Grace Cathedral 030203 Byrd Recital

A Recital of Keyboard Music from the Age of Shakespeare

Davitt Moroney, Muselar Virginal
by John Phillips (Berkeley, 1991), based on Ioannes Couchet (Antwerp, 1650)

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PROGRAM

Music by William Byrd (c.1540-1623)

Prelude in F
Variations on "Will you walk the woods so wild"

*
Fancy in D minor
Pavana Lachrymae; Harding's Galliard

*
The March before the Battle
The Irish March
The Trumpets
Galliard for the Victory

*
Hugh Ashton's Ground

*
Pavan and Galliard in F
A Hornpipe

The muselar virginal used for today's concert of music by William Byrd was built by John Phillips of Berkeley in 1991. Such instruments are designed to give domestic pleasure and cannot be heard at their best in a large concert hall. In a small space, their subdued rhetoric communicates naturally in an intimate way. As is appropriate for gently persuasive discourse, the instrument is not highly strung. The low tension on the strings results in a pitch of A = 392, a whole tone lower than modern concert pitch (A = 440). This relaxed pitch was used for other domestic instruments in sixteenth-century England.

This muselar is a copy of an exceptionally fine Flemish instrument built in 1650 by Ioannes Couchet of Antwerp. Couchet was born in 1615, was apprenticed to his uncle Ioannes Ruckers in about 1625, and became a master harpsichord builder in 1642. When he died in 1655, he was buried lying on his left side in the case of an unfinished single-manual harpsichord, instead of a normal coffin. This was a logical and inexpensive choice, as well as a touchingly elegant one, for a family that specialised in building good wooden boxes . . . Constantijn Huygens drew a picture of the coffin, noting "In this crooked box rests Couchet, for a good reason: it shows his craft and fits his shape exactly," a comment that has since caused scholars to speculate about Couchet's physical appearance.

The linked names Ruckers and Couchet have the same prestige in the history of harpsichord building as the name Stradivarius for baroque violins,. The Ruckers were a dynasty for four generations, over a century. Their reputation was international and had already become legendary in the eighteenth century. Their instruments now command the similar prices in auction rooms as Stradivarius violins. The family fortune was established by Hans Ruckers (c.1550-1598), followed by his sons Ioannes Ruckers (1578-1642) and Andreas Ruckers (1579-c.1652). Andreas's son, also called Andreas (1607-1654), continued the firm along with his cousin Ioannes Couchet (1615-1655), who was the son of Hans Ruckers daughter, Catharina, and her husband Carel Couchet. They worked in the same workshop, building the same models, and even used some of the same tools as their famous grandfather. The family business was continued under the three sons of Ioannes Couchet until it came to an end in sad circumstances. The last Couchet, Ioseph Ioannes, died in 1706, having been interned in a cloister as "insane."

The 1650 Couchet instrument is in the Vleeshuis Museum in Antwerp, Belgium. Although it dates from nearly thirty years after William Byrd's death, virginals of exactly this style and size were made during his lifetime. Well over a dozen Ruckers or Couchet muselars survive, several of which are preserved in American collections. The earliest, by Hans Ruckers, is dated 1581; it is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Two muselars by Andreas Ruckers may be seen in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: one is dated 1610; the other is from 1620 and belongs to the New England Conservatory. George Harding, the brother of US President Harding, once owned a fine Ioannes Ruckers muselar dated 1623 (now in Stuttgart), and Harvard University has another Ioannes Ruckers from 1636. All these instruments are almost identical in design to the Couchet muselar on which today's instrument is based.

Like the majority of virginals, harpsichords, and organs of the seventeenth century, muselars have one manual with a "C/E short octave" in the bass. They also usually have the arpichordium stop, a way of producing a startling twanging noise in the bass by making little metal hooks touch the lower strings. This instrument might look small by modern standards, yet it is a "six foot" muselar virginal, that is, a large one with a keyboard range of four octaves (forty-seven notes). Most of Byrd's keyboard music was written for a substantially smaller sixteenth-century instrument with a range of just over three octaves (thirty-eight notes). Such "little" keyboards nevertheless corresponded to the full range of normal human voices, the three-octave Gamut, from low bass to high soprano. The seven-octave twentieth-century piano keyboard, corresponding to the range of the full panoply of orchestral instruments from lowest contrabass to highest piccolo, would probably have seemed monstrous and pointless to Byrd, whose musical inspiration is often of vocal origin. He would therefore have found the instrument used for this recital to be big and "modern," representing the latest technical inventions and advances.

