack in the Box, music to a pantomime by Jules Depaquit (called a "clownerie" by Satie), Geneviève de Brabant, a short comic opera on a serious theme, text by Lord Cheminot, The Dreamy Fish, piano music to accompany a lost tale by Lord Cheminot, and a few others that were mostly incomplete, hardly any of them staged, and none of them published at the time.

Both Geneviève de Brabant and The Dreamy Fish have been analysed by Ornella Volta as containing elements of competition with Claude Debussy, of which Debussy was probably not aware, Satie not making this music public. Meanwhile, Debussy was having one of his first major successes with Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, leading a few years later to ‘who-was-precursor-to-whom’ debates between the two composers, in which Maurice Ravel would also get involved.

In October 1905 Satie enrolled in Vincent d'Indy's Schola Cantorum de Paris to study classical counterpoint while still continuing his cabaret work. Most of his friends were as dumbfounded as the professors at the Schola when they heard about his new plan to return to the classrooms, especially as d'Indy was an admiring pupil of Saint-Saëns, not particularly favoured by Satie. Satie would follow these courses at the Schola, as a respected pupil, for more than five years, receiving a first (intermediate) diploma in 1908. Some of his classroom counterpoint-exercises, such as the Désespoir agréable, were published after his death. Another summary, of the period prior to the Schola, also appeared in 1911: the Trois morceaux en forme de poire, which was a kind of compilation of the best of what he had written up to 1903.^{[citation needed]}

Something that becomes clear through these published compilations is that Satie did not so much reject Romanticism and its exponents like Wagner, but that he rejected certain aspects of it. From his first composition to his last, he rejected the idea of musical development^{[citation needed]}, in the strict definition of this term: the intertwining of different themes in a development section of a sonata form. As a result, his contrapuntal and other works were very short; the "new, modern" Fugues do not extend further than the exposition of the theme(s). Generally, he would say that he did not think it permitted that a composer take more time from his public than strictly necessary.^{[citation needed]} Also Melodrama, in its historical meaning of the then popular romantic genre of "spoken words to a background of music", was something Satie avoided. His 1913 Le piège de Méduse could be seen as an absurdistic spoof of that genre.

In the meantime, other changes had also taken place: Satie had become a member of a radical socialist party, and had socialised with the Arcueil community: Amongst other things, he'd been involved in the "Patronage laïque" work for children. He also changed his appearance to that of the 'bourgeois functionary' with bowler hat, umbrella, etc. He channelled his medieval interests into a peculiar secret hobby: In a filing cabinet he maintained a collection of imaginary buildings, most of them described as being made out of some kind of metal, which he drew on little cards. Occasionally, extending the game, he would publish anonymous small announcements in local journals, offering some of these buildings, e.g. a "castle in lead", for sale or rent.

Height of success and influence[link]

Erik Satie: project of bust, 1913

Starting in 1912, Satie's new humorous miniatures for piano became very successful, and he wrote and published many of these over the next few years (most of them premiered by the pianist Ricardo Viñes). His habit of accompanying the scores of his compositions with all kinds of written remarks was now well established so that a few years later he had to insist that these not be read out during performances.^{[citation needed]} He had mostly stopped using barlines by this time. In some ways these compositions were very reminiscent^{[according to whom?]} of Rossini's compositions from the final years of his life, grouped under the name Péchés de vieillesse.

However the acceleration in Satie's life did not come so much from the success of his new piano pieces; it was Ravel who inadvertently triggered the characteristics of Satie's remaining years and thus influenced the successive progressive artistic and cultural movements that rapidly manifested themselves in Paris over the following years. Paris was seen as the artistic capital of the world, and the beginning of the new century appeared to have set many minds on fire.^{[citation needed]} In 1910 the "Jeunes Ravêlites", a group of young musicians around Ravel, proclaimed their preference for Satie's earlier work from before the Schola period, reinforcing the idea that Satie had been a precursor of Debussy.

At first Satie was pleased that at least some of his works were receiving public attention, but when he realised that this meant that his more recent work was overlooked or dismissed, he looked for other young artists who related better to his more recent ideas, so as to have better mutual support in creative activity. Thus young artists such as Roland-Manuel, and later Georges Auric, and Jean Cocteau, started to receive more of his attention than the "Jeunes".

As a result of his contact with Roland-Manuel, Satie again began publicising his thoughts, with far more irony than he had done before (amongst other things, the Mémoires d'un amnésique and Cahiers d'un mammifère).^[8]

With Jean Cocteau, whom he had first met in 1915, Satie started work on incidental music for a production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (resulting in the Cinq grimaces). From 1916, he and Cocteau worked on the ballet Parade, which was premiered in 1917 by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, with sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine. Through Picasso Satie also became acquainted with other cubists, such as Georges Braque, with whom he would work on other, aborted, projects.

With Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, and Germaine Tailleferre Satie formed the Nouveaux jeunes, shortly after writing Parade. Later the group was joined by Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud. In September 1918, Satie – giving little or no explanation – withdrew from the Nouveaux jeunes. Jean Cocteau gathered the six remaining members, forming the Groupe des six (to which Satie would later have access, but later again would fall out with most of its members).

From 1919 Satie was in contact with Tristan Tzara, the initiator of the Dada movement. He became acquainted with other artists involved in the movement, such as Francis Picabia (later to become a Surrealist), André Derain, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Hugo and Man Ray, among others. On the day of his first meeting with Man Ray, the two fabricated the artist's first readymade: The Gift (1921). Satie contributed writing to the Dadaist publication 391. In the first months of 1922 he was surprised to find himself entangled in the argument between Tzara and André Breton about the true nature of avant-garde art, epitomised by the failure of the Congrès de Paris. Satie originally sides with Tzara, but manages to maintain friendly relations with most players in both camps. Meanwhile, an "Ecole d'Arcueil" had formed around Satie, with young musicians like Henri Sauguet, Maxime Jacob, Roger Désormière and Henri Cliquet-Pleyel.

Finally he composed an "instantaneist" ballet (Relâche) in collaboration with Picabia, for the Ballets Suédois of Rolf de Maré. In a simultaneous project, Satie added music to the surrealist film Entr'acte by René Clair, which was given as an intermezzo for Relâche.

Personal life[link]

Satie and Suzanne Valadon, an artists' model and artist in her own right, and a long-time friend of Miguel Utrillo (and mother of Maurice Utrillo), began an affair early in 1893. After their first night together, he proposed marriage. The two did not marry, but Valadon moved to a room next to Satie's at the Rue Cortot. Satie became obsessed with her, calling her his Biqui, and writing impassioned notes about "her whole being, lovely eyes, gentle hands, and tiny feet". During their relationship, Satie composed the Danses gothiques as a kind of prayer to restore peace of mind, and Valadon painted a portrait of Satie, which she gave to him. After six months she moved away, leaving Satie broken-hearted. Afterwards, he said that he was left with "nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness".^[9] It is believed this was the only intimate relationship Satie ever had.^[10]

Death[link]

After years of heavy drinking, Satie died on 1 July 1925 from cirrhosis of the liver.^[11] He is buried in the cemetery in Arcueil. There is a tiny stone monument designating a grassy area in front of an apartment building—'Parc Erik Satie'. Over the course of his 27 years in residence at Arcueil, no one had ever visited his room. After his death, Satie's friends discovered compositions that were totally unknown or thought to have been lost. The orchestral score to Parade was thought, by Satie, to have been left on a bus years before. These were found behind the piano, in the pockets of his velvet suits, and in other odd places, and included the Vexations; Geneviève de Brabant and other unpublished or unfinished stage works; The Dreamy Fish; many Schola Cantorum exercises; a previously unseen set of "canine" piano pieces; and several other works for piano, many untitled. Some of these would be published later as additional Gnossiennes, Pièces froides, Enfantines, and furniture music.

Media[link]

Gymnopedies – La 1 Ere. Lent et Douloureux

Performed by Robin Alciatore. Courtesy of Musopen

Gnossienne 1

Composed c. 1890.

Gnossienne 2

Composed c. 1890.

Gnossienne 3

Composed c. 1890.

Recordings and arrangements[link]

Piano works[link]

Recordings of Satie's piano works have been released by Cristina Ariagno, Jean-Pierre Armengaud, Jean-Joël Barbier, Aldo Ciccolini, Claude Coppens (live recording), Reinbert de Leeuw, Eve Egoyan, Philippe Entremont, Frank Glazer, Olof Höjer, Michel Legrand, Jacques Loussier, Anne Queffélec, Bill Quist, Pascal Rogé, João Paulo Santos, Yūji Takahashi, Branka Parlić, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, John Lenehan and Daniel Varsano, among others.

