This CD of William Byrd's divine sacred music was recorded live in a concert that earned both popular and critical acclaim. ClevelandClassical.com praised Quire Cleveland's "robust, chiseled sound ... crisp diction" and declared "Blend and balance were impeccable." PROGRAM NOTES by KERRY McCARTHY, biographer of William Byrd William Byrd loved the sound of the human voice. He wrote in 1588 that “there is not any Musicke of Instruments whatsoever comparable to that which is made of the voyces of Men, where the voyces are good, and the same well sorted and ordered.” This CD offers a broad selection of Byrd’s vocal music: Latin and English, public and private, melancholy and joyful. We have chosen a title which was given to Byrd during his own lifetime: "England’s Phoenix." The phoenix is the immortal firebird of ancient legend. (Byrd’s contemporaries seem to have enjoyed making avian puns on his name, and he is praised elsewhere as England’s nightingale and as a sweet-singing swan.) The phoenix is also a unique creature—there is only one in the whole world—and the name points to Byrd as a unique character in his day. He was a pioneer in many musical styles and an innovator in nearly everything he tried. He was the first English composer to take full advantage of the new technology of music printing, at a time when the price of a good book of music dropped from the cost of a small farm to the cost of a decent pair of shoes. He combined almost endless creativity with a great willingness to take risks. Byrd’s "Mass for Five Voices" is the golden thread running through our program. It is surprising that anyone was writing this kind of thing at all in Elizabethan England. Catholic worship was illegal there, punishable by heavy fines at best and gruesome execution at worst. Byrd knew the danger he was courting when he composed music for it. For many other Renaissance composers, writing masses was the bread and butter of everyday musical life. (We have a letter from the prolific Palestrina, reassuring one of his patrons that he could produce one every ten days.) Byrd took a different approach. He wrote only three masses, one each for three, four, and five voices. Unlike his European colleagues, he did not build them on pre-existing materials such as popular songs or chant melodies. He never even gave them names—or, if he did, the names have been long lost. He brought his own unique approach to each movement in the five-voice mass, from the beautifully quirky setting of the Creed to the emotional intensity of the "Agnus Dei." In the 16th century, the "Agnus" was generally treated as a grand finale, a place to pile on extra voices and show off technical skill. Here it is a poignant appeal for mercy and peace, two things that were certainly needed in Byrd’s day. Alongside his three masses, Byrd also wrote a large selection of music for different times and seasons of the church year. "Tollite portas" is a piece for Advent, a setting of the “Lift up your heads, O ye gates” so familiar from Handel’s "Messiah." It offers some perfect examples of Byrd’s own principle, as reported by his loyal student Thomas Morley: “You must haue a care that when your matter signifieth ascending, high heauen, and such like, you make your musicke ascend: for it will be thought a great absurditie to talke of heauen and point downwarde to the earth.” "Ave verum corpus," from the same collection of music, is a traditional rhyming prayer in honor of the Eucharist. Its elegant simplicity has made it one of Byrd’s best-known works. It is also unlike any other Latin motet he ever wrote. He borrowed its most arresting features from the secular French and English love songs that were so popular in 16th-century England: all the voices singing the same words at once, repeated pauses for rhetorical effect, and the whole final section repeated to get the point across. This is also where we find, in a moment of pious fervor (“O dulcis! O pie!”), the only exclamation marks Byrd ever put in print. Many of Byrd’s most famous sacred works were not written for church at all. His "Cantiones sacrae" (“sacred songs”) were chamber music for connoisseurs, the same people who would have enjoyed evenings of playing the harpsichord or the viols in richly tapestried Elizabethan rooms. "Ne irascaris," a substantial eight-minute motet, was perhaps the most famous of all these pieces. One musician in Byrd’s own day copied it out with the simple note “good songe.” Byrd treats the mournful text from Isaiah with solemnity and insistence. Even the major chords are quite sad. (The only musician who seems to have missed the point was one enthusiastic 17th-century English scribe who adapted this motet to the text "Behold I bring you glad tidings.") "Haec dicit Dominus" is another intense lament, this time for lower voices, with echoes of the older generation of music that Byrd would have known in his childhood. Byrd also wrote some splendidly cheerful motets. The Easter motet "In resurrectione tua" is one of his shortest works, barely taking up a couple of minutes even with its exuberant alleluias. "Venite exultemus" has the distinction of being the very last Latin motet he ever published. He added it to the end of his final motet book as a sort of bonus track, an all-purpose song of rejoicing that fits any happy occasion. The musical language is shared with the madrigals of his day. If we ignore the words for a moment, it is easy to imagine nymphs and shepherds frolicking in some Arcadian scene. Our journey through Byrd’s sacred music is completed by two of Byrd’s English anthems. One of them, "Exalt thyself," was lost until the 1970s, when it was rediscovered in an obscure manuscript in the library of Worcester Cathedral. We owe this near-miss to the fact that Byrd generally did not publish his English church anthems. Unlike his other vocal works, they seem to have been the exclusive property of the Chapel Royal, the great cathedrals linked to it, and the guild of professional musicians who copied this music out by hand for their own use. One of the few anthems to make it successfully out of this narrow orbit was "Sing joyfully," which was already a classic in its own day. It is also the only piece by Byrd which we know was performed on a very specific historical occasion: the baptism of King James’s infant daughter Mary in 1605. The little girl—the first royal baby born in England since the days of Henry VIII—was dressed in velvet and ermine for her christening. After the happy event, “there ffollowed a full Anthem (singe Joyfullye),” sung by the musicians of the Chapel Royal. — Kerry McCarthy, Guest Lecturer & Artist