THE PEAK (AND LIMIT) OF STYLISTIC REFINEMENT
Passages from two pithy motets in Byrd’s Gradualia, one from each book, show the ultimate degree of
refinement not just of Byrd’s art but of the whole art of Catholic church polyphony. Ave verum corpus, the
sacramentary hymn for the feast of Corpus Christi, is probably the best known piece from these late
books, possibly Byrd’s best known sacred work outside of the Masses. Partly because its text is a hymn,
and partly because of the way (reminiscent of the ending of Josquin’s Ave Maria) it addresses Christ
using the first person singular, it is one of Byrd’s most unwaveringly chordal settings. Not only that, the
motet is virtually without conventional dissonance; even cadential suspensions are often avoided. At the
same time the harmony is famously wayward and, by implication, discordant. Why the seeming
contradiction between the stark simplicity of the texture and the fractious harmonic ambience? As usual,
the answer is to be sought in the domain of rhetoric.
The subject of the motet is one of the great marvels of Christian dogma: the transubstantiation of the
Communion Host into the body of Christ. We have already seen Palestrina using unusual harmonies to
delineate a magnum mysterium; but where Palestrina uses a chromaticism that arises out of a speeded-up
sequence of ordinary fifth-relations, Byrd exploits with special expressive intensity a harmonic usage
that, while not unknown in continental music, was cultivated with special gusto by English composers and
is for all practical purposes an English trait.
That special feature is called the “false (or cross) relation”; it consists in the immediate juxtaposition
or brief simultaneous occurrence in two voices of a diatonic scale degree and its chromatic inflection
(often putting the major vs. the minor third in a triad). Successive cross relations pervade the motet;
simultaneous cross relation occurs at the moment of prayer, miserere mei (Ex. 16-20), in which the bass’s
F rubs directly against F#, the sustained chord third in the tenor, creating a dissonance to add urgency to
the words addressed to God.
For a last look at Byrd, and at the ars perfecta, we can focus on Non vos relinquam, the Vespers
antiphon to the Magnificat for the feast of Pentecost, known in England as Whitsunday. The Pentecost
liturgy, being the climax of the jubilant post-Easter season known as Paschal Time, resounds throughout
with the word “Alleluia,” the emblem of exaltation. That was another word Byrd never took for granted,
but clothed in countless specially expressive guises. Here he throws in an extra “Alleluia” of his own to
rebound against the first word of the liturgical text in what was known as a “double point”: a complex of
two motives that unfold in perpetual (and perpetually varied) counterpoint (Ex. 16-21). It was something
he had inherited from Ferrabosco (who had inherited it from the Continent), but which Byrd took to a new
level of suppleness and concision.
EX. 16-20 Ave verum corpus, mm. 36–43