Orchestral and vocal[link]

• A recording of historical importance is Template:Erik Satie, Les inspirations insolites, re-issued by EMI as a 2-CD set, containing among other pieces: Geneviève de Brabant (in a version before Contamine's text had been recovered), Le piège de Méduse, Messe des pauvres, etc.
• Many other recordings exist: Parade/Relâche (Michel Plasson / Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse), Satie: Socrate [etc.] (Jean-Paul Fouchécourt / Ensemble), and recordings of songs, e.g., by Anne-Sophie Schmidt.

Arrangements in popular music[link]

• In 1968, Blood Sweat & Tears released their eponymous second album, which included an adaptation of Erik Satie's Gymnopédie #1 (arranged by Dick Halligan) which they titled as Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie (First and Second Movements). The first movement is a straightforward elaboration of the basic theme using flutes, an acoustic guitar and a triangle. The second is a far more abstract variation using only brass instruments. In 1969, Halligan received a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Performance for the piece.
• In 1974, the jazz flutist Hubert Laws recorded an arrangement by Bob James of the "Gymnopedie #1" in his "In the Beginning" double album. The band featured keyboardist Bob James, guitarist Gene Bertoncini, bassist Ron Carter, drummer Steve Gadd, three strings, and Hubert's brother Ronnie Laws on tenor sax.
• In 1979 the band "Sky" (Tristan Fry, Francis Monkman, Kevin Peek, Herbie Flowers, and John Williams) included a version of Gymnopedie No1, which was arranged by John Williams, on the band's first album, which was entitled "Sky"
• In 1980, Gary Numan's 7-inch "We Are Glass" featured "Trois Gymnopedies (First Movement)" on the B-side.
• In 1987, the Serbian electronic music composer Mitar Subotić on his debut album Disillusioned! recorded a twenty-five minute long instrumental track "Thanx Mr. Rorschach - Ambijenti na muziku Erika Satija" ("Thanx Mr. Rorschach - Ambient to the music by Erik Satie"), as a kind of a musical Rorschach test to the music by Satie.
• In 1989, the Vienna Art Orchestra (directed by Mathias Rüegg) released The Minimalism of Eric Satie, a 2-LP set on the Swiss HatART label that included "reflections" on a number of Satie's works, notably three performances of Vexations in various instrumental/vocal combinations.
• In 1990, Movement 98's (Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne) single "Joy and Heartbreak" used the opening phrase of Trois Gymnopedies as the intro and instrumental.
• In 1994, Malcolm McLaren arranged Gnossienne 3&4 in his concept album Paris.
• In 1999, electronic music act Plaid's CD "Restproof Clockwork" included a track called "Tearisci" which is an uncredited version of Satie's "Pièces Froides, No. 2: Danses De Travers: III. Encore".
• In 2000, ex-Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett released the album, "Sketches of Satie", performing Satie's works on acoustic guitar, with contributions by his brother John on flute.
• The English electronic duo Isan recorded versions of the three Gymnopédies for a 2006 7-inch single, "Trois Gymnopedies" on the Morr Music record label.
• The 2006 video game Mother 3 features an arrangement of the 1st Gymnopedie as background music, titled "Leder's Gymnopedie".
• The 2006 movie The Painted Veil features Gnossienne No. 1 throughout the film.
• The 2nd movement of his Gymnopédies has been used in the original soundtrack of 2010 Japanese animated film The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya by Kyoto Animation studio. The full Gymnopédies as long as Gnossiennes are included in the 2nd CD of this OST.
• Ogive Number 2 (incorrectly labelled Ogive Number 1) was re-recorded electronically by William Orbit on his album Pieces in a Modern Style
• In 2011, singer-songwriter Tori Amos released an album entitled Night of Hunters, where her song "Battle of Trees" is a variation on Gnossienne no. 1.
• In 2011, Satie's "Gnossienne No.1" was used in the film Hugo.

See also[link]

• Ambient music
• Dada
• Impressionist music
• List of compositions by Erik Satie
• Surrealism

References[link]

Sources[link]

In English, unless indicated:

Writings by Satie[link]

• A Mammal's Notebook: Collected Writings of Erik Satie (Serpent's Tail; Atlas Arkhive, No 5, 1997) ISBN 0-947757-92-9 (with introduction and notes by Ornella Volta, translations by Anthony Melville, contains several drawings by Satie)
• Correspondence presque complète: Réunie, établie et présentée par Ornella Volta (Paris: Fayard/Imes, 2000; 1265pp) ISBN 2-213-60674-9 (an almost complete edition of Satie's letters, in French)

Books and articles on Satie[link]

• Allan, Kenneth R. “Metamorphosis in 391: A Cryptographic Collaboration by Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Erik Satie.” Art History 34, No. 1 (February, 2011): 102-125.
• Davis, Mary E., Erik Satie. Reaktion Books – Critical Lives. June 2007. ISBN 978-1-86189-321-5
• Gillmor, Alan M., Erik Satie (Twayne Pub., 1988, reissued 1992; 387pp) ISBN 0-393-30810-3
• Myers, Rollo H., Erik Satie. (Dover Publications, New York 1968.) ISBN 0-486-21903-8
• Orledge, Robert, Satie Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, London, 1995)
• Orledge, Robert, Satie the Composer Cambridge University Press: 1990; 437pp – in the series Music in the Twentieth Century [ed.] Arnold Whittall) ISBN 0-521-35037-9
• Templier, Pierre-Daniel (translated by Elena L. French and David S. French), Erik Satie (The MIT Press, 1969, reissued 1971) ISBN 0-262-70005-0 and (New York: Da Capo Press, 1980 reissue) ISBN 0-306-76039-8. Note: Templier extensively consulted Conrad, Erik Satie's brother, when writing this first biography that appeared in 1932. The English translation was, however, criticised by John Cage; in a letter to Ornella Volta (25 May 1983) he referred to the translation as disappointing compared to the formidable value of the original biography.
• Volta, Ornella and Simon Pleasance, Erik Satie (Hazan: The Pocket Archives Series, 1997; 200pp) ISBN 2-85025-565-3
• Volta, Ornella, transl. Michael Bullock, Satie Seen Through His Letters (Marion Boyars, 1989) ISBN 0-7145-2980-X
• Whiting, Steven, Satie the Bohemian: from Cabaret to Concert Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999; 596pp). A fully researched account of Satie's musical career in what then was regarded as popular music.

Other[link]

• Satie Home page – Niclas Fogwall's website dedicated to Satie

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Erik Satie

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Erik Satie

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Erik Satie

Information and listening[link]

• Biography and photos
• UbuWeb's Erik Satie pages – including an Erik Satie Primer and downloadable recordings
• About Erik Satie – The eccentric Impressionist French composer and musician
• Erik Satie at Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music
• Three Gymnopedies by Eric Satie
• (French) erik-satie.com Website dedicated to the musician, with blog, timeline, gallery, biography
• Works by or about Erik Satie in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Scores[link]

• Public domain scores Satie's Scores + Audio
• Free scores by Erik Satie at the International Music Score Library Project
• Free scores by Erik Satie in the Werner Icking Music Archive (WIMA)
• Free scores by Erik Satie in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
• www.kreusch-sheet-music.net Free Scores by Satie
• Satie's Scores – by the Mutopia Project

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Henriette Renié (1875-1956) was a French harpist and composer, a deeply religious woman who lived in poverty for much of her life, but who was independent and successful in a time when fame was socially unacceptable for women. She codified a method for harp which is widely used.

Musical life[link]

Before the age of five, Henriette played piano, but at five, she saw a concert featuring Alphonse Hasselmans, and declared "That man is going to be my harp teacher." She was not allowed to play harp until she was eight, and then her feet did not reach the pedals. She would hop off her bench to change them and then hop up and continue playing; her father eventually developed pedal extensions for her.

Hasselmans had begun teaching at the Paris Conservatoire, and they met half-way to have lessons at Sebastian Erard's workshop. In 1885, she became a regular student at the Conservatoire. At ten, she won a second prize in harp performance (the committee had actually voted to give her first prize, but the director had decided it was inappropriate), and at eleven, she won the Premier Prix.

Renié began teaching early on; at nine, she had declared her brother's friend Fernand Maignen would play the harp and began teaching him, and following her success at the Conservatoire, students from all over Paris, many of them more than twice her age, began seeking her out.

After her graduation at twelve, she gave performances around France and taught students all over Paris. An exception was made for her to take harmony classes at the Conservatoire, which did not normally allow students under fourteen in harmony and composition. She was used as an example, and her professors Théodore Dubois, Ambroise Thomas, and Jules Massenet all encouraged her to compose. However, she was accustomed to the idea that women stayed at home and was reluctant to attract attention; she hid Andante Religioso for six weeks before she showed it to them. (She also was traditional enough that she never went out without a chaperone.)

