The 2025 Byrd Festival is a tribute to Orlando Gibbons on the 400th anniversary of his death. We will be singing nine of his anthems, along with works by his contemporary Thomas Tomkins and a full performance of the Great Service by Byrd. The career of Gibbons — born in 1583, died in 1625 — coincided with a golden age of English sacred music. This is music from the dawn of the Baroque, full of elegance and sweetness. The early seventeenth century was a time of great optimism for church musicians in England, whose art finally seemed to be thriving again after a couple of difficult generations. These anthems and songs come from the same world that produced the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert, and they are every bit as intense and beautiful.
Gibbons began to compose music for the church just as Calvinist severity was finally going out of fashion. He went directly from a choral scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge to the court of King James I when he was barely out of his teens. Even as a young assistant organist of the Chapel Royal, he was a ruthless self-promoter who managed to arrange his schedule so that he could play on the days and occasions he found most appealing. He gradually accumulated duties and honors over the next twenty years: a tour to Scotland in the royal entourage, composing for the king’s fashionable new violins, playing the harpsichord in the private royal chambers. He also kept his ties with the academic world, composing his grand double-choir anthem O clap your hands for the graduation of a friend in 1622 (or, as some seventeenth-century gossips claimed, ghostwriting it for him so he could get his degree.) Gibbons died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1625, at the age of just 41, while in residence at Canterbury Cathedral preparing for the arrival of young Charles I and his new French bride Henrietta Maria. He left behind a splendid legacy of music, far too much to fit into any one festival program.
Thomas Tomkins lived a much longer life, rivalling that of the composer he called “my ancient, and much reverenced Master, William Byrd.” Like Byrd, he spent almost seven decades as a professional musician. By the time he died in 1656, England was a recognizably modern country with coffee shops, newspapers, and extreme political strife. Tomkins survived to see the world of English church music fall apart (though only temporarily) in the civil disturbances of the mid-seventeenth century, a state of affairs reflected in 1649 in his Sad Pavan for these Distracted Times. Perhaps the most famous of Tomkins’s sacred works is When David heard that Absalom was slain, a musical lament that is easily one of the best pieces of its generation. When it was performed in a concert in Oxford in his own lifetime, critics were already singling it out for its “exquisite invention” and “melodious harmony.”
There is something unusual about our concert repertory this year: every word of it is in English. This was important for Gibbons, Tomkins, and their contemporaries, and they worked hard to communicate these sacred texts so that they would be heard and understood. Solo singing with instrumental accompaniment was already an important part of sixteenth-century English theatre. Byrd seems to have been the first composer to make the intuitive leap and bring that sort of singing from the stage into the church. It can be heard in its simplest form in his Teach me O Lord, which was quite possibly the first “verse anthem” ever composed. By the time Byrd reached his later years, this had become an incredibly popular genre of music. It is also the closest we will ever come (barring some sort of technological miracle) to hearing real human voices from four hundred years ago declaim their words with inspiration and emotion. Sometimes there is a whole crowd of various voices, as in See, see, the Word is incarnate, a whirlwind tour through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ that does in seven minutes what Handel’s Messiah does in three hours. Sometimes there is just one very direct speaker, as in Behold thou hast made my days, a poignant meditation on human mortality written for Anthony Maxey, dean of Windsor, composed in a single day at his “entreaty” a week before he died. This is the record of John was another personal commission, written for William Laud, distinguished clergyman and lover of sacred music, who eventually met a violent end in the 1640s when book-burning and beheading were briefly in vogue again.
Byrd’s Great Service for ten-part double choir is a centerpiece of this year’s evensong and final concert. It is one of the true monuments of early English church music, but it is rarely performed live in full because it contains an entire day’s worth of services according to the Book of Common Prayer: matins in the morning, Eucharist toward midday, evensong later on. Like Shakespeare’s Tempest — another wonderful work written near the end of a long career — it is an intricate story that unfolds in the space of one day. The music itself is theatrical, with stereophonic effects between the two choirs and a color palette of almost forty different mixtures of voices. It is a celebration of all the possibilities of the English choral sound.
- KERRY MCCARTHY