In muselar virginals, the keyboard is placed to the right, rather than being on the left (as in spinet virginals) or centered. This enables the mechanism to pluck the strings right in the middle of their sounding length, creating a uniquely warm and full sound. (Harpsichords, spinets and other virginals all pluck the strings at one extremity.) In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, muselars were greatly appreciated for their rich sound quality. Although the beautiful sonority is the direct result of the plucking point (and therefore of the keyboard being on the right), this very feature inevitably places the action for the left hand in the exact middle of the highly resonant soundboard. The inescapable result is that occasional mechanical clicks and clunks that occur are all faithfully amplified by the soundboard. These can make some rapid left-hand scales slightly problematic. A prejudiced eighteenth-century commentator noted that instruments "which have the keyboard on the right-hand side are good in the right hand, but grunt in the bass like young pigs" (Quirinus van Blankenburg, Elementa Musica, 1739). Muselars therefore fell out of favor largely as a direct result of the precise feature which creates their special sound. However, I admit to enjoying (and even sometimes exploiting) such "grunts." This little quirk is a small price to pay for the wonderful sonority. In Byrd's The Battell, for example, the "grunts" can even be put to good musical use, as can the vigorous twangs made by the arpichordium (heard during The Trumpetts).

This muselar was specially commissioned for my complete recording of Byrd's keyboard music (Hyperion, 1999). The soundboard painting, covered with flowers, is an exact copy of the original - apart from the addition of a California poppy at the right end, near the tuning pins. The lid painting, by Janine Johnson of Berkeley, is a composite scene incorporating (by direct reference or allusion) the titles of twenty-six pieces by Byrd; in addition there are fifteen different kinds of plants with bird-related names (some of which, such as the parrot tulips, traditionally appear on seventeenth-century soundboard paintings). Also depicted are twenty-three different species of bird, including all those to which Byrd was likened during his lifetime: the phoenix burns, of course, in a fire; the swan swims calmly, no doubt singing a swansong; and the eagle is shown floating directly over the exact centre of the keyboard, hovering above the figure in black, whose head is based on the only known engraving supposedly representing Byrd. The muselar is itself depicted more than once in the painting.

PROGRAM NOTES

Prelude in F (BK 115); Variations on "Will You Walk the Woods so Wild" (BK 85)
The short F major prelude was identified in 1973 as Byrd's work by Oliver Neighbour. Various versions of the title of Byrd's variations survive in the different sources of the piece (the Fitwilliam Virginal Book calls it "The Woods so Wild"; another source has "mr birds wandringe the woodes"). The song on which the variations are based appears to have been especially popular in sixteenth-century England. Sir Peter Carew is said to have sung to King Henry VIII a song with the text "As I walked the wode so wylde." The poet Sir Thomas Wyatt used the same idea: "I muste go walke the woodes so wyld / And wander here and there." The words of the song "Will you walk the woods so wilde," attributed to Charles Jackson, occur in the Giles Lodge lute book (1571).

The eight-measure melody has the charming characteristic of alternating two measures of F major with two measures of G major, creating gentle harmonic shocks not only throughout each variation but also between variations. Byrd's setting is dated 1590 in the two most important manuscripts, My Lady Nevell's Book and the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. It is the only one of his 127 keyboard pieces to be precisely dated. It also survives in five other manuscripts, a sure sign of its popularity. The melody is audible in the first half of the work, migrating in pitch from the alto register (variations 1, 3-6) and the soprano (variations 2 and 7). For variations 8-12 it more or less disappears, although the ear imagines it without problem. Finally, for the last two variations it returns, first in the alto then triumphantly at the upper octave when the melody is lifted up to the top of the instrument and supported by rich six-part chords.

Fancy in D minor (BK 46)
This fancy, or fantasia, probably dates from about 1590. It was revised shortly after being copied into My Lady Nevell's Book in 1591 since the text in a slightly later manuscript (c.1595) presents some significant improvements. The revised version will be heard today.