At fifteen, Renié gave her first solo recital in Paris, marking her growing troubles with Hasselmans, whom her parents had neglected to list as orchestra conductor on the programs. Henriette had them reprinted at her own expense to mollify her teacher. However, tension between them continued as Hasselmans was keeping all the professional students for himself, leaving Henriette to teach young ladies with high social standing, who were only increasing their marriageability; as a result, when serious students approached Renié, she often gave lessons in secret. As time progressed, Hasselmans also refused to recommend her to conductors as a soloist and circulated segments of her unpublished pieces in his classes without giving her any credit. Nonetheless, Renié remained loyal to him.

In 1901, Renié completed the Concerto in C minor that she had begun composing while at the Conservatoire. On the advice of Dubois, she showed it to Camille Chevillard, who scheduled it for several concerts. Unfortunately, Renié, had suffered a severe stomach disorder at 21 that left her weak, and though she often forced herself to perform despite her illness, she became so sick that one of the Lamoureux concerts with Chevillard had to be delayed. Nonetheless, these concerts established Renié, not only as a virtuoso, but as a composer, and helped establish the harp as a solo instrument, inspiring other composers to write for harp.

In 1903, she composed a substantial harp solo called Légende, inspired by the poem Les Elfes by Leconte de Lisle. The same year, Renié presented eleven-year-old Marcel Grandjany to the Conservatoire, but Hasselmans denied him admittance; the next year, Grandjany was accepted as a student but not allowed to compete. At thirteen, the first time he was permitted to enter the competition, Grandjany won the Premier Prix. He, along with Mildred Dilling, introduced the Renié method to the United States.

In 1912, Hasselmans and Renié were reconciled; he announced that he was physically unable to teach at the Conservatoire and wanted her to take his position, although there were no female professors teaching advanced instrumental classes. However, the Conservatoire, as a governmental institution, required approval from the Ministry of Education for its appointments, and because of Renié's religious beliefs, she was not hired and Marcel Tournier was given the position. Hasselmans died the night he was told she would not be appointed. She then turned down a position at the Ecole Normale de Musique, but started an international competition in 1914, the "Concours Renié," which included a significant sum of money along with they prize, and had notable musicians on the jury over the years, including Salzedo, Ravel, Grandjany, and Gabriel Pierné.

During World War I, Renié survived by giving lessons, and gave charity concerts almost nightly, going to a fund that gave immediately and anonymously to artists in need, even when battle was being fought 90 kilometers from Paris and Big Bertha was bombarding the city. After the war, Toscanini offered Renié a contract, which she declined because her mother's health was failing.

In 1922, a politician recommended Renié for the Legion of Honor, but she was rejected again for her religious beliefs.

Renié began participating in radio broadcasts and making recording in 1926 for Columbia and Odéon. Her recordings all sold out within three months, and Danses des Lutins won a Prix du Disque, but the recording sessions exhausted Renié, so she refused to sign any new contracts despite her success. In 1937, Renié began complaining in her diary about fatigue and overexertion; illness forced her to postpone and cancel concerts, which had become painful and draining.

During World War II, Renié, at the request of her publisher, wrote the Harp Method, which became her main focus during the war. In two volumes, it is a thorough treatment of harp technique and music. It was adopted by such important harpists as Grandjany, Dilling, and Susann McDonald. After the Armistice, students flocked to Renié and spread her teaching to conservatories over the world.

Severe sciatica and neuritis, as well as bouts of bronchitis, pneumonia, and digestive infections in winter, nearly disabled Renié, but she continued giving lessons and concerts despite the intense level of sedatives she was taking.

When Tournier retired from the Conservatoire after 35 years, Renié was offered the job, but declined, (amusedly) saying she was four years older than Tournier. She was also finally given the Legion of Honor, at the urging of her goddaughter. The next year, she gave a concert, featuring Légende, saying it was the last time she would play it, and died a few months later in March, 1956.

Salvi, Erard's successor, created a "Renié" model harp, and the French Institute created a "Henriette Renié Prize for Music Composition for the Harp."

Technological advancement[link]

Renié was critical in promoting the double-action harp of Sebastian Erard, and inspired the creation of the chromatic harp through an offhand complaint about pedals to Gustave Lyon, who worked for a manufacturer of musical instruments, including harps. Ironically, Renié demonstrated the rival Erard harp at the Brussels World's Fair, and was the major cause of its demise.

Family[link]

Henriette's father, Jean-Emile Renié, was the son of an architect. His family had cut him off completely when he decided to be a painter instead of an architect. He studied with Théodore Rousseau, but to survive, he became an actor and then joined the Paris Opera.

Henriette's mother, Gabrielle Mouchet, was a distant cousin of Jean-Emile. Her father was adamantly opposed to their marriage, but her mother supported it, so M. Mouchet eventually gave in on the condition that Jean-Emile give up acting.

The couple had four sons before Henriette was born. The oldest three were harsh with her, but she was deeply attached to the fourth, François, and would become listless and unhappy apart from him. At one point, Henriette's nose was broken while she played with her brothers, so she had two profiles for the rest of her life.

Renié kept a close relationship with her parents and was fond of her nephews and nieces, but distanced herself from them because her sisters-in-law were jealous. When Renié's father died, she lost twenty pounds in a short period of time and began supporting her mother financially. She also remained close to her brother François, who was isolated because of his deafness and poor vision.

Personal life[link]

While Henriette was in her teens, the family spent summers in Etretat in Normandy, and Henriette had a rare chance to interact with people her own age. She was mutually attracted to one of her brother's friends, but decided she could not sacrifice her art and career to live with him. She also rejected marrying Henri Rabaud three years later. Henriette also paid for her brothers' riding (they were in the army more for honor than money, and Henriette had to give them financial help).

In addition to supporting her brothers as officers, she paid for a new harp for herself. Still, though she was struggling financially, she refused to take commission on the many harps she picked for her students at Erard, and sometimes gave lessons for free. As a teenager, Renié worked constantly, and had only one friend, Hasselmans's daughter, who was also her student. Later on, she became close to the Chevillards, especially his nearly blind wife, a singer and a spiritual inspiration for Renié.

Shortly before World War I, Renié became friends with the family of one of her students, Marie-Amélie Regnier. After winning the Premier Prix and being introduced to Théodore Dubois, Marie-Amélie swore that Renié would be the godmother of her first child. During the war, Renié undertook the family's financial support (the son was killed, the father's health was failing, and the sisters could not support them). When the war was over, Marie-Amélie got married and presented Renié her goddaughter, and because Marie-Amélie's husband, Georges Pignal, was an engineer who was frequently absent because of contracts in Morocco, the child spent more time with her grandmother and godmother than her parents. In 1923, Renié helped Louise Regnier (Marie-Amélie's mother) buy a portion of a house. She moved in with the Regniers, along with her brother François, shortly after her own mother died. In 1934, Louise Regnier died and left the goddaughter, Françoise, in Renié's devoted care. Sometimes, Renié would ride in back of Françoise's motorcycle. Despite Marie-Amélie's former gratitude and Renié's generosity to the family, the former pupil was a hostile housemate, and tried to evict the Reniés, but Françoise fought her family to save Renié from financial ruin.

Renié was deeply religious when the Third Republic was trying to separate the church and state, and ostentatiously wore a gold cross to show her support. Because of this, the government kept a file on her, as they did for all citizens they considered enemies of the regime. She was generally assertive with her beliefs; she also tore down German propaganda posters despite the fears of her friends and students.

She published many works with major French publishers which have been mainstays of the harp repertoire for harpists of her lineage. Additional works remain in manuscript, but many were destroyed in a fire in the collector's home.

Famous students[link]

• Marcel Grandjany
• Mildred Dilling
• Harpo Marx
• Susann McDonald
• Odette Le Dentu

References[link]

• des Varennes, Françoise (1990). Henriette Renié Living Harp, Bloomington, Indiana: Music Works - Harp Editions.

External links[link]

• Free scores by Henriette Renié at the International Music Score Library Project

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (June 2010)

William Byrd

William Byrd (1540 or late 1539 – 4 July 1623) was an English composer of the Renaissance. He wrote in many of the forms current in England at the time, including various types of sacred and secular polyphony, keyboard (the so-called Virginalist school) and consort music.

