William Byrd and His Contemporaries

Essays and a Monograph

Philip Brett author Joseph Kerman editor Davitt Moroney editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:3rd Nov '06

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

William Byrd and His Contemporaries cover

Throughout his distinguished career, Philip Brett wrote about the music of the Tudor period. He carried out pathbreaking work on the life and music of William Byrd (c.1540-1623), both as an editor and a historian. He also studied other composers working during the period, including John Taverner, Thomas Tallis, Orlando Gibbons, and Thomas Weelkes. Collecting these influential essays together for the first time, this volume is a tribute to Brett's agile mind and to his incomparable skill at synthesizing history and musical analysis. Byrd was a prominent court composer, but also a Catholic. Besides important instrumental music and English songs, he wrote a great deal of sacred music, some for his Protestant patrons, and some for his fellow Catholics who celebrated mass in secret. Ranging from the report of Brett's findings on the Paston manuscripts, an unpublished round-table paper that he delivered a few months before his untimely death, to his monograph-length study of Byrd's magnum opus, Gradualia, the essays collected here consider both sacred and secular music, and vocal and instrumental traditions, providing an intimate glimpse into what was unique about Byrd and his music. Elegantly written, with the particular brilliance for which Brett was known, this book opens a fascinating window onto one of the most fruitful periods of English musical history.

"This is superior scholarship that establishes very significant aspects of Byrd's music and its history, and the volume will be an important landmark in Byrd scholarship. The range of methods and subjects itself is admirable; the editors have chosen writings that represent substantial and first-rate study that are either out-of-print or inaccessible. This is an outstanding work." - William Mahrt, editor of Convention in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Music"

ISBN: 9780520247581

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 23mm

Weight: 499g

272 pages