Ordinary, one a year, respectively for four, for three, and for five voice parts. This, finally, was music that
could only be sung behind closed doors. The first Mass Ordinary settings ever printed in England, they
were issued without title pages (but as Kerman observes, “Byrd’s name was coolly entered as author at
the top of every page”).^21
In 1605 and 1607, Byrd followed up with two ambitious volumes of Propers, called Gradualia. In
them, he supplied England’s clandestine Catholics with a comprehensive body of gorgeously wrought but
modestly scaled polyphonic music for their whole liturgical year—a veritable Magnus Liber, to recall the
first such attempt, at Notre Dame de Paris, as long before Byrd’s time as he is before ours. More
immediately, Byrd was following in the footsteps of Henricus Isaac who about a hundred years earlier
had received a commission from the Swiss diocese of Constance to set the whole Graduale to polyphonic
music, and responded with three big books called Choralis Constantinus; they were finally published
between 1550 and 1555, long after Isaac’s death in 1517, in an edition by his pupil Ludwig Sennfl, who
put the finishing touches on the last items.
Isaac’s settings, based on Gregorian chants as advertised by the title of his book, used the cantus-
firmus and paraphrase techniques of his time. Byrd’s settings, employing no traditional melodies, were
(like his Ordinaries) the concise and tightly woven epitome of a half-century’s striving after imitative
perfection. (Between 1586 and 1591, another Proper omnibus, the Opus musicum by the flamboyant
Austrian Catholic composer Jakob Handl, containing a record-breaking 445 motets in an ostentatious
variety of styles, many of them avant-garde for the time, was published in Prague.)
Byrd’s preface to the Gradualia contains one of the most eloquent humanistic descriptions of musical
rhetoric ever penned. Sacred words, he wrote, have an abstrusa et recondita vix (translatable as “a
cryptic and mysterious power”). Yet what Byrd affected to attribute to the words, however, was really the
power of his own musical inspiration. “As I have learned by trial,” he continued, “the most suitable of all
musical ideas occur as of themselves (I know not how) to one thinking upon things divine and earnestly
and diligently pondering them, and suggest themselves spontaneously to the mind that is not indolent and
inert.”^22 One pictures the composer walking about, pen in hand, mulling and muttering the words he is to
set, deriving his musical ideas from their sound as uttered in his own earnest voice, and weaving the
polyphonic texture out of motives so acquired. It is the consummate balance of distinctive personal
enunciation and lucid formal design that is so affecting in Byrd’s last works. His way of shaping musical
motives—so closely modeled on the precious, threatened Latin words—into contrapuntal structures of
such dazzling technical finish at once sums up the whole notion of the ars perfecta and raises it one final,
matchless and unprecedented notch.
In the case of the Masses, the works are literally without precedent. The tradition of Mass
composition in England was decisively broken by the Reformation. Nor were the grandiose festal Masses
of Taverner and his generation—implying a secure institutional backing and leisurely confidence in
execution—suitable models for Masses that would be sung by undercover congregations in rural lofts and
barns, using whatever vocal forces the congregation itself could muster up. Nor is there any indication
that much continental Mass music—unprintable stuff in England—could have come Byrd’s way. This was
a wheel that he would have to reinvent.
He did it on the basis of his own motet-writing experience, in which he had worked out a very
personal synthesis of ars perfecta imitation and rhetorical homophony. Byrd’s Masses are in effect
extended, multipartite “freestyle” motets of this kind, affording a whole new way of approaching the text,
a manner unprecedented on the continent where composers wrote their Masses by the dozen. Byrd was
one composer—the one Catholic composer, as Kerman has remarked—who did not take that text for
granted, but who set it with unexampled and unparalleled awareness of its semantic content: a very
idiosyncratic awareness, in fact, as befitted his plight and that of his community.^23