Provenance[link]

Knowledge of Byrd's biography expanded in the late 20th century, thanks largely to the research of John Harley (Harley, 1997). Following the discovery of a document dated 2 October 1598 in which Byrd's age is given as "58 years or there abouts," it now appears that he was born in 1540. The older dating 1542–3 is derived from Byrd's will (endorsed on 22 November 1622) which describes him as 'in the 80th year of my age'. It now becomes clear that it must have been drafted about three years earlier than the date of endorsement. Byrd was born in London, the son of a Thomas Byrd (not Thomas Byrd of the Chapel Royal) about whom little is known. Byrd had two brothers, Symon'd and John, and four sisters. It is clear from a reference in the prefatory material in the Tallis/Byrd Cantiones of 1575 that Byrd was a pupil of Thomas Tallis, then the leading composing member of the Chapel Royal Choir. Byrd also worked in collaboration with two other Chapel Royal singing-men, John Sheppard and William Mundy, on one of his earliest compositions, a contribution to a joint setting of the alternatim psalm In exitu Israel composed for the procession to the font at the Paschal Vigil. As an item for the Sarum liturgy this was presumably composed near the end of the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–1558), whose Catholic beliefs impelled her to revive Sarum liturgical practices during her brief reign. In view of these contacts it is reasonable to speculate that Byrd was a Chapel Royal choirboy, though the surviving records do not name the choristers individually.

Early years[link]

A few other compositions by Byrd should probably be assigned to his teenage years. Apart from his contribution to In exitu Israel (Similes illis fiant a4), these include his setting of the Easter responsory Christus resurgens (a4) which was not published until 1605, but which as another Sarum liturgical unit could also have been composed during Mary's reign. Some of the hymns and antiphons for keyboard and for consort may also date from this period, though it is also possible that the consort pieces may have been composed in Lincoln for the musical training of choirboys.

Byrd's first known professional employment was as organist and choirmaster of Lincoln Cathedral, a post which he held from 25 March 1563. Residing at 6 Minster Yard Lincoln, he remained in post until 1572. His period at Lincoln was not entirely trouble-free, for on 19 November 1569 the Dean and Chapter cited him for ‘certain matters alleged against him’ as the result of which his salary was suspended. Since Puritanism was influential at Lincoln, it is possible that the allegations were connected with over-elaborate choral polyphony or organ playing. A second directive dated 29 November issued detailed instructions regarding Byrd's use of the organ in the liturgy. On 14 September 1568 Byrd married Julian Birley, a long-lasting and fruitful union which produced at least seven children.

The 1560s were also important formative years for Byrd the composer. The Short Service, an unpretentious setting of items for the Anglican Matins, Communion and Evensong services, which seems to designed to comply with the Protestant reformers’ demand for clear words and simple musical textures, may well have been composed during the Lincoln years. It is at any rate clear that Byrd was composing Anglican church music, for when he left Lincoln the Dean and Chapter continued to pay him at a reduced rate on condition that he would send the cathedral his compositions. Byrd had also taken serious strides with instrumental music. The seven In Nomine settings for consort (two a4 and five a5), at least one of the consort fantasias (Neighbour F1 a6) and a number of important keyboard works have been assigned to the Lincoln years. The latter include the Ground in Gamut (described as 'Mr Byrd's old ground') by his future pupil Thomas Tomkins, the A minor fantasia and probably the first of Byrd's great series of keyboard pavans and galliards, a composition which was transcribed by Byrd from an original for five-part consort. All these show Byrd gradually emerging as a major figure on the Elizabethan musical landscape.

Some sets of keyboard variations, such as The Hunt's Up and the imperfectly preserved set on Gypsies’ Round also seem to be early works. As we have seen, Byrd had begun setting Latin liturgical texts as a teenager, and he seems to have continued to do so at Lincoln. Two exceptional large-scale psalm motets, Ad Dominum cum tribularer (a8) and Domine quis habitabit (a9), are Byrd's contribution to a genre cultivated by Robert White and Robert Parsons. De lamentatione, another early work, is a contribution to the Elizabethan practice of setting groups of verses from the Lamentations of Jeremiah following the format of the Tenebrae lessons sung in the Catholic rite during the last three days of Holy Week, other contributors including Tallis, White, Parsley and the elder Ferrabosco. It is likely that this practice was an expression of Elizabethan Catholic nostalgia, as a number of the texts suggest.

The Chapel Royal[link]

Byrd obtained the prestigious post of Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1572 following the death of Robert Parsons, a gifted composer who drowned in the Trent near Newark on 25 January of that year. Almost from the outset Byrd is named as ‘organist’, which however was not a designated post but an occupation for any Chapel Royal member capable of filling it. This career move vastly increased Byrd's opportunities to widen his scope as a composer and also to make contacts at Court. Queen Elizabeth (1558–1603) was a moderate Protestant who eschewed the more extreme forms of Puritanism and retained a fondness for elaborate ritual, besides being a music lover and keyboard player herself. Byrd's output of Anglican church music (defined in the strictest sense as sacred music designed for performance in church) is surprisingly small, but it stretches the limits of elaboration then regarded as acceptable by some reforming Protestants who regarded highly wrought music as a distraction from the Word of God.

Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur (1575)[link]

In 1575 Byrd and Tallis were jointly granted a patent for the printing of music and ruled music paper for 21 years, one of a number of patents issued by the Crown for the printing of books on various subjects. The two musicians used the services of the French Huguenot printer Thomas Vautrollier, who had settled in England and previously produced an edition of a collection of Lassus chansons in London (Receuil du mellange, 1570). The two monopolists took advantage of the patent to produce a grandiose joint publication under the title Cantiones que ab argumento sacrae vocantur consisting of 34 Latin motets dedicated to the Queen herself and accompanied by elaborate prefatory matter including poems in Latin elegiacs by the schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster and the young courtier Ferdinand Heybourne (aka Richardson). There are 17 motets each by Tallis and Byrd, one for each year of the Queen's reign.

Byrd's contribution to the Cantiones is highly variegated in character. The inclusion of Laudate pueri (a6) which proves to be an instrumental fantasia with words added after composition, is one sign that Byrd had some difficulty in assembling enough material for the collection. Diliges Dominum (a8), which may also originally have been untexted, is an eight-in-four retrograde canon of little musical interest. Also belonging to the more archaic stratum of motets is Libera me Domine (a5), a cantus firmus setting of the ninth responsory at Matins for the Office for the Dead, which takes its point of departure from the setting by Robert Parsons, while Miserere mihi (a6), a setting of a Compline antiphon often used by Tudor composers for didactic cantus firmus exercises, incorporates a four-in-two canon. Tribue Domine (a6) is a large-scale sectional composition setting a from a medieval collection of Meditationes which was commonly attributed to St Augustine,^[1] composed in a style which owes much to earlier Tudor settings of votive antiphons as a mosaic of full and semichoir passages. Byrd sets it in three sections, each beginning with a semichoir passage in archaic style.

Byrd's contribution to the Cantiones also includes compositions in a more forward-looking manner which point the way forwards to his motets of the 1580s. Some of them show the influence of the motets of Alfonso Ferrabosco I (1543–1588), a Bolognese musician who worked in the Tudor court at intervals between 1562 and 1578. Ferrabosco's motets provided direct models for Byrd's Emendemus in melius (a5), O lux beata Trinitas (a6), Domine secundum actum meum (a6) and Siderum rector (a5) as well as a more generalized paradigm for what Joseph Kerman has called Byrd's 'affective-imitative' style, a method of setting pathetic texts in extended paragraphs based on subjects employing curving lines in fluid rhythm and contrapuntal techniques which Byrd learnt from his study of Ferrabosco.

The Cantiones were a financial failure. In 1577 Byrd and Tallis were forced to petition Queen Elizabeth for financial help pleading that the publication had 'fallen oute to oure greate losse' and that Tallis was now 'verie aged'. They were subsequently granted the leasehold on various lands in East Anglia and the West Country for a period of 21 years.

Catholicism[link]

From the early 1570s onwards Byrd became increasingly involved with Catholicism, which, as the scholarship of the last half-century has demonstrated, became a major factor in his personal and creative life. As John Harley has shown, it is probable that Byrd's parental family were Protestants, though whether by deeply-felt conviction or nominal conformism is not clear. Byrd himself may have held Protestant beliefs in his youth, for a recently discovered fragment of a setting of an English translation of Luther's hymn Erhalt uns, Herr, bei Deinem Wort, which bears an attribution to 'Birde' includes the line 'From Turk and Pope defend us Lord'.^[2] However, from the 1570s onwards he is found associating with known Catholics, including Lord Thomas Paget, to whom he wrote a petitionary letter on behalf of an unnamed friend in 1573. Byrd's wife Julian was first cited for recusancy (refusing to attend Anglican services) at Harlington in Middlesex, where the family now lived, in 1577. Byrd himself appears in the recusancy lists from 1584.

