Interview, David Skinner on Byrd's 'Songs of Sundrie Natures'

2023's Byrd anniversary festivities continue in style, with the second part of a double-bill from Alamire in collaboration with Fretwork. Following their recording in 2021 of the Psalmes, Sonets, and Songs of Sadnes and Pietie from 1588, they now present the Songs of Sundrie Natures published the following year – both collections comprising a wide variety of works on both religious and secular topics, for a variety of forces and of varying difficulties, with the intent being that there would be something for everyone.

The Artistic Director of Alamire is David Skinner of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (where he is also Director of Music) – known as a musicologist for his work on the early Tudor composer Nicholas Ludford, as a singer for his time as a lay clerk at Christ Church Cathedral Oxford, and of course as a conductor for a succession of finely-polished recordings of Renaissance music. I spoke to him about his new recording of the 1589 Songs.

You comment on Byrd’s surprising decision to publish this collection of sacred vocal “chamber music” rather than one of church music per se. Would they nevertheless have been used in formal worship as well as domestically?

’Church’ and ’Sacred’ vocal music had two distinct functions in Byrd’s time. Church music was in the form of liturgical texts for Matins (morning service), Evensong (his ’Short’, ’Second’, ’Third’ and ‘Great’ services) and Communion (the Mass in English), complete with responses, metrical psalms and anthems. These count for a relatively small output among Byrd’s liturgical works. There is somewhat of a functional blur with English anthems, which from 1549 replaced the great devotional Latin, largely Marian, antiphons such as Tallis’s Gaude gloriosa and others. Byrd’s English liturgical works were strictly the domain of cathedrals, college chapels and wealthy parish churches who could maintain a professional choir. The religious ’songs’ found in the two collections of 1588 and 1589 were most likely performed in the context of a chamber or Hall rather than a chapel, either for entertainment or private domestic worship.

In some editions, alternative and less unpalatable lyrics are provided for Susanna fair, which you give here with its original text. Why do you think this unambiguously nasty scenario was included in the collection?

’Susanna fair’ is from a biblical story found in the Book of Daniel, and placed in the Apocrypha by Protestants and other denominations. It concerns the tragic tale of ’Susanna’, a Hebrew wife who was spied while bathing by ’two old men, desiring their delight’. Susanna was brutally assaulted ‘if not by tender love, [then] by force and might’. When Susanna refused to be blackmailed into submission, she was arrested and sentenced to death for adultery. However – the false accusers were ultimately put to death, and Susanna’s virtue triumphed.

Byrd produced two settings of this text: one for three voices and the other for five. It was also set by Italian composer Alfonso Ferrabosco I, and published in a collection of Italian madrigals ‘Englished’ (Musica transalpina, 1588). Variant textual versions were also set by Giles Farnaby, which itself was loosely modelled on ’Susanne un jour’ by Orlandus Lassus.

You mention that bit of possible borrowing of Christ rising again by Gibbons in his Second Evening Service – do you think it’s just a coincidence, or maybe a gesture of appreciation by Gibbons of his musical forerunner?

Byrd’s Christ rising again was given pride of place as the last song in his 1589 collection. Gibbons would have only been six years old when it was published.. The corresponding musical sections of Byrd’s ‘restored to life’ and Gibbons’s ‘and ever shall be’ are so similar – in both counterpoint and harmony – it could be marked as a blatant act of plagiarism! However, this is nothing new. The most common way a composer could pay homage to an earlier master would be to offer a parody, or imitation, of their work. Josquin, for example, was so revered that many of his works were parodied into complete Mass settings by Palestrina and others. Byrd, likewise, paid homage to Tallis at the end of his Lamentations, so it is not surprising to find Gibbons offering the same to Byrd here. So to describe it as a gesture of appreciation is spot on!

After this Byrd double-bill, what’s next for Alamire? There’s two volumes of Gradualia just waiting to be recorded, after all…

Well, the complete Gradualia has already been recorded by The Cardinall’s Musick over the several volumes of their Byrd Edition project. It’s a collection, I believe, that benefits from musical buffers (either motets as recorded by Cardinall's, or within the context of Byrd’s three Masses as Andrew Carwood and I devised during our early years in the Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford).

Alamire's next project will be our final Byrd CD during the 400th anniversary commemorations of the composer’s death. We are very excited to return to the oft-recorded ‘Great Service’, but complete with chamber organ, cornets and sackbuts, and a choir of Elizabeth’s Chapel Royal proportions – and at (what I believe to be) a lower, more plausible pitch scheme. It will be quite a different take on such a well-known masterpiece.