| William Byrd's final Latin work was his two-volume Gradualia (1605/07), an elaborate cycle---a hundred and nine pieces in all---of feast-day Mass propers and related pieces composed for the clandestine liturgy of the English Catholic community. In the previous decades, Byrd had gained fame for his Latin Cantiones, mostly on texts of penitence or political outrage. As Joseph Kerman has pointed out, his selection and manipulation of sacred texts during those years was itself an art. Near the end of his life, he turned from the extrovert, often anguished ad libitum rhetoric of the Cantiones to the strictly ordered world of the liturgical cycle. It is nonetheless in his preface to the first book of Gradualia that he makes his famous statement about setting sacred texts, in which "there is such hidden and concealed power that, to one thinking about divine things and turning them over attentively and earnestly in his mind, the most appropriate measures come." The key to a closer examination of Gradualia is in fact a simple question, around which this study revolves: how did Byrd engage with the texts of these later liturgical works?;A close examination of the two volumes of Gradualia, notably Byrd's own detailed prefaces to them, reveals two pervasive concerns: the integrity of the liturgical cycle and the systematic close reading of sacred words. These are two issues central to the English Catholic community of Byrd's day, most notably through the influence of the Jesuits and Ignatian meditative practices. I investigate both topics at length, with reference to numerous early modern recusant sources, many of them recovered for the first time. The last part of the thesis is devoted to systematic musical analysis of Gradualia in light of this contemporary evidence. I revisit the structure and detail of the cycle, revise the likely chronology of its composition, and reveal an unexpected richness and coherence at all levels, from the tiniest motivic transformations to the grand narrative of the liturgical year. |