His involvement with Catholicism took on a new dimension in the 1580s. Following Pius V's Papal Bull of 1570, which absolved Elizabeth's subjects from allegiance to her and effectively made her an outlaw in the eyes of the Catholic Church, Catholicism became increasingly identified with sedition in the eyes of the Tudor authorities. With the influx of missionary priests trained in the English Colleges in Douai and Rome from the 1570s onwards relations between the authorities and the Catholic community took a further turn for the worse. Byrd himself is found in the company of prominent Catholics. In 1583 he got into serious trouble because of his association with Lord Thomas Paget, who was suspected of involvement in the Throckmorton Plot, and for sending money to Catholics abroad. As a result of this Byrd's membership of the Chapel Royal was suspended for a time, restrictions were placed on his movements and his house was placed on the search list. In 1586 he attended a gathering at a country house in the company of Father Henry Garnett (later executed for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot) and the Catholic poet Robert Southwell.

Byrd's commitment to the Catholic cause found expression in his motets, of which he composed about 50 between 1575 and 1591. While the texts of the motets included by Byrd and Tallis in the 1575 Cantiones have a High Anglican doctrinal tone, scholars such as Joseph Kerman have detected a profound change of direction in the texts which Byrd set in the motets of the 1580s. In particular there is a persistent emphasis on themes such as the persecution of the chosen people (Domine praestolamur a5) the Babylonian or Egyptian captivity (Domine tu iurasti) and the long-awaited coming of deliverance (Laetentur caeli, Circumspice Jerusalem). This has led scholars from Kerman onwards to believe that Byrd was reinterpreting biblical and liturgical texts in a contemporary context and writing laments and petitions on behalf of the persecuted Catholic community, which seems to have adopted Byrd as a kind of 'house' composer. Some texts should probably be interpreted as warnings against spies (Vigilate, nescitis enim) or lying tongues (Quis est homo) or celebration of the memory of martyred priests (O quam gloriosum). Byrd's setting of the first four verses of Psalm 78 (Deus venerunt gentes) is widely believed to refer to the cruel execution of Fr Edmund Campion in 1581, an event that caused widespread revulsion on the Continent as well as in England. Finally, and perhaps most remarkably, Byrd's Quomodo cantabimus is the result of a motet exchange between Byrd and Philippe de Monte, who was director of music to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, in Prague. In 1583 De Monte sent Byrd his setting of verses 1–4 of Psalm 136 (Super flumina Babylonis), including the pointed question ’How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?’ Byrd replied the following year with a setting of the defiant continuation, set, like de Monte's piece, in eight parts and incorporating a three-part canon by inversion.

Cantiones sacrae (1589 and 1591)[link]

Thirty-seven of Byrd's motets were published in two sets of Cantiones sacrae, which appeared in 1589 and 1591. Together with two sets of English songs, discussed below, these collections, dedicated to powerful Elizabethan lords (Edward Somerset, 4th Earl of Worcester and John Lumley, 1st Baron Lumley), probably formed part of Byrd's campaign to re-establish himself in Court circles after the reverses of the 1580s. They may also reflect the fact that Byrd's fellow monopolist Tallis and his printer Thomas Vautrollier had died, thus creating a more propitious climate for publishing ventures. Since many of the motet texts of the 1589 and 1591 sets are pathetic in tone, it is not surprising that many of them continue and develop the 'affective-imitative' vein found in some motets from the 1570s, though in a more concise and concentrated form. Domine praestolamur (1589) is a good example of this style, laid out in imitative paragraphs based on subjects which characteristically emphasize the expressive minor second and minor sixth, with continuations which subsequently break off and are heard separately (another technique which Byrd had learnt from his study of Ferrabosco). Byrd evolved a special 'cell' technique for setting the petitionary clauses such as ‘miserere mei’ or ‘libera nos Domine’ which form the focal point for a number of the texts. Particularly striking examples of these are the final section of Tribulatio proxima est (1589) and the multi-sectional Infelix ego (1591), a large-scale motet which takes its point of departure from Tribue Domine of 1575.

There are also a number of compositions which fail to conform to this stylistic pattern. They include three motets which employ the old-fashioned cantus firmus technique as well as the most famous item in the 1589 collection, Ne irascaris Domine the second part of which is closely modelled on Philip van Wilder's popular Aspice Domine. A few motets, especially in the 1591 set, abandon traditional motet style and resort to vivid word-painting which reflects the growing popularity of the madrigal (Haec dies, 1591). A famous passage from Thomas Morley's A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597) supports the view that the madrigal had superseded the motet in the favour of Catholic patrons, a fact which may explain why Byrd largely abandoned the composition of non-liturgical motets after 1591.

The English song-books of 1588 and 1589[link]

In 1588 and 1589 Byrd also published two collections of English songs. The first, Psalms, Sonnets and Songs of Sadness and Pietie (1588) consists mainly of adapted consort songs, which Byrd, probably guided by commercial instincts, had turned into vocal part-songs by adding words to the accompanying instrumental parts and labelling the original solo voice as ‘the first singing part’. The consort song, which was the most popular form of vernacular polyphony in England in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, was a solo song for a high voice (often sung by a boy) accompanied by a consort of four consort instruments (normally viols). As the title of Byrd's collection implies, consort songs varied widely in character. Many were settings of metrical psalms, in which the solo voice sings a melody in the manner of the numerous metrical psalm collections of the day (e.g. Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter, 1562) with each line prefigured by imitation in the accompanying instruments. Others are dramatic elegies, intended to be performed in the boy-plays which were popular in Tudor London.

Byrd's 1588 collection, which complicates the form as he inherited it from Robert Parsons, Richard Farrant and others, reflects this tradition. The ‘psalms’ section sets texts drawn from Sternhold's psalter of 1549 in the traditional manner, while the ‘sonnets and pastorals’ section employs lighter, more rapid motion with crotchet (quarter-note) pulse, and sometimes triple metre (Though Amaryllis dance in green). Poetically, the set (together with other evidence) reflects Byrd's involvement with the literary circle surrounding Sir Philip Sidney, whose influence at Court was at its height in the early 1580s. Byrd set three of the songs from Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella, as well as poems by other members of the Sidney circle, and also included two elegies on Sidney's death in the Battle of Zutphen in 1586. But the most popular item in the set was the Lullaby (Lullay lullaby) which blends the tradition of the dramatic lament with the cradle-songs found in some early boy-plays and medieval mystery plays. It long retained its popularity. In 1602 Byrd's patron Edward Somerset, 4th Earl of Worcester, discussing Court fashions in music, predicted that ‘in winter lullaby, an owld song of Mr Birde, wylbee more in request as I thinke’.

The Songs of Sundrie Natures (1589) contain sections in three, four, five and six parts, a format which follows the plan of many Tudor manuscript collections of household music and was probably intended to emulate the madrigal collection Musica transalpina, which had appeared in print the previous year. Byrd's set contains compositions in a wide variety of musical styles, reflecting the variegated character of the texts which he was setting. The three-part section includes settings of metrical versions of the seven penitential psalms, in an archaic style which reflects the influence of the psalm collections. Other items from the three-part and four-part section are in a lighter vein, employing a line-by-line imitative technique and a predominant crotchet pulse. The five-part section includes vocal part-songs which show the influence of the ‘adapted consort song’ style of the 1588 set but which seem to have been conceived as all-vocal part-songs. Byrd also bowed to tradition by setting two carols in the traditional form with alternating verses and burdens, and even included an anthem, a setting of the Easter prose Christ rising again which also circulated in church choir manuscripts with organ accompaniment.