The work is in the serious Dorian mode and uses a different style for each of its three sections. The opening theme is possibly intended to be a reference to the Salve regina plainsong. In this fancy, written a generation before Italian keyboard composers such as Frescobaldi had published their toccatas, Byrd anticipates in a single movement the three distinct kinds of baroque keyboard music which would become clearly crystalized during the seventeenth century, the polyphonic "old style", the dance style, and the improvisatory "fantastic style." The whole first section is intricately polyphonic, in the style of a learned contrapuntal ricercar. Stylistically, Byrd here adopts what would later be called the "old style," based on points of imitation in vocal style. The second section is based on livelier dance rhythms, similar to those found in polychoral canzonas of Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli (although it is unlikely that Byrd knew such Venetian music). The remainder of the work is made up of one large section that is weightier and more sonorous. Towards the end, one remarkable passage anticipates by twenty years the close, rising imitations and driving cross rhythms found in another Venetian repertoire, Monteverdi's Vespers of the Blessed Virgin (1610). Byrd's pupil, John Bull, later paid homage to this remarkable passage by quoting it in the closing section one of his pavans. Byrd closes the fancy by repeating this phrase with elaborate extra ornamentation. Here the fingers are released in long, free, toccata-like flourishes announcing what became known as the "fantastic style."

Pavana Lachrymae (BK 54); Harding's Galliard (BK 55)
            Flow my teares, fall from your springs
        Exil'd for ever; let me mourn
           Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings,
        There let me live forlorn....
           Hark, you shadows that in darkness dwell,
               Learn to condemn light;
        Happy, happy they that in hell
        Feel not the world's despair.

   This famous piece started out as a solo lute pavan by John Dowland, some time before 1595. The first printed version occurs as a song in pavan form, with the subtitle "Lacrime" ("tears"), in his Second Booke of Songs (1600). It was later again transformed into the well-known "passionate pavan" for consort, Lachrymae Antiquae, which he published as the opening work of Lachrymae, or Seaven teares (1604). Numerous keyboard adaptations of Dowland's magnificent pavan exist, by Farnaby, Cosyn, Schmidt, Sweelinck and Scheidemann, as well as several anonymous versions.
Of all the keyboard arrangements, Byrd's is the finest and certainly the least mechanical arrangement. Faced with Dowland's great song, Byrd (to quote Oliver Neighbour, the author of an important study of Byrd's keyboard music) "responds with the unmistakeable sympathy that he usually reserves for popular music. The spacious pavan framework allows him room not merely for the most imaginative flights of figuration, but for far-reaching elaboration of the melody and contrapuntal reflection upon it . . . His excursions away from his model do not aim at correction . . . but pay it the compliment of treating it as a source of inspiration."

Byrd's point of departure was Dowland's original lute version, not the song or the consort piece. Pavans have three main sections, each of which is repeated with elaborate ornamentation. Dowland had placed the important high notes strategically since the first sixteen-measure phrase has C as the highest note, the second has D, and the last has E, the highest note available since it corresponds to the highest fret of the lute's top string. In order to recreate a similar effect, Byrd transposes the pavan up a fourth into D minor, lifting the work into a more singing part of the keyboard. The thre main seections (and the ornemented repeats) thus climax progressively on F, G, and finally A, the top note of Byrd's keyboard. The upward transposition also allows Byrd to add richer harmonic textures underneath.
The lively galliard Byrd chose to follow the solemn Lachrymae pavan is an arrangement of a piece by the lutenist James Harding. Like the pavans, galliards have three sections, each of which is repeated with ornamentation. Byrd's two arrangements are in his latest style and must surely date from around 1600, when he was about 60.

The March before the Battle (BK 93)
from The Battell (BK 94): The Irish March; The Trumpets
Galliard for the Victory (BK 95)

Byrd's The Battell is an amusing piece of descriptive music, perhaps closer to the playing with toy soldiers rather than to the dust and blood of real war. There is a long tradition of such musical "battle pieces." One of the earliest is Clément Janequin's La Guerre or La Bataille, commemorating the battle of Marignano (1515). Other notable works include John Bull's keyboard work A Battle and no Battle. Playing these selections from The Battell on the muselar virginals allows the performer to exploit all the instrument's possible noises, including the twangy arpichordium stop.

The most significant battle in the Elizabethan Irish Campaign took place in 1578. Alan Brown has shown how several of Byrd's different musical scenes in The Battell seem to correspond to some of the twelve engravings in John Derricke's The Image of Irelande (published in 1581), showing battles between the English and the Irish, foot soldiers and horse soldiers on the march, the English accompanied by trumpets and the Irish by bagpipes, etc. These elements are reflected musically in Byrd's work.

