William Byrd was an English composer of late Renaissance music.
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William Byrd wrote in many of the forms current in England at the time, including various types of sacred and secular polyphony, keyboard, and consort music.
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William Byrd was born in London, the son of another Thomas Byrd about whom nothing further is known, and his wife, Margery.
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William Byrd's first known professional employment was his appointment in 1563 as organist and master of the choristers at Lincoln Cathedral.
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All these show William Byrd gradually emerging as a major figure on the Elizabethan musical landscape.
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The inclusion of Laudate pueri which proves to be an instrumental fantasia with words added after composition, is one sign that William Byrd had some difficulty in assembling enough material for the collection.
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William Byrd's setting of the first four verses of Psalm 78 is widely believed to refer to the brutal execution of Fr Edmund Campion in 1581 an event that caused widespread revulsion on the Continent as well as in England.
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Thirty-seven of William Byrd's motets were published in two sets of Cantiones sacrae, which appeared in 1589 and 1591.
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William Byrd evolved a special "cell" technique for setting the petitionary clauses such as miserere mei or libera nos Domine which form the focal point for a number of the texts.
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The first, Psalms, Sonnets and Songs of Sadness and Pietie consists mainly of adapted consort songs, which William Byrd, probably guided by commercial instincts, had turned into vocal part-songs by adding words to the accompanying instrumental parts and labelling the original solo voice as "the first singing part".
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William Byrd set three of the songs from Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella, as well as poems by other members of the Sidney circle, and included two elegies on Sidney's death in the Battle of Zutphen in 1586.
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William Byrd's set contains compositions in a wide variety of musical styles, reflecting the variegated character of the texts which he was setting.
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William Byrd was now in his early fifties, and seems to have gone into semi-retirement from the Chapel Royal.
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William Byrd moved with his family from Harlington to Stondon Massey, a small village near Chipping Ongar in Essex.
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William Byrd was ideally equipped to provide elaborate polyphony to adorn the music making at the Catholic country houses of the time.
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William Byrd now embarked on a programme to provide a cycle of liturgical music covering all the principal feasts of the Catholic Church calendar.
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Normally, William Byrd includes the Introit, the Gradual, the Alleluia, the Offertory and Communion.
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The liturgy requires repeated settings of the word "Alleluia", and William Byrd provides a wide variety of different settings forming brilliantly conceived miniature fantasias which are one of the most striking features of the two sets.
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Nevertheless, William Byrd felt safe enough to reissue both sets with new title pages in 1610.
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William Byrd played a role in the emergence of the new verse anthem, which seems to have evolved in part from the practice of adding vocal refrains to consort songs.
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William Byrd's setting is on a massive scale, requiring five-part Decani and Cantoris groupings in antiphony, block homophony and five, six and eight-part counterpoint with verse sections for added variety.
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The layout of the set broadly follows the pattern of William Byrd's 1589 set, being laid out in sections for three, four, five and six parts like its predecessor and embracing an even wider miscellany of styles .
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William Byrd's set includes two consort fantasias as well as eleven English motets, most of them setting prose texts from the Bible.
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William Byrd virtually created the Tudor consort and keyboard fantasia, having only the most primitive models to follow.
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William Byrd raised the consort song, the church anthem and the Anglican service setting to new heights.
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However, by the time William Byrd died in 1623 the English musical landscape was undergoing profound changes.
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The native tradition of Latin music which William Byrd had done so much to keep alive more or less died with him, while consort music underwent a huge change of character at the hands of a brilliant new generation of professional musicians at the Jacobean and Caroline courts.
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