My Ladye Nevells Booke[link]

The 1580s were also a productive decade for Byrd as a composer of instrumental music. On 11 September 1591 John Baldwin, a tenor lay-clerk at St George's Chapel, Windsor and later a colleague of Byrd in the Chapel Royal, completed the copying of My Ladye Nevells Booke, a collection of 42 of Byrd's keyboard pieces which was probably produced under Byrd's supervision and includes corrections which are thought to be in the composer's hand. Byrd would almost certainly have published it if the technical means had been available to do so. The dedicatee long remained unidentified, but John Harley's researches into the heraldic design on the fly-leaf have shown that she was Lady Elizabeth Neville, the third wife of Sir Henry Neville (Gentleman of the Privy Chamber) of Billingbear in Berkshire, who was a Justice of the Peace and a warden of Windsor Great Park.^[3] Under her third married name, Lady Periam, she also received the dedication of Thomas Morley's two-part canzonets of 1595. The contents show Byrd's mastery of a wide variety of keyboard forms, though liturgical compositions based on plainsong are not represented. The collection includes a series of ten pavans and galliards in the usual three-strain form with embellished repeats of each strain. (The only exception is the Ninth Pavan, which is a set of variations on the passamezzo antico bass)

There are indications that the sequence may be a chronological one, for the first pavan is labelled 'the first that ever hee made' in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book and the Tenth Pavan, which is separated from the others, evidently became available at a late stage before the completion date. It is dedicated to William Petre (the son of Byrd's patron John Petre, 1st Baron Petre) who was only 15 years old in 1591 and could hardly have played it if it had been composed much earlier. The collection also includes two famous pieces of programme music. The Battle, which was apparently inspired by an unidentified skirmish in Elizabeth's Irish wars, is a sequence of movements bearing titles such as 'The marche to fight', 'The battells be joyned' and 'The Galliarde for the victorie'. Although not representing Byrd at his most profound, it achieved great popularity and is of incidental interest for the information which it gives on sixteenth-century English military calls. It is followed by The Barley Break (a mock-battle follows a real one), a light-hearted piece which follows the progress of a game of barley-break, a version of the game now known as ‘piggy in the middle’ played by three couples with a ball. My Ladye Nevells Booke also contains two monumental Grounds, and sets of keyboard variations of variegated character, notably the huge set on Walsingham and the popular variations on Sellinger's Round, Carman's Whistle and Lord Willoughby's Welcome Home. The fantasias and voluntaries in Nevell also cover a wide stylistic range, some being austerely contrapuntal (A voluntarie, no. 42)) and others lighter and more Italianate in tone. Like the five-and six-part consort fantasias, they sometimes feature a gradual increase in momentum after an imitative opening paragraph.

Consort music[link]

The period up to 1591 also saw important additions to Byrd's output of consort music, some of which has probably been lost. Two magnificent large-sale compositions are the Browning, a set of 20 variations on a popular melody (also known as The leaves be green) which evidently originated as a celebration of the ripening of nuts in autumn, and an elaborate ground on the formula known as the Goodnight Ground. The smaller-scale fantasias (those a3 and a4) use a light-textured imitative style which owes something to Continental models, while the five and six-part fantasias employ large-scale cumulative construction and allusions to snatches of popular songs. A good example of the last type is the Fantasia a6 (No 2) which begins with a sober imitative paragraph before progressively more fragmented textures (working in a quotation from Greensleeves at one point). It even includes a complete three-strain galliard, followed by an expansive coda (for a performance on YouTube, see under 'External links' below).

Stondon Massey[link]

In about 1594 Byrd's career entered a new phase. He was now in his early fifties, and as a far as the Chapel Royal is concerned he seems to have gone into semi-retirement. He moved with his family from Harlington to Stondon Massey, a small village near Chipping Ongar in Essex. His ownership of Stondon Place, where he lived for the rest of his life, was bitterly contested by Joanna Shelley, with whom he engaged in a protracted and unedifying legal dispute lasting about a decade and a half. The main reason for the move was apparently the proximity of Byrd's patron Sir John Petre (the son of the former Secretary of State Sir William Petre). A wealthy local landowner, Petre was a discreet Catholic who maintained two local manor houses, Ingatestone Hall and Thorndon Hall, the first of which still survives in a much-altered state. Petre held clandestine Mass celebrations, with music provided by his servants, which were subject to the unwelcome attention of spies and paid informers working for the Crown.

Byrd's acquaintance with the Petre family extended back at least to 1581 (as his surviving autograph letter of that year shows) and he spent two weeks at the Petre household over Christmas in 1589. He was ideally equipped to provide elaborate polyphony to adorn the music making at the Catholic country houses of the time. The continued adherence of Byrd and his family to Catholicism continued to cause him difficulties, though one surviving petition suggests that he was granted permission to practise his religion under licence during the reign of Elizabeth. Nevertheless, he regularly appeared in the quarterly local assizes to pay heavy fines for recusancy. No doubt his wide circle of friends and patrons among the nobility and gentry were able to ensure that he escaped more severe penalties.

Masses[link]

It was evidently at the behest of this circle of friends that Byrd now embarked on a grandiose programme to provide a cycle of liturgical music covering all the principal feasts of the Catholic Church calendar. The first stage in this undertaking comprised the three Ordinary of the Mass cycles (in four, three and five parts), which were published by Thomas East between 1592 and 1595. The editions are undated (dates can be established only by close bibliographic analysis)^[4] do not name the printer and consist of only one bifolium per partbook to aid concealment, all signs of secrecy: reminders that the possession of heterodox books was still highly dangerous. All three works contain retrospective features harking back to the earlier Tudor tradition of Mass settings which had lapsed after 1558, along with others which reflect Continental influence and the liturgical practices of the foreign-trained incoming missionary priests. Mass for Four Voices, or the Four-Part Mass, which according to Joseph Kerman, was probably the first to be composed, is partly modelled on John Taverner's Mean Mass, a highly regarded early Tudor setting which Byrd would probably have sung as a choirboy. Taverner's influence is particularly clear in the scale figures rising successively through a fifth, a sixth and a seventh in Byrd's setting of the Sanctus.

All three Mass cycles employ other early Tudor features, notably the mosaic of semichoir sections alternating with full sections in the four-part and five-part Masses, the use of a semichoir section to open the Gloria, Credo and Agnus Dei, and the head-motif which links the openings of all the movements of a cycle. However, all three cycles also include Kyries, a rare feature in Sarum Rite mass settings which usually omitted it because of the use of tropes on festal occasions in the Sarum Rite. The Kyrie of the three-part Mass is set in a simple litany-like style, but the other Kyrie settings employ dense imitative polyphony. A special feature of the four-part and five-part Masses is Byrd's treatment of the Agnus Dei, which employ the technique which Byrd had previously applied to the petitionary clauses from the motets of the 1589 and 1591 Cantiones sacrae. The final words dona nobis pacem ('grant us peace'), which are set to chains of anguished suspensions in the Four-Part Mass and expressive block homophony in the five-part setting almost certainly reflect the aspirations of the troubled Catholic community of the 1590s.

Gradualia[link]

The second stage in Byrd's programme of liturgical polyphony is formed by the Gradualia, two cycles of motets containing 109 items and published in 1605 and 1607. They are dedicated to two members of the Catholic nobility, Henry Howard, 1st Earl of Northampton and Byrd's own patron Sir John Petre, who had been elevated to the peerage in 1603 under the title Lord Petre of Writtle. The appearance of these two monumental collections of Catholic polyphony reflects the hopes which the recusant community must have harboured for an easier life under the new king James I, who came from a Catholic background himself. Addressing Petre (who is known to have lent him money to advance the printing of the collection), Byrd describes the contents of the 1607 set as ‘blooms collected in your own garden and rightfully due to you as tithes’, thus making explicit the fact that they had formed part of Catholic religious observances in the Petre household.

The greater part of the two collections consists of settings of the Proprium Missae for the major feasts of the church calendar, thus supplementing the Mass Ordinary cycles which Byrd had published in the 1590s. Normally, Byrd includes the Introit, the Gradual, the Alleluia (or Tract in Lent if needed), the Offertory and Communion. The feasts covered include the major feasts of the Virgin Mary (including the votive masses for the Virgin for the four seasons of the church year), All Saints and Corpus Christi (1605) followed by the feasts of the Temporale (Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, Whitsun and Feast of Saints Peter and Paul (with additional items for St Peter's Chains and the Votive Mass of the Blessed Sacrament) in 1607. The verse of the introit is normally set as a semichoir section, returning to full choir scoring for the Gloria Patri. Similar treatment applies to the Gradual verse, which is normally attached to the opening Alleluia to form a single item. The liturgy requires repeated settings of the word ‘Alleluia’, and Byrd provides a wide variety of different settings forming brilliantly conceived miniature fantasias which are one of the most striking features of the two sets. The Alleluia verse, together with the closing Alleluia, normally form an item in themselves, while the Offertory and the Communion are set as they stand.

In the Roman liturgy there are many texts which appear repeatedly in different liturgical contexts. To avoid having to set the same text twice, Byrd often resorted to a cross-reference or ‘transfer’ system which allowed a single setting to be slotted into a different place in the liturgy. Unfortunately, this practice sometimes causes confusion, partly because normally no rubrics are printed to make the required transfer clear and partly because there are some errors which complicate matters still further. A good example of the transfer system in operation is provided by the first motet from the 1605 set (Suscepimus Deus a5) in which the text used for the Introit has to be reused in a shortened form for the Gradual. Byrd provides a cadential break at the cut-off point.

