in church.
FIG. 16-3 Johann Joseph Fux, author of Gradus ad Parnassum.
The most influential of these books was Kontrapunkt, by Knud Jeppesen (1892–1974), a Danish
musicologist and composer, who based his method on his doctoral dissertation, a fresh description of
Palestrina’s style that was published in English in 1927 as The Style of Palestrina and the Dissonance.
Either in the original or in its English language edition, published in 1939, Jeppesen’s Counterpoint was
standard pabulum in European and American conservatories and universities at least until the early
1960s, when the author of this book worked his somewhat lugubrious but finally profitable way through it.
Many have questioned its relevance to modern composition by now, and its hold on the curriculum has
loosened. But for historians traditional counterpoint training is invaluable. His territory has been
shrinking, but Palestrina lives.
BYRD
The fate of William Byrd, Palestrina’s somewhat younger, longer-lived English contemporary, was rather
different. He was a far more versatile composer, adept in every contemporary genre both sacred and
secular, who made an important contribution to the early development of instrumental chamber and
keyboard music, realms about as far removed from Palestrina’s sphere of interest and influence as can be
imagined. In this chapter, however, we will concentrate on the side of Byrd’s output that overlapped with
Palestrina’s, and on his position as a late—arguably, the very latest—great master of polyphonic service
music in the Catholic tradition, of all European musical traditions the most venerable.
With Byrd we truly reach the end of the line. His work was never canonized the way Palestrina’s was
but had to await revival by musical antiquarians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The reason was
simple and cruel: the church he served had also reached the end of the line in England. Far from the
official musical spokesman of established religious power, Byrd became the musical spokesman of the
losing side in a religious war: that of the so-called recusants or refusers, loyal Catholics in an England
that had anathematized the pope and persecuted his followers. Byrd’s latest, greatest music, on which we
shall focus, was the music of a church gone underground.