The two pieces associated with Byrd's The Battell, The Marche before the Battell and The Galliard for the victorie, clearly form a separate pair of works in a different key (G major), and fine pieces they are. The March is called The Earle of Oxfords Marche in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, although the Earl of Oxford took no part in the Irish Campaign.

Hugh Ashton's Ground (BK 20)
This piece probably dates from the late 1570s. Byrd's pupil Thomas Tomkins, an excellent judge of the finest works of his generation, included it on his list of Lessons of worthe, thereby giving Hugh Ashton's Ground a kind of "seal of approval" that has stayed with it ever since. The work is one of Byrd's finest and most harmonically expressive compositions, balancing elaborate keyboard figuration and cogent contrapuntal discourse.
It is built on a repeating sixteen-bar bass pattern (or Ground) in the Aeolian A minor mode. The bass tune used is derived from one that occurs in a set of consort variations entitled Hugh Aston's Maske, a work by Ashton, but he may not be the composer of the bass tune itself. Other known compositions based on the same Ground include an anonymous Mass setting and an exceptionally fine anonymous keyboard work, which has some similarities to Byrd's work. Several works survive by Hugh Ashton or Aston (c. 1486-Nov 1558), including a famous keyboard Hornepype which probably inspired the hornpipe by Byrd that closes this recital.
Byrd's Ground has twelve variations. The first five unfold gradually, with increasingly rich harmonies and subtle cross rhythms until, at the end of variation 5, the eighth notes break loose; the triplets of variation 7 continue to carry the music forward. Variation 9 is the most closely argued in polyphonic terms; indeed, it is almost argumentative in nature. In variations 10 and 11 the eighth notes run freely again and the work ends with a richly harmonised statement of the bass tune, finally exploiting the lowest part of the keyboard.

Pavan and Galliard in F (BK 60)
As with the serious Lachrymae pavan, each of the six phrases of the pavan lasts sixteen measures, resulting once again in a substantial work running to ninety-six measures. The exceptionally rich musical material of the pavan is subjected to numerous hidden imitations (in the first strain), augmentations in the bass (in the second and third strains), and lively countersubjects throughout. The playful galliard, with unexpected cross-rhythms, perfectly complements the pavan. Both pieces probably date from about 1600.

A Hornpipe (BK 39)

This youthful work in C major may have been inspired by Hugh Aston's excellent Hornepype (c. 1530), and probably dates from the late 1560s. At the start Byrd puts on the brakes, willfully holding back the energy so that the piece almost seems to have difficulty getting off the ground. But his apparently slow starts are always deliberate, a compositional ploy designed to set off the intensity that follows. When he does at last release the energy, the work takes flight rapidly, with all the force of pent-up vigor and good humour. In Oliver Neighbour's words, this hornpipe "keeps breaking into dance rhythms of unquenchable gaiety."

        Davitt Moroney was born in England in 1950. He studied organ, clavichord, and harpsichord with Susi Jeans, Kenneth Gilbert and Gustav Leonhardt. After studies in musicology with Thurston Dart and Howard M. Brown at King's College (University of London), he entered the doctoral program at Berkeley in 1975. Five years later, he completed his Ph. D. with a thesis on the music of Thomas Tallis and William Byrd for the Anglican Reformation.
        For twenty-one years he was based in Paris, working primarily as a freelance recitalist in many countries. He has made nearly fifty CDs, especially of music by Byrd, Bach and Couperin. Many of these recordings feature historic seventeenth- and eighteenth-century organs and harpsichords. They include Byrd's complete keyboard works (for the Hyperion label; 127 pieces, on seven CDs, using six instruments including this muselar), the complete harpsichord and organ music of Louis Couperin (seven CDs, using four instruments), Bach's The Well tempered Clavier (four CDs), French Suites, Musical Offering, complete sonatas for flute and harpsichord, and for violin and harpsichord, as well as The Art of Fugue (a work he has recorded twice). His recordings have been awarded the French "Grand Prix du Disque"(1996), the German "Preis der Deutschen Schallplatenkritik" (2000), and three British "Gramophone Awards" (1986, 1991, 2000).
     In August 2001 he returned to Berkeley as a faculty member. He is Acting Professor of Music and University Organist.