The 1605 set also contains a number of miscellaneous items which fall outside the liturgical scheme of the main body of the set. As Philip Brett has pointed out, most of the items from the four- and three-part sections were taken from the Primer (the English name for the Book of hours) thus falling within the sphere of private devotions rather than public worship. These include, inter alia, settings of the four Marian antiphons from the Roman Rite, four Marian hymns set a3, a version of the Litany, the gem-like setting of the Eucharistic hymn Ave verum Corpus, and the Turbarum voces from the St John Passion, as well as a series of miscellaneous items.

In stylistic terms the motets of the Gradualia form a sharp contrast to those of the Cantiones sacrae publications. The vast majority are shorter, with the discursive imitative paragraphs of the earlier motets giving place to double phrases in which the counterpoint, though intricate and concentrated, assumes a secondary level of importance. Long imitative paragraphs are the exception, often kept for final climactic sections in the minority of extended motets. The melodic writing often breaks into quaver (eighth-note) motion, tending to undermine the minim (half-note) pulse with surface detail. Some of the more festive items, especially in the 1607 set, feature vivid madrigalesque word-painting. The Marian hymns from the 1605 Gradualia are set in a light line-by-line imitative counterpoint with crotchet pulse which recalls the three-part English songs from Songs of sundrie natures (1589). For obvious reasons, the Gradualia never achieved the popularity of Byrd's earlier works. The 1607 set omits several texts, which were evidently too sensitive for publication in the light of the renewed anti-Catholic persecution which followed the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. A contemporary account which sheds light on the circulation of the music between Catholic country houses, refers to the arrest of a French Jesuit named De Noiriche, who was followed from an unidentified country house by spies, apprehended, searched and found to be carrying a copy of the 1605 set. Nevertheless, Byrd felt safe enough to reissue both sets with new title pages in 1610.

Anglican church music[link]

Byrd's staunch adherence to Catholicism did not prevent him from contributing memorably to the repertory of Anglican church music. Byrd's small output of church anthems ranges in style from relatively sober early examples (O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth our queen (a6) and How long shall mine enemies (a5) ) to other, evidently late works such as Sing joyfully (a6) which is close in style to the English motets of Byrd's 1611 set, discussed below. Byrd also played a role in the emergence of the new verse anthem, which seems to have evolved in part from the practice of adding vocal refrains to consort songs. Byrd's four Anglican service settings range in style from the unpretentious Short Service, already discussed, to the magnificent so-called Great Service, a grandiose work which continues a tradition of opulent settings by Richard Farrant, William Mundy and Robert Parsons. Byrd's setting is on a massive scale, requiring five-part Decani and Cantoris groupings in antiphony, block homophony and five, six and eight-part counterpoint with verse (solo) sections for added variety. This service setting, which includes an organ part, must have been sung by the Chapel Royal Choir on major liturgical occasions in the early seventeenth century, though its limited circulation suggests that many other cathedral choirs must have found it beyond them. Nevertheless, the source material shows that it was sung in York Minster from c. 1618. The Great Service was in existence by 1606 (the last copying date entered in the earliest surviving manuscript source) and may date back as far as the 1590s.

Psalms, songs and sonnets (1611)[link]

Byrd's last collection of English songs was Psalms, Songs and Sonnets, published in 1611 (when Byrd was over 70) and dedicated to Francis Clifford, 4th Earl of Cumberland, who later also received the dedication of Thomas Campion's First Book of Songs in 1615. The layout of the set broadly follows the pattern of Byrd's 1589 set, being laid out in sections for three, four, five and six parts like its predecessor and embracing an even wider miscellany of styles (perhaps reflecting the influence of another Jacobean publication, Michael East's Third Set of Books (1610). Byrd's set includes two consort fantasias (a4 and a6) as well as eleven English motets, most of them setting prose texts from the Bible. These include some of his most famous compositions, notably Praise our Lord, all ye Gentiles (a6) This day Christ was born (a6) and Have mercy upon me (a6) which employs alternating phrases with verse and full scoring and also circulated as a church anthem. There are more carols set in verse and burden form as in the 1589 set as well as lighter three and four-part songs in Byrd's ‘sonnets and pastorals’ style. Some items are, however, more tinged with madrigalian influence than their counterparts in the earlier set, making clear that the short-lived madrigal vogue of the 1590s had not completely passed Byrd by.

Last works[link]

Byrd also contributed eight keyboard pieces to Parthenia (winter 1612–13), a collection of 21 keyboard pieces engraved by William Hole and containing music by Byrd, John Bull and Orlando Gibbons. It was issued in celebration of the forthcoming marriage of James I's daughter Princess Elizabeth to Frederick V, Elector Palatine, which took place on 14 February 1613. The three composers are nicely differentiated by seniority, with Byrd, Bull and Gibbons represented respectively by eight, seven and six items. Byrd's contribution includes the famous Earl of Salisbury Pavan, composed in memory of Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, who had died on 24 May 1612, and its two accompanying galliards. Byrd's last published compositions are four English anthems printed in William Leighton's ' Teares or Lamentacions of a Sorrowfull Soule (1614).

Byrd remained in Stondon Massey until his death on 4 July 1623, which was noted in the Chapel Royal Check Book in a unique entry describing him as ‘a Father of Musick’. Despite repeated citations for recusancy and swingeing fines, he died a rich man, having rooms at the time of his death at the London home of the Earl of Worcester.

Reputation and reception[link]

Byrd's output of about 470 compositions amply justifies his reputation as one of the great masters of European Renaissance music. Perhaps his most impressive achievement as a composer was his ability to transform so many of the main musical forms of his day and stamp them with his own identity. Having grown up in an age in which Latin polyphony was largely confined to liturgical items for the Sarum rite, he assimilated and mastered the Continental motet form of his day, employing a highly personal synthesis of English and continental models. He virtually created the Tudor consort and keyboard fantasia, having only the most primitive models to follow. He also raised the consort song, the church anthem and the Anglican service setting to new heights. Finally, despite a general aversion to the madrigal, he succeeded in cultivating secular vocal music in an impressive variety of forms in his three sets of 1588, 1589 and 1611.

Byrd enjoyed a high reputation among English musicians, especially in the earlier stages of his career. Despite the failure of the Cantiones of 1575 some of his other collections sold well, while Elizabethan scribes such as the Oxford academic Robert Dow, the Windsor lay clerk John Baldwin and a school of scribes working for the Norfolk country gentleman Sir Edward Paston copied his music extensively. Dow included Latin distichs and quotations in praise of Byrd in his manuscript collection of music (GB Och 984-8) while Baldwin included a long doggerel poem in his commonplace book (GB Lbm Roy App 24 d 2) ranking Byrd at the head of the musicians of his day:

Yet let not straingers bragg, nor they these soe commende,

For they may now geve place and sett themselves behynde,

An Englishman, by name, William BIRDE for his skill

Which I shoulde heve sett first, for soe it was my will,

Whose greater skill and knowledge dothe excelle all at this time

And far to strange countries abrode his skill dothe shyne...

In 1597 Byrd's pupil Thomas Morley dedicated his treatise A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke to Byrd in flattering terms, though he may have intended to counterbalance this in the main text by some sharply satirical references to a mysterious ‘Master Bold’. In The Compleat Gentleman (1622) Henry Peacham (1576–1643) praised Byrd in lavish terms as a composer of sacred music:

‘For Motets and musick of piety and devotion, as well as for the honour of our Nation, as the merit of the man, I prefer above all our Phoenix M[aster] William Byrd, whom in that kind, I know not whether any may equall, I am sure none excel, even by the judgement of France and Italy, who are very sparing in the commendation of strangers, in regard of that conceipt they hold of themselves. His Cantiones Sacrae, as also his Gradualia, are mere Angelicall and Divine; and being of himself naturally disposed to Gravity and Piety, his vein is not so much for leight Madrigals or Canzonets, yet his Virginella and some others in his first Set, cannot be mended by the best Italian of them all.’

Finally, and most intriguingly, it has been argued that a reference to ‘the bird of loudest lay’ in Shakespeare's mysterious allegorical poem The Phoenix and the Turtle may be to the composer. The poem as a whole has been interpreted as an elegy for the Catholic martyr Saint Anne Line, who was executed on 27 February 1601 for harbouring priests.

Although Byrd had a major reputation in England during his lifetime, his music was in many respects curiously uninfluential. Although his pupils included Peter Philips and Thomas Tomkins, both of whom were active as keyboard composers, the native virginal school to which he had contributed so much went into sharp decline with a number of deaths in the 1620s and never recovered. Thomas Morley, Byrd's other major composing pupil, devoted himself to the cultivation of the madrigal, a form in which Byrd himself took little interest. The native tradition of Latin music which Byrd had done so much to keep alive more or less died with him, while consort music underwent a huge change of character at the hands of a new generation of professional musicians at the Jacobean and Caroline courts. Ironically in view of Byrd's own religious beliefs, it was his Anglican church music which came closest to establishing a continuous tradition, at least in the sense that some of it continued to be performed in choral foundations after the Restoration and into the eighteenth century. Byrd's exceptionally long lifespan meant that he lived into an age in which many of the forms of vocal and instrumental music which he had made his own had lost their appeal to most musicians. Despite the efforts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarians, the reversal of this judgement had to wait for the pioneering work of twentieth-century scholars from E. H. Fellowes onwards. In more recent times Joseph Kerman, Oliver Neighbour, Philip Brett, John Harley, Richard Turbet, Alan Brown, Kerry McCarthy, and others have made major contributions to increasing our understanding of Byrd's life and music. In 2010, The Cardinall's Musick under the direction of Andrew Carwood completed their recorded survey of Byrd's Latin church music. This series of thirteen recordings is the first time that all Byrd's Latin music is available on disc.

Veneration[link]

Byrd is honored together with John Merbecke and Thomas Tallis with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on November 21.

Media[link]

	Allman From the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Performed by Ulrich Metzner on a harpsichord of the type used in the early 20th century
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

See also[link]

Saints portal

• List of compositions by William Byrd
• Orlando Gibbons
• John Bull (composer)

Notes[link]

1. ^ See K. McCarthy, ‘Byrd, Augustine and Tribue Domine’,Early Music 32 (20040 pp. 569–576
2. ^ O. Neighbour, 'Music Manuscripts of George Iliffe from Stanford Hall, Leicestershire, including a new ascription to Byrd', Music and Letters 88 (2007) pp. 420–435
3. ^ J Harley, 'My Lady Nevell Revealed', Music and Letters 86 (2005) pp. 1–15
4. ^ See P. Clulow, ‘Publication Dates for Byrd's Latin Masses’, Music and Letters 47 (1966) pp. 1–9

References[link]

•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Byrd, William". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
• P. Brett, William Byrd and his Contemporaries (Berkeley, 2007)
• A. Brown and R. Turbet (gen. eds), Byrd Studies (Cambridge, 1992)
• E. H. Fellowes, William Byrd (rev. edn, London, 1948)
• John Harley, William Byrd: Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, (Aldershot, 1997)
• J. Kerman, The Masses and motets of William Byrd (London, 1981)
• J. Kerman, William Byrd, New Grove 2, 2001)
• O. Neighbour, The Consort and Keyboard Music of William Byrd London, 1978)
• R. Turbet, William Byrd, A Guide to Research (New York, 1987)
• Stainer & Bell. Ltd., (13.IX.2006) – Contains bio and list of works

Editions of Byrd's works[link]

• The Byrd Edition (gen. ed. P. Brett), Vols 1–17 (London, 1977–2004)
• A. Brown (ed.) William Byrd, Keyboard Music (Musica Britannica 27–28, London, 1971)

External links[link]

Wikisource has the text of the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia article William Byrd.

• Complete list of Byrd's works from stainer.co.uk (PDF)
• William Byrd at Find-A-Grave
• The keyboard music of William Byrd including recordings
• Free access to high-resolution images of manuscripts containing works by Byrd from Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music

Scores and recordings[link]

• Free scores by William Byrd at the International Music Score Library Project
• Free scores by William Byrd in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
• Free scores by William Byrd in the Werner Icking Music Archive (WIMA)
• William Byrd - Fantasia #2 - Viol Consort on YouTube
• Free recordings of Madrigals, Latin Church Music
• Free recordings of Byrd's Ave verum corpus
• Free recordings of Mass for four voices and some Christmas motets
• Motet Ave Verum Corpus as interactive hypermedia at the BinAural Collaborative Hypertext
• Kunst der Fuge: William Byrd – Free MIDI files
• William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, In Chains of Gold. Dunedin Consort, DCD34008
• Ceremony & Devotion - Music for the Tudors Harry Christophers, The Sixteen (CORO)
• Complete Byrd Edition Andrew Carwood, The Cardinall's Musick (ASV / Hyperion)

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (August 2010)

Arthur Foote as a young man

Arthur William Foote (5 March 1853 in Salem, Massachusetts – 8 April 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts)^[1][2] was an American classical composer, and a member of the "Boston Six." The other five were George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach, Edward MacDowell, John Knowles Paine, and Horatio Parker.

The modern tendency is to view Foote’s music as “Romantic” and “European” in light of the later generation of American composers such as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris and William Schuman, all of whom helped to develop a recognizably American sound in classical music. In some sense, then, he is to music what American poets were to literature before Walt Whitman.

Foote was an early advocate of Brahms and Wagner and promoted performances of their music. Foote was an active music teacher and wrote a number of pedagogical works, including Modern Harmony in Its Theory and Practice (1905), written with Walter R. Spalding. It was republished as Harmony (1969). He also wrote Some Practical Things in Piano-Playing (1909) and Modulation and Related Harmonic Questions (1919). He contributed many articles to music journals, including "Then and Now, Thirty Years of Musical Advance in America" in Etude (1913) and "A Bostonian Remembers" in Musical Quarterly (1937).

The Grove Music Encyclopedia says:

“In his finest works Foote was a memorable composer. His style, firmly placed in the Romantic tradition, is characterized by lyrical melodies, expressive phrasing, and clear formal structure. He excelled in writing for strings and achieved particular popularity in his lifetime with the Suite in E major, Op. 63. and A Night Piece for flute and strings. Of his works for full orchestra, the Four Character Pieces after the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Op. 48 is noteworthy for its colourful instrumental writing ...”.

A good part of Foote's compositions consists of chamber music and these works are generally among his best. The Chamber Music Journal, discussing Foote's chamber music, has written, "If his name is not entirely unknown, it is fair to say that his music is. This is a shame. Foote’s chamber music is first rate, deserving of regular public performance." His Piano Quintet, Op.38 and Piano Quartet, Op.23, are singled out for special praise. With regard to the Piano Quintet, the author writes, "Each of the movements is a gem. The Scherzo is particularly fine and the rousing finale beyond reproach. I believe that the only reason this work never received the audience it deserved and deserves is because it was written by an American who was 'out of the loop.'” As for the Piano Quartet, the opinion is that "it is as good as any late 19th century piano quartet."

Chamber music works[link]

• Three Pieces for Cello & Piano, Op. 1
• String Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 4
• Piano Trio No. 1 in C minor, Op. 5
• Three Pieces for Violin & Piano, Op. 9
• Sonata for Violin & Piano, Op. 20
• Scherzo for Cello & Piano, Op. 22
• Piano Quartet in C major, Op. 23
• Three Pieces for Oboe (or Flute) & Piano, Op. 31 (Flute = Op. 31B)
• String Quartet No. 2 in E major, Op. 32 (Finale performed separately as Tema con Variazione)
• Romanza for Cello & Piano, Op. 33 (slow movement of Cello Concerto, Op. 33)
• Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 38
• Melody for Violin & Piano, Op. 44
• Suite in E major for strings, Op. 63 (premiered and first recorded by the Boston Symphony Orchestra)
• Piano Trio No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 65
• Ballad for Violin & Piano, Op. 69
• String Quartet No. 3 in D major, Op. 70
• Two Pieces for Violin & Piano, Op. 74
• Legend for Violin & Piano, Op. 76
• Aubade for Cello & Piano, Op. 77
• Sonata for Cello & Piano, Op. 78
• Sonata for Viola & Piano, Op. 78A
• Nocturno & Scherzo for Flute & String Quartet, WoO. (1918, Nocturno also known as A Night Piece')
• At Dusk for Flute, Harp and Cello, WoO
• Sarabande & Rigaudon for Oboe (or Flute), Viola (or Violin) and Piano, WoO

References[link]

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians, Ed. Sadie, Stanley, MacMillan 1980, ISBN 0-333-23111-2
• The Chamber Music Journal, Vol XIII, No.2, 2002, p. 11, ISSN 1535 1726
• A Catalog of the Works of Arthur Foote, 1853–1937, Cipolla, Wilma Reid, Information Coordinators 1980, ISBN 0-89990-000-3

External links[link]

• Free scores by Arthur Foote at the International Music Score Library Project
• The Chamber Music of Arthur Foote. Sound-bites and information from several works.
• Arthur Foote - biography page at the Unitarian Universalist Association web site
• Art of the States: Arthur Foote Three Character Pieces, op. 9 (1885)

Further reading[link]

• Tawa, Nicholas E. (1997). Arthur Foote: a musician in the frame of time and place. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-3295-X. http://books.google.com/books?id=dsVaI4